Welcome to Orison

 I have been playing MMOGs since 1996, when I made a character in Medievia, a text-based MUD. I've played a good selection of MMOs since then, and I have greatly enjoyed my time in some of these virtual worlds. I believe, though, that MMOs have a serious flaw, one that is basic to the design philosophy of nearly all of these games. The flaw is that these games are not actually designed as multiplayer games. These games should more appropriately be called Massively Single Player Online games.

Medievia: It's all downhill from here

Ask yourself this: apart from the player interaction, is there any difference in design between, say, World of Warcraft and Skyrim? I hear you saying, 'apart from player interaction? I saw you palm that card. Player interaction is what makes a multiplayer game multiplayer. If you remove that, you should not be surprised to get a single player game.' My point, though, is that if you remove player interaction from a multiplayer game and are still left with a game that makes sense, then what you started with was not really designed as a multiplayer game. Instead it was designed with one player in mind and tools for player interaction are tacked on.
Let me give you a concrete example. I start a character in Arche Age (I'm not picking particularly on Arche Age, all MMOs are guilty of this, but AA had so much promise ruined so early) and find that I'm knee deep in a pond... with a hundred other people who look almost exactly like me. I see an NPC with a golden exclamation mark over her head and I talk to her. She recognizes me and implies by her dialogue that she knows me and that I am the only one around. Two VERY bad things are happening here. First, I am now psychologically separated from my character. I don't know this NPC, and she does not know me. She knows my character. So now I am distinct from my character no matter how much suspension of disbelief I had when I started up the game. Second, the world that my character inhabits does not agree with the evidence of my eyes and I have an incentive to ignore all other players in order to make the story make sense.
Now, let's look at the story. Every story in every MMO. I am special. I am the chosen one. There is a great evil in the world and I am destined to end it.

Lots of words.

Once again, no matter how much suspension of disbelief I can muster, I know that there are hundreds of characters, just in my character's immediate area that are being told this exact same lie. That is not to mention the other thousands on the server and the other tens of thousands on other servers. This is very demoralizing. I talk to a farmer who says he is having trouble with wolves or something and wants my character to bring him five tails. Well, I go to where the wolves are popping out of thin air (and not hurting the sheep at all, by the way) and there are a dozen characters all killing wolves as hard as possible. I know that these wolves are never going to harm the sheep, that the farm makes no economic difference to anyone, and that if I and everyone else found a way to skip this thing (I can't bring myself to call it a quest) then the farmer would still be permanently standing in that one spot, night and day (for games that even have a night/day cycle) with that exclamation point over his head waiting to give out a bit of gold (materializing out of nowhere) to kill wolves (that are also materializing out of nowhere) that are just standing there waiting to be killed.
Now, you could say to me, “wait a minute, you want enough meaningful, interacting systems programmed in to keep tens of thousands of level 1 players busy for the five minutes that it takes them to reach level 2? If we had an army of angels programming away for a century, it could not be done!”
To the first part I say, 'yes,' and to the second I say, 'with a change in the design philosophy it could be done with a reasonable amount of work.'  Granted, it will be more work than is currently put into MMOs, but that isn't really saying anything as the whole genre has descended into a contest of who can tantalize their player base with these couple of new features in the end-game long enough to keep them pushing through our Everquest knock-off for a hundred hours or so.
But how? That is what this blog is about. Here I will expound upon a concept MMO that I call Orison. I have been working on these concepts for ten years and I feel that I just have to tell somebody about them. I had a dream a while back of building up a video game company from scratch just to make this game, but I can't do that without support any more than I can pick myself up by pulling on my shoelaces.

So read, enjoy, ponder these articles, and possibly you will, like me derive much pleasure in simply living in this world in your own mind.