To D'ni and Back Again

It's funny that I found out about Uru (the online game of Myst) after the servers had already been shut down. It's funny because I was in the thick of it when the game relaunched through GameTap, and now it's about to go away. In a sense, we've come full circle.

My opinion - not that anyone cares, but I might as well state it - is that Cyan should take this opportunity to break free. That's hard to do, but look what happened last time: they stayed in the circle, and it brought them right back here. Either you leave the circle or you keep bottoming out.

Myst Online was a great concept: a nonviolent, social puzzle-solving game in a beautiful and immersive environment. No one had ever done that before Cyan. Now that we've reached the second end for Uru, it's clear why no one can. The kind of social puzzle-solving Myst encourages thrives in small groups, and an MMO needs extremely large groups. We need MMOs that encourage deep, cerebral gameplay, but so far it seems like those two terms (massively multiplayer and cerebral) are opposed to each other.

So now the members of the Myst community and all like-minded gamers have two options. We could just sit around and wait for something like Portal Online, which I just made up but actually sounds pretty rad, or we could form lots of small groups of content creators working within an MMO framework developed by a technical team (there's some related work going on at WPI, vaguely related to Garry's Mod). These teams would work to create their own individualized mini-MMOs on privately hosted servers. By letting the community create its own content, we would eliminate the main expense and delays associated with MMOs.

I know this sounds a lot like Second Life, but I'm talking about a much smaller system here. A system by the people, for the people, etc. so that the death knell of servers might never draw such spikes through the hearts of gamers again.

Tell me how wrong I am in the comments.