This Will End Badly for Us All

Firefly

You know what was great about Firefly? The characters’ interactions were subtle and their motivations, while hidden to themselves, were often clear to everyone else on the ship. Fundamentally, it was a character drama that used a smuggling mcguffin every week to show something about the characters and their relationships.

Now, consider this article over at Wired Magazine that foretells of a Firefly MMORPG. Ignore the fact that he calls Firefly hard science fiction for a moment (Sorry, I can’t ignore it. It’s just… like, neither the author or his editor know what it is? It’s about as hard sci fi as Star Wars, which is about as hard sci fi as Hello Kitty. It’s a literary genre. You’d think an editor would know what it is.) and consider what MMORPGs are good at:

In World of Warcraft, you team up with other players to accomplish quests. Even on designated “role playing” servers, I’m told that the character stuff is pretty thin; it’s a strategy and tactical game (which can still be an RPG, of course). People have fun playing it when they play it as such. The rules don’t support playing a character with motivations and relationships.

Now consider this:

What made the show special was the wry, often self-deprecating humor of its characters, from the captain with the checkered past to the unwittingly sexy engineer, the dull hunk of a mercenary with a girl’s name, and the mysterious young woman passenger with special gifts.

Sounding pretty good, right? (I mean, aside from the fact that Kaylee is wittingly sexy.)

The online version will move away from those central characters — after all, there’s only one Mal Reynolds. In an MMORPG, “everybody has to have their own story,” says Multiverse co-founder and executive producer Corey Bridges.

Now, moving away from those characters, that’s great. Making it so everyone has their own story — their own checkered past, embarrassing name, secret love, death wish, quest for forgiveness or whatever, that’s great. But a shadow falls:

“Television series can be really good properties to turn into MMOs, because when you make a TV series, not only do you need great characters, but you need to create a full, rich, compelling place,” Bridges says. “If you’re doing science fiction, you have to really think it out and create an incredibly rich environment that is compelling in its own right, and worth exploring and going back to week after week. That’s what Joss Whedon did with Firefly.”

See, cuz, no, he didn’t. He didn’t care about how fast the ship could fly, what planets existed, or how ranks work in the Alliance forces. What mattered was that the ship broke to put the characters in conflict with each other, the Confeds were bureaucratic and cold, and that the planets they landed on were stuffed full of characters who wanted something from the protagonists. Shit, he didn’t even know what was on the left side of the bridge until Serenity. He certainly didn’t have a list of planets, ships for sale, and damage values for different weapons.

“We want to find someone who wants to do something unique and fun and interesting, not just a re-skin of World of Warcraft or Star Wars Galaxies,” Bridges says.

Because the underlying technology is already in place, “I feel confident that we’ll see something the public can play sometime in 2008,” he adds.

That underlying technology had better make some leaps and bounds if this is to be anything but a pale shadow of something really fun and engaging.

PS: What’s up with the baggy drawers on the dude at the head of this post? He’s a superhero from 1940. He seems to be hiding not only an enormous schlong, but love handles, as well.

0 thoughts on “This Will End Badly for Us All”

  1. Preaching to the choir, Joshua. This is exactly the kind of thing that drove me to write With Great Power… Supers about character, passion and tragedy rather than just powers and costumes. It’s almost like I was talking to The Man:

    Me: “Don’t just clone the skin of the thing! Sieze its heart and make it your own!”
    Those Who Make Money Doing This Stuff: “What? Cut the skin into the shape of a heart? We can do that. . . . For a small fee.”

  2. I’m convinced it has possibilities. Actually, I’m convinced it has grand, huge possibilities, and I’m just hoping it works well. Sure, you don’t want to get bogged down in the facts and figures, but MMOs enable players to get into the setting without having to deal directly with those – far less than in, say, most tabletop RPGs.

  3. Drew, you miss the point. The issue is not whether you get bogged down in figures. The issue is whether they’re the core part of the system.

    If you’re playing a Firefly game that’s fun in the same way as the series, what do you do?

    You get in dilemmas that test your moral conviction and the strength of your relationships with the crew members. You see systems that do that kind of thing in Prime Time Adventures, Sorcerer, Polaris, and Shock: but you won’t see it in World of Warcraft. It’s simply not built for it. It’s like trying to take an airplane underwater.

    If the “underlying technologies” exist, we’re not going to see something that captures the charm of the show.

    For instance, will there be an XP system? What are you going to get XP for? You can’t tell me that, in a Firefly game, you’ll get XP for shooting cows and more XP for shooting people. If that is how you get XP and it’s just frowned on by players who want to “role play” then you have a finely tuned recipe for disappointment.

    Once the reward cycle does what you need, the game has possibility. As it stands, it’s likely a huge disappointment.

    Sez me. It would be cool if I was wrong, if the developers have already thought this out. I’d really like to see how they could make that happen.

  4. I dunno. You could make a good Firefly MMO, you’d just want it to be based on EVE. Small groups forming up hard-scrabble trading groups?

    yrs–
    –Ben

  5. By “hard sci-fi” I think he means that they didn’t have sound effects when things exploded in space.

    I’m not sure I want to discuss the game elements of a project that is a recipe for failure. The show couldn’t stay on the air, the movie didn’t meet production costs, the game . . . Firefly fans are devoted (I bought my DVDs!) but they don’t have very deep pockets.

  6. Crap. Now I AM thinking about it.

    How do you have witty conversations? Enter a “banter” encounter. Use voice chat. At the end each player rates the others. Stats modify those ratings up or down so a smart talker with bad CHA can still get a low score. Assign XP accordingly.

    Please don’t make me think about this again.

  7. This reminds me of a conversation I once had with a dude who was way into Star Wars Galaxies. I’m thinking, yeah, fighting stormtroopers, spreading the word of the rebellion, learning to use the force, maybe? I haven’t played, but that’s what I think of when I think of the good films.

    So I ask him, “what’s your character all about?”

    He says, “I’m a wookie tailor.”

  8. Matt, that’s really funny, down to the fact that Wookiees are nudists.

    Russ, that represents a conflict of interest if the characters are either opponents (rate each other low so neither of you will get an advantage over the other) or friends (rate each other high for maximum helpiness).

    Mountain Witch poses one way out of this: you assign Trust to each other. Let’s say the bunch of us are the crew on a ship. Hell, let’s say it’s Serenity so we’re all using a common lexicon.

    Let’ say I’m playing Simon and Russ, you’re playing Jayne. We don’t trust each other much; you think that I’m hiding something horrible about River (I am) that I will unleash on the crew (I won’t). I think you want to turn us in for the bounty (you do). We’ve got a pretty low Trust in each other, so the things we do can effect each other pretty little. If you shoot me, I’ll get better; if I abandon you, you’ll find your way back. Now, let’s say Matt is playing River. I Trust River a lot, and she trust me a lot. That means two things: if River saves me, it works very well (and vice versa), and if we betray each other — imagine some sort of Of Mice And Men thing — that would also be very effective. You remember in the pilot (part II I think) where Mal and the mayor of some shitburg planet trust each other enough that Mal knows that she’s lying and is planning to shoot him?

    Now we’ve got a system about our relationships. It’s a relationship inherently about trust and betrayal, and there’s certainly more to relationships in real life, but I think that represents Firefly pretty well.

  9. See, that’s for me the primary failing of Firefly – apart from the characters it’s an absolutely crap universe (using a fusion torch in an atmosphere should be a felony, running into a corpse in space would be a lot more like a Grand Slam made of frozen meat going off on your windshield than running a drunk over on the street).

    The problem with that universe is that it’s built around a specific set of stories and outside those, it falls the fuck apart because it’s just not that well thought out. That’s not a judgment on the quality of the show (I own it and realy enjoy it when I’m in the mood).

    I’d really like to play a game set in the Downbelow Station millieu, because apart from the economics it’s a reasonably hard, consistent, and interesting universe with a lot of stories just waiting to be told. The Firefly universe is just window dressing for a specific story.

  10. Hey, Soren!

    I don’t know if it’s a failing; I mean, is it a failing of the King Arthur story that you can only tell stories about honor and sacrifice in it? The story does what the story does.

    I haven’t read Downbelow Station. What’s good about it?

    1. I don’t think the two cases are equivalent – Arthurian legends are unapologetic heroic fantasy, Firefly tries to be science fiction but is really a Western – there’s nothing, off the top of my head, that required it to have space travel. It’s good fiction, just not good science fiction.

      Downbelow Station is about a station and a fleet on the losing side of the first interstellar war. Subsequent books in the same universe (Rimrunners especially) are eerily similar in tone to Firefly.

      It’s locally hard, scientifically, and it deals a lot with the political and social sides of space opera in a fairly realistic fashion. Life in space isn’t all fun and flashy lights, and bad shit leftover from the war lurks out in the dark. Three human governments that don’t understand each other very well, and a closed, space-born society that wants as little as possible to do with any of them. It’s worth a glance if you like that sort of thing.

  11. Firefly isn’t really science fiction. It’s a Western. It uses science fiction color the way Star Wars does. It absolutely doesn’t interfere with the show, and the “space ship crew” aspect works much better than if they were just, I dunno, in a wagon or something. It’s more claustrophobic so it puts more pressure on the protagonists to get into each others’ business.

    I suppose it could have just as easily taken place on a submarine. That’s kind of a funny idea.

    Downbelow sounds really, really cool. It in the queue now.

  12. Firefly’s science was as hard as anything I can recall seeing on TV.

    Which admittedly isn’t saying much.

    Still, they had lightspeed lasers, silent explosions in space, lampshaded the existence of a-grav, and employed the Kzinti Lesson, so I have to give them some kudos.

  13. Man. It’s ridiculous that I can’t argue with that. Maybe Babylon 5, with the way their fighter-scale craft worked? But it was saturated with psychic powers and ignored the presence of antigravity, too.

    Welcome to the glyphpress! It sounds like you’re the kind of person I like having around here!

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