Here's an interesting read: some thoughts on the shelf life of MMOs. In the article, Celia Pierce-- a director at Georgia Tech's Emergent Game Group-- pegs the life of the average user within a virtual world at about 18 months, and discusses some of the challenges designers face in retaining their userbase and keeping them from losing interest.

While new online worlds are cropping up all the time, others-- like Motor City Online and Earth & Beyond (both by Electronic Arts), and Bandai-Namco's Gundam Online (set to go offline Dec. 15)-- get shuttered for good due to lost users. How to spot an online world on the decline? According to the article, abandoned homes and vast stretches of vacant land are a sure sign that the inhabitants are on the move.

Pearce suggests that the market for fantasy worlds might be a little oversaturated, with World of Warcraft squarely in dominance and flanked by the likes of Ultima Online, the EverQuest games, and, most recently Dungeon Runners.

She also cites what she refers to as an "addictive curve," wherein: "People are playing 40 hours or 30 hours a week and they get burned out and wonder, 'Why am I spending all this time doing the same thing over and over again?' Then they go into another game and 18 months later find that they're doing it all over again."

LucasArts producer Jake Neri, who works on Star Wars: Galaxies (now in its fourth year) notes that keeping content fresh and customers focused is "not an easy challenge." After a decline in users following some considerable systemic changes in 2005, Neri and his team had to come up with a fresh angle.

"What we wanted to do is figure out a cool way to help our player base gain access to that land," says Neri. A new initiative called the "galaxy-wide demolition plan" was forged, wherein players who mark virtual homes that have been abandoned by inactive players will be rewarded with points redeemable for in-game items, such as home furnishings and pet robots-- rewarding the players while making available the virtual land for current players to develop anew-- all with as little disruption as possible to the narrative flow of Galaxies' fantasy world. "What we came up with was this idea that Darth Vader and the Empire wanted to clear out abandoned homes on the various planets," Neri says.

Still, Pearce doesn't see an end to the high turnover rate for online property anytime soon-- as the article says, it's much easier to create a virtual homestead than it is to put down real-world roots, and even easier to abandon one. But it seems likely that users will keep creating fantasy homes just as quickly as others are vacating theirs-- for as Pearce says: "For many people, this is their only opportunity to own a vacation home."

[Via HamptonRoads.com]

[For more about Celia Pearce and the Emergent Game Group at Georgia Tech, which investigates how culture emerges from game design, check out the EGG's website, or dig an interview with Pearce from our sister site, Gamasutra.]