Raph Gone Wild

Yoru: So, what I want to know is… when you start talking about the market, you start saying… our traditional thinking of the market is wrong-headed, and that we need to consider a broader segment of the playing public when we are designing and researching our games.

Raph: Yes. And I think the way to look at it is that other people have already considered this broader segment of the playing public–

Yoru: And have eaten our lunch?

Raph: And are… well, they’re certainly stealing fries off our plate, at any rate. And, y’know, I’ve made this point a couple of times already, so depending on who posts first, you or Gamespot…

Schild: They will. They will.

Raph: (laughs)

Yoru: Well, we’re going to go to sleep first.

Raph: Um… some of the biggest publishers today… first of all, if you consider portals and publishers to be exactly the same thing, which I think they clearly are, then you have to consider Cartoon Network, Lego and Kellogg’s as being really major players in the video game publishing business. Which is really strange to think, right? But, these are the guys who are doing all this marketing legwork, they’re aggregating content, they’ve got… right? Holy crap, these guys are stealing french fries off our plate!

Yoru: Now… how have you been applying this thinking to your work on virtual worlds?

Raph: Hmm… ‘kay, that would be part I’m not talking about yet, right?

Yoru: Well, how are you applying this to your thinking on virtual worlds, your philosophy of design?

Raph: Well… I think the thing to realize is that already, today, we’re seeing things that edge on to Virtual Worlds from other angles, that are not angles that the current virtual world industry would ever take. Particularly not the gaming industry. As it is, the gamers snub something like Second Life. Second Life’s CTO is an ex-arcade game programmer, okay? Second Life is not the one that’s out of our orbit, Second Life is like… kissing cousins, okay! The one that’s not kissing cousins is, like… Cyworld, or something. And Cyworld went and ate our lunch!

Yoru: Really?

Raph: Totally, dude!

Yoru: What’s their market size?

Raph: … ninety percent of Korea!

Yoru: … oh!

Raph: Oh, yeah! Cyworld is MySpace with a virtual apartment–

Schild: We started davidlopan.cyworld.com. We’re looking for the Green-eyed Girl.

Raph: I see. Yeah, Cyworld has ninety percent of Koreans in their twenties. Literally. Maintain a Cyworld homepage. Cyworld is basically MySpace but with a virtual apartment where you can buy furniture and decorate your room.

Yoru: Kind of like a MySpace plus Habbo Hotel.

Schild: MySpace plus Gaia Online.

Raph: Mmm, it’s simpler than either Gaia or Habbo, actually. Habbo is actually like a virtual space that you can walk around in. MySpace is.. Gaia is… actually has games and stuff in it. Cyworld is more like color forms. Room, color forms, paste ’em on! I can show you.

Yoru: Sure, why not.

(laughter)

Schild: Cyworld is also impossible to navigate. I mean, it is… We, it took us maybe three hours to figure out how to do everything, it was like… Eve is easier. (coughs)

Raph: My problems with, uh, Gaia… (fiddles with computer)

Schild: Well, Gaia when they started was just a little anime figure with…

Yoru: A bulletin board attached to it, right?

Schild: Well, you could get clothing by posting. Your post count gave you more Gaia Dollars or whatever they called ’em. And you know, like.. every Halloween or something they’d give you a present… And the mini games mostly revolved around… There was almost an economy at the beginning where you could, after the first Christmas you could put an item into a box and donate it, and people could come by and you could see who got your crappy item. But…

Koboshi: Secret Santa with no secrets.

Schild: Yes… well, Secret Santa with really annoying secrets.

(Raph continues to fiddle with his computer.)

Yoru: While you’re looking for that… on another tack, you also talked about the rise of boutique and indie MMOGs. What do you see in the middleware industry as, today, compared to what’s really needed to make that revolution happen?

Raph: Um–

Yoru: What do you think are the steps between those two? ‘Cause right now we have BigWorld and things like that…

Raph: All of the middleware out there is geared towards making the sort of Big Iron games we are already making. That helps, but it doesn’t solve the core problem, which is the art… And, until you can lick that…

Yoru: So what do you think of, like, a Spore-like partially-procedurally-assisted art generation tool?

Raph: Nobody’s got that!

Yoru: Spore?

Raph: Well, Spore doesn’t have any of the other pieces…! (laughs)

Yoru: Right, but I’m saying one system you could extract from there… is that the sort of thing you’re talking about?

Raph: Well, yeah, I’ve been pushing procedural content for a really long time. Um, it’s hard! It’s a real challenge and when you look at the amount of effort that Will’s team has gone to, it’s an extraordinary, I mean they’re doing a crazy… I remember a couple of years ago, he said to me, “Hey I want to talk with you, see if you can help.. we’re trying to tackle this procedural animation problem, it’s gonna be really tough, I want to bounce some ideas off you.” And I said, “Yeah! Actually, in our indie group, we’re thinking of doing something like that, have you looked at this SIGGRAPH paper and that SIGGRAPH paper?” And he said, “Yeah… we’re three years ahead of anything that’s at SIGGRAPH.” Okay… well, then I have nothing to help you with!

(laughter)

Raph: And, further, nobody in the world does! Right? I mean, literally, they’re doing cutting-edge research in order to do this. We shouldn’t underestimate how much of a moon-shoot it is to pull off something like Spore! Um, getting that to a middleware state might take a little while! (chuckles) And I doubt EA will do it. Even within EA, I doubt anyone’s saying “Yeah, we’re gonna use the Spore Engine!” That’s just not really how EA works… um, here’s what Cyworld looks like.

Yoru: I see… You have a little room and… okay!

Schild: You have one also! Hey, how about that!

Raph: Yeah, did you put one up?

Schild: Lopan!

Raph: Oh! I pulled up mine.

Schild: Y’know, Big Trouble in Little China? (laughs) It’s the only Asian we could come up with that wasn’t taken.

Raph: Well, I’m on the US one…

Schild: So are we, but you know how many Korean-Americans there are on there…?

Raph: Yeah, of course, yeah!

Yoru: I had a question, now I’m blanking again… go ahead.

Koboshi: I’m curious about the last of the middleware bit… the one thing I’m seeing almost as a trend, is that it may seem that… If middleware becomes as big as I guess it needs to be, then it might just come to the point where middleware is the industry and the MMOs are, like, yeah, my Grandma has an MMO, you’re not going to pay her for it, are you. Do you think it’s going that way, or do you think middleware doesn’t have the strength…

Raph: Yeah, middleware is professional tools. There’s a mindset that when you’re making middleware you’re making tools for professionals. So, your Grandma is just not going to pick up the Hero engine and build anything, that’s just not happening, nor can she afford it…

Koboshi: Nowadays my Grandma could make a web page, go a couple years back and everybody would be like, what are you talking about?

Raph: Yeah, but your Grandma isn’t using Coldfusion! (chuckles)

Yoru: No one should be using Coldfusion.

(laughter)

Raph: Well, but…

Koboshi: Well, we’re talking about things like the procedural creation of characters and stuff like that. Suddenly there’s character creation you don’t have to worry about. Suddenly you don’t have to be able to render in 3D, and that’s a whole skill set…

Raph: Sure, lemme back up then. When you say middleware, what it conjures up right off the bat is, actually, professional level tools. It’s Coldfusion, it’s Oracle, it’s whatever…

Yoru: It’s a platform for development.

Raph: It’s a development platform and what you’re talking about for your Grandma is consumer tools. The difference in Coldfusion and Frontpage is a long way, and it’s… it starts with a mind-set when you’re developing the tool…

Yoru: CAD programs versus The Sims home builder.

Raph: Right. Yeah…

Koboshi: Right, but… I think.. at a certain point, we’ve got the builders around, you can’t give them all the power easily that you could give to a professional tool, but it’s Multiverse… where they really want, say, a thousand MMOs, a million MMOs. They’re pushing for more and more people to be able to create for their system, and that kind of pressure might push what is the middleware market into what I sort of call the plug-in market, so that… people.. are making things. Do you see that as a trend in the industry…

Raph: Yes. I do.

Koboshi: Or is the MMO going to retain its technical… like, not anyone can make a movie.

Raph: No, it’s not. No no no, MMOs are getting democratized, if that’s your question. It is getting democratized. I don’t know that it will happen from what we think of as the current middleware business. I think it will explicitly won’t happen from what we consider our middleware business. I think it happens more from things like Habbo Hotel, it happens more from things like Sims that are intentionally consumer-facing. And I think that something like Multiverse… It’s kind of a half-middleware, half-consumer-facing kind of thing, so it’s an interesting straddling the line kind of product, but 3D modeling? It’s not something your Grandma will be doing.

Yoru: Let me key off something you (points at Koboshi) said a minute ago which pulls us back around to procedural content… You said procedural characters… What do you think will be the role of procedural or artificial character research in next-gen virtual worlds? Do you think there’s going be a lot of PC-NPC interaction, or the newer worlds that you’re thinking of will be mostly player-player, or user-user, really?

Raph: I think that depends a lot on what kinds of worlds we’re talking about. I think the current industry is going to keep doing things the way that they have been doing things. Because that has been an unbroken line of continuing to do things the same way since about 1978, and I don’t see any changes coming there. I think we see incremental things… So yeah, we might have more expressive characters because we spend more effort on lip-synching, or the AI or whatever.

Yoru: That’s not quite what I’m talking about.

Raph: But no one’s going to go adopt Linden Labs’ puppeteering!

Yoru: Are you familiar with the Bringsjord-Wodicka research on artificial characters?

Raph: No.

Yoru: Okay, I’ll send you a paper or something, it might be interesting. Essentially what they were looking at doing, four years ago in a lab…

Schild: Raph, I have to go, I have another interview, but you and I will hook up some time, sorry… (exits)

Yoru: What they were looking at doing is… some emotional modeling, but primarily self-writing stories, what they did was, they developed an engine called Brutus–

Raph: Won’t happen.

Yoru: Actually, they have an engine called Brutus that actually writes revenge stories…

Raph: It won’t matter. Won’t happen. I’m familiar with Brutus, it won’t happen. The game industry won’t adopt it.

Yoru: Why do you say that?

Raph: Because, A, not invented here. B, there is this persistent belief that the game industry is entertainers, and entertaining demands crafted content. So look at the highly ambivalent reaction that something like Facade got within the gaming community. And they’ve actually put out the code, okay! Use us! Um… and C, it’s too intensive, in many ways, that’s why the some of the quests we see in World of Warcraft are actually significantly simpler than even than the quests we saw even on the text MUDs. The bigger scale, the more moving parts, the simpler and simpler and simpler…

Yoru: So, do you think that that attitude of not invented here is hurting the industry, putting blinders on it?

Raph: Yeah, it puts blinders on in every industry, sure, but it is a tricky line to walk because part of the reason why Not Invented Here gets… sometimes it gets used when it isn’t entirely applicable, because it has this negative connotation that people are just refusing to listen to the outside stuff. But sometimes they don’t listen to the outside stuff because the outside stuff doesn’t know enough about the problem space in their particular domain, and that’s kind of a core question, right? It’s whether or not the solution is actually useful, right? Remember a while back at GDC, I did that Love Story challenge thing, right?

Yoru: Yes.

Raph: I actually made that algorithm…

Yoru: Really?

Raph: Yes, we actually coded it up and it works.

Yoru: And is it engaging and fun, or is it not useful for a game?

Raph: It makes what read exactly like romance novel outlines. Not useful for a game!

Yoru: Really? You couldn’t generate a quest or some text from that?

Raph: No! Because in order to make it work well as a romance novel story, it had to assign character arcs to the characters. Including YOU.

Yoru: Ah. So, essentially, doing that would’ve put the player on rails.

Raph: (nods) So it’s a question of the particular problem domain. It would probably make a nice choose-your-own-adventure generator or something. But for making MMO quests in particular, it wouldn’t be useful.

Yoru: So do you think it would be applicable in other parts of the industry, like, making Final Fantasy cookie cutter sort of games?

Raph: Maybe!

Yoru: Because those are all on rails…

Raph: Yeah, maybe. And it’s publicly disclosed and sitting on the web site! So people can go ahead and try, but the point being that when you try to move a solution even from one problem domain to another that’s really close, often things don’t work. So… look at Facade, I know the guys who did it, they’re extremely smart, I have no idea whether that would be easily adaptable. And from outside people would say, “Yeah, look at that, those characters actually have interior lives, and they react differently depending on what you say to ’em!” and all that, but yeah, our problem domain is we need them to kill five of those people with interior lives and get the rat tails, so…! (laughs)

Koboshi: Is that a definition, or is that what you keep telling yourself what the definition is? What I’m trying to say is… if you say that’s not the definition, then is that problem gone?

Raph: Well, he asked whether the current industry would adopt it, and what we’re saying is… (laughs)

Koboshi: Well, could the current industry get knocked around enough so that they start… I’ll put it another way, is the current industry just doomed by name, which is to say that what we call the current industry doesn’t exist, and if we call the current industry all these other things, then is the current industry going stronger than ever?

Raph: Well, I don’t think that you can sidestep it as just a definition question or category question, because… the uses, even, to which the materials are put are very different. When Kellogg’s and Lego do it, it’s for advertising purposes.

Yoru: Well, you had advertising in your talk as one of the new generators of revenue…

Raph: The business models are different, the funding sources are different.. I mean, literally, it’s coming from a different industry!

Koboshi: But if you’re going into.. let’s say Kellogg’s calls you up and they say “We want you to make the Kellogg’s MMO, and you can do whatever you want, but people are going to look like Frosted Flakes and, uh.. you’re gonna run into Rice Krispies everywhere, but as far as anything else goes, make a game.” Are you still going to define it as an advertising thing? Or…

Raph: They already did! You just gave me an advertising constraint!

Koboshi: Okay, that’s an advertising constraint, but for an industry that’s spent its entire life getting over the technical constraints… why the hell is this suddenly a constraint? Before it was just part of what you’re doing.

Raph: Okay, let me give you an example. Look at CokeMusic. CokeMusic is your Kellogg’s example, all right?

Yoru: And it’s huge.

Raph: And it’s huge! It’s really really big, and you know, like, God.. it’s been a while, but last time I talked to Juan Pablo Gnecco, it was two and a half million. And this was back in Living Gameworlds, whenever I went to that… and so you look at that, and the constraint is not just that the advertising of Coke, the constraint is that this is not going to the gamer market at all. And this is bypassing all the other aspects of the gaming industry. It is not using the distribution channels, it is not using the funding channels, it is not using the marketing channel, it is not using… none of the current elements of the industry are going to be applied to this, except maybe the programming channel. Okay, so, sure, people can move back and forth between, but the overlap from a business perspective is virtually none. Once you’re over in that industry, a lot of the assumptions are very different, and particularly the audience assumptions are very very very different.

Yoru: Do you think we need to adopt more of their methodology and thinking into the core industry?

Raph: If we want the industry to spread beyond our current market we do, yes. And I’ll give you a direct example. Of CokeMusic! All of CokeMusic is the musician system from Star Wars Galaxies!

Yoru: The musician system from Star Wars Galaxies–

Raph: Works the same way as CokeMusic. You take loops, stick ’em together, combine ’em–

Yoru: Combine ’em, add different flourishes, and right… yeah, I hadn’t thought of that.

Raph: Over in the gamer market, it’s like, “Why did you do include that?!” Outside the gamer market, (slaps table) it’s two and a half million people by itself! Um, disconnect, right? It goes both ways!

Koboshi: But… does it go back? I mean, you’re talking.. there’s a definite it wasn’t made here philosophy, but I guess the question I’m getting at is, if anyone doesn’t say that, does that mean they’re not in the industry…?

Yoru: Yeah, do you think there there needs to be a cross-pollination?

Raph: Of course there needs to be a cross-pollination! Absolutely!

Koboshi: Yeah, but could you define that.. could some guy go out and say “I understand why this happened in the media world, but I’m going to go back and make it an entertainment thing, you’re going to pay me for it, we’re going to do the economic model of a game…” And when that guy starts taking these ideas back…

Raph: Well, yeah, I mean, you know…

Koboshi: But is that guy still… when you talk about, people talk about the death of the MMO… you talk about all these… losing ground…

Raph: We’re not talking about the death of the MMO! We’re talking about…

Yoru: The dwarfing, really…

Raph: We’re not talking about the MMO at all, really, but of the current big development model of publishers and their particular funding structure. We’re talking about the way that this business is currently configured. Other businesses are making the same product in just very different ways, and what I’m saying is that the way in which we make this product is what is in danger. Because it’s an adaptation to this particular circumstance and it’s been allowed to kind of grow in this hothouse way for a very long time. So when you try from within the industry.. and I’ll pick things that aren’t me. When Daniel James tries, from within the industry, to change up the assumptions and puts in puzzle games… we think it’s cute.

Koboshi: I think it’s freakin’ crack, but that’s just me. (laughs)

Yoru: He loves Puzzle Pirates.

Raph: I know, but God, he shopped that around to publishers for so long, and there was just… skepticism! You know… And so there’s … you have to overcome that right? And in practice, he’s going about it the right way now! He’s saying hell with that! He got a publishing deal, right? Went nowhere! And he’s doing so much better now that he’s said “You know what, I’m not really part of the game industry! I’m over here!” And whoosh! He’s taken off, and doubloons are doing great! So that’s the thing, it can be very hard to break out of the little hothouse mentality, right…

Koboshi: Do you think that means that that’s… how long before… two questions. How long before the industry gets it, and the other question is, does the current industry ever get it, or does it die and this new model becomes…?

Raph: The industry doesn’t die, and some people do get it. Somebody who got it ten years ago, and it took them a long time to actually adapt was Nintendo. Nintendo got it…

Yoru: … the Wii …

Raph: No, ten years ago Nintendo got it!

Yoru: Which product?

Raph: They started by trying to get it with GameCube. When they said, you know what… (laughs)

Yoru: The family market is…

Raph: We’re not going to chase high graphics, we think it’s the family market. In and of itself, that wasn’t enough. Right, however, around the same time, they said, you know, this whole GBA business isn’t bad either. And they kept trying to find what are these other things… they tried Virtual Boy!

Yoru: (chuckles) Virtual Boy!

Raph: Yeah, they were trying other stuff! And the DS… click! Oh yeah! You don’t think the DS numbers are selling to Gamers?

Yoru: Hell no.

Raph: Hell no! They’re selling to these people over here. They’re selling to a very different crowd of people and to the Gamers too, right? And they’re trying to do it again with the Wii. And they’re doing it with titles that cost a fraction to develop! A fraction! I think other groups do get it, but it’s just how far along they are in their getting-it. Microsoft gets aspects of it, obviously, otherwise there wouldn’t be a Live Arcade and there wouldn’t be a Game Studio Express. Sony certainly got it when they tried Netzeroes (?) and it didn’t go anywhere, right? So there’s people who get it… EA has a digital distribution initiative that they have on their web site… they have their own Steam kind of thing. But clearly, even though you can look at EA’s and you can look at Valve, and you can say okay, they kind of do the same thing, there’s some way in which Valve is fundamentally more adapted to the new paradigm than EA is. Valve is just further ahead of the curve, I don’t think we can say that EA is selling half of its titles that way, but we can say that for Valve..

Yoru: So digital distribution is one of the drivers of this next upswell…

Raph: Oh god, yeah! Yeah yeah yeah.

Yoru: The impulse buy potential alone is staggering.

Raph: It’s not just the impulse buys…

Koboshi: It only costs you a button to buy something.

Raph: All media are bits on a disc. Everything today is bits on a disc. And bits on a disc have certain characteristics, one of ’em is, they don’t like to stay put on a disc, (chuckles) duh, and another is that they’re basically worthless. Doesn’t matter how much they cost to make, they’re still basically worthless.

Yoru: Right, they’re non-rival goods.

Raph: Yeah, so everybody just needs to get with the picture, dude! (laughs) ‘Cause that’s our reality now, we just make bits on a disc! And, you know, we’d better find ways to fill those discs up more cheaply, and figure out the fact that selling the disc is not a particularly good business model! (chuckles) Because it’s the bits that people want, not the disc!

Yoru: So, filling the discs more cheaply… where do you fall in the dichotomy between favoring crafted and generated content? Where do you think the happy medium is?

Raph: The happy medium… um, I don’t know if there’s a happy medium, I think it strongly depends on the kind of game. You’re gonna have certain things you’re going to need to make by hand. On the other hand, when I was at Georgia Tech at Living Gameworlds, there was this Ph.D student there, she had made this procedural platform world generator, by going through and measuring all the platform games and seeing, well, in best practice, you know, what are the kinds of intervals you need between jumps and how…

Yoru: That actually sounds kind of neat, I want to play that…

Raph: Yeah! I was like, oh, wow, what do you know! And actually, um, it never came out here in the States, brilliant game, Vib Ribbon! Masaya Matsuura. Same guy who made PaRappa the Rapper.

Yoru: I’ve heard of it. I think Schild wrote about it at one point.

Raph: So, Vib Ribbon, it’s this weird-ass game, okay? (chuckles) It’s all line art…

Yoru: Yeah, the line art guy…

Raph: Line art bunny rabbit, okay, and he’s walking on a line that’s kind of wiggling and this weird Japanese music starts playing and the line changes into these weird shapes, and each of those shapes maps to a button on the controller. So it’s kind of like… part of the problem is, you learn to see the shapes.. the jaggy line means press X, the loop-de-loop means press O, and then the shapes start being like the jaggy loop-de-loop, which means a chord of those two buttons. And it analyzes any music that you put in and it does this… and that’s a great example of where procedural content worked just beautifully. And there’s many! I just picked up the latest DDR clone, that, now it analyzes your CDs, right?

Koboshi: LucasArts, I think is…

Yoru: LucasArts is planning that…

Koboshi: Planning one for PSP or something.

Raph: For the PSP, that’s besides the point, but the thing is… these kinds of things are great for the right kinds of games, right? There are many many many parts of the game industry that would benefit from more procedural content. because the costs are getting astronomical, but there’s going to be parts where we’re always going to want directed content, and you’re going to have the director. The reason why I’ve always been a big fan of generated content is because, in MMOs, in a large part, not just the cost but the fact that it can be reactive. If what you’ve generated is part of a simulation, then you can…

Yoru: Right, it’s uh… the buzzword was.. (taps pen) Systemic game design.

Raph: Right, you can poke and prod it and players can have an impact and see it. Statically created content, this is why the debate in the industry is simulation versus stagecraft.

Yoru: Disposable content.

Raph: Stagecraft, yeah, it’s consumable content. Have you ever been on a… almost everybody has at one point or another, but have you ever been on a stage just to see how faked it is, because it looks so good from back there…

Yoru: Yeah, I’ve worked backstage a couple times.

Raph: Okay, so then you know exactly what it is. Most games today, the handcrafted stuff is all cardboard on a stage…

Yoru: Yeah, it’s all cardboard, you can see that easily enough by turning on no-clip and flying around a level.

Raph: Yeah, exactly.

Yoru: Um… so, what do you think… five years ago, ten years ago, the manufacturing industry started getting very excited about a thing called Mass Customization. And you talked about, in the next ten, twenty years, we’re going to start seeing that as a sort of Mass Nichification, with boutique MMOs. Do you think that’s going to be the largest part of the industry, or more of a small, boutique, sideshow?

Raph: Well… I think the answer to that is that it’ll look exactly like the constellation in any other media. Which is to say there’ll be a power-law distribution between the big guys and the little ones. The trend that people have been noticing is that the big guys have been getting smaller and there’s more and more and more little ones. I don’t think we’ll ever reach the end-trend where everything is little, I think there’ll always be hits, but the scale of hits will be getting smaller..

Yoru: Yeah, you spoke about that in your talk… Anyway, Raph, we’re sort of running overtime, so I don’t want to keep you too long…

Raph: I don’t think I have another interview for another… your questions are all over the map, dude!

Yoru: I’m just flipping through everything you’ve said at the convention, and the things that you’ve been saying and trying to get as much of the Raph-brain onto the tape, it’s a fascinating place…

Raph: (laughs) Right, well, if you just think of this sort of smeared-out brain… bleaaah.

Koboshi: So I do have a sort of general “What’s your opinion on…” and I think he (points at Yoru) asked it earlier, and in the context of something else, but… Do you believe that NPCs are going to be more or less important in the future? Do you think that it will be my neighborhood and I don’t want a bunch of dogs and cats and lions and orcs walking around in my neighborhood.

Raph: I… started out really into the NPCs. And on Galaxies, we contemplated NOT having them at all. And partly that’s driven by the fact that NPCs have become less and less and less NPCs.

Yoru: Less interesting.

Raph: Yeah, NPCs in a game like WoW clearly deserve the name quest dispensers…

Yoru: Whereas NPCs in pen and paper games are kind of central…

Raph: Yeah, in WoW, they’re quest dispensers except they’re shaped like meat. Rather than shaped like a terminal..

Yoru: Well, in WoW it’s questionable whether they’re really shaped like meat or shaped like…

Raph: Yeah, well, that’s not a knock on WoW, it’s.. it’s people prefer to see them, it’s certainly something we learned with Galaxies, people would rather get their quests from something shaped like meat than from a literal terminal, right? It’s more personal, it feels better, so there’s nothing particularly wrong with that, but, to me, that’s an indication that, you know, the question of whether, will they become more or less important is very much driven by what you consider to be an NPC!

Koboshi: Including basically, anything that walks around and does stuff…

Raph: Something with cool AI or…

Yoru: Mobiles…

Raph: I don’t think those will ever go away because they’re just a useful tool…

Yoru: Escort quests alone and whatever.

Raph: Yeah, incidental stuff, they’re nice to have around. I mean…

Koboshi: But is that what they… is the attempt to create the great AI, the Turing Test AI, is that just dead and people are just like “Okay, this is window dressing, stop paying so much damn attention to it.”

Raph: Yeah, that’s the question. I think the consensus that the industry is coming to is that why bother when…

Yoru: Why do it when you can get a player to do it for you…

Raph: Well, no, nobody’s going to… it’s the stagecraft question again. What is the benefit that you derive from having this be a real person? Well, not a real person, but a substantial AI? If the substantial AI leads to them walking up and down the street, then fuck it! Hard-code a path and make the guy walk up and down the street, you know! Instead of spending nine months writing your complicated AI…

Yoru: And five hundred thousand cycles…

Raph: Cycles, and burning all this energy. And that’s basically, that’s the argument against the whole UO ecology modeling thing. The flip side of the argument is, yeah, but if I need the guy to run away when suddenly the dragon flies overhead, and I also need that guy to rush up to any player who keels over because the plague hit, and I also need that guy to.. you know, you can’t special-case all of the cases, so you just don’t do that. If you have a good general solution, then you could actually have a whole lot of really cool dynamic stuff. The second-order question that then people ask is, yeah, but do players want cool dynamic stuff? And the answer these days is no! No, they pays their money, they gets on the ride…

Yoru: The theme-park analogy?

Raph: Yeah, yeah, you don’t want the haunted mansion to suddenly give you a random… yeah, now the Ghost actually flies through you and sucks our your soul. That part you don’t actually want, you know, and having the one in a hundred chance is not a selling point! And I don’t entirely agree with that, I think there’s room for rides and there’s room for dynamic, more varied worlds… many make the case that, yeah, but the ride will always be more mass-market. And I think there’s a very big question to ask, what’s more mass-market: theme parks or parks? Because plain old parks seem to get used by a lot of people all the time, and they’re pretty damn freeform. So you know, there’s room for both…

Yoru: So, do you think there’s possibly, there’s a need for a ‘gateway drug’ to get people into gaming and then move them on to a more technical, more complex, more freeform experience…

Koboshi: Or at the end, freeform into gaming…

Raph: Uh, in my opinion, you cannot turn the heavily gamey world into a worldy game. And I’ve had this argument on your forums, actually, and lots of people disagree with me, but the reason why I say that is because… the whole point of building it in a gamey way, you read Rob’s keynote, right, you read through the keynote and you realize that by doing that, he’s chopping all of this off in order to have this space, and have it really tightly defined, so once you have that nice tightly defined space…

Yoru: That’s where it comes from, yeah, that’s why you can explore it for the ‘best solution’…

Raph: But, by trying to turn this into a worldy thing now, you went and chopped off all this stuff, how do you make this worldier, right?

Yoru: Window dressing.

Raph: It has to be window dressing! It’s far easier to start with something worldy and then drop that very channeled thing into it, and so, I think it’s very hard… I’ve argued on the forums with folks like Darniaq about it, and whatnot, because, it’s a common question. Why… why can’t we start with a really small base of a pyramid and then build it out? And the answer is you can do that if you’re building something gamey all the way, but if you’re trying to build something worldy… The more rails you put in at the beginning, you can’t pull up the rails, they’re there forever! You end up building a different foundation. So that’s, um… Galaxies used to have an imperfect information economy. Today, Galaxies and WoW both have perfect information economies. You don’t get to go back from that. Once you’ve made that change, it’s not something you can just go back out and say, “Sorry guys, from now on, you’re going to have to go back to checking every vendor for pricing.” No, no. You’ve made it more gamey, it stays more gamey. Going the other way…

Yoru: Just angers people.

Raph: Just angers people!

Yoru: And you get the NGE.

Raph: Well, you get… no, the NGE is an example, I don’t think, it isn’t an example… it’s not gamey going worldy.

Yoru: No, I meant the other way…

Raph: Worldy going gamey? But it’s actually possible to do that, I don’t know if it’s possible to go the other way. How would you add a worldy feature like freeform, place-anywhere, assemble-buildings-any-way-you-want housing into WoW? Where would you put it?!

Yoru: Yeah, you’d need to add a whole lot of systems first.

Raph: Yeah, there’s just no… it’s just not set up for it! The core assumptions are just not there.

Koboshi: So let me just strap you to a wall, whip you and force you to tell me… you’re going to make a virtual world, and in that virtual world, you’re going to have soccer stadiums… A game within… you know, in real life, we have a virtual world, a nice pretty one we all believe in, and we play games. And so you can have gaming in virtual worlds.

Yoru: You have that in Second Life as well, you have people building games inside the world.

Raph: Inside the world, yeah.

Koboshi: So yeah, that’s my categorization…

Raph: Are you asking, is that what I am doing, with my startup?

Koboshi: I’m not prodding you for anything you’re not allowed to tell, I’m just wondering, if some guy… if you’re going to direct some guy to make the virtual world, what are his steps? What are… from money to … backers or phones or what.. do you do it in schools, you have enough gaming schools right now…

Raph: But there is no the virtual world, is the thing, I don’t know what… I’m not even sure how to answer that, do you mean just a virtual world?

Koboshi: It’s virtual and not just EverQuest with virtual worldy stuff…

Raph: But people can do just go it now!

Yoru: Yeah, look at Second Life.

Raph: Second Life! RuneScape! RuneScape is a virtual world, it is not a straight-up EverQuest clone! RuneScape is the game most like UO running today. RuneScape is all skill-point driven, use-based.. your first quests are go fish, chop down a tree… it plays like UO…!

Yoru: I have to go try it out now…

Raph: With really horrible graphics. (laughs)

Yoru: You ever heard of DartMUD?

Raph: Yeah…

Yoru: I code for that, so…

Raph: Really?!

Yoru: Yeah.

Raph: Wow. Awesome!

Yoru: Yeah, I’m working on (stuff I really shouldn’t’ve talked about)…

Raph: Cool… DartMUD was actually one of the inspirations for some of the original UO stuff way way way back when.

Yoru: Yeah, I wasn’t around at that time. Those guys…

Raph: Of course, I read all the help files, logged on to DartMUD and saw three concurrents so…

Yoru: We’re get about forty concurrents now.

Raph: Awesome, up by a factor of ten in fifteen years…

(laughter)

Yoru: And at the same time, Diku MUDs have gotten how large?

Raph: If you count WoW, pretty damn big!

(laughter)

Yoru: So in terms of specific features, do you think skill based games are going to come back in some form, as opposed to class based games?

Raph: Yeah, they’re not going to go away…

Yoru: Eve’s offline skill training, what do you think of that?

Raph: I’m not a huge fan of passive rewards, or rewards for doing nothing. There are really nice advantages to it, but I think that that’s a taste thing. I think that a lot of worlds will find ways to provide… like WoW’s rest system is also a form of offline skill gain, but it doesn’t feel like “Go log off now!”. It doesn’t have the same kind of… I think elements of that will stick around.

Yoru: Since you are making a startup, I don’t know if you can talk about this, are you incorporating these things that you’ve been talking about… about finding alternative funding, developing different ways of thinking about the game from outside the industry perspective, and bringing that in-house?

Raph: My startup is funded. It is not funded by anything in the video game industry. It will not have a subscription fee and it will not come on a CD.

Koboshi: Name, rank and serial number!

(chuckling)

Yoru: So when will you actually be able to tell us more about it?

Raph: Probably not for a few months…

Yoru: GDC?

Raph: Ma-aybe. Maybe. Going to run quiet for a while, build more of it. You know… But I do expect that once I’m ready, I’m going to run the same kind of community thing I always have…

Yoru: Okay, so you’re designing what you want to create as opposed to something that you think will hit a market…

Raph: Oh, no, I think it’ll hit a market… (laughs)

Yoru: Are you designing for a market or are you designing for yourself or somewhere in between…?

Raph: You’re always designing for an audience, you can’t design for yourself. You’re always designing for other people, there’s no such thing as designing for yourself, really, but it might not be the same people. It might not be the usual suspects crowd. I don’t know whether the F13ers will like it!

Yoru: Well, I’ll try anything, so… (chuckles)

Koboshi: I’ve got all kinds of crazy questions… I love this back and forth thing we’ve got going, we have your head going like a tennis match…

Yoru: Yeah, I wish we had video…

Koboshi: You’ve talked about no-NPC worlds, and virtual worlds with no games involved… but what of no-level worlds?

Raph: Woohoo! I hate levels. I don’t mind levels as labels, I hate them as hit point machines.

Koboshi: I guess the question I’m asking is… A, would you be able to get past that sentence with anyone? You say I’ve got a game and it doesn’t have levels, and everybody goes, “Bye!” Uh, in the industry. In the industry…

Raph: No, there are people in the industry with whom that would go over just fine. You know, it would very much depend on what segment of the industry, and so on, I think everybody would ask you, okay, but what are the milestones of achievement…

Yoru: What’s your reward schedule…

Raph: What’s your reward schedule, what’s your feedback, you know, those kinds of things. And those are very good questions that you have to have answers for. The thing I dislike about levels is the… essentially, we… God, I’ve written this, I wrote a freakin’ three part essay on this on the blog, go look up “Do Levels Suck?” I wrote it on the blog…

Yoru: I remember that one.

Raph: We stole levels from D+D, and in D+D, levels were this achievement marker, but they were also segmenting who you were playing with, but a given adventure was just for this narrow level band..

Yoru: And you were usually playing with the same people.

Raph: Yeah, and you were usually playing with the same people, so you know… oh hey, we want to try this level 15 module? Everybody go roll up a level 15 character, okay, no problem, right? So we adapted a model over into these games that has a lot of advantages, right? But also gives us a whole bunch of other headaches.. content creation headaches, the biggest one is the goddamn hit points thing.

Yoru: Yeah, you can only do so many things with one meter.

Raph: Yeah, and it comes with so many hassles… it’s what keeps people from being able to group with each other, is the hit points and the increasing damage and all that jazz.

Koboshi: Why do you think that’s still… it’s something from the moment I played an MMO…

Raph: Because people like feeling powerful! And fundamentally these games keep selling the same damn power fantasy, of slaying bigger orcs and bigger orcs and bigger orcs..

Koboshi: But is this just one of the defining problems, which is to say, if you define your audience as the people who like that, then everyone in your audience likes that?

Raph: Yeah, I mean, it’s so trivially easy to come up with alternate schemes.. So trivially easy, especially an MMO. Imagine a game, we’ll call it the F13 game, the F13 desert island game, okay? So let’s imagine you take all the F13 posters and you dump them onto desert islands. You have all the furry fans over there, and the Winger fans over there, and those few of us on the guitar thread over on this one and that kind of thing. And nobody ever levels up, but the islands level up. It’d be trivially easy!

Yoru: It’s a collaborative game.

Raph: Yeah, it’s a co-op game, and you can move between the islands freely! You just take your little rowboat, avoid the shark and get to the other island and then you’ll be helping a different group level up. You could do that, and people would have all kinds of markers of achievement, you could get medals hung on you for having helped your coconut tree grow these extra coconuts, who cares? And you’ve never gained a hit point!

Yoru: I think it’s not just the reward of getting bigger.. I think it’s also a slot machine reward, you pull a lever, and every now and then something big happens, and you get, you know, endorphins and whatnot.

Raph: Sure! You don’t need levels for that!

Yoru: Really, all you need is a rat, a lever and an electrode.

Raph: (laughs) Yeah, I don’t even technically need the rat if I’ve got you, I just need the electrode, actually. (laughs)

Yoru: Do you find it disturbing at all that we’ve used a lot of B.F. Skinner’s terminology when talking about games? Reward schedules, things like that?

Raph: Um… It is disturbing a bit because, first off… I don’t actually… when designers use this stuff, they use it generally incorrectly. They only use it after the fact in the analysis, and never actually use it in the process, because designers just don’t think that way, and don’t approach it that way. You very rarely see it used even for tuning, which is where it actually would be really useful. Um… The place where it’s scary is that everybody talks about addiction, which is the very next step in that particular discussion, and that word is just misplaced, generally, because once you start using the addiction scale, indiscriminately, on anything, then you find out that we’re addicted to everything…

Yoru: I’m addicted to water.

Raph: Exactly. And so, it’s a very… it’s a tricky line to walk, because obviously, addiction is a problem, there are people who’ve had the problem, they just about always seem to have some other problems too, and it’s clearly a more complicated issue. And reducing it down to, oh yeah, the games use Skinner techniques is just not enough. Learning the piano uses Skinner techniques.

Yoru: Yeah, stimulus, reward…

Raph: Yeah.

Yoru: I think I’m running dry. I think.

Raph: We have… six, seven minutes before my next interview shows up. If they don’t kick us out of the room.

Yoru: Uh, okay… Koboshi, you have anything… Ookii, you have anything? You’ve been quiet the whole time, come up with something.

Ookii: I know I’ve been quiet the whole time, this is over my head.

Raph: Yeah, ask some questions on the other end, because God knows these guys are boring the F13 readers silly.

Yoru: Yeah, we’re gonna get torn to shreds, people are gonna be going, like, “Why didn’t you grill him on Star Wars?!”

Raph: That’s right!

Koboshi: Yeah, I’m gonna write about all the lectures I went to, and they’re gonna be, like, “Cool.” And that’s gonna be the post.

Raph: Let’s see whether anybody’s said anything about your writeup…

Yoru: I haven’t written up your lecture yet…

Raph: Yeah, there’s a summary of.. there’s a liveblog. Who did the liveblog?

Ookii: Samwise. Samwise’s been liveblogging.

Yoru: Damn it, ruined an entire article.

Raph: I actually posted… it’s so much better an article than the versions done by GameSpot or Next Gen, so… congratulate Samwise. Yeah, the entire thread is about beer, and it is five posts long.

Yoru: So what type of beer do you like Raph?

Raph: I don’t drink a lot of beer, actually…

Koboshi: What’s your spirit of choice…?

Raph: So, silly story, when you start going to business meetings, you actually have to pick a drink of choice, because, it’s expected that you will go to the hotel bar and have drinks. So you have to pick a drink that, you know, sends the right signal, or whatever…

Yoru: Any of the last three nights in town could’ve told you that…

Raph: Yeah, so, I had to pick a drink of choice, so I’ve settled on the black russian.

Yoru: Mmm, good choice.

Raph: Um, because it’s fairly reliable, it can be made devastatingly strong, and it doesn’t taste like crap. Um, it’s a lie. I grew up in the Caribbean, so I like froo-froo drinks with rum.

Yoru: D’you like mojitos?

Raph: Well, if it’s got rum in it, and fruit, I’ll drink it! Because those are the kinds of things… my favorite drink is probably pina colada. But you can’t order pina colada at a business meeting, you have to have something that involves…

Koboshi: Clash, clash…

Raph: Exactly. So I like the froo-froo rum-based drinks, but instead I have to order something that comes in a squat little glass and is dark and involves amber liquid and…

Yoru: Tastes like fire.

Raph: Tastes like fire, so that was the one I picked. Couldn’t order a white russian, because white russians are for girls or something.

Ookii: It’s the cream.

Raph: It’s equally strong, is the thing! It’ll knock you just as flat. But, anyway…

Koboshi: I’ve realized, one thing is that I am not a drinker of any level, and it’s screwing me up because simply I don’t have the experience to sit at a bar and say I want this… I keep going, every time I go to a bar, because I rarely do, is I look behind the bar and go… Menu? Because everybody here has memorized like…

Yoru: Yeah… not so much in Raph’s case since he’s married, but for us, if the bartender is a girl, you say, What’s your favorite drink? Okay, give me that.

(laughter)

Raph: Yeah.. the thing of it is, that… I just don’t drink much. So, like… for beers, I’ll get like, what… a Bach? Elsewhere, in a microbrewery, I’ll be like… okay, get me the pale ale.

Yoru: Okay, now here’s the weird part. The entire thread about this is going to be about the last two minutes where we’ve been talking about liquor.

(Guy in Suit walks up, commence a few seconds garbled, random chat that’s impossible to transcribe)

Raph: Everyone should really just go down Sixth Street until they hit the Waterloo Ice House, and right around the corner from it is Amy’s Ice Cream, and they should have some Amy’s Ice Cream. Have you had Amy’s?

Guy in Suit: No, I haven’t.

Raph: Have you had Cold Stone? Or any marble-slab ice cream?

Koboshi: Do you know what that means?

Guy in Suit: No, I don’t…

Raph: That’s where they take the ice cream and put it on a marble slab and pound it and slap it and then mix stuff into it… So Amy’s does it with actual gourmet ice cream and, yeah, it is worth it…

Ookii: We do have some time to kill…

Raph: It’s right next to the Waterloo Records, it’s a great record store, probably one of the best in the country…

Koboshi: I live in Phoenix, and it, like, it doesn’t have any character, it’s like those Star Wars Galaxies cities…

Yoru: Yeah, that’s why, when you guys came to LA, I was glad to show you that, yes, this city has culture…

Raph: LA…! LA… ugh…

Yoru: It’s where my job is.

Ookii: You want to say anything else before I turn the recorder off?

Raph: Nah, go ahead.

Yoru: Kill it.