(This is a repost from my old blog. I am going to post a bunch of MMO stuff the next few days/weeks, so i needed this here for reference )

I´m an avid MMO player. I started out with Ultima Online, switched to EverQuest, Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online and now Eve Online. This has made me think about the structure of such games, and the tendency to design these games on an almost completely identical template.

As I see it the MMO genre can be boiled down to two different design tendencies (and yes I am simplifying things a bit – but hey it´s my blog). I´ll call these tendencies “Templates” as it seems like MMO design tend to be based on the exact same design philosophies, as I will try to show in the following.

The first template is what I call “linear”. Here the player starts out at level 1. He works his way through all sorts of missions/quests and always has somewhere to go and something specific to do. The player really doesn’t have any choices in what he can do. He can level up his character to become tougher, kill more monsters, and level up again. Off course different kinds of missions exist – courier missions, collect missions, and kill missions. But in the end, the player is bound to these missions, and if he wants to play the game he will end up doing the missions set forth by it. It should be noted that the player in these games do have the possibility of just going out and power-leveling. He isn´t forced into doing the missions, but it is my argument that by way of design, he will be forced into doing missions if he wants to have his character become as effective as other players. For example he will need to do certain missions to get certain items improving his character. I call this game template “linear” not because the player is forced to do things in a certain order, but because he eventually IS forced into doing them. Games that use this template are, amongst others: World of Warcraft, EverQuest, Lord of the Rings Online etc.

The second template is, surprisingly, called “non-linear”. In this type of game the player will usually get the feeling that he lacks things to do. It is entirely up to the player to figure out what to do with his character. The game involves missions with rewards, but these missions aren´t necessary for the player, and usually the rewards will only be monetary. In other words the player isn´t forced into doing a certain mission to get certain items. These items can be built, or bought in other parts of the game. The player has control of his character and on what to do, but in turn doesn´t always have something to do. So here the player has to take a certain amount of initiative to figure out the possibilities in the framework set forth by the game. The only game, to my knowledge, that uses this template completely is Eve Online, although Star Wars Galaxies had some of these non-linear elements when it was first released.

So in conclusion it can be said that the main difference between the linear and non-linear templates lies in the amount of initiative the player has to take to interact with the game. One is a game with a set of goals, and the other is a framework for the player to do whatever he wants. One is entertainment, the other is interaction.

On that note I’ll end this post, but I will be posting more MMO theories soon.