Non-combat MMO?

I was thinking if a MMO game without combat would be possible. I found an interesting experiment called Seed, but it failed. My partner Tom wondered if Second Life would be an example, but SL isn’t really a game, is more like a social environment, much more like a 3D version of IRC or Orkut. A Tale in the Desert seems to be a good candidate.

Let’s face it, MMO combat is nonsense. Traditional video-game RPG combat is nonsense. To evolve, you have to kill things like pigs, zebras, dinossaurs, giant lizards and angry mushrooms to evolve. Why is that? Come on, even if you lived in the Middle Ages, you wouldn’t kill a dog in the street or a deer in the woods just to become more powerful. 🙂

The reason is that such a level system is still based on the old Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition Experience Points (XP) model – kill the beast, get stronger. But this system was created in the 70’s, for tabletop games to fill young men afternoons. Since then, a number of other RPG books have created much more meaningful gameplay and experience systems – even the present 3th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

Well, so, what’s next? Seed failed. All the mainstream MMOs are combat-centered on the old D&D model. Why a non-combat, or maybe just non-combat-centered MMO would succeed? For the same reason casual games succeeded: there is an enormous amout of people out there that simply want some non-violent fun on their spare times. Some people are even investing on “Casual MMO” projects for the years to come, but I believe one already exists: it is NeoPets.