Last week in Vague Patch Notes, I attempted to lay out my thesis for what it means when we say MMOs require other people. Now I need to start drilling that down a little bit further, and to start that, I’m going to talk about a dog. Not my dog, but a dog I did live with for quite a while, a very affectionate rat terrier owned by my stepmother.
At the time, my stepmother and mother would get up and leave for work before I did. The dog liked to sleep with other people. So when they woke up, first, my stepmother would take the terrier out to relieve herself. Then she would come back inside, run into my room, leap up on my bed and lick my face to start waking me up. Then she would curl up immediately next to my head and doze for a bit until my alarm went off.
I did not really want to be woken up every day by dog saliva smeared across my face. This did not spark joy. But that’s also the entire premise of having a dog instead of having a stuffed animal. Which is why other players in MMOs are dogs, and I swear, this isn’t an insult even if it sort of sounds like one right now.
Anyone who has had a pet has gotten used to the idea that pets are… well, they’re sometimes inconvenient. They make noise when you want silence. They need to be fed and cared for. Sometimes you want to have intimate time with someone and your cat decides that now is a perfect time to scream and cry for attention. Things get knocked around, items get chewed or clawed or moved, and in general you have an animal in your house that is going to behave like an animal.
This sounds like it might suck until, you know, the first time your dog puts his head in your lap and stares up at you with love in his eyes because he knows you’re sad. Or the time when you feel sick and your cat just purrs against you. One of the major reasons I’ve said over and over that I love cats is because cats are persnickety in their affection, and if a cat comes over and purrs and cuddles you, it’s because the cat wants to do that.
It doesn’t happen on your timetable. And this is the whole point of MMOs.
There are a large number of things in any MMO allowing me to dictate exactly how much I want other people to be interacting with me at a given moment. I can log in to Final Fantasy XIV, set myself to Do Not Disturb, turn my chat window to one that does not contain messages from player chat, and go out to someplace I do not expect to see a critical mass of people at any given moment. All of these things are under my control.
But you know what? I can go somewhere obscure and people still might show up to dance in front of me, and there’s nothing I can do about that. I do not control what is up on the game’s market boards or the prices for same. I cannot control who is going to do FATEs in a given area, if anyone. I cannot control other people who might decide to join me in Leap of Faith in the Gold Saucer, and despite my earnest wishes, I cannot vaporize male Viera with the power of my mind.
The flip side of that, of course, is that they can’t vaporize me either. In fact, I am just as much of an element for them as they are for me. However much I might choose to go off the grid, there is still a grid.
In my prior column I brought up Baldur’s Gate 3, and that wasn’t by accident because that game – like lots of games populated by one human and several party members – does its best to make you feel as if everyone in the group is fundamentally a human being. You, as the player character, have agency, but the game works overtime to create the illusion that Astarion and Gale and Karlach and so forth all have their own wants and desires, too. Get back to camp, and Lae’zel wants to talk to you whether you want to talk to her or not.
Only… she doesn’t have agency, not really. If she has a quest marker over her head, you can happily just never talk to her. In fact, the game lets you kill her, stuff her corpse in a box, then toss the box in the storage container at camp and never think about her ever again. Nor will any of your party members remark about the time you did that. It is a simulacrum. If you want other players to just be present when you want them, you don’t want an MMO. You want a single-player game with multiplayer options.
And that’s fun, too! I like that games like Saints Row the Third can be a lot of fun with another person or solo. But if you have the ultimate power of saying “no” to another person, you aren’t looking for an MMO.
The lack of the ability to control other people is crucial to a whole lot of aspects that make MMOs fun in the first place. In the comments last week, our own editor Bree talked about how it just feels more fun to do building in an MMO instead of single-player even if it boils down to the same root actions. And it’s true. Showing off my farm in Stardew Valley is part of the fun for me, but it’s even more fun for me to elaborately decorate my house and front yard in FFXIV so that others can see it – even if I might not know the people who are checking it out.
A lot of multiplayer games are defined by one of two things: either all involved players competing or all working toward a shared goal. Two-player Mario games usually mean two people both trying to clear levels; two-player Civilization games are about one player winning and the other losing. But MMOs are entirely built around the fact that other players are there. All the time. Whether you want them to be or not.
They aren’t there to help you, but they can help you. They aren’t there to hinder you, but they can hinder you. They’re people, with their own goals and wants. And you need to interact with them, whether your first instinct is that that sounds delightful or you’d rather be left to your own devices.
Just like dealing with a dog who really, really wants to lick your face before falling asleep next to you, your own goals there are somewhat irrelevant. And now that we’ve thoroughly established this point, next week, we’re going to talk about solipsism and the average MMO player. Look, I never promised that this wasn’t going to get weird.
Vague Patch Notes: Going solo isn’t a problem in MMORPGs
Vague Patch Notes: Living like a rock in MMORPGs
Vague Patch Notes: Solipsism and what it means for playing MMORPGs
Vague Patch Notes: The MMO world you don’t control
Vague Patch Notes: MMOs rely on other people – but what does that really mean?
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
