Realism and MMOs: a hidden market?

I’ve been wrestling with Python all day, so what better excuse than a digression into gaming (again). World of Warcraft’s second expansion is out tonight, so I suppose I’m just putting my WoW Insider hat on a bit early…

Speaking to someone recently about MMOs, he admitted that the fantasy and sci-fi theming of most popular games put him off. “If only it were a bit more realistic…”

My instant counter was that, despite the fantasy setting, a game like WoW is realistic in many ways. At a very basic level, once you’re immersed in the game and playing with a lot of other people, the elves/dwarves/orcs/dragons setting becomes mostly inconsequential. Conversation in-game is mostly about the real world, there are countless nods to popular culture in the game itself, and skills such as guild management, auctioneering and finances are remarkably applicable outside of Azeroth.

However, when you’re starting out and trying to learn a lot of things about the game and its world, this stuff isn’t readily apparent. A comment I heard a long time ago about the problems of sci-fi MMOs versus fantasy MMOs is that in fantasy, people generally know fundamental things about the world, such as silver being worth more than copper, plate being more robust than leather, etc. That’s certainly true, but in the real world people don’t spend silver and copper any more, nor do they wear heavy metal armour. Simply getting into the mindset that your clothes are what affect your performance the most, that you go about most of your daily business by hitting animals over the head with pointy objects, etc; that’s where fantasy starts to come into it. While many people read fantasy books and even enjoy the setting, it’s clear that some people just don’t get it, or don’t want to.

But how can we incorporate realism into MMOs without either a) making them a second job or b) making them Second Life? What would a “real” MMO look like? For a start, many functions in the real world simply don’t exist in MMOs the way they do in reality. It varies by game, but generally you don’t get hungry and need to eat, you don’t have to sleep, you don’t need to shower and you certainly don’t have to visit the mother-in-law on a Sunday. Would people genuinely enjoy playing in a world where these constraints were in effect?

Money is also a problem. In general, it doesn’t grow on trees, and people have these pesky things called jobs where they slog away day after day to earn it. A game is supposed to be fun, and although many MMOs have massive grind elements where you can make money, they don’t really reflect the reality of work. Why should they?

So if we assume a traditional-MMO approach to money and the physical demands of life, how can it stay ‘realistic’? One option is to take the GTA approach, embrace crime and set it in a modern style city. Another is the Sims Online — creating model humans was immensely popular offline, but when turned into a MMO (and you couldn’t starve them to death) it flopped. However, the game design involved mini-jobs, many realistic pursuits like shopping and even running the Mafia, and was generally the “dream reality” approach.

Veering slightly away from MMOs to virtual worlds, we find alternate realities all over the place, often focused around socialising. You make “the perfect you” as an avatar, there are various ways to make money (selling clothing designs, operating in-world businesses, casinoes, etc) and generally you can have a jolly old time. Until you get bored.

See, that’s the thing. Real life doesn’t have game goals. Wanting to be successful, own a big house and have adorable grandchildren aren’t things you can necessarily model in a game — and why should you? Wanting to wield the sword of a thousand truths, be known throughout the realm as Orc-Slayer and have the highest level skills — that’s more measurable, and arguably more fun in the short term.

A lot of our MMO pride comes via possessions, whether they’re rare items or simply possessing an awesome character, and some of that is translatable to the real world. Owning certain brands is a status symbol, but to model the complex relationship between brands and consumers in a game simply as part of a larger whole… not only does it beg the question “why” but the thought isn’t a warming one to most designers. Worlds like Stardoll and Second Life have managed successful brand integration, but to truly mimic real life you don’t want a subset of brands that you partner with – you want a mirror world where a Porsche is cool regardless of whether they’ve paid you any money.

There are two tangents to the “realistic MMO” line of thought. The first one is alternate reality games, a weird, wonderful and fascinating genre of media. I’d classify most ARGs as MMOs without a blink, though they don’t follow the traditional client-server monthly-subscription models. ARGs are realistic, for the most part, and they pull off their realism with style. They don’t try to mimic the real world, but generally insert a pocket of believable fiction somewhere that leads players into a much bigger alternate universe — “this is not a game”.

However, they often dictate the involvement of their players, although recent variants have played a lot with the theme. Players can’t just log in and waste an hour a day, they wait for the puppetmasters’ next move and then furiously work away at puzzles in amazing coordinated efforts. You also can’t just jump in, if you come along too late in a game’s lifecycle it becomes all but inaccessible. Of course, these are huge generalisations based mainly on older ARGs — there are new styles and approaches being taken all the time, and yet the collaborative universe discovery that is the heart of ARGs can’t really happen on a “MMO” timeframe. Still, if you like games and puzzles, but don’t like orcs, ARGs will probably resonate very well.

The second angle on realism is passively multiplayer games. This isn’t really a genre with many inhabitants at the moment, though PMOG is a fairly decent flagship. The idea is that the game happens based on things you might normally do, as well as enabling you to interact directly with the game — in PMOG you can level up purely from visiting the webpages you normally would, but you can discover interesting trails and challenges along the way or even seek them out.

Web browsing is certainly a “real-world” pursuit and constrained enough that you can build a game around it — the same could be said of other platforms and indeed there are location-based physical games that are a mix between alternate realities, competitions, interactive fiction and passively multiplayer. However, with today’s increasing amount of surveillance, biometrics, logging and cross-referencing, perhaps you could go one step further and build a passive reality game.

Yes, I just made that term up, but the general idea is that by conducting your daily life you would accrue currency in-game — effectively living everything twice, once online and once offline. An application of this would simply be health maintenance — your iPhone tracks how much you walk, you input what you eat and how long you spent at the gym, and the online you changes in line with the real you. There’s also the MMO aspect, where you compare against others — Nike+’s running community serves as a good example of this.

The problem is it all requires active input – we’re not quite at the stage yet where computers can automatically figure out what we eat, especially if we don’t have labels. It wouldn’t be too hard to scan the barcodes of anything I buy, though, and automatically figure out how much I sleep based on when my laptop goes idle and wakes up. You can extend this beyond health by adding in MMO-style microrewards and transactions, such as points accrued while you sleep, rewards for exploring a new area of the city, a virtual wardrobe that reflects what you buy in real life that you can tinker around with from work, etc. There’s a bit of a tangent here, but the idea of getting rewards simply from daily activities and using game mechanics to encourage ‘good’ behaviour based on our personal goals is something that doesn’t seem too far off.

To attempt to summarise; reality is too unpleasant to directly translate into a MMO, and if it did, nobody would play it because it wouldn’t be fun. But there are aspects of the real world that can successfully translate, and some of them already have. In the meantime, give orcs a try — once you’re accustomed to a MMO’s world, most of the fantasy trappings are incidental.

[Photo from Alice]