It’s madness… madness I say!

There is a lot of talk going on right now… a lot of people making statements.  The ideas in these statements are not necessarily new.  In fact, people have been saying the same thing for years.  It just seems to go in waves where people acknowledge a fairly uncomfortable truth and begin speaking of it again.

The basic premise is that once the initial ’shiney and new’ wears off of an MMO, we are forced to confess that these games are really not all that great.  At least, not good enough to keep us coming back for more year after year.  MMO’s, just like their stand-alone counterparts, are decent games with a limited amount of replayability.

For all those who keep playing day after day and year after year, there is one thing that keeps us coming back for more.  For some, that one thing is some need to have it all.  These people will befriend any who can serve their cause and then cast them away once that cause is met and begin befriending friends in the next tier up.  They are on a ladder climbing over those climbing more slowly than they would like and they aren’t going to rest until they reach the top.

For others, there are the frienships.  Some might hesitate to brand a person they have never met and don’t even know their real name as a friend, but the emotions are the same.  Some how, some way, for reasons not fully understood, spending hours with people day after day on a shared adventure fosters a sense of friendship.

And because of these friendships, we continue logging on day after day.  If our friends don’t happen to be online, we might log off and do something other than game for an evening.  The excitement of getting into a game can deminish rapidly if your friends aren’t online and you are suddenly left to fend for yourself.

This past Thanksgiving marked my 8-year anniversary in MMO’s.  I started playing EQ two days before Thanksgiving in 2000.  I think back on all the things that have occurred in my small corner of the MMO universes.  Most memories make me smile.  Some make me laugh.  A few make me sad.  There are even a couple that make me angry.

The one commonality is that they ALL revolve around the friends I have made (and sometimes lost) inside MMO’s.  I don’t have any fantastic memories that stand out in my mind of the times I was off soloing somewhere.  My memories, much like the memories I have of real life, involve the time I spent with the people I have spent my time with.

It all leads me to increasingly question why so many companies are working so bloody hard to take the social part out of MMO’s.  Taking the social elements out of an MMO is like building an amusement park with a lot of rides but putting those rides behind glass walls and telling people they can look but they can’t actually get on.  It might be semi-interesting the first time you walk through the park, but you aren’t ever going to come back again.