I read a weird article this morning on WIRED’s Game|Life blog about PVP in MMOs–specifically about the PVP in Age of Conan, which is to say, Age of Conan itself. Contributor Earnest Cavalli (with a name to tip your hat to) asks:

“Can [Age of Conan] really succeed based on players’ desire to kill each other, or has MMO gaming simply run out of ideas and is instead opting to ape the online shooters from which they originally evolved?”

First of all, who says MMOs evolved from online FPS? I’m gunna go ahead and disagree. Maybe MMOs evolved from RPGs? That, at least, sounds better to my old ears. Maybe I’m wonky.

You could argue that Age of Conan has a very tightly structured playing experience, as the people who play it seem to sing often of bloodlust and glory to whomever will listen. So we know for sure that there’s bloodlust in AOC, and glory, which sure sounds like a PVP experience to me, but there’s something else that Cavalli missed, I think.

In Rory Manion’s piece for 1up.com, a romantic notion lies:

“I honestly can’t see myself enjoying AOC on a non-PVP server. Not because I’m too masochistic to have fun without the constant threat of violence, but because that threat forces the kind of teamwork that online games are supposed to engender and, in doing so, makes the grind more bearable.”

I know we try not to use the word “emergent” these days when we’re talking about video games, but doesn’t that resonate? Risk and danger might be all AOC needs to separate itself from Wow, and maybe pull in a million or two subscribers, if it can scale. So maybe PVP, if you leave it loose enough, is actually a doorway to a more sophisticated type of play. Or at least something different and interesting.