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What happened to MOOs, indeed?
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 4:54 pm on 5/16/2005
Game Neverending was officially cancelled a while back. Here’s what I wrote about it back when it was still on (long before Flickr took over Ludicorp):
We all know what happened to MUDs. The text-based online dungeon crawls of yesteryear begat Meridian 59, Ultima Online and finally EverQuest, which begat so much raw cash that it spawned an industry within an industry. But what happened to MOOs? […] MOOs fulfill the other side of the promise of immersive worlds (AKA cyberspace, the Metaverse, or whatever you want to call it). EverQuest puts you in someone else’s world, but in a MOO, the world was yours to help create. Perhaps for that reason, MOOs tended only to attract the upper echelon of intelligent, technical freaks - the sort of people who have weblogs these days.
I had, of course, answered my own question there. The Web is what happened to MOOs, and it’s why they still languish today while MUDs are eating the gaming industry whole (even more than they used to be).
Where MUDs are typically very gamelike, have a central theme that’s well-adhered to, and a small committee of coders, in a typical MOO the game is coding. Or at least, it’s markup… or what we used to have before we had markup. Maybe not all players have coding privileges, or can understand the design of the cryptic, unfriendly early object-oriented language known as MOOcode. But you can create your room, and describe it in your own words - and since words are all the place is made of, there’s no central control of the world’s design. MOOs are open in a way that MUDs are not. And in most MOOs, virtually the whole game is in building things, and showing others the cool things you’ve built and the spaces you’ve made.
However, the social rewards for building cool stuff are so much greater in the techified blogosphere, a world that’s truly all the way open, that MOOs have no game in comparison. Put your coding skills to work in JavaScript and make a cool DHTML widget, and you’ll not only not have to write MOOcode, but maybe you’ll get some linkfame - amplified by all the tools other people have built to help give each other linkfame. There’s no server they have to log into and stumble around by way of north, south, up and down - the game of the Web has fewer barriers to entry. And as the idea of “Web 2.0″ - the Web that you write as much, and as easily, as you read - continues to spread, the social rewards (in all senses) of building with others (in all senses) will continue to amplify there.
What the Web, 2.0 and otherwise, lacks compared to MOOs is a sense of immersion. Even if you have a really big monitor and turn out the lights in your office, you can’t really enter the Web the way you can a MOO. It doesn’t represent a wondrous other world - it represents this one, and its voice is pitched at people who don’t necessarily want to escape. (What does it say about me that my interest in MOOs has increased just when I’m bored with web work and of spending so much time in front of monitors?)
There are Alternate Reality Games, of course… but they still don’t address you as part of the world in a way that lets you enter in the same way. It’s a subtle thing that I’m trying to describe; I’m thinking of Scott McCloud’s conception of the iconic lead character. Comic books and cartoons (for children, anyway) succeed in part because their lead avatars are relatively featureless, letting readers step into his/her shoes and project onto them any features or qualities that would aid identification. Web pages of any kind tend not to give you shoes to step into. (Somehow, a box on the page containing “You are logged in as misuba - Logout” and an icon with my face on it doesn’t fill the bill.)
It’s tempting to conclude that any world that’s open and connected enough to reward building-play (to the level that the Web does, anyway) is always going to be too open to create a sense of wonder, too flat and well-indexed to be transporting. And yet it was so simple to log into the second GNE prototype and feel like I was somewhere else.
I have all these ideas for making spaces, but I’m done making things people don’t come and appreciate. Is there any way to open up alternate/immersive worlds to really take advantage of network effects? Is that simple sense of elsewhere-ness you can get by opening the right chat window something that only a few people value? I can’t answer either question right now, although I think ARGs may eventually show us. But in the meantime, feel free to discuss.
May 16th, 2005 at 9:51 pm
I have always been suspicious of any participatory game that does not have a guiding core of designers or direct its participants towards some end. I have never found that sort of thing to produce satisfying results.
May 16th, 2005 at 11:14 pm
if you make it i will play
May 16th, 2005 at 11:23 pm
ouro: Then it sounds as if you’re not the sort of person who plays the typical MOO. Did you look into GNE or FlickrLive at all when they were running? (The latter is not as good an example)
sue: Thank you for that data point. :-P
June 20th, 2005 at 1:48 pm
MOO…
Mike wrote a nice little ode to MOOs and how they’ve still not quite been replaced with anything…
I don’t play Everquest or any of those, so I’m afraid I can’t compare, but I do, occasionally, miss those days of messing around on the Vassar MO…
April 27th, 2006 at 8:42 am
My problem with moo’s or at least the last gasp moos, is that they were not widely accessible enough to attract mainstream users, and the quality of the interactions suffered. Too many nerds. It is high time for a MOO with a web portal and an easy object/room editor that any user can pick up and use. I would totally throw my time into a project like that. I’m sure second life is fun and all, but:
1. They charge, limiting the userbase
2. There’s still something appealing to me about having it happen in text. I can describe something more effectively with words than I can with polygons.
April 27th, 2006 at 1:56 pm
Yeah… MOOs are about code, and code-based cultures have a troubling tendency to become about themselves. But it has to be about something, or like Second Life, it will just end up being about sex. Not that I mind sex, but sex has a way of drowning out other subject matter.
Sad as it is to say it, I think one will have to exert some up-front control over what people are allowed to code (and yes, Ouro, have an editorial focus) to keep this new-model MOO from becoming about code, and therefore everything, and therefore sex. I think the only other focus that could keep the interest of the target audience is games and play. But now I’ve given away too much…
(Welcome! I am like t3h biggest Waking Life fan evar. I assume you made it here from Justin’s recent doin’s, about which I should really make a post.)
May 6th, 2006 at 3:41 am
[…] Allá por los 90, estaban los Chats en 3D con sus avatares, o espacios virtuales como Habbo Hotel. No terminaban de funcionar. No había una historia o interés común que ligara a las personas y les motivara a participar. Dejo aparte BBS y MUDs, algo demasiado geek para lo que me ocupa aquí. Hablo de la creación y evolución de juegos a partir de interacción social en la web. […]