No, not that Ownership Society, arguably a significant part of the psychology behind the housing boom and bust (and other problems in the economy). I’m talking once again about MMOs and video games. In an age of great sales via digital distribution, subscription games and ever dwindling PC game sections in stores, the landscape of game ownership is varied and interesting.
I’ve written about this sort of thing before, but Gordon over at We Fly Spitfires is my reference this time:
The Importance of Character Customization
I wholly agree that character customization is a significant part of giving players some ownership in a game. That’s a big part of establishing a relationship that the player wants to maintain, maybe even at the cost of a subscription.
What interests me is the cognitive dissonance between giving players ownership, all while running what amounts to a lease, wherein once the monthly cash drip is pinched off, ownership dissolves.
Of course, as in the discussions that inevitably come up about difficulty, it’s been noted that players don’t really want difficulty, they want the illusion of difficulty, and a pat on the back or some loot. So, what do players really want from their characters? What do players really want from their gaming dollars?
I don’t think there’s any one right answer. (Yes, that’s an obvious statement, but I do feel it needs to be noted. Challenging the status quo of MMO design is sort of a hobby of mine.)
I just know that for me, ownership of a game is much more than customizing a character. I want to play it whenever I want, however long I want, without incurring a cost to do so. I’m happy to pay for a game I like (as my wife will attest to… like Andrew, I probably have more games than time to play them). I don’t want to lease a game.
Likewise, ownership of a character in a game is much more to me than picking a class at creation and mucking around with talent trees. I want more out of my gaming time than conforming to a dev’s script. I’ve written about this before, and likely will again.
Perhaps it’s not so much that I want a sandbox game, but rather, I want a sandman character. I don’t mind some structure to my games (after all, a sandbox is still a box, and you can’t think outside of it until you know where it ends), but I want to have flexibility in how I approach the game’s challenges. I want to really own my approach to the game, to leave my stamp on the experience. Not because I want bragging rights, but because it’s simply more fun to me to do things my way. I want to make my own memories, tell my own story, and have my own fun.
Because, well, that’s what I want for my money.
Tish Tosh Tesh 
At my most cynical, I think gamers don’t want anything a mmorpg has any more than a moth wants to fly into the flames. They just keep coming back to the flame because like the moth, an age old instinct has been driven haywire.
And after I’ve had a beer, I think people want to be creative – like a band or whatever, and have a bit of fame for it.
And mmorpgs do actually manage the fame part to a degree – lots of people will see your efforts.
But creativity wise I think it’s dead as a dodo.
Or maybe people think changing your characters hairdo is creativity and…wait, the cynicals coming back. Hand me a beer, eh?
I’ve wondered before why some look to games as a means of expressing themselves. I just play them for the fun of playing. Neither is wrong, to be sure, I just don’t relate to the need to be seen playing a game.
I really related well to your quote you made here “I don’t want a sandbox, I want a sandman” I too would like to have a sandman character. One I can make into whatever I want. Its already been done in a few single player games to some or a greater extent, but never in an MMO that I know of.
Well, I don’t think it’s just wanting to be seen playing. People are story creatures – we have a natural instinct to tell stories – you even say you want to tell your own.
Now stories don’t have to be told to others but usually they are. That’s covered. Except the stories being made in mmorpgs are…they aren’t even at a ‘Run spot, run!’ level.
I guess for me, I’m far too negative about what’s possible within the confines of the gaming world. My colleague has a similar approach to gaming as you do and that’s why he prefers live roleplaying with his friends to RPG games because, at the end of the day, no matter how good the AI is you will still be conforming to a script and pre-defined rules and barriers.
Ironically, the point of MMORPGs is to allow player interactivity to govern decision making yet we seem to have ended up just playing our own little single player adventures alongside each other, occasionally crossing paths and saying “hi”. Nothing anyone really does in a MMO has any affect on anyone else and you’re pretty much always stuck to following pre-laid rails.
There are really two types of players that “want to been seen playing”, in my experience. The first and most common are those who want to compete with others, whether through achievements, PvP, server firsts, best gear, topping dps charts, or whatever. The second are roleplayers, who often depend on the context of the community of other players to tell their stories. Both are of course valid approaches, though personally only the second interests me, and of course as we all know, most modern MMORPGs really aren’t built to support RP at all… and thus almost nobody does RP.
I’m not sure that cognitive dissonance really develops over character ownership though, since on a basic level I think we all realize that our characters exist only in the context of our subscriptions or in the context of a service that we don’t control. Even while the lease continues, we don’t really have much if any control over our characters, since they’re so tightly bound with so few options to develop meaningfully. Emergent character customization is all but nonexistent these days, except in a social context. I won’t beat that dead horse here but I know you feel the same as I do about the desirability of agency for players, which in turn leads to said emergent character customization.
As for players wanting only the illusion of difficulty, hrm. I’m not sure I agree; I think in many cases players want some difficulty, but want to be able to master situations such that they can overcome difficulty with predictable results. The process of mastering the situations is for many (achievement-oriented) players the true goal; once complete mastery is achieved the game can become trivial and uninteresting. This of course leads to the treadmill model we see in most subscription-based games, where mastery is obtained only at the cost of copious amounts of time spent gaining levels, gear, reputation, etc. Players with different orientations will of course have other goals, which are often harder to subsume to the subscription model.
At the very least, it’s beneficial to have players that want to create, build and own things in a virtual world. These are the players that lend variety to a world that focuses far too much on combat and killing monsters.
MMO designers need to create more substantive ways for players to self-actualize other then just combat. WoW for example has 2 people who work on crafting compared to scores of people who work on the combat which is creating dungeons, itemization and more.
For example if we have a town of peaceful artisans and crafters doesn’t it make sense to have players that like combat fulfilling the role of defending that town?
Combat right now is all about getting better loot. At least having a relationship between different gaming styles such as crafters and combatants (as just one example here) would create far more interesting dramatic, situational synergistic relationships between players within the gaming world.
As people that play MMOs and comment on them we should want them to be more interesting then they currently are. Players also need the tools to be able to express themselves within the world beyond a chat interface.
I’m inclined to think the name ‘crafting’ isn’t what you do when you ‘craft’ in a mmorpg.
I think COV’s thing where you can make levels for other people to play, that’s the player actually crafting.
But getting items and clicking craft, that isn’t crafting.
As you can see with the COV example, I don’t think it’s impossible, I just think what is usually called crafting in mmorpgs has nothing to do crafting.
@Wolfshead so far the design seems to be to churn out more dungeons and make them more accessible through things like the dungeon finder, but no MMO offers much more than token and reputation grind at the moment. The genre is still in stagnation in this regard. Turbine’s Siege of Mirkwood was quite nice, but for the coming months they seem to intend for me to do daily quests and farming one of the short and uninspired dungeons and do the raid now and then. I might rather do some parts of the old content I have not seen yet, like the older raids. I already finished the storyline books some days ago.
Right now I am playing Dragon Age, which is a cool single player game with a lot of dialogue that, despite being very good, makes me want to skip it as it happens over and over and over and I am just watching/reading the cutscenes.
I fear this style won’t work for Star Wars: The Old Republic. They probably changed it a bit, but I am quite sceptical if Bioware’s take on RPGs is going to give the MMO genre a much needed new impulse and fresh ideas.