GDC07 – Raphing It Up (f13 interview)
You read that right – we did actually sit down with Raph at GDC this year. Belatedly, we bring you the first in a short series of articles, consisting of transcripts from the marathon interview conducted at the very beginning of the conference.
As is becoming standard with our designer interviews, we’re roaming all over the landscape in terms of topics. In this installment, we touch on Areae, team sizes, Chief Creative Officers, game grammars, the play preferences of children and the fun of flapping, among many other things.
Enjoy!
Raph: I refuse to answer that question! (laughs)
F13: Okay, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way…
Raph: Yes, now, I’ve got a new company… except it’s not new any more!
F13: It’s not new any more, it’s six months old…
Raph: It’s older than that!
F13: Well, it’s six months since you’ve started talking about it seriously… You’ve released your website, you’ve started saying you’re going to do Web 2.0, massively-multiplayer crossover… Inventing The Matrix.
Raph: Hopefully without the sequels!
F13: So what have you been occupying your time with in the past six months that you’re willing to tell us about, then?
Raph: Actually, it’s been a lot of fun. The company was actually founded back in July last year, and part of that time was spent fundraising. We were fully-funded as of AGC last year, so since then, actually, it’s been team-building. We’re up to about a half-dozen people already, and we don’t expect to grow that big. One of the virtues of the way we’re doing it is that it doesn’t require an army, which is actually REALLY refreshing!
F13: So one of the things you’re working on is building both a platform and a method of doing business to compress those 200-person teams down to… twenty?
Raph: Well, you know, it’s actually the platform itself. If you change some of the assumptions about what the platform really should be, then yeah, a whole bunch of other factors change. And it’s been really fun just working with a small team again.
F13: I believe you’ve already told us there’s going to be a 3-D client, so what assumptions are you actually changing?
Raph: Well, that should be obvious just because we have that hiring req on the website. What assumptions are we going to be changing…? I don’t think I can actually tell you anything about that YET. … Yeah, not yet.
F13: So, I think this is the first time in the last several years that you’ve worked outside of a large business…
Raph: Ever!
F13: Ever! Didn’t you work on LegendMUD prior? That wasn’t a large business…
Raph: That wasn’t a large business, but that also wasn’t for pay.
F13: So how are you finding the experience of being your own boss, finally? Is that allowing you to take new, better creative avenues?
Raph: Well, it’s different in a lot of ways. I mean… When I compare back to the early days of working on UO, UO was very much a skunkworks project, the UO core team was a half-dozen… less than ten…
F13: Well, nothing like that had really been done before, nothing on that scale…
Raph: Yeah, but it was also… even within Origin, it was very much a skunkworks, off-in-the-corner, most-of-the-company-didn’t-know-what-we-were-doing kinda thing. It was very kinda isolated from everything. So because of that, we had this real classic skunkworks kind of mode where we didn’t know what the rest of the company was doing, they didn’t know about us, and we just did things our way and tried lots of wild and crazy stuff, right? And those skunkworks projects are often the best working times of your life, right? Even UO.. UO didn’t finish that way, it eventually, for a while, had the entire U9 team on board, and all that.
F13: And it kept growing and now it’s their last product, ten years later…
Raph: Well, but it grew like crazy… And at SOE, everything always started big! I mean, we come into SWG, and we had a core team, but the core team, we already had a half-dozen people and it ballooned really quickly because we had a project very quickly, and we knew it was big… So, you work so differently… The difference between a team of six batting around ideas and a team of twenty right off the bat is just MASSIVE. A huge, huge difference. It’s way more collaborative to be working with a smaller group, you can be more experimental, you can try something, throw it away, try something new… Whereas when you’re working on a big project with a big team, you have to plan it all out in advance, seek approval, because you’re spending a lot of money, and then continue on that path. You don’t get to adjust very well, right?
F13: So how have you adjusted your operating methodology to be more creative, since that’s obviously what you’re aiming for with your company?
Raph: Well, I think the biggest thing is that I’m actually coding things myself again, and that’s a big thing…
F13: How long has it been since you’ve actually worked down on the metal?
Raph: Well, I worked down on the metal on UO. I coded guilds. I coded the original house sign. I coded the Tillerman’s Stories, I coded a whole bunch of things, I coded a whole bunch of stuff in UO. The wisp language, lots of stuff. And, you know, gosh… if you work in video games, being able to actually make something as opposed to just working on paper, huge difference, right? On SWG, I never really got to do anything. Almost everything I did was on paper…
F13: Really, so mostly you went to meetings, sat in offices, …?
Raph: Went to meetings, design meetings… reviewed design docs, had plenty of design brainstorm meetings, but did almost no implementation myself, and what I did, most of it actually isn’t actually in the game, so there’s just a difference in how close you are to the metal, like you said. And as CCO, I started… I was even more removed from projects, right? I started doing a lot of game stuff on the side just for fun…
F13: So what does being a CCO entail? I don’t think there’s a clear definition…
Raph: No, and it actually evolved a lot over the course of my tenure there. It was a lot of what I call “public face” work, it was a lot of that. There was a lot of milestone reviewing, I didn’t so much review the projects that were ongoing, as it was the new starts. Lots of looking at projects when they were getting started, and seeing how to shape them. But again, there, it’s still mostly giving advice to the team, it’s not your project, so you’re not pursuing your own vision, instead you’re trying to help them.
F13: So you said you were doing games on the side?
Raph: Yeah, I did lots of little puzzle games and stuff like that, just for myself, and reconnected, actually, with making games directly.
F13: So you were falling… out of love with the game industry prior to…?
Raph: No, it was just that the nature of the job was so different…
F13: Going back to your roots…
Raph: Yeah, in a lot of ways, it was going back to the roots, right? You know, I’m not a great artist, I’m not a great programmer, but I learned to make games back in the 8-bit days. So that means I know enough to be able to make a game by myself, and being able to stretch those muscles was a lot of fun. It was like, wow, I can still do this! I can make a game by myself! I was doing this the same time as writing the book, so writing the book, focusing on “What Is Fun?” and all that, so easy to lose sight of that on a giant project, so doing it in a… When it’s just you, and you make a puzzle game and you have a choose an art style and all the rest… Every choice you make is right in your face, and so… you’re not offloading any decisions, it forces you to think about that stuff, I think that… I did a lot of board games too, just for myself, play with my family, that kind of thing, play with friends…
F13: And board games are great, because you can prototype one in thirty minutes.
Raph: Exactly! So I got in the mode of prototyping computer games in thirty minutes too! It was like, start on Friday, and show something to friends on Monday morning when I went into work.
F13: That’s pretty cool.
Raph: Yeah, it’s a lot of fun! I’m not doing it as much now, but I’m doing a session, Jonathan Blow is running a session called Nuances of Design…
F13: I think I saw that on your blog.
Raph: Yeah, I’m gonna show the Andean Bird game that I threw up on the blog. Which is exactly one of those. I started up on Friday evening going “I wanna make this game about flapping that I’ve been thinking about”, and then I posted it to the blog on the following week, just get it out there…
F13: So, you mentioned your book. It’s been about two years since it’s been published…
Raph: Yeah, about two years. Came out late ’04?
F13: Yeah, late ’04. Since then, you have, personally, gone through a lot of changes in where you’re working, what you’re working on… Has that affected how you think about the same problem? Has your thinking on “What Is Fun?” changed?
Raph: Actually, no, not really, it hasn’t…
F13: Has it come more into focus?
Raph: Some of it has come more into focus, because after I did that book, I did all that Game Grammar stuff, and actually… that…
F13: There’s a session on that somewhere here on GDC, I believe.
Raph: And I just got a preview of it! Because I’m not going to be able to go…
F13: Really? When is it? I might have to…
Raph: It’s opposite the MMO: Past, Present and Future panel..
F13: (grumbling) Well, I can’t go either.
Raph: So I got a preview of it, and it’s fantastic, it’s a natural next step off of what I was doing. And these guys aren’t the only ones working on notation, a whole bunch of people… And from what I can see, it is now 100% obvious that this stuff works, actually. Which is kind of cool because, with mine, you couldn’t tell if it worked, but now, it’s clear, it works, I wasn’t insane, which is nice! So, yeah, I think a lot of things have just come more into focus, I guess is the way to put it, I don’t think of the underlying stuff is, really….
F13: So now that we’re developing a notation for game design, are you actually shopping this around with academic institutions, as well?
Raph: I’m not! I think those guys are…
F13: Are you still involved with the notation crowd, or is that something you’re just observing?
Raph: I’m just observing it, you know… I’m not really involved with it. I actually moved on to the next step, which was that horseshoe talk I gave about influences and about the… You know, I’m… I went, first I looked at fun and concluded it was pattern learning, and then I said, “You know what, these are mathematical patterns!” so then I went to the notation thing. And now I’ve come out the other side and I’m going “Shit! Is that it?! Crap!”
F13: (laughing) So, now you’re working on application, of course, because…
Raph: Well, application, but also concern about the fact that it’s all Math! And the questions of how much does that constrain what we can do with games?
F13: Well, it also brings up absolutely existential questions, determinism vs. free will, have you run into that at all?
Raph: Um… Not so much from the determinism-free will side, more from the… Some of the concerns I articulated are things like… Well, I’ll give you the metaphor. “A wash of gray is not the same as a 256 grayscale palette.” And games always work in the palette. Everything they do, they quantify. And what’s more, they quantize! They don’t just quantify, but they abstract out into these digital steps. Even the board games do it, honestly. And that’s… to me, that’s a little worrisome, under the… It’s this underlying current and I go, “Ehh, I dunno how comfortable I am with that!”
F13: It’s a mechanistic form of recreation.
Raph: It’s kind of a mechanistic thing, yeah. There’s one commenter on my blog, Prokofy Neva, and one of the things she always says is that “Games teach you to obey.” It’s like, here’s the system, work in it.
F13: Particularly with Japanese games, you see that a lot.
Raph: It’s like, you can only work in it, you can’t innovate on it. And it, it’s… that’s a little worrisome to me.
F13: It is a hard to make a nondeterministic system in a deterministic machine. Which is one of the problems. But that’s why we have tabletop roleplaying games and things like that.
Raph: Yeah, and certainly, we can do computer-mediated stuff along those lines, but it’s still an interesting problem because I gained so much appreciation for those mechanistic systems and how powerful they are, and so on… And stages one and two, right, the fun and the grammar, now to be at stage three makes me go, wow, I hate to be calling that into question, because I think there’s really cool things there, but it’s still a little worrisome. So, you know, that was part of the genesis behind the Andean Bird thing… I wanted to make a game about flapping, because I wanted players to feel what felt like, right? And that’s why it’s on two keys, like this… and I really want to put it on the analog triggers… (making Xbox-controller trigger motions)
F13: Analog triggers, like on an Xbox…?
Raph: Yeah. But you know, you hit keys on opposite sides of the keyboard to match which wing, and you hold ’em down for different lengths of time. My first draft had all these numbers measuring the angle of the wing, and the time to return to position.
F13: What IS the wing speed of an unladen swallow?
Raph: African or European?
F13: I don’t know that!
Raph: (chuckling) Auuugh! Yeah, um… So the thing of it was, though, that what I ended up with was… I was aiming for the sensation of flapping, and honestly, I started out with this very math-driven thing, and then… I had pictured it as almost like a flying platformer, you were picking stuff up and swooping down and grabbing things and dodging stuff, but my first prototype I didn’t have any of that, I just had a blue field and you flap your bird around on it. And this amazing thing happened, where I got this crazy Zen thing going on. It was just the weirdest thing. ‘Cuz when I started, I couldn’t flap at all. It’s hard, actually, it’s really hard! I sit newbies down to it, they have real trouble with it. But people just click with it, they can pretty soon… they can flap anywhere on the screen, they can deal with wind currents and everything. And I posted that to the blog, what people reported was this Zen vibe of “wow, I’m just flying”.
F13: Like that Flow game, almost. It doesn’t have an ostensive purpose, it just has a mechanic you can play with. More of a toy, is what it is.
Raph: Yeah, and there was this radical split in the audience, of people who commented on it. Half of ’em were like “Oh I love it, my kids love it”, lots of parents… The kids just loved it! My kids loved it. And then there were the people who were like “Where’s the game? Give me the lasers, I want to shoot something!”
F13: Did you actually look at the demographic behind those two sets of posters?
Raph: No, I didn’t… Um, I didn’t. I think it was achievement-driven, versus… you know, that kind of thing. And, some people asked for mouse control, but I was like, but if it’s mouse control, it’s not the flapping…
F13: Well, you have two mice…
Raph: People actually suggested that. You know, doing this (making push/pull motions) with the friggin’ mice or flapping on the mouse buttons. I actually had it on the mouse buttons for a bit, but I switched to the keys, because using one hand versus the other… gives you more of a feel to it! Then the next step, I added… I was like, okay, I can fly anywhere now, now I’m gonna have a 3-D path you have to follow in the air, and there’s gonna be wind blowing you off of it! I put that in, it was REALLY FUCKING HARD! Really hard!
F13: How did that affect the comments? How did that affect the way people reacted to it?
Raph: It RUINED the game! Making it more gamey ruined it! You lost the meditative vibe…
F13: You lost the sense of… because now you’re working towards a goal.
Raph: You’re working, yeah. Before you’d pay attention to how beautiful the clouds were, and you’d look at the sparklies in the water, and you’d see, oh look, if I hold both down, I start diving faster, and the island rises up, and you’d zoom in until the island was way up close and you could see the pixels in it. It was kinda neat in an exploratory way. And then you put the path on, and you’re not looking at anything except the path. And that’s it! And you don’t have that vibe any more…
F13: Especially for a difficult game, if you’re not focused right on the path…
Raph: And it was hard enough. You’d dive readily, right, so… So it was a weird, it was a weird thing. So the version I’m showing today… well, not today, but this week, I put back in free-flight mode. And, I actually wrote… Jon Blow said I wrote lyrics to it. I wrote lyrics to the experience, so they float up and come up on the screen, kind of telling the story… It’s almost like an abstracted version of the development process, it tells the story of, “Yeah, I started out to make this bird, and I thought I was heading to this, and I actually went over here…” But it’s told as a fairy tale about a bird who sets off to fly over the coast and find the edge of a world, and ends up discovering that he’s put in a box, because all he is is a dream…
F13: And this is the first time you’ve released that, here at GDC?
Raph: Well, the new version. I’ve released like three versions on the blog before.
F13: Well, now you’ve added narrative to the game. How do you think people are going to react to that?
Raph: I dunno!
F13: Just gonna find out? See what comes?
Raph: Yeah, the thing is… I got a lot of marketing people who post on the blog. And they’re always asking, “What’s the target audience for this?” And I’m like “I don’t have a fucking clue”, there’s no target audience. That’s not the point. What’s interesting to me is, I made this thing, I thought it was neat, I put it out there, and a lot of people thought it was neat, and a lot of people thought it TOTALLY sucked! So it was like, you know, whatever!
F13: You mentioned a lot of parents said their children liked it. Do you think that, actually, children might enjoy more… non-linear, or I dunno how to…
Raph: Less goal-driven?
F13: Less goal-driven, but more freeform modes of play. And as we get older, we get either get trained or we become inured to goal-driven play?
Raph: Yeah, I think it’s certainly easier to get into Play Mode when you’re a kid, it seems, right? We do get kind of goal-driven later in life. But honestly, I don’t quite know why it is that kids… On the blog, people were saying kids as young as three were like “Ooh birdie, raaah!” Like, going for it, and I’m like, “Okay!”
F13: I can see a kid as young as three, seeing an abstract representation of a bird…
Raph: Did you actually play it?
F13: I didn’t, I don’t follow your blog THAT closely. I usually go back…
Raph: Tsk tsk tsk. Every once in a while? Well, if I had my laptop with me, you could play it now, it’s in the hotel over there…
F13: Yeah, I’ll go head back to the office and I’ll take a look at it after this.
Raph: Yeah, the newest version won’t be there. You’d have to download two versions.
F13: Or I can catch up with you later this week or something.
Raph: Yeah, or you can come to the session. What they’re going to do is, they’re going to hand out the installer to every game that’ll be talked about. And you play it while people talk about it.
F13: What time is the session?
Raph: I dunno. You’re making me look it up! It’s in the little folder… (papers shuffling)
F13: Oh, right, you have your speaker’s schedule. I was gonna have to go through the twenty-page encyclopedia…
Raph: Thursday, 2:30-4:30. I don’t know when in there I will be.
F13: Yeah, I think I actually have something at that time, but I will take a look, see what I can pull…
Raph: Oh look, a party we can go to…
Long before the recent Vanguard scandal, f13.net sat down with Raph Koster to chat about a wide variety of topics relating, at least tangentially, to the gaming industry. Earlier this week, we released the first installment in a short series of transcripts from the resulting brain-dump.
Today, instead of beating a dead horse, we bring you Part Deux, including some of Raph’s thoughts on journalism, the handling of scandals from both press and industry points of view, the future direction of MMOs, and the relevance of independent and Korean games to the market.
Raph: Heh, yeah.
f13.net: I wanted to get your reaction and, you know, see what your thoughts on the relationship between independent press and development houses. Particularly ones, at the moment, like yours, that is currently very concerned with what it releases and what you don’t…
Raph: Was it you that just editorialized that they weren’t actually press?
f13.net: That would be Schild, I believe…
Raph: Yeah, Schild editorialized… There’s kind of an interesting line there, I don’t know if… I mean…
f13.net: Is what I do press? I mean, I’m sitting here with you, with a recorder…
Raph: Well, you’re the one with the money hat. (laughs) It’s kind of a weird thing, right? You look at that and you go… That ecology is always weird, right, so one part of me wants to say, “Tough shit, it’s out of there.” And, you know, it’s pointless to get pissed off at press people for doing what they do, right?
f13.net: Finding out stories and leaking them?
Raph: Finding out stories and… well, not leaking them, you know, reporting them, right? And I say this as somebody that Kotaku personally burned really badly last year! Kotaku leaked that I was leaving SOE, and frankly, that was a massive pain in the ass and hurt a whole bunch of people, badly! I was pretty damn pissed and really annoyed and frustrated, but I also go, “Well, that’s what they do…” Right? So it’s a weird tension…
f13.net: And they’re kind of a tabloid…
Raph: Well, you could argue that pretty much all the blogging sites are kinda tabloids. Right? There’s no… They don’t go through the kind of training in journalistic ethics, whatever that may be these days, but… Professional journalists take that really seriously, and random blogger dude doesn’t, necessarily. So they’re kind of a weird thing there. I’m watching all the people breaking the Kaneva NDA, all the people who broke the Lord of the Rings NDA, or whatever, it just comes out, right?
f13.net: Does that make you more cautious, less likely to talk to smaller sites?
Raph: Err, well, more cautious in terms of going off-the-record with them. Because, you know, a professional journalist who breaks the on-the-record thing, that gets out…
f13.net: He’s lost his job.
Raph: He’s loses his job and possibly his career! A blogger? No! He’s not going to lose anything! So, you gotta be…
f13.net: They’ll shuffle some guys around, maybe get a new front page man, but, even then, it’s not likely.
Raph: Yeah, but on the other hand, with the smaller sites, you can develop more of a relationship, where it’s like, “Well, I know where you live…” But it’s more of a personal relationship, where…
f13.net: It’s more of a trust…
Raph: A trust relationship develops. Yeah, I have a trouble seeing the F13s or the Stratics or most of those out-of-the-fandom kind of communities. They get trusted with lots of secrets, all the time, actually, and they don’t come out…!
f13.net: Well, we actually have developers posting on our boards, which is very unusual…
Raph: Yeah, there’s a trust thing that’s developed there over the years. And I think that’s a good thing, but I think you still have to be careful. If it’s a big enough story, anybody could be tempted… So yeah, it’s a tricky line to walk.
f13.net: Now, on the other side of that same fence, we have CCP. Have you watched CCP’s latest debacle? With the developers playing and cheating?
Raph: Yeah, I watched it, it’s like “here we go again”.
f13.net: What do you mean, “here we go again”?
Raph: This has happened before!
f13.net: On the same scale? In the same way? And in what games?
Raph: Yeah, on the same scale in the same way! Do I have to muckrake ten year old history? Does no one remember GM Darwin?
f13.net: Well, I don’t, personally…
Raph: You don’t remember GM Darwin. You have some Googling to do. Yeah, there’s been plenty of cases historically of admin abuse, even for financial gain. And usually the companies want to deal with it very quietly, right, because nobody wants to admit it…
f13.net: No-one wants to drag each other’s reputations through the mud.
Raph: The company, from a liability point of view, can’t! They run the risk of being sued. So the company’s always… there’s no good reason for the company to want it out there, right? Selfishly, on many different angles. I think that there is a level of responsibility to the public to come clean and say “Hey, this won’t happen again.” But they really can’t delve into what happened, exactly!
f13.net: Even if the public is screaming and wants that, they really can’t do it, legally…
Raph: They REALLY can’t do it, legally. It’s a tricky line. They can’t tell you… it’s the same thing, they can’t tell you why somebody left the company. There’s all kinds of things companies can’t do. So, you know, I feel for the CCP guys because I’m sure they never intended for it to happen, I’m sure as soon as it did happen, they moved on it, but they’re between a rock and a hard place.
f13.net: They’re in a particular situation because they have a relatively zero-sum PVP game. If someone gives someone else the best armor in WoW, it doesn’t affect your play, in general…
Raph: I’m not sure, in terms of the public perception, that even matters. The players still feel screwed over, zero-sum or not. So… (shrugs)
f13.net: So, with Second Life, we’ve been seeing a lot more social relevance. A lot more press, a lot more high-profile activity taking place. Take the Edwards campaign, for example.
Raph: They were on the Today show last week.
f13.net: At the same time, we’re seeing more invasions, more vandalism. And it doesn’t seem that Linden Labs is increasing their security…
Raph: I don’t know if we’re actually seeing more. It might just be more high-profile. You’d have to ask them, I think certainly more stuff gets publicly reported. You know, the sex and the furries and the ageplay and all that have always been there, it’s just now getting pushed into the limelight because of the kinds of attention Second Life is getting. So I don’t know if there’s necessarily more.
f13.net: Well, you have SomethingAwful penis monsters attacking real estate tycoons…
Raph: One of the first things that happened in UO was that somebody took fish and spelled “FUCK” on the bridge. I mean, come on. That stuff has always been there, it’s just how publicly visible it was.
f13.net: So, cook a man a fish, he’ll eat for a night, give a man a fish, he’ll spell “FUCK” on your bridge.
Raph: (chuckling) Yeah, pretty much. It’s just a question of visibility.
f13.net: So, you’re also looking for a very community-oriented MMO, er, game or experience…
Raph: He tries to slip one past!
f13.net: Game or experience, sorry! I have to pick my words carefully. Are you looking at these sorts of security problems? Are you using any sort of non-technical approaches to try to prevent people from doing these sorts of things? Reputation systems…
Raph: Well, yeah, you can extrapolate a lot of that from the stuff I’ve done before, so I guess I’m not spilling beans to say “sure, of course”. I mean, also, because of the fact that we keep saying Web 2.0, reputation systems and rankings and ratings are one of the core pieces of Web 2.0. So, it’s unsurprising that I’m going to be paying attention to user content. But if you look at the kinds of user content that I’ve always done, it’s a different kind of mode from Second Life, and, um…
f13.net: Well, you’ve gone for a lot of user customizability as opposed to full-on genesis, full user creation.
Raph: Well, yeah, I’ve always… even if you go back through old GDC sessions. There was the one with the big inflammatory statement where I told the movie guy “Get over yourself, the rest of the world is coming!” But part of that was saying that the rest of the world is coming, but they’ll be working with Legos instead of with atoms. So, you can extrapolate from there. Nothing there is something new that I’m saying, I’ve been saying similar things for a while.
f13.net: So, what other things you’re looking at while you’re here at GDC, that you’re excited about?
Raph: Gosh, it’s all meetings… (laughs) So many of the sessions I want to go to I can’t, it’s very frustrating. I want to go to Nicole Lazarro’s session on her new research, because I’m really interested in her research on… She examines, watches people as they play, figures out what emotions they’re having and what in the game triggered them. That’s really cool stuff. This is gonna sound all so dry and academic… I’m interested in going to the top ten lessons from academics. Because last year, it was a great session. I really want to go to a bunch of the MMO talks. Damion’s running his “Beyond Men in Tights”, his “Men in Tights” talk was fantastic, so I really want to hear how he… He ended it on this note of wistfulness, “here’s why all this stuff works and we’re gonna keep making it… there must be more though!” So, I’m really curious… I don’t know if I’ll get to go to any of them. There’s a lot of the indie MMO guys. Daniel James is going to be talking about MetaSOY…
f13.net: MetaSOY?
Raph: Yeah, I’m really curious about it. They’re revealing everything… Their cowboys, pirates and ninjas session. I’m really curious to see what happens with that, but it’s opposite a talk of mine, so I can’t go. He and Matt Mihaly are doing that microcurrencies and whatever stuff they’ve learned… I don’t think a lot of people have been paying attention how well doubloons has gone for Puzzle Pirates. It appears to have gone REALLY well.
f13.net: Well, they’re still in business, they can’t be doing terribly…
Raph: Not just still in business, still in business and making more titles, which means they must have done pretty well. And of course, Matt’s been doing it for a long time and is now gearing up with Earth Eternal, which looks really cute…
f13.net: Everything he does is kinda small and on the side and out of the mainstream, he’s still focused on the text world.
Raph: Yeah, he is, but you know, his games are really good. Those are really good games, and I’m a lot less interested in the direct mainstream of the MMOs right now.
f13.net: Well, the mainstream is still swords, sorcery and hitting things in the head for points.
Raph: Yeah, and I’m kinda done with that… well, I shouldn’t say I’m done with it, I still think it’s an important piece, but it just can’t be all there is…
f13.net: That is what’s attracting a lot of the investment right now. Do you see that as a problem?
Raph: The investment’s kinda split, actually. Half the money seems to be going towards, “Hey, let’s beat WoW!” And the other half is seems to be saying, “Let’s beat anything but WoW, because that’s what… Too much money is going into beating WoW.” So there’s kind of two splits… And some people say some is the dumb and some is the smart money, but I don’t think it’s quite that simple.
f13.net: A lot of the high-profile developers, the Biowares, the non-Blizzard large names. They’re all starting to build their own MMOs, and they all seem to be designing on the WoW side…
Raph: Well, that’s true, but we’re also seeing Red 5 and Trion and those kinds of guys. That’s one strain and they’ve gotten tens of millions of dollars. Whatever Romero’s doing, there’s all this stuff going on that side. And the money coming in from the media companies, there’s a lot of it! I like to make the point that the company that has shipped the most MMOs in the last six months isn’t NCSoft, it’s Viacom.
f13.net: They’ve done a lot of little, online web stuff, haven’t they?
Raph: It’s not little! Nicktropolis is a full-blown MMO, Virtual Laguna Beach is a full-blown MMO, The Hills is another full-blown MMO. They’ve shipped three in six months, and it’s like, “whoa!”
f13.net: How successful are those? Persistance-wise, as opposed to just when the headline hits.
Raph: I have no idea how most of them have done, but Virtual Laguna Beach is apparently pretty popular, they’ve got hundred of thousands, according to the articles I’ve read. There was a Wired article not that long ago. So, keeping an eye on these guys is important. Honestly, I’m a little worried that the mainstream game industry has missed the boat.
f13.net: Well, you gave a talk about that at AGC.
Raph: Yeah, I think that the center of gravity of where MMOs are happenin’, I don’t think it is WoW. I think that the happenin’ spot any more, I think the happenin’ spot is elsewhere and I think it’s below the radar of everybody else. I just keep seeing more… You ever heard about Webkinz? Webkinz sells plush toys. Each one comes with a dogtag with a code on it. You go to their website and you punch in the code, you land in this MMO where you have that plush toy as a virtual pet.
f13.net: As an avatar, or as a pet?
Raph: As a pet. And it’s… Essentially, the cost of the plush toy is your year-long sub. And they have a couple million uniques in December alone. And it’s like… “Whoa, this is bigger than WoW is”, in the West. I think you have to keep making this territorial comparison. And it’s like, whoa, wait a minute. I look at the Habbos, the Puzzle Pirates, the Webkinz, the Runescapes, the Gaias, the… all of these things. I’m going, holy crap, is anybody noticing that all of the most popular MMOs are actually over here? It’s weird…
f13.net: If you look at them, they’re not hardcore, 6-hour-a-day experiences. They’re things you can log on to from work or from school…
Raph: Yeah, they’re not, they’re not. I constantly get people posting on the blog, going “I’m a little worried you’re going to abandon us gamers”. There have been a lot of threads about how we’re ignoring the gamer and stuff. And that’s not actually true, I’ll say that much on the record, okay! IT’S NOT TRUE! (chuckles) But, I can see why people say it, because we are paying a lot of attention to these models, and I think it’s, in part, because those things are as important, if not more important, to what happens in the next five years than WoW is.
f13.net: What do you think the core gamer demographic sees… sees the play it’s learned to like, maybe, learned to love… and see it threatened by something new and different?
Raph: Frankly, it’s like being a wargaming fan, or something…
f13.net: In the 1980s?
Raph: Yeah, it’s like, hey, we’re the #1 genre. Nobody would predict that, five years later, they’d be off the radar entirely. And I dunno if it’ll be off the radar entirely, but I do think that elves in tights is kinda nichey in the real world, even if it isn’t in our world right now. And it’s gonna be really interesting to see what happens there, really really interesting. And so many of the things that go with that, the high production values, the hardcore mechanics, the 200-person teams, none of that flies with the mass market at all. At all. And I think what we’re going to see is more population in that stuff. Have you looked at Xfire? Xfire publishes a whole bunch of stats…
f13.net: No, I haven’t…
Raph: You should go check out Xfire’s site, because they publish top ten games played by hours. And in their MMO category, you will be blown awaaaaaay.
f13.net: I know I’ve seen the Xfire banners around, but… what are the top three?
Raph: Well, so, the thing is, the number one is WoW. But rounding out the top ten: Silk Road Online, RF Online, Flyff?!
f13.net: I would not have guessed that.. Is it primarily Western-facing? Because I would never have guessed that RF Online was that big in the West…
Raph: But, you know, Eve is on the list, Galaxies was on the list.
f13.net: Most of the triple-A titles are on the list, somewhere?
Raph: No, not in the top ten, no. There’s only a couple of triple-A titles, the rest are mostly Korean games.
f13.net: That says a lot for the silent penetration of Korean games to US shores.
Raph: I don’t think it’s that silent. I think that the Korean games have penetrated to an enormous degree, and most of the West just isn’t paying attention. It’s the Western press and also the Western hardcore gaming community. I think that if you go around and start asking fifteen-year-olds, they’ll all list Korean games. My kids are nine and ten, and they’re in the Cub Scouts, my son is in the Cub Scouts, and one of the things they had to do was visit somebody’s workplace. They visited my workplace…
f13.net: (chuckling) That had to be a fun experience for a kid.
Raph: Yeah, although we don’t have much to show off, honestly, being a new, small office. And the first thing they asked was “Did you make LEGO Star Wars?” They saw the Star Wars Galaxies poster and they’re like, “Did you make LEGO Star Wars?” And I said, no, sorry, we’re making a different sort of game, we’re doing a lot of stuff with the Web and stuff like that. And he said “Oh, do you make games for…?” And he started rattling off portals. This is a NINE-YEAR-OLD, and he was rattling off, “Oh, do you make games for Gametunnel?” Do you make games for this, do you make games for that?
f13.net: A nine-year-old knows about Gametunnel?
Raph: Yeah, rattling ’em all off. It’s like, oh, holy shit, they’re way more connected than any of us really expected. That’s how Runescape spread, right? And I think what we’re seeing, actually, is that these kids play the Flyffs, the Silk Roads, the whatever, because they can’t afford to play WoW. Until the day that they graduate to WoW, I think there’s a lot of that going on.
f13.net: We get ’em young.
Raph: Yeah, I think that the penetration of those free games… Do a search sometime for free online game or free multiplayer game, and you’re gonna find these portals… There’s these portals that do nothing but index the Korean games and rate them. And there’s hundreds of them, they’re all tabulated, and there’s tens of thousands of ratings on them. So, somebody’s out there playing them, and the people who read F13 aren’t it!
f13.net: Of course not. I mean, the Western press, the Western hardcore gamer, it’s very hard to separate those two things. The Western press primarily caters to the Western hardcore gamer, and the Western hardcore gamer primarily gets his news from the Western press. It’s this incestuous little whirlpool.
Raph: Yeah. I think there’s a whole bunch of people playing a whole bunch of games that we pay no attention to. And I think that it’s hard for us to break out of that model and that narrow perspective… That’s not a dis on the hardcore games and the hardcore gamers, it’s just a recognition that, look… It’s like looking at television and thinking that Heroes and Lost are the only things on TV, and forgetting that there’s a whole freakin’ golf channel.
f13.net: And that golf channel has quite an audience…
Raph: Quite a lot of people, right? I think it’s important to see the overall perspective. I think even G4’s core demographic likes venturing over to watch Law & Order or the History Channel sometimes. Or whatever. I think it’s worth it to know that more is going on, because I think there’s things we can learn from those other worlds, those other channels.
f13.net: Particularly the free client part seems to drastically increase a game’s popularity.
Raph: It does. It certainly drives trials, anyway, if not net popularity. It’s true, part of that is packaged-box companies are just not set up to think that way. They still derive huge amounts of revenue off the box sales. The amount of revenue derived off the boxes right now is actually really big. It’s a significant amount of money.
f13.net: At least on the triple-A titles, not the medium-size, digital-only titles?
Raph: Yeah, you’re making the gamble that bypassing retail will actually increase your reach. And that’s not necessarily true, because a lot of people don’t have the marketing and distribution muscle to make up for the lack of retail presence. Some people do though.
f13.net: Or you go by word of mouth and hope you snag a fifteen-year-old who gets his entire school addicted to it.
Raph: Yeah, but that’s very tricky too. Often very hit and miss. Very hit and miss…
Last week, we started posting a short series of interview transcripts with Raph Koster of Areae, taken from an epic chat conducted at the beginning of GDC07 in March. Today, we’re proud to conclude the series with the final transcript, covering academic gaming programs, prototyping, tools, inspiration and moneyhats.
If you missed part one or part two, you may want to start there first.
f13.net: You mentioned academia earlier, briefly. What’s your relationship with the academic community these days?
f13.net: I mean, are you working closely to create curricula of game design…
Raph: No, I’m not doing anything like that. The book is on a bunch of curricula of game design already. I try to keep a little list, keeping track. It’s in use… USC, UCSD, Georgia Tech, CMU, a lot of the game design programs use it, which is really cool. I still speak occasionally at academic conferences and things like that, just to stay in touch with what’s going on on that side, but I don’t work closely with any one. I’m an advisor to the program at Indiana. I do jack shit for them, honestly… (laughs)
f13.net: What do you think of those programs? Are they valuable things that we should be fostering, or…
Raph: They’re all different, actually. There is no unified curriculum yet. I would say that some of them are very artsy, and some of them are too practical. So, some of the artsy ones really treat games as art objects and that kind of thing. I think the industry sometimes loses patience with those, because they’re like, well, “Where’s the beef? How do we hire somebody out out of this?” And all the way at the other end are the very practical ones, where all they teach is level building, and it’s like… do you actually learn how to do game design from that or come up with anything innovative? And there’s a whole bunch of programs that, I think, are successfully charting the middle ground, and some of the game design stuff is actually really, really good. I think the best ones are the ones where you actually have to make games. CMU does that, USC does that.
f13.net: Until we determine the notation, as you were talking about, it’s still a very experiential thing, isn’t it?
Raph: Yeah. USC has not one but two good game programs. One in engineering and one over on the media side. Actually, I think they have more than two programs, I want to say they have more like four. But, anyway, it’s an interesting thing. It’s grown by leaps and bounds just in the last few years. And not just in quantity, but the quality has grown by leaps and bounds in the last few years. So I think it’s pretty exciting. We’ve certainly put out calls for interns through those programs.
f13.net: Okay… I had one more question and I’m completely blanking on what it was.
Raph: Moneyhats!
f13.net: Yes, I’m still have my moneyhat, of course. It’s kinda my trademark by now.
Raph: What your favorite drink is this year…
f13.net: Still the Black Russian?
Raph: Still the same, I still rely on the Black Russian. My fallback drink.
f13.net: Oh! Okay, I remember what it was now. Sorry. I just want to get an idea of what your work process is when you’re creating a new game. Do you start out with a spreadsheet, look at numbers, on paper? Do you go out in the park and stare at the birds for half an hour? It is more of an epiphenomenal thing, more mechanical?
Raph: You like bigger words than I do, that’s weird… Um, this is one of those weird things. “Where do you get your ideas? Schenectady.” For me, anyway, particularly since the book and the grammar and stuff, I see games almost like lattices, or graphs, or networks, or crystals or something. I remember when we were going through SWG, in my head, I had this picture of a ball, this cool geodesic dome or something, buckyball or whatever. Little pieces connecting and so on. We’d cut a feature and I’d be like, all right, we’ve removed that, but it still looks like a sphere, so it’s okay.
f13.net: Since it was SWG, was it a Death Star?
Raph: (laughs) In my head, I have these… I picture all the moving parts, and to me, they hang together in that kind of way. And certainly walking through stuff like grammar and whatnot pushes you to think even more that way. When I come up with an idea for a game, it’s often… Sometimes it’s from messing around with prototypes, sometimes something jumps out at me, sometimes it’s… Often it’s just an image. Last year, I wanted to make games that felt like a kaleidoscope, or I wanted to make a game about flapping, or whatever. There’s one I’ve been wanting to do for a while now involving mice and cats and cheese, where you’re trying to guide a mouse from one end to the other through a maze full of cats, and all you can control is the cheese. So, stuff like that. It’s often that kind of thing. I don’t usually come to it wanting to tell a story…
f13.net: You usually want to convey an experience, almost?
Raph: Yeah, yeah. It’s an experience. It’s funny because I get yelled at by people like Abalieno, HRose, whatever. Innsmouth, how many more aliases can we come up with…
f13.net: The crazy Italian guy.
Raph: Yeah, because he… he says, “The problem is, you don’t approach it from the experience point of view.” I think I actually do. But to me, the experience and the underlying model are very closely tied together, and so, I’ll have the idea for one, or the other, and it really doesn’t matter because the other one follows within like thirty seconds. Which one I start with is kind of a… (shrugs) But my process after that is, I try a prototype. And I’ll try it with cards, with glass beads, with a board. I’ll often try it that way before doing any code. If I can’t do it that way, if it needs code… Like, a lot of puzzle games I can do that way, the bird thing I couldn’t. So I’ll just throw together some code, but I can do that in an hour. So I’ll do that…
f13.net: You prototype primarily in Flash then?
Raph: No, actually, I use BlitzMax. And I do that because it’s cross-platform, Linux, PC and Mac, so I can give it to my wife, she uses a Mac. It gives me access to… basically, it’s 2D and 3D OpenGL, so I can do stuff like alpha and rotating and all that, which makes prototyping much easier. It still runs plenty fast. But it’s a basic syntax and I don’t have to deal with all the goddamn overhead of Windows libraries and all that crap. Because, honestly, for the last few years, that’s actually been my barrier. C is not the barrier, I can do C and C++. Visual Studio is my barrier.
f13.net: Well, the hardest part in any real programming these days is dealing with the platform, the libraries…
Raph: It’s the platform, the OS, and the libraries. I’m like, how do I open a window, just give me a window, oh…
f13.net: “Give me a canvas and let me paint.”
Raph: Let me paint, exactly. It’s really frustrating. Rod Humble, actually, is the guy who turned me on to doing stuff with that, so I’ve been really enjoying that, and we’re actually using that in the office. I’ll prototype it in that. We know that the whole prototype is not going to be final code at all and we’re not going to ship any BlitzMax, but…
f13.net: You’re willing to “make one to throw away”.
Raph: Oh yeah, we actually make five or six to throw away, right?
f13.net: That’s the point of a rapid prototyping tool.
Raph: Absolutely. It’s a lot of fun to do it that way. I keep thinking I should go learn Flash, but I keep getting scared off by the fact that, apparently, it’s a completely different metaphor, with the whole timeline and stuff. I’m used to the old school, because that’s how I learned to do it.
f13.net: Object-oriented, graphics…
Raph: Older than that, I’m a procedural guy. I learned to program in the original BASICs with line numbers! So I’m used to GOSUB. (chuckles)
f13.net: I’m sure your engineering staff loves that.
Raph: Oh no, there’s no GOSUBs any more, there’s no… But I’m more of a functional programmer than I am an object-oriented programmer. I’ve found that I use OO only for… Aw, let me give you an example. If I go make a shoot-em-up, I’ll absolutely use types for all of the enemies and the bullets and the explosions and the particles. I probably wouldn’t for the player, because I’m like, there’s only one of him! And I definitely wouldn’t for the screen! In full OO, you’d do it for the screen, you’d do it for everything.
f13.net: Give the score an object!
Raph: Yeah, I guess I’m just not really there. I’m like, if it’s only one number, then what the fuck? Just make it a AddScore(). So yeah, that makes me sloppy and bad, but whatever, I don’t care, because it’s a prototype! As long as we understand what’s going on… It’s too easy to get hung up on the methodology. The point is to get the fun on the screen.
f13.net: So do you use your family and your friends and your blog a lot to test your prototypes out, or ideas that you’ve had?
Raph: I haven’t used the blog that much. The only stuff that I’ve posted to that is actually the bird thing. I use family and friends. Make a game to give away to them for Christmas. A few years ago, before there was XBox Live… So, in college, it was a Mac campus, that meant we played Crystal Quest, a LOT! And, I got a hankering a few years ago, like three years ago, I wanted to play Crystal Quest, dammit! So I went looking and well, there was a PocketPC version like four years ago, and that was it.
f13.net: So you made your own?
Raph: So I made my own, and I gave it to people for Christmas. And then, of course, Live launched a year later with Crystal Quest on it. Not the one I have on my laptop, because, you know, you can’t get the Live one on your laptop. So it’s just one of those things, you miss it. And that one… that was the first game I made when I decided “I want to get back into doing this”. So that was my learn-BlitzMax game, was cloning Crystal Quest…
f13.net: So, XBox Live, especially here at GDC this year, they’re pushing XNA and TorqueX and their rapid development, rapid prototyping tools. Have you looked at those? What do you think of them?
Raph: I haven’t, I keep meaning to, because I’m pretty tool-agnostic, you know, so I was awfully tempted. Oh, let’s go port Andean Bird over to XNA and C# and see! Because it’d be awfully fun to play it on an XBox, that’d be cool. But then I go, yeah, if I what I really want is to try the triggers, I’ll just plug in the controller to the PC. But, learning a whole new language just to prototype the triggers…
f13.net: It’d be a good learning experience.
Raph: Yeah, it’d be a good excuse. I think it’s really cool, I still think it seems… I don’t know if it’s aimed broadly enough yet. The fact that you have to pay to consume, not just to produce…
f13.net: Yeah, that’s the biggest hangup that people seem to have, to pay $99 a year just to play other people’s stuff that Microsoft isn’t even making for you, or even to play your own stuff on your XBox.
Raph: Yeah, and you compare that to the Youtube For Games stuff that’s out there now. There’s so much, where you just go and you play stuff. And it’s like, well, I’m not going to give Microsoft more money for indie titles when indie titles are practically trying to find you all the time, yeah. So it’s kind of a weird tradeoff. I think they’d have to open it more to get that kind of thing. A lot of the Youtube For Games projects out there are just awesome, and there’s some fantastic stuff out there.
f13.net: What’s your favorite one?
Raph: I like Kongregate, but there’s so many! There’s just tons of ’em.
f13.net: All right, well, I know I have to get back to work, I don’t know if you have to do something right now, but…
Raph: Well, I need to finish my slides…
f13.net: Thank you Raph! I appreciate it.
Raph: Sure!
