A New Kind of Game
I keep reading about the positive/negative aspect of 'online games' as if, somehow, they are completely devoid of any relationship between any other kind of game. I had a conversation with a game developer recently that went something like this:
GD: What kind of games do you like?
ME: Several kinds, but my favorites are probably RPG's.
GD: What RPG are you playing now?
ME: Neverwinter Nights and Everquest, and recently Shadowbane.
GD: Uh... those are online games.
ME: ... but I play them like RPGs
GD: ...
So, we are at an impasse. To be sure, there are several "game design" issues that crop up in online games that aren't there in single player versions ( player killing (PKing), camping (sitting there endlessly while the same content re-spawns and you kill it), etc.) But you know what? These aren't all entirely new - I used to 'PK' people in other games that only supported 2 players, its only easier in massively multiplayer games. I can remember playing Bard's Tale from EA, and I "camped" the same mob that dropped 'phat lootz' by getting there, killing it, saving, turning off my computer, turning it on, restoring to that position, and viola - mob was there! No, I didn't get to be all powerful in front of other players, but I did get to walk through the final dungeon of the game at level 99 with roughly ten thousand hit points on my tanks (things hit you for about 50 if that puts it in perspective). Never even had to heal...
The thing that is a little different, I suppose, is that you can influence the game of someone else, and so cheating takes on a much larger significance. But people still cheat (anyone have a packet-sniffing linux box running next to their EQ machine? eh?). And it doesn't kill the game. In the parlance of our times: /shrug.
"Online games", at its core, is not a genre. Its an extension of several known types of games into an online environment. Is that different? Sure. Does that completely devalue everything we *should* have learned about the existing genres as we apply them to the online world? Absolutely not. Let's take the SIMS Online, which is regarded currently as somewhat of a failure (although I am not sure that it is that, exactly), and which was mentioned over at Many to Many.
The SIMS was a descendant of SIM-CITY in many ways, so I'll start there. SIM CITY was a game that was incredibly interesting because of its play style. A Player setup an initial town and based on some semi-realistic processes and a bit of luck that town grew into a thriving metropolis, or a sink hole, depending on your "skill". This was tuned incredibly well, and struck a great balance between feeling like the player had control and the 'I set some things in motion and I sat back and saw the results of my actions'. That second part is the key to the whole "SIM" part of it - the idea of simulation is that you observe the natural output of a system after seeding it with initial values.
The SIMS took this further as the player got to engineer several little people, and place them in an environment and 'watch what would happen'. The way I and several of my friends played the SIMS was to set up little scenarios before we went to work, and then leave the computer on all day. Then you come home and see what unfolded. The sense of mystery was astounding. The SIMS even extended into a sort of online game in they way you could trade props and sets and objects with other people online and also in the way people recorded the stories told by their little sim-people in websites and emails.
Somehow, in the SIMS Online, all of that was scrapped. Because there are several people interacting in the same space, what you get back from the environment loses the mystery of 'everything that happened was, somehow, a result of my influence in the world'. That was the whole beauty of the SIMS, it was amazingly simple, but direct, and well executed. The SIMS Online forgot the basic lesson of the SIMS. That doesn't mean that a game with online capability is doomed to fail in the SIMS world - it means that there the game design community can't look at an online game as 'a new form of game' - its an old form of game that is *also* something new.
Go check out any gaming magazine at the newsstand that covers more than one kind of game and you'll find 'RPG', 'FPS', 'Racing', 'Adventure', and 'Online' (or something very similar). Online? Online is a technology, not a gaming genre. There is more similarity between Everquest and Diablo than Everquest and Half-Life.
