I blame Brian Green’s blog for this one He wrote yesterday about the event that Tabula Rasa held as part of its shutdown, and how he sees it as “a sign of people giving up hope”. But there’s another way of looking at this, and not that bad of a perspective at all…

Tabula Rasa was kind of doomed from the start- to me at least. When one of the marketing points for your game is who worked on it, then your game may be running a bit thin, but that’s just my personal opinion. But marketing and branding aside, I think the shutdown was handled really well.

It’s true, the TR team didn’t really give players a day to get together and bask in the nostalgia the game gives you about all those raids and fun escapades you had with your fields. And it’s not like what you feel when actors take the stage during the final episode of your favorite show on TV and bow for the audience and share some laughs half-in, half-out of character (again, nostalgia from remembering all the fun and drama you shared by following their characters’ stories over the years). But they did something else…

They stuck with the story to the bitter end…

Well, that’s got to count for something. No matter what anyone says about the game features or how the development went, none of that mattered in the gameworld. In the gameworld, the humans faced an onslaught that, in the end, they could not overcome. The players did not get a chance to get out of character, because they were too busy getting mowed down by endless waves of aliens. Of course, that doesn’t lend itself to the feelings of nostalgia that you would have from other game shutdowns, but it does bring closure to the gameworld within its own context.

So now, the question for designers should become: Okay, so I admit to myself that my MMO is not immortal (zomg nooooo!) and will eventually shut down- but how do I both bring closure to the gameworld and allow players a way to bask in that nostalgia at the same time?

Now there’s a doosey of a question- luckily with a ready answer. What designers need here is a full-spectrum view of their gameworld, from begining to end. I think that there is plenty of room for endings that both resolve the gameworld’s major story lines as well as give players time and opportunity to celebrate the time they had. And to use an example from movies, I submit:

Ocean’s Eleven

At the end of this movie, the heist is pulled off, the bad guys thwarted (by guys still bad- but not as bad as the bad-bad-guys), and the “honest criminals” get the money (and the girl, in Clooney’s case). And that’s just half the point. That’s the closure of the story arc of the movie- the TR-like end-game event. But, instead of just ending right there and letting them ride off into the sunset immediate afterwards, a is shot of the group at the Bellagio fountains celebrating not only their victory, but also their friendships, indicating that their own stories move on. And people who watch the movie get to bask in that sense of nostalgia that the characters are basking in, because they did share in one of their escapades, after all.

As a game developer- and as a world designer, it is your responsibility to look at the possible ending of your world. Or, more precisely, endings. The time of MMOs being static entities is quickly passing, and world designers will soon be incorporating features that will allow players to drive the path of their worlds in directions that they never envisioned. Really good world designers will also incorporate ways to use that path to extrapolate “end states”, or at least states in which the gameworld can be seen in a kind of “Dramatic Pose”. Dramatic Pose being the universal equivalent to epiphany or milestone, a realization, a point where the population of the gameworld can stop and look and say “whoa”, reflect on that point in time- and then keep on keeping on. Or maybe just making your game engine do an embarrasing drunken vogue-dance for the player. Whatever floats your boat…

From a literary perspective, the Lord of the Rings trilogy had multiple points where the characters were able to celebrate the major points of the story at places such as the rest in Rivendell, the celebration after Helm’s Deep and Orthanc, after the battle at the Black Gate, and again after the battle in the Shire. The story even goes further and delves into the future when Frodo leaves, and follows Sam back again to bask in the nostalgia by telling his children stories of his adventures.

Anyway, the point is: You really can have it both ways.