01.26.08
NASAMMOG
Despite the risk of turning this place into a newsblog, I just have to address this MMOG that NASA is planning:
Wired: Would You Play World of Warcraft, NASA-style?
The idea is to create a virtual world that mimics the physics, scientific goals, and presumably the realistic mission profiles of the space agency’s real-world activity. Which is an entirely admirable goal. But I might add a few words of advice: Add space orcs.
I really like the idea of less combat-oriented MMOG’s, but the question of “What does the player do all day?” seems to always get in the way of this. Of course there’s The Sims Online and Second Life, but these seem more like social platforms than any sort of actual game. A game has rules, goals, obstacles, and rewards all built into it, and by far the most repeatable form of content for a game is good old-fashioned violence. If you have a good, fun combat system with place for variety, all you need to do is provide some different weapons and switch out the enemies every now and then, and you can pretty much populate a 100-hour game with nothing but one skirmish after the other.
This is what current successful MMOG’s (definitely including World of Warcraft) have turned into a ridiculously successful business model. In fact the quest that made me cancel my subscription to WoW and never look back was one of many quests were I was tasked with going out into a field and killing a specific type of monster in anticipation of getting a particular item with a very low drop rate. I’d killed at least a hundred of these miserable critters until I quit in disgust, and seeing how WoW recently hit 10m subscribers, I’m thinking a lot of people are more patient with such quests than I am. In theory Blizzard could’ve just thrown 500 of those quests into their game and called it a day, players would be grinding mindlessly for years to come.
So the question is: What sort of activity could NASA build their game on? Exploration only works so long there are new areas to explore, and if there are no enemies or other time-sinks to slow you down, the world will have to be stupidly big to keep you playing for more than a month - and nobody will want to keep playing unless the world is full of interesting details to discover in the first place. Scientific goals are interesting enough, I suppose, but my experiences with science have never provided the sort of instant gratification that players crave. Plus I’d be hard pressed to turn science into fun gameplay, although it would probably help if I knew science beyond what I was taught in high school.
So what could NASA do to create a good, successful MMOG? Well, they could aim for a niche, of course, appealing primarily to enthusiasts and hobbyist astronomers and perhaps be content to attract the rest of us for just a month or less - enough to get some public relations messages across, if nothing else. Or they could sell out entirely, creating Everquest In Space, but that would be the boring, embarrassing, easy way out, and I don’t think any of us want that.
Me? I’d go for strategy and management, possibly letting each player create a colony on Mars or something like that, and demanding they explore their surroundings and expand their base while constantly maintaining a steady flow of research materials back to Earth. Maybe it’d work, maybe I’d get fired. Only a prototype could tell 
Razumasu said,
January 26, 2008 at 16:43
First of all - you must have been really unlucky with WoW. I played my char to around lvl 50 without having to spend hours and hours trying to get a drop. Off course there where a lot of missions requiring you to kill stuff and get something from them - but usually if an item wouldn´t drop you just went and did something else for a few days, then randomly killed 5-10 more of the critters and then the item would drop. I quit WoW because i found other games
As for the NASA MMO (NASAMMO?) i really can´t figure out anyway they could make it really entertaining to a mass crowd. If they want to build the game on what NASA does in real life, well then its pretty limited. Having colonies on other planets would be ruled out, and pretty much everything besides building space stations and going to the moon wouldn´t work either. They could however expand the the game to involve colonisations and different types of discovery missions…. but in truth, without the threat of combat and death/failure i think the game would end up lacking.
EER said,
January 26, 2008 at 22:32
“Travel to Mars in real-time and witness first hand what austronauts will encounter on Mars”
There’ll be YEARS before the first players start to arrive on Mars, so much time to come up with something. Space orcs don’t sound THAT bad…
Seriously though, the NASA thing (http://prod.nais.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/eps/synopsis.cgi?acqid=128415) states that it is about “Development of a NASA-based Massively Multiplayer Online Learning Game”.
NASAMMOLG … so the LG part would be important I guess. Actually, it doesn’t make any sense to me why it would have to be MMO. Perhaps it’s just Multiplayer, with a virtual classroom in space or something. We’ll see what it’ll be in 2010 or something. Or later.
Jonas said,
January 26, 2008 at 23:09
Clearly it has to be MMO because WoW has 10m subscribers and everybody wants in on that success
EER said,
January 27, 2008 at 10:03
I am imagining a NASA board meeting:
*You know what my kids play these days? World of Warcraft, they call it an MMO*
*We want kids to like NASA, what can we do?*
*Oh I know, let’s buy Blizzard*
*Too late, Vivendi did it*
*Can’t we just bribe that Morhaime guy?*
*Nah, let’s have our own game, that seemed to work with the Army.*
*OK, but it HAS to be an MMO, so people get addicted, we need souls!*
*YEAH, SOULS*
I’ll just stop there
Jonas said,
January 27, 2008 at 13:05
Where’d you get that transcript? I’m pretty sure leaking NASA board meetings is considered some form of treason or terrorism.
Although I guess it’s not treason if you’re Dutch.
EER said,
January 27, 2008 at 14:31
Shit, it’s out that I am an international spy, now I have to kill you and all your readers…
And I don’t like the anti-spam word below the comment box, this way I am going to forget to type that word VERY often.
Jonas said,
January 27, 2008 at 16:48
It goes away if you register and log in.
NVShacker said,
January 27, 2008 at 18:20
I registered, and now it feels like I have to make a commitment to your blog or something. Jerk.
As for the NASA game, I have no idea what to think because I haven’t the slightest clue as to what the game could possibly entail.
Jonas said,
January 27, 2008 at 19:10
You do have to make a commitment. Glad to have you on board!
Now man the oars at once, we’re setting sail for the Blogipelago!
EER said,
January 28, 2008 at 09:18
Ah it’s back on top, excellent
I already registered btw, but I can’t remember my password.And I can’t be bothered to log in every time I want to leave a comment.
It could be a massively multiplayer online e-mail game. Turn-based science experiments, best game ever!