Pokemon GO Generation 2 is out now, and it feels a lot like an MMO expansion in a lot of ways: We have new features, we have new grinding mechanics, and (of course) the combat system’s been overhauled (twice, with the original change making dodging useless, the second possibly fixing the situation).
On the one hand, I’m excited as a Pokemon fan, especially since it’s a free update. On the other hand, I’m starting to think that Raph Koster’s famous comments on AR games being MMOs might be a bit off, at least in terms of POGO.
Virtual worlds vs. MMOs vs. other genres
See, when Koster said AR games are MMOs, people challenged him, and he responded with a follow-up. Koster says that the issue is that people assume meatspace trumps virtual space when, essentially, it’s the opposite. Think of the ways Facebook and Amazon, virtual spaces, have access to your contacts, phone number, home address, and that a misstep or theft of either can have massive real world repercussions. As he puts it,
“What we are building [with Pokemon GO or other virtual spaces using real world information], in fits and starts, is a large scale spatial simulation that allows clients to connect to it, which has object types for every object in the world, will eventually track as many instances of objects (physical ones like buildings, keys, cars, shipping containers; and virtual ones like businesses, Pokemon gyms, and housing lots) as is feasible, maintains a persistent data store of all of those objects, and which includes an object type for “players” who are real people.
That is pretty much a textbook definition of what a virtual world is. And it is critical to understand that the client has never been the important part. Pretty much every virtual world ever made has supported multiple views of this simulated world: text, 2d, 3d, etc.”
Let me sum up those definitions of a virtual world so that we understand where POGO doesn’t match up:
- Avatar-based (text, 2-D, 3-D, etc.)
- Environment is persistent and interactive
- The environment then leads to player-to-player interaction
A key point to notice is that, originally, these games and their interactions were carried out only via text. We can do so much more that games are more graphically intensive and can use other control input methods, such as motion control or GPS tracking. And we expect a persistent environment that not only allows players to move through it but can be changed by player action in meaningful ways that is also persistent (i.e., an exploding barrel that respawns doesn’t count, but converting a red NPC to blue one does).
An MMO is a virtual world, but not all virtual worlds are MMOs. When we talk about the difference between virtual worlds like, say, Second Life vs. “true” MMOs, it seems to me there are two key differences between the two: An MMO must have AI to interact with, and there must be some sort of reward system.
To differentiate between lobby shooters and an MMO, we generally assert that the game can’t require or display a population size to start or cap out at. In addition, servers must be controlled by the company or publisher, not private players (unless it’s an emulator of a game that formerly did this) in order to assure fairness.
To cut out games like Farmville, which are “social” but in ways that don’t feel “massive” during your portion of gameplay, we’ll say an MMO must have direct, real-time player interaction in a virtual world using with the previous definition (mail systems doesn’t count, and turn-based systems must be player controlled actions limited by seconds/minutes, not hours or days).
Communication breakdown
POGO certainly has these features. It has some AI, it has rewards, and I suppose gyms are fairly persistent and something we interact with. There’s just one thing all of the above examples have that Niantic’s monster fighter lacks: an in-game communication system. While software may be good at swallowing meatspace, at this point it seems that doesn’t apply to communication systems, especially for a game with little real player-to-player interaction (with a few exceptions among the hardcore).
This is sadly where I feel everything breaks down for Mike Quigley’s comment on wanting the game to be more “WoW-like.” While players can communicate face to face and even form their own teams/gangs (as Koster predicted), that’s outside the game. The original Animal Crossing is a persistent world that allowed other players to help/hinder each other indirectly through gifts or even destroying another player’s town, but I’d never argue that working outside the game suddenly made it an MMO, even though players coordinated through the internet.
POGO players are essentially alone in their game world. Other players can influence the environment, but just barely. All direct assistance and communication has to be done outside the game still, and without monster nicknames appearing, that’s become more difficult. While I’m sure Nintendo has something to do with it, as Ingress has chat, even simple player interaction systems like trade seem in danger.
I still think AR games can be MMOs. I think Koster made some valuable points. However, after several months and essentially an expansion, I think it’s easier to say Pokemon Go is not an MMO but a fun exercise game with geocached scoreboards.
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What? PokemonGO had way more real communication than any MMO I played on my computer. You walk around with a friend and talk the whole time or with groups of friends… Also you meet other people IN PERSON that are playing and talk about the game, put down items for them to gain more XP or pokemon and so on. The whole point is to meet people in person with this type of game not to communicate on the screen with them.
The pokemon in the header-pic looks like he could really use more fiber in his diet.
…and waters wet.
If they removed GPS tracking and had buttons to move your character around, the game would still be the same thing.
The augmented reality part of Pokemon Go is just a gimmick with no real impact on the actual game itself.
I disagree here with what a virtual world is. What we have are partial virtual world simulations. They don’t have any real interaction, for the most part, with the world… it is a flat, empty background with wireframes to give it some shape and paint jobs to make it look pretty.
Any true virtual world requires that the world is actually something that we can interact with, not just a few parts and npcs. That is probably somewhat limited by technology of course, but there are examples that approach that end as compared to the oh-so-many games that get called ‘virtual worlds’ while being a hollow shell for AI or PVP interactions and crafting nodes if they exist.
The overuse of the term ‘virtual world’ has rendered the actual idea meaningless. It is one of those terms that needs to have some different aspects set aside, and some sub-terms like ‘persistent character world’ and ‘virtual park.’ Things which denote what games actually are… because as it stands the term ‘virtual world’ is EVERY game. They all have some sort of world. It is virtual. Derp.
The only reason we landed on “virtual world” is because nobody wanted to stick with “graphical MUDs.” That’s really what we are talking about here: shared spaces, with persistence, that run when you’re absent. (There are lengthier, more specific defs than that, but that hits the broad strokes).
It’s a much tighter definition than one covering every game. It excludes stuff like Diablo or Battlefield, for example.
It’s odd tosee how you keep referring to “outside” the game. You seem to have missed the part where PGO takes place in the real world, simply augmenting it by putting a layer on top. The world is the game. Having a chat in the game would change nothing.
And Ingress chat is used 90 % for gear sellers, 5 % for trash talking the other team and 5 % to get new players into other chat solutions like Discord, Hangouts, Slack and Telegram. No serious player uses the client chat for anything.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, we’re planning the next gym raid where we drive around in rural areas and tear down gyms and train them up to L10 and top them off with all the high CP defenders we have.
It’s interesting to hear your take on the Ingress chat. It’s also interesting how you note only “serious” players don’t use it; does that mean that people who only use in-game tools aren’t serious? Does it mean that because a player who may not know about external tools isn’t a “real” player? I totally get that real life is part of game’s equation, but it’s also a problematic one.
With PoGO (and I’m sure Ingress as well), you’re at the mercy of your local scene(s). My ex played Ingress around Japan, and she noted the same issue: one place might have people who talk and play openly, but others are like dead or private servers with no admin. As you mentioned, barely anyone used Ingress’ chat, but at least hearing people rant about how X location is always under attack let you pick up things about your immediate area.
PoGO doesn’t even have that. Maybe it’s a suburb/rural problem, but the fact remains that there are many of us out there with dead/dying scenes who almost never meet the other “serious” players, even if we use online tools to seek them out. The ones I have met are older people or family folks who don’t use social media, just steal some free time to take gyms and often from there cars where there’s no communication, just them and their game.
Hmm. Serious might have been the wrong word. My intent was to describe someone who stays with the game and just not tries it out. And there may be the odd solo player, but they have little use for communication, and if they ask question in chat, we answer.
Ingress is two things first and foremost: A PvP game and a (global!) team game. The PvP aspect makes the ingame chat unsecure. We need secure channels where players are vetted.
We also need to talk to players across on the other side of the world. I can be at an anchor i Norway, waiting for a go from east coast Canada, we may have cleaners across continental Europe, and our Intel Operator may be in China. I can set my chat radius to infinite, but I then see chat from all over the globe, but that makes things impossible. Not to mention a mobile screen is not that big, and we’d like to see the game screen as well. Remember that where other PvP games makes you lose gear or time, we often spend thousand of dollars planning and travelling when doing ops. Having that interrupted by poor stock chat would be dumb.
That said, one of the most hardcore thing to do in Ingress is to actually run an “Open Comm” operation. It’s messy, enemy agents can see all you plan, and it’s easy to miss chat. But very satisfying when you make it.
My claim: MMOARG’s should not include chats. The games take place in the world, and people are good at organizing themselves there. Let them.
I don’t think an in-game communication system is a requirement for an MMO, or a virtual world either. UO launched without any form of chat except spatial chat, for example. To get around that, players… coordinated outside the game!
Something like The Endless Forest (http://tale-of-tales.com/TheEndlessForest/) only supports body language. It’s easy to envision MMOs with no communication facilities.
That said, I agree POGO is *barely* an MMO. The persistent nature of the shared gyms is really the only thing conveying that you are in the same simulated environment.
But spatial chat is still communication, as is body language. You have none of that in PoGO, especially since you don’t even see other players. Do you think a game can be a virtual world if you don’t see other players, just their scoreboard?
You are right that players can communicate outside of the game, but remember that Asheron’s Call 2, like Ultima, often had only local chat due to their faulty chat system. That’s an issue still cited as a reason for its failure, despite being a sequel strong enough to draw in new players. Local chat made it playable for people who couldn’t be bothered with voice chat, but as someone on one of the more active servers (Thistledown), I remember few people wanted to bother with finding external communication. Now imagine if the chat was completely gone and players also couldn’t see other players’ avatars. Is it really a virtual world if communication (text or otherwise) is only available by adding another virtual layer? (that’s not rhetorical! I’d be really curious to get an expert opinion on that!)
Yeah, I think it is. Consider an MMO where no one has chat because The Silence has fallen across the world. But everything else you are used to is the same… you’d still call it an MMO, wouldn’t you?
Even an MMO where every player played SimCity, in a connected single world map… could trade, set regional policies, etc, and had no avatar — and no chat. You’d still think it was an MMO. (It’d be better with chat, though. Still want to make this game someday).
I… don’t think I would, actually. I might call it a virtual world if it has the potential to be inhabited by others who can still affect the game (despite me not seeing them), but just barely. An MMO without other people, though, is single player game, isn’t it? No Man’s Sky tried to do the whole “there’s tons of players and they may affect your game, but you’ll never see them” thing and I don’t think most people would call it an MMO, even if it had worked as advertised.
Without text, avatar gestures, or symbolic communication from other players, the game is just a set of mechanics that, at best, allows interaction via scoreboard (or whatever else you’re using to compare power/accomplishments), isn’t it? We don’t call Donkey Kong an MMO because players interact with each others’ scores, right?
I could be wrong though. I feel like maybe I’ve forgotten something in your definition, or I’m missing something that’s preventing me from understanding your perspective on this.
That being said, I’m sure people would love a SimCity affected by other people on a huge map, especially if it had at least pre-written communication options to make trade easier!