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Editor’s note: Jon wonders what an MMO would be like that thrust its players into a world that’s more like 1984 than The Lord of the Rings. It’s an interesting idea. Would you be willing to tackle the greater issues — and risks — of playing in such a world? -Jason
Rather than merely providing a world for people to quest in, I’d like to see a developer make a massively multiplayer online game that had a real political message about the way our countries are run.
I had an argument a while back with Suzie Hunt from the site Girls Don’t Game about whether Grand Theft Auto would make a good MMO game. The important thing to take from this is her argument — that this hypothetical GTA MMO would be a very negative place to spend the amounts of time usually associated with MMO play. Her argument got me thinking; do these virtual world’s we live in really need to be nice places to play in?
It’s pretty fair to say that most MMO worlds are utopian. Sure, vast battles may be raging, and you may encounter the occasional racist comment, but these battles serve to make the game more interesting and never pose much of a threat to the players. The racist comments come from people that won’t exist in the world for much longer.
Aside from losing a little XP every now and again, players never really encounter any true danger. This is a good thing in most games, because punishing the player wouldn’t serve any purpose.
The only MMO that’s really different is EVE Online. Developer CCP has chosen to take a back seat in the game’s story and just let the players take the lead. CCP engages in very little policing in the game, and the result is that there’s real tangible danger in the EVE universe.
Players can run banks, set up companies providing assassinations, or just run guilds. Some very interesting stories have come out of the game as a result. Interestingly, the game’s politics still revolve around democracy and a free market, like most of the world today.
Some of the greatest pieces of literature revolve around societies that have fallen completely apart, where a totalitarian government seeks to use every means at their disposal to control the population. Books like George Orwell’s 1984 or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale are interesting not because of the stories they tell about the people in these worlds but because of the worlds they inhabit — and how they can serve as a warning to us in our everyday lives.
I’d love to see a developer create an MMO world that’s not pleasant to inhabit, that makes its players feel like they’re in constant danger from the government. It would have far more power than any one of these books, and it might just challenge views on issues such as ID cards when players see the potential of where an increase in governmental control can lead.
The most difficult prospect facing anyone developing this idea is creating a world that people willingly inhabit even with all this danger. There’s no use in making a game that’s so unpleasant that people don’t want to spend time with it; such a game would be useless. As a result it makes sense for the player’s objective in such a world to revolve around rebellion, about trying to make the world a better place.
Perhaps you task the player with getting some leaked documents — information that shows the government for what it really is — across town. You might give them the option of going on foot but keeping out of the authorities’ line of sight. Maybe you allow them the use of an underground network of other rebels, but only if they’ve gotten themselves into this group previously. Maybe you give them a weapon, just to see them fail.
Potentially, the most interesting thing you can do with such
a setup is turning players into spies for the government. A common theme among books like 1984 is how it turns every stranger into a potential enemy that could destroy you at any moment. Accomplishing this in a game could have huge implications for how players interact with one another. Maybe you reward players who correctly identify and report other players working for the rebellion. How much harder would it be to complete a quest knowing that any one of the players walking the street might be following you?
Games have a unique quality as a medium that can create an entire virtual world for people to inhabit. So far, the worlds gamemakers have created haven’t deviated much from utopias. But there’s a real potential to make the world play a much more central part in the experience — and maybe get across an important message at the same time.