Comments on: MMO Home

By: /AFK – Sypina Edition « Bio Break

/AFK – Sypina Edition « Bio Break — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 13:49:28 +0000

[...] Procrastination Amplification asks, what’s your MMO home? [...]

By: scrusi

scrusi — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 09:56:28 +0000

Thanks, I’ll link to you anytime.
An MMO without travel is an interesting concept, but a bit tough to grasp for me. For one, one could have a game that simply has no concept of place and therefore eliminates the need for travel, but that boggles my mind if I try to give concrete examples of how something like that may look. You could say that games like Starcraft have no concept of place outside of the games themselves, with instances being launched out of an overarching lobby but that seems to defeat the concept of an MMO somehow.

Having a concept of place almost makes travel a necessity in my mind as there would always be something (or someone!) somewhere else that you’d need to travel to. Even a set of chat rooms requires you to “travel” between those rooms – even if that travel is instantaneous.

As for your other point, I think place and travel are ultimately connected to each other – you can’t really have one without accounting for the other and if one is meaningless, so is the other. That’s what leads me to believe that travel must be meaningful to give place a meaning.

By: Tesh

Tesh — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 14:45:40 +0000

Nice article, and thanks for the link!

Might I ask a few tangential questions? Why do we travel in MMOs in the first place? What if it really were potentially interesting everywhere for everyone? (And how would you create that?)

I’m not convinced that travel must be hard to make place matter, but that is indeed one solution. That suggests to me that it should be worth it to “put down roots”. A solid player-based economy would be a good backbone for that. A dynamic world would help.

…and now I’m wondering how WURM Online plays. Hmm…
.-= Tesh´s last blog ..Dead Again: The World’s A Stage =-.