Posted by: yoru @ 15:27:20 on 11/12/07
Towards the end of the last Austin conference, F13.net was lucky enough to snag a dinnertime interview slot with two of the more interesting figures in modern-day online game development: Scott Jennings, formerly Lum the Mad, and Dave Rickey, formerly of a lot of places. As neither Dave nor Scott were able to tell us about their upcoming titles, we instead did was we must, because we could: ask random questions and then try to keep out of the crossfire.
F13: So, we're here at a Mongolian barbecue restaurant with Dave Rickey and Scott "Lum" Jennings...
Scott: Don't you have a cool name?
Dave: Mahrin Skel, but what the hell.
F13: Everyone knows you as Dave anyway, it's what you sign all your posts with.
Dave: (chuckles) Yeah.
F13: So, what got you guys into the industry, what attracts you to the game industry in general?
Scott: Insanity.
Dave: It's show business for geeks. I mean, you've worked as a programmer. Did you know any programmers who didn't at least occasionally mention how they'd like to work on games?
F13: Very few.
Dave: Well, I was a programmer working on insurance rating software and inventory control systems, and I kept thinking "Gee, I really wish I could work on games!"
Scott: And I worked on databases and wrote a whiny blog.
F13: And which whiny blog was that, Scott? I think some people might not have heard of it!
Scott: And I think it's probably better they remain without that knowledge.
Dave: Thank God for web-rot.
Scott: Yeah, really. The only people who hit me up about my old website now are other game developers, it's kind of eerie. The memory of the internet is measured in microseconds.
F13: Jumping back, Dave, how did you get into the industry?
Dave: Okay, I was playing UO, and right after UO came out, I had a really bad car accident. I mean, like, month in intensive care, the whole works. Major life altering experience, I just realized there was not enough money in the world to keep doing work that bored the shit out of me. I had to do something more interesting. Right about that time, the buzz for EverQuest was picking up, I got active in the community for that, ran the EverQuest Vault for a while. I made connections inside the team and actually got a job as the assistant junior wannabe-head game master on EverQuest for Verant. And then I just kinda never looked back. I did that for about six, eight months, then I went to work for Mythic, and then I went to work for Mutable, and then I went to work for Orbis, and here I am!
F13: Scott?
Scott: Pretty much the same thing, but with different names, and like I said, there was a whiny blog in the intervening time. Basically, I was a database programmer who was woefully underutilized in my job, so in between being the human load-balancer for NT Support servers, which meant that I basically watched them and waited for them to bluescreen so I could hit the reset button.... Needless to say, this was not a constructive use of my time, so I spent a lot of time writing for my whiny blog. This was way before blogs became vogue, so writing for my whiny blog meant typing into an HTML page and uploading it to the internet. It became somewhat popular among the internet microframe group of users who played MMOs, which at the time were one, and then eventually two. And then the Dot-Com explosion happened, and the company I was at decided they couldn't afford to pay people to watch NT servers bluescreen any more, so I posted to my whiny blog "Holy crap, I'm unemployed, heeeeeeelp!" One of the people who read that was Matt Firor over at Mythic Entertainment, who said "Hey, doesn't Scott work on databases? We need a database guy. Maybe we should talk to him." So they did, and I packed up my entire life and moved to Fairfax, Virginia, and the rest is, well, not quite history but something of the sort.
F13: Collectively, what's your favorite project you've ever worked on? Why? ... Uh-oh, Dave's got a look on his face. Out with it!
Dave: Both favorite and least favorite.
F13: Sure!
Dave: I really, really had a lot of hopes for Wish and what we were planning on doing. And I was really, really disappointed in how things turned out.
F13: Why?
Dave: Well, one, because I worked on it for like seven months, we were barely started getting the stuff I wanted to do in there, and then I couldn't do it any more. And then they went on auto-pilot basically following the designs I had laid out but not calling it by its right name, for another year, and then, just kind of, it died. Moral of the story, never work for manic-depressive Germans.
Scott: What about manic-depressive Americans?
Dave: Eh, at least you speak the same language.
Scott: So in my case, the favorite project I've worked on is the one I'm currently working on, which I can't talk about at all. The reason why it's my favorite project is because it's my first chance at actually practicing what I preach, working on design. And, for some insane reason, they're actually entrusting me with coming up with all the systems design of the project. The nuts, how the game works, basically.
F13: So, how have you dealt with the transition from engineering to design?
Scott: Well, I've always been an armchair designer from back before I worked at Mythic. I mean, my entire whiny blog was basically armchair design, so it just moved from armchair design to full-chair design, I guess.
Dave: They let you design in a driveway.
Scott: Yes, they let me design in a driveway. Most people at MMO companies are frustrated designers, because design is where the cool stuff happens. Design is where you actually get to talk about gameplay and you don't have to worry about things like plumbing and how you're gonna keep the servers up and where you're going to host the database servers and things like that. It's more like the cool stuff that you actually worry about when you're off-duty and are actually playing the game you were actually working on for the previous twelve hours. And in my case, it consists of typing into a wiki a lot and pointing at other people and saying "Hey, tell me where what I'm writing is full of crack." I'm not getting a whole lot of comments on things that are full of crack, so I'm hoping we go public soon so the general public at large can tell me where I'm full of crack. I have great faith that the internet will tell me, precisely, how full of crack I am. ... Including, probably, people at this table.
(laughter)
F13: So, if you had to name three people, who would you say are the three people you look up to most in the design world, and why?
Scott: You first or me?
Dave: I'll take this first. Will Wright. I mean, probably saying the same things that everyone else puts in their top three. Definitely Will Wright, he gets the good drugs. I want some of what he's having. A lot of times Peter Molyneux, although he can get a little out there sometimes, follow an idea further than he really should. It's really hard to name a third. I'll just pass to Scott at this point.
Scott: Oddly, my list is completely different from his. First on the list is Richard Bartle, not only did he invent this whole beast, but he still has a lot to say about it, which is very interesting and usually very much on point. Oddly enough, when you think about this stuff for twenty years, you start to come up with some conclusions. It's a crying shame that he's not actually involved in a live MMO at this point. Somebody needs to hire this man, I keep saying this, I'll say it again, I'll keep saying it. Another one would be Raph Koster. I know everyone loves to bash on him, especially message boards and people who've played his games and what not. But say what you will, the man thinks deeply. He treats MMO design as a very serious challenge, he gives it the gravity that it deserves. He's responsible, more than anyone else, for pursuing MMO design as an academic discipline and as something that can actually be taken seriously. Third would probably be Shigeru Miyamoto, simply because he was the first person, the first game designer, who came up with the concept of "Hey, I'm gonna make fun stuff." Everything Miyamoto makes is fun, everything Nintendo makes when they're hitting all cylinders is fun. That's why the Wii is kicking everyone's butts right now, because it's fun! It's not the highest-level tech, it's just a repurposed Gamecube basically, with some cool hardware, but it's the cool hardware that makes it. They actually looked outside the box and said, "Hey, let's have people wave things around!" and stuff like that. It's just another way of thinking, basically.
F13: You mentioned treating game design seriously. What do you really mean by that?
Scott: Well, most people dismiss games. Most people dismiss... Okay, it's games, we're going out and we're gonna make D&D On-line, no offense to the actual D&D Online, we're not gonna think too seriously about this, we're gonna slap together some monsters, slap together some levels, put together some quests where we kill ten rats for the rat skins, because there's an inexhaustable series of people who apparently want to buy rat skins...
Dave: Beyond that, I mean... Game design is an art, but it should also be a craft. In any art, there are matters of technique. There are things that work, there are things that don't work. There are things that almost work that you do just because it's "artistic", and that's when things start to fall apart. But the point is, we're nowhere near that phase. There's a lot of matters of pure craft and technique that we still need to learn, and Raph is one of the guys who's working really hard at establishing what those issues are.
F13: Just what are some of those issues, by the way?
Dave: Just for starters, his whole game notation idea. It's an attempt to have a way of talking about games that doesn't describe them in terms of other games. Some objective reference system that isn't just pointing this way and that way...
Scott: "It's like WoW but with chimpanzees!"
Dave: Exactly.
F13: Now, you were also working kind of in that space, you've retreated in your Miyamoto Musashi manner to make games for girls. So, what are your feelings on treating design seriously, then?
Dave: Well, yeah, I mean... I think you have to. We don't know what it is, but we know it's very important. Games live or die based not on tech, but design. We are not in the technology business, we're in the entertainment business. A competent movie director can take the stupidest idea you've ever heard of, Kangaroo Jack anyone? And make a watchable movie out of it.
Scott: Kangaroo Jack was watchable?
Dave: I didn't turn it off. It was the number one movie when it was out. The point is, why can't a competent game designer take a laughable or even stupid game idea, and make something at least playable out of it? The fact that we can't do that is an indication of just how primitive our craft is. So, I was trying to figure out how to make games for people who are as unlike me as possible: 13-to-30-year-old women.
F13: So, what have you discovered over the past year, since we last spoke with you?
Scott: That he is, in fact, a 13-to-30-year-old woman.
Dave: I've gotten in touch with my feminine side.
(laughter)
Dave: No, I mean, seriously, that women do think differently than we do. And you have to be unafraid to confront stereotypes, because there's always a grain of truth at the bottom of the stereotype. I won't name specifics, because that'll get me, "Oh, you're just a male chauvinist pig, blah blah blah blah..."
Scott: Oh, I'll name specifics all day. Women are guild leaders. Men are PKs.
Dave: Women are... At the head of most powerful in-game organizations, you'll find, generally, a man-woman team. Not necessarily in a relationship, but it'll be the man that leads and the woman that is the glue that holds everything together. Almost without exception.
Scott: Women tend to be community leaders, because women tend to assume a nurturing role, whether they want to or not. And I've talked to some women who absolutely despise being thrust into the nurturing role, but they get pushed into it because they're the den mother, they're the woman. Men, on the other hand, seek to have pretty explosions, they seek to destroy. Now, of course, I'm wildly generalizing. There are plenty of female PKs, there are plenty of male guild leaders. But when you speak of stereotypes, you speak of generalities. And generally speaking, when you look at large guilds, at the core of them there's a woman somewhere.
F13: So how do you exploit these psychological tendencies, then, to draw women in as an audience?
Dave: Well, again, don't be afraid to confront the stereotypes, but don't be afraid to kick them out the door either. Women are not necessarily casual players. I told the story last interview that we did, about how my mother is hardcore at bridge and backgammon and other games played online. She puts in thirty, forty hours a week playing these things. That is not casual by anyone's definition. But everyone says, oh, but Club Penguin is casual, CyWorld is casual. If you look in there, you don't see a lot of people just putting in the five-minute game experience. They're binge-playing. They'll play that game hardcore for a week and then move to a different game. The point is, women are different in what they're looking for in their game experience, but in their actual playing habits, they're not all that different. They want a game that is fully going to engage them and is going to give them an additional life on top of the one they already have.
F13: Now, is that a matter of different mechanics, or different subject matter?
Dave: Subject matter... can be very critical. Mechanics can be critical. Women do not want to go in, in general, they do not want to go in with big guns and blow up things in huge showers of gore. There are always exceptions, but this is just general. They're much more interested in building things, in managing things, in the social environment that grows up around all the rest of this.
F13: All right, since you mentioned it earlier, where do you fall in the spectrum of considering that games should be art, or that games should be entertainment?
Dave: Yes.
F13: Yes. Explain?
Dave: Games should be art, games should be entertainment. Movies can be both art and entertainment. Movies that try to be pure art tend not to be very entertaining. Games that try to be pure entertainment tend not to be good art. What's the problem? We just need to figure out what that spectrum means for games.
F13: What do you think?
Dave: I think we're going to see a separation. We're already starting to see it with the serious game movement versus the sequelitis you see in the mainstream. And, how will it sort itself out? It probably never will. We'll still be arguing about it, just like we do with movies, we'll still be arguing about it when we're in our seventies. It'll be... it's just not going to happen. The more we know, the more questions we're gonna have.
F13: So, how do you get your research data? You found out a bit about the gaming habits of women and girls. Did you just have to iterate? How did you approach that?
Dave: Well, fortunately, I was able to start working off of what my business partner had already put together with [Virtual Horse Rancher], which was really... The core of VHR is all hers. I mean, she built it just because she wanted to play it, and then a bunch of other girls wanted to play it. It's just a matter of... you have to watch. It's a lot of cultural anthropology. You try to observe without embedding... without influencing. You spend a lot of time being there but not letting them know you're there, or at least not that you're watching. And you see how they play and what they do, and try to infer from that why they're doing it. Because, if you ask them, two people who play exactly the same ways for the same exact goals will give totally different reasons for why they're doing it. Asking them their motivations is the worst way to find out.
Scott: My personal target audience is me. So, when I do research on what I like, I peep into myself and go "What do I like?" Seriously, Dave is very brave in making games for 13-to-30-year-old girls, I do not do that. I am someone who doesn't pretend to understand what other people want, other than myself; I make what I want. I try to watch out for what other people would want, because I realize that not everyone wants to play the penultimate Russian Civil War sim where everyone dies of dysentery. But at the same time, generally, we write games that we want to play. That's how we make good games, because we're gamers ourselves. We want to play good games. I'm in the MMO industry because I really love MMOs, I really love playing MMOs, I really get off on the whole global nature of connections that MMOs have basically invented in terms of gameplay. So, in terms of what research I do, and what people do, I read a lot of boards, I try to talk to as many people as possible, but, in the end, I can't rely on... you can't do market research on what a 12-year-old thinks fun is! I can only... when it comes to fun, in Orwellian Newspeak, it's bellyfeel. It's what you think is fun. And that's something that each person can only answer individually. Now, obviously, once you get the game made, you can do market research out the ass to make sure what you've made doesn't completely suck, but when you first start attacking it, you make something you think is fun.
Dave: Beyond that, there's the old anecdote about Isaac Asimov going to give a presentation at his college about one of his stories, and the students absolutely insisting that he was totally wrong about what the meaning of his story was, and what did he know, he was just the author! And there is something deeper there. Just because you thought you were making a certain game, that's not the way everybody's going to play it. They're going to find fun in things you put in there just because they fit into a hole.
F13: So, how do you go about finding that fun then?
Scott: Finding fun?
F13: Yes.
Scott: You mean do I go out on a corner and look on a street corner...
F13: Yeah, do you root around in the trash like a hobo?
(laughter)
Scott: I guess you're asking how do you first design a game that is fun?
F13: Yeah, what's your work process like?
Scott: Well, my work process is, I start from a very vague outline of what I want the game to be and what I want the game to accomplish. Usually involves writing an executive summary. Completely theoretically, if I had to describe to the CEO of the company what I'm spending millions of his dollars on, then, you know, it's a two-page executive summary of what I want the game to be. Then you drill down to the various parts. You want combat? Okay, what is combat? How is combat gonna work? How are players gonna fight each other, ARE players gonna fight each other? Do you want crafting, if so, why? If not, why not? How is that gonna work? And you keep drilling down. Now, the problem with doing nothing but drilling down is that you lose sight of the fun, because then you're basically micromanaging every small part of it. So every so often, and this is really the lead designer's job, or the producer's job if the lead designer isn't doing anything, basically, someone has to step back and take the bird's-eye view and say, "Well, what is this game, what are you doing? If I log in, how am I going to spend an hour, what am I doing?" And, is it fun?
Dave: Where did the fun go?
Scott: Yes.
Dave: The infamous "I WILL TAXI TO VICTORY" screed? That was a case of somebody who completely lost track of where their fun was.
Scott: I had a lot of fun!
Dave: You had a lot of fun making fun of it!
Scott: Well, I was drunk.
(laughter)
Dave: But, no, they had a firm idea of what they were trying to make, but they drilled down so deep on what they were trying to make that what they wound up with what was a really rigid simulation that had taken most of the fun out for all but that hardcore grognard who doesn't mind spending three key-presses to line up a shot with his rifle.
Scott: Actually, they way they describe it now, it's seven. And apparently they posted that on their wall as an inspiration to the others.
Dave: (throwing up his hands) Okay!
Scott: So now we both have done that.
Dave: Cool.
F13: So, moving back around to something you started to say there for a second... What really inspires you to start making a game, to start designing a game? Where do you draw your ideas from?
Scott: Books, movies. When playing other games, thinking "oh, I could do so much better than that". Which, honestly, everyone does if they think more than five minutes about it. Everyone who works in the game industry has ten game design ideas in their back pocket. That's just a fact of life. And, you know, getting to actually pitch a game involves taking one of those ideas and refining it. But as far as where the idea comes from to begin with, just everyday life, you know? I was only half-joking when I said eventually I want to make a game about the Russian Civil War. That's a fascinating period of history that most people know absolutely nothing about. I mean, it would make a perfect MMO. There were many sides fighting each other almost completely at random, there was lots of drama, the Czar's gold being carried around on carriages, a Czech legion which was fighting for a nation which didn't even exist yet which was sent to Siberia for a completely different reason, there were three different Communist factions all fighting each other, oh and the Americans were there too but nobody knows about that because we don't study history. This would be a kick-ass game. But, it's a kick-ass game that I would enjoy, but would anyone else enjoy it? Probably not, unless they're a complete turbo history geek. ... Actually, I see a lot of people at the table raising their hands, which is kind of frightening me.
Dave: The problem you get, and this happens over and over again in this industry, is that we set out to make games for ourselves, and we compromise that to make it more marketable. Then we go to make the sequel, we have more authority, we make it even more like what we really wanted to make in the first place, and, in the process, refine down the available market. Maybe we get to do one more round, and the next round is something either so completely watered down and completely tasteless that nobody wants to play it or so refined that there's like ten people on the planet who actually enjoy that game.
F13: So, you mentioned movies and books. If you had to pick a passage or quote from a book, or a scene from a movie, what would you describe as your most inspirational or most influential on your design?
Scott: The scene in Return of the King, the book, where Eowyn is fighting the Nazgul lord, where Tolkien literally choreographed every blow of that fight. I mean, he literally had it in his mind. Eowyn raising her shield and having it shattered by the huge mace, and being knocked to her knees and all that. Reading that as a child, I was inspired. I wanted to be there, I wanted to pick up a sword and kick ass and fight alongside her. That was probably the most inspirational passage in literature I've ever seen in terms of gaming. And that's why we all make fantasy games, that kind of literature speaks to us. We all want to be that knight that kicks the Nazgul's ass. That's something that speaks to everyone, really.
Dave: I'm afraid mine has nothing to do with inspiration for what games to make, although it does sometimes affect the way I play them. It was a science fiction story, I don't even remember the name of the author, but the title of the story was "Stars, Won't You Hide Me." And it was all about... Basically, you have a human pilot being chased by alien pilots at relativistic speeds, time dilation... they literally chase him to the end of the universe, and because he managed to survive right to the very end, humanity didn't really lose the war. That was just inspiring to me. And sometimes, a lot of times, that's the way I'm playing a game. I'm not going to win, but damn it, I'm going to be the very last one to lose.
Scott: So reputation grinds are your fault?
Dave: Probably.
F13: You mentioned everyone wanting to be a knight or something like that... Now, I'd say a lot of games, at least in modern times, are based around that kind of adolescent power fantasy. Do you think we need to move beyond that kind of narrative in order to grow as a genre, or grow as an entertainment medium?
Scott: The problem with growing as a genre is that, remaining safe is inherently a safe bet. If you want to make a fantasy game, chances are good you're going to make some money out of it because everyone loves fantasy. If you want to make a science fiction game, it's a risk because less people buy science fiction games. If you're going to make a game about something entirely new, like history or the Old West or what have you, fighting in Ancient Greece like Perpetual's doing, that's a risk. It's not something that's been done before, and not only is it a risk to bean-counters and businesses, it's a risk to customers. Customers like the familiar. I mean, World of Warcraft sold nine million copies not because everyone was a Warcraft 3 fan, okay? It's because it's familiar, it plays on those familiar tropes. Everyone knows what an orc is, everyone knows what an elf is. Everyone knows that elves are stalwart and shining, everyone knows that orcs are bestial and they probably beat people with axes. These are narratives that don't have to be explained in great detail. You fill in the blanks. It's what I like to term narrative bandwidth. If you have a new story that you have to explain, then you have to have a lot of narrative bandwidth, you have to describe everything. If you're making high fantasy, you don't have to describe jack. You put an elf there and everybody knows what it is.
Dave: It's like, okay, you look at the movies from the thirties and forties, when they were just finally figuring out how to really make good movies. But you didn't have a lot of complexity - you had good guys, you had bad guys, you generally could always tell who was who. It wasn't until the fifties, and especially the sixties, that you started to see conflicted heroes, anti-heroes, the bad guy who reaches redemption in the last act. All of this kind of narrative depth didn't occur until both the medium and the audience had matured beyond the simplistic.
Scott: And, just to back him up, the game industry obviously is a young industry and it hasn't matured to that point. We're still making silent movies, especially in the MMO space. I mean, we're still learning how to tell stories. There's a lot of technical hurdles that we're still leaping in terms of just telling nonlinear stories. That's really hard to do. It's really hard to make a well-crafted story that millions of people can participate in simultaneously.
F13: We're still learning to keep servers up.
Scott: Well, I think we've got that down...
F13: I think you're both saying that the audience has to learn along with the developers.
Scott: Oh, absolutely, the market needs to mature, and the audience is a part of that.
F13: We've all learned what a bad guy looks like in a movie in the 21st Century, we can pick 'em out very easily, we all know what a movie is like. Do you have any ideas of what we can do in the game space, how we can help perpetuate this, help the audience learn?
Scott: A lot of that is sort of a meta-tutorial process. I mean, you train the user as part of the game process in what the story is. That's one thing that WoW does very well with their quests, is draw you in to their story, they teach you that, no the Orcs...
Dave: You want the meta-narrative on how you make more complicated good guys versus bad guys? Red vs Blue. Why is the Red side good? Because we're the Red side. Why is the Blue side bad? Because they're fighting us. We don't need any more justification, that's all that's necessary. We need more complexity than that, but that is a good start. It indicates that the players are ready to accept this absolute moral relativism, where everything is judged from where you stand. And that's the only important viewpoint, is where you stand.
F13: So, since we were bringing up stories in games, what do you think the relationship between a dense narrative, or a good narrative, and a good game is?
Scott: I think narrative has been extremely underutilized in games. I'm very much an advocate of narrative, I actually like to call it context. I like to think there's a reason things are happening. If I'm being told to kill ten wolves, I want there to be a reason to kill those ten wolves, I don't want it to be just because I have to fill the quest journal to get quest number 32 out of my journal and get five more XP. I want it to be because there's some reason the wolves are attacking the town.
Dave: And beyond that, I want there to be some resolution to it, beyond the fact that I get the shiny wolf fang dagger.
Scott: And then thirty people lined up behind me have to go kill wolves as well.
Dave: Yeah. We need to... people want to be at the center of their story, but they also want their story to have meaning. And right now we're not doing that very well. We're not giving their stories meaning except in their relationships to each other. Their relationship to the world pretty much remains unchanged because the world remains pretty much unchanged.
F13: What do we need to do to take steps towards that sort of thing? How do we inject that kind of context into a game?
Dave: Okay, well, as you know, I'm real hard-core on EVE lately. Lately being the last year and a half. Once you get out of the so-called Empire areas of EVE, everything is about the players. If the players didn't build it, it isn't there. If the players don't bring it, it's not gonna happen. Everything is about the interrelations between the players, their politics, their wars, their plans, their dreams. Yes, it seems pathetic, this is just internet spaceships, it doesn't really matter, except that it always matters, it's about the relationships, the relationships are always real, even if the world isn't.
Scott: Actually, the world is real, because it contains people and thus it is real. When you have the wars in EVE, you have the wars between Band of Brothers versus RedSwarm, GoonSwarm or whatever, those are real wars. Those are people who are fighting each other. They may not be literally picking up sticks and beating each other, but they definitely get angry enough that they just might. If you read interviews that people give, like that one that was posted on Shacknews with the Mittani, the intelligence weirdo with GoonSwarm, I mean, he is metagaming the metagame of the metagame! There's so many layers there that I don't think he knows where they are any more. How is that a part of the game any more? He's not part of the game, he is metagaming the community that has formed around the game. He is at war with another community, he is not at war in the game any more. Now, is that a bad thing or not? Probably not. He's having fun, the people he's playing with are probably having fun.
F13: That kind of overflow from a game into real life, is that something we should be encouraging? If so, how should we do so?
Dave: Everybody always reflexively says "No, we shouldn't encourage it!" because the first thing they think of is the street gangs that track each other down in Korea, guys from different PC baangs that track each other down and beat each other to a pulp.
Scott: Because nobody ever dies in Asia except because of an online game.
Dave: Exactly, we've got crime regardless. And yeah, there's stories about things that have happened in EVE, like people tracking down the enemy commander's address and going up and cutting the power to his house in the middle of a battle. Do we want to encourage that? Of course not. But on the other hand, the relationships are real. There's no reason why games should be any less a part of somebody's identity than music. Both are equally virtual, both are equally meaningless in and of themselves. Nobody thinks twice about describing someone as goth or punk or a metalhead or whatever. Why should we think twice about describing someone as a WoW player or whatever? There's no reason they can't be part of our identity. Right now, it's a niche activity, it's a little creepy. The stereotype is the guy who's in his parents' basement, with acne and 300 pounds.
Scott: It's handy to be demonized by politicians. I mean, no one has ever managed to do a political career off of "I'm pro-gaming, gamers are cool." No, instead, it's today's comic books, it's something they can safely say they're taking action against the cultural filth of America.
Dave: Hail, hail, rock and roll!
Scott: Exactly. History is repeating itself once again. Once you get gamers into the political process, and once you get gamers who are actual politicians, which is actually starting to happen... There's a legislator in Guam or something that's actually is high-level WoW raid leader.
Dave: When you think about the depth and the intricacy of the politics in EVE, and you think about the fact that the guys that are running these things are in their early or mid-twenties? And you think about what's gonna happen when these guys finally start running for office... How highly refined, compared to your typical congressional staffer, are their political skills going to be?
Scott: Yeah, they've had a lot of practice.
F13: So do you see the modern political focus on games as a social ill as a boon or a threat to gamerdom?
Scott: A threat, it's definitely a threat.
Dave: It's just that we're changing the social order. It's a socially-disruptive technology. Which is always scary. Old revolutions good, new revolutions bad. This isn't the same as rock and roll, rock and roll was just good wholesome music, and this is like, my God, the kids are actually in there!
Scott: The problem will be when you get clueless legislators that actually start making laws on things that they know nothing about. What happens if someone wakes up tomorrow and says, "there's too many people spending too much time in World of Warcraft" or "there's children being exploited in Second Life", or whatever? And then you have people start passing mandates, like they have in China, like you can only play MMOs four hours a week. And the company has to maintain that. Well what will happen is that the companies will shut MMOs down because it won't be cost-effective to maintain them in such a legislative environment.
Dave: When gaming is outlawed, only outlaws will game.
Scott: Yeah, BNetD will rise again.
F13: Okay, let me fire off our little closer here because we're already running pretty long. So, presume you had an infinite amount of time, an infinite amount of talent and an infinite amount of money. What do you make?
Dave: My own universe? I mean... at that point I'm God...
Scott: Infinite is pretty big.
F13: What I mean is, what's your dream game, what do you really want to make at the end of the day?
Dave: I don't know yet, I don't know enough about how to make games! I know what I would do as my next step is, do I know what I ultimately would make? I don't know what the limits are.
Scott: Yeah, I back that up. I mean, we're still figuring out how to make games, really. Everything is iterative, really. Players complain because there isn't the perfect game that comes out, there isn't a game that actually fulfills what everyone wants to play. Well, that's because we're still learning. And not only are we still learning, the businesses are still learning, they're still learning what's profitable, what we can do, what we want to do. I mean, WoW was a huge surprise to many designers, because it proved that massively parallel gaming was viable. By massively parallel, I mean people basically soloing to the end game. Prior to that, you had the EverQuest contingent which believed that if you didn't force people to group, the game would fail, because you wouldn't have social connections to form. Well, it turns out that people like playing their own little game in conjunction with everyone else playing their own little game, and within the world that springs up from that. So, we're still learning things like that.
Dave: At the core of it is the fact that we're talking about a social change in where people look first for their entertainment. For the last two generations, it's been television. If you had nothing better to do, you turned on the TV and found the least objectionable thing that was available. Now, if you're a gamer, what do you do if you have nothing else to do, there's nothing new on TV, nobody's going out tonight? You log in and start playing your game. That's your default leisure activity.
F13: Okay, any closing comments?
Dave: We suck.
Scott: He sucks. I rule.
F13: All right, thanks guys!
[discuss]
Scott: Don't you have a cool name?
Dave: Mahrin Skel, but what the hell.
F13: Everyone knows you as Dave anyway, it's what you sign all your posts with.
Dave: (chuckles) Yeah.
F13: So, what got you guys into the industry, what attracts you to the game industry in general?
Scott: Insanity.
Dave: It's show business for geeks. I mean, you've worked as a programmer. Did you know any programmers who didn't at least occasionally mention how they'd like to work on games?
F13: Very few.
Dave: Well, I was a programmer working on insurance rating software and inventory control systems, and I kept thinking "Gee, I really wish I could work on games!"
Scott: And I worked on databases and wrote a whiny blog.
F13: And which whiny blog was that, Scott? I think some people might not have heard of it!
Scott: And I think it's probably better they remain without that knowledge.
Dave: Thank God for web-rot.
Scott: Yeah, really. The only people who hit me up about my old website now are other game developers, it's kind of eerie. The memory of the internet is measured in microseconds.
F13: Jumping back, Dave, how did you get into the industry?
Dave: Okay, I was playing UO, and right after UO came out, I had a really bad car accident. I mean, like, month in intensive care, the whole works. Major life altering experience, I just realized there was not enough money in the world to keep doing work that bored the shit out of me. I had to do something more interesting. Right about that time, the buzz for EverQuest was picking up, I got active in the community for that, ran the EverQuest Vault for a while. I made connections inside the team and actually got a job as the assistant junior wannabe-head game master on EverQuest for Verant. And then I just kinda never looked back. I did that for about six, eight months, then I went to work for Mythic, and then I went to work for Mutable, and then I went to work for Orbis, and here I am!
F13: Scott?
Scott: Pretty much the same thing, but with different names, and like I said, there was a whiny blog in the intervening time. Basically, I was a database programmer who was woefully underutilized in my job, so in between being the human load-balancer for NT Support servers, which meant that I basically watched them and waited for them to bluescreen so I could hit the reset button.... Needless to say, this was not a constructive use of my time, so I spent a lot of time writing for my whiny blog. This was way before blogs became vogue, so writing for my whiny blog meant typing into an HTML page and uploading it to the internet. It became somewhat popular among the internet microframe group of users who played MMOs, which at the time were one, and then eventually two. And then the Dot-Com explosion happened, and the company I was at decided they couldn't afford to pay people to watch NT servers bluescreen any more, so I posted to my whiny blog "Holy crap, I'm unemployed, heeeeeeelp!" One of the people who read that was Matt Firor over at Mythic Entertainment, who said "Hey, doesn't Scott work on databases? We need a database guy. Maybe we should talk to him." So they did, and I packed up my entire life and moved to Fairfax, Virginia, and the rest is, well, not quite history but something of the sort.
F13: Collectively, what's your favorite project you've ever worked on? Why? ... Uh-oh, Dave's got a look on his face. Out with it!
Dave: Both favorite and least favorite.
F13: Sure!
Dave: I really, really had a lot of hopes for Wish and what we were planning on doing. And I was really, really disappointed in how things turned out.
F13: Why?
Dave: Well, one, because I worked on it for like seven months, we were barely started getting the stuff I wanted to do in there, and then I couldn't do it any more. And then they went on auto-pilot basically following the designs I had laid out but not calling it by its right name, for another year, and then, just kind of, it died. Moral of the story, never work for manic-depressive Germans.
Scott: What about manic-depressive Americans?
Dave: Eh, at least you speak the same language.
Scott: So in my case, the favorite project I've worked on is the one I'm currently working on, which I can't talk about at all. The reason why it's my favorite project is because it's my first chance at actually practicing what I preach, working on design. And, for some insane reason, they're actually entrusting me with coming up with all the systems design of the project. The nuts, how the game works, basically.
F13: So, how have you dealt with the transition from engineering to design?
Scott: Well, I've always been an armchair designer from back before I worked at Mythic. I mean, my entire whiny blog was basically armchair design, so it just moved from armchair design to full-chair design, I guess.
Dave: They let you design in a driveway.
Scott: Yes, they let me design in a driveway. Most people at MMO companies are frustrated designers, because design is where the cool stuff happens. Design is where you actually get to talk about gameplay and you don't have to worry about things like plumbing and how you're gonna keep the servers up and where you're going to host the database servers and things like that. It's more like the cool stuff that you actually worry about when you're off-duty and are actually playing the game you were actually working on for the previous twelve hours. And in my case, it consists of typing into a wiki a lot and pointing at other people and saying "Hey, tell me where what I'm writing is full of crack." I'm not getting a whole lot of comments on things that are full of crack, so I'm hoping we go public soon so the general public at large can tell me where I'm full of crack. I have great faith that the internet will tell me, precisely, how full of crack I am. ... Including, probably, people at this table.
(laughter)
F13: So, if you had to name three people, who would you say are the three people you look up to most in the design world, and why?
Scott: You first or me?
Dave: I'll take this first. Will Wright. I mean, probably saying the same things that everyone else puts in their top three. Definitely Will Wright, he gets the good drugs. I want some of what he's having. A lot of times Peter Molyneux, although he can get a little out there sometimes, follow an idea further than he really should. It's really hard to name a third. I'll just pass to Scott at this point.
Scott: Oddly, my list is completely different from his. First on the list is Richard Bartle, not only did he invent this whole beast, but he still has a lot to say about it, which is very interesting and usually very much on point. Oddly enough, when you think about this stuff for twenty years, you start to come up with some conclusions. It's a crying shame that he's not actually involved in a live MMO at this point. Somebody needs to hire this man, I keep saying this, I'll say it again, I'll keep saying it. Another one would be Raph Koster. I know everyone loves to bash on him, especially message boards and people who've played his games and what not. But say what you will, the man thinks deeply. He treats MMO design as a very serious challenge, he gives it the gravity that it deserves. He's responsible, more than anyone else, for pursuing MMO design as an academic discipline and as something that can actually be taken seriously. Third would probably be Shigeru Miyamoto, simply because he was the first person, the first game designer, who came up with the concept of "Hey, I'm gonna make fun stuff." Everything Miyamoto makes is fun, everything Nintendo makes when they're hitting all cylinders is fun. That's why the Wii is kicking everyone's butts right now, because it's fun! It's not the highest-level tech, it's just a repurposed Gamecube basically, with some cool hardware, but it's the cool hardware that makes it. They actually looked outside the box and said, "Hey, let's have people wave things around!" and stuff like that. It's just another way of thinking, basically.
F13: You mentioned treating game design seriously. What do you really mean by that?
Scott: Well, most people dismiss games. Most people dismiss... Okay, it's games, we're going out and we're gonna make D&D On-line, no offense to the actual D&D Online, we're not gonna think too seriously about this, we're gonna slap together some monsters, slap together some levels, put together some quests where we kill ten rats for the rat skins, because there's an inexhaustable series of people who apparently want to buy rat skins...
Dave: Beyond that, I mean... Game design is an art, but it should also be a craft. In any art, there are matters of technique. There are things that work, there are things that don't work. There are things that almost work that you do just because it's "artistic", and that's when things start to fall apart. But the point is, we're nowhere near that phase. There's a lot of matters of pure craft and technique that we still need to learn, and Raph is one of the guys who's working really hard at establishing what those issues are.
F13: Just what are some of those issues, by the way?
Dave: Just for starters, his whole game notation idea. It's an attempt to have a way of talking about games that doesn't describe them in terms of other games. Some objective reference system that isn't just pointing this way and that way...
Scott: "It's like WoW but with chimpanzees!"
Dave: Exactly.
F13: Now, you were also working kind of in that space, you've retreated in your Miyamoto Musashi manner to make games for girls. So, what are your feelings on treating design seriously, then?
Dave: Well, yeah, I mean... I think you have to. We don't know what it is, but we know it's very important. Games live or die based not on tech, but design. We are not in the technology business, we're in the entertainment business. A competent movie director can take the stupidest idea you've ever heard of, Kangaroo Jack anyone? And make a watchable movie out of it.
Scott: Kangaroo Jack was watchable?
Dave: I didn't turn it off. It was the number one movie when it was out. The point is, why can't a competent game designer take a laughable or even stupid game idea, and make something at least playable out of it? The fact that we can't do that is an indication of just how primitive our craft is. So, I was trying to figure out how to make games for people who are as unlike me as possible: 13-to-30-year-old women.
F13: So, what have you discovered over the past year, since we last spoke with you?
Scott: That he is, in fact, a 13-to-30-year-old woman.
Dave: I've gotten in touch with my feminine side.
(laughter)
Dave: No, I mean, seriously, that women do think differently than we do. And you have to be unafraid to confront stereotypes, because there's always a grain of truth at the bottom of the stereotype. I won't name specifics, because that'll get me, "Oh, you're just a male chauvinist pig, blah blah blah blah..."
Scott: Oh, I'll name specifics all day. Women are guild leaders. Men are PKs.
Dave: Women are... At the head of most powerful in-game organizations, you'll find, generally, a man-woman team. Not necessarily in a relationship, but it'll be the man that leads and the woman that is the glue that holds everything together. Almost without exception.
Scott: Women tend to be community leaders, because women tend to assume a nurturing role, whether they want to or not. And I've talked to some women who absolutely despise being thrust into the nurturing role, but they get pushed into it because they're the den mother, they're the woman. Men, on the other hand, seek to have pretty explosions, they seek to destroy. Now, of course, I'm wildly generalizing. There are plenty of female PKs, there are plenty of male guild leaders. But when you speak of stereotypes, you speak of generalities. And generally speaking, when you look at large guilds, at the core of them there's a woman somewhere.
F13: So how do you exploit these psychological tendencies, then, to draw women in as an audience?
Dave: Well, again, don't be afraid to confront the stereotypes, but don't be afraid to kick them out the door either. Women are not necessarily casual players. I told the story last interview that we did, about how my mother is hardcore at bridge and backgammon and other games played online. She puts in thirty, forty hours a week playing these things. That is not casual by anyone's definition. But everyone says, oh, but Club Penguin is casual, CyWorld is casual. If you look in there, you don't see a lot of people just putting in the five-minute game experience. They're binge-playing. They'll play that game hardcore for a week and then move to a different game. The point is, women are different in what they're looking for in their game experience, but in their actual playing habits, they're not all that different. They want a game that is fully going to engage them and is going to give them an additional life on top of the one they already have.
F13: Now, is that a matter of different mechanics, or different subject matter?
Dave: Subject matter... can be very critical. Mechanics can be critical. Women do not want to go in, in general, they do not want to go in with big guns and blow up things in huge showers of gore. There are always exceptions, but this is just general. They're much more interested in building things, in managing things, in the social environment that grows up around all the rest of this.
F13: All right, since you mentioned it earlier, where do you fall in the spectrum of considering that games should be art, or that games should be entertainment?
Dave: Yes.
F13: Yes. Explain?
Dave: Games should be art, games should be entertainment. Movies can be both art and entertainment. Movies that try to be pure art tend not to be very entertaining. Games that try to be pure entertainment tend not to be good art. What's the problem? We just need to figure out what that spectrum means for games.
F13: What do you think?
Dave: I think we're going to see a separation. We're already starting to see it with the serious game movement versus the sequelitis you see in the mainstream. And, how will it sort itself out? It probably never will. We'll still be arguing about it, just like we do with movies, we'll still be arguing about it when we're in our seventies. It'll be... it's just not going to happen. The more we know, the more questions we're gonna have.
F13: So, how do you get your research data? You found out a bit about the gaming habits of women and girls. Did you just have to iterate? How did you approach that?
Dave: Well, fortunately, I was able to start working off of what my business partner had already put together with [Virtual Horse Rancher], which was really... The core of VHR is all hers. I mean, she built it just because she wanted to play it, and then a bunch of other girls wanted to play it. It's just a matter of... you have to watch. It's a lot of cultural anthropology. You try to observe without embedding... without influencing. You spend a lot of time being there but not letting them know you're there, or at least not that you're watching. And you see how they play and what they do, and try to infer from that why they're doing it. Because, if you ask them, two people who play exactly the same ways for the same exact goals will give totally different reasons for why they're doing it. Asking them their motivations is the worst way to find out.
Scott: My personal target audience is me. So, when I do research on what I like, I peep into myself and go "What do I like?" Seriously, Dave is very brave in making games for 13-to-30-year-old girls, I do not do that. I am someone who doesn't pretend to understand what other people want, other than myself; I make what I want. I try to watch out for what other people would want, because I realize that not everyone wants to play the penultimate Russian Civil War sim where everyone dies of dysentery. But at the same time, generally, we write games that we want to play. That's how we make good games, because we're gamers ourselves. We want to play good games. I'm in the MMO industry because I really love MMOs, I really love playing MMOs, I really get off on the whole global nature of connections that MMOs have basically invented in terms of gameplay. So, in terms of what research I do, and what people do, I read a lot of boards, I try to talk to as many people as possible, but, in the end, I can't rely on... you can't do market research on what a 12-year-old thinks fun is! I can only... when it comes to fun, in Orwellian Newspeak, it's bellyfeel. It's what you think is fun. And that's something that each person can only answer individually. Now, obviously, once you get the game made, you can do market research out the ass to make sure what you've made doesn't completely suck, but when you first start attacking it, you make something you think is fun.
Dave: Beyond that, there's the old anecdote about Isaac Asimov going to give a presentation at his college about one of his stories, and the students absolutely insisting that he was totally wrong about what the meaning of his story was, and what did he know, he was just the author! And there is something deeper there. Just because you thought you were making a certain game, that's not the way everybody's going to play it. They're going to find fun in things you put in there just because they fit into a hole.
F13: So, how do you go about finding that fun then?
Scott: Finding fun?
F13: Yes.
Scott: You mean do I go out on a corner and look on a street corner...
F13: Yeah, do you root around in the trash like a hobo?
(laughter)
Scott: I guess you're asking how do you first design a game that is fun?
F13: Yeah, what's your work process like?
Scott: Well, my work process is, I start from a very vague outline of what I want the game to be and what I want the game to accomplish. Usually involves writing an executive summary. Completely theoretically, if I had to describe to the CEO of the company what I'm spending millions of his dollars on, then, you know, it's a two-page executive summary of what I want the game to be. Then you drill down to the various parts. You want combat? Okay, what is combat? How is combat gonna work? How are players gonna fight each other, ARE players gonna fight each other? Do you want crafting, if so, why? If not, why not? How is that gonna work? And you keep drilling down. Now, the problem with doing nothing but drilling down is that you lose sight of the fun, because then you're basically micromanaging every small part of it. So every so often, and this is really the lead designer's job, or the producer's job if the lead designer isn't doing anything, basically, someone has to step back and take the bird's-eye view and say, "Well, what is this game, what are you doing? If I log in, how am I going to spend an hour, what am I doing?" And, is it fun?
Dave: Where did the fun go?
Scott: Yes.
Dave: The infamous "I WILL TAXI TO VICTORY" screed? That was a case of somebody who completely lost track of where their fun was.
Scott: I had a lot of fun!
Dave: You had a lot of fun making fun of it!
Scott: Well, I was drunk.
(laughter)
Dave: But, no, they had a firm idea of what they were trying to make, but they drilled down so deep on what they were trying to make that what they wound up with what was a really rigid simulation that had taken most of the fun out for all but that hardcore grognard who doesn't mind spending three key-presses to line up a shot with his rifle.
Scott: Actually, they way they describe it now, it's seven. And apparently they posted that on their wall as an inspiration to the others.
Dave: (throwing up his hands) Okay!
Scott: So now we both have done that.
Dave: Cool.
F13: So, moving back around to something you started to say there for a second... What really inspires you to start making a game, to start designing a game? Where do you draw your ideas from?
Scott: Books, movies. When playing other games, thinking "oh, I could do so much better than that". Which, honestly, everyone does if they think more than five minutes about it. Everyone who works in the game industry has ten game design ideas in their back pocket. That's just a fact of life. And, you know, getting to actually pitch a game involves taking one of those ideas and refining it. But as far as where the idea comes from to begin with, just everyday life, you know? I was only half-joking when I said eventually I want to make a game about the Russian Civil War. That's a fascinating period of history that most people know absolutely nothing about. I mean, it would make a perfect MMO. There were many sides fighting each other almost completely at random, there was lots of drama, the Czar's gold being carried around on carriages, a Czech legion which was fighting for a nation which didn't even exist yet which was sent to Siberia for a completely different reason, there were three different Communist factions all fighting each other, oh and the Americans were there too but nobody knows about that because we don't study history. This would be a kick-ass game. But, it's a kick-ass game that I would enjoy, but would anyone else enjoy it? Probably not, unless they're a complete turbo history geek. ... Actually, I see a lot of people at the table raising their hands, which is kind of frightening me.
Dave: The problem you get, and this happens over and over again in this industry, is that we set out to make games for ourselves, and we compromise that to make it more marketable. Then we go to make the sequel, we have more authority, we make it even more like what we really wanted to make in the first place, and, in the process, refine down the available market. Maybe we get to do one more round, and the next round is something either so completely watered down and completely tasteless that nobody wants to play it or so refined that there's like ten people on the planet who actually enjoy that game.
F13: So, you mentioned movies and books. If you had to pick a passage or quote from a book, or a scene from a movie, what would you describe as your most inspirational or most influential on your design?
Scott: The scene in Return of the King, the book, where Eowyn is fighting the Nazgul lord, where Tolkien literally choreographed every blow of that fight. I mean, he literally had it in his mind. Eowyn raising her shield and having it shattered by the huge mace, and being knocked to her knees and all that. Reading that as a child, I was inspired. I wanted to be there, I wanted to pick up a sword and kick ass and fight alongside her. That was probably the most inspirational passage in literature I've ever seen in terms of gaming. And that's why we all make fantasy games, that kind of literature speaks to us. We all want to be that knight that kicks the Nazgul's ass. That's something that speaks to everyone, really.
Dave: I'm afraid mine has nothing to do with inspiration for what games to make, although it does sometimes affect the way I play them. It was a science fiction story, I don't even remember the name of the author, but the title of the story was "Stars, Won't You Hide Me." And it was all about... Basically, you have a human pilot being chased by alien pilots at relativistic speeds, time dilation... they literally chase him to the end of the universe, and because he managed to survive right to the very end, humanity didn't really lose the war. That was just inspiring to me. And sometimes, a lot of times, that's the way I'm playing a game. I'm not going to win, but damn it, I'm going to be the very last one to lose.
Scott: So reputation grinds are your fault?
Dave: Probably.
F13: You mentioned everyone wanting to be a knight or something like that... Now, I'd say a lot of games, at least in modern times, are based around that kind of adolescent power fantasy. Do you think we need to move beyond that kind of narrative in order to grow as a genre, or grow as an entertainment medium?
Scott: The problem with growing as a genre is that, remaining safe is inherently a safe bet. If you want to make a fantasy game, chances are good you're going to make some money out of it because everyone loves fantasy. If you want to make a science fiction game, it's a risk because less people buy science fiction games. If you're going to make a game about something entirely new, like history or the Old West or what have you, fighting in Ancient Greece like Perpetual's doing, that's a risk. It's not something that's been done before, and not only is it a risk to bean-counters and businesses, it's a risk to customers. Customers like the familiar. I mean, World of Warcraft sold nine million copies not because everyone was a Warcraft 3 fan, okay? It's because it's familiar, it plays on those familiar tropes. Everyone knows what an orc is, everyone knows what an elf is. Everyone knows that elves are stalwart and shining, everyone knows that orcs are bestial and they probably beat people with axes. These are narratives that don't have to be explained in great detail. You fill in the blanks. It's what I like to term narrative bandwidth. If you have a new story that you have to explain, then you have to have a lot of narrative bandwidth, you have to describe everything. If you're making high fantasy, you don't have to describe jack. You put an elf there and everybody knows what it is.
Dave: It's like, okay, you look at the movies from the thirties and forties, when they were just finally figuring out how to really make good movies. But you didn't have a lot of complexity - you had good guys, you had bad guys, you generally could always tell who was who. It wasn't until the fifties, and especially the sixties, that you started to see conflicted heroes, anti-heroes, the bad guy who reaches redemption in the last act. All of this kind of narrative depth didn't occur until both the medium and the audience had matured beyond the simplistic.
Scott: And, just to back him up, the game industry obviously is a young industry and it hasn't matured to that point. We're still making silent movies, especially in the MMO space. I mean, we're still learning how to tell stories. There's a lot of technical hurdles that we're still leaping in terms of just telling nonlinear stories. That's really hard to do. It's really hard to make a well-crafted story that millions of people can participate in simultaneously.
F13: We're still learning to keep servers up.
Scott: Well, I think we've got that down...
F13: I think you're both saying that the audience has to learn along with the developers.
Scott: Oh, absolutely, the market needs to mature, and the audience is a part of that.
F13: We've all learned what a bad guy looks like in a movie in the 21st Century, we can pick 'em out very easily, we all know what a movie is like. Do you have any ideas of what we can do in the game space, how we can help perpetuate this, help the audience learn?
Scott: A lot of that is sort of a meta-tutorial process. I mean, you train the user as part of the game process in what the story is. That's one thing that WoW does very well with their quests, is draw you in to their story, they teach you that, no the Orcs...
Dave: You want the meta-narrative on how you make more complicated good guys versus bad guys? Red vs Blue. Why is the Red side good? Because we're the Red side. Why is the Blue side bad? Because they're fighting us. We don't need any more justification, that's all that's necessary. We need more complexity than that, but that is a good start. It indicates that the players are ready to accept this absolute moral relativism, where everything is judged from where you stand. And that's the only important viewpoint, is where you stand.
F13: So, since we were bringing up stories in games, what do you think the relationship between a dense narrative, or a good narrative, and a good game is?
Scott: I think narrative has been extremely underutilized in games. I'm very much an advocate of narrative, I actually like to call it context. I like to think there's a reason things are happening. If I'm being told to kill ten wolves, I want there to be a reason to kill those ten wolves, I don't want it to be just because I have to fill the quest journal to get quest number 32 out of my journal and get five more XP. I want it to be because there's some reason the wolves are attacking the town.
Dave: And beyond that, I want there to be some resolution to it, beyond the fact that I get the shiny wolf fang dagger.
Scott: And then thirty people lined up behind me have to go kill wolves as well.
Dave: Yeah. We need to... people want to be at the center of their story, but they also want their story to have meaning. And right now we're not doing that very well. We're not giving their stories meaning except in their relationships to each other. Their relationship to the world pretty much remains unchanged because the world remains pretty much unchanged.
F13: What do we need to do to take steps towards that sort of thing? How do we inject that kind of context into a game?
Dave: Okay, well, as you know, I'm real hard-core on EVE lately. Lately being the last year and a half. Once you get out of the so-called Empire areas of EVE, everything is about the players. If the players didn't build it, it isn't there. If the players don't bring it, it's not gonna happen. Everything is about the interrelations between the players, their politics, their wars, their plans, their dreams. Yes, it seems pathetic, this is just internet spaceships, it doesn't really matter, except that it always matters, it's about the relationships, the relationships are always real, even if the world isn't.
Scott: Actually, the world is real, because it contains people and thus it is real. When you have the wars in EVE, you have the wars between Band of Brothers versus RedSwarm, GoonSwarm or whatever, those are real wars. Those are people who are fighting each other. They may not be literally picking up sticks and beating each other, but they definitely get angry enough that they just might. If you read interviews that people give, like that one that was posted on Shacknews with the Mittani, the intelligence weirdo with GoonSwarm, I mean, he is metagaming the metagame of the metagame! There's so many layers there that I don't think he knows where they are any more. How is that a part of the game any more? He's not part of the game, he is metagaming the community that has formed around the game. He is at war with another community, he is not at war in the game any more. Now, is that a bad thing or not? Probably not. He's having fun, the people he's playing with are probably having fun.
F13: That kind of overflow from a game into real life, is that something we should be encouraging? If so, how should we do so?
Dave: Everybody always reflexively says "No, we shouldn't encourage it!" because the first thing they think of is the street gangs that track each other down in Korea, guys from different PC baangs that track each other down and beat each other to a pulp.
Scott: Because nobody ever dies in Asia except because of an online game.
Dave: Exactly, we've got crime regardless. And yeah, there's stories about things that have happened in EVE, like people tracking down the enemy commander's address and going up and cutting the power to his house in the middle of a battle. Do we want to encourage that? Of course not. But on the other hand, the relationships are real. There's no reason why games should be any less a part of somebody's identity than music. Both are equally virtual, both are equally meaningless in and of themselves. Nobody thinks twice about describing someone as goth or punk or a metalhead or whatever. Why should we think twice about describing someone as a WoW player or whatever? There's no reason they can't be part of our identity. Right now, it's a niche activity, it's a little creepy. The stereotype is the guy who's in his parents' basement, with acne and 300 pounds.
Scott: It's handy to be demonized by politicians. I mean, no one has ever managed to do a political career off of "I'm pro-gaming, gamers are cool." No, instead, it's today's comic books, it's something they can safely say they're taking action against the cultural filth of America.
Dave: Hail, hail, rock and roll!
Scott: Exactly. History is repeating itself once again. Once you get gamers into the political process, and once you get gamers who are actual politicians, which is actually starting to happen... There's a legislator in Guam or something that's actually is high-level WoW raid leader.
Dave: When you think about the depth and the intricacy of the politics in EVE, and you think about the fact that the guys that are running these things are in their early or mid-twenties? And you think about what's gonna happen when these guys finally start running for office... How highly refined, compared to your typical congressional staffer, are their political skills going to be?
Scott: Yeah, they've had a lot of practice.
F13: So do you see the modern political focus on games as a social ill as a boon or a threat to gamerdom?
Scott: A threat, it's definitely a threat.
Dave: It's just that we're changing the social order. It's a socially-disruptive technology. Which is always scary. Old revolutions good, new revolutions bad. This isn't the same as rock and roll, rock and roll was just good wholesome music, and this is like, my God, the kids are actually in there!
Scott: The problem will be when you get clueless legislators that actually start making laws on things that they know nothing about. What happens if someone wakes up tomorrow and says, "there's too many people spending too much time in World of Warcraft" or "there's children being exploited in Second Life", or whatever? And then you have people start passing mandates, like they have in China, like you can only play MMOs four hours a week. And the company has to maintain that. Well what will happen is that the companies will shut MMOs down because it won't be cost-effective to maintain them in such a legislative environment.
Dave: When gaming is outlawed, only outlaws will game.
Scott: Yeah, BNetD will rise again.
F13: Okay, let me fire off our little closer here because we're already running pretty long. So, presume you had an infinite amount of time, an infinite amount of talent and an infinite amount of money. What do you make?
Dave: My own universe? I mean... at that point I'm God...
Scott: Infinite is pretty big.
F13: What I mean is, what's your dream game, what do you really want to make at the end of the day?
Dave: I don't know yet, I don't know enough about how to make games! I know what I would do as my next step is, do I know what I ultimately would make? I don't know what the limits are.
Scott: Yeah, I back that up. I mean, we're still figuring out how to make games, really. Everything is iterative, really. Players complain because there isn't the perfect game that comes out, there isn't a game that actually fulfills what everyone wants to play. Well, that's because we're still learning. And not only are we still learning, the businesses are still learning, they're still learning what's profitable, what we can do, what we want to do. I mean, WoW was a huge surprise to many designers, because it proved that massively parallel gaming was viable. By massively parallel, I mean people basically soloing to the end game. Prior to that, you had the EverQuest contingent which believed that if you didn't force people to group, the game would fail, because you wouldn't have social connections to form. Well, it turns out that people like playing their own little game in conjunction with everyone else playing their own little game, and within the world that springs up from that. So, we're still learning things like that.
Dave: At the core of it is the fact that we're talking about a social change in where people look first for their entertainment. For the last two generations, it's been television. If you had nothing better to do, you turned on the TV and found the least objectionable thing that was available. Now, if you're a gamer, what do you do if you have nothing else to do, there's nothing new on TV, nobody's going out tonight? You log in and start playing your game. That's your default leisure activity.
F13: Okay, any closing comments?
Dave: We suck.
Scott: He sucks. I rule.
F13: All right, thanks guys!
[discuss]