Abstract Trouble in River City: The Social Life of video games by
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- The Evolution of the MMRPG
A Typology of ContentCreating a typology of game play is more complicated than classifying the genre of a movie, book or television show because any one game may have several play characteristics or variations. A given game often fits a single genre fairly neatly, but the options presented to the player make for added complexity for researchers. For example, a single game may let the player play alone or with other players, or may offer computer-based “non-player characters” (or NPCs). These other players and NPCs may be on the player’s side or they may be antagonists. Play can take place on a computer, console, or a portable device such as a GameBoy, PalmPilot or a cell phone. Other variations in a game can come from space, time, and narrative structure (Wolf, 2001). Lastly, the question of social setting can be important: is the player alone or with others, and in a home, office space or a public space? Therefore, describing a game for the purposes of research begins with genre, but must always include an accounting of the several other variations in game content and context that may impact the variables under study. Not including purely educational titles, there are eight generally acknowledged video game genres, based on industry practice, but increasingly adopted by the growing research community (Funk, 1993; J. Sherry & Lucas, 2003) (see Table 1). Like other media products, games can overlap genres, as with the popular Rise of Nations that borrows elements from simulation, action and strategy games. The most popular genre, and the one under study here is the RPG, or role-playing game.
An important recent development in video games is the mainstream arrival of networked play. Networked games are those played by multiple players, each using their own terminal device. With the rise of the public Internet in the mid 1990s, PC-based games were the vanguard of networked gaming. More recently, home consoles have taken advantage of DSL- and cable-based ISPs and have incorporated networked game play; broadband connections are impacting entertainment choices (Kwak, Skoric, Williams, & Poor, 2003). By most accounts, networked play is seen as the future of the video game industry, partly because players expect new titles to have some kind of multiplayer experience built in (N. G. Croal, 2001; Kushner, 2002a; Pham, 2001; J. Schwartz, 1999). Forecasts suggest that online gaming will grow from a $127 million industry in 2003 to a $6 billion one by 2006 (ScreenDigest, 2002). Studying an online RPG therefore means studying the most popular genre, and potentially the dominant future form of video games. Online games are played by large and small groups of players, and last for very different time periods. The smallest games—for example, online chess—have only two players and are relatively short. Medium-sized games such as Counterstrike or Quake, may last about the same time period, but have from 2 to 40 players. A handful of these titles can be played competitively for cash (Lubell, 2003). The largest games of all have hundreds of thousands of players and continue indefinitely. This last kind of game is known as a “massively multiplayer online role-playing game,” more commonly referred to as an MMORPG or MMRPG.
Online multiplayer gaming has undergone a slow evolution from niche hobby to mainstream marketability. How many players “massive” means is not clear, but games have moved steadily from allowing only two players to allowing as many as possible, sometimes up to several hundred thousand. According to Mulligan (2002), a long-time online game industry veteran, the industry evolved through three stages. The first generation was marked by the invention of games played not just on a computer between people, but over networks where those people sat in front of separate terminals. This was made possible by the 1969 debut of the ARPAnet, the research institution-based precursor to the modern Internet. As with the early game development chronicled in Chapter 2, progress was made by university students with access to mainframe computers. The first networked games quickly launched that first year of ARPAnet when Rick Blomme wrote a network version of Spacewar, two years before Nolan Bushnell adapted it into the arcade clone Computer Space. Crude 3D graphics games appeared in 1973. T  he second generation dates from 1978 to 1995, and introduced the concept of “persistence” to online games. The text-based 1978 Multi-User Dungeon (or MUD) was the first real-time, multi-player game that a
Figure A. Planning schematic for the original text-based MUD. Shows “places” as a series of nodes. (http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/masep84.htm) llowed players to save their characters and grow them indefinitely, meaning that their characters persisted even after the play session ended, i.e. the character would pick up where it left when the player next joined the game.1 “MUD” eventually became the generic term for any text-based, persistent multiplayer game, and scores of general and specialized MUDs flourished (Curtis, 1992). Like most of the MUDs and MMRPGs that followed, MUD drew its source material—just like Dungeons & Dragons—from the fantasy novels of J.R.R. Tolkien (Pearce, 2001). Nearly every MMRPG features variants of the stock characters of trolls, orcs, elves, armor-clad warriors, and wizards. Written for the PDP-10 mainframe computer, MUD’s code was “shared” by users worldwide when it was anonymously posted on ARPAnet. Its success inspired the fledgling game industry to experiment with networked titles, and by the mid 1980s, rudimentary games using the CompuServe and Genie networks were charging $4 per hour for p  lay.
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he third generation began in 1996 when online games moved from proprietary networks like CompuServe to the public Internet, and when the games began charging a flat monthly fee, rather than an hourly one. These two changes brought the niche hobby to the mainstream public—or at least to those early adopters who were online in 1996. The first title in this vein was Meridian 59 (see Figure B), which has since folded (Colker, 2001). Following Meridian 59 was the first truly successful MMRPG, Ultima Online (UO), which traded on a recognized game brand and convinced developers that the genre could be profitable on a large scale; for the first six months of its release UO was the fastest-selling product in the history of Electronic Arts, the most successful publisher in games history (Mulligan & Petrovsky, 2003). Who plays MMRPGs? Because of the proprietary nature of publishers’ data, exact figures for MMRPG play are not available, meaning that we are still not sure who plays them. National survey data show that general online play is diverse in terms of gender, race and age (see Table 2).2 Data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project illustrate that higher percentages of racial minorities and women are playing than white men, and that surprisingly large numbers of older people play.
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