Burning Flipside, and the relevance of Burning Man to MMOs

I am taking off tomorrow morning to Austin, TX for my first trip to Burning Flipside, one of the larger ‘regional events’ associated with Burning Man. I’ve been to BM eight times now, every year since I moved to the US. Obviously I think it’s worthwhile, and not just because it’s a big silly vacation in the desert with my pals from all over the world and 40,000 other crazy dorks.

I think Burning Man is very interesting from an MMO perspective. At the excellent Austin Games Conference last year I moderated a panel on ‘User Created Content’, and set out an opening position as follows; I believe that MMOs (or Virtual Worlds, or whatnot) are tremendously important as the dominant media of ‘The Future’. In this context, there is a War for the Future. I likened this to a Tale of Two Cities.

Both are cities in Nevada that are primarily recreational in purpose.

One is a temporary autonomous zone created and dismantled over a week, built almost entirely by its residents, who bring nearly all the entertainment and consumables they require. No money changes hands. Incredible feats of creation and destruction occur. People party hard, fall in love, enjoy epiphanies and sometimes hard falls. It’s physically and mentally gruelling. ‘Participants’ spend months preparing and then weeks or months winding back down. What happens at Burning Man people carry away with them, changing them.

The other is a cynical corporate machine designed astutely to extract money from visitors whilst giving them the apparent sensations of fun. Everything is for sale. The buildings and scenes are extravagent and beautiful, mirroring the wonders of the world. The shows are astounding and intricately produced. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Give or take a good number of marriages, some broken banks and some terrible hangovers, most of experiences are ephemeral.

The analogical contrast between Second Life and expensive content-driven theme-park MMOs like World of Warcraft is obvious.

If humanity has a future (i.e. if we don’t blow ourselves up, or devour ourselves in green or grey goo), then I believe we’ll largely live lives of leisure. How will fill that leisure time will be profoundly important. As a creator of leisure, a builder of (virtual) leisure cities, I would much rather people spent most of their time at a virtual Burning Man than Vegas. That said, Puzzle Pirates is more Vegas than Burning Man. Heck, we’ve even got Poker. Clearly I have some work to do!

At the end of the Austin panel, after a great debate from the chaps there (Jim Purbrick from Second Life, Walter Yarborough from Dark Age of Camelot, Dr Cat from Furcadia, and Andy Tepper from A Tale in the Desert), I asked the audience to vote; Vegas or Burning Man? It was about 50/50. Here is the powerpoint from the panel, mostly images of Second Life and Vegas/Burning Man images I snagged from Google image search in the 30 minutes beforehand.

This year at the Austin Game Conference there’s going to be a whole panel about the connections between Burning Man and Vegas, with a bunch of fresh newbies who’ll still be dusty from their first trip. Should be fun!

11 thoughts on “Burning Flipside, and the relevance of Burning Man to MMOs”

  1. There seem to be a lot of Burning Man fans in the MMORPG blogosphere. I suppose I’ll reserve comment on the phenomenon having never been out there. I just wonder whether, as a business proposition, “We offer physical and mental exhaustion without a whiff of corrupting consumerist influences!” is a great marketing tag-line. It seems to me that there are better real-world metaphors for a game aspiring to make content creation a very democratic endeavor: perhaps “We’re sort of like the Boy Scouts, except online.” Think of it: scouting is an inherently social activity which is characterized by mostly, but not totally, monetarily disinterested cooperation by “regular Joes” who nonetheless have varying degrees of proficiency in special skill sets. And most of them learned those skills in the Scouts. They get together and “create” to enjoy the community, to compete with their skill sets, to aquire new skill sets for later non-scouting use, to spend quality time with their children, and for reasons which are more or less ideological (“Scouting teaches my son to be a fine, upstanding young man”). Scouting also supports an array of business endeavors (camps, camping supplies, pinewood derby kits) as well as non-profits organized around a single entity which happens to be a non-profit but doesn’t necessarily *have* to be. Scouting also fulfills a need similar to what many BM and MMORPGs fans have identified: to withdrawl from “the real world” for a while in favor of something a little, well, different.

  2. I like this analogy in some ways, but there are major fundamental differences. Scouting is built on military, command-and-control lines. BM is radically decentralised and anarchistic. There are rules and a central organisation, but these exist (arguably, but at least in theory) to facilitate everyone else doing as-they-please.

    Also I never liked the shorts in cub scouts. I did enjoy the camping trips, though. Especially one where we all dressed as cowboys and indians and shells the crap out of each other with giant water-balloon-hurling catapults. Uh, umm, go figure.

  3. I’m not gonna get all deep…

    Why not an MMO (with skills and combat) mixed with a virtual world like SL (see their crafting system, higher skills let you use more advanced scripting commands/building blocks), and NO MONEY. All transactions would be handled with real money, through a PayPal-esque service provided by the game, and the game would take a cut of every single transaction. 2%, 5%, whatever. Houses would be craftable, and probably expensive.

    The more I read about the “metaverse” and Second Life and all these virtual worlds, they seem like smaller versions of the internet. Each house in second life like a web-site, each player like a blog. So why not base a game off the most successful (or maybe second most?) web-site in the world? eBay.

    Just take a cut.

  4. I’m going to make a bold statement (or perhaps it’s not that bold at all).

    Most people don’t want to be anarchists.
    Most people don’t want to have to create their own fun.
    Most people want to be consumers of entertainment.

  5. I’m back, a bit dusty and pretty tired. It was a great event — those Texas folks put together a lot of great art and theme camps. Highly recommended. The land was incredible, too. Very lovely being at a BM-style event with greenery and a river for swimming.

    TheAmazin wrote:
    > Just take a cut.

    I suspect that this is how things will go, yes, although the infrastructure costs of operating such a service will necessitate a larger cut than ebay’s.

    StClair wrote:
    > Most people don’t want to be anarchists.
    > Most people don’t want to have to create their own fun.
    > Most people want to be consumers of entertainment.

    Mostly, yes. For now. That can change! I think it certainly is with this new generation of kids who’ve grown up with the webternet.

  6. Following the boy scout concept, how about the boy scout explorer. It’s somewhere in the middle between the top-down boy scouts and the decentralized burning man.

    My home town LARP (Live-action Role Playing) game are organized as an Explorer troop to benefit from the insurance and camping support. In return, traditional boy and girl scouts aged 14+ gets to learn about historical reenactments (at least in a pseudo-form).

    Another structure that is a good middle ground analog is The Gathering, a LARP event that have upwards of 10,000 participants.

    Frank

  7. I think people want to be given easy-to-use tools to create their own fun. SimCity, the Sims, Second Life, Ultima Online, Civilization, these are all games where the focus is on how you customize your experience. All the hardcore Sims players don’t play to accomplish the goals, they play to build houses and custom characters and to watch how they interact with each other. Without the “story mode” of the Sims, it would still be fun.

    Ultima Online, in the beginning, was anarchy. And I don’t mean anarchy in the sense that everyone killed everyone else, I mean it in the sense that people did what they weren’t expected to do. It was going against the intended design that was fun, because it felt like you were in control. And I had the most fun I’ve ever had at a video game playing those first few years of UO.

    I agree that people want to be consumers of entertainment. But I also think people want to have something to be proud of. Something unique that is theirs, that they can display to other people. Something they created. Something better than what you made. And I think that people would pay to try.

  8. TheAmazin wrote:
    > I think people want to be given easy-to-use tools to create their own fun…
    I agree that people want to be consumers of entertainment. But I also think people want to have something to be proud of. Something unique that is theirs, that they can display to other people. Something they created. Something better than what you made. And I think that people would pay to try.

    I couldn’t agree with you more.

  9. HI Capn’

    just wanted to say hello, and i hope you enjoyed our little burn in Austin, Texas.

    I was introduced to PP back in May, and have been addicted to it since. i’ve never been one for video games, and i have never played an online game before…. until now…. i’ve gotten friends, and my two small children addicted to it as well.

    i’m in the planning stages of transforming my golf cart into a pirate ship for flipside next year. i hope that you can make it out again next year, and i’ll let you drive it around 🙂

    take care!

  10. This is the first I’ve heard of burning man. I still don’t understand it.

    Except, perhaps:
    A bunch of people come to an empty location; erect a town, with no government; say “cheese” and take pictures; and then clean up, leaving only footprints.

    Am I even close?

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