And I shall call it “the wheel”

One of the articles that recently caught my attention was the new one over at Gamasutra featuring none other than Richard  Garriottt .  However it is not the fact that Richard Garriott and his company Portalarium are getting into social gaming (i.e. Facebook Applications) that I thought was interesting.  Rather it was some of the comments he made about the subject:

“So, I believe the casual gamer and the social gaming platform represent the largest ever yet seen emergence or change within the gaming industry. And all of us in the development community have a choice to either participate and lead in this journey or get left behind.” – Richard Garriott

“most dialogue in most games are you’re told to go to location A, you might find some monsters on the way to location A, but there’s nothing relevant story-wise to your growth as an individual is going to happen on your way to location A, and when you get to location A, there’s generally one real outcome, which is go to location B.

And I don’t care how good a storyteller you are, that’s never going to be very interesting. You’re never going to feel like you’ve really participated in a truly meaningful way unless you discover things on the journey from A to B, and also when you do get to A and meet that person and have dialogue with, some form of discourse with, that it again has some outcome that for you will be unexpected, as often is not.” – Richard Garriott

Mind you I will always be a big Richard Garriott fan, even if he never returns our messages.  Still, the first thing I ask myself is whether or not Mr. Garriott is correct in his assumption that game developers and publishers who don’t involve themselves and their companies in social gaming will quickly be left behind. After all, the last time I bought off on his assumptions concerning the future of the gaming industry he was calling Blizzard’s “system of inventory management” the “harbinger of failure”. Still, there is a lot to be said for what he says about adding meaning to gaming development beyond simply “go from point a to b and kill monster c”.   In fact right now “state of the art” social games aren’t even that involving.

But what if developers where to add in a good story. What if there were more to social games than “do you want to click button a or b” and wait for a mathmatical formula to tell you if you are the new mafia don, or if your potatoe  crop will be ready for harvesting now or five minutes from now? What if a social game actually told a story? What if I could log on to facebook, create a character and become part of an epic story arch that would grab my imagination? Perhaps the decisions I made wouldn’t simply go from point a to point b but instead branch out to myriad outcomes?

Sounds great doesn’t it?

Would you spend a few bucks to play such a game? I know I would. But wait. I seem to have heard about that sort of game before. What was it called?  Oh yes, it was called…

Multi-User Dungeon

…and Dr. Richard Bartle pioneered it along with Roy Trubshaw.  Apply the same principles as M.U.D. to a facebook application? Perhaps that is a new and inovative idea. Grandma, on the other hand, would have simply said “the more things change the more they remain the same.” Whatever the outcome, and whatever the direction the gaming industry takes, while social gaming may be a new trend, I seriously doubt that any publisher who choses not to partake will consider themselves “left behind.” Time will tell. One thing is for sure, however.  The more choices gamers have, the better they have it.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

(posted for Julie Whitefeather by The Webmaster)