It’s no secret I’m a big fan of Neopets, but it’s just come so close to being a fully fledged virtual world, it was just a matter of time before they took the step and made it one. I just happened to be browsing the post-mortem of Virtual Worlds 08 (about which I made some posts on Massively), that Raph pointed to and saw this crumb about Nickelodeon making World of Neopia – finally! Pet-raising, minigame-playing action in 3D!
Some have asked how I can like games like Neopets and yet have few good things to say about upcoming titles such as Free Realms. Well, for one thing, being as it is (currently) just web pages, they can and do many surprising things. Neopets in particular has a very deep stock trading simulation, full auction house with lots of means of arbitrage, hidden quests, many many combat arenas with a surprising depth to their combat… since their barrier to innovation is set so incredibly low, nothing gets in their way. They have built-in blogging, guilds, player houses (which you can make however you like – mine is three stories tall with a tower at each corner, a courtyard, and landscaping I designed myself). Player stores with shopkeepers you can script – plus hundreds of great minigames. And more LOTS more.
Because there is so MUCH there, you can find yourself in little areas where you can make your own challenges – like solving the Shapeshifter puzzle to 100, a challenge that requires you to create a very involved program and teach yourself efficient tree-search and pruning algorithms. I met some fascinating people along the way to solving it; it took me about nine months (with breaks).
All I can be certain of with Free Realms is that SOE will have decided everything I can do before I even make my character. There won’t be any puzzles that require months to solve. There won’t be things to do that a kid would find hard or impossible to do – and so there won’t be anything that a kid could be challenged by. Like, I dunno, maybe a part of the game where a kid would need to know how to read and write in French, just a little. And if you moved deeper, you needed to know more French – and native speakers would be comfortable there, giving kids opportunities to speak to other kids all over the world in their native tongues.
There is so much opportunity in MMOs to not only socialize, but to learn and enrich people. If people can learn incredibly complex raids or how to fight in arenas in WoW, then they can learn other things as well.
If I’m going to let my kid play an MMO, I’m going to want to know what the tangible benefits of it are, or they won’t be playing. Learning how to shop – not a tangible benefit. Advertising a vendor’s products – also not a tangible benefit. Marketing does not usually benefit the target.
I guess what I’m saying is, what justifies a new MMO? It can’t be its own justification. WoW was an iterative collection of MMOs to that point, but has now matured and taken its own path. Lord of the Rings Online, to take advantage of the movie buzz to let you roam a famous world. EQ2, to remake EQ with better tech. Why Free Realms? (or Playstation Home, for that matter?)