The Escapist: Scratching the Surface

The Escapist has a new article up about online gaming and how it's about a
fraction as deep as it really should/could be.

That couldn't be any more square on the head.

So I was thinking about what online gaming should be like, then I
remembered playing this game called A Tale in the Desert. It was a free
online MMO that was really interesting: the goal was not to level up. I
mean, of course there was the societal-mmo side of the game, but that's
what made it good. Here's what I mean.

Take a game like World of Warcraft. There is a main goal in the game, I'm
assuming. But what do you hear most people talk about? Levels. Grinding
levels. Farming gold and experience points. All valid enough reasons to
make me stay away from it. No game should ever sound like a chore when
talked about by most people.

A Tale in the Desert was interesting. You scrapped bark from trees, found
rocks in the dirt, and picked seeds and ended up making bricks and fabric
looms and knives. I was getting pretty adept at it. I knew where to find
things that I need in the virtual nature and had a sizeable camp of my own
production in no time. I knew that from the game I was supposed to be able
to make bigger tools, and if I'm correct, a boat to get across the river.

What I didn't know was how indepth this game really got. People reported
spending time researching chemistry and botany. Actually creating new
things like flowers or fertilizer. They made the world better. So instead
of working by myself on my island trying to create all this stuff myself,
I could have created a virtual brick manufacturing plant that everyone
came to for bricks.

Okay, that's not really that sexy. Nor does that not sound like grinding.

But in the world on online gaming as we know it today, the content is
pretty much stiffled by the gameplay, which is stale. RPGs have the
biggest chunk of online gaming. We are a sports world that is waist deep
in number fascination. Everything from RBIs to Exp. Bind that together
with mythical monsters and swords and you have yourself a subscription
selling product. World of Warcraft. Dungeons and Dragons. Where will it
all end?

A Tale in the Dessert was good because it was different. It allowed the
player to step away from either not being strong enough to open an new
area or continual grinding. It allowed the player work with others on the
idea that you could personally bring things to the game to make your
character better. Instead of being able to crunch more monsters than
someone else and just change your armour, you could think of a way to make
beer or breed flowers or create a farm.

Travian is another game I am pretty heavily invested in. In the way that
ATIND lost me, because of really awful account requirements to login once
every set amount of time, Travian is slower. I can leave the game alone
for two days while my crops grow or my soldiers train. Crops won't rot in
storage or die in the heat as in ATIND. I can join a clan if I want to
slowly conquer my server (or protect it), but for now I'm enjoying filling
up my town with stables and blacksmiths.

So why aren't any of these games making the Xbox 360? Who will be the
first publisher to take their gold titles and derive the more socialized
MMO. What kind of in-game goals need to be created for an online game to
be more like a game and less like a second job? I flirt with the idea of a
Metroid MMO, but don't really have a clue about what it would involve. A
Mario MMO? A Zelda MMO? It all sounds good, but how much grass am I going
to have to cut to get Linko enough spare cash to buy a jar?