Travian Stories, Episodic MMOs
August 19th, 2006, By Duncan Gough
To recap, Digg and Travian track each other closely in terms of traffic. Digg and Travian are social websites with different subjects. Travian is a web-mog, a MMO, a Passive Game played throughout each day in the same manner I periodically check email. Digg is a news website that I read frequently, around which a community of users has grown. Whilst Digg is still an order of magnitude bigger, I see Travian as proof that proper localisation for European markets can have tremendous rewards. Both Digg and Travian are free, support by ads. Both Digg and Travian offer rewards to their most prolific users in the form of community celebrity.
As I have noted before, Digg is a Web 2.0 website can teach Travian as an Online Games website a few tricks. On the other hand, Travian as an Online Game is beginning to show Digg how to repurpose its’ users and offer them even greater respect and community standing:
On one of the many worlds in Travian, somebody won. Is there such an endgame at Digg? Probably not, no-one can win at Digg, there is little persistance within its’ transient community. You’re only as good as your last front page. Again, I think, Travian has the advantage since it is able to create these kinds of stories. Read the forum post and you really get a feeling of how much effort has gone into winning, how much they’re enjoyed the game. These kind of stories that come out of MMOs are really what define them. The Matrix MMO tried this a while ago and I *think* that City of Heroes does much the same thing. Digg has the Diggnation Podcast but there is little in the way of acknowledgement for anyone who gets a story read out. EVE online still wins the award for best MMO story, though, with ZZZZ-Best.
I should point out that winning in Travian causes a server reset. The world loses its’ persistance and the game starts again. That’s OK. Digg has the infrastructure for something similar when you consider that front page stories are ranked on a weekly basis. Each week Digg resets and its’ persistance starts again. Digg could certainly increase the ‘play’ element for users, if they wanted to, of course.
Whilst researching Travian, I found this thread on Indiegamer about Episodic Content. When you add Passive Games into the mix with browser based, persistent, online worlds, and start talking about episodic content, games like Travian to take on another meaning. If, as Valve have done with Half Life 2: Episode One, episodic content is generally perceived to cost something, then Travian has a new revenue stream. Create an episode, charge a premium for access and play out the content in a shard of one of the many virtual worlds, resetting the game once the story has concluded. Episodes can be played and replayed until a new episode is released, at which point the persistance of the world can be extended into the new content.
I hadn’t considered episodic content and web-mogs, but now that I do, they seem perfectly matched. If the episodes are shorter, they are more winnable. If they are more winnable then more people get a shot at greater community recognition, and if the episodes are short enough, you start to move Passive Games into the domain of Casual Games where there is an existing mindset of paying users who are looking for the new games to play.
Meanwhile, over on BrokenToys.org, there’s a suggestion that Battlestar Galactica would make a great MMO. The hard part is avoiding the pit falls of having a virtual world that pulls against the one on display on television. Episodic content would be ideal for this, as I suggested in the comments.