Raph Koster talks Areae

Raph Koster‘s pre-Christmas announcement about his new project Areae kicked off digital mountains of speculation about what the celebrated game and virtual world designer (and prolific blogger) had up his sleeve. The details out there are sketchy, often scraped together through a combination of information fragments, rare snippets of insider knowledge and raftloads of speculation, so I contacted Raph to find out just what this new MMOG-meets-Web 2.0 project is all about.

There’s been a huge amount of speculation about your new project, Areae. Most of it centres around the marriage of MMOs and Web 2.0 applications. Why marry these? It’s clear that the Web has developed tremendously in the last decade. We have better applications, way better interactivity and interfaces, much more agile development, open standards and APIs all over the place… On the other hand, the MMO world still looks much like it did in 1996-1997. We have big proprietary closed services, with no interoperable data, specialized clients – basically, it all looks like AOL used to.

I think there is a lot for each side to learn from each other. A lot of the web services have gotten more interactive, but not more compelling – there’s a lot that games can teach about incentive structures, feedback, and well, just plain fun. People tend to like all the game-like features on websites, like collecting stuff, ratings, badges, rankings, and the like. And on the flip side, I think that games have a lot to learn from the way the Web works today, from almost every angle. Some of those lessons are the same ones that other content industries are learning rather painfully: about new distribution models, digital delivery, the value of free content, DRM, and so on… and others are about things like different development practices, “launch early, launch often,” rapid feedback cycles listening to users, that sort of thing.

Looking at the Areae advisory board, you’ve got a nice mix of game developers and web community gurus. What can game developers offer Web 2.0 creators? The fact is that Web 2.0 is increasingly encroaching on entertainment’s turf. It tends to be shallower, less immersive entertainment than the big budget productions that the traditional publishers create, but it’s still entertainment. There’s now a massive and rapidly expanding ecology of games and game developers that bypass the mainstream industry altogether, and a lot of those folks are approaching it from the web side: stuff like Club Penguin, Gaia Online, Habbo Hotel, and so on, aren’t the sort of thing that would ever be made only within the game industry.

If I had to identify the big things that web developers can learn more about from game developers, I’d say it’s about flow, entertaining the user, content, direction, incentive structures.

What can Web 2.0 creators offer game developers? I actually wrote a whole post covering this on my blog a while back.

I think a lot of what the game world can learn harkens back to the old cathedral and bazaar thing. Games are clearly cathedrals, as built right now. Each one is a moon shoot. (That’s why we get so little innovation in the games, really: the costs are so high that is limits innovation). I’d say that chief virtues the Web has that games could emulate include the notions of digital distribution – basically, an acknowledgement that we basically sell worthless bits, and have to reach an accommodation with the current world on that -, the notion of products as platforms, particularly data-driven platforms. Games tend to be one-shot special case code. The notion of the KISS [Keep It Simple, Stupid] principle, because again, games are basically baroque in their complexity both as code and often in the user interaction model. And lastly, a lot of the web characteristics like “small pieces loosely joined,” open APIs and client agnosticism, and so on, are clearly things that are missing in the game world.

Which interactive apps have inspired you from a design perspective (perhaps even unsuccessful ones)? On the Web side, I think one is wise to look at the big hits – Amazon, eBay, MySpace, Flickr, del.icio.us, and so on, of course. But also many of the smaller things have a lot to teach. A really cool one I just saw was Geni, which is a very Web 2.0 genealogy site. Really, learning is everywhere, you just have to be open to it.

Which innovations do you feel are the most successful in practice? It’s important not to over-innovate – and by that, I don’t really mean trying too many new things, but rather not stretching beyond what the users really want. It’s all too easy to get caught up in the coolness of what you are making without pausing to consider whether anyone else actually wants it. This means that often small incremental innovations are the best way to go. But the danger there is also that if you only ever pile small stuff on top of more small stuff, you end up with these fractally complicated sorts of apps, like Microsoft Word. Sometimes you have to go back, wipe the slate clean, and question fundamental assumptions. I think each approach has its merits at different times in a product’s lifecycle.

The market for MMOGs exploded with WoW, but arguably, the worldwide population who plays them is dwarfed by the number of people who engage in Web 2.0 apps like online social networks (MySpace, for example).

Why is “game” important in Areae? The most successful social networking apps were the ones that had “something to do.” People don’t show up to just chat. They show up to chat about something. It’s just like the real world – you plan social events around activities of some sort. On something like Orkut, the only thing to do was to gather more connections. But on MySpace, clearly a lot was driven by the emphasis on music, and still is.

In our case, we think that having fun stuff to do right off the bat is incredibly important. And that’s where games come in. Practically everyone is a gamer — it’s really a question of what games they feel comfortable playing, be it bridge or Battlefield 2142.