Joe Wintergreen

Being poor I feel like I've always focused on the treadmill aspect of a lot of MMOs. Especially with early MMOs like Everquest, it really seemed like they were slow as a way to keep you engaged just enough to keep you subscribed.

I remember being in the City of Heroes beta with some friends. It was actually genuinely fun leaping around rooftops as a Hulk-sized mountain of muscle I called "Herbal T" (a riff on Mr. T). I remember when the beta ended, they ran an event where an alien race called the Rikti invaded the main plaza of the city. My computer back then was not anywhere near adequate -- a Sony Vaio with a hand-me-down GeForce 3. With 300+ players all crowded around the town square, my framerate was so low that you could count individual frames on your fingers. In fact, my framerate was so low, the server would sometimes kick me because my system took too long in between drawing the next frame.

A year or two later, armed with a better PC, City of Heroes launched a rerun campaign where lapsed players who used to play (or were in the beta) would get a week of game time for free as a way to hopefully lure them in to a sub. Remembering how fun and fresh the beta felt, I eagerly downloaded and joined my friends...

...Only to see the treadmill in crystal clarity. All they wanted to do was their daily/weekly grind missions. The fun of exploring the city and punching thugs off sky scrapers was gone as we warped around using fast travel, walked three feet, and were thrust in to a dungeon where they skipped most encounters and focused only on the handful of specific mobs/materials they needed.

That was maybe 2005 or 2006, and the last time I ever touched an MMO, to this day.

The only one Ive likes is ESO but it's basically a big singleplayer Elder Scrolls game most of the time and you occasionally see other people at major hubs

I used to play this shitty mmo as a kid called Tibia. The combat was almost fully automatic, all you chose was who to attack, where to stand, and what your battle stance was. It had some neat aspects nobody else did where you interacted with npc’s by actually talking to them with ingame chat, and you had to type out spells to use them likewise.

Otherwise, the game had some surprising freedom in where you could go. Boxes could be stacked and climbed and you could traverse Z-levels entirely that way.

But the gameplay loop was incredibly bad and boring. It took forever to level up, and even on retro private servers with huge XP bumps it takes a while to level up. Just an awful game.

during the early to mid 00s when i was very keen to discuss & theorize about game design online (bad idea, me) there was a pretty large community of people who were also into that but were focused mostly on MMOs, and i never quite got into most of what they were saying because of the gulf between their rhetoric about "virtual worlds" and mmos being these wild new little prototype societies, and the reality of these games all being subscription-based multiplayer RPGs whose moment to moment and experiential design (all the dreams that might pop into one's head when first hearing the words "virtual world"!) was constantly dragged down by CRPG design cruft, entrenched and frequently hyper-conservative (not in the political sense) player bases, narrow creative aspirations (~70-80% were sword and sorcery fantasy settings which i've never found inherently interesting); and perhaps most of all the burdens of being these mini-capitalisms, economies basically, and the demands of that becoming a gravity well that every other creative decision was ultimately sucked into.

and clearly they were cool virtual spaces where many friendships were formed, large scale interesting social spaces emerged, and lots of weird cool social/design experiments happened... so i don't mean to discount all of the neat stuff going on with them. but i think there are big and clear reasons that domain didn't end up being as indicative of the future shape of society (online or otherwise) as the real diehards, and the people who'd made it their primary academic focus, believed it was going to be. and if i thought about it deeply enough there are probably some parallels with the free software / open source ideology and how its mainstreaming didn't somehow usher in a socialist utopia (as some of its adherents believed it would).

because engagement ROI demands predatory design. gotta prey on vulnerable people with addictive tendencies and keep them on the treadmill forever. gotta make it nearly impossible to kick the habit permanently. gotta keep them clicking buttons to receive smaller and smaller drips of dopamine. cause MMO execs aren't interested in making art, or indeed even making games. they're interested in making money.