The Angry Bear #5: EverQuest's Heroic Journey
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By Jim allice green in game Published: Friday, 27 March 09 - 01:52 AM (GMT) |
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The original blockbuster MMO invented the "Where did you get that?" moment, for better or worse.
It's the 10th anniversary of EverQuest, the original blockbuster multiplayer world of its time and the birthplace of much of what defines the modern MMO. While it's been supplanted in the popular consciousness by World of Warcraft and other "third generation" MMOs, it's important to note something about EQ. EverQuest is not "yesterday's game." It's still a vibrant and active community of enthusiastic players that Sony Online continues to support with new expansion packs. Indeed, the success of EverQuest is even more remarkable when one considers that the game is running concurrently with EverQuest II, the game that was supposed to be its ultimate supplanter. Looking back over 10 years of controversy and craziness, the saga and structure of EverQuest offers a fascinating lesson for the future of MMOs -- its greatest achievement may also be the genre's greatest trap.
My first experience with massively multiplayer online games was horrendous -- the opening days of Ultima Online. Anyone around at the time can tell horror stories of being slaughtered by rats and rabbits and being unable to take three steps without getting jumped by player-killers. Ultima Online was more "Anarchy Online" than the game that eventually bore that name. The problem with the game was the natural mistake the developers made... assuming that everyone who ever entered the world of Britannia would view it the same way they did, as a giant stage where they could act out their role-playing inclinations. What they created, therefore, was a world of complete freedom where anyone could be anything they wished to be.
The problem with that notion was that there's a word for complete freedom: anarchy. Not everybody dreams of being "Lord British" or being a tailor or a baker in a medieval serf's village. In a game with absolutely no social controls or directed experiences, many people used their freedom to indulge the worst aspects of their character in a consequence-free environment. Their "role" as it were, was to have their fun at the expense of the fun of others. Indeed, the more miserable they made an anonymous stranger, they more they seemed to enjoy themselves. Without an actual "game" to play, these folks found that "winning" by harassing another player offline was much easier than fighting a monster that tends to hit back.
The greatest innovation of EverQuest wasn't the game's graphics or the technology that let it push so much data over the primitive Internet technology of the time. It was in the very name of the product -- questing. MMOs are often derisively called graphical overlays for chat rooms, but that misses an important distinction: People already have such technology available to them if all they want to do is remotely chat. They're called "chat rooms." EverQuest did more. It gave people the other half of the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy. They not only got to live in a fantasy universe, they got to go out, slay a dragon, steal its loot and feel like a hero, in front of other people! It provided a structured experience for players that channeled the need for challenge, competition and excitement in an arguably more pro-social direction than the murderous anarchy of early Britannia.
The effects of this decision had a huge impact. It was an attempt to provide the compelling kind of directed content and structure so familiar from single-player RPGs with the added thrill of real people. It was the first game that realized the true source of wealth in an MMO economy isn't gold or dollars. In a world without material scarcity (after all, the developers can create more gold or another magic sword with a few key presses) the true source of wealth is player time (and the running subscription fees that come with it). The value of an object is therefore directly proportional to the amount of time, effort and coordination that it takes to achieve it and the social cachet that goes along with possessing it.
This last part simply cannot be underestimated. For all the derision that sometimes placed on the MMO's fixation on "phat loot," the reason the classic RPG "kill monster, take its stuff to go and kill bigger monster" is so cliched is that it works. It's the classic hero's journey boiled down to its simplest components and served up for a mass audience who all get to feel for the briefest moment like a hero. It's the endlessly compelling illusion of achievement. Why else would players on MMO test servers derisively refer to their granted uber-item as "fake" and struggle through the same content on live servers in order to get "real gear?" That +7 glowing Sword of Sharpness is just as virtual and is functionally no different than "real gear," but doesn't has the benefit of context, history and story. It's the knowledge that you went through this with your friends, you worked hard to master the challenge together and every "Where did you get that?" moment or /inspect from another player is validation of what you've achieved. It's also why people hate gold farmers so much.
This tendency is very, very human. We are materialistic creatures (as James Twitchell points out, "There's a reason that we call them 'goods' and not 'bads.'"), and we've always created fetishized objects to denote status. There's every reason to believe this tendency to do so began in our remote past as a way to sublimate more violent methods of status competition into a symbolic struggle that wouldn't leave competitors dead. This was mirrored in a small way by EverQuest. springing from the disastrous first days of UO and the dynamic was so compelling that World of Warcraft (a project began by a group of EQ fanatics within Blizzard) smoothed off EverQuest's rough edges and delivered an insanely compelling and addictive version of it that garnered success far beyond the dreams of the original EQ team.
That's also the problem. The very success of the EQ innovation as popularized by World of Warcraft has warped people's perceptions of what an MMO is. When 12 million people's entry into the genre is a game that's fundamental gameplay dynamic is ever-increasing loot, it makes it enormously difficult for other MMOs that might explore a different paradigm. I think about some of the noble experiments of the past few years that I've really enjoyed -- great games like Pirates of the
Pirates, for example, doesn't actually have much in the way of "loot" as a WoW or EQ player would understand it. LotRO has no end-game and if you're racing to max level to get to the "good stuff," you're very much missing the point of the game.
This certainly doesn't reflect poorly on World of Warcraft. WoW is what it is. I love it, I played it for a long time and have tremendous admiration for the developers over at Blizzard that created it. I also acknowledge the harsh reality that gaming is a business that requires dollars to survive and it's far easier to invest in something that's proven to work than something bold and innovative that might not. Still, it behooves all of us as players to open our minds and wallets to new forms of gameplay and encourage MMO developers to experiment with the form. EverQuest was an important chapter in the history of gaming, but it's important to not let it be the last chapter.
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