Like you, I am not in the up-and-coming generation of MMO players. I’m in my late 30’s, and thrive on pencil and paper games. I wanted the MMO to be the natural extension of the gaming table into the virtual world. MMO’s, in my mind, would have been about players grouping and working together to defeat the evils programmed into the worlds, to experience the storyline, to develop their characters, to customize, discover, and adventure.

My first experience of being PK’ed in Ultima Online was a real wake-up call for me. While PvP seemed some kind of great fun for some players, I never connected enjoyment with pitting my skill and character against theirs. That, to me, was the biggest generation gap I had to face.

Sure, games like Doom and Duke Nuke’em allowed the ever-popular “deathmatch”, and from time to time a jaunt onto a network server with friends to waste a few hours of mindless fun blowing each other away was good therapy. But an MMO designed with this feature seemed alien to me, and I think for crowds of my age-group (there are of course exceptions) not worth the code they are written in.

While I agree that our generation, for the most part, looks for an MMO to allow them freedom to develop their characters and story, I disagree that they do not have a primary interest in being a hero. PnP games are all about being a hero, in your party’s own special way. PnP games are ego-centric, and customized around the players’ desires to live out the roles of heroes adventuring in fantastic worlds, playing their versions of heroes like Aragorn, Obi-wan Kenobi, or Indiana Jones.

In the MMO world, there is still that desire, but these games are very poor about making the effects “ego-centric”. Defeat a named mob and it just respawns. Find a special weapon as a result of a quest, and discover so have every other player on your server. Finish a quest to alter a story arc, and the NPC is back again asking for the same help.

This is where I agree with sandbox tools, so players can create their own enduring stories, provide their own monsters, and even spawn their own loot. Clearly these things require the utmost of care to balance, lest the seedier side of the player base take advantage of it and exploit it for one of many reasons.

Younger players seem more concerned with proving themselves against their peers. They wish to finish a quest-arc first. Be the first to the level cap. Have the best equipment. Win the most battles. Fight everybody they come across to prove their superiority. It is almost a rite of passage. Guilds form to carve out their territory and declare themselves the biggest and the baddest. And then inevitably lock horns with other youngsters trying to do the same.

And there, to me, is the difference. Younger players seem obsessed with measuring themselves against other players. Older players are more interested in measuring themselves against their own objectives, and possibly the game story itself.

And of course, this is generalizations. Clearly you can find players in each group that don’t fit my mold of them.

I remember standing in our swg guild cantina, just chatting with other guildies around, doing some 1on1s, defending our city/base and just having a great time without the feeling that I HAVE to raid, have to grind to advance etc..

Tried EVE, but I’m a fantasy freak. So we we need EVE with Dragons!

The only generational issue I really see is MMOs as an entertainment medium. Certainly amongst people my age and older a lot of people who don’t game treat MMO players as social outcasts from “normal society”. It’s a bit of the old “don’t want my kids listening to rock and roll music” attitude back in the 50’s. A lot of them are uncomfortable with the cross generation effect that MMOs tend to have.

I find it highly amusing that whenever studies look at the number of hours Gamers spend online they don’t look at the number of hours these people spend watching Television, a much more passive medium.

But I can distinctly remember stages back in the day when the “beat the game” attitude was prevalent. Remember when the first videos came out showing how to beat Doom in under 20 minutes? I think what you’re feeling is more of a gradual “well I’ve beaten other games, and it was kinda hollow feeling afterward, maybe this time I’ll stop and smell the pixels as I go”. This type of attitude comes with general maturity (as a gamer) and is probably not a generational thing per see.

Besides as a community we have yet to truly delve into all that MMOs as a genre have to offer. Just look at EvE online and the way a lot of it’s features differ from the “traditional” MMO and you can see there’s probably TONS of possibilities that have not even been explored yet.

The way I’ve began to view it is that there are really two crowds. Those who want an mmoRPG and those who want and MMO(with or without the rpg). And the dividing line between those two crowds does seem to fall on the age gap as well. Those of us that played RPGs, when they weren’t MMOs, want that same RPG aspect brought into our MMOs so that we can share that experience with our friends whether they are at the same table as us or across the world. But the “kids” that grew up on fast paced multiplayer games where victory was determined in short rounds, and dominance was won or lost every few minutes, they seem to not care a squat about character advancement unless it increases their chances of “winning”.

Well written, and spot on if’n ya ask me.