In rewriting Digital Integration, I began day dreaming about a wonderful world where I could turn this into mmorpg. The place where Chris goes to be a superhero is basically an mmo in the inner workings of the world anyways so it would flow pretty easy. I even imagined making it into an open source project. tho my research into what was available in the open source mmo world left me disappointed. one was a project attempting to rip off second life for no good reason, the only other I found seems to be more interested in arguing about the complex problems rather then solving the easy problems as often happens with mismanaged open source projects. Ah well what good are dreams if they aren’t unrealistic.
It was a fun thought expiriment to try and come up with things I could add to the mmo space rather then merely copying WoW like most other places. There is one thing I think you’ll see companies start doing soon, though I can’t think of anyone who is doing anything close yet, and thats improving the out of game experience. The fact that its a little “out of the box” to use a horrible horrible phrase is probably why it hasn’t really been done. Its probably a little counter intuitive or even counter productive for the smaller mmo companies to implent stuff that doesn’t directly make the game part of the game more fun. Which is why blizzard will enevitably deliver this first and leave everyone else to wonder wtf to do now. After all Blizzard has already done a lot to add value to players when they can’t play, with there Armory a site where you can go to compare your characters and those of other players based directly from the server data of your characters. You can view your calendar, and add items to it, so that you can better plan when to do events with your guild. (you can see my main character Emilea here.) they even have a convient iPhone app, so you can do it on the go.
But I don’t think even Blizzard is going far enough to get the real value out of the offline space. They veiw it always as a game first and any other use the players use it for second or third. the second and third priorities Blizzard likes to let the player base take care of with add-ons and fansites. If a use becomes popular then they absorb it into the game proper. But I think it misses what the bigger trend on the internet is, social networking.
MMO’s are the perfect social networking framework though and I think there could be real value in strengthening that aspect of it(social networks are notoriously hard to quit because thats where your friends are, the business model for MMO’s is trying to get people to not quit). For starters lets extend the concept of guilds to a place out of game, by establishing guild forums so you could have asynchronous chatting with your fellow guildies. Blizzard already has forums set up for public use that you post using your character’s identity, this would merely be extending the system to a locked down area where you don’t have to see all the regular idiots of the game just the people you chat with. The only way of asycronous chat available to people currently is the in game mail system, but thats in game and is only person to person (and provides all the joys of snail mail). its not really ideal to getting to know your fellow guildies and planing out guild events. Which is why most decently sized guilds have their own website. but that puts smaller guilds at a disadvantage. I haven’t even talked to most people in my guild and I’m fairly active in the game. Theres probably some non-zero infrastucture costs to adding a forum to every guild, but theres no reason you couldn’t lock it down into managable chunks that would be unlocked by the guild so that larger guilds would unlock the most features, while smaller guilds aren’t wasting resource. sort of a guild achievement system, because Achievements are awesome. It would even make it better, because it would be a bonding experience for a guild.
