Or: Why I can’t wait to play Valve’s first MMO.

I was sitting in my hotel in San Diego earlier this year, pondering a blog post and the day’s events. The sun was on the horizon and to keep the back of my mind occupied I popped on the television. Watching cable TV is a rare treat for me. Primarily I watch specific TV shows via iTunes or Netflix, so channel surfing is really only something I do for the 30 minutes or so I’m on the elliptical at the gym.

Animal Planet, Discovery, and other channels sometimes run shows on zookeeping or zoo design, and I just can’t get enough of that stuff. What can I say, I like animals and how stuff gets put together? In any case, that San Diego evening I entertained myself by occasionally looking up to see a hippo being fed or a bear cave being cleaned.

The thing of it is, in some ways those zoo animals have it better off than your average MMO player. I’m not just talking about free food and no rent - I’m talking about enrichment activities.

Animals in zoos, y’see, tend to live fairly repetitive lives. While enclosures in modern zoos are leaps and bounds better than the start concrete floors and metal bars of the 50s, they’re still enclosures. For animal species like great cats (which patrol a large territory) or grazing herbivores (which migrate to feed) even the most spacious exhibit will start to feel cramped very quickly.

One solution that’s regularly used in zookeeping is the concept of enrichment activities - stuff to alleviate the boredom. At a lot of institutions these activities are very simple. Hiding food so that the animal has to forage for their meal is very common, as are simple toys and architectural elements. An increasingly common enrichment technique involves having more than one species of animal living together in an exhibit; antelopes and capybaras, for example.

As much as the idea of live events strains the minds of developers and GMs alike, for the sake of argument here I’m going to liken them to zoo enrichment activities. Keeping the daily routine of players from becoming too routine seems like a very laudable goal. Regular holiday events have long since become accepted in most games, and those are great in-roads to enrichment. WoW offers regularly changing PvP weekend events, but those only hit a small portion of the overall playerbase.

What I’d like to see are deliberate attempts to shake up the status-quo every once in a while. Developers argue that anything disrupting the quest/grind treadmill has to be avoided, because customers will complain. Commercial MMOs are over ten years gone at this point, though, and I just don’t buy that as an answer anymore. There are endless tracts of time between holiday events and patches in some games, and having something to break up the monotony seems like a darned good idea.

The elemental invasions in WoW and the Rikti attacks in CoH are the sorts of things I’d like to see … only moreso. Big events that pit players of all levels against a common foe, or just cause a little mayhem. An Overlord-lead attack on Qeynos every once in a while, maybe? That could be a great combo PvE/PvP event, with PCs pitted against not only rallied evil players but spawned NPCs as well. An “AQ style war effort”, only in Star Wars Galaxies? Pit the Rebels vs. the Imperials against each other in a rush to supply the armed forces for a major confrontation. When the supplies are ready, announce that the attack is on, and direct players to the front lines via new (obvious) quests.

See, the key with enrichment activities is that they don’t even have to be all that great. Developers are always complaining that players don’t participate or that they think the events are lame. Well, I guarantee you the fourth time that polar bear has found a steak in the same hiding place he’s not super impressed either. The point isn’t quality - it’s novelty. Don’t aim for the suck, of course, but given the right set of tools I have a hard time understanding why microevents aren’t a regular in-game option. Life isn’t entirely predictable; why should MMOs be any different?