Social media was the WoW killer
The final step in the degradation of the MMORPG genre
And the crumbling of the wall between the real and the internet
The history of the MMO genre is one of groundbreaking technological progress, swiftly culled by profit maximization.
Unbeknownst to my escapades playing Ultima Online free shards, there was a battle for the soul of the genre, fought between UO and Everquest. I don't care to bore you with chronologies. Ultimately, player safety took a front seat and UO relented, creating a 1:1 copy of the original world where hostile player actions couldn't be triggered.
It perfectly captures the times and troubles of MMOs and gaming in general in the 00s.
Recommended reading. Click this text to be redirected to the comic page.
What followed were ever increasing concessions: persistent worlds became instanced as less and less loot is lost on death; PvP corraled into ever smaller areas until every action requires consent from all parties involved, player-player interaction takes a backseat and the theme park MMORPG begins to take shape with World of Warcraft.
Crafters didn't win. Rogues didn't win. PvP'ers certainly didn't win and griefers kept finding ways around the system until it became so restrictive there was no escaping the rail tracks. Roleplayers enjoyed their victory lap but, in the end, only one MMORPG playstyle thrived: the bank-sitting tough guys.
Wheezl and I look so badass, dressed like that, with 'Avenger of Justice' over our heads,
we are primed for ... standing around the bank with the rest of them and hearing them lie about killing PKs."
-- Spleen, November 18th 1999
The type that spend their lives in high traffic safe zones in their best outfits, talking themselves up, chatting about the meta zeitgeist and crying for balancing of features they have no experience with, ocasionally making fools of themselves whenever something lures them out of safety as every NPC calls them glorious lords on their merry way back for a res.
Despite the need to rely on cooperation to beat the game getting culled to oblivion, the social aspect of MMORPGs takes center stage. With nothing left to do, players fester about in "endgame". By 2010, Chad Sexington, last of the mainstream UO adventurers, playing as a thief almost a decade since the class had been declared dead, was asking:
"Where are the stories of glory and treasure?"
And elaborating in much the same way as I am in this page:
"The sad truth is, in the grand scheme of things, everyone starts in neutral. And in order to hear tales of great adventure, someone needs to get knocked down a peg for someone else to rise. And that's why it no longer exists. People wouldn't and couldn't accept a world where others would gain from their expense. The gods agreed and decreed that their safety come first."
By the end of the 00s, the genre is exhausted. Bitching about the meta, begging devs for fixes to real and imaginary problems, debates to figure out how everything went so wrong, missed opportunities and nostalgia wank dominate. MMORPGs assume their final degradation into glorified chatrooms. Consequently, their popularity begins to fade.
Meanwhile, propelled by legacy media and other dark forces, social network services begin to settle in the strata of the internet. Their degradation into addicting platforms is a story already told many times over. The game chatroom and the gamified chatroom converge and one must give way to the other -- why bitch and moan for 10 dollars a month to a localized audience when you can do it for free for the whole world to see? The matrix trilogy reasserts itself as the most prescient piece of mainstream media of the 00s.
Where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No-one would accept the program, entire crops were lost.
Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world, but I believe that, as a species,
human beings define their reality through misery and suffering.
The perfect world a dream your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from."
Smartphones come to be and the eternal september hits another milestone as the NORPs finally plant their flag on the web, doing away with Rule 30 forever. Now it's all about the social game. The type of niwaka that jumped on the WoW bandwagon find their new home. Here, too, there's guilds and factions in the form of tenuous socio-political affiliations. Fandoms as home towns. Flavour of the month media as new instancea and internet personalities as quest-relevant NPCs. Rather than a fantasy world, a simulacrum of our world which slowly but surely permeates into the real. And here too we find the same bank-sitting tough guys of two decades prior.
But like two decades prior, they are easy prey. And with real identities tied to their activities, the stakes Chad Sexington so mourned are back and higher than ever. For you'll never be allowed notoriety and failure may follow you offline. At least MMORPGs lived and died over delivering on the promise of your skill shaping the world.
The meta whining evolves. No longer is it about game mechanics, but about shaping the real world under the guise of protecting an unwitting playerbase. Lawmakers hurry to roll out balance patches that cater to a minority as small as in Azeroth, solving no real problems and alienating just as big a proportion of people. This new game may have millions of unique accounts but only about ten thousand are active. The crazies who idle their life away usurp the narrative, making it all about 「the culture」. In a state of battle lines constantly redrawn, everything becomes a statement. This kusoge needs a human nature patch, but mess with that core engine feature and you risk a cataclismic error. Why go through all that trouble when the psychopaths in charge and the banksitters with the premium "power and connections" pack are raking in the dough?
The more things change,
the more they stay the same
(Except gayer)
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