Festive Events: Do They Represent The Community?

One of my favorite times, and I suspect many people's favorite time in MMOs, is during Halloween. Pumpkins, beastly costumes to farm (or buy) and an overall tingly atmosphere is injected into the everyday grind. Then of course, you have Christmas and the ever increasingly hyper-pinkified Valentine’s day events. But today, when there is an opening up of gaming to everyone around the world, why are we still having the same old predictable in-game events?

The four event timelines feels stale and uniform: people are expecting their usual summer swimming costume event, their bunny ears and egg hunt for Easter. Most of the time Christmas is a fuzzy winter costume with twinkling trees, and Halloween is always pumpkins and a few candles. US servers sometimes have localized events for the 4th of July, yet nothing new is brought to the table.

Instead, imagine a weekend where you have a festival of colors contest from Holi,an ancient Hindu festival, which has become popular with non-hindus internationally. People celebrate by throwing multicolored water bombs at each other to usher in a vibrant spring. Anyone at any time is fair game, with everyone coming together to enjoy a fresh start. You could get a few days poking your allies or enemies, one devious water fight at a time.

If you ask people in-game about it, they might say, "well these holidays aren't as well known" or "everyone in the world knows x, y or z," but these comments don't consider why that is. Sure, many of the MMO seasonal events we enjoy are designed with Western audiences in mind, but these players aren’t a homogenous group themselves, and they might want to experience unfamiliar holidays.

With the Increase of easy access to the internet, players from all over the world are now able to play together. In a raid you may find yourself accomplishing feats of heroism with players from the USA and Europe, to India and South America. With the exception of Asia only servers, publishers are situated in the USA and Europe, yet copies of games like World of Warcraft are sold as far as Cape Town and Dubai.

MMOs picked up momentum through publishers in the West, but their popularity is now shared globally. It was the starting point, but continuing an ethnocentric view of gaming doesn't fit with international MMOs.

One culture does not need to dominate. It sends out a message that diverse players are not recognized as part of the community. Christmas has religious origins, but evolved into a cultural holiday which anyone can participate in. It’s possible for other holidays to become the same if we look outwards, but there is tunnel vision of what the norm is for in-game events.

If we continue looking through the lens that brought us to this point, back when the player-base only included a small segment of the population, we will not be adding fresh ingredients to the gaming experience. You could argue that festivals rooted in culture shouldn't be involved at all, but then we would lose the events we have now and nobody wants that. But we do want an excuse for another costume. Companies need to feel free enough to consider that their playerbase is no longer just Western or Eastern. Gaming is global. It would be impossible to create events for every single holiday in the world, but there is an opportunity to design seasonal events which bring us all something new.