Online Roleplaying: comparing a commercial MMORPG with roleplay Second Life

November 2009

Massively recently ran some interviews with online Role Playing Game (RPG) developers and producers in their series of blogs titled "Redefining MMOs". In particular, Jeffrey Steefel, Executive Producer of Lord of The Rings Online included a nice list of "ingredients" for a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG or just MMO for short)

His list was:

I was curious to compare a commercial MMORPG with the typical role-play experience one can find in Second Life using this list. Unfortunately, Mr Steefel didn't provide any interpretation to go with his list so the first step is to provide my own definitions: I stess that the interpretations below are mine and not Mr Steefel's.

Persistence: the world remains online and inhabited by others even when a player logs off. It is also around week after week and year after year.

Sense of Place: ideally, players should feel that when they play, their characters inhabit a 'real' place. The virtual world that is created in the game should give enough cues that it strongly suggest this.

Sense of Purpose: the world provides, either implicitly or explicitly, a variety of actions and activities that players can engage in which will benefit their character in some way.

Social Connectivity: the ability for players to easily find and contact other players who have valid reasons for interacting with them.

Social Identity: the player is able to develop a strong identity for their character through making choices in the avatar appearance and allying themselves with other forces that are present in the world.

Social Grouping: a player feels a valued part of a community, either a small team dedicated to achieving a short-term goal or the body of players who inhabit the world and play the game.

Participatory Experience: all players feel they 'have a part to play' that is more or less equal to everyone else in the game.

Storytelling: players are the authors of their own story. They may also work together to produce an interactively constructed story arc or a collection of small improvised episodes which contribute to the overall theme.

For the comparison it seemed appropriate to select Lord of the Rings Online (LoTRO) as the typical commercial MMORPG: it's the game Mr Steefel produces, a game that is consistently in the top 10 MMORPGs in terms of popularity and, most importantly, a game I also play and so know well. The scores for Second Life roleplaying are based on my own experience of 3 years of roleplaying (and game development) in Second Life. In the table (below) I have rated each of the factors on a scale of 1 to 5. I explain the justification for the scores below.

Persistence

LoTRO scores well because its servers are up all day and every day (with occasional planned outages for maintenance). In addition, the game world has been accessible for over 3 years and probably will be accessible for several years more. Compare this with a typical roleplaying region in Second Life which is owned and run as a hobby by an individual who has to find a hundred dollars a month or more to pay for it and may have to fit all the organisational and community management duties around a full-time job, college work and/or family responsibilities. It is not surprising that many roleplay areas in Second Life don't last more than a few months. On top of that, the Second Life servers have a reputation for requiring unscheduled maintenance, although the amount of downtime is comparable with commercial MMOs.

Sense of Place

LoTRO can build on the sense of place created by Professor Tolkien's genius and huge body of work, as well as a phenomenally successful cinema interpretation of his literature. In Second Life, it is often difficult to provide a sense of place with the limited area of virtual space that is affordable to the hobbyist. On top of this, owners of intellectual property have demonstrated that they are willing to defend their "brand" even against hobbyists in virtual worlds. My own roleplay game development efforts in Second Life have been the target of such intellectual property enforcement. One further complicating factor is that in Second Life players have absolute control over their appearance. Any background which requires players to adopt a certain appearance (for example: a medieval-looking human) may have its sense of place continually challenged by visitors who don't know about, or refuse to follow the "dress code" and walk around in a bikini or with animal ears and a tail! In summary, many Second Life roleplay areas are idiosyncratic creations that convey a recognizable sense of place to players only with great difficulty.

Sense of Purpose

LoTRO offers a typical "structured play" experience consisting of a series of quests, combat with randomly spawned computer controlled creatures and a resource gathering and crafting system. Second Life is a virtual world that offers building and communication tools but no structure at all regarding how they are used. It is the ultimate "sandbox game". Some SL users have built game systems which incorporate some of the standard structured play found in MMOs, the most widely used are combat systems which allow players to fight each other and some character progression system to encourage player engagement with the system. The quality and integrity of these game systems varies widely.

Social Connectivity

LoTRO has a good set of tools which players can use to find other players who are online and doing the same quests. Perfect for the game! Second Life has a set of tools to allow players to communicate in various ways but discovering other players who might share the same interests and activities as yourself is difficult. Without being able to fall back on the focus of a directed quest system, Second Life needs to look at the ways Social networking sites are learning to facilitate connections between their users, but at the moment there is no sign of that. Most roleplayers in Second Life resign themselves to weeks of "getting to know" the other players who play in a certain area and it maybe only after considerable investment in time that they realize they don't actually share the focus and goals of the other players!

Social Identity

As with many commercial MMOs the avatars used by the players are somewhat restricted in the ways they can be customised in LoTRO. After playing for a while, one avatar of a certain class or race starts to look very similar to another. Not so in Second Life! It is almost unimaginable to think that two avatars could be identical, and although it is possible, actually trying to impersonate someone else's avatar would be quite a challenge.

Social Grouping

In LoTRO players come together to undertake a quest and to form guilds. The quest groups are short-lived and the players often don't meet again after the group disbands. Guilds are communities where guild members get to know each other and friendships are made (and broken). I don't have any fact or figures to back it up, but I suspect that most players' experience of social grouping involves the short-lived quest group and only a small percentage of players go on to join and actively participate in guilds. On the contrary, in Second Life invites to join groups and offers of in-world friendship are commonplace from the moment someone creates their Second Life account and steps in-world. In both Second Life and LoTRO, players often resort to web-based collaboration tools (forums, photo sharing spaces etc) outside the game platform to build their community.

Participatory Experience

In LoTRO there are occasional events and groups working on a quest which players can participate in, but beyond that very little else except involvement in a guild. The potential for participation in Second Life is huge. Players can help create the roleplay world either by building it, designing it and making it feel real by inhabiting it.

Storytelling

LoTRO has a wealth of story woven into its quests and a special series of quests which puts the player on the center-stage of a heroic saga. But that is nothing compared to the potential of Second Life where a group of players can create their own setting, characters, costumes, vehicles and write, act and even film their own story.

Conclusion

Second Life has the technical potential to create all the 'ingredients' for an MMO that Jeffrey Steefel lists but requires significant investment of time and/or money in order to offer a level of engagement to players. Comparing the rating of Second Life and LoTRO there is a complementary distribution of the factors which are rated highly: LoTRO excels in the 'world creation' and offering a 'structured play experience', while roleplay in Second Life has great potential for 'character customisiation' and 'storytelling'. I wonder what a game that excelled in all the factors listed would look like?

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