The Past Affects the Future

Very few graphical virtual worlds that are announced as being in development actually wind up being played. This situation may change as the barriers to entry fall, but probably not significantly so.

Estimates vary, but at least a hundred graphical virtual worlds—perhaps up to two hundred—were announced in the two years following EverQuest’s launch in 1999. Some were down to wishful thinking on the part of talented (or otherwise) amateurs; some failed in preproduction because funding was not available; some failed when the money they did raise ran out; some built up a community and reached live testing before they went belly-up.

Some, however, were set to become bestsellers yet were inexplicably cancelled. Three of these were to have repercussions for the industry as a whole.

Missed Opportunities

OSI, which wrote Ultima Online, was part of Electronics Arts (EA). Given the positive effect of the Ultima name on sales, other brands from the EA stable were considered contenders for implementation as virtual worlds. Thus began the Privateer Online project. Raph Koster was installed as lead designer, with Rich Vogel as producer. Work was well advanced when the project was suddenly, bizarrely cancelled. Raph, Rich, and others were immediately snapped up by Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) to work on the Star Wars license they had recently acquired. SOE was the new name of Verant, a company spun off from 989 Studios to develop EverQuest. In other words, EA presented some of its best virtual world experts to one of its two major competitors. EA would shortly give most of its remaining experts to its other major competitor.

Ultima Online 2 was planned to be set in the same universe as UO, but to be fully 3D with an EQ-style moveable camera. Early screen shots showed it to be much superior in looks to EQ, and with Damion Schubert (of Meridian 59 fame) as lead designer and Starr Long (Rich Vogel’s predecessor at UO) as producer it was sure ¹ to be a hit. Also involved was Jeremy Gaffney, who was a founder of Turbine and had worked on Asheron’s Call.

Signs of strangeness appeared when the game was renamed as the unwieldy Ultima Worlds Online: Origin, but it wasn’t until 2001—three years into the project—that it was insanely canned.

Starr Long, Jeremy Gaffney, and most of the other talent involved left almost immediately to set up with the designer of the Ultima series itself, Richard Garriott. Their new company, Destination Games, was shortly thereafter acquired by NCSoft, developers of Lineage, who saw an opportunity to use their Korean profits to break into the American market. Jake Song moved from Korea to Austin, Texas, to work with them. Electronic Arts had done it again. They were not the only company capable of such monumental gaffes, however.

Venerable games publisher Sierra had dipped its toes in the online marketplace before, having set up The Sierra Network in 1991; they sold it in 1994 for around $50,000,000 to AT&T, who renamed it ImagiNation Network ². Sierra had maintained an interest in a virtual world called The Realm, designed by Steve Nichols, which was eventually launched early 1997. The Realm was graphical, but had separate, static 2D pictures for each location that acted as a stage across which animations of the players’ characters moved. It dated rapidly and failed to attract more than about 25,000 subscribers at its peak (late 1997). Nevertheless, it was proof of concept, and Sierra had an ace up its sleeve.

Some mainstream entertainment properties would make poor virtual worlds. The Harry Potter universe, for example, doesn’t really allow for more than one Harry Potter in it. There are three franchises, however, that are especially well suited to being embodied as graphical virtual worlds ³ and which would produce a guaranteed hit: Star Wars, Star Trek, and The Lord of the Rings. Sierra had a Lord of the Rings license.

In 1998, Steve Nichols signed up as lead designer of Middle Earth Online, along with Janus Anderson (also of The Realm), Daniel James (from a top-notch commercial text-based virtual world called Avalon), and Jay Esparza (already with Sierra). The designers were keen to discuss all aspects of the development with prospective players, and consequently generated a lot of buzz. They also generated a lot of friction with Sierra executives, who didn’t like some of what was being mooted—especially with regards to plans for the permanent death of player characters.

The project continued, however, until during a company-wide reorganization of Sierra in 1999 the opportunity was put on ice. The design team was removed. Sierra also decided to abandon The Realm because it didn’t look good against Ultima Online and it looked worse against EverQuest. The game was taken up by Codemasters and newly released Steve Nichols joined them.

The story does not quite end there, however. Sierra secretly hired a new design team to work on Middle Earth Online. This was perhaps not unrelated to the fact that the first of the Lord of the Rings movies was due to be released in 2001, which would generate massive, free publicity. Again, though, Sierra mystifyingly canned the project—although at least this time the developers, MM3D, sued.

Sierra had missed its chance. In December 2001, the movie The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was released. It grossed $155,862,412 in its first two weeks ⁴.

That is how out-of-touch management decisions shape an industry.

Theory and Practice

It should be clear by now that virtual worlds have a long and varied history—much longer and more varied than many of the people who play and design them realize. But so what?

It’s not entirely the case that only by understanding the past can people understand the future. Virtual worlds have been “invented” at least seven times (MUD1, Sceptre of Goth, Avatar, Island of Kesmai, Aradath, Monster, and Gemstone were all developed autonomously), and the designers of these games had no sense of any “past” in what they were doing. Originality is entirely possible without rehashing other people’s ideas.

However, to ignore completely what has gone before would be extremely foolish. Time and time again, designers have made the same mistakes their predecessors made, either because they were simply not aware of the earlier work or they were too arrogant to believe it could possibly be relevant to their greatly superior product.

Conversely, some designers look too hard at what has gone before. To use some admired virtual world as a prototype is fine if you fully understand that world, but very limiting if you don’t. A designer whose major experience of virtual worlds is EverQuest might, for example, think “what character classes should we have in our new game?” rather than “should we have character classes in our new game at all?” Some of the more basic assumptions go right back to MUD1, with few designers even realizing that they are assumptions, let alone that they can be questioned. That can’t be right!

Nobody wants to repeat the mistakes of the past, but people don’t always realize that what they’re repeating is a mistake. That’s because they’re learning the wrong lessons. The past delivers facts—the practice. History delivers the understanding of those facts—the theory. It provides the causal links.

This is especially true for the design of virtual worlds. Each must be conceived as a complete entity. Each one can’t really be modularized: Every component affects every other. Sometimes newspapers put together composite pictures made of the best features of famous faces—Bette Davis’ eyes, Julia Roberts’ mouth, Doris Day’s, nose and so on. The result is usually more like Frankenstein’s monster than “the world’s most beautiful woman.” So it is with virtual worlds: It doesn’t matter how perfect the parts, it’s by the whole that they are judged.

Thus, designers who know not only the choices available to them but also the wider effects of those choices are better able to create a virtual world that works than those designers who don’t.

Whither Innovation?

The design of virtual worlds proceeds by a process of evolution rather than revolution. New virtual worlds usually draw heavily from one or more “parent” worlds, even to the extent that it’s possible to map out an entire family tree for all the various codebases ¹. This being so, it is becoming increasingly important that designers of new virtual worlds become aware of innovations arising in other branches of the tree. Not only does this ensure that the best ideas spread, but there is less danger of standards problems arising from the same concept being implemented differently in different virtual worlds.

Because graphical virtual worlds take so long to develop, their designers in particular must keep an eye on what’s happening elsewhere. These games (they do tend to be games) have their own strengths, of course: Their visual representation demands new levels of virtual world physics, and the huge number of players they have opens the door to all manner of interesting developments that would be impossible on a smaller scale. However, they are still several years behind text-based virtual worlds in nearly all other areas.

Furthermore, they’ll probably stay behind for some time. When it comes to implementing new ideas, text-based worlds are more:

• Responsive: Adding a new object doesn’t mean adding a new texture map.

• Enfranchising: Many more people can write well than can draw well.

• Adaptable: Program changes can quickly be made anywhere in the system.

• Experimental: The test/edit cycle is much shorter, so changes can be made almost on impulse to be later refined, retained or rejected.

• Open: Players give new ideas more of a chance.

• Pragmatic: Players accept crashes and other failures more readily if they’re not paying.

• Tunable: Minor changes don’t mean major down-time.

• Promising: More is possible with text than with graphics.

• Robust: Balance is less of an issue with fewer players.

Besides, the consequences of a failed programmed-in-your-spare-time virtual world are far less agonizing than they would be for a $15,000,000 graphical extravaganza.

So how does a designer keep up to date?

Anyone with time on their hands ² can check out a sample of the several thousand text-based virtual worlds that there are in existence ³ if they want to find out “the word on the street.” However, as I pointed out earlier, knowing what is available without knowing the theory behind it can be disastrous. It’s therefore in the best interests of all virtual world designers to discuss ideas with one another. It isn’t for sentimental reasons that luminaries such as Raph Koster, Damion Schubert, Brad McQuaid, and Jessica Mulligan not only subscribe to the MUD-DEV ⁴ mailing list, but are active posters to it. Neither is it surprising that the best informative and speculative articles about virtual world design are being written for—and made publicly available for free by—a company specializing in immersive text-based worlds, Skotos ⁵. There’s even a print magazine, The Mud Companion ⁶.

The future of virtual world design is therefore rosy, although obviously not as rosy as it would be if people richer than Skotos were to throw money at it.

The future is just that, however: the future. There’s little point in discussing what may happen to virtual worlds unless you understand what has happened and what is happening.

The timeline I’ve presented here has outlined how things came to be the way they are in the virtual worlds of today ⁷, but it has given few hints as to what actually comprises a virtual world, let alone the wider effects of including or excluding particular components in a design.

It is to this topic that the major part of the remainder of this book is concerned.