Are online games owned by the gaming communities?

A lot of us who play MMORPGs have been either playing video games online, or strictly MMORPGs for a long, long time. Take me, for example. I got my first computer when I was 7, and my biggest accomplishment by age 10 was that I could kick your ass in an Age of Empires DM Cho War. Before the days of games with dynamic content(i.e.: content that is constantly being patched, changed, or updated), there were only games with static content(i.e.: most RTS games, FPS, etc.). These games were designed by developers the way they wanted to, and the gamer either liked it as it was, or hated it. People didn’t stick around Warcraft III a year after release hoping that their experience would change; they knew whether the game appealed to them or not during initial gameplay. These days, most of us are spoiled. We play games that are constantly seeing new updates, and so it is not uncommon for us to stick to the mentality that there is only one game for us, and that we must fight the developers to the death to implement the changes that we want. This makes me wonder: are games owned by the developers, or is the direction of the game decided by the community? Who should decide where the game is going?

The Vision

Most game developers have a vision when creating a game. They decide what type of game they want to make, and where they want to go with it. This isn’t any different with MMORPGs, and we seem to forget that sometimes. When companies create and develop a game, they want to take it in a certain direction, they want to do what they think is best for the game. Let’s take World of Warcraft for example. World of Warcraft at this point is a game that is owned by the community. Blizzard implements things that the players want to see, completely overlooking their original intentions often forsaking their characters, and their lore to create a simplistic type of game-play that will earn them a ton of money

I believe game development to be an art. Not just the programming, but the graphic design, the music, the writing, etc. All of these components, when combined properly can create an overwhelming alternate reality for players to explore and enjoy for hundreds, or even thousands of hours. That said, the direction of this interactive art, and its ultimate goal should be decided by the creator, not by the ‘fans’. It’s fine to have an opinion, and it’s fine to hate something. However, when it comes to the MMO world, we seem to want to change everything in a game to our liking rather than hate it and go play something else. We pressure the artists, the creators, we threaten them with our money to create a world that we like, rather than follow their vision and see where they’re going with it.

Think about it. What if we went around altering the original intentions of every artist out there? We’d update the Sistine Chapel to feature tribal painting, or random Japanese characters. If we start altering art at the rate we want to alter video games, we’d end up living in a cultural wasteland where we eventually wouldn’t even be able to remember the great minds of the Renaissance.

Some clarification:

I’m not saying we need to go back to the days where games never saw any updates, or that we should simply learn to deal with what developers throw at us. We have choices as gamers, and we decide what to hate and what to like. There’s no point in sticking around in a MMORPG you say sucks,  when all you do is sit there on the official forums writing about how much it sucks. Try playing something else.

I’m also not saying that creators shouldn’t expand on their ideas. I always love learning more about a certain fictional world I enjoyed reading about or playing in; developers should release expansions that explain the history of the world we’re playing in, our role in it, etc. However, they should do so if they’re willing to put as much effort into their expansion as they have into their original work. For example, The Burning Crusade was a very different game from the original World of Warcraft. Many people felt they just added ten levels, and threw on more stats on everything and called it a day. The Burning Crusade caused many people to leave, in the same way The Wrath of the Lich King will cause many people who enjoyed The Burning Crusade to leave. Blizzard’s vision was altered by their community. They wanted more items, more levels, easier-to-obtain epics, etc.

To conclude:

We have a ton of choices when it comes to video games, much in the same way we have a lot of choices in real life as to where to eat, what ISP to use, etc. We don’t live in a world where you have to play one game, and I don’t think we’ll ever hear anyone say “There’s no Warhammer: Online coverage in my area, I have to play World of Warcraft.” We should be thankful for this. If you like sci-fi games, go play something with a Jedi. Don’t campaign to have Guild Wars include Jedis in the next expansion.

In my opinion, games belong to the creators. They share them with the community. We pay for a service, but said service includes constant content patches, server usage, and support within the game. We’re not paying to lead the game in the direction we want it to go in. In the end, we need to realize that just because we’re paying for a service, let’s say…a hamburger, doesn’t mean we have a right to decide that Burger King should suddenly start making pizza.