Games that could be MMOs: Spore
Ever since I saw Spore being shown at Macworld this year, I've been thinking about how our characters progress, and likening it to evolution. The more you fight, the more you grow -- in levels, anyway. Here, however, death doesn't cut off your genetic line, but neither do you get to pass yours on. And while it's cool to watch your character gain abilities, hit points, new gear, etc., what if there were an MMO that let you actually evolve?
Take Spore as our example: start life as a single-celled organism. Eat and avoid being eaten long enough, and you level up to the next step: evolving into something better adapted to the environment, so you can survive better, longer. Keep on growing until you've begun making tools. Organize a community. Explore the world, and eventually, space itself, and new worlds. This is what Spore promises, but currently it's a single-player game, with the only interaction with other players arising when spaceflight is achieved. But what if Spore started out as an MMO?
Think about the struggle of surviving in the primordial soup, just one of a thousand tiny critters, all vying for life. Other players are in there with you, eating each other, coming back as new microbes until they get it right. You choose to evolve into a tough-as-nails predator out to dominate your environment. Let's say you get to choose from a limited set of biological add-ons -- horns, stingers, claws, etc. -- and that somewhere out there, another player is choosing the same set of add-ons. Eventually you meet, and recognize a common ancestry; you choose to cooperate with each other in the name of shared survival.
Others find you, and you become, to pursue the MMO analogy, a guild. Your add-on options increase. You research new technologies. You choose roles: hunter, gatherer, shaman. You level up your chosen profession, allocating points to differentiate yourself from your guildmates. You build shelters, crude at first, then with increasing sophistication as your storehouse of knowledge increases. Crafting, in this world, might mean actually exercising creativity, rather than merely clicking on a single button to increase your skills.
You begin to build your empire. You go on raids to other villages to steal their food, or their weapons, or their knowledge, which brings new options for your add-on pool. You make alliances, and your sphere of influence grows, or you exterminate your neighbors and absorb their resources. You grow in wisdom and might, eventually leaving the planet to explore life within the void of space. Think of the narrative possibilities inherent in such a system!
Why won't this work? Because of the ever-present possibility of True Death. I've written about this before, and it seems that players aren't quite ready for the idea of losing everything they'd built up over time just to satisfy the ontological dictates of a truly evolutionary system. But with greater risks come greater rewards. You would know the measure of your fellow players by the fact that they stand with, or against you. Any player clever and lucky enough to reach the same level that you had would be a worthy opponent indeed. This is the beauty of an actual, skill-based system: the cream rises to the top.
And imagine the vibrant diversity of a procedurally-driven set of customization tools. Looking at the character creation screens of Age of Conan alone is enough to illustrate the potential for a world filled not with cookie-cutter character templates, but with real individuals, each one shaped by their own history and circumstances.
I'm going to stop frothing here in a minute, but just let me dream for a bit. A world designed to challenge you, in which Player vs Environment really means something; failure to adapt means death. And at the same time, Player vs Player would take on greater import, with the stakes at risk being nothing more than the ability to prove your worthiness to take on the world. Just like the fish that took its first step out of the water, an MMO that could accomplish this would signal the next phase in the evolution of the genre itself. Will Wright, finish Spore already; your next mission awaits.
