Is there a future for artisan MMORPGs?

I’ve been playing Star Wars:The Old Repuiblic lately, to see what the state of the art in MMORPG is, and its ok, but as a long time tabletop RPG gamer, it is not very satisfying. I can get lost in it, occasionally, but I’m a bit fed up picking up 7 credits and a pinch magazine from every Separatist trooper I mow down as I level up on Ord Mantell. Do the old sarge give them all 7 credits in the morning for lunch money? (I feel bad about looting them now!) Do Sith Lords all carry empty magazines so I can collect them off their dead bodies? who knows – but I’d like something more in my MMO experience.

The market for entertainment meets many levels of needs. A great many people are happy to consume media, while the market for those who want a more interactive experience is smaller. This is why the community of people interested in old fashion sit round the table RPGs or board wargames is smaller than the market for fiction in those genres. Nonetheless, there is a market. The age profile for SRTT RPGs is seen as aging, but technology may create a new generation of gamers who are willing to pay for a curated, GM led, MMORPG

How large that market is, and how much they are willing to pay are separate questions. Most SRTT RPG players, and those who join guilds and pay MMORPGs, average 1 or 2 evenings a week – a couple of four hour sessions. I’m guessing most folk who buy DVDs or subscribe to services like Netflix probably manage a night or two in front of the TV, or laptop, or tablet. There is a slice of time available there, in which people want entertainment and are willing to pay for it.

Let’s look at some datapoints.  People will pay not only for MMORPGs, but also books and non-MMO games. There is still a market for both sci-fi and fantasy books – people will pay, say €10 for a book which will entertain them for a couple of days or a week.  People will buy a console or PC game which is good for 30-60 hours of play.   People will buy a DVD  olf a movie which is good for 3 hours of entertainment, or a box set of a series which is good for 20 hours of entertainment.  There is a loose market rate for good quality entertainment.  In some cases, people who can fill that need are already moving to direct funding for their projects – C. E. Murphy, among others, for writing on Kickstarter, where Charles Wheaton is one of many game designers raising funds to produce an RPG (Resistance: Road to Liberation – worth a look) and there are many more there. So people will pay for entertainment content, in various ways.

The question then is, do the tools to deliver it exist? The answer is almost, but not quite

It is possible to run RPG games in Second Life – people have built traditional, and some not so traditional, RP settings in parts of the Second Life grid. The benefit is that you can build anything, and the problem is that you have to build everything. A more significant problem is that you have to code everything – an MMO engine will mange a cast of thousands, whereas in Second Life, creating and programming actions for the same cast is much harder work. And technically, the Second Life platform, and its open source version, is an ongoing beta, with enough twitches to make it too much hard work for many potential online GMs. If no other option existed, a committed GM might do it for love, but there should be a better way.

There are some very good commercial MMORPG engines out there which you can download for free. You can use some for free on a non-commercial game, and if you are charging money, they will charge you a percentage of your income, and some will handle your hosting. They make it much easier to create a big world and a large cast of NPCs. Engines like Unity or HeroEngine have been used for big commercially successful games like Star Wars: The Old Republic, so we know they work.

Creating a game linked to a well known setting, like LOTR, Star Trek or Star Wars, demands that the game be faithful to what the fans expect, and that demands a team of artists who can accurately re-create game art which fits the players expectations of the setting.  Even something like D&D Online, where there was a huge body of existing print artwork, imposed those demands on the game builders. But a plain old generic Fantasy or Sci-Fi setting is much easier to roll. Some of the free MMORPG engines come with some content, and most have communities of world builders who are creating, and often sharing, assets for games. We haven’t quitre got to the stage with a GM can have a one-click install on a working generic RPG setting, but it isn’t far off. Some sort of marketplace for trading game assets, and standards to make it easy to move content between platforms, and up to new platforms, would be good, and those are not impossible to achieve.

In theory, if you want to add unique colour to your game, you need only tweak the interaction settings that relate to your plot(s) and quests, Starting with a conventional RPG setting, a gamesmaster could tweak it as little or as much as s/he liked, or had the patience for. In practice, it is a harder – big, stable MMO engines are built to run 1,000s of low level NPCs who all behave the same stupid way, which is why I can quickly learn how to clean out Talloran village, pick up my 7 credits per kill, and get back to Fort Garnik for coffee.

Except the cantina doesn’t serve coffee, or much else, and if I want to “colour it up” that needs detailed work.,  More to the point, the engine doesn’t allow a GM to jump in during a session, grab control of an NPC, and play them as an interesting character, rather than a ‘mob’.  Running the game so that that conversation creates interesting downstream actions is not impossible, but it is complex.  If I’m running a game as a pro GM for different groups 5 nights a week (and grossing $250 a week from my hobby ‘job’ ) I’m quickly going to need separate instances of my game world, or mechanisms to decide which actions by the Monday night group can influence the world which the Tuesday group are playing in. Of course some MMORPGs try to do that at world level, but not so much at party level.  Some companies have tried to develope MMORPG with a significant level of live GM input and content creation, and failed, but they came close. But I think the market models are evolving, and people will find ways to make the tools and the economics work. Standards for interoperability, a market rather than single company control,  micro-payments and subscription models and the next generation of MMORPG engines are all important for it to work, but it will happen.

I’m going to be teaching a gaming course in our Digital Arts & Humanities MA programme next year, and I think I might throw out some practical coursework assignments on this theme. I also think there is scope for some digital infrastructure research in programmes like Horizon 2020 which would bring the CS folks and the creative/humanities communities together to develope these tools. Any takers out there?