“Doomed… you’re all doomed.”

I still sigh when I read this. But I lived off the anecdote for months.

The other day during the tutorial we ran, I had a very scary experience. I asked the audience of a few hundred, “So, how many of you have played EQ?” And four hands went up. “Really? Wow, I’m surprised,” I commented–since these days it seems like I can’t go to the grocery store without overhearing someone talk about their 23rd level necro.

“OK, how many of you played UO?” Five hands. More than EQ. Surprising. “Asheron’s Call?” Around a dozen hands–OK, it keeps getting weirder. “Other?” A few stragglers, like five maybe.

Then I asked the biggie. “How many of you are currently making or soon plan to be making a massively multiplayer online world?”

All the hands went up.

It was all I could do not to sigh into the microphone… “…doomed. You’re all doomed.”

This incident occurred at the Game Developer’s Conference in 2001, when Amy Jo Kim, Rich Vogel and I ran a tutorial together on community building for massive online worlds.