On 6/25/07, John Buehler <johnbue@msn.com> wrote:
> As the fidelity of the online experience improves, I'm wondering what
> will happen.
One should begin by asking what you mean by "fidelity." Are you
referring to the realism of simulations? Are you referring to better
graphics? Are you referring to 5.1 surround sound, smell-o-vision,
and vibrating seats? What, exactly, are you suggesting by "fidelity"?
And then, as an additional question, is whatever you are defining as
"fidelity" actually improving at all?
> Right now, the people who are enjoying our bronze age are
> either comfortable with alien experiences, or they're comfortable with
> the traits of this bronze age. As things change, the xenophiles will
> stick with it, while the bronze age players will drift away in
> dissatisfaction, to be replaced by the iron age players.
Drift away to what, though?
> If the fidelity of experience keeps improving, grief actions by others
> will be that much more impactful. Something will have to be done to
> guard players against the negative actions - and simply negative
> experiences - that an MMO can bring. That's true whether the negative
> actions are intentional or accidental. To my mind, that means either a
> loss of anonymity, suggesting a certain accountability on the part of
> those who visit a given experience, a reduction of interaction (e.g.
> watching a baseball game through a privately-controlled set of cameras),
> and/or a supplanting of the MMO model by a GO model. Groups Online.
> Playing with buddies.
All games devolve (or evolve, depending on how you look at it) into
cliques. This was true, even in MUDs (or the "stone age," if you
will). TinyMUSHers, for example, tended to become increasingly
balkanized over the lifespan of a MUSH. This is nothing new. It has
happened, is happening, and will happen again.
> As the fidelity of online experiences improves, will the sort of people
> who then come into the online arena want to retain their ties to their
> existing social circles, or will they too decide that the value of the
> experience itself is superior to the value of experiencing something
> with their real world friends?
People already have to make that decision.
> Remember that I'm not talking about the current crop of folks who are
> content with the online experience as it is (even as they hope for
> something better). Those are people who are happy to do the stuff that
> we can do online without the touchy-feely experiences of another person
> when they talk to them or interact with them in some way. As the
> fidelity goes up, that will change the appeal of the experience to the
> world population as a whole. I can understand wanting a fairly sterile
> experience when interating with many strangers, as in an MMO experience.
> But as the fidelity goes up, will the dominant group of people
> interested in that higher fidelity still want to be surrounded by
> strangers?
I think you're making an incorrect assumption. In general, those
games with the broadest appeal for "the world population as a whole"
have tended to have low hardware requirements, and could not be
described as "high fidelity" in any real sense. Your hypothetical
iron-age players don't have bleeding-edge hardware. Unless your
definition of "high fidelity" has nothing to do with technology, their
mere existence would be a paradox.
Tess