TNW Answers
This Q&A was held on TheNextWeb Answers on November 13th, 2019.
Joseph Manley
In previous years, you have talked about taking concepts you are familiar with and look at them from an unfamiliar perspective. What is the most unusual way you have looked at a game?
Not sure I have a good answer on that one. I try to strip away the surface of the game, find isomorphisms to other sorts of systems. So basically, I look for ways to analyze the game system and put the same system into very different shapes. I once did a boardgame design where I used the pips on dice as a measure of how many neighbors they were allowed to have in adjacent hexes.
Dallas Van Winkle
Hey Raph! Huge fan.
– In your upcoming MMO, you’ve talked about using systems that weren’t feasible in the days of UO. The concept of the virtual ecology has always been so intriguing to me. Is your MMO going to have any virtual ecology elements? How intense would such a system be on the network? How will it work?
– Do you have any idea of what art style you want for your MMO? I always loved Andrea Fryer’s (Kat’s Purr) blog on UO art and what went wrong with it and would love to see you work with her.
– Will your MMO have a player run economy? What do you think about gold farmers for example, and what will your approach be in regards to this phenomena?
Thank you!
I’m going to stay away from answering stuff about the new game in too much detail, if you don’t mind — we won’t be announcing material on that for quite some time. 🙂
That said — I think in the general case, people don’t appreciate just how much more computing power and bandwidth we have than we used to. I used to have the numbers handy, but we have something like 27000 times the bandwidth budget than we used to back in the Ultima Online days when we did a virtual ecology there.
I love Kat’s stuff too! 🙂
Given my past interests, it is probably no surprise that yes, we will have a strong player economy. As I said when the company was announced, we are interested in building a game that bridges different sorts of people, and trade is one of the principal ways we do that in the real world — whether it’s liking other culture’s cuisines or just needing a great plumber.
I’ve always seen gold farming as an expression of the interest that players have in the game. A game no one loves has no gold farmers. And it’s impossible to prevent if you have trade (see Randy Farmer’s “KidTrade” paper for more on that. But it’s important to keep it from damaging the experience for everyone.
The Doctor Who Show
Raph, is it fair to say there’s a market for an MMO along the lines of Second Life, except made to modern standards? Because I have long believed there’s an un-serviced audience out there which is more interested in ‘living’ in their game worlds than playing the same raid over and over and over again, or just randomly killing other players because they can. I think this is why something like SWG was so popular; it was more about the community and living in the world, than it was about any other aspect.
There’s a market, for sure, but I think that a lot of the thunder for that mode of virtual world was stolen by “flatter” virtual social experiences — namely, Facebook and Twitter. If the primary intent is just chatting, there are lower friction ways of doing it.
So any social world has to offer activities within itself in order to reach beyond that pure chatter audience that settles for minimal friction over richer features. At some point we end up calling it a game again — whether it’s a pure building sandbox or whatever, it starts acquiring gamelike things as you move towards providing things for people to talk about.
Personally, I’m going after a game with very strong social elements, not the other way around, this time.
Noobzilla [MMORPG]
Do you believe that early Ultima Online would have been as memorable if it would have launched without any bugs or unintended features or do you think those ended up adding to the charm and quirkiness of UO? One of my favorite activities was collecting server birth rares and displaying them in a rares museum.
As always, thanks for letting us into your mind for a few questions at a time because it is always an interesting read.
Looking forward to hearing more about Playable Worlds!
It would have been impossible to launch without bugs — we were inventing too much and UO was frankly pushing the Internet to the edge of its capabilities at the time. I mean — one of the first large scale VPNs ever done, they had to add a backbone line to our office, all that, never mind issues in the game itself!
I do think that allowing quirks and idiosyncrasies to live can be a good thing. The players find them interesting and love trading knowledge of them like lore. Not that different from how quirks of the real world become secrets like great fishing spots or that one store that sells stuff way under street value. Players like feeling smart, and finding quirks makes you feel smart.
Either you build in those things by hand, laboriously, or you let them emerge. I prefer to do it via emergent systems with unpredictable results, rather than outright bugs, if possible. 🙂 But even with a bug — ask yourself, as a designer, whether it adds charm or new dynamics, and whether it hurts things as a whole. Often the answer is to embrace it rather than fix it.
(This doesn’t mean you let serious bugs live, of course. But there’s something to be said for rough edges and a lack of glossy perfection).
Ryan Berckmans
Hi Raph!
Thanks for doing this. Your writing has been very inspiring and instructive over the years. I build an indie MMO.
- Nick Yee says that the difference in Competition as a player motivation is larger between young men and older men than between men and women at any age. Fortnite is being called “the new MMO” because young men play it so often. Are young men among the demographics that your new game will specifically target?
- I’ve read your interview where you discussed – paraphrasing – “life beyond combat”. Will your new game have a significant investment in a combat engine?
- Will your new game rely on a core of extremely active players to create sociocultural continuity among your playerbase? Let me elaborate: in your interviews you mentioned that your new game will target a segment of casually active players in terms of their play time budget. One way to give casual players a good social experience is for them to reliably encounter extremely active players each time they login. For example there might be 10% of guild members who play 40+ hours per week and, statistically, will be online when casuals log in for their 90 minutes per week, and then the casuals can reliably group or socialize with the extremely active players. Another strategy is to use persistent, asynchronous social mechanisms like message boards or mutable worlds (like minecraft) for a society of casuals to successfully interact without relying on extremely active players. What is your strategy here or thoughts on this? Obviously there will always be some players who are extremely active. The question is, to what extent will your new game rely on extremely active players?
- On which platforms will your new game launch? If multiple platforms, will I be able to play my same character on PC and mobile? Ie. will the playerbase be segmented by device, or is each of my devices an opportunity to participate in the same society with my same character?
- Will your new game have multiple servers/instances or a singe global world? If multiple servers, will they be navigable by the same character, or disconnected like WoW Classic?
- You’ve mentioned that many players enjoy *some* specific in-game job, like being a postal worker. I suspect that your new game will have an economy of dozens or maybe hundreds of interconnected jobs. To what extent will you offer an explicit menu of jobs vs an implicit system of incentives and resources from which jobs can arise organically? For example an explicit system might have classes, profession selection, a menu of job quests, etc., whereas an implicit system might no explicit professions but instead a world of resources/costs/prices/incentives or explicit skills that are a level of indirection away from the job itself (eg. a “speedwalking” skill that is more likely to be taken by someone who fancies herself a postal worker vs. a postal worker professional that comes with a speedwalking buff).
- We have said we are interested bringing together many different types of players. I do believe that in a rich enough virtual world, there are roles for highly competitive people (of any age) as well as more peaceful or social types. It’s a matter of finding the right incentives so that they help one another in their preferred playstyle, rather than bugging the crap out of each other. 😉
- Yes, it will. For better or worse, play combat is one of the top ways that players enjoy interacting with virtual worlds.
- Every persistent game has a pyramid of activity, wherein the top users disproportionately spend the time. You have to design for the whole pyramid, and we will. We also were pioneers of the asynchronous methods, particularly in SWG with harvesting, so expect similar ideas to reappear.
- Won’t say yet. 🙂
- Won’t say yet. 🙂
- If you provide an explicit menu, you sort of limit player creativity in coming up with new jobs. We didn’t design “music video maker” or “beauty pageant host” into SWG but they happened. So I would aim for that sort of emergence.
Marco Alvarez
Raph,
One concept that fascinates me on your approach to virtual world design is the idea that it takes a lot of knowledge on non-game subjects to create a believable and immersive virtual world. If I recall, you’ve explained how your book shelf is filled with books on subjects as broad as Sports and Music Theory, and these books have in one way or another influenced your game-design decisions.
I am curious which broad, non-gaming concepts you find yourself researching these days with the goal of enhancing your new game’s development. Anything you’d like to share?
Ooof. Let’s see. Recent stuff I’ve been reading includes information theory, history particularly of the early Internet — and the telegraph even! — and a lot on human evolution. Also a lot on climate. Some on mobbing and other negative social dynamics.
Yes, I too have an overly long name because I can.
Performing a bit of a post-mortem on Fallout 76, one of its biggest missed opportunities was arguably having a strong player-driven economy to incentivize cooperation between players. In contrast, one of UO’s, SWG’s, and EVE Online’s most beloved (and memorialized) features was their near-exclusively player-driven economies. It seems the idea of player-driven economies in online games has fallen completely by the wayside, especially in major MMO releases in which mudflation are persistent, and in some cases economy-breaking, problems.
What triggered that shift in game design philosophy? In the context of contemporary industry trends such as microtransactions, free-to-play modeling, and expanding games-as-subscription-services modeling, are the days of triple-A games having player-driven economies over? What might it take to revive the trend, if it’s even possible?
I suspect that it may be related to the fact that a lot of services derive their revenue from controlling the player’s experience around gear, items, and thus virtual goods sales. A trade-based economy means that you have far less control, and a lot of the F2P or microtrans-based games rely on the ideas around limited exclusives, locked or soulbound sales, and so on. Trade means that the players can undercut the game provider. I think there are certainly ways around that, but it’s complicated enough that many devs simply wouldn’t want to add risk.
Hectorino Ferreira
Do you think that Ultima Online is one of the most long-lived games in active of the history of videogames? i can’t read nothing about in google, but i still playing from 1998, do you think it was a revolution in the world of games? whats your opinion, because i love this game ever, thank you.
I know it is one of the most long lasting, unless you compare it to boardgames, which have lasted thousands of years with active playerbases. But UO is beaten in the graphical world by Furcadia, and in the text-based world by several dozen MUDs which have been running longer, including one called LegendMUD which I worked on before UO. 🙂
In hindsight, I don’t think anyone would question UO was a revolution in games, serving as a harbinger of everything we today call Games As A Service. The whole gaming world is slowly “going MMO.”
lucas
Hi Raph !
I am really curious about social progression systems. What advices would you give to game designers working on a progression system that would focus on rewarding people for the social value they bring to other players ?
How could you make sure people don’t hack these systems like they did with The Sims Online ? (Which rewarded people who created great houses, just according to the number/length of visits).
Many thanks !
I think the trick to this, as with all incentives, is to make sure you are rewarding the right thing. Does a mere visit actually increase social value? By making a visit accrue social progression, you have effectively turned visits into a currency. Is that really the action you want to be rewarding? Or do you want to reward a great location? Because the connection between a visit and great location is tenuous — think of not-great locations we visit often, like the subway station, or the bathroom.
You want to look for a transaction between two parties which actually provides real value to both sides. That’s where you look to reinforce social connection for real, so that’s where you want to put the incentives.
noel
Hi Raph,
do you think that there is even space in the mmorpg genre for sandbox based on ultima online or swg these days ?
i mean many game dev´s target groups are way to big to throw a game with complex elements on the market and have success with that xD
Unquestionably yes.
Sandboxes are MUCH MORE CASUAL at their core than themeparky things with lots of grind. Sandboxes are where you find systems like dress-up, gardening, interior decoration, a little light puzzle action, taking care of a pet, and so on. These are the foundational mechanics behind most of the popular casual and mobile games in history. (And it’s a mistake to think that players don’t get hardcore about these, or that they can’t be complex. They can be both!)
The challenge sandboxes have always had is that they can feel directionless and confusing. But that’s a UX problem, not a core design problem.
Cara Curtis
Hey Raph! Thanks hosting a session. Women are underrepresented in the gaming industry. Can you name a few of your favorites? And why do you think there are fewer women in gaming compared to men? Thanks 🙂
I am lucky enough to count many amazing women as friends and colleagues in games. I immediately think of Brenda Romero, Robin Hunicke, Laralyn McWilliams, Christina Norman, Jen Scheurle, Emily Greer, Alice Taylor, Em Short, Sheri Graner Ray, … ack, I could go on and on and I am likely to offend someone if I leave them out! My favorite game designer of all time is Dani Bunten Berry, actually.
As far as why there are fewer: the industry has historically been brutally sexist, since at least the NES era, when consoles started being marketed solely to boys. The average career length of a woman in games is well under five years. It takes very hard work to change a culture of decades, and while we have seen amazing progress in the last decade, there’s a long way to go.
It’s important to get more kinds of people making games so that we get more ideas in games so we get more kinds of games so we get more kinds of game players. It just makes games better for everyone. Culture should never be in the hands of a homogenous group.
TNW
How do you think we can start to tackle this brutal sexism in the gaming industry, and help more women professional gamers/game designers succeed?
Make role models visible. Hire women as leaders. Call out the bad actors and bad actions. Sponsor and help aspirants to get in. Use broader focus groups. Not really that different from any other industry, really.
Mike Daoust
Hey Raph!
As somebody starting a big new game endevour, what are some of the types of talent you have a hard time finding in industry right now?
Tech artists. Server programmers.
Yessi Bello-Perez
Hey Raph, thanks for making the time! I’m curious, what was your favourite game growing up and where do you get your inspiration from?
My favorite game growing up, and probably still now, is M.U.L.E.
I try to get my inspirations from outside games, usually from reading nonfiction or observing the world.
necronut
Good afternoon, Raph,
MMOs struggle to gate content any more creatively than to add time to the grind, i.e. time to craft, time to level, time to gather, time to group, etc. Does PW have any plans to throw the proverbial stick in the spokes of the classic design and gate more creatively, if so, could you get anecdotal with it?
Looking forward to seeing PW’s work. Thanks and take care.
It’s hard to avoid having time be an element. In the real world, time, and practice, are gates on just about everything. Time is money, time flies, and so on , as the cliches have it.
In a game, a big challenge is that you have to find gates that are something code can detect.
The classic compensations games use is to have you accrue points via some means — a verb, an action like killing monsters, etc. That is basically a way to require a set number of task completions. Tasks, of course, can take time, and if you have too many repetitive ones, that’s when you feel a grind.
We should also be exploring adding gates that are social, based on interactions with others, or collaborations with others. It’s still a measurable transaction that we could detect in code. We see this in action in “likes” in a really crude way on social media. I think this is a very rich area to explore. Think about Amish barn raisings, for example — the thing we detect isn’t how long it takes to build the barn, or how many barns you make, but how effectively the team worked together, perhaps.
But ultimately, these will all always take time.
TNW
Hi Raph, thanks so much for joining! Tell us: what does the future look like?
Lately, I admit that I have been pretty pessimistic about the future. A lot of our dreamed futures have turned out on the dystopian end, and a lot of the tech we were so optimistic about building as technolibertarian geeks in the late 80s and early 90s has turned sour for me as it has been misused.
But above all, i think the thing that people don’t have a clear picture of is how much climate change is going to affect everyday life. Red tides over the whole Gulf means no seafood in New Orleans. No pine wood thanks to beetle infestations means huge changes in the say, the furniture industry. That sort of subtler change, the third-order effect, is what fascinates me as a system designer.
I think a lot of our future is going to be shaped by that sort of butterfly effect, and I can only be hopeful that as we master our understanding of systems, we may be able to reach accommodations with a changing world. It’s one of the big things games can help contribute to society, I think.
TNW
What’s the best and worst piece of professional advice you’ve ever been given?
Hmm. The best and most obviously practical, in the end, was to self promote but do it by always helping others, learning in public, and contributing back. I have found this to be absolutely true, and worth it.
The worst…. probably to crunch or work harder. Hard work doesn’t equal good work.
TNW
Who else would you like to see host TNW Answers?
Has Cory Doctorow done it? Or danah boyd?
TNW
What do you think is the biggest dissonance between what gamers actually want and what the market seems to think they want?
Above all, that there’s a specific “what gamers want.” No such thing. You can’t want what you don’t know about, and there are an infinite amount of games that haven’t been invented yet. 🙂
TNW
What’s the single biggest innovation from the last ten years of game development that you’re eager to incorporate into your new MMO?
That’s a great question. It’s probably not so much an innovation in game development as it is in game design… the ideas around cooperative gaming have taken the tabletop world by storm, and I find it a deeply pro-social set of concepts. There’s so much we can do in terms of bringing people together and helping them understand one another. I think there’s a lot there to apply.
The learnings on procedural generation are also fascinating to me, and I’ve been spending time digging into that stuff for fun.
Beyond that, frankly, I’m somewhat more interested in UNlearning some of the things from the last ten years of development. I want to use that CPU and GPU power on different things than most games do.
TNW
What influence do you think games have on society as a whole now that they didn’t have what you started making them?
In terms of the *types* of effects — the same. What has changed is in the scale. We are a mass medium now. So it’s about reach, it’s about cultural relevance. There’s a very real sense in which the nerds in the basement won, you know?
That said, I do worry about the ways that games train us to see the world, sometimes. Not everything needs to be beaten. Not every problem has a pat answer. You can’t always keep trying until you succeed. We, as designers, have to think about what our games teach, not just in terms of the raw content, but also in terms of the problem-solving approaches they inculcate.
TNW
What’s one game you’ve played or experienced that made you think, “Darn, I wish I’d made that (or thought of that, or whatever)”? And what struck you about it in particular?
All kinds! Baba is You opened the top of my head with procedurality. Journey made we revisit everything I thought I know about social design. Edith Finch taught me things about game controls I didn’t know. I take away things from all sorts of games, even ones that lots of folks don’t like or that didn’t get popular. There was an indie game a year or two ago called Circles — it didn’t become a huge hit or anything, but it taught an entire language of movement via shapes and colors, with no words at all. I thought that was a huge design feat and it blew my mind. But it’s probably too esoteric an accomplishment for the typical person to focus on, you know?
Bottom line: there’s amazing work all over the place these days.
Rachel Kaser
Hi Raph, thanks for doing an Answers sesh! What advice do you have for fledgling game developers out there? Are there any particular books (your own being a given, naturally) you’d encourage them to read or design philosophies you’d encourage them to study?
1) Make games.
2) Design of Everyday Things, Understanding Comics, all of Tufte, all of DeKoven, Making Movies Work, 100 Principles of Design
3) Make more games
4) Read into specialty subjects for inspiration
5) Make more games
6) make more games.
lucas
Thanks again for the Answers ! In a virtual world, what do you think are the most important elements for players to feel like they belong to tigh-knit communtities within it?
A realization that other people matter. That nothing you do in the world is unsupported by other people. Someone made the mold for the machine that shapes the stick of butter that was milked by someone and churned by something that was built by someone and then the butter was transported by someone in a vehicle built by someone to a store staffed by someone who put butter on shelves very early this morning so that you could have toast. The whole WORLD is like that.
We don’t tend to perceive it. We take it for granted. But once you see it, you can’t unsee it. You can’t see the delicate dance and the incredible web of dependency. Once you see the world as the meshing of systems, you realize how indispensable *everyone* is. And that’s when you realize what a community is: a dance in which everyone does their part.
So you have to find systems that reveal this truth. That’s what you need for players to feel it.
lucas
What do you think of virtual Worlds that only allows communication through Voice chat ?
Voice chat is basically very hard-to-impossible to moderate. And lack of moderation is always bad. You can only get away with lack of moderation when the communities are small, and people know each other well. After that scale, you HAVE to govern, you HAVE to moderate. And while we have great tools in text such as filtering, detection of words, and so on, those don’t really exist for voice, other than generic blocking, which history has repeatedly proven inadequate.
lucas
What would be the greatest advices you would give to a small team of developers/designers working on a Virtual World / MMO Game ? Thanks so much 🙂
That there are faster ways to spend a lot of money! 🙂
My more serious answer would — learn the ropes as cheaply as possible. That may very well mean something in text, a .io style game, simple 2d, or the like. All the technical challenges, which are large, as TINY compared to the challenges of running a service and governing a society.
TNW
What forms of gameplay or design do you see that are common in MMOs that are creeping into other games as well? What design do you think should be incorporated into other games (if any)?
Housing. Persistence. Customization. Social play. Social rewards. Timed re-engagement. RPG mechanics. The list is endless.
I don’t think we can ever say that a design SHOULD be incorporated. Every game is different, and has a different audience. Use the design elements that make sense for that game and that audience. There is no generic answer.
necronut
I’ve noticed a trend across a few of your answers, Raph. The term “social.” I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on re-invigorating the social feel of MMO gaming that more “hardcore” games like UO, SWG, and EQ had and perhaps your ideas not on re-inventing the wheel, but making the ride more comfortable.
I actually wrote a blog post ages ago called “Ways to make your Gamey World more Social” or something along those lines.
The fact is that we live in a deeply connected world. There’s a lot that people assume about online interaction that just wasn’t there back then. We have to have those lessons in our games today.
lucas
A lot of MMOs are about allowing their users creating complete experiences by themselves: worlds, rooms, games (e.g. Roblox, Rec Room, VR Chat…) but inside of a same MMO, these experiences have no link between them whatsoever. What do you think are the pros & cons of building communities, and long term retention with this “Game as a Platform” solution ?
I did this with Metaplace. It has a… LOT of wrinkles to it, and demands careful thought as to the technical architecture and social architecture. But in other ways, it is a lot like architecting the Web. 🙂
noel
i guess there is enough time to test other uo like games released in the past year till yours is finished .
i am worried about the playerships of those sandbox games these days. This Legends of Aria (Shards Online) is kinda dead 500 active players. Hope u doing it better.
Thank you for the answer before.
There are a lot of elements that go into making something be a big success. And often good work isn’t successful. There’s a hefty element of luck in everything we do. All you can do is put your best foot forward, hope that not only there is resonance with an audience, but also that you manage to hit that magical balance point between big appeal and lasting value to the player. It’s not easy, and I don’t think anyone can claim there’s a repeatable recipe.
In the meantime, players can just do their best to support creatives they like, and ideas they like, because the market is getting more and more crowded and brutal. In the end, everything we do is just pixels in the sand — what matters are the connections we make along the way, and the ideas and feelings we exchange. So please do go support LoA, and others who are making a go of it, because regardless of how it works out, they did something very hard and made a difference for people. That’s really all we can ask for and hope for.
Thanks all, for coming and asking such great questions!
noel
thank you for being here 🙂
lucas
Thanks so much! Can’t wait to know more about PW 🙂
