Mmog @ MindSay

I just finished watching all 26 episodes of .Hack//Roots.  This is the latest anime series based on the Bandi multi-media franchise, .Hack .  I can express how I feel about the show succinctly.

It was a total mess.  No continuity, no resolution, no comprehensability.  It starts as a team story, as the five members of the Twilight Brigade search for the fabled Key of Twilight.  QUICKLY, the fellowship is broken, leaving us to follow the two LEAST-interesting members as they flail about in angst.  New characters show up, drop out, and interact with no rhyme or reason.  At the end, only two story threads manage to resolve, in unfulfilling ways.  Everything else is left hanging.

Now, .Hack is SUPPOSED to be a multi-media experience.  Bandai wants me to read the books, play the games, and trawl the websites.  I get that, and I'm still disappointed.  It's also possible that the value in .Hack//Roots (which isn't the 'roots' of anything, by the way) lies in the treatment of real MMORPG concepts, like player-killing and Real Money Trading.  If so, I'm not the target audience, since I'm well beyond the rather basic treatment they give these concepts.

Ultimately, I'm disappointed because the first five episodes promise a sense of wonder and mystery that is dropped like a hot rock in the rest of the series.  I kept watching for it to come back; it never did.  Grrr.

I've been reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow, and I came across this passage:

"Though I’d never bought so much as a lottery ticket, I immediately got his compulsion: for me, it was Beating The Crowd, finding the path of least resistance, filling the gaps, guessing the short queue, dodging the traffic, changing lanes with a whisper to spare—moving with precision and grace and, above all, expedience."

Raph Koster  talked about this in a recent speech; he said that players are driven to optimize their patterns of success, even to the detriment of their own fun.  People will use the cheat codes to get to the final level, even knowing that it'll spoil the game for them.

So how do we turn this around, and  give this kind of player a fun game, without letting them spoil it for themselves or others?  Well, I suppose giving them any sufficiently complex game system will make them happy until they figure it all out.  But I suspect that's the minimum we can do.  Perhaps giving players the chance to build their own game systems, as dangerous as that sounds....