Yay! Easy homework this week from Psychochild:

So, based on one of my comments in my last post, this challenge will be about licenses for MMOs. What makes a good license? Oh, let’s also talk about the potential trainwrecks since those are fun to laugh at. :)

This is easy, because I actually did to a lot of thinking about this earlier this week before I put up my own post on this issue.

Bad Idea: The Lost MMOG

I mentioned it offhandedly at the end of my post, that lots of popular television shows could have virtual worlds attached to them to increase viewer participation. This, though, would be a bad idea. Commercially, it could be a great success. If you licensed a client to keep things cheap you could probably launch with fairly quickly. All you’d have to do is build the world; no content required. The reason, of course, is that viewers would ascribe their own significance to everything in-world. Even technical errors would come to be seen as meaningful. “OMG, that tree is flickering. It must mean something!” As Scott Kurtz illustrates in a recent comic, as much fun as Lost is to watch it’d actually be a really crappy story to participate in. The worst part of this idea is that (if not with Lost per se) this ‘Virtual World attached to an ongoing confusing TV show’ is almost certain to be eventually done. TV shows that I think this would work for? Heroes, for sure, and maybe a puzzle-based world for Numb3rs? Anyone have any better ideas? I don’t watch much television.

Good Idea: Ghost in the Shell

As much as people knock Asian MMOG imports, there are a lot of great things about them. Maple Story may not be the bestest thing evar, but it does have some mighty kwai art. I can certainly understand why people play it. Now imagine a Massive game with more fully realized anime-inspired art direction (something I don’t think we’ve seen a really good example of here), and set in the NeoTokyo of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. An instance heavy game, there’d be three axis of development: hacking, soldiery, and cybertech. A perfect background for an episodic storyline, you’d want player to actually do a minimum of playing during the week. GiTS:SAC has a very tight storyline over two seasons, and both stories do a lot of slow unfolding and have a number of twists in the road.

Players could take the part of government agents, with perhaps criminal toughs serving as a second faction. Giving players the opportunity to play the content from multiple sides would be a definite bonus.

Like Cowboy Bebop, I think there would be a lot of work required to put this into some semblance of order, but I definitely think the world of GiTS is just as strong as Bebop’s. There’s the added bonus of a lot of cultural handholds for players; Bebop is fairly removed from our own understanding of the world, whereas Ghost in the Shell is set in a (admittedly transhumanist) future version of our own society.

As an end note: if you haven’t watched the Ghost in the Shell series … I highly recommend it. :)