Excerpt / Summary "All MMOs must end, eventually"
"But City of Heroes is not the only massively multiplayer online game (MMO) to shut down recently. Glitch, a quirky one dreamt up by the team responsible for Flickr, called it quits on December 9. Others that failed to gain traction or disappeared for different reasons include Star Wars Galaxies, Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa, Fury, LEGO Universe Online, and dozens more. The very nature of MMOs means most of them will fail. Only a few can reach World of Warcraft status. The demand simply isn't large enough.
"The problem with MMOs is that they take a lot of time to play, so most people cannot play more than one," Jesper Juul, game theorist and author of the forthcoming The Art of Failure, says. "There is a very natural limit to the size of the market. People will keep launching these games in hopes of capturing some of that slice, but most of them are going to fail."
Even if a game does find an audience and manage to turn a profit, there's no guarantee it won't be turned off for political or strategic reasons. NCsoft, the South Korean company that produced City of Heroes, simply decided they no longer wanted to deal with running and administering the game. That angered and upset the dedicated players, but they had little recourse beyond outraged forum posts and a passionate Facebook campaign. Three months after NCsoft’s late August announcement about the impending end, CoH ceased to exist."
"The trauma of an end"
"IT'S LIKE WHEN YOU START WATCHING A GOOD TV SHOW. YOU DON'T KNOW IF IT'S GOING TO GO ON FOR EIGHT YEARS, OR IF IT'S GOING TO GET CANCELLED AFTER HALF A SEASON." MMOs, understandably but also unavoidably, end. This can be traumatizing. Imagine pouring your time, your money, your creativity, and your energy into something, and then watching it disappear completely. MMOs aren't like traditional games. They can’t be saved or played again. Once the server goes down, an MMO as a player knows it is gone. Frequently, the end comes without warning. "I knew that MMOs ended sometime, but it hadn't occurred to me that most of them end relatively quickly. It's like when you start watching a good TV show. You don't know if it's going to go on for eight years, or if it's going to get cancelled after half a season," Laura Blackwell, a writer for PCWorld and avid Glitch player, says.
A strong, and very real, sense of community develops within the games. Players are not in the same room — and will likely never meet in person — but they do form lasting, important, and viable relationships. Humans are social creatures, with or without physical, in-person interaction. "In a virtual world, you have the ability to make these relationships real. You're engaging physically with a projection. You are interacting with other people, even though you might not know specifically who they are," Dr. Pamela Brown Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center, says. "These experiences are very real. The loss of one of these worlds is like the loss of anything you do with a bunch of other people."
Juul agrees. "It's like being expelled from the nation where you grew up. It's the distant homeland that you can't return to," he says. "MMOs are the kind of games that most clearly promise you a world or a home or a place to be. They appear to be very permanent and tangible, these concrete places. At the same time, they can very quickly melt into air. They are the most fragile of all the game forms, too."
The worlds can disappear, but there isn’t anything psychologically wrong with mourning their loss. Rutledge believes a grieving period is important, appropriate, and sometimes even necessary. “Those are normal feelings and they should go through the same process anyone does when they miss something. Remember it fondly. Get together and reminisce a little bit. Celebrate the shared experience. Then, find other things to do to replace it."
But first, they have to get over the loss. That takes time, especially when it comes suddenly and unexpectedly." |