Are Online Games Owned by the Gaming Communities?

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Are Online Games Owned by the Gaming Communities?
October 1st, 2008 by Malcom

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.

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