So, as we're all wiling away the afternoon (or evening if you're European), waiting for the latest game client to finish updating, I thought I'd get some thoughts up concerning a couple of posts in the SLogosphere recently that have had me thinking. And in fact, before we even get to the entries in question, there are probably some acronyms that first need defining, also listed at the ITG Lexicon of Second Life Slang; whenever you come across terms here that don't make sense, you should always check by there first (and let me know if you think a phrase needs added). Anyway, the terms to be defined are all related, which is why they get so confusing...

The first is a Massively Multiuser Online environment, known as an MMO; since this definition is so broad, it can refer to anything from a bunch of online console shooter-game players to a group of suburban housewives gabbing via chat room. Second Life is inarguably an MMO, but then again so are a lot of other popular online things.

The second is a game within an MMO, known as an MMOG; this specifically refers to an environment where lots of players are supposed to do constructive and entertaining things together at once; some consider Second Life to be an MMOG as well as an MMO, and others don't. And in fact it does get quite tricky when it comes to the grid; for even though such gameplay is the main point of being there, and is what most people enjoy the most while there, it is certainly not the only thing to do, nor the only way to derive entertainment from Second Life.

Then finally, when you add a full-time roleplaying element to an MMOG, you get yourself an MMORPG (whew!); conventional wisdom limits this category to such popular, Windows-based out-and-out games as World of Warcraft, as well as the burgeoning experiments among the console companies. There are dozens of commercial products being used now that can be classified as MMORPGs; most believe, though, that Second Life shouldn't, since it is certainly no requirement at all that you take on an entirely new persona, just to get value out of the experience (as any corporate worker who's been there during the day can tell you).

In reality, there are in fact only a handful of MMOs that are not MMORPGs; Second Life for sure, The Sims as well, with an argument that There.com should be included too. And to be frank, there exists a certain undeniable wariness among MMORPG fans for such "plain" or "pointless" MMOs; without the RPG, many of them argue, why bother with the MMO? And boy, there are lots of other problems with Second Life as well, as any random visit to an MMORPG forum will tell you: that the graphics and animations are far inferior; that the infrastructure's a joke; that it's only good for slow middle-agers who want to pretend they're hip MMORPGers; that all this mainstream attention is going to bring nothing but more government regulation to all MMO environments; and more often than anything else, how there's just freaking nothing there to actually do, for frak's sake LOL :) and all that other stuff that roleplay gamers add to the ends of forum posts.

It's a hard mindset for many MMOers to get out of; that there needs to be a predetermined "point" to being in that MMO in the first place. And let's face it, this is because almost every MMO that's now existed has come out of the ranks of videogame veterans, the only people with access to enough servers, processors and coders to pull off a pervasive 3D graphical online world to begin with. Most MMORPGs still exist as commercial, for-profit games, things to be bought and subscribed to for a certain amount per month, where the entire gameplay experience is created and packaged as a benefit from a seasoned creative organization. Second Life, on the other hand, is an entirely different thing; the same coding and servers that run a game's graphical universe, but with content creation entirely open source, and with it being the burden of the players to create interesting things to do.

Screenshot courtesy Clickable Culture.

As a recent entry at Tony Walsh's excellent Clickable Culture points out, though, as the MMO videogame industry matures and starts filling with a plethora of talented companies, players are going to start tiring of the pre-approved gameplay options faster and faster, and start creating their own Second-Life-style entrepreneurial activities, whether the owning company likes it or not. I've mentioned Walsh here before, and how I'm a big fan of his; and part of that's because he has the patience and interest to cover all kinds of other MMO environments besides just Second Life, and to file reports on the sometimes very subtle ways they're all influencing each other. The entry that caught my attention here was on an MMORPG called "City of Villains," an offshoot of a popular but long-running game called "City of Heroes," that many feel is getting to its last legs.

Apparently, and this is just based on how I'm interpreting other reports, COV was meant to be a placater for old COH fans, who had felt that the game had nothing more to offer them; it was meant to be a sequel of sorts, if I'm getting it right, with all new things to do and options to choose. But we don't live in 1997 anymore, players seem to be saying; according to this entry at Clickable Culture, a big new activity that has caught on at COV is a player-created one, a new sport called Repel Ball that was supposedly created because there's just so little interesting stuff to do from the official development team itself.

It's not that any of these creative teams behind these MMORPGs are necessarily bad ones, although I'm sure that there's at least a couple of clunkers out there; just that a rule of unchangeable physics applies here, that the greater the number of smarties are dedicated to a project, the greater number of smart ideas you get. Where Second Life is getting things right, and why they're generating 90 percent of all media coverage concerning MMOs these days, is precisely that they're leaving content creation up to the hands of the users; that they're betting that two million people all working on new ideas, especially when given the chance to make real money, will ultimately create something better than the 30 people on the Linden Lab staff, no matter what geniuses those 30 people are. (And they're geniuses, make no mistake, and I'm not just saying that because I currently have a curriculum vitae being reviewed by them. Well, okay, I am.) As more and more MMORPGs get created, more and more ideas are going to get exhausted; players are going to burn out more and more quickly, because they simply won't be enthralled by the same things anymore. Whether game creators embrace it or are threatened by it, the fact is that user-created activities and content are going to start sneaking into all MMO environments soon, as the collective brain trust of the videogame industry simply is no longer big enough to entertain these hundreds of millions of players.

Screenshot courtesy Raph Koster.

And then here's a screenshot from the other SLogosphere entry that's had me thinking this week; it's from Raph Koster, who like Walsh actually covers a whole slew of MMOs besides just Second Life. He recently did a graphic "mind-map" chart of the leading MMO blogs that now exist, using a free online tool called TouchGraphGoogle; it's a customizable tool as well, so that Koster could do things like set a threshold of "popularity" under which a blog would appear. As you can see, the majority of the world's most authoritative blogs on the subject of MMOs fit into a tight and strong web, with most of them both feeding and informing most of the others; the main caveat to this, though, is that the tight web you're seeing the middle there only consist of blogs that cover traditional videogame-style MMORPGs. The entire rest of the online MMO conversation going on these days, it seems, breaks down into two groups; those you see in the upper left, discussing the political, sociological, artistic and sexual ramifications of virtual realities (with people such as Lawrence Lessig and groups such as Boing Boing landing there, in this case turned invisible by Koster to avoid visual clutter); and that little lonely nebula you see in the lower right, us dorks who talk about Second Life.

It's no secret, of course, that the Linden Lab staff gets irked when people refer to Second Life as a 'game,' and so do a lot of long-time residents; maybe what this chart is revealing, then, is that the rest of the MMO community is finally catching on to this, and deliberately placing them outside of the traditional gaming sphere of conversation. This is not necessarily a bad thing, I think; most would agree, I believe, that Second Life is an utterly different experience than most of these online videogames, while the games themselves are mostly better/worse variations on each other. Perhaps ten years from now, we'll see yet another web just as strong as complex as this gaming one, but with Second Life at its center and the subject of MMO as a communications platform being its unifying theme. Or, hmm, maybe we'd actually see such a web now, if Second Life were to be placed in the middle of a new Google Touch Graph. Anyone out there want to try it and send me a screenshot of the result? I'll definitely post it as an update if someone does.

Anyway, that's it for now; as I see by the clock, Linden's weekly client should be finished by now, and ready for me to download. Let's see if this did some good, or brings us yet more trouble. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.