In a sense, are we not all MMO tourists? We don’t really live lives as citizens of a virtual world, we just punch the clock and reel in the loot, saving the real citizens who just won’t stay saved from threats that just won’t go away. (Does the Lich King have Joker Immunity?)
Some MMOs have player housing, but for the most part, that housing is less a measure of citizenship and more of a trophy room or Simsish minigame. Some games even use housing as a currency/time sink, charging “property tax” for the privilege of maintaining the place.
What is citizenship, though? What is the point of taxes in the real world? What do they buy?
Perhaps oversimplified, I view citizenship as a state of being where people who live within a community take an active interest in that community. It is a mixture of responsibility and reward. Citizens are not only interested in the people but also the place and the governing policies of the local politics, likely also the history of their chosen locale. This is manifest in simple ways like picking up the trash as you walk past or cheering for local football teams, and in more significant ways, like taking part in politics or local business. There are very good reasons to “buy local” and support your neighbors, since you’re stuck with them if the larger political structures collapse.
This sense of spatial importance is one significant thought process where rivalries and wars tend to stem from. After all, few things are more visceral than protecting your home turf. Personal insults can slide, but challenges to your space are immediate and tend to elicit stronger responses. Barbarians or undead at the gates tend to prompt action. It’s also easy to demonize the “other” who lives over thataway. If there’s not someone somewhere else to criticize, we may have to own up to our own flaws.
Taxes are a way for the government to respond to those threats, imagined or imminent. Not everyone wants to serve a stint in the military, after all, or work on infrastructure. Taxes are the cost of living somewhere, and they go to maintaining, protecting and improving that place. (…at least in concept. The reality doesn’t always correlate, but I’m not really angling to flame broil well nurtured beefs with taxation and representation today.)
So, what exactly is the point of maintenance costs on MMO housing? What does it do beside keep the place impossibly clean and perfectly locked in a pocket universe? Maybe that’s all that it needs to do, but what if property tax in an MMO actually were tied to a place, and players had more citizenship within those places? What if it meant something to the rest of how you played?
To be sure, the lion’s share of that concept weighs on the shoulders of the players. Still, if there were game design mechanics to make place matter, and give players a reason to take up citizenship in certain places, what might that do for factional warfare and immersion? Could there be local politics, either NPC or PC based, where elections have a real impact on gameplay? Could home town pride make PvP more interesting and impactful? What if you could raze enemy players’ houses to the ground, and rebuild your own when the inevitable retaliation hits? What if that were subverted by paying taxes, with an NPC security force? What if you had to pay the salary of Stormwind guards?
…some of that sounds pretty onerous, actually. Not unlike really being a citizen and giving a flying feline fiddly bit about politics. But what if a game could capture the good parts without the costs? Is it possible to make location an important thing again in these MMO worlds, beyond just finding the sweet grinding spot or binding to Dalaran so you can get to the best vendors? Can PvP be interesting and tied to a location without being a huge inconvenience and griefing tool?
Do we care where we are in MMO worlds, or are we just passing through, looking for the next sweet loot drop?
Tish Tosh Tesh 
There you go again, dreaming about virtual worlds instead of games!
One the one hand I think (ok, actually it’s more that I desperately HOPE) the pendulum will swing the other way and we’ll finally have great gameplay in great virtual worlds.
But I also look at the proliferation of casual games on Facebook, etc. and former “hardcore game developers” going that route because (as Raph phrased it on Twitter) they no longer have an audience, and I have to wonder if the entire genre won’t start leaning in that direction to hit such a large demographic?
I think that in order for location to mean something, travel must be cumbersome. In a world where travelling takes days and taking all your positions with you requires packing and protecting a horse-drawn cart during those travels, players would be much more inclined to settle somewhere and grow attached to that region. As long as fast travel and global bank access are in a game, I don’t think becoming attached to a location is possible.
Implementing that is quite problematic though. Players like fast travel and easy inventory management. Hell, travel times were one of the reasons I absolutely couldn’t stand EVE when I tried it. This might be a good way to implement a one-server MMO though. Run different regions on different servers and make it difficult (but interesting!) to travel between them and you might get load balancing while still allowing players to move in with their friends, so to speak.
See, in a sense paying monthly subscriptions does mark you as a citizen of a game world. It certainly focusses people on the games for which they pay and what services they expect to receive (in a way that you might brush off in a F2P game because it’s free.)
Scott, sorry, it’s reflexive! 😉 I agree, though, that it seems the money isn’t leaning this way. That’s unfortunate, but it underscores the notion that virtual worlds may well suit a smaller audience than is profitable.
Scrusi, interesting thoughts, and I think you’re right. I’d take it a step further and make the level band narrow and player skill more important than avatar skill, to make it so that *who* you play with is more important, too, and to try to prevent groups or towns that are invincible. That way, players could conceivably make anywhere home, and not be stuck to a few choices that are level appropriate.
Spinks, true… but that turns into a sort of “game” citizenship where the hometown is the game, rather than a place within the game. It’s a layer removed from what I’m talking about here, and fuels blind fanboy rages and business model prejudice… but you’re right. It certainly has many of the same psychological effects and emotional investment. Now, how to take that into the game itself and make it a fun game mechanic?
Personally I would hope we are tourists and the game world helps us to care or self reflect about the real world were in, right here, right now. Much like many books and movies might suck all our attention, but then we leave and take some of their wisdom (if they have any) into the real world.
But I think much like a moth’s ancient, legitimate instincts are screwed up by a flame, humans are story creatures – we get our attention sucked into stories. Because like the moth navigates by the stars, so we navigate by stories. And as humans we try to get all intense about mmorpgs due to an ancient and otherwise legitimate/otherwise functional desire to get into stories.
But they don’t end here, with mmorpgs. You don’t exit them and take any wisdom out into the real world. In the old ways, the story teller would get tired and you’d have to go back to real life, stronger. Here, the server is precisely like the terminator – it wont get tired, it wont stop.
This might be a racy comparison – but watching porn so as to then have much hotter sex in real life, that makes sense. But just getting more and more intense about a game world – it’s like just watching porn, and more porn and more and never actually doing anything in the real world.
It seems like back when I was in Black Opal and SD got Eta, I had a sense of pride about the place and contributed to the cost.
In WoW, place isn’t so important really. Dal is nice because it has the most portals to other places I might want to go, and it’s close to my current content. I don’t really think of anywhere as “home” in wow, unless you count the bank steps, cause who doesn’t like to bank sit?
I don’t think travel time has a damned thing to do with it wanting to call a place “home.” Today’s world is full of “fast travel” options. Hardly anyone outside huge metropolitan areas doesn’t drive a car, and flying has taken days of travel down to hours. Does that make your real home somehow “less” to you because it’s so easy and fast to travel to the opposite coast, or even international? Of course not.
That is also a perfect example of my original comment that I hope eventually we get good *gameplay* (which includes fast travel) along with good virtual worlds (which automatically means NO DIKU). Making travel a punishment is not good gameplay, no matter how hard you think your core might be. Say is that “meaningful travel” in your pocket, or are ya just happy to see me?
The closest recent example of choosing a “home” was in LOTRO when deciding which area to buy a house in. The Breeland homestead is typically the obvious choice because it was so close to a major quest/travel/social hub of Bree-town. But I was willing to put up with a few seconds/minutes of extra travel if necessary to live in the Ered Luin homestead since my character is an elf, and of the starter areas, that was my favorite. That was my tiny bit of role-playing, I suppose.
To a larger degree, I was hoping that a sense of home, and of loyalty and pride to my homeland, was what “RvR” was going to mean in Warhammer. I was hoping Mythic was onto a formula that would provide meaningful PvP and make PvE-only players a valuable part of the equation even if they were not directly in the combat. I was hoping that where World of Warcraft left the “war” out of things and the only difference between Alliance and Horde was “pretty or ugly” and there was no allegiance or pride to one’s “home” other than binding to the most convenient location, I was hoping WAR would instill that allegiance in its players and give everyone a sense of joy and pride at every victory and sorrow for every loss of your home realm.
Callan, would a game world with a home really be that much more addictive and life-consuming than the current MMO design already is? Also, some stories do make place and “home” important to them; this need not be a way to make players more addicted… though yes, that’s a good caution to keep in mind.
Sass, echoing Spinks’ comment, I do think that many think of WoW as their “gaming home”… and that yes, sometimes it’s hard to think of anywhere within the game as home. That seems like a ripe place to explore game design to me.
Scott, and yet, there is something to making distance matter if we’re talking about spatial location being important. Or, more accurately, distance is relevant if the interstitial spaces between towns matter.
If, on the other hand, “home” is the focus, making that location matter can be done without travel time, since it really is about the place, not the space between places.
I think Guild Wars did well with this; you had to walk somewhere the first time, but could warp to towns and hotspots later at will. That, to me, seems to be a good compromise. Players got a good sense of space whilst exploring initially, but could bypass the repetition on subsequent trips. It’s a way to get to the gaming once you know where you are and where you want to go. The sense of place works there because you’ve seen it once, and the game works because you don’t have to see it again if you don’t want to.
At some level, a place is more important if you know how it fits into the world at large. That means at least a little exploration…
But at the same time, again, I’m thinking of making the town itself important, not so much the world itself (that’s another discussion). Even those of us in the real world who make a place home don’t necessarily care about all of the larger picture. Also, it’s not like it’s terribly wise to make players explore if all they want is Dungeon Finder Quickplay.
Making place important could be done if you can always just warp between towns. As long as you get a sense of what each town has to offer, you can make a choice.
Perhaps the key is in the beginning of Scrusi’s comment. Moving a bunch of *stuff* from place to place could be a way to make place important. That’s part of putting down roots, after all. Players themselves can be itinerant and wander from place to place via fast travel, but if you’ve bought a home, you can’t just whisk *that* and the furniture between towns in your magic backpack. You might be able to carry your stuff (or have some magic Broker House handle the moving), but the house itself, not so much.
Maybe that way, day to day activities need not be bothered with cumbersome travel, and you can get on with gaming, but when you consider your “home” and its belongings, it’s a bit more involved.
That’s how it works in Puzzle Pirates; travel is very fast when you need it to be (though whisking to islands requires you to have set foot on them before, ferries are pretty fast and run between many islands, and you can always instant whisk home), but if you want to set up your furniture in a new house (whether on a new island or a move on the same island), you have to pack up and move it all in your pockets, then reorganize them in the new place.
Right, I wasn’t implying that fast travel to every possible location should be available the moment your character is created. I loved Guild Wars’ system so I could explore and travel if I wanted, but if got in a group I could be there in 3 clicks of the mouse. Compare that to say, my famous example in Vanguard where I got into a group and they had to wait 30 minutes while I traveled to them. And that was after using a Riftway too (before the patch that unlocked them all). That type of cumbersome (as the guy above me phrased it) travel punished everyone in the group. I was just lucky they didn’t boot me.
would a game world with a home really be that much more addictive and life-consuming than the current MMO design already is?
I would argue yes, based on my own experience from SWG. But I also have to consider that SWG was my first MMO, therefore it was my first MMO addiction, and all the nostalgia through rose-colored lenses associated with that. When I first was told about player housing and decorating, etc. I thought “pfft, who cares? This is Star Wars, I have a laser rifle and genetically modified pets. I just want to blow stuff up!” Then I got my first house, and whoah was that a huge deal! It was amazing how much time my friend and I took finding just the right location with the perfect scenery on a planet we liked, but not too extra far from the nearest town because there was no fast travel — we had to ride all the way there. Then came all the decorating, etc. Hours and hours spent moving things around pixel by pixel, turning to a precise angle, and so forth. Then our guild became big enough we could create our own player town but we had to move to another planet that had space. That was a project — we couldn’t just click a menu and our house and all its contents packs up into a nice little inventory slot. Nooooooo, each individual item had to be moved out of the house before we could take the house down. With limited inventory, it took multiple trips from planet to planet moving things piece by piece. One of us had to have a house on the new planet too so a lot of the time was spent putting his stuff into my house then helping him move, then empty all my stuff into his new house and finally moving my house. I think the move alone took us probably two days because of how time-consuming it was, combined with real-life requirements.
But then, the houses and towns in old SWG were something more than *just* an extra storage chest and an extra bind point like most MMO houses are these days.
It’s all part of why I’m hoping that pendulum swings the other way back towards giving us real virtual worlds to be part of and to care about, in addition to being great games.
Hmm… Tangent. But of course, it’s a nugget!
I think what you’re talking about, in terms of ‘pride’ does exist… but as an external factor, not an in-game factor.
If you take all the games (or just the MMOs if you prefer)
out there as the external ‘multiverse’ available through games, then I feel that home-town pride most certainly *does* exist.
If it didn’t, then no-one playing an MMO that is NOT WoW would ever see this line, ‘Go back to WoW!’ (with the attendant hisses, boos, and spits).
😦 Because for some reason Wolfshead no longer allows me to post (evil proxies + my country + new wordpress stuff, I am in no way saying he hates a nugget XD), I ended up putting up a small ramble on how size influences immersion and community in any given world.
http://nuggettygoodness.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/immersiveness-inversely-proportional-to-massiveness/
As is usual for a nugget, it is a tangent off THIS tangent, but I hope that it at least tries for relevance. ^_^
This even ties back to the interesting things about how … travel has to be difficult (lol 7 hours to install sacred 2 on win7… travel is difficult indeed – not to mention some of the horror stories associated with installing AoC) the first time. But once the ‘world’ is shiny enough (if it is), you then want to bring friends along…
In a very real way, our current virtual ‘worlds’ as we have them, are what we tend to become citizens of. Not the areas within the worlds, but rather what the worlds themselves represent to the uh… outside world.
Just one example of this is how, some friends survive the ‘move’ from one world to another, and some others when they move to another world (country), you never hear from them again.
…but that would mean subscriptions and other forms of payment are our taxes. OOOOOOM!
(Sorry, weird nugget tangents off in all directions again.)
>.< Additional comment…
Despite my running around poking my nose into other worlds (games) left and right…
…for me, Guild Wars feels like coming home.
I actually think that games that offer mechanics like PvP create a far stronger sense of community that those that don’t.
For instance, when I played EQ2 on a PvP server there was a hugely powerful sense of community as the environment was dangerous if one wandered out alone plus everyone hate the opposing faction. It was the perfect way to bond the community.
Don’t get me wrong, I would love a good solution that doesn’t prevent me from travelling – I just doubt that it can be done. Specialized locations that can be reached (almost) instantaneously don’t really make you pick and choose. Even if you have your house or whatever in one place, if you can simply move there from anywhere in the world (give or take) and vice versa, your house might as well be in your backpack.
In a PvP world, the issue wouldn’t be defending your hometown but instead going wherever the action currently is – other PvP games have shown that quite clearly.
Towns and cities work because there’s a mutual benefit to living in close proximity to other people. For proximity to be good, distance must be bad. Guilds in MMOs can exhibit quite decent internal structures of belonging, but if you don’t give players a reason for staying close to each other, than you will never be able to bind that to a home. I know we used to have a guild spot in Ironforge in classic WoW where our players were supposed to idle – few ever did simply because being there had no advantage over being anywhere else.
The distance penalty mustn’t be related to travel time, but no distance penalty makes location irrelevant.
Since I can’t edit: The last sentence was supposed to say “doesn’t have to” instead of “mustn’t”.
SWG actually did this rather well as you had player run cities dotted across maps. You paid an upkeep on your house but the mayor of a town (voted on by the citizens of the town and you could restrict who could build in your city limits) could also set a tax level which would line the coffers of the city in order that you could pay for structures to improve your city as it advanced. For all of its flaws SWG was an excellent sand box game that really made a virtual world. There were some dodgy decisions for the combat side of it but it was awesome at the start.
[…] maybe more addictive, though, which isn’t always the best idea, duly noted by Callan in the Home Town Pride article’s […]
[…] to find joy in virtual worlds? Or can we find it by being part of a place? Tesh as always has a good post about the need to have pride as a part of something, and a sense of place. Maybe we need more of […]
[…] is". Is it though? (image: jinx.com)Tesh really got me thinking about this with his post on home town pride. The closest we get to such a feeling on World of Warcraft is guild, server, or faction pride. We […]