More than any other type of entertainment, massively multiplayer online games exhibit one of the most important characteristics of living creatures: they are constantly evolving in response to the changes in their environment.
Spurred on by an excellent article by Psychochild, Gordon recently wrote an post connecting MMOs to genetic programming in which he asserted that these large games needed to undergo gene-like mutation in order to “excite [players] and stimulate new growth”.
Unfortunately, I feel that what Gordon is actually looking for is something different than genetic mutation, and in fact he misuses the term in his piece repeatedly. Specifically, the following quotation demonstrates his mistake:
We now see evolutions of minor features, like guild windows, instead of sweeping and grand gestures that drive the industry forward. Mutation, the anomalies which bring radical changes and ideas to the table, are necessary in order to challenge the status quo.
Evolution is not a discrete operation, it is a complex one that, in genetic programming, is made up of two operations: crossover and mutation. Crossover mimics reproduction in nature, and is a chance for two different organisms to share their genes in order to create a new organism. Mutation, on the other hand, is accomplished by randomly changing the values of genes and is used to introduce novelty into the system and prevent stagnation. Long term evolution is impossible without mutation, and difficult without crossover. Thus, the minor features that Gordon observes and the sweeping changes that he hopes will happen are both evolutionary – only the scale differs.
Fleshing out the evolution analogy
While I may take issue with Gordon’s application of the ideas and terms that underpin genetic computing and evolutionary theory in general, I think that the idea that MMOs are complex creatures within an evolutionary landscape is a fascinating one.
Whereas most games are released to consumers and live or die based on their form at the time of shipping, massively multiplayer games have ongoing patches, release cycles, and expansions. The look and feel of an MMO on day one is radically different from its form five years later; a quick look at World of Warcraft provides a perfect illustration of this. In short, an MMO can be said to evolve.
So how exactly do the elements of an MMO map to genetic computing, and how tight a fit is this analogy?
Organism: Every MMO represents a single organism, which competes with all other organisms for limited resources within an environment. The success of each MMO is measured by how long it lasts and how much money it makes.
Environment: The landscape that these organisms live and compete in is not a physical place, but rather is defined by the play time of video game consumers. Clearly this environment is not bounded, and may grow or shrink depending on the popularity of MMOs in general, and the games industry as a whole.
Resources: The primary resource that organisms compete for in the environment is cash. Without a stable cash flow an MMO cannot survive, and will eventually be shut down. Secondarily, MMOs compete for play time which may not always translate directly to dollars, but is indirectly valuable in obtaining them.
Fitness: The fitness of an MMO can be measured directly by calculating some combination of monthly revenue and gross hours played across all users. Without making a profit, an MMO is less likely to add new features and evolve, and instead will focus all of its earnings on survival (server/staff maintenance).
Chromosomes: Organisms in this system are made up of chromosomes, each of which represents a system or feature within an MMO. Chromosomes may be simple (e.g. the minimap widget) or complex (e.g. the combat system), however complex chromosomes can be reduced to a series of simple chromosomes.
To bring it all together, under the evolutionary model organisms (MMOs) consisting of chromosomes (features) compete for resources (dollars) within an environment (video game players), and their success and longevity are determined based on their fitness (profits).
Evolution in motion
To illustrate these concepts and bring the discussion back to the original topic of mutation within massively multiplayer games, it may be instructive to consider an example of how an MMO introduces a new feature, and what evolutionary steps are taken along the way.
Mutation Example:
Step 1. A developer comes up with an idea for a change to the game (which could be an addition, removal, or modification), thinks it over in his head, and perhaps in extreme cases runs some simple numbers or writes a basic proof of concept to validate the idea. This is the mutation in its rawest form.
Step 2. The idea for the feature-mutation is shared with company stakeholders and (frequently) members of the game’s community. The feedback from this initial review process serves to estimate the fitness of the feature-mutation (which is a luxury that nature does not have).
Step 3. If the fitness estimate is deemed to be net positive (or, at worst, neutral), then the feature-mutation is implemented within the MMO (i.e. the mutation “multiplies” within the “population”). If the idea is not supported, the feature-mutation dies out immediately.
Step 4. After the implementation has been completed, some initial in-house testing is performed. Data from these tests trigger another round of fitness testing, after which the feature-mutation could again live or die.
Step 5. The change is deployed onto test servers where real players can dabble with it. The feature-mutation is once again tested for fitness.
Step 6. The feature-mutation is rolled out to the live servers, where the entire player base can interact with it. At this point you could consider the mutation to have been adopted by the entire organism (MMO). Obviously, the fitness of the organism including this new feature-mutation is again tested as players react to the impact by playing and/or paying more or less depending on how they feel about the game with the new feature incorporated.
In this way the living game (MMO) is constantly evolving through a series of small mutations, each of which has to pass a series of fitness tests before finally being adopted by the organism as a whole. It is important to note that even after being adopted into the main organism, these feature-mutations will constantly have their fitness tested as their environment (the player base) changes, the organism adopts more and different mutations, and other organisms evolve to compete for the finite resource pool.
Summary
Of course, the analogy isn’t perfect – in nature and genetic programming speciation can occur, and entire different competing species with the same original ancestors will compete for supremacy in the same environment. Within the scope of the MMO genre, however, organisms do not reproduce in quite this manner. The closest games come to speciation is when games blatantly clone existing titles (e.g. Alganon copying World of Warcraft), and then diverge from that base copy.
Even still, it is clear that MMOs evolve and adapt in a manner that is not all that far off from the fundamentals of genetic programming and evolutionary theory. Spurred on by the implicit competition for consumer dollars, these living games are constantly remaking themselves to appeal to an audience that can provide them with the resources they need to sustain their day to day operations and grow towards the future.
It’s anyone’s guess what the MMOs of tomorrow will look like, but chances are extremely strong that whatever form they arrive at will be the result of incremental changes (both big and small) over time.
Bonus points
Although it it beyond the scope of this article, I believe it is safe to say that the interactions between consumers and the large number of MMOs on the market serve to form the basis of a complex adaptive system. As such, the direction of the genre (for lack of a better term) is emergent as opposed to predetermined. This implies that no matter what the best and brightest game designers in the world today may think, they are not really in control of the shape of MMOs in the future. It’s a fascinating thought.
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