I took it in as was written: I’m a subscriber to Tobold’s and to Broken Toys, not to Massively (which I usually never read unless a 3rd party points at something interesting) or Keen & Graev. I read Scott’s take on it and thought nothing more of it, and later in the day got Tobold’s first post on the matter in my feed reader. Then I went back to the source – Keen, and finally Massively, where I read the whole interview. And the picture this gave me is Tobold echoing Keen by jumping on one single sentence in an otherwise quite interesting interview.

To me, it came across as the kind of bunk you’d read from a fanboy (which Keen might or might not be for all I know – and care), not from a serious commenter, especially since the rest of what Bartle said was worthy of being read.

He might provide some perspective on “the way things were” versus “the way things are now” but that doesn’t give him any credibility on “the way things should be as we move forward”.

Thing is, he does nothing of the sort – all three of these. He questions design decisions. As a consultant and professor should do.

Quite honestly, it doesn’t take a degree in MMO history to figure out what’s fun and not fun about a game.

Funny you’d say that, because the immense pile of failed MMOs (not to speak about the rest of gaming, or entertainment at large) seems to be a clear indicator of the contrary. In practice, the designers are by the very nature of their trade quite incapable of determining ahead of time of what could be fun to a player.

Take SWG for instance. If you want to market to the massive Star Wars fan base, from a player point of view, it doesn’t really take rocket surgery to figure that the core appeal of the two movie trilogies are Jedi and space battles with tiny crafts blowing up huge space stations. The KOTORs, despite their flaws, are fun to play because you play a Jedi. The X-Wing series are fun because you play the space battles. And you get Koster, definitely one of the more interesting designers to read, who oversees a game which launches without space travel, and set in a timeframe where there are one Jedi and two Sith in the whole entire universe.

What Bartle does (and not just in that one interview) is provoke. It should be viewed as a reminder that despite WoW’s immense success, it’s not clear that Blizzard themselves actually know the recipe of the secret sauce. In the current production cycle, each game is going to come with a certain mix of a couple of “been there done that” elements, along with some new ones for good measure. Predicting whether you actually have the right mix to create, not a WoW competitor but simply a honourable 1-2 million subscriber game is not possible. Considering the budgets and sums in play today, though, agree or disagree with the Bartles, Kosters and Garriotts of the world, but the designers better damn well question every single decision they make before implementing them, and once a working implementation is here, question the whole desicion all over again. That’s part of the polishing process, and facilitating this kind of questioning is what Bartle has been doing for quite some time now.

It’s interesting that we all think of the MMO genre as a single genre when it’s actually comprised of lots of different genres.

Well, Eve, WoW and SL are all massively multiparticipant online worlds, MMOs. And that’s pretty much the only trait they have in common, as you pointed out. There’s probably going to be some refined terminology for the main categories which will eventually emerge once everyone agrees on their acronyms MMORPG certainly is a subdivision. And once we’re all agreed on what the subdivisions are, we will happily wage two or three decades of religious wars over what product fits into which category.

That being said, most people have been critical of Tobold simply because he called Bartle irrelevant and that he looks “foolish” or “crazy”. Intentionally or not, Zenke’s article does make him look foolish and crazy.

As for Bartle being irrelevant, he is irrelevant. He might provide some perspective on “the way things were” versus “the way things are now” but that doesn’t give him any credibility on “the way things should be as we move forward”. Quite honestly, it doesn’t take a degree in MMO history to figure out what’s fun and not fun about a game. On the contrary, this same perspective also puts him in a position where he might be willing to throw the baby out with the bath water because he’s “been there and done that.”

Lastly, his comments, even from a design standpoint – are a bit offbase. It’s interesting that we all think of the MMO genre as a single genre when it’s actually comprised of lots of different genres. Innovation within a single genre is more about evolution than revolution. There is nothing wrong with revolution, but recognize that people who like to play a certain genre may or may not want to play the new genre you created. Quite frankly, the whole way we think about the MMO “genre” needs to change so we stop making comparisons between games which have little resemblance (like Eve to WoW to Second Life).