Icarus Studios News

Millions of people, hundreds of quests, multiple cityscapes and settings to explore—how could we get bored with MMOs? But we do, and quite often. It is the absence of true interactivity in a massively multi-player game that promotes stagnation and boredom. More importantly, having a barrier to interactivity in a group environment such as a massive creates problems between players who might feel that they are paying for an incomplete service.

But what exactly IS “true interactivity” as far as these games are concerned? Am I speaking of user-to-user interactivity, environmental interactivity, or player-to-concept interactivity? Shouldn't it be enough simply to able to speak with your teammates? My thought is that, while they are all important to the ultimate feel of the game and each aspect likely provides its own percentage of entertainment, it's the third sort of interactivity (player-to-concept) that truly creates a spectacular “world.” After all, we aren't really creating worlds, we're creating effective shorthand to promote the illusion that a world exists. Since illusion is something that happens in the player's mind, focusing our efforts on impacting users conceptually seems to be the most direct route to success.

That said, it's worth it to step back and take a brief look at user to user interactivity in this context:

As opposed to a game system, what an online environment offers, simply by its nature, is the ability to communicate with multiple others, not only over vast amounts of space but simultaneously. This altered nature of communication is a large part of what makes an online environment different from real life. It doesn't take much extra work on the part of a game system for these communication characteristics to appear. These features are not game mechanics, it's just a matter of interfacing one technology with another, regardless of whatever game design you implement.

The level of interaction bestowed upon multiplayer games purely by virtue of being online environment (inter-player communication and organization) is more likely to be hindered by the superimposed structure of a games system. However, each successive game claims to cultivate “interactivity” while keeping to a similar system of play and experience. Most of the player-to-player interaction taking place is the player's pro-active desire to communicate with one another, not prompted by the dynamics of the game system itself. Depending on the nature of the media connection provided (text, graphical, auditory, a mix), different symbols are provided for the player, but the player does all the work of manipulating those symbols.

People get together and they congregate. If a chat box is provided, they chat. If a game object is provided, they see if they can play with it. If they want to sound like a big shot, they talk about themselves like they're a big shot. The “players” are still in a maze at this point. There is activity, yes, but not really any interactivity going on with the environment. There's nothing wrong with that, but a lot of people want more, and a lot of entities want to offer more.

(Continued in Part 2) 

-Miri Funderburk, Virtual Worlds Team