Why We Care About Virtual Worlds and Why Free Realms Is Missing the Point

You know those dinners when someone starts up a joke and sets it up for three minutes until people’s smiles start collapsing and they are just praying the teller will arrive at the punchline?  Sometimes the joke actually works.  Sometimes, there just is no punchline.

Having now played as a non-free paid member in almost every class of character (up to at least level 10, several to level 15) there is to play in Sony Online Entertainment’s “freemium” MMORPG, the so-called “Free Realms” and speaking as a graduate of the Baldur’s Gate, Ultima Online, Everquest I and II and World of Warcraft schools of role-playing, I am amazed and saddened to report that there is no trace, whatsoever of any sort of storyline or anything that even resembles a campaign.

Grouping up with friends is neat for whomping monsters in their little instances, but after a few goes at that, again there is no real motivation to do so beyond the novelty of it, or maybe because they are paying you in donuts to power-level them.

Why We Care About Virtual Worlds

In his book Virtual Worlds, Edward Castranova discusses the allure of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games as stemming from the fact that where real life os full of dreams that despite hard work and diligence may never bear fruit, questing in a virtual reality always delivers; we are driven by motivation and receiving our rewards for the time we spend is justification alone to endure the struggle to see them realized.

Lack of motivation is often linked with depression and inversely, depression often comes from a sense that regardless of our efforts we cannot attain our desires.

Why A Multi-Million Dollar Game Can Fail In Five Seconds

Will Wright, the mastermind behind the world’s most successful video game franchise – the Sims and its permutations, once said that there are three cycles to a game:

• The five second cycle that comprises the basic functionality and maneuverabilty within the game.
• The five minute cycle – comprises the mini-game or basic quest (these can practically be categorized by type since there seem to be a finite number that are recycled – for example the Go Fetch, the Collect, the Race the Clock etc.)
• The five hour cycle that strings these first two into an overarching storyline that gives us a sense of greater purpose.

Wright explains that the success or failure of a game is most often parallel to the success of failure of the five-second cycle; if a gamer can not or does not like how a character moves, jumps, flies, swims or walks through a game and/or how the GUI works in tandem with it, they will quickly become frustrated and try again elsewhere.

This makes a lot of sense – the five-second cycle will be the one that is repeated more that any other, so the level of frustration will be compounded if this does not work well.

The five minute cycle is really less significant.  If the gamer doesn’t like one kind of quest, they might simply choose another.  Because the types of five-minute quests are finite, it is difficult for a game developer to really blow it.

The five-hour cycle is where imagination, mythology and real creativity come to the foreground.  This is the world in which the gamer will be spending their dozens, hundreds or even *gasp* thousands of hours, so they had better like it, whether or not it is something they ethically adore or abhor.  It is in this wider arena that we play out and learn about our selver and what matters to us – where we evolve into a benevolent or malevolent archetype, or even play against our real-world propensities so that we can role-play from the “other side”.

Imagine if you are a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat and you could live out the life of a staunch Republican for a year.  You may not like it, but you are bound to garner new insight. Same goes for male gamers who “cross-dress” and play female avatars in the virtual world – there are countless stories of male gamers playing as female characters because they discover that there are inherent advantages to being desirable in this way – easier to find groups, easier to make deals when everyone is vying for your hand.  Of course, this only works in an MMO because in MMOs there is a homogeneity to the characters’ appearances.  But this is a subject that goes beyond the scope of this article, lest I digress…

What really matters here is that, as in “real life” – we learn to eat, walk, run, speak and write.  This is the five second cycle.  Then we learn to form sentences, make friends, dress ourselves, do chores, run errands, go to work.  This is the five minute cycle.

But what we choose to do with our lives, and the exploration for what matters to us most determines which of these we end up doing more or less and how we prioritize them.  We build a history, a future, a legacy, a reputation for ourselves and this is the macro-story, the meta of our experience.  We hope to be remembered for our feats and we weave these smaller actions into long strings and sequenes that we hope someone will someday parse and say “that was a great hero” or whatever is for which we want to be remembered.

The Big Picture and the Call to Adventure

Without this overarching narrative thread, Free Realms is nothing but a bunch of basic chores, ad nauseum, going around in circles, and thus eventually reveals itself for what it is – a very nicely realized (and derivative at that) three-dimensional wrapper for a bunch of time-wasting chores that ultimately leads nowhere.

I do hope that the developers realize how important this element of gameplay is in an MMO.  If the ceiling for a gamer’s “role-playing” is no higher than what color jerkin they choose to wear, it isn’t really role-play at all, is it.

Perhaps some sort of campain or storyline eventually emerges for the player in the world of Free Realms, but I certainly haven’t encountered it after a good combined thirty hours of gameplay.  This is far too late to make ammends.  The call to adventure must begin at the commoner’s doorstep – like Luke humping droids to the Jawas on Tattoine – not after he has become a Jedi.  Without the Herald, signalling the incoming scourge of evil, why would the hero ever leave home at all?

I would love to hear your thoughts on this and invite your comments.