SciFi bringing hybrid mmorpg television show

The SciFi channel is bringing a hybrid MMORPG and television show. On one level, I’m pretty excited about this since this is exactly the type of audience participation that is needed now in television. Forget reality television. It’s like mixing World of Warcraft with American Idol.

SciFi has partnered with Trion World Network, which will do the gaming side of things and has some serious backers in this gaming corporation. There obviously are really good and bad things that could come from this experiment. Not only is it a high cost venture, but it has to be done correctly. The game in itself has to have a lot of politics and story lines that are already drawn out for each “race” or “nation”. There needs to be a team of writers that have not only written background stories of some of the NPCs that guide the story arc, but they also need to help guide it along in case it goes haywire since there is a television arc that is based off of it.

What’s interesting is that this reminds me a lot of the imagination realm of mudding back when I played Wheel of Time muds. The storyline was pretty much set, but depending on who the players were, it actually made it exciting in the same environment that the books but in a different parallel plane. Similarly, this could be a very exciting venture if the game itself is actually fun to play but on the flip side is complex enough to actually generate stories that can be episodic. Since there isn’t too much to go off of, no one really knows what this will be about except it’ll be futuristic Earth.

Personally? Post-apocalyptic is a much more imaginative than utopian. Just look at how Battlestar Galactica turned out. In fact, I’m sort of disappointed that they didn’t use this story, since it’s a good one. In not choosing an already made arc with defined good-bad roles, that makes extremely more difficult to write for and requires a talented staff that can improvise on the fly. Hats off the SciFi to try this but we’ll see if the end product flies.

Photo Credit: ( [ dg ] )