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Role Playing (Games)

MMORPGs Will Change the Future 73

Posted by Zonk from the all-your-orcs-are-belong-to-us dept.
Franz Ferdinand writes "An article at PointlessWasteofTime discusses all the unexpected directions MMORPG technology will change the future. From the same gentleman who brought us the Gamer's Manifesto." From the article: "There are 10 million MMORPG users in the world and their population is doubling every two years. Hold your hand about three feet above your monitor. That's where the graph will be in 2010. It's an infection, it's a tsunami, it's a volcanic eruption. All at the same time, waiting, like a nest of plague-infested rats next to a ticking hydrogen bomb in an underwater volcano. Or something. What I'm trying to say is, it's The Next Big Thing. "
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MMORPGs Will Change the Future More

MMORPGs Will Change the Future

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  • Well, if the World Of Warcraft players I know are anything to go by, the freeways will be a helluva' lot less crowded. Those dudes never leave that damned game. They say it's the new crack.
  • 1. You must have your own forum to dispense the bullshit.

    2. Once you have the forum setup, pick something that is really popular right now. Lets say, "eating".

    3. Expand on this popular activity and project how popular it will be in the future. Use an exponential scale, and then scale that up by a few orders of magnitude. Example: "5 years from now EVERYONE will be eating! They'll be eating all the time, everywhere! Eating is changing the world!"

    4. Sit back and enjoy the accolades from people who think you h

  • Old logic flaw. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Golias ( 176380 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @04:07PM (#13272771)
    "My dog was six inches tall last year."
    "My dog is two feet tall this year."
    "Based on this trend, my dog will be taller than my house in a few years."

    • Re:Old logic flaw. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Shadow Wrought ( 586631 ) <shadow.wroughtNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday August 08, 2005 @04:16PM (#13272845) Homepage Journal
      Old logic flaw.

      My favorite example of this is projections in baseball. Usually you can count on someone hitting a couple homers in one of the opening day games and then he's projected to hit 324 during the course of the year;-)

      With MMORPG, there is a certain audience that likes the games and will continue to pour money into them. Once that market is saturated, however, the numbers will plateau (same as in every other industry). There are many people, myself included, who don't really care for the genre and will not waste resources (be they time or money) on playing them. I'll bet any of you a shiny nickel that in ten years, the number of people like me (i.e., those who don't play MMORPGs) will still outnumber those who do.

      • Re:Old logic flaw. (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Golias ( 176380 )
        Well, there's a lot of appeal to the idea of walking around in a virtual world with a stunningly handsome/beautiful avatar to represent you as you interact with people and do stuff.

        The place where these games fall down is that the "stuff to do" still isn't really fun enough. The WoW missions seem like fun at first, but they all quickly blur into "travel 10 minutes to that place, engage in the same basic MMORPG combat system that goes all the way back to text-based level-grinding MUD's, then travel all the
      • I'll bet any of you a shiny nickel that in ten years, the number of people like me (i.e., those who don't play MMORPGs) will still outnumber those who do.

        If I told you in 10 years, that MMOGs have direct neural interfaces and that you could have sex with Hollywood movie star(s) of your choice (mind you depending on your expansion pack), would you still bet that nickel?
        • Yeah, but think of it this way, if that happens, he'll be out a nickel but can still have the sex. If you're wrong, however, he still gets a nickel. Damn, interest probably! Maybe I should bet nickels on hot Hollywood VR...

    • Re:Old logic flaw. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by vertinox ( 846076 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @05:07PM (#13273399)
      You're dog is not a multi-organism entity.

      The saying should be:

      "There were 5 bacteria cells in this Petri-dish yesterday."
      "There are 2500 bacteria cells in this Petri-dish right now."
      "Tomorrow it is safe to say as long as I put enough food in the Petri-dish there will be 1,250,000 million bacteria cells."

      Comparing things to a single organism which has DNA instructions to cease growing is a logic flaw in itself because if the number being compared is of things that are independent nature and have no set limit in growth beyond actually consumption of fuel and energy then that would be more correct.

      Obviously, the number of MMOG subscribers are not restrained by DNA programming, but like all things is dependant of fuel and does have a limit, but that limit is more economic related.
    • Apparently, in 20 years, 10 billion people will play mmorpgs and firefox will have 210% of the browser market.

  • Interconnected (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Thyamine ( 531612 )
    So will we reach a point when games will be able to interconnect with each other? Sort of Trans-Atlantic cabling built right into the game, possibly even allowing some type of interworld commerce?

    Having been an EverCrack addict, I can attest to the staying power these games and environments have. With in-game advertising becoming a more popular option, will this genre become the new WWW, so to speak? It would be interesting to see.
    • I never played EQ, but as a SWG player, I can attest to the staying power. SWG is horribly bugged, and SOE's dev team makes me embarassed to be a programmer, yet I continue to play...
    • Don't worry, we have plenty of drugs going around. Not everyone will become addicted to EverCrack and its ilk, but everyone eventually becomes addicted to something :)

      It's all about the comeback....
  • ...will keep growing the same way. That's why all dot-coms have been so insanely, wildly successful since the late 90s.
  • Will be most of humanity. By that time, the happening new MMORPG will have been created by machines. The remaining humans not in the MMORPG will consist purely of hundreds of thousands of hackers who will attack the servers and free the minds of the billions of players trapped in the game.
    • > Will be most of humanity. By that time, the happening new MMORPG will have been created by
      > machines. The remaining humans not in the MMORPG will consist purely of hundreds of thousands of
      > hackers who will attack the servers and free the minds of the billions of players trapped in the game.

      Fortunately, The Matrix Online turned out to be realy sucky and failed miserably.

      Chris Mattern
  • We know people don't tend to play games or watch TV because they feel they have too much time on their hands. So mostly it amounts to more engrossing and thorough distraction.

    I'd say the biggest question is: from what?

  • Leave it to Non-RTFA'ing /.ers.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MBraynard ( 653724 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @04:14PM (#13272821) Journal
    to question the 'logic' of a comedy piece. PWOT is a comedy website. Admittedly some of it's stuff can be serious, but this article is clearly a joke. The charts are jokes. The headlines are jokes.
  • and their population is doubling every two years
    though certainly not via reproduction... perhaps they meant by total body mass?
  • Not to put down the article much (I do like the way it was written, with some fresh data), but he's just using new data to re-re-reconfirm what many other people have many times. MMOs were decidedly going to get increasingly more important. We've got that ever since EverQuest came out. Cool. Now, if there was something more interesting, like, well, "Based on such-and-such, we should have 3D MMOs in 10 years, where people are completley immersed in the game", then I would be more impressed. Cool data, old n
  • The most entertaining aspect of games is multiplayer. It has been since the beginning of games. Pong. Competition, and more recently cooperation, are the core of gaming. More specifically, social interaction is what all humans crave on an instinctual level.

    Gaming is just the new avenue for those of us who despise mall-walkers and the like.

    That being said, anything Massively Multiplayer is the wave of the future. However, RPGs are simply the first step. MMOFPS games like PlanetSide and the upcoming Huxley ar
    • I agree completely. RPGs in their current form are limited in their appeal. Not everyone enjoys playing D&D on a worldwide scale.

      Before MMOG's really take off, they'll need to expand into other genres. Like you said, first-person shooters will likely be the next genre to go MMO. GTA-esque games may soon follow, and more casual games like Animal Crossing could be very popular with non-gamers. MMO racing games and certain sports games (like the Tony Hawk series) could evolve into their own niche, with

  • Matrix (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Profcrab ( 903077 )
    Sentient machines will not need to put us into sensory cocoons that recreate a world for us to interact in. I think we will end up doing that ourselves.

    We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us.
  • Exactly.

    Users

    Not to say that everyone who plays an MMORPG is addicted, but I have seen people get kicked out of college because they stopped going to classes in favor of EQ.

    Those who arent addicted still get trapped -the need to level up and stay caught up with everyone else makes it more time-consuming than any other kind of game.
    • Exactly.

      Users

      And don't forget - 5 million of them are in Korea!

      That's no joke. Growth rates in the rest of the world have been pretty low. Of course, cup-half-fullers will say that just means there's more growth potential in other countries. Half-empties like me will say it shows that not everybody is really interested in online gaming, even in advanced, internet-saturated nations.
    • I saw people drop out of college because of substance abuse.

      I saw people drop out of college because they didn't like it.

      Obviously, MMORPGs, substance abuse, and not liking college are major plagues upon our society.

  • OH NOES! (Score:3, Funny)

    by theantipop ( 803016 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @04:47PM (#13273217)
    At this rate, there will be more MMORPG players than there are humans in no time! Yet more proof of the existence of aliens!
    • At this rate, by 2156 there will be a sphere of MMOPRG players expanding into the universe from the surface of the earth at the speed of light.

      In 2e8 the local supercluster will begin to collapse under the gravitational influence of the MMORPG player complex.

      In 2e21 the MMORPG player transcendancy, living among dead galaxies burnt to red cinders, pitted by ravenous black holes, and awash in the slow rain of proton decay, will sense that history should not have played out the way it did. The energy of a mil
  • Does this concept (not the article)strike anybody as vaguely familiar? It reminds me of the Kingdom as described in Revelation (and elsewhere)....
    • Incorruptable bodies
    • Mansions
    • Streets of Gold
    • No Taking of Wives (Husbands)
    • No Money
    • No Poverty
    There are probably more, but that's enough to really kind of unnerve me....
    • Don't let THEM immanentize the eschaton!
    • Judging from the amount of beggers in Iron Forge, I'd say World of Warcraft has quite a bit of poverty. It certainly has money. You can't get your own mansion. Having an Horde undead character kill you and then cannibalize your corpse sure FEELS like having your body corrupted.
      • nothing the catholic church couldn't work around if it'd make them more relevant. "Just release real quick, then, it hasn't really happend!"

        Re beggars: in wow, those are just a special kind of PKers. Instead of killing you avatar, there are making an attempt on your mind.

  • Sure... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <[slashdot] [at] [keirstead.org]> on Monday August 08, 2005 @05:12PM (#13273450)

    There are 10 million MMORPG users in the world and their population is doubling every two years. Hold your hand about three feet above your monitor. That's where the graph will be in 2010.


    Yeah. Just like how we have over 20 billion people in the world now , and the DJA is climbing above 20,000.

    You can't just take a current trend, and extrapolate it into infinity. It is total bollocks. For one, many *many* of those "10 million users" are the same people with accounts on more than one game. For another, the number of MMORPG gamers will reach a critical mass, once it reaches the number of people who don't like to spend over 10 hours a week on their home computer - you know, people who GO OUTSIDE.

  • It's a bit disturbing (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RzUpAnmsCwrds ( 262647 ) on Monday August 08, 2005 @06:42PM (#13274206)
    A friend of mine has logged over *85 Days* (over 2000 hours) of playtime in WOW. The game has been out for approximately 250 days. That averages out to about 8 hours per day, every day, for the last 250 days. Or, put another way: my friend has spent HALF his time (16 non-sleep hours in the day) playing WOW since release. That's 56 hours a week, more than a "full-time" job and in the same ballpark as many technology jobs.

  • Am I the only one who finished reading TFA? It looks like virtually everyone dropped the ball before going through section 1.

    Wong is a comedian, and this is not a serious analysis. This is a very fun read. If you go past section 1, he will tell you why the growth chart matters and how MMORP will become the new reality. It actually gets better all the way until the end, when he starts comparing economies (he notes that our "real" money is largely fictional and electronic already!), he also talks about porn

  • As I read the article, deep inside a part of me was chanting (in very poor Cantonese) ho gang ah, ho gang ah, ho gang ah, which means very afraid. The very idea of essentially replacing the real world with a virtual one made to pacify even those in abject physical poverty borders on horrific. And while others have already posted criticisms of the growth predictions made by the author, there are not any technical reasons I can think of that would prevent such a future from taking place. What authoritarian go
  • This is one hell of a funny article, even funnier that everyone is taking it at face value (or more likely, commenting based on only reading the summary). Go on, read it - you'll laugh.
  • Somebody already mentioned the infinite exponential growth problem, so let me run the rest of them down really quick:

    3. One big problem: It's not John's Bonebiter. Everything in your standard MMORPG is owned by the developer, and stealing anything within it would be impossible because all you're doing is transferring bits from one part of the server to another. Then there's the fact that anyone who would take an MMORPG weapon that seriously needs to rethink his priorities.

    4. The difference between MMOR
  • If we look at a dog in the first year of his life, we see fast growth. That's what we have here. Using the same math, you'll have a 50 foot dog in about 10 years, depending on breeds.

    I look at my 10 year old "puppy" (shih Tzu) and I see while the growth continued though decreasing in speed, for the second year, it plateaued there, That's the same as every single real dog (they reach full height in 2 years which is why some rules for dog's age call them 25 after 2 years (15 after the first because they are
  • Its a JOKE the whole site is made of articles with the "sarcasm" tag on the beginning, get it? none of it is to be taken seriously.

    Of course as my wife explained to me once jokes are based on subconscient thought so there is a lot of truth (or wishful thinking) hidden in there.
  • I'd be curious to see how we're gonna power this virtual world. Saudi Arabian invasion... or should we start investing in radiation suits?

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