VaultNetwork Designer Dragon Interview: Community Building

The following interview was done by Jonric of the VaultNetwork on the topic of community building in online games. You can find the original of the interview here.

Designer Dragon Interview

Raphael Koster, better known as Raph or “Designer Dragon” is the Lead Designer for Origin’s pioneering persistent online world, Ultima Online. Also a veteran of text-based MUDs and a co-founder of LegendMUD, he is easily one of the game design community’s foremost experts in the area of online community building. Since community building in large-scale online games is currently a prominent topic amongst developers and gamers alike, I was very pleased when Raph agreed to share some of his thoughts about it in this extensive interview.

Jonric: Let’s start at the beginning. Please describe how and when you got involved with online games in general, and with LegendMUD in particular.

Designer Dragon: I’d guess I started way back when I first played BBS games ages ago. But in terms of MUDs, I started around 1992, soon after arriving at graduate school. Friends from college told me about them, and I started trying out a bunch, before settling on Worlds of Carnage. It went down a few months later, and eventually several of us from that MUD started our own, which was to become LegendMUD (http://www.legendmud.org, telnet://mud.legendmud.org:9999).

Jonric: Briefly, what is a MUD? What would you consider the major types to be, and what kind is LegendMUD?

Designer Dragon: I’d describe MUDs as text-based virtual realities. They tend to break down into social types (spaces in which the primary activity is socializing or building), roleplaying spaces where everyone attempts to stay in character and fit a given theme, and gaming spaces wherein the primary objective is to gain experience points and levels. Legend is a gaming MUD with a lot of emphasis on quests. It’s themed around history, “the world the way they thought it was.” This let us do lots of stuff like China Tea Trade, Beowulf, Aztecs, Sherwood forest, etc. And it uses a PK switch (I can see a bunch of UO players going into shock here…!)

Jonric: Please tell me about your Laws of Online World Design. How, when and why did you start accumulating them?

Designer Dragon: I’ve been participating on the MUD-DEV mailing list (http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev) for a couple of years now. In reading the list, I noticed a lot of aphorisms flying around in the debates. At some point, the moderator, J. C. Lawrence, and I were trading e-mails and I said, “a list of these would be really interesting!” And he said, “Have at!” So I did. The Laws include material gathered from researching past virtual spaces and MUDs (there’s a ton of research material out there waiting to be read), stuff from the list, and material from my own experience. Since I started with them, they seem to have attracted a lot of attention, and I’ve now run roundtables on them at the Game Developer’s Conference.

Jonric: “It’s a SERVICE. Not a game. It’s a WORLD. Not a game. It’s a COMMUNITY. Not a game. Anyone who says, ‘it’s just a game’ is missing the point.” Please tell me about this Law, and about what makes an online world a service, a world and a community rather than “just a game.”

Designer Dragon: What led me to come up with it? I don’t think I came up with it at all. You see people who have been doing online games for any length of time patiently trying to get this point across to those who don’t understand it. I just stated it a bit more baldly, I guess. I think the key here is that “just a game” is a common excuse used by those who want to minimize the importance of what happens online in this sort of environment. “You playerkilled me!” “Relax, it’s just a game.” But even if it is a game, the emotions that you feel while playing are real emotions, and the people on the other side of the screen are real people… There’s also the important adjustment that traditional box software companies have to make when they publish an online world game – it really is a different business model, a different marketing challenge, a different thing altogether. You have to treat it like a service industry – like cable TV, or phone service. Ultimately, whoever is making this sort of game is making a virtual space for players to interact in. To a large extent, the game itself is superfluous. It’s about the other people.

Jonric: How important are community and community-building for an online world? Is the level of importance the same for all of them? Do different types of online worlds have different types of communities?

Designer Dragon: Community is absolutely critical. If you don’t have a community in your game, its growth will almost certainly be stunted. Different types of online games of course have different types of community, but fundamentally, they all offer SOME degree of community formation, because they can’t help it. As soon as you put people together in a shared space with some goals in common, they will start to form social bonds. Where they differ is in the character of the communities, in the tools and facilities that they provide to the players for community-building.

Jonric: Does a community just happen by itself? What factors most affect the extent to which a game develops a strong community?

Designer Dragon: Some degree of community does happen by itself. If the game doesn’t provide enough facilities for community, then the community will move outside the game and develop on websites, mailing lists, in IRC channels, or whatever. You get community for free, simply because you have a group of people with shared interests and common goals. But you have to shape the community, and tie it to your particular game. Good communication structures, ways for players to forge strong individual and group identities, a sense of history to the environment… there are many tactics.

Jonric: About these tactics… what can designers do to promote the initial growth and the continuing vitality of a game’s community?

Designer Dragon: As a rule, anything which helps a player quickly feel like they are a part of the world helps. Anything which helps them feel special or unique. Stuff that keeps them from interacting with other players tends to be bad. As far as ways to keep the community growing – you have to give it the facilities to grow within the game. If you don’t have things like in-game guild systems or other ways for groups to define themselves, then they will have to do so outside the game, and that means that you’re not helping them enough.

Jonric: Does the sense of community differ if a game encourages or requires coop group play compared to one in which it is relatively easy for a player to adventure solo?

Designer Dragon: You know, I am not sure it does differ. Yes, obliging players to depend on one another and forcing them to interact helps form those bonds, but they do happen without forced grouping or interdependence. So, encouraging group play is always good, since it is a multi-player game. But requiring it may be overkill, if just encouragement gets the job done.

Jonric: Do you feel the nature of a game’s community is affected by the presence or absence of non-consensual Player versus Player combat?

Designer Dragon: I think it is affected a lot. A society encompasses many types of people, and the strongest societies are those that embrace that range of difference. Homogeneous cultures tend to die off. So conflict and different viewpoints are important. Whether the conflict takes the form of player vs player combat seems immaterial to me, as long as there are mediums for competition of some sort. Beyond that, I feel that the ability of players to engage in player vs player combat encourages group activity and socialization. The bad guys are forever getting together to do raids, the good guys are organizing police forces. It adds a very interesting dynamic. Of course, there’s plenty of people out there who don’t want to have PvP impinge upon their experience in any way, and if PvP gets out of hand, they will be very unhappy. It’s quite a juggling act to have non-consensual PvP in your game.

Jonric: Can you perhaps elaborate on the community-building dynamic inherent in PvP?

Designer Dragon: Being attacked tends to form community bonds very quickly, and they tend to be strong ones. Facing any kind of adversity does that – how many Reader’s Digest stories have you read about tragedies or adventures which resulted in the group being friends forever afterwards? PvP happens to be one way to get that sort of adversity in a way that matters. If you just have monsters attack a town, there’s no real significance if you win or lose – but if it’s a player-built town and actual players who will occupy it if you lose, then you’ve got something that matters that you’re fighting for. And that’s a very real psychological difference. Keep in mind, this is just MY opinion. Folks like Dr. Cat, who’s currently working on Furcadia, disagree with me on this. It’s hardly a settled issue, and there are lots of opinions on the matter!

Jonric: You noted earlier that LegendMUD uses a PK or PvP switch. What kind of impact doe this have?

Designer Dragon: A PvP switch is just one tool for managing this sort of conflict. Dividing players into opposing factions is another… redirecting the conflict into other arenas (like political systems, or something) is another route you can take. There’s dozens of ways.

Jonric: You’ve said that once you get more than 250 players, you have sub-communities rather than a single community. Why and how does this happen?

Designer Dragon: That’s actually from real world sociology and anthropology and political science. Basically, there’s only so many people you can personally know & have any sort of meaningful relationship with. Only so many people you have time to get to know. And as anyone knows, once you get enough people in a room, you’ll start to find differing opinions on things, even if they have common interests (for example, even among a room of CRPG fans, I bet I could find the real time combat guys and the turn-based ones, or the solo adventurer versus party people, or the show-me-the-stats versus the give-me-only-words people). So once you get a group of people that is large enough, subgroups will start to form, that are formed around more specific shared interests, and limited in size based on how easily they can communicate with one another. It happens way before 250. By 250, though, you can be pretty sure that you will have definite separate interest groups within the group, and it will be difficult to organize them into a single community. It’s more fruitful to have some sort of hierarchical structure. We do this in our real world political structures, too.

Jonric: How and when did you become associated with UO?

Designer Dragon: Rick Delashmit, who is now with Wombat Games, recommended my wife and I as designers for Ultima Online, which was then just getting out of the “proof of concept” stage, sometime during 1995, don’t remember exactly when. I was finishing up my MFA at the time… after some interviews and some lengthy e-mails, and after Richard Garriott logged onto LegendMUD and played around for a while, we were hired as designers. I was not the original lead designer, though.

Jonric: In what ways do you feel your background in MUDs affected the basic design philosophy of UO?

Designer Dragon: Almost all the original core team had MUD backgrounds, so it’s safe to say that said background was a major influence on UO. We wanted to push certain things that had been done in MUDs farther, and kind of shake up the “standard” designs MUDs had. We wanted to try a more player-driven environment than MUDs tend to. We wanted to have a richer and deeper world than MUDs usually do, which is why we wanted things like crafting and building houses in there. We wanted to get away from the common “level, level, level” style of gameplay in gaming MUDs. Architecturally, we borrowed elements from all the major MUD code bases in the way the architecture was set up, too. If you’re a MUDder, it’s not hard to point at aspects of UO and say, “housing is kinda MUSH-like, and the script language is a lot like LPC, and monster definitions are sort of like Diku templates…” We had team members who had worked on all those different types of MUDs, so it all went into the mix.

Jonric: Was community-building one of the core design goals for UO right from the beginning? What specific things were done to foster community growth?

Designer Dragon: In terms of community building, we wanted to support as many play styles as we could. We wanted to have the social types and the roleplayers and the hack n slashers and the PvP people co-existing in the same space, rather than having a virtual world that catered only to one subset of the possible audience. Lots of features were intended for community building. Player housing is a pretty clear one. Standard things like in-game bulletin boards. The ability to write in in-game books.

Jonric: Looking at the LegendMUD and UO communities, what do you consider the major similarities and differences to be?

Designer Dragon: Well, LegendMUD is text-only, and back when UO was getting going, had a much older audience, one that was savvier about the Internet. That’s been changing over time as more people get into the Net. There’s a fair amount of Legend players who play UO and EverQuest. I think the biggest differences in the community are that the Legend community is confined almost entirely to within the game, whereas with UO a lot of the community is externalized on discussion boards and mailing lists. Both communities are very into helping shape the game, discussing every aspect about it and communicating with the team that works on the design.

Jonric: If you were doing a UO report card, what grade would you give it in terms of community or community-building?

Designer Dragon: I’d give it a pretty high grade, but of course I am biased. I think the amazing amount of discussion surrounding every aspect of the game is a sign of the strong community. There’s just so many people intensely involved in talking about the game and what they do in it… The fact that the community extends both within the game (in the form of player-run taverns and cities) and outside is pretty amazing.

Jonric: What aspects of the UO community are you happiest about?

Designer Dragon: I think it’s probably the in-game community centers, the player-run taverns and the like. UO offers facilities for furnishing them and decorating them, and players really like that. The player-run establishments are what gives each shard its own unique flavor, and are a major part of the success of UO, to my mind.

Jonric: On the other side of the ledger, what aspects have disappointed you?

Designer Dragon: Well, we didn’t live up to everything we wanted to do, of course. From a community side, I am still disappointed that we’ve had to step in administratively as much as we have in terms of handling playerkilling and the like. I’d really love to see an online world with enough facilities and tools for players to truly run it themselves. I think it’s a great sociological experiment, and also really the future of virtual reality. UO has gone pretty far along that direction, but we’re just not there yet.

Jonric: Do you think UO and the UO community will have the same type of longevity that some MUDs have achieved?

Designer Dragon: Who knows? It’s a new dynamic, because now you’re dealing with people who are paying to play, and dealing with obsolescence in graphics that simply didn’t surface as an issue in text MUDs. A text MUD from ten years ago doesn’t look dated at a casual glance, and if they have continued to upgrade the code, it might be quite contemporary. But advances in graphical technology are instantly apparent, and may effectively make a given virtual world not commercially viable far sooner than the actual lifespan of the game might normally dictate. Then again, some of the games run by Kesmai and others have been running with their older graphics for a very long time now, and they are great games.

Jonric: Is there anything else you’d like to tell our readers, or anything you’d like to ask them?

Designer Dragon: Just that we have a great team here, and we’re really committed to UO. There’s just so much there already, and so much that can be done. I still think it’s the richest online RPG out there. A lot of that is thanks to the players – the feedback they have given us and also the things they themselves add to the game, as a community and as players with the ability to shape the world they play in.

Jonric: Having never played UO, I can’t personally relate to being a member of its community, but I certainly know a number of players who refer to is as their online home. Thanks very much for a look at what goes into creating such feelings.