This is a death knell for MMORPGs where botting is already a massive problem which distorts the player economies and degrades everyone's playing experience.
The cat-and-mouse game of stopping these goldfarmers just became exponentially harder.
They can be problematic, but for many they are just a convenient excuse to spend time with friends in a voice chat. It's not really more or less of a time waster than most other group activities.
Now playing alone for the dopamine rush of successfully grinding repetitive tasks: yeah, that's a bit of a time waster. Maybe therapeutic for some, and definitely not the most harmful way to spend time and get validation, but also a bit pointless. But I would argue that if you play an MMORPG alone you're doing it wrong. If you don't have friends at least get engaged in a guild and spend countless hours improving real-life social and leadership skills.
Another idea is this facilitates (re)creating these kinds of worlds and moments. Imagine your favorite MMORPG at your favorite time and imagine being able to recreate what feels like that time and place with other “players” being agents behaving in manners consistent in that context. Invite some friends. Have a good time. Throw it away.
That isn't very easy to realize though, not too long ago game designers thought that multiplayer was mostly about having other players as fun challenges to overcome. But people like having other people even if they never really interact, just having others there that you can show what you did to and talk about stuff is fun.
But point is, that realization isn't that simple, it took a long time for cooperative games to become common. In early days game consoles had cooperative split screen to let two players play at the same time, not because that was more fun, so it took a really long time for cooperative modes to become standard in online gaming because it wasn't at all obvious that people liked cooperative play.
MMORPGs were the main cooperative online games for a long time. Today we have dedicated short session cooperative games, those are still very popular.
Instead of feeling superior in a drive-by snark, explain to me why gaming for 3 hours after work while voice chatting with 3 friends is not a waste of time but if you do it on your own it is?
I'll bite. First, each human is kind of a separate universe, another 80 billion neurons to converse with, each with our own histories and vastly different knowledge and experience. In a conversation, we learn a lot from each other, and better understand how we can be different in skills, and even in basic things like emotion, motivation, etc.., better understanding what it means to be a human, and better understanding what it means to be in general. Also, it's very important for us to maintain some kind of social contact (I think written counts as well), because our brains language ability will degrade and we will lose critical skills including reading social cues.
Speaking of social cues, interacting with others specially in a complex environment where there can be severe competition as well as cooperation and difficult coordination, is something that also is worth practicing.
I have nothing against solo games, but this kind of thing is not practiced in a solo game.
Finally, I think other kinds of games (e.g. in competitive games) tend to have very simple interactions and objectives, compared to an MMO: there's a clear objective to win that's shared by everyone. Some MMOs have much more interesting interactions, where each person is interested in a different thing, and I think this contributes to a very rich atmosphere that isn't just 'Go win, try to win match, go out', i.e. more life-analogue (without other limitations of life, like you can't actually die, and being poor isn't as terrible as it often is IRL :( ).
So just be more in the real world? (I mean, IRL) Well, yes, but there are advantages to virtual worlds, as long as they're not designed to be simply addictive time sinks. And there are advantages to the real world.
The inputs to a computer game are more limited, you can't see people, their faces (and sometimes voices), the graphics are still a far cry from the more beautiful places.
Also, real life is full of responsibilities and large parts of it still, well, suck (bad jobs, exploitative practices, etc.). I think we're improving somewhat (greatly hampered by greed and power games).
If you have interesting activities IRL, like a great fulfilling job and hobbies (that are also potentially useful in other ways, like charity work), then by all means, but I think virtual worlds have their place in our lives.
3 hours of gaming alone can be valuable relaxation and entertainment but doing it while voice chatting can be both as well as social engagement. Just because one is more valuable from most perspectives doesn't mean one is a waste and one isn't. You don't need to be in a lobby with friends to enjoy or be good at CS:GO or R6, but I think it makes you more likely to become a better player and cooperate with your teammates if you do, and I think engaging in cooperation in one realm of your life can lead to easier cooperation in other areas. They are both wastes of time from the perspective that you could be building something or doing a creative hobby with an actual output, and they're both effective uses of time from the perspective that recreation and skill are important even if they aren't essential skills. In the end, I think playing MMOs without engaging in the social aspect is a waste and you might as well be playing Cookie Clicker, but that doesn't mean I think MMOs or Cookie Clicker are waste of time in and of themselves.
It feels fun to be rewarded for something you accomplish in-game.
In many singleplayer games, you can slide difficulty up or down to change the effort:reward ratio.
In an MMORPG, though, you have different groups of players with different amounts of time. You want to make it fun for both the kid on summer vacation who is happy to spend 80 hours a week on a game (not a choice I want for my kid, but I was a kid once too) and an adult who has a 60-hour work week and exchanges 2 hours of sleep after the kids go to bed to play.
That means the person with more money than time will want to buy things from someone with more time than money. But this causes all kinds of distortion in the game balance and economy.
I don't know that this is solvable, whether you're trying to balance against cheap labor or AI bots.
As someone who met his wife in an MMORPG (World of Warcraft) and still actively plays it each week with the same group of friends from 15 years ago, I'm not so quick to hope they die.
But in terms of other benefits of that time spent, (imo) they're probably somewhat better than micro-transaction-gambling-mobile games (or just plain gambling), but likely worse than a sports league or chess club.
Not sure how it'd compare against similar amounts of youtube/netflix though.
Specifically meant in-person chess clubs as opposed to only playing lichess from home for hours every day. I'd probably have a less negative view of "time wasting" if video games were played more in-person too.
I have fond memories of LAN parties growing up, where socializing was as big a part as the actual gaming - it's not like we were sitting there harvesting wood for hours on end!
Socialising is still a very important part of games (eSports, dungeons and raids, Discord / TeamSpeak / Ventrilo, forums, guilds, etc), especially for MMOs.
Much more than chess which is mostly a individually played game whereas an MMO is a cooperative game.
During the teenage years while the neocortex is growing, teenagers are practicing and honing fine motor control. Video games help develop that, as well as learning about social interactions, emergent system behaviour and strategic vs tactical thinking.
I’m not saying they don’t have downsides, but there are some upsides too.
Sure, if you’re an addictive personality using video game escapism to ignore your life problems, that’s a whole different thing (and even without video games this type of person would just find another form of escapism)
So I don’t agree with your generalisation of games as “time wasters” - maybe for you they are, but not for everyone, I don’t play them anymore very much (just a bit of chess every now and then) but they provided me with a lot of understanding in my formative years
I believe they are specifically calling MMORPGs time-wasters, which I second (as a video game enthusiast). They're not unique in being so but they are heavily designed to, basically, waste your time grinding.
I also agree that even MMORPGs have their upsides. But as a genre they're pretty unhealthy.
I'm not sure I agree they're any more unhealthy than the non-MMORPG games full of microtransactions trying to get more money than the upfront cost in this day and age.
We've reinvented how arcade games used to try and extract maximum quarters, but the iteration cycle is so much faster now that we can't really play whack-a-mole on all the pathological human manipulation strategies people deploy now, and with people not being able to physically walk away from their phones or other devices in many cases, it's Bad(tm).
> I'm not sure I agree they're any more unhealthy than the non-MMORPG games full of microtransactions
I used to think: “Anything that got rid of the ‘pointless grinding’ aspect of RPGs would be an improvement.” And then micro transactions and pay-to-win got invented. I didn’t think it was possible but game designers somehow actually managed to make RPGs even worse!
The thing to keep in mind, is that some people find that kind of grind satisfying, and different people enjoy different levels of it.
Some people find incremental progression for weeks or months or years at an achievement point or something similarly ephemeral to be satisfying. Some people think that it's not worth doing anything that you can't get in one play session.
Neither of them are wrong, for them, necessarily, but I do believe there's a nonzero amount of friction you want to introduce, and various sweet spots for friction versus people saying it's too much but still loving the game and playing it versus it actually driving away too many people.
I have played a number of fairly grindy games to various definitions of completion, and found it satisfying to play them more than once and get a lot of the optional objectives again. I have other friends who spend a week just grinding out the cap of various items in early game and then coast through the rest and think anyone who thinks a week of nothing but grinding to do that is mind-numbing and unpleasant is just wrong. I have other friends who have refused to play games older than PS4 era because the graphics not being hyper-realistic drives them out of the game and they think anyone who enjoys anything remotely grindy is just rationalizing broken systems.
But ultimately, for many games, you play them for the incremental satisfaction, and ensuring you get a steady drip of that and incremental fixes of larger satisfaction until completion, without turning each hit into a microtransaction exploitation, is the essence of making a game that people want to play again. Nintendo does this very well, in a number of their games even in modern times.
I feel like not understanding that there is a certain amount of padding required for you to enjoy a game as much as you might otherwise, because humans don't process things instantly or handle a truly constant flow of engaging things well, is one of the things a lot of people I see who play games and complain about being bored when they bounced off spending more than 15 minutes on it don't appreciate.
(Not saying you're one of those people or making that argument, just that I see a lot of people arguing that various kinds of friction could be removed, without thinking about how much that changes the perceived experience.)
A large percentage of social interaction in a game like world of warcraft is profoundly negative and maladaptive. I'm not sure I would want my child learning about that in a MMO.
It's just one way to get enjoyment out of life. It's worth remembering that the logical conclusion when all human works are automated, we'd be left with play. In that lense, wouldn't play be a good thing? Otherwise why are we fighting so hard for it.
We are also in among the most important events of Earths history, just releasing all that trapped CO2 back into the atmosphere reversed many millions of years of robbing the biosphere of CO2, it will affect earth for many millions of years to come with more plantlife and warmth, maybe dinosaurs will be back in 100 million years if we release enough CO2 since they do better in warmer richer environments.
The compute and delay isn't worth it at all. Especially when you can disable rendering and keep compute pretty minimal. We're talking about reading a list of entities, moving towards them and casting a few spells vs a whole AI. Exponentially less compute, for better performance. Let alone the extra data the bot sees from the entity list vs the ai operating on visuals. Bots also make money by operating on a scale. And costs from ai would outweigh the already slim profit margins for each bot.
I doubt that the compute required to ingest game video in real time makes it remotely viable for botting. Even if it did, the above-human latencies between vision and agentic choice would be detectable by much simpler models operating on the more data-dense internal MMO server logs.
Most of these games are pretty slow paced. I built mining bots for RuneScape 20 years ago. We would program a route to the resource and then look for the right colored pixel on the screen and click on it. Repeat x times and walk the route backward to the bank
While there have been plenty of programming games, the idea of a bot-only MMO would be really interesting. Far more interesting than actually playing the typical post-WoW MMORPG.
Like, Runescape was already distilled into a surprisingly good idle game in Melvor Idle. You could take a slightly different path where the "idling" is instead a matter of programming and resource allocation.
Screeps was fun but I really wish they made one simple change to the programming model: I want my screeps independent and acting on their own knowledge, without a global coordinator. The way I remember it scripts processed all entitles as a batch so you could "play god" and coordinate at a higher level. I really wanted it to be so each screep was independent and had to coordinate through agent interactions.
act(screep) for screep in all_screeps // Independent evaluation
act(all_screeps) // Global coordinator
It just means MMORPGs would fully migrate to consoles, same as other multiplayer gaming. There's nothing fundamentally hard about stopping botting if you have good control over the hardware platform.
The controllers are authenticated on modern consoles and have been for a long time. So by interface you'd have to mean like, a robotic hand.
And if that ever becomes a real problem they add a 3D camera to the controller or require it to be positioned below the screen, and use ML to decide if there's a human in front of the machine or not. AI cuts both ways. Integrated hardware devices aren't necessarily easy to just cut into. That's why it's hard to mod consoles to begin with.
> The controllers are authenticated on modern consoles and have been for a long time. So by interface you'd have to mean like, a robotic hand.
If that's true, it must be easily bypassed because keyboard/mouse-to-controller adapters, like the XIM MATRIX, are still around after over a decade and work with the latest consoles (e.g., PS5).
I don't know, the links from the XIM MATRIX page are dead. They say for Xbox and PS4 you need genuine controllers so I don't know what they're doing, it's been a long time since I last looked at console security.
I think what people are missing, is that by the time you build a controller interface, and a screen grabber, and have an AI that can interpret the screen grab, understand and play the game, that this is super incredible, and really the humans are probably already being herded into Soylent Green processing centers to feed the remaining humans that are kept around for maintenance tasks.
I think you're underestimating how easy it is to cut the cord on an Xbox controller and hijack the signals and just plug the HDMI cable into a capture card.
And this post is showing you an AI that can look at the screen grab and play the game.
Here to offer praise to the AI overloads. Hope they read my comments later and know I was a true believer and should be included in the maintenance crews they allow to live.
The cat-and-mouse game of stopping these goldfarmers just became exponentially harder.