Social Gaming? It Would Be Nice To See Some

This article at WebPro laments that even though "Social Games" or the New Hotness, there's not much socializing happening with gamers.  The fact is, "Social Games" are largely single-player web games with "viral" hooks, you can't get the shiney unless you let the game spam your friends.  Which has led to all kinds of fallout as people find new ways to keep from annoying their friends and the "Social" game developers fight back.

Online poker is more social than Candy Crush.

Where did we go wrong?

So, I've been re-reading a lot of my old archives, trying to recapture the sense of what I was thinking, way back in the day.  One thing that comes through over and over, not just from myself but from other writers, was the sense that boundless possibilities existed, that MMO's would expand in possibility and become ever more varied....

It didn't work out that way.  Oh, there have been variations, but mostly in the realm of adapting designs to the F2P business model.  Most of the games these days are only nominally MMO's, they're really small-M multiplayer games with (optionally) really big and pretty matchmaking lobbies.  World of Tanks and the whole genre of Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas have only a thin veneer of persistence and generally no over-world at all.  Instanced raids have become so much the norm that in many of the "Online RPG" old-school games the overall world is little more than a topographical mnemonic for the instance portals, a place to park the vendor NPC's and quest hooks.

The "Big World" MMO is virtually dead, persistence of change in the world is generally nothing and even of the characters it is remarkably shallow.  Most games offer extreme levels of "Respec", allowing a fully developed character to reverse at least most of the "development" choices, and in extreme cases they are completely protean, a character is just a length of development time that can be reeled back in and relaid down any of the possible character development paths, the character classes are just forks on that road.  Rather than becoming more varied, the games have become ever more the same.

It's disappointing, to say the least.  I am the "sleeper" who hibernated away a generation and woke up expecting shiny jumpsuits and flying cars, and instead....

What have you people been doing for the last 8 years?

To Become Humble...

...One must first be humiliated. It's a long story, how I came to drop off the face of the earth for so long. Actually, it's several long stories, some of which I may never share. The short version is that after Orbis Games fizzled out on me, it was a major blow to my ego that knocked me back on my heels. You don't know your limitations until you hit them so hard you bounce, and with Orbis I learned that I wasn't very good at the business of video games.

I'm not going to point fingers, "Mistakes were made", many of them were mine. I picked goals that were too ambitious for our resources, didn't drop the resulting projects when it became clear they weren't going to work out, and in general was too willing to believe that if I picked goals worth reaching towards that somehow the ability to reach them would materialize. I walked away from deals that would have given me part of what I needed because I believed a better deal would emerge. I hit my limits so hard I left a Dave-shaped impression on the wall, but I definitely bounced.

This, by itself, would only have sent me underground for a few months, while I nursed my wounds and processed the lessons, but....

I have an aphorism I used to trot out when I was explaining why I was so driven to focus on game design: "The secret to greatness is simple: Have nothing in your life that is more important than your own ambition." And at the time, following that advice was easy: I was single and although I had a daughter, through no fault of my own (in fact despite my best efforts) I had no contact with her. By the time I left Orbis, this was no longer true. I had gotten married, my eldest daughter was living with us, I had two stepsons, and we were trying to adopt two other girls.

About the time I pulled myself out of the hole of existential doubt my failure with Orbis put me in, everything went to hell on the family front. My eldest daughter was diagnosed with MS, and the adoption of the youngest (at the time not even a year old) became complicated as the family of the biological father became involved. Very simply, I had to choose between my ambitions and my obligations. My daughters needed me present and focused, not running around with my hair on fire trying to make deals, and not drifting around with my head in the clouds thinking Deep Thoughts about game design.

For what it was worth, it wasn't a dilemma I agonized over once it was clear to me. I stopped trying to scare up other work, stopped trying to keep up with the minutiae of the ongoing soap-opera that is the game business, and focused on my family. Not everything worked out the way I would have liked: We didn't adopt the older of the girls we were trying to, and after lots of drama and screaming, I wound up divorced.

I'm not going to go into the details of how that happened. It wouldn't be hard to make my ex-wife look like a villain, but since I have to work with her for the next 13 years or so, until my youngest daughter is 18, it wouldn't be productive to dwell on it. Anyway, ranting about your terrible ex is a cliche, and I don't do cliches.

The reality of the situation I deal with now is that I have to restart my career, having been out of circulation for 5 years and not having done anything really relevant (as in working on a significant title) in nearly 10. It sucks, in some ways it is harder than breaking in the first time, because the first time I didn't have any history to live down.

I've tried at various times, in various ways, to start blogging again, each one wound up going nowhere. I realized that I was forcing it, reaching into the well of confidence from which I used to pontificate and finding it empty. I'd know I was ready to start again when it actually took an effort of will not to do it. For the last week or so, I've been restraining myself, and I think it's time to start again.

What will this blog be about? Any damn thing I feel like writing about. That will frequently be game design and the games business, because that is again the focus of my day to day life. Sometimes it will be about my RV and how I keep it running and make it more livable. Occasionally, it will be about my daughters, because I happen to feel like it and it's my damned blog, I'll shout any damned thing I want into the void.