CHAPTER 16

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs)

MMOGS: THE NEW KID ON THE BLOCK

You’re walking down a street lined with drab gray skyscrapers, interspersed here and there with colorful low-rise structures. Robotic-looking characters wearing business suits hurry by, fellows with names like Number Cruncher, Flunky, and Head Hunter. You carefully sidestep a guy named Pencil Pusher, who has a pencil point for a head, and then dodge another unfriendly looking gentleman, Micromanager, whom you certainly want to avoid, because he’ll tie you up in red tape if you fall into his clutches.

No, these characters are not escapees from a Dilbert comic strip. They’re actually NPCs in Toontown Online, Disney’s lighthearted Massively Multiplayer Online Game, or MMOG. Toontown is a member of one of the most rapidly growing and financially lucrative forms of interactive entertainment ever to be devised. MMOGs are mere youngsters compared to video games—the first major ones out of the box, Ultima Online and EverQuest, were not launched until the late 1990s. Yet they’ve already drawn an intensely dedicated fan base in many parts of the world. In some regions, they are even more popular than traditional single-player video games.

MMOGs are derived from MUDs, text-based adventure games in which players assume fictional personas, explore virtual worlds, and interact with each other. MUD stands for Multi-User Dungeon (or Multi-User Domain or Multi-User Dimension). The MUD, and its close cousin, the MOO (MUD, Object Oriented) can support the simultaneous play by a great number of participants. The first MUD (and MUD was indeed its name) was developed in Great Britain in 1978. It was a team effort of Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw, both students at the University of Essex. It is quite easy to detect the close family resemblance between the MUDs and MMOGs. However, MUDs are text based, while MMOGs immerse players in a world of richly animated graphics.

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MMOG

MMOGs, sometimes also called MMOs or MMPs, have several characteristics that set them apart from other games, even online games. For one thing, they are played simultaneously by tens of thousands of people, and the interactions between the players are a significant part of the experience. They are set in sprawling fictional landscapes that usually include multiple complex worlds, all of which may be populated. These game worlds are also persistent universes, meaning that the activities going on in them continue even after a player has logged off, just as in the real world things continue to happen even when we go to sleep.

One of the most popular subsets of the MMOG is the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG). It observes many of the characteristics of RPGs discussed in Chapter 14 on video games. Players create and control one or more avatars who are defined by a set of attributes, such as species, occupation, and special skill. These player-controlled characters strategize with each other, go on quests, and explore. Players work hard to advance their avatars’ skills and powers. A great many MMORPGs revolve around so-called “sword and sorcery” medieval fantasies and feature bloody encounters with NPCs and player controlled avatars.

Typically, MMOGs are supported by subscriptions. To play them, people pay a regular monthly fee, much like a magazine subscription (although in some Asian countries, where MMOGs are typically played in cafes, players may pay by the hour). In addition to the subscription, players usually have to purchase the initial software, often sold on a CD-ROM. Many games also come up with periodic expansion packs, and players are encouraged to buy them so they can have access to new features of the game. A MMOG needs only to attract a few hundred thousand players to generate a considerable income, and over the course of several years, a successful MMOG can take in more money than even a hit video game or movie.

However, because MMOGs demand so much attention from their players, it is generally believed that most people will only subscribe to one at a time. Thus, the key to success for a new crop of MMOGs is to appeal to a new audience. This is exactly the approach Disney has taken with its two MMOGs, Toontown Online, introduced at the beginning of this chapter, and Pirates of the Caribbean Online, both of which will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter.

NARRATIVE IN MMOGS

Essentially, the production team for a MMOG creates a framework for people to play in. They devise an intriguing backstory, various narrative elements to be discovered during play, and set up quests for players to undertake. They also create the virtual landscapes for the MMOG, the NPCs, and the types of avatars that players can build and control. But although MMOGs contain a certain amount of story material created by the production team, they also contain narrative elements that the players themselves have initiated and that emerges as they play.

A MMOG typically contains a number of simultaneous storylines as well as an overarching narrative. The overarching storyline is set up in the backstory and gives context and excitement to the fictional world of the game. But within this framework are a number of ministories. In fact, each quest that a player goes on may be regarded as a story, with a starting point, a period of intense conflict and action, and a resolution—a traditional three-act structure. However, the overarching storyline of the MMOG is left open ended.

This type of narrative is in some respects quite similar to the type of storytelling found in soap operas, a point made by Nick Iuppa and Terry Borst in their book, Story and Simulations for Serious Games. As with a soap opera, the core story in a MMOG is never resolved. This is quite different from the narratives found in movies, which have clear-cut endings, with all the pieces neatly tied up. Yet the audiences of soap operas and the players of MMOGs find them intensely involving; the lack of closure of the central storyline does not diminish the pleasure of watching or participating in these stories, for there is always something new to discover and a new twist to the tale. The lack of closure also makes MMOGs different from other kinds of games. Although a game may have a number of possible endings, it does have a point in which it comes to a conclusion, even if the conclusion is the player’s death.

WHY SO POWERFULLY ADDICTING?

Much to the fascination of journalists and to the dismay of psychologists, parents, and spouses, MMOGs are such a potent form of entertainment that some players have actually become addicted to them. These games are sometimes referred to as “heroinware,” and EverQuest has been nicknamed “EverCrack.” Gamers who cross the line from recreational play to something more serious exhibit all the classic signs of addiction. They lie about the time they spend playing; develop problems with work, school, or relationships; and are unable to stop playing, even when they try. In South Korea, there’s even a documented case of a young man who dropped dead after playing a MMOG for 50 hours straight.

While this is an extreme case, most fans of these games do spend a surprisingly large amount of time on them—as much as 20 to 40 hours a week. Anyone with a professional interest in this arena has to wonder what it is that makes these games so compelling and wonder if these factors can be incorporated into new games—not to make more MMOG junkies, of course, but in order to attract new players to this arena.

Players cite these qualities that make MMOGs so compelling:

The World’s Most Popular MMOG

To date, the Western world’s most successful MMOG is World of Warcraft (WoW). It has made hundreds of millions of dollars, and according to the most recent statistics available, it has 9 million subscribers worldwide. Lineage II, a South Korean MMOG, is also enormously popular, though mostly played in Asia. WoW, a Tolkien-inspired game from Blizzard Entertainment, has attained its immense popularity for a variety of reasons. It presents a richly detailed, enormous fantasy world to adventure in, and players appreciate the different kinds of gameplay it offers and diversity of character types and professions available to them for their avatars. It offers exciting combat with a variety of opponents, and the pacing is brisk. In addition, players regard it as easy to learn and play.

A PLAYER’S POINT OF VIEW

In order to gain a better understanding of how a fan experiences one of these games, and what in particular appeals to them, I spent an afternoon with 15-year-old Michael Loeser as he played the Dark Age of Camelot, a popular medieval fantasy game developed by Mythic Entertainment. Loeser, who had been playing the game for a month or so, said he liked it because it had good character control, was easy to use, and he could make his character look really cool. “I don’t like games that are too difficult,” he told me. “They are more annoying than fun.” For him, he said, most of the satisfaction of this kind of game comes from “working up levels and getting cooler stuff and going into battle.”

He said he particularly likes medieval games because of their magic and swordplay and also because he thought it was an interesting time frame. He took me on a tour of his favorite of its three realms, the island of Albion, via his avatar, a poor but strapping warrior. I was struck by the lush exterior environments and the beautifully detailed interiors of the taverns and shops we visited. (See Figure 16.1.) The island seemed immense. Loeser said it could take hours to cross on foot, though if you were in a hurry and had money, you could buy a ticket to ride a horse. Day also changes to night in this game, and Loeser told me weather could also be a factor in the game play. Just as in England, it can be foggy and rainy here, making it difficult to spot your quarry.

Figure 16.1 A misty landscape in Albion, one of the three realms of the Dark Age of Camelot.

Image courtesy of Mythic Entertainment.

Loeser enjoys playing in character and demonstrated how he does this, begging a passerby, a wealthy-looking nobleman, for some coins by way of a courtly typed message sprinkled with thees and thous. To my surprise, the passerby generously complied. And what would Loeser do with his newfound bounty? He promptly spent most of it to have all his clothes dyed red, along with much of his equipment. Clearly, this game was some kind of medieval fashion show. “If you have money, you may as well make your character look good,” he told me. But he justified the expense by explaining “people are more eager to let you join their group if you look cool.”

With that, Loeser activated a function that signaled he was looking for company, and in short order we hooked up with about a dozen other players and were off on a monster hunt. The fog was rolling in and dusk was falling, reducing visibility, but just enough light was left for the group to track a lumbering, furry-looking creature, to surround it, and to do it in—the conclusion of a good day’s work in Albion.

THE MOOG-MAKERS’ POINT OF VIEW

A player’s point of view can be illuminating, but to understand how these games are put together, I turned to several expert sources: the duo that heads up production for EverQuest, developed and published by Sony Online Entertainment, and the person who heads up the creative team of Disney’s Toontown Online and Pirates of the Caribbean Online.

EverQuest, like The Dark Age of Camelot, is a medieval fantasy game. (See Figure 16.2.) And, until WoW came along, it was the most popular MMOG in the western hemisphere, with only Lineage beating it internationally. My experts at EverQuest were the two people who headed up the game’s day-to-day production work and who know as much as anyone in the world about creating and producing MMOGs: Rich Waters, design director, and Robert Pfister, senior producer.

Figure 16.2 EverQuest, a medieval fantasy game, is vast in scope, with 220 adventure zones, 16 city zones and approximately 40,000 NPCs.

Image courtesy of Sony Online Entertainment.

Waters and Pfister told me (answering my questions jointly) that one of the greatest challenges of producing a game like EverQuest is its vast scope. They compared what they did to running a small city, requiring the juggling of multiple and highly demanding responsibilities. The game has 220 adventure zones, 16 city zones, and some 40,000 NPCs. “That’s a lot to look after, each day, every day,” they pointed out, an understatement if ever there was one. And, on top of that, they are continually writing new stories and developing new features.

Essential Questions

Designing a new MMOG, they told me, is a multiyear project requiring a staff of 20 to 70 people. The first questions you must answer are the game’s genre (role- playing? action? strategy?) and the setting (medieval times? space? post apocalyptic?). Then you must determine the basis of the game’s conflict, which might be player versus player, group versus group, player versus computer, or a combination of all of these. Another key question, they said, is how players will be rewarded for the risks they take.

Character and Story

The two elements that demand special attention, they said, are story and character. “Story is very important to a game,” they asserted. In the context of a MMOG, story is primarily considered to be the history, backstory, and lore of the fictional world, as well as the conflicts within it. Story, they explained, “can be introduced in a two-minute cut scene at the beginning of the game, or can be spread across the world in books, tales told, and in quest backgrounds. … The richer you make your world, the more likely people are to come to visit and stay.” They told me that players can, and do, spend years exploring EverQuest. “They find that every inch is covered with lore and story.” But, they added, part of their job is also to create “very specific adventures for people to complete—fight this dragon, defeat this god, rescue that person.”

The characters in MMOGs, as with video games, fall into two broad categories: the NPCs and the PCs (avatars). In EverQuest, the NPCs may be monsters you fight or human characters like shopkeepers or guild masters. The monsters fall into a category called a MOB, short for Mobile Object, which is an object in the game that moves, as opposed to an inanimate object like a door or chest that you must “attack” in order to open. In developing an NPC that will have a role in a new quest, the design team works out what its function will be in the overall quest, what its backstory is, how players will interact with it, and what lines of dialogue it will speak. The artists will then do concept drawings of the new NPC, working with the designers to refine the look, and then add clothing and “attachments”—things like shields and hats. The final step is to animate the character, giving it actions like running, swimming, fighting, casting spells, or dying. That done, the character is imported into the game.

The design process for the avatars is somewhat different. In EverQuest, the basic character types are either drawn from standard mythology (archetypes like ogres, trolls, elves, and gnomes) or else from Ever Quest’s own mythology. Waters and Pfister said that the critical thing, when designing a new class or race, is to take care that it does not create an overwhelming advantage to one particular group of characters. They consider how the character will work on its own, how it will play in a group, how it will play in a large raid, and what affect it will have on all the different types of NPCs.

Because a MMOG like EverQuest has to accommodate hundreds of thousands of players, many things must be considered before any new features are added, imagining all the different ways it might be used and how its presence might impact the game. For example, Waters and Pfister told me they recently added horses to the game. In doing so, they had to address such questions as: Can people steal horses? Can horses be killed? What role will horses play with the most competitive players? With more casual ones?

Overall, they also cautioned against making a game too technically demanding, stressing instead that it must be enjoyable to play. “You can have the most detailed online world imaginable down to the cracks in the sidewalk,” they asserted, “but if it isn’t fun, no one will play.”

BREAKING FRESH GROUND

Obviously, the challenges of running an established MMORPG are enormously daunting. But imagine what it would be like to start with a blank sheet of paper and create an entirely new sort of MMORPG—one that was a steep departure from the familiar “swords and sorcery” motif and that was intended to attract a completely new demographic. Instead of being geared to the young males who were drawn to these games because of their fierce competitiveness and bloody combat, this one would feature cartoon characters and plenty of humor and would be designed to attract both children and adults. This was the formidable task faced by the creators of Disney’s Toontown Online, the game portrayed at the beginning of this chapter. (See Figure 16.3.)

Figure 16.3 Toontown Online is a cheerful place full of friendly Toons, but the Cogs threaten to make unwelcome changes. This is the playground in Toontown Central, one of the six Toontown neighborhoods.

Image courtesy of © Disney Enterprises, Inc.

Toontown Online, released in 2003, is a colorful world inhabited by Toons, or cartoon characters, many of which are avatars controlled by the players. All is not well in Toontown, however. This cheerful place is being threatened by business- minded robotic creatures called Cogs with a single-minded agenda: to take over the Toons’ buildings and convert them into drab office structures. As a player, your mission is to protect Toontown from the Cogs. To battle these robots, you launch “gags” at them—the Toontown version of ammunition. For example, you can pelt them with cream pies or drench them with your personal rain cloud.

This innovative, humorous approach to the MMOG was dreamed up by Mike Goslin, vice president of Disney’s Virtual Reality Studio. As Goslin relates it, the idea came to him late one night in 1999 as he was working on an attraction for DisneyQuest, an urban interactive indoor theme park in Orlando. It was born out of a “what if” question: What if you took the skills and experience acquired from designing theme parks and applied them to a MMOG? He told me it was like a light going on overhead, especially as he realized that a MMOG was really “a place more than a game, and we know how to build places.” Strikingly, though he was coming at it from a totally different set of experiences, Goslin’s vision of the MMOG as a “place” closely echoed that of Richard Bartle, quoted earlier in this chapter.

Early Development Work

Once the project received the green light from Disney higher-ups, the game took the creative team approximately three and a half years to develop. Interestingly, the idea of setting the game in Toontown evolved during development—it was not a core part of the concept from the very start. But once this critical decision about the world was made, Goslin said, many things started to fall into place. For instance, it helped define the nature of the core conflict in this world—the ongoing clash between the Toons and the Cogs. It also made it possible to lay out the geography of the game—six different neighborhoods, each with a distinctive flavor and set of characters. Each neighborhood would have its own central playground, where Toons could go to relax and rejuvenate after encounters with Cogs—they would be Cog-free zones. From there they could take trolleys to Toontown’s many minigames, and by playing them, they could try to win valuable jelly beans, the equivalent to money in this world. (See Figure 16.4.)

Figure 16.4 The cannon game is one of the many minigames which Toons play in order to earn valuable jelly beans.

Image courtesy of © Disney Enterprises, Inc.

The trolley system used to transport players to the minigames was another Toontown innovation. The trolleys were devised to vastly speed up time spent getting from one place to another in the game. Though time-consuming navigation is characteristic of most MMOGs, Goslin’s team realized it was not something young children were likely to have much patience with.

The Characters

Just as with MMOGs for adults, this new game would be populated both by NPCs and PCs. The NPCs would fall into two basic categories: Cogs (the game’s antagonists) and other Toons (neutral characters). The creative team came up with 32 different types of Cogs, all based on the theme of big business. Four different variables would determine each Cog’s persona: its name, physical appearance, dialogue, and mode of attack. For example, a Cog named Cold Caller would have a block of ice for a head, and his mode of attack might be to throw a telephone; when encountered in the street, he might say something like “Sorry to interrupt your dinner.” The game would replenish any defeated Cogs; there would be no end to them.

The other group of NPCs, the nonplayer Toons, would mostly be shopkeepers, and about 800 of them would be dispersed around Toontown. They would be on hand to interact with player-controlled Toons and to give them tasks to do. Along with these working Toons were also some “star” Toons of the Disney universe, familiar characters like Mickey, Minnie, and Pluto. They would circulate through Toontown and thrill players when they appeared.

As with adult MMOGs, players would get to design their own avatars, molding them from a million possible combinations. They could choose from six possible species—dog, cat, mouse, horse, rabbit, or duck—and pick different body types, color combinations, and clothing styles. (See Figure 16.5.) They would then get to name their Toon. During the game, they would be viewing their Toon from a third-person point of view, which Goslin termed “the wing man view.” It would be as if the camera were tethered right behind the Toon.

Figure 16.5 Screen capture showing the “Choose Your Clothes” activity of Toontown’s “Create Your Toon” feature. Players of Toontown Online get to design and dress their own Toon, and with a million possible combinations, it is unlikely that any two Toons will look the same.

Image courtesy of © Disney Enterprises, Inc.

Toons would have plenty to keep them busy. Along with the aforementioned minigames, they could shop for gags, socialize with other Toons, and run errands for Toon merchants to earn extra jelly beans. Also, since all Toons received a house when first joining the game, they could decorate their abodes and embellish them with all manner of purchased furnishings. But their chief occupation would be fighting the loathsome Cogs.

Reaching a Broad Demographic

One of the most important tasks during preproduction was to take every possible step they could to ensure the game would appeal to the broad demographic they were hoping to attract. Thus, they did not merely rely on their theme park background, but they also read social science research; studied Jean Piaget (for more on Piaget, see Chapter 8); did focus group testing; consulted with experts in children’s content; and used play testers.

During development, they considered each demographic group they wanted to attract and built in elements that would appeal to each. For adults, for example, the primary attraction would be the game’s sophisticated workplace humor and wordplay, such as the puns in the Toontown shop signs. Working in things for boys was not difficult, Goslin said, because, based on the history of how boys have responded to prior games, “we know what they like.” But shaping the content to appeal to girls was harder, he noted, because “no one’s done it before.” The team felt girls would respond well to the emphasis on cooperative play and to the social aspects of the game and would enjoy being able to customize the avatars. They also considered the tastes of girls in the visual design, with Toontown’s bright colors and rounded shapes.

The design team also took steps to ensure that the game would not be plagued with griefers (players who deliberately make life miserable for other players). One way they handled this was by preventing unrestricted chat. Instead, they offered a “speed chat” system, giving players a selection of words and phrases to choose from. This short-circuited the ability of ill-mannered players to verbally harass others and also protected young users against predators and the invasion of privacy, an important consideration for families. The downside, of course, was that it could limit the social aspects of the game. However, with parental approval and a special code, kids could enjoy free chat privileges with people they knew from outside the game.

To further ensure a positive experience, the game encouraged good behavior by rewarding cooperation and team play. It offered no incentive to compete, and no opportunities for player versus player (PvP) battles. It thus circumvented the bloody player attacks prevalent in most MMOGs. Even the battles between the players and the Cogs were nongory affairs, emphasizing strategy and humor rather than physical force. (See Figure 16.6.) Not only would the Toons use gags for ammunition, but the Cogs would retaliate in kind. For example, they might spray a Toon with ink from a fountain pen or fling half-Windsor neckties.

Figure 16.6 Screen capture of a Toontown battle scene: the Toons (on the left) versus the Cogs (on the right). In Toontown Online, the Toons use gags, not swords or guns, to fight their enemies, the Cogs.

Image courtesy of © Disney Enterprises, Inc.

The Role of the Treadmill

One feature that can be found in classic MMORPGs like EverQuest and WoW is a device called a treadmill, and this device was built into Toontown as well. A treadmill is an internal structural system that keeps the player hooked, cycling repeatedly through the same types of beats in order to advance in the game.

In an old-line MMOG, the treadmill might require players to kill monsters to earn money to buy swords to kill more monsters. But in Toontown Online, the treadmill works like this: Toons play minigames to earn jelly beans; Toons use the jelly beans to buy gags; Toons use the gags to fight the Cogs, at which point their inventory of gags is depleted; then, once again, the Toons must play minigames to earn jelly beans. Players cannot advance in the game without using the gags, and the gags get better—more effective and more fun—as players work their way up. For instance, one line of progression begins with throwing cupcakes, advances to slices of pie, and then to entire wedding cakes. The best treadmills, according to Goslin, are integrated into the game in a natural way, as part of the overall game world.

Story and Structure

One of the toughest challenges Goslin found in developing Toontown was dealing with the story. In a shared world like a MMOG, he said, “It is a unique challenge to do storytelling … you stretch the limits of storytelling in this kind of thing.” As he pointed out, in a traditional story, you have one story structure featuring one hero and one major encounter. But in a MMOG, each player is the hero of his or her own experience of the game. Furthermore, you need a reusable climax, something that can be played through by each person. This precludes having a fixed ending. And finally, you don’t want the game to come to a conclusive and final end, because this would undercut its subscription basis.

How Toontown Has Been Received by the Players

Although Disney does not release subscription numbers, its own surveys indicate that people play Toontown Online, on average, for an astonishing 22 hours a week, and that fans of the game include a significant number of adults. Thus, it demonstrates that the MMOG genre can successfully be extended beyond the traditional “swords and sorcery” games and can appeal to a new demographic of gamers.

A NEW KIND OF MMOG SETS SAIL

Following up on the success of Toontown Online, Disney launched a new MMOG in the fall of 2007, Pirates of the Caribbean Online. Mike Goslin, who headed up the Toontown Online team, took on the same daunting role for this new MMOG.

With Pirates of the Caribbean Online, everyone who had ever fantasized about sailing away on a pirate ship, engaging in swashbuckling swordfights, and digging for buried treasure would have the opportunity to indulge that fantasy to their heart’s content. Clearly, this MMOG would be quite different from the safe cartoony world of Toontown Online, as the swordplay alone suggests. While all the physical encounters in Toontown feature NPCs (the Cogs) and involve weapons no more lethal than cream pies, this game would offer live player versus player (PvP) combat with an arsenal of potentially dangerous weapons. Furthermore, players would be able to communicate via open chat, unlike the tightly restricted player exchanges in Toontown.

A Knotty Matter: The Franchise Tie-in

Unlike Toontown Online, the pirates game is closely tied to other well-known Disney properties—the beloved Disneyland Park ride, three hit movies, and the virtual reality version of Pirates of the Caribbean at the DisneyQuest indoor theme park. Tying a MMOG into such a well-known and successful franchise would present challenges not faced in the development of the Toontown game.

In designing the new MMOG, Goslin told me, the movies were envisioned as a bridge to the game, giving players the chance to live in the adventurous world they’d come to know so well in the films. Goslin recognized that for this MMOG to succeed, it would have to meet and exceed the expectations of the films’ fanbase. It needed to include familiar settings from the films and many of the most popular characters, first and foremost the dazzling, offbeat pirate character Jack Sparrow, played by Johnny Depp. The game’s overarching storyline and its special brand of fantasy–horror and humor would also need to feel as if they were cut from the same piece of cloth as the films. The characteristics that made the movies so distinctive and turned them into such megahits would be woven into the quests and storylines. They would also be layered into the game via high-end cut scenes and via the NPCs and their lines of dialogue.

The backstory and overarching storyline for the game remains within the same setting as the films but introduces a new villain, the evil Jolly Roger, who has the power to wake the dead and then enslave them so they will do his bidding and fulfill his ultimate goal: to take over the Caribbean. Naturally, it is the player’s job as a pirate to prevent this from happening while at the same time seeking fame and fortune of one’s own. And as player–pirates make their way through this treacherous world and complete various quests, more pieces of the backstory will be uncovered.

Additional chapters of this saga, revealing new parts of the story, will be released as expansion packs. Each new chapter, Goslin said, will be presented as a new island—a natural way to add to the game, given its Caribbean setting.

Attracting Young Pirates—And Older Ones, Too

Unlike the hard-core gamers who might be found inhabiting traditional MMOGs like World of Warcraft, the target demographic for the pirates game is young teenagers, and beyond that, anyone who loves the theme park ride and the films. Finding ways to appeal to this new group of players was another challenge for Goslin’s team.

They realized the game would have to be faster and easier to play than a typical MMOG, which were often highly labor-intense, sometimes taking days of real time to travel from Point A to Point B to join a quest. They decided to liberate players from this kind of work and jump right into the fun. To achieve this, the creative team deconstructed the vast physical geography of the game and devised a system of “teleporting” that would let players go directly to wherever they wanted.

Tone was another important consideration for Goslin’s team. They knew they’d have to strike just the right note to appeal to young teens. In particular, they had to walk a fine line when it came to fantasy. Fantasy would certainly have to be part of the game—after all, the Pirates of the Caribbean films were heavily laced with fantasy. But the wrong kind of fantasy in the game—fairy tale fantasy, for instance—would turn this age group off, because it would hearken back to their childhoods, which they were eager to leave behind. On the other hand, the game designers were confident of the appeal of the special type of fantasy that was the hallmark of the films—a special mix of fantasy and horror, liberally sprinkled with gritty realism and spiced with dark humor. According to Goslin, the creepiness, the scariness of this type of fantasy “ages the game up.”

The Future of MMOGs

Goslin believes that the potential audience for MMOGs is still largely untapped, and he looks forward to breaking yet new ground. One possibility he mentioned to me was building a MMOG based on the animated movie Cars. He feels a number of genres have yet to be explored. Among them are horror stories and sports-based games. But he advises anyone venturing into this arena to be careful of making assumptions about the game’s potential players. “If you think you know how they will use it, you will probably miss something,” he asserts. He recommends thoroughly testing every aspect of the game before releasing it, and he thinks the testing process should continue for weeks, even months. But he also believes this is not an area for the timid. Though it requires discipline, he said, it also requires passion. “It’s not a mistake to aim high,” he asserts. “If you aren’t aiming high, you can’t hit high.”

CONCLUSION

From this examination of several MMOGs, we can see that even games as disparate as Toontown Online and WoW have many things in common, and that players of these games are, in general, attracted to the same things. They enjoy playing MMOGs that

Clearly, the process of developing a MMOG is not suited to those with short attention spans, shallow pockets, or a lack of creative vision. The vast scale of MMOGs, coupled with the fact that they must be able to support tens of thousands of simultaneous players, has substantial impact on story, structure, and character development. These games require that their creators be able to let go of familiar narrative techniques and regard storytelling in a bold new light.

IDEA-GENERATING EXERCISES