Are MMORPGs an evolutionary dead end? What is an evolutionary dead end anyway, and how to torture an analogy (part II)

 This is part two of a post I put up yesterday.  I orginally put up both parts at once, but after sleeping on it I decided to break it up.  Even for my blog , where my readers must be unusually patient with long-form rambling, it was a likely a very TLDR inducing post :-)

Having set the stage, I can now move into the idea that motivated this garrulous post duology.  I speculate that MMORPGs were the first games to occupy the shared digital world product niche, and by getting there first they perhaps had more success than they really could maintain.  We can think about an analogous process in organic evolution, where there are all sorts of ecological niches that will get filled by some organism given enough evolutionary time and opportunity.  When we look in the geological record of various time periods, or sometimes in different regions during a given era, we see different groups filling those roles. Often the later species to fill a given niche are more complex organisms that members of earlier lineages that filled the same role would have trouble competing with.

 

Pterygotids, also known as "sea scorpions."  Some of these species were the top predators of their ecosystems, and the largest arthropods known to have existed. This and following images via wikmedia commons. I guess I could have used AI for these, but I actually wanted accurate images.

For example, one niche that is particularly dramatic and easy to think about is the "top predator" niche.  In any given ecosystem there are usually a few species near the very top of food webs, that as adults can prey upon any other species they come across and are themselves almost immune to predation.  Think of a lion in modern African ecosystems, a tiger in Asian ones, or a polar bear in the arctic.  In marine environments the progression of top predators over geological time was especially dramatic.  The first marine top predators were various types of invertebrates, culminating in the Pterygotids.  This groups includes the largest arthropods ever known to have existed, and were almost certainly among the top predators of their environments.  However, a basic arthropod design has some serious disadvantages when it comes to being a truly large animal.  Among the primary issues is that the skeleton is on the outside of the muscles.  That means that the size and weight of the skeletal elements increases faster than the power of the muscles that move them around as you keep scaling up in overall body size.  So the largest sea scorpions were probably large as animal using that basic bauplan can get and still function well, at least here on earth.

One of the earliest known vertebrates, Haikouichthys.  This little fellow lived over half a billion years ago, and was only about an inch long.  For one of the biggest sea scorpions, it would not have even warranted notice as a snack.

Vertebrates had also been trucking along for a while at that point, but until the Devonian period they didn't get particularly big.  However, they had one huge advantage.  By having a basic design where you put the supporting skeleton on the inside and the muscles that power it on the outside, they are able to achieve much larger functional body sizes than any arthropod could ever hope to.  Being really big is also pretty important for a top predator, as they need to be able to overpower anything they want to eat.  In the Devonian, around 385 million years ago, we see the first big aquatic vertebrates filling the top predator niche in their local ecosystems.  From there we see a progression of a variety of top predators coming from different vertebrate taxonomic groups, culminating in two absolutely monstrous animals that lived in the same time and place and may never be equaled again.  Though to be fair even the relatively paltry orcas and great white sharks of today are still very impressive animals that would have killed a sea scorpion (the top image) with ease.

The first really impressive vertebrate predators we find in the fossil record are these arthrodires that lived from around 380 to 360 million years ago, in the Devonian.  They belong to an early group of jawed fish that are now completely extinct.  From here to the present we see an ever more impressive array of top marine predators in the fossil record, each more terrifying looking than the last. Once big vertebrates were on the scene, the age of arthropod top predators was over. Vertebrates could reach body sizes that no arthropod could hope to equal, and with that came corresponding speed and bite force.

Going back to the evolution of shared virtual spaces, I am now beginning to think of MMORPGs as an early experiment that succeeded despite the technological limitations of the time by stealing crunchy mechanics from other games.  These mechanics helped to create the illusion of a world, and allowed them to succeed despite primitive graphics and a first hour experience full of absolute confusion for many players. These days any visuals or interactions that you care to represent are possible to render digitally.  Instead of creating the illusion of a world with mechanical depth, games can create the illusion of a world by simply rendering it in nearly photorealistic detail and putting a lot of stuff to interact with in it.  That is actually a much better mass market solution than crunchy RPG mechanics.  For example, most people have no interest whatsoever in understanding something as arcane as how stats really work in Everquest, or how you build out a legendary item in LoTRO.  But do they want to run around in an extremely well realized shared digital world and have all kinds of adventures?  Hell yes, almost everyone can see how that is fun.

This terrifying animal, Livyatan, was larger than a modern sperm whale.  From the arthrodires (above) we see a gradual, but certainly not linear, progression of vertebrate marine top predators.  Giant lobe finned fish, Ichthyosaurs, Pliosaurs, Mososaurs, even a 40 foot long marine snake.  All of this culminated in the two largest macro-raptorial animals that ever lived (unless Ichthyotitan was actually predatory and not a planktivore).  Megaladon, a giant shark that only seems to have died out about 3.6 million years ago, you have almost certainly heard of.  Livyatan overlapped with it in space and time.  Unlike modern sperm whales that basically slurp up giant squid like they are big scary noodles, this species was an active predator going after prey much closer in size to its own.  It was up to 60 feet long and absolutely used those teeth to take giant bites out of other whales.  Both this species and Megaladon lived in an oddball ecosystem where there were tons of baleen whales about the size of a gray whale.  In this environments both sharks and hypercarnivorous whales evolved to be the tigers to these planktivorous whale antelope.

I also suspect that is why we have started to see more and more games that aren't MMORPGs begin to incorporate MMO elements, and in turn why the market for MMORPGs has stagnated.  Other types of games have started to take over that market niche.  What we are seeing now is the inevitable transition from arthropod top predators to vertebrate top predators that can engage a wider variety of players and do so much faster.*  Once you can digitally represent anything you can think of,  distracting players with crunchy mechanics and endless statistical complexity becomes completely unnecessary.  And much like how the endoskeletons of vertebrates are a superior basis for top predator compared to the exoskeletons of arthropods, design elements that generate player immersion almost as soon as you stick your head into a space are a much better starting point for mass market shared digital worlds than crunchy RPG mechanics that a casual "five-minute impression" player (1) may not notice or (2) may even be turned off by if they do.

Like a vertebrate, cephalopods have a "muscles on the outside" design (in their case the arms consist of a solid bands of muscle surrounding a central nerve cord) and can get very large.  Much larger than any arthropod. In fact, cephalopods have kind of always been waiting in the wings, and would likely be quite happy to take over the top predator role if vertebrates ever really stumble.**  Will invertebrates retake the marine top predator crown at some point in the future?    While that would no doubt be a fascinating development, and I'd love to see what kind of designs they would come up with (if I were immortal and could watch the whole thing play out) I have to admit I doubt it.  Fish are so abundant and diverse that even if all the current big ones (along with marine mammals) got wiped out, some other fish would probably take over in a half million years or so. In a similar vein, I'm not betting my retirement on a major western MMORPG revival any time soon, as much as it would delight me. 

 
Now I love me some crunchy RPG mechanics, don't get me wrong.  I am honestly a bit sad to see games like LoTRO, SWTOR, and many similar ones that I love (and started this blog largely to talk about) start to fade from the limelight.  But I won't be too upset!  A ton of innovation is happening in the space of shared digital environments right now, and quite frankly I can't wait to see what comes next. 

That said, every time a new MMORPG comes out I will be rooting for it.  "You go little sea scorpion, show them what you can do!"

*We (or at least our wallets) are the prey in this analogy, obviously.  However it really breaks down when you consider that many of us are actually swimming around, hoping to get eaten (at least for a year or two at a stretch).

**I left cephalopods largely out of the narrative because it becomes much more nebulous if you include them.  It's clear that there were and are some very large ones, but exactly how often any ecosystem had one that was able to compete with vertebrates on close to even footing for the overall top predator spot is not clear at all. In moderns oceans only a few sharks and whales are able to feed on a large adult of the largest squid species.  There have always been rumors of absolutely monstrously large individuals, but most evidence indicates that Colossal squid top out at around a half ton (though absolutely still nothing you want to run into while swimming!).  

Are MMORPGs an evolutionary dead end? Where they came from and where they are (part I)

This post over at Inventory Full, got my wheels turning.  Well, it's actually about three posts, the middle one is the one I am talking about.*  The premise is that big budget MMORPGs are pretty well dead, and that going forward the only new and successful ones we get will have small budgets aimed at a niche audience.  While I feel that the Asian "big budget" MMO market may still have some legs in it, by-and-large I have to agree.  Further, the few Asian MMOs I have tried (most recently one on my phone) really were not enjoyable to me .  While often pretty games with visually interesting settings, they mainly seemed designed to get you to pay to bypass various grinds. 

This also seems like a good opportunity to step back and think about where shared digital spaces are at in general.  However, I feel like some context helps with that, at least if you want to do it at a really high level.  So let's back way way out, and think about the history of online multiplayer games and virtual social spaces.  At first just having any kind of shared digital environment where there were avatars run by other players was quite novel.  Games doing that with honest-to-Christ graphics are way older than most people think.  However, during the 1990s is where we can see evolution of shared digital spaces really start to take off. A bit of an adaptive radiation in the parlance of evolutionary biology.  

Message boards, social spaces where you can hang out and have an asynchronous conversation,  had been going strong for a while.**  MUDs had also been going strong, but the two had really remained largely distinct entities though most of the 80s, or so I have read (I was in middle school in the mid- 80s and didn't even dial into my first local BBS until around 1989). However in the 90s with much wider adoption of the internet, and especially the popularization of the web around the mid 90s, shared spaces on the internet really began to take off.  Message boards started to become really mainstream, with a lot of websites built for other purposes even embedding some kind of message board into themselves (back then every single news story on the internet didn't have a comment box at the bottom . . . different times).  For example, IGN is a direct descendant of a N64 gaming focused news site with integrated message boards I used to hang out on around 1998.  This was all obvious to pretty much anyone on the internet back then.

However, much less obvious, save to fairly hardcore PC gamers, was all the innovation going on in shared virtual playgrounds.  There was a real hunger for places to hang out in that felt like actual physical places rather than a disembodied asynchronous conversation on a BBS or Usenet, and a lot of people were trying to figure out how to deliver that. In the MUD space all sorts of bizarre experiments were attempted.  MUDs were an especially fertile ground for experiments because coding up new rules for environments described by text is pretty straight forward (at least compared to building your own shared graphical environment from scratch!).  Programs to implement basic MUD architecture and modify it as you see fit were also really common and well documented back then.  For example by the late 80s you could hardly download a big IBM game compilation without at least one being in there, or at least that was my experience. MUDs also worked well with primitive 1980s and 1990s tech because the human imagination can be a pretty powerful graphics processor, as anyone that has ever read a book is likely aware.  

The mid-1990s is when things began to really accelerate. Suddenly almost everyone had at least heard of the internet, if not headed there themselves to hang out on message boards, set up a primitive website or track down kinky images.  During this time the game graphics needed to represent a world also evolved at a startling pace.  In console space, the progression in graphical fidelity from the Super Nintendo (1990) to the PS1/ N64 (1994) to the PS2/ Gamecube/ Dreamcast / Xbox (1999) was absolutely flabbergasting.  Each generation made the one before it look positively primitive.  While a little more granular on the PC end, as better and better hardware become standard equipment a similar progression was also happening there.  In the background data compression algorithms that would allow a server in one place to keep track of more and more information about the characters being run by players on multiple systems all over the world also continued to improve.  Back in the parlance of evolutionary biology, key innovations that would allow games to fill a new market niche were being developed.  There were early forays into online PvP, some of which like Doom, Quake and Half-life became wildly popular even in the 90s.  However, those represented baby steps, and were still quite removed from a fictional world you all hang out in together (unless by "hang out" you mean run around a small map and shoot each other in the face).  Regardless, it become very clear that it was only a matter of time before we would get shared virtual spaces that felt like some kind of alternate reality.   Science fiction authors like Donaldson and Gibson saw it coming, and had been telling us how awesome it was going to be for years.

While Meridian 59 and a few others came out first, arguably the games that first delivered on the promise of a shared virtual reality in a really rich and immersive way were Ultima Online and Everquest at the very end of the 1990s.  The way that they delivered that "virtual world" feel was pretty clever.  They took the rich mechanical detail of PC roleplaying games, Ultima VIII in one instance and DikuMUD in another, and used that to breath life into the somewhat simple shared graphical user environments that technology of the time was capable of rendering and keeping track of.  The worlds themselves were fairly primitive, if sprawling and filled with a lot to explore, and even for the time the graphics were pretty basic.  However, when you are in a world that is thought out in such detail, where there are hundreds of vendors to interact with, entire poorly rendered continents to explore, piles of loot to dig through, and even books to find and read, the fact that the graphics weren't cutting edge didn't really matter.  Those games felt like real places whether they looked like one or not.

Of course Everquest was insanely successful, and that let to the next wave (DAoC, Anarchy Online, COH, and many others).  Then WoW iterated on EQ, smoothing out the most punishing mechanics of the first generation, and was an order of magnitude more successful than EQ.  This led to many big budget MMOs chasing WoW sized audiences with a similar design that basically be summarized as  "DikuMUD mechanics stuffed into a shared 3D  rendered world."   Some like LoTRO, SWTOR, EQ II and even the original EQ remain among my favorite games to this day.   Up through at least 2012 these games were thriving, with what seemed like an endless variety of new ones to try out.  Even back in 2008 I had spent time in more than a dozen of them.

The modern era: where I hope the long rambling intro starts to pay off. 

However,  more recently we have seen this lineage of games start to die out.  Since Elder Scrolls Online, which came out in 2014, the only even moderately successful new western big budget MMORPG I can think of is Amazon's New World.  And even that us regarded as an overall disappointment by many.   I have to agree with Bhagpuss's take that the only successful games in that genre going forward are likely going to be ones that aim for a niche audience and budget accordingly.  We have even recently had a very dramatic example of a game crashing and burning on launch because the developer hallucinated that they could expect a large audience for a game that costs $60 to get into.  It really feels like there just isn't a big enough market for that kind of game to generate a return on investment for a budget in the tens or hundreds of millions any more.  When the new ones come out and flop onto the beach to die a painful death  while the internet watches, I honestly kind of feel bad for the developers at this point.

Yet, surely the appetite for shared digital worlds and virtual playgrounds hasn't diminished?  For example, based on audience size, the manga and anime Sword Art Online seem to envision a world that many find compelling, and one would assume that developers find aspirational.  Fortnite and Roblox are two of the most successful games in human history, and it is as hybrid gaming and social spaces that they really succeed for a certain audience.  So it seems like there is still a very large consumer niche that can be profitable for anyone that fills it.   So what is behind this change in fortunes for MMORPGs?

I decided to split this post up since it was way too long for me to expect someone to read in one sitting, though if you did make it through the full version I posted yesterday, congrats!  Second half to be reposted tomorrow.

*And his response to my response below.

**These are obviously still going strong in the form of Reddit, Discord and a whole host of message boards like GAMEFAQS and MMORPG.com.  You could even argue that blogs are part of this lineage.

***I stuck my head in a few MUDs back then but the few I tired seemed pointlessly clunky and slow paced compared to the ascii graphics roguelikes I was into at the time.