Building a Third Generation Persistent World

This panel from GDC 2002 has been lost to history. However, one brief segment of it was audio recorded by the folks at Joystick101.org, whose website is now defunct, and that segment is cited a fair amount. I recently found the audio of it, so here it is.

Audio

Transcript

Question: How do you make it so that if other people want to start playing in that so that either it works out, or it’s a good story, or… what do you do?

Gordon Walton (panel moderator): So, I can paraphrase this unfairly, an unfair paraphrase is, what are we going to do when these unwashed people actually start, you know, putting stuff in front of us, you know, and spoil that beautifully crafted world to tell… so that’s one paraphrase… So, how are we going to get over the “99% of everything is crap,” right? That’s the real problem, if 99% of everything is crap, and most people have the desire to be creative but most of them don’t have any actual skill to be creative. It’s a real challenge, I think that is a real challenge. Why don’t we see anything? That’s probably a big part of it. Raph is dying to say something.

This is probably the last question. So start filling out the little forms… mark “1” for Jessica [laughter].

Jessica Mulligan: Ah. Ah. [rest lost in laughter–Jessica Mulligan was one of the panelists, and I kept contradicting her, and it had turned into a running joke. Basically, Jess said a dirty word, and I said, “Shame on you, now that’s on tape!” and she said “Yeah, like they never heard that word here…”].

Raph Koster: Let me say, sir, that I really sympathize. I’m an artsy type, as Jessica is fond of reminding me, and you know, I have an MFA. I spent much of my life training to write crafted experiences. There’s an intense amount of learning and skill and craft that goes there, and I hate to say this to say this to all the film directors, writers, poets, um, painters, and everything else out there in the world: get over yourselves, the rest of the world is coming. Okay? People value self-expression. Is story going to go away? No. Is careful crafting going to go away? No. Are the professionals engaged in that going to go away? No–well, except that IP, the concept of intellectual property, may; but that’s a whole other side discussion.

The thing is that people want to express themselves, and they don’t really care that 99% of everything is crap, because they are positive that the 1% they made isn’t. Okay? And fundamentally, they get ecstatic as soon as five people see it, right?

So we can move to a meta-level of crafting experience. We can try to take a step up and say… you know, we can do what Lego did, which is give them the building blocks, so that they fundamentally can’t really make something so screwed up that everyone ends up leaving. Okay? And that’s a different level of authorship than what we are used to, but it’s a really exciting area of authorship.

It’s all them, guys, and fundamentally, authorship is about us. And it’s the wrong medium for it–it’s not what the medium is for.

Gordon Walton: Anyone else want to…? OK, thank you very much for coming, we’ll be up here [rest drowned out in applause].