The other day, I had a quick exchange about donuts on Twitter with Stephan Frost, who is a producer at Carbine working on WildStar. I met him last February at Arkship, and let me just tell you.. Frost is metal. Anyway, why were we talking about donuts? And what do they have to do with MMOs?! I get there, so please bear with me!
Señor Frost tweeted out a pic of Top Pot Doughnuts to fellow donut aficionado (and WildStar music director extraordinaire) Jeff Kurtenacker. For the uninitiated, Top Pot is a donut shop of legend in Seattle, offering “hand-forged” donuts that quite simply over-deliver on any sort of promise a donut could ever make. A short tweet-versation followed, ending with several people chiming in about how great Top Pot was (or with Ahnrez explaining how Voodoo in Portland is better), and with Frost declaring he would be stuffing his suitcase full of them on the way home from PAX this fall.
Why would anyone carry donuts all the way to southern California from Seattle on a plane when they can easily go to their local grocery store to pick some up? Or pizza. I’m not ashamed to admit I once carried a pizza from Bocce on a plane back to Orlando from Buffalo. I got some looks from people in the security line, that’s for sure.
Want vs. Need vs. Common Sense
People tend to seek out the best craftsmen they can find and/or afford when they really want something of a certain quality or notoriety… or triggers one or more of their senses. For example, why would anyone order cabinets from Italy, when they have many available choices in stock at the local Home Depot? What is it that makes us do this?
The answer is that there’s something special about the product, the service or the craftsman that make consumers go out of their way to acquire them and usually pay a premium for the experience.
So, It got me thinking… can this kind of phenomenon ever really be created in an MMO economy? Could a crafted product ever set itself apart so much that folks would go out for their way to get it and pay a premium for them? Further, with other similar/competing products still perfectly available and viable?
A Way Forward?
Part of the problem is there’s a very narrow way in a virtual world to measure how “good” something is, and for it to have a relative value different from one player to the next. It usually boils down to stats that do something beneficial for us… But in the real world, we have smell, taste, texture, and more. My favorite pizza may taste like absolute garbage to you… but for me, it’s the one I’d go out of my way to acquire and pay extra for the privilege.
Currently, I feel here are too many guardrails in games today, especially surrounding economic systems. There’s often a very calculated progression path through the economy that ends up being nothing more than a time and money sink for most. We can’t really fault designers too much, because they need to account for many different types of players existing in the same space, lest they take a torch to the millions of dollars spend on making the game. Still, I wish there was more experimentation and allowance for emergent economic conditions.
In Conclusion
Can we somehow get to this point in an MMO? The point where things are either objectively or subjectively the “best” for our character, but be ok that these items are not always available or too expensive to have all the time? Can such things exist that we seek them out, and when we find them, hoard them for later because we never know when the next opportunity to procure them will come up? Are we sad when the player or vendor is out of stock on something and we don’t know when they’ll have more available?
I for one sure hope so. This is the pinnacle of merchant gameplay in my opinion, and I truly hope to see the next generation of sandboxy virtual worlds embrace some of these ideals.
Would love to hear your thoughts. Do you have any game experiences where this happened?