MMO Weekly: There And Back Again

16 Mar 2010 at 00:00:00 by Jeff Hollis

Hey there, my virtual friends and neighbors, and welcome to this week's MMO Weekly. In this week's installment, I'll take you along on a journey that explores two remarkably opposite stories. The first is a significant and final death in the MMO world. The second is a resurrection of a game that died a significant and final death a couple of years back, except that now we learn that it isn't permanently dead.

There

Back in 2003, there was There. An awkward name? Perhaps. But There was a intriguing exploration of virtual space. It was an experiment with the then unknown concept of the “casual MMO.”

Remember, in 2003, there were only early, somewhat primitive, and arguably hardcore MMOs: Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Everquest, and Asheron's Call. And then there was There.

There wasn't really a game. It was a lot more like Second Life, but with rules. Things like “No, your avatar cannot have breasts the size of zeppelins, sir”, and “You can't turn your avatar into a giant walking penis”, and things like that. (Second Life, as you know, has no such rules, and is populated with a lot of walking, talking giant penises.) In a nutshell, it was a nice, polite, non-perverted Second Life.

When you logged into There, you didn't have a purpose. It was a place to hang out. There were casual games (cards, etc), but there was certainly no overarching game. You weren't leveling up, killing the evil witch-king of There Land, or anything like that. You just kind of interacted with your friends, went snow-boarding, played some kick-back games with them, and you hung around.

It was a game supported by “ThereBucks”, a microtransactions system. You could buy clothes, hats, and paintballs for your paint gun. These transactions paid the developers' salaries and, since the recession hit, the money just isn't there to keep There afloat. This week, There was shut down.

What significance does this have for MMO gaming overall? Quite a bit, I think, at least in terms of what online communities will look like in the future. Seven or eight years ago, people were under the impression that simply hanging out in a virtual world was an unbelievably cool thing to do. That sentiment has changed, and severely faded, simply because the novelty has worn off. Have you logged into Second Life recently? It's seriously underpopulated, because it's got that same “hang out” vibe to it. That model – just log in because it's cool to do and you can chat with your friends and wear cool clothes – seems to be a failing experiment.

Contrast this, for a moment, with another casual MMO with a bit of a “hang out” feeling to it – Entropia Universe. But Entropia is a bit more clever, as there is an overarching 'game' to won. Yes, you can just hang out, buy clothes, go dancing, etc. But in Entropia, any money you make can be converted into cold, hard, real world cash. That kind of thing – a larger purpose – is what's keeping Entropia thriving, while other, similar worlds are shriveling. I suspect that we'll see a lot more Entropia's down the road, while virtual worlds like There and Second Life will be few, far between, and short-lived.

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