The most recent Warframe update starts with a solid chunk of story, and the story that it tells is that of a time loop. And without spoiling exactly what happens within that loop, well, it’s not sunshine and happy days. It is clearly meant as a point when the player character is meant to look at what is being asked and say, “No. No, I am not going to accept what you want me to do in this scenario no matter how you explain it because this isn’t what heroes do.”
Whether or not the player character in that game is supposed to be a hero in the first place is debatable (intentionally so), but the point remains. And it’s worth bringing up because we have a similar scenario in everyone’s favorite pile of endless nonsense called accelerationism. If you’re unfamiliar with the term in and of itself, you’ve led a nicer life than I have, but you’ve probably seen it espoused before, and applied to our genre, it would basically be the idea that if you force a whole bunch of MMORPGs to shut down and possibly burn any number of companies to the ground along the way, suddenly the resultant fiery cleanse will leave the world in a beautiful state where everything is perfect and nothing hurts.
In other words, nonsense.
A lot of you probably have immediately keyed in to why this is nonsense, but let’s not make it a rhetorical game to get to the conclusion. When you smash all the toys in the toybox, the toybox does not manifest new toys. People who buy into it believe that the big things in the space are crowding out better things, and if you remove all the things you don’t like, the better things will just emerge as a natural consequence of that destruction.
This is dumb for several reasons, and the first reason is just an obvious one that we learn from ecology. If you kill off all the predators in an area, what happens is not automatically that the herbivores you want to conserve experience a population boom. Sometimes what happens is that another herbivore becomes way more aggressive and crowds them out. Or a new predator moves in that’s even worse. Or the herbivores you want to conserve do experience a population boom and then mass starvation.
We’ve even seen something similar happen in niche MMO spaces. It would be fair to speculate that part of what caused Champions Online to suffer was that it did not give City of Heroes players a compelling reason to swap over and its design did not encourage the sort of play that made the older game so fun and engaging. But then CoH shut down, and CO did absolutely nothing to capitalize on it and instead just left people waiting for years for the much older game to come back.
Oh, sure, you can say that CO had a skeleton crew on it at that time, but if CoH players had flocked to the game en masse to start with, I am pretty sure Cryptic would have reallocated resources pronto. It did not happen.
So in that sense alone, this is stupid. But it’s also stupid because as I already noted, breaking things does not manifest new things. It doesn’t even mean that the new things that it manifests are going to be very good, or that the things that manifested are an actual improvement on what was already in place. If you take only one lesson from the Mad Max films, it’s that when you remove all external laws from the system, what you get is the first guy calling himself Immortan Joe or Lord Dementus or whatever and can shoot a gun real good will collect a bunch of other people who like following him, and the world does not get better for anyone else.
Right now, we have a number of MMORPGs that are pretty successful. If all of those games suddenly shut down, the result would not be game studios saying, “Wow, I guess we should build Ultima Online again only with more open PvP.” It would be most of those same studios saying, “Well, guess we’re done with MMOs now,” and that’s the ballgame.
It’s even categorically ahistorical because isolating the constant open PvP was precisely the thing that saved UO and made it more popular, to the chagrin of the devs who didn’t want to believe it. Some niche things have, in fact, always been niche things; they were just niche within a smaller overall market. Even in the long term, there is no reason to assume that burning everything to the ground will result in people building things back up in the way that you want, or even that they will bother building some of the things you value back up at all.
And that’s in the long term. In the short term you’re talking massive job losses, a great deal of institutional loss as people pivot to other fields or retire, and a general crash that makes everything worse. All on the basis that maybe when people sort out the rubble, you might get the things you think you want.
Of course, the usual response from this style of person is that some projects – especially smaller, indie, niche MMOs with smaller playerbases – shouldn’t exist in the first place. Why shouldn’t they exist? Well, because the speaker in question isn’t interested in the project, so why is anyone bothering? Yes, that exposes the basic solipsism on display in the entire exercise in “why is this thing I don’t care about something other people care about,” but it’s also just dumb.
We do have projects that no one cares about and fizzle out, and that’s usually for a reason. I’m not thrilled that things like The Wagadu Chronicles didn’t make it, but I didn’t actually play the game because it sounded like it wasn’t actually a great game underneath the great idea. I can be thrilled that we’re seeing afro-fantasy projects without giving them an automatic pass into my heart.
But it’s hard to point to a single MMORPG – or even a smaller MMO – that’s failed because of the field itself. We’ve had games that launched small and found their footing, games that launched big and got bigger, games that launched rough but cleaned themselves up. If I had to pick a winner between The Elder Scrolls Online and WildStar when both launched in the same year, I know which one I personally found more interesting and fun to play.
Except… WildStar kept screwing up. It kept making all the wrong decisions instead of looking at its launch reception, altering mechanics and the player experience as needed, and pivoting until players were happier with it. That wasn’t the fault of any other game; it was the decisions being made by the people in charge of WildStar itself, and if somehow it had launched unopposed, the same story plays out the same way.
Accelerationism is a loser philosophy espoused by people who want to believe that if you smash all the game pieces, someone will come in and clean things up and give you what you’re certain you want without any consequences for being a big whiny baby. It bears no resemblance to the real world beyond the fact that people will wreck things just because it’s something to do. The only way we manifest a better future for ourselves is by making it happen, period end. And if you don’t see that applies to video games just as surely as anything else… it might be time to do some work on yourself, hoss.
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.
