I've recently played Maple Story and, due to another class, have had ample time with Second Life. Maple story being a 2-D MMORPG is significantly different in terms of player goals, player behavior, and representation than Second Life, being a 3-D virtual world.
Maple Story and Second Life as Platforms:
Before getting into the details of both Second Life and Maple Story, Morningstar states, "The essential lesson that we have abstracted from our experiences with Habitat is that a cyberspace is defined more by the interactions among the actors within it than by the technology with which it is implemented" (Morningstar). This particular lesson learned by Morningstar and his team at Lucasarts, hit the nail on the head. The players in both Second Life and Maple Story enjoy the games they play in large part due to their interactions with other players, whether it be a 2-D side scoller or a 3-D Virtual world. Both SL and MS support communication features that allow players to engage with one another, and, from my experience, I did not see either SL or MS as superior to the other in this regard.
The essay by Dibbel touched on the complexity of politics and law within LambdaMOO, which is a purely text based game, containing no visual assets other than text. The fact that such a rich social landscape can be produced purely out of text, supports Morningstar's finding through-and-through. Certainly Second Life and Maple Story have a similar community of players who've developed a social framework, as these communities have a large user-base. I have not spent enough time in either environment to recall a case from either, but I have seen signs of a social structure in Second Life simply through signage, area restrictions, and player interactions.
Markets:
From first glance, Maple Story appears to be for teens donning "cute" 2-D Anime Pixel Art, but a complex item management system and exploration goals. Second Life appears to be for a more technically savvy, young-adult to adult crowd, as it has a complex user interface but very powerful tool for its users to create anything they want -- Second Life also supports external programs for importing user made furniture, buildings, code scripts, etc.
Player Activities, Usage, etc:
"It seems to us that the things that are important to the inhabitants of such an environment are the capabilities available to them, the characteristics of the other people they encounter there, and the ways these various participants can affect one another" (Morningstar).
Maple Story is an MMORPG, so with that classification comes a set of conventions. You create a character, go on missions, amass items and money, and fight in battles. The game opens with its first few missions as tutorials for the player, and then proceeds to set them free in a neighboring town where NPCs (non-player characters) sell items and assign missions. As expected, players spend time leveling up, collecting items, and talking with others. There didn't seem to be a huge creative aspect to the game, as you are only given a few choices in gender, race, hair color, and clothing from the beginning. Player growth and customization comes from a player's ability to progress through the game, or make friends who have items and are willing to donate them.
Second Life on the other hand, offers an absurd level of customization and open world-ness. Since Second Life is an open world environment, and not a game in the traditional sense of the word, these kinds of features make sense for its users. Second Life offers its users alot of flexibilty, and thus you see alot of player created content. When viewing all of these marvelously designed office buildings, shops, castles, and resorts, I was reminded of a statement made by Pearce, "These trends show that play has its own productive character, which can also be seen as a form of cultural production and perhaps could be defined as a form of folk art" (Pearce 24). There's a level of appreciation, that I give to the users of Second Life -- though it is not something I can see myself getting into. From the areas you traverse, to the people you interact with, to the actions you can perform in certain areas are all created by the users of Second Life.
One particular player that helped me get used to the Second Life interface and game space talked to me about how her clothing and hair was made of "X number of Prims", and that there are people who have made items with "X times 2 number of Prims". I had no idea what Prims were, but I believe they are some sort of unit used to measure the complexity of objects in Second Life -- I compared the system to pixels. So, apparently there is huge appreciation and recognition of the work you put into your character and their attributes amongst users. Reminds me of the times I would marvel at my friend's custom LEGO vehicles.
Second Life does however exert a sort of Theme Park-ness that Pearce mentions "Thanks in part to the advent of 3D and eventually real-time 3D in the 1990s, video games have come increasingly to resemble theme parks in terms of both design and culture" (Pearce 201). Each location within Second Life is like an isolated themed zone.
I like to categorize Second Life, There.com, and Habitat as all part of the same lineage of virtual world games where the they are "deliberately open-ended and pluralistic" (Morningstar). These virtual worlds allow the users to dictate the direction they would like to explore within the game. Second Life has complex camera features and is often used for Machinima productions. I can imagine that some players really get into the "movie making" aspect of Second Life, since they have a large amount of control over the environments, actions, and actors in their films.
The Affordances and Constraints:
As Taylor states, "Turning our attention to the people on the back-end of these environments - the programmers, designers and world builders who actively work in the space of socio-techno construction-- are central to critical examination of these spaces". It's quite apparent what the intended use of Maple Story vs. Second Life, and vice versa, due to the systems and abilities granted to the players in both virtual environments. Second Life nurtures and encourages customization, where Maple Story is about exploration and ranking. Second Life inherently has no goals for the player, the player creates those of their own will. Maple Story, not-so-much as you are presented with very clear goals from the first play session. Maple Story uses a coherent pixel art aesthetic that is locked-in by its designers. If users were allowed to create their own pixel art, it may look inconsistent with the rest of the Maple Story package.
Second Life, on the other hand, uses 3-D Graphics that do not particularly have a themed aesthetic, as they leave that up to the players. The graphics are implemented almost rudimentary, in that there's really no "life" or "style" built into your character from the start -- the style, if any, is to be a blank slate. A game like Little Big Planet is heavily themed, and even though players are able to create assets, every 'building block" is skinned to create a coherent look, no matter who created it.
Having played both Maple Story and Second Life, I can see that the virtual environment and massive multi-player games are going to grow as a desired play system for users. These worlds offer a tremendous amount of social potential and provide context for players' interactions with one another. I am intrigued by the studies Pearce has conducted regarding Player migration from MMO to MMO, and may look into some of these issues when I attend Amy Bruckman's Designing Online Communities class in the Spring 2010.
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