If you haven’t played Animal Crossing on the DS or Wii, i strongly suggest that you find an opportunity to do so. On its own the game is addictive, but its weird implementation of massively multiplayer online play is really worth a long look. Nintendo are infamous for their friend code system, which puts users who want to play together through a good few burning rings before they can actually do so. Because of this system, you will never openly communicate with an identifiable unknown. The system allows for play with random strangers, but communication seems to be reinvented every time. If you are connected friends, you might get a full suite of options, but for random strangers you’re typically given what amounts to a few emotes and canned phrases. For a game with MMO pretentions, this is obviously hugely challenging.

Animal Crossing lets users that aren’t connected friends “interact” through side-effects of their actions. I had a real moment of wow when i spent a few irrational minutes making a pixel perfect nazi swastika pattern and put it up in my clothes shop for my (already utterly irreverent) animals to wear. Soon, the swastika pattern had migrated from my town to my few friends’ towns. And then the ball just rolled from there. Friends of friends of friends of friends would see nazi animals show up in their towns.

Media in Animal Crossing spreads like a disease. It’s a viral mmo.

An animal will show up in your town and ask for a new catchphrase. The next day, it might have moved out to another town. Which town? You’re not the one who decides. This lets you communicate ideas, but only to random recipients. This system is epitomized in the bottled mail system, which lets you write a message, put it in a bottle and toss it into the sea. Whoever gets the message is apparently completely random, throughout the online service. I have gotten bottled messages ranging from ascii cats to sorrowful suicide notes.

This is what makes Animal Crossing so enticing for adults i think. A combination of pure OCD collectomania and a world that seems wildly chaotic. In my mind, after a few weeks play, an Animal Crossing town is like an out of control train in a tight turn teetering on one rail.

What we begun putting together today is a purification of the bottled mail system. An anonymous client that lets you post messages into a pile, and retrieve random ones you haven’t written yourself. When you retrieve one, it is removed from the database. This ensures that a message is anonymous and personal. Of course, the system is widely open to abuse, but i actually don’t mind that aspect. Sitting on the beach sifting through debris for gold, you’re likely to find a whole lot of junk.

I’m hoping the system will find a place as a way to let off steam, and let off guilt. Somewhere to confess, or to be heard by someone who will know that somewhere, out there, a single individual posted this thought for a single individual to read. The internet is so often about the individual entity spreading information as widely as possible; the cluster bomb collateral damage model of information.

This narrows the focus back on the individual recipient, and theoretically eliminates the egotist exhibitionist publisher.

It’s the Anti-Twitter, anti-Facebook. It’s not about the masses, but the individual, sporadic connection of strangers’ eyes meeting sporadically through the window of a passing bus. The prototype is in development here, and I hope you’ll find it interesting as it evolves. At the time of writing it has almost no effort whatsoever put into the UI. Making it pretty comes next.

Everyone’s familiar with the queuing issue, when realms started choking and Blizzard were forced to implement the population full status, effectively denying any new players.
At the same time, Blizzard has realized that to keep the players that are filling up these servers, they need to supply more high-level content.

In the first bout, this resulted in the battlegrounds and improved honor point system, supposedly incentive to keep PvP where it belonged.

Secondly, the intensified raid focus, leading to huge sprawling and admittedly epic quests that have given some players their best experiences with the game.

Third, the expansion pack, providing a whole new high level world of sorts, as well as new character races.

All of these enhancements have, paired with the barring of new players to full realms, in my mind at least, effectively doomed the game to an endless cycle of creating new realms, and endlessly enhancing high level content. As a gamer who has always been quite happy being around the half-way mark with x number of level 30 characters, this ensures my experience with WoW is a solo affair. I’ll elaborate.

The last time i played WoW, i played on Neptulon, lazily pushing a character up to level 20, before i realized i was bored to shit with the experience of endlessly “killing stuff while being on an irc with more advanced smileys”. Recently, having seen a number of patches and updates to the game, i figured i’d give it another go. I found that Neptulon was now a full realm, but my character was still intact. The problem is, everyone else on the server is levels 50 through 60, meaning every single area i could safely go to was populated by exactly nobody, leading to an incredibly lonely experience. In the same way, why would a level 60 reroll on a server to go through the same lonely junk i was? In this way, the low/mid level content is completely wasted, and the server is dependant on high level content to keep its appeal. It doesn’t help that so much low/mid content almost requires a group, meaning if anyone wishes to go through said lonely grind, they’ll have to do so against terrifying odds. Not cool.

So this gets me thinking.. Where is WoW heading? What is even the point of the low level questing anymore? New players are barred the full experience, veterans stay for their buddies and the prestige of the PvP. What made WoW so amazing to me was its genuine *content*, it’s hand made feel and its willingness to really make you care about its world. All this is essentially forfeit now, to keep a hard core group of dedicated players.

In the same way, the increased focus on gigantic raids has excluded a great number of players on inferior hardware, who could handle the game normally but feel the utter pain of 1fps when they join a large raid; WoW’s technology can’t *handle* the raid sizes required in some cases. Some players who were drawn to WoW for it’s scalability, that they could actually get it to run and look good on their old rigs, these players are effectively excluded from a great deal of the content.

Going around alone on Neptulon, grinding my way through yada-quest after blabla-quest, trying to reach a point where i can actually SEE all these players that are filling up this realm, it’s hard not to quit the damn thing and play a game that actually offers an experience on its own without the assistance of lol-ing powergamers. What good is an MMORPG that bars the general public from enjoying it?

Actually, without the people, what good are MMORPGs at all? What can developers do to ensure that their game doesn’t reach critical mass like WoW is rapidly approaching and instead have an organic, open appeal that isn’t limited to those who are the most dedicated?

As much as i loathe Second Life’s presentation and weird reliance on real money, i believe they are touching on something WoW is missing sorely: the player’s ability to manifest. This lack of reality and consequence to the player’s actions pulls the rug from underneath the game’s suspension of disbelief. An example of Blizzard’s disdain of this is the addition of the instant quest text of a recent patch, which lets players breeze through quests paying no heed to the carefully written briefings. This caters *only* to the veterans who want to get through quests again to quickly level. All this builds on the feeling that everything you do is meaningless other than the quest reward and XP, and that’s a fallacy that made me leave AO back when, and get into WoW in the first place. I wanted a single player calibre experience with my friends, and for a long time i got just that.

I want WoW to give me an experience other than levelling and chatting with strangers. Is this too much to ask?

With every single one of these games, the point of saturation at which i realise i’m bored with almost every single game mechanic aside from actually gaining levels occurs around level 30 (or in the case of swg, the equivalent to level 30). I stopped levelling at 30 in AO to purely socialise and roleplay. My roommate reached level 200 multiple times, i never went past 30. (Who cares about killing monsters when you can run a sex club at the reet retreat for high level players?)

There is a fundamental problem with mmorpgs, and that is less a problem with the games themselves than there is a problem with the foundation on which they are built. Levelling is only fun when you get marked differences from level to level. In AD&D the difference between a level 1 warrior and a level 10 is like the moon put next to the sun. In a mmorpg the difference is more like the moon put next to a slightly larger moon. You set goals in tens. You try to reach 10, then 20 then 30. Every level is just another slow meandering step on the road, and god what a boring road it is when you have to spend 6 hours of constant work to gain one measly level.

WoW was total fun up to level 30. Now i don’t feel like there’s any more for me to do. I’ve seen every quest type, i’ve seen the types of combat i can engage in, i’ve seen the extent of the tradeskills. What else is there? Exploration? Even that gets old.

I’m not holding my breath, but i think Guild wars is doing something right. Its scope is smaller, but i think it’ll suit my brand of gamer better. Until this concept is reinvented, i’m going to save my monthly buckazoids and get insane killer experiences like Oddworld Stranger, or even reinstall Fallout 2 for another jaunt. It is infinitely more rewarding in a far shorter timespan, and it doesnt attempt to give me the illusion that i am part of a social circle.