Differentiation

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9 March 2005

by Mike Rozak

I have been concerned about how much one virtual world can differentiate itself from another. The virtual worlds out there (MMORPGs and MUDs) and not too promising; they're almost all variations on the Tolkien or D&D fantasy theme.

If virtual worlds can't differentiate themselves then the market will ultimately collapse into a few games, just like the market for office software only has a few competitors out of the hundreds of office products that once existed. After all, two word processors can only be so different.

Points of differentiation

Worlds have several broad categories that they can use for product differentiation:

• Business model - Luckily for differentiation, several business models seem to work for virtual worlds, including subscriptions, one-off fees, advertising, and the player pyramid.
  
  
• Setting - The standard setting for a virtual world is a generic fantasy world with humans, elves, dwarves, and halflings. A few have branched into science fiction, but contemporary settings are still limited.
  
  
• Eye candy - The graphics and sound in the virtual world. Most virtual worlds look fairly similar, although a few, like World of Warcraft, are visually different than the rest. How many visual styles can be generated by 3D accelerators though? Cartoon-shading. Ultra-realistic. And what else?
  
  
• Races and classes - Most virtual worlds provide the standard races, and the standard fighter, magic-user, healer, thief classes. Differentiation is easy enough to do; it just requires that the game designers be willing to avoid traditional races and classes.
  
  
• Sub-games - The sub-games offered by contemporary virtual worlds are   limited to combat and some economic sub-games. Virtual worlds are starting to add vehicle simulations, such as Star Wars Galaxies' spaceship combat. Even when virtual worlds manage to duplicate single-player computer game genres, there won't be enough differentiation in just the sub-games; quests will need to augment the differentiation. (See below.)
  
  
• Backstory - Thousands of years of story creation has demonstrated that stories can be differentiated substantially. Unfortunately, the backstories of MMORPGs and MUDs almost always boil down to, "Something bad has happened to society and now there's all-out war." Part of the reason why the backstories are so poor is because the current sub-games are limited... Only so many backstories will explain why everyone is killing everyone else.
  
  
• Quests - Quests often resemble stories embedding in a virtual world, and since stories are easily differentiated, they should produce a large variety to quests. Unfortunately, contemporary quests are based on only a few sub-games, and consequently don't vary much within and without the virtual world. However, with enough sub-games and some good story-lines, each virtual world should be able to provide radically different quests.
  
  
• Target market - Most virtual worlds target teenage or 20-something males; After all, they are the most easily-attracted demographic. A few virtual worlds are attracting different sorts of players, but the other demographics seem to be much smaller (at the moment).
  
  
• Multiplayer features - The last category for possible differentiation is what multiplayer activities and features are provided. These are multiplayer games... or so their name says. I'll spend the rest of the document discussing multiplayer features.

Differentiating multiplayer features

When I look around existing virtual worlds, I notice an amazing lack of differentiation amongst the multiplayer features. The standard multiplayer features are:

• Chat
• Trading equipment person-to-person
• Trading equipment in a market
• The ability for form a party
• Guilds
• Player-vs-player combat
• Sieges (in some games)

Even the specific implementations of the features aren't that different from world to world...

Such lack of variation worries me, because if multiplayer features can't be differentiated sufficiently between worlds then "multiplayer" virtual worlds may not be differentiable.

Since existing virtual worlds make poor role models, I decided to come up with my own list of multiplayer features: First, I wrote down a list of reasons why a person would chose to play a multiplayer game over a single-player game. Then, I listed some ways that the features could be differentiated from one another. Below is the list: