Rantings: The Concept of Intromo

Today's subject, which will hopefully and mercifully be shorter than the last ranting, is a concept I came up with about a year ago. It relates to the ongoing fight for the "soul" of video games. That is, are they art or entertainment? Is multi-player, whether cooperative or competitive, the superior, default, or even the only valid system to use? Are narrative games doomed to extinction, and should they be?

All of these are excellent questions, and some variant of them will be addressed later on in this blog. However, the concept of "Intromo" is more mercenary. How successful is an intellectual property going to be for the multiplayer environment? And, more importantly, when is making a single-player game the best way to attract a multi-player audience? Intromo tries to address that.

The entire multi-player standard as a revolution came from the success of a few very successful individual games or series, including Halo and World of Warcraft. However, the big problem with these games is that their greatest strength is also the industry's greatest weakness; there is no ending to the gameplay. A narrative game has an ending, and after it's completed, attention will usually wane after another replay or two at the most. For games with ongoing payment systems like a subscription, that's a death sentence. On the other hand, it means that the gamer is then ready to buy a new game, probably of a similar genre. When the gameplay lasts forever, there's no incentive for the gamer to get a new game, let alone maintain a second game that offers a regular subscription.

This makes it harder for other companies to work around a multi-player game with such legs. The ur-example, and the one that made me start to think on this subject, is World of Warcraft. At least for games with a subscription model and a price point of their level, they have moved beyond dominance of the industry. They are, unquestionably, THE fantasy MMO. So, let's say you're a company that wants to make a new MMO. They couldn't compete with WoW; they lack the fan base and the financial resources to create a game that attracts the same audience. The comparisons to WoW would be inevitable, and when the point comes where WoW becomes so graphically or technically out of date that a replacement could defeat it, Blizzard is in the easiest position to make the sequel that does just that.

The first alternative to this death sentence is easy; just make a game different enough to attract a different audience. And many companies and games do just that. EVE Online has scored a niche among science fiction enthusiasts, City of Heroes did the same for superhero fans, and so on. But there are only so many settings to go around, and while there are some interesting gaps to fill, they can't last forever. And while none of the games mentioned above have remotely dominated their setting the way WoW has, that brings up a dangerous question for prospective publishers; are they not as popular because they don't have the polish of WoW, making this potential new game the one to accomplish this, or because these settings just don't have as large an audience as the traditional fantasy setting? If the latter, they may fail to compete with the established game, let alone replace it.

The next option is to base the new game on something that already has an audience. Lord of the Rings, for example, managed to create a successful MMO by appealing to Tolkein fans. And remember, Warcraft was an established IP well before their MMO came out. This is risky as well, however, as Dungeons and Dragons Online and even Star Wars Galaxies have found out. Granted, there's more to attracting an audience than a popular name, and the quality of the game must also be of a certain standard.

But it is my opinion that to be successful in the long-term, both quality and the attraction of the setting are necessary elements. This is originally where the term Intromo came from. It suggests a game that has limited multi-player options, but the world it creates is so exciting that it brings its audience with it to a later multi-player game. So Intromo is short for Introduction to MMO, which itself an anagram for Massively Multiplayer Online. But the concept is expansive, and it can refer to any later multi-player systems an IP develops, or even additional multi-player features added to a primarily single-player game.

What sort of game has good Intromo? There are a few components. First, the world of the game must be expansive, full of interesting characters, and distinctive traits. For example, many Final Fantasy games would be capable of supporting multi-player gameplay, and the series as a whole created such a recognizable experience it supported its own MMORPG for years now, though I still suspect that had they found a way to include popular locations like Final Fantasy 7's Midgard, it could have neared WoW's level of success.

Also important is the impression that the world of the IP exists beyond that of the single-player game's characters. As good a series as it is, God of War would be a bad example. Nearly every character exists as an eventual target for Kratos to destroy, and there's little appeal to playing anyone but him. By contrast, while Master Chief is easily the most popular character of the Halo universe, the series has succeeded by surrounding him with sympathetic allies and pointing out that the character is merely the most noteworthy example of an already impressive species of warriors, the Spartans, and the player can easily insert himself or herself into the role of any other Spartan and feel just as important.

Finally, the world must demonstrate a wide range of actions people in it can participate in. If the only thing you see people do in your IP is shoot each other, you might have enough for competitive multi-player deathmatches, but an MMO would be nearly impossible. The more people you expect your game to attract, the wider the range of heroes you have to provide, from battle-ready soldiers to free-spirited mercanaries to pacifistic entertainers.

The concept of Intromo has already been instructive in my game designs, and I have reconsidered earlier ideas and reverse engineered them to include more multi-player options or room for such expansions, even in ones that must initially be single-player narratives. At the very worst, it makes your world more vibrant, your characters more multi-dimensional, and your gameplay more varied.