Out There: Do MMOGs need death?

Today, Ultima Online's early days, seem exotic, driven by the magic of the internet, a burgeoning economy - and danger. In Ultima Online, death was permanent. It meant that every play session was unpredictable and meaningful.

Keith Burgun of Dinofarm Games, maker of the excellent iOS Rogue-like 100 Rogues, argues that this is exactly what's missing from modern MMOGs, claiming that social interaction in them is stunted, their static nature preventing players from imprinting themselves on their worlds. "In the modern MMO, there is very little unpredictability, and further, very few things matter," he says.

The answer lies in the early days of the modern MMOG, he suggests - in Ultima Online: "There has to be death; real death. Things have to be able to be created and destroyed, including characters. There is simply no other way that a world can be sustainable."

Death means danger, and danger makes things meaningful and unpredictable. "I could mine for ingots, sell them to a blacksmith. He could produce a sword and sell it to a vendor. The vendor could sell it to another person, who perhaps would get killed by a player-killer or a monster. It could come back around to me someday."

Eve Online engages with a lot of what Burgun argues was right about Ultima Online, of course, though you can't permanently die. You can permanently lose vast amounts of carefully hoarded materials, while its economy has generated a startlingly complex structure of social interaction that mirrors those of the real world.

But here's the question: do you want to play Eve Online? Or do you really just want to read about it, glad that it exists, because the level of investment and risk that it demands is simply too high? Death is scary.

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Read this excellent piece, Who Framed Roger Ebert? by Richard Stanton, and let's never talk about games as art again.

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Lovely pixel renderings of Portal 2, Deus Ex, BioShock 2 and more by Deviantart user pieceoftoast.

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Every crate in Super Crate Box is hard won, making this ongoing record on Twitter of the number of crates players have collected to date a poignant record of striving, hardship and death.

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Tutor in the Games Program at RMIT University Christian McCrea challenges the world of game studies, addressing everything, really, but we'd like to highlight the following:

"We accept few other positions. The anarchic violent joy of action games, the sexist and puerile concept art, the majestic and fantastical concept art, the secluded and isolated design cultures, the open and global design cultures, the changing shape of independent game design, the morphology of character design, weird histories in game music, the absurd microhistories of arcade machines, deranged pedophilic dating sims, bone-snapping murder simulators, the involvement of drug cartels in the history of Street Fighter game design, game development labour itself, the delirious mania of early 90s SEGA, everything to do with Pokemon, everything to do with Call of Duty, everything to do with Final Fantasy - all of these are peripheral to what we talk about when we say we do game studies."