Mmorpg design with an ecological sensibility

From a comment on Chris blog. His posts always stimulate me.

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I'm against the "mudflated" development simply because it kills the game world.

The development is always planned to replace a part that is ALREADY in the game. New content is usually added at the "margins" of a game. As a new "limb". What I'd like to see (and it's extended to the whole game, not just the content) is a development that uniformly considers the game to improve it.

Right now "new content" and explansion packs are added to the margin of the game even when the "core" is still broken, not functional, unfun or unused. The fact is that this new content keeps derailing the development on something irrelevant. My idea is that you can add and expand the world by keeping a cohesive approach. To consider the game world as a "whole" instead of an amass of stuff you pile up randomly and that keeps growing without a sense.

Instead of creating new zones with new mobs and new quests, you can also re-consider what's already in the game, add more paths and quests, add interactivity, adjust something that isn't working properly and so on. With this approach you do not need a brand new zone with brand new monsters and quests in order to keep the game up to date and the interest of the players alive. The development can reuse, adjust and expand what is already available and add more "space" only when it is truly required.

Mudflated games finish to become just patchworks of more or less successful development. In 90% of the cases something broken or terribly unfun isn't properly addressed and refactored. It just lies there as a "museum" while the developers work on something completely new in order to replace that part.

This is an approach that is strongly deep-rooted in a CULTURE. We produce JUNK. Nothing is reused because we throw everything away and buy something brand new. It's the consumer society.

I do not like this because as in the real world this approach is killing the place where we live. It's viable only as a temporary solution. We live on a countdown. We destroy the world because we have the illusion that everything can be replaced. There's always space, always an exit. If something is broken or has problem, we do not fix it: we throw it away. We do not face the problems, we simply dodge them.

We bury them like we do with junk. We hide.

I believe that a game world should be respected as we should respect our real world. Like we do with a "body". Instead of producing junk and hide it from the view to not feel guilty, we should address the real problem. We should face the situation and plan the actions to go back at the root. To not keep killing and destroying what we have.

I don't imagine a mmorpg like a cemetery of old and obsolete content. I imagine it as a continue development that keeps adjusting its content. That keeps fixing and improving what doesn't work. That listens to feedback and that doesn't ignore or hide the problems.

A world that won't ask the players to move on a sequel in order to clear the junk that was laid around. A world without a Damocle's sword hanging over its head.

I agree with Raph. A lot of the real world teaches us how to build better games, a lot of what we find in games can teach us about how the real world works. That's why they are so fun.