[MUD-Dev] New Yorker Article

[Dave Rickey]

Found this through Slashdot, it's a surprisingly perceptive piece that
goes *way* beyond "Gamers are wierd, and here's how wierd they can
get".  Raph presumably knows about it, since he was interviewed for
it.  As far as "Mainstream Attention", I don't think you get much more
mainstream than the New Yorker.

http://www.newyorker.com/FACT/

--Dave Rickey

<EdNote: Copied below>

--<cut>--
PIMPS AND DRAGONS
by ELIZABETH KOLBERT
How an online world survived a social breakdown.
Issue of 2001-05-28
Posted 2001-05-21

Maps of Britannia show a boomerang-shaped island with the cities of
Minoc and Vesper at the northern end, Britain and Yew in the middle,
and Trinsic in the south. The kingdom, which is stuck somewhere
between the sixth and the twelfth centuries, has a single unit of
currency, a gold piece that looks a little like a biscuit. A network
of servers is supposed to keep track of all the gold, just as it
keeps track of everything else on the island, but in late 1997 bands
of counterfeiters found a bug that allowed them to reproduce gold
pieces more or less at will. The fantastic wealth they produced for
themselves was, of course, entirely imaginary, and yet it led, in
textbook fashion, to hyperinflation. At the worst point in the
crisis, Britannia's monetary system virtually collapsed, and players
all over the kingdom were reduced to bartering.

Ever since Pong, at once goofy and mesmerizing, reached the mass
market, back in the mid-seventies, electronic gaming has moved ahead
at an improbable speed. Now, between the sales of consoles and those
of software, it is a business larger than Hollywood. Meanwhile, the
games themselves have become faster, smarter, meaner, and, in the
case of Ultima Online, more outlandish.

A "massively multi-player online role-playing game," or, only
slightly less awkwardly, an M.M.P.O.R.P.G., Ultima Online is managed
and operated by Origin Systems, a gaming company based in Austin,
which charges subscribers nine ninety-five a month to maintain a
character, or "avatar," in Britannia. Players manipulate tiny
two-dimensional figures who move jerkily through a
computer-generated landscape of spells and dragons and ridable
ostriches. The game has no beginning and no end, and there is no way
to win or lose, although it is possible to be killed. Nearly a
quarter of a million people subscribe, and each player logs an
average of thirteen hours a week, meaning that in the course of a
year Ultima absorbs more than a hundred and sixty million man-hours.

Ultima's appeal is clearly that of an escapist fantasy, yet the most
striking feature of the game's brief history is its perversely
recurrent social realism. In its original design, the game gave
players a choice of professions: they could train their avatars in
any of some three dozen fields, ranging from archery and alchemy to
animal taming. No sooner was U.O. up and running than a player
introduced a new line of work by operating two characters, one named
Jenny and the other Pimp Daddy. On top of hyperinflation, Britannia
has suffered a wave of extinctions, paralyzing hoarding, and a crime
problem so intractable that at one point the game was forced to, in
effect, split itself in half. Considered as an inadvertent and
largely unsupervised experiment, U.O. raises questions about whether
people can manage to coexist peacefully even when they don't really
exist.

After the counterfeiting bug was fixed, members of Origin's staff
decided that they needed to shrink the money supply by retiring gold
from the system. Among the various schemes that they tried was
holding an auction for a special kind of red hair dye. Players?their
characters, anyway?lined up for hours, partitions had to be built to
keep the crowds in line, and eventually guards were summoned to
prevent a riot. Apart from its attraction as a status symbol, the
red hair dye had, even within the fiction of the game, no value
whatever.

Lord British wears a silver crown and a gray tunic with a silver
serpent emblazoned on the chest. As the ruler of Britannia, he has
been a frequent target of protest; at one point, hundreds of
disgruntled citizens stripped down to their underwear, broke into
his castle, and stood around shouting (well, typing)
profanities. Lord British has the power to make himself
invulnerable; once, when he forgot to do so, he wound up dead.

Lord British is the handle of Richard Garriott, Origin's
founder. Garriott sold the company to Electronic Arts, the
computer-games giant, in 1992, for thirty million dollars, but he
continued to work there until last spring, when, as a result of what
could broadly be described as creative differences, he and
Electronic Arts parted ways. I happened to visit him one morning
just as his yearlong non-compete agreement with Electronic Arts was
about to expire, and he was preparing to formally launch yet another
computer-gaming company. His phone rang almost continuously.

Garriott, who is thirty-nine, is tall and lanky, with blondish hair
and two very long, very thin braids that hang, like tails, down his
back. He designed his own house, which sits high up on a hill not
far from Origin's offices, in north Austin. It has a network of
secret passageways, a rooftop observatory, a dungeon with a real
human skeleton, and a scuba-diving pool equipped with faucets that
issue hot and cold running rain. Garriott collects old toys, and
armor, and fossils, and models of the solar system, and a lot of
other things that are not so easily categorized, like a lunar-soil
collector called Lunakod 21, which is still on the moon and which
the Russians sold him, several years ago, for sixty thousand
dollars. It is his dream to make a space voyage himself one day?his
father, Owen, is a retired astronaut?and, to this end, he has
travelled to Moscow several times for weightlessness training. Next
spring, he is planning a submarine trip to the ocean floor beneath
the ice cap at the North Pole.

Ultima Online grew out of a series of computer games that Garriott
began designing when he was a student at the University of
Texas. The first, which he finished in 1980, was called Akalabeth;
it came on a floppy disk and could be played only on an Apple
II. Garriott was selling the game in Ziploc bags at a computer store
he was working at when a software publisher from California happened
upon it. They signed an agreement under which Garriott was to
receive five dollars for every copy of the game that was sold. By
the time he finished his freshman year, he had made a hundred and
fifty thousand dollars. A year later, he dropped out of school.

Like many other computer-driven medieval-fantasy games, Akalabeth
drew heavily on Dungeons & Dragons, which for its part had drawn on
"The Lord of the Rings." Garriott describes himself as deeply
influenced by Tolkien, who, as he points out, took an extremely
rigorous view of make-believe. "It's incredibly important for me to
know much more detail about my fictional worlds than ever comes
out," he told me, once we had settled in his office, which is
appointed with a Japanese cosmonaut's suit. "That's the only way to
give it internal consistency and integrity and build something that
is believable."

Nine successors to Akalabeth followed, called, collectively, the
Ultima Series. In each of the games, a player navigates through
various perils to help Lord British save the world from various
evils. In Ultima V, for example, subtitled "Warriors of Destiny,"
the player encounters a tribe of nasty-looking aliens who turn out,
in the end, to be trying to protect their kingdom from the
destruction that the player himself has wrought. Finishing a game
takes from fifty to a hundred hours, depending on a player's
experience and ability.

In keeping with Garriott's Tolkienism, Ultima Online is also
extraordinarily detailed, down to its most banal features. Players
can design clothes for their avatars; they can have pets and train
them to do tricks; and they can construct elaborate houses, which,
if they have the wherewithal, they can decorate with paintings and
rugs and candelabra and tchotchkes. They "talk" to one another by
typing?the words appear suspended above the characters' heads?and
they tend to use a combination of pseudo Middle English and
computerese, slipping from "thee" and "thou" to "LOL" (Laughing out
loud) and "WTF" (What the fuck?).

Many familiar elements of the Ultima Series, like Lord British,
reappear in Ultima Online, but the logic of the enterprise is
inverted. In place of the goal-driven narratives of the earlier
games is an open-endedness that leaves the player free to do pretty
much whatever he pleases?slay dragons, raise the dead, or make
shirts. U.O. features a kind of fishing, which involves gripping a
virtual pole and clicking on some virtual water. (Virtual fish bite
according to a fixed algorithm.) The activity has proved extremely
popular.

As Garriott pointed out to me, U.O. is one of the few unambiguously
profitable uses of the Internet, other than pornography. Still,
moving the game online has not been without its costs. In the
original Ultima games, the player might have been all alone, but he
did get to be the hero. In U.O., the player has to struggle for
recognition. "Playing a virtual-world game takes some getting used
to," Garriott told me. "You have to realize that the world is what
you make of it. Unfortunately, that means most likely you're going
to have a relatively mediocre life."

Britannia has some thirty "game masters," who work in
round-the-clock shifts out of a large room on the third floor of
Origin's headquarters. The room has two rows of carrels, and each
carrel is outfitted with two computers. Three-quarters of the game
masters are young men, and they seem to subsist mainly on cigarettes
and litre-sized cups of soda. One day, I spent several hours in the
room, sitting next to the young man who plays Game Master
Quinnly. Game Master Quinnly wears a red robe and tries to remain
courtly even under difficult circumstances. "Hail, I'm GM Quinnly,"
he told one young knight accused of killing a friend and then
looting his corpse. "GMs suck ass," the knight responded.

Queries come into the game masters' queue from all over the
world?"Ich sitze hier in Jail und weiss nicht weiter " was one that
I saw?and on every conceivable topic. Often, players accuse each
other of "macroing"?operating a character on an automatic program,
which is against the rules?or of exploiting bugs in the programming
to circumvent the game's limitations. There were complaints of
harassment and stealing and scamming and also several reports of
foul language?for example, "A guy named Sebell called me a faggot,"
and "Feodoric is continuing to call me a bedwetter"?which is another
violation of game protocol.

Running the game masters' room is a big expense for Origin and, to a
large degree, an unanticipated one. Britannia was supposed to be
self-policing, but instead it kept veering toward anarchy. Early on,
more experienced players figured out how to identify new characters,
or, as they are called, "newbies." In addition to being unfamiliar
with the landscape, newbies cannot defend themselves against older
characters who have had more time to collect skill points. Some
players were luring newbies out into the woods, beyond the
protection of the town guards, and killing them; others were
encouraging newbies to commit crimes, and then letting the guards
kill them. The result was a lot of players whose experience of the
game consisted mostly of being dead, a condition that discouraged
them from continuing to pay their monthly fees.

In response to the slaughter, U.O.'s designers introduced the
"notoriety" system?a version of "Megan's law." The server was
reprogrammed to note when one character killed another and to
gradually turn a murderer's name?characters' names appear above
their heads?from very blue to very red. The problem with the
notoriety system was that player-killers, or PKs, soon figured out a
way to foil it. Killing a player-killer was considered by the
servers to be not a bad deed but a good one, so PKs paired up to do
each other in. The more times they did this, the bluer their names
became. "You'd see this person and you'd go, 'Hey, it's Mother
Teresa,' and then he'd stab you in the back," one of the designers
of the system told me.

"Notoriety" was subsequently modified to "reputation," a system
similar to that used on eBay, by which victims could rate their
murderers. The problem with this system was that everyone handed out
murder counts, no matter what the circumstances of the
killing. (Dead characters can be resurrected by characters skilled
in healing.) The counts eroded over time, so PKs were keeping their
characters logged on, doing nothing, as a form of self-imposed jail
time. Eventually, a bounty system was introduced, but this, too,
proved vulnerable to manipulation: PKs would have their friends kill
them and split the bounty.

Finally, last year, U.O. gave up on the notion of
self-policing. Britannia these days exists in two parallel versions,
or "facets"?Felucca, where killing other players is O.K., and
Trammel, where, except under very limited circumstances, it is
not. Four-fifths of all players choose Trammel.

The facet system has succeeded in reducing unwanted
player-versus-player violence, but, if the time I spent with the
game masters is any indication, it has certainly not eliminated
it. One complaint received by Game Master Quinnly concerned a
character named Gaudemus, who, it was reported, was sicking his
dragon on other characters. (Dragons can be tamed and kept as pets.) 
Quinnly hastened to the scene:

GAUDEMUS: WTF.  GM QUINNLY: Let's discuss your releasing dragons to
kill other players.  GAUDEMUS: That's illegal.  GM QUINNLY: Quite.
GAUDEMUS: I released it because I don't want it. It was a crappy
dragon.  GM QUINNLY: I am releasing you on this warning.

One night in Austin, I went out to dinner with Raph Koster, U.O.'s
former lead designer, and Rich Vogel, the game's former
producer. Both now work for Verant, which is owned by Sony and
produces EverQuest, U.O.'s main rival. The two are on the
development team for a game based on the "Star Wars" fiction, which
is scheduled to launch next year. Vogel, who is thirty-two, is tall
and fair and reticent; Koster, who is twenty-nine, is short and dark
and voluble. The restaurant that we went to served American cuisine,
and was decorated, somewhat incongruously, as a ski lodge, with
snowshoes on the wall and a fire roaring in the hearth.

Austin these days is a major high-tech center?the direct flight
between the city and San Jose, California, is referred to as the
"nerd bird"?and it has become a hub of electronic gaming. The city's
gaming world is a close one, whose inhabitants all seem to have one
another's numbers programmed into their cell phones.

Like almost everyone else I met who had been associated with U.O.,
Vogel and Koster referred to themselves as "gamers," by which they
seemed to mean not just that they liked to play computer games but
that they didn't really see them as games. Koster was an aficionado
of MUDs, or multi-user dungeons, while Vogel had been an early
addict of a game called Dragon's Gate, which operated on the
computer service Genie and was billed on a per-hour basis. When his
habit was at its height, Vogel told me, he had run up bills of
several hundred dollars a month.

U.O. took more than two years to design, and, according to Koster,
who joined the development team in 1995, a great deal of that time
went into trying to perfect what was known as the "resource system." 
Under this system, both natural and man-made objects were coded
according to the imaginary resources that went into them?a sheep,
for example, was a couple of units of meat and a couple of units of
wool?and the total pool of each resource was fixed, so that there
would always be a certain amount of meat in the world and a certain
amount of wool. One of the goals of the system was to produce a
naturalistic and therefore dynamic environment: the sheep would get
eaten by wolves, and as the wolf population grew the sheep would
decline.

The resource system had many features that participants in the early
tests of the game found cool. "Players really liked seeing the
wolves attack the sheep," Koster said. "If wolves stayed alive a
long time, they got cannier and stronger and smarter and deadlier,
so you'd run into these old grizzled wolves that had been around the
block. These wolves would eat sheep even if there were no players
nearby. They were actually living out their little artificial lives
out there."

Even as experienced gamers, Koster and Vogel were taken aback by
what happened next. U.O. went live in late September of 1997, and by
early October Britannia was on the brink of environmental
collapse. "The creatures had all gone extinct, because people had
hunted them out completely," Koster recalled. "The land was
completely deforested, so no more wood was growing anywhere. And all
the mines had been mined out." Players even assembled teams to hunt
down some particularly cunning wolves. "These wolves got to be so
deadly that a single player had no chance against them, because we
didn't put an upper cap on how smart they could get," Koster said.

Under the resource system, players could gather raw materials, like
ore, and make them into finished goods, like armor, which, once
used, would begin to break down and renter the pool as raw
materials. Players, it turned out, liked to make things?they were
turning out hundreds, and even thousands, of swords and shields and
gauntlets?but instead of using them, or throwing them out, which
would have had the same effect, they hoarded them. One player
reportedly had a collection of ten thousand identical shirts. The
result was that there were hardly any materials available to
replenish the pool, which deepened the environmental crisis.

At first, the design team tried to deal with the situation by
funnelling in more resources, but these, too, were quickly grabbed
and hoarded. No one could figure out how to keep the game going
without giving up on the system: in the virtual world, as in the
real one, economic growth and ecological stability can be tragically
difficult to reconcile.

Now the game is programmed so that the servers continually add more
ore and sheep and wolves to the landscape. This largesse has solved
the mass-extinction problem, but not the hoarding, which continues,
contributing to server lag. Why players hold on to so many
essentially useless items remains a mystery. When I asked Koster
about it, he said, "Why do you have all the junk you have?"

The first time I visited Britannia, I went as Gudrun, a young
archer. Like all players, I got to choose many of my avatar's
features upon creating her. I gave her a peaches-and-cream
complexion, blond pigtails, and a not very medieval miniskirt. Not
long after Gudrun arrived in the kingdom, she met Dark Wolf.

Dark Wolf was wearing a red robe and carrying a long sword. He
bought Gudrun some shoes, and also a suit of leather armor, which,
when she put it on, turned out to be a tight-fitting affair halfway
between a cuirass and a bustier. It was unclear to me whether Dark
Wolf was expressing simple fellow-feeling for Gudrun or something
harder to satisfy. Because Gudrun was an archer, she came equipped
with a bow and a bunch of arrows. Being young, she was not a very
good archer; nevertheless, with Dark Wolf's assistance she managed
to kill some poor hapless hart. "U were great," Dark Wolf told her.

Britannia operates on the principle that doing is improving, and so
the most skillful characters are, almost by definition, the ones who
have been playing the longest. On the island of Moonglow, Gudrun met
a knight named Roy, who seemed to have a lot of experience but
claimed to have just started playing earlier that week. She asked
him how he had been able to become so skilled in so short a
time. "In the last couple of days, I've been sick, heh, heh, heh,"
he replied.

As Gudrun, I never managed to lose my newbie status, and I spent a
lot of time wandering around, trying to figure out what I was
supposed to be doing. Other characters were constantly offering to
trade things with me?every character starts out with a thousand gold
pieces?or inviting me home with them, or asking me to join their
"party," which meant that I could communicate with them through
special channels, and also, somewhat less appealingly, that they
could loot my corpse if the opportunity arose. But being a member of
a party often just seemed to mean not knowing what to do as a member
of a group. I found the game at once mildly addictive and boring,
like the dances I used to go to in high school.

Ever since electronic multi-player role-playing games first
appeared, in the form of multi-user dungeons, back in the late
seventies, there has been much speculation about what draws people
to them. Richard Bartle, an Englishman who might be described as the
Claude L	vi-Strauss of the MUD world, once proposed a four-part
typology, dividing players into "socializers," "achievers,"
"explorers," and "killers." Even though U.O., with a quarter of a
million subscribers, is two or three orders of magnitude larger than
even the most populous MUD, Bartle's scheme fits the game pretty
well.

As time has passed, communityoriented players have introduced into
Britannia a wide variety of ordinary, not to say humdrum, social
rituals. They organize pet shows and comedy nights, put on amateur
theatricals, and regularly hold disco parties in the
dungeons. Marriages are commonplace in the game, and when a player
dies in real life a funeral is usually held for his avatar; players
leave virtual flowers on the virtual grave. In Austin, over and over
again I was told stories of friends who meet in the taverns of
Vesper and Trinsic to do nothing more remarkable than pretend to
drink beer and pretend to play chess.

The game's achievers, for their part, have managed to produce an
overheated, almost Hamptons-esque real-estate market. Buildable lots
are scarce?in some areas unobtainable?and such is the demand for
mansionettes that it has spilled out of Britannia. On any given day,
eBay has a couple of thousand auctions running of U.O. homes and
other paraphernalia. Recently, I saw on the auction site an enormous
castle for sale in Trammel that had received twenty-two bids and was
going for eight hundred dollars.

The killers, meanwhile, have not confined themselves to
killing. They've organized themselves into murderous factions and
extortion rackets. Origin discourages those under thirteen from
playing the game, but one eight-year-old girl found a way in and, as
the company learned later from her irate mother, took as a pet a
cat, which another player skinned.

To the extent that Bartle's typology is clarifying about U.O.,
however, it reveals how peculiarly conflicted the enterprise is. If
conventional games have an overarching ambition, it is to define the
competition in such a way as to avoid the sort of messy, emotional
uncertainties that characterize life on the outside. U.O. and other
role-playing games have the reverse effect, forcing players to fight
again and again over what the game is really about. "The hatred that
some socializers bear for killers admits no bounds," Bartle once
observed.

In this sense, U.O. is, for all its evident silliness, essentially
serious: a game with inherent moral complexity. And it is this,
perhaps, that keeps the socializers, the achievers, the explorers,
and the killers all engaged. In U.O., you never know whether the
other players you encounter are there for the fun of making friends
or for the fun of murdering them.

U.O. has been in operation for nearly four years now, which makes it
the oldest surviving game of its type. Its rivals were still in the
production phase during its worst moments and, not surprisingly,
profited from its mistakes. EverQuest, for example, which takes
place in a similar ersatz-medieval setting, has clearer rules about
violence, offers players a sharper sense of purpose, and now has a
hundred thousand more subscribers.

Certainly hyperinflation and mass extinction are not, while they are
happening, a lot of fun, and U.O.'s designers acknowledge the
commercial costs of the game's many crises. At the same time, they
seem as a group proud, in a Jurassic Park sort of way, of what has
gone wrong. Starr Long, the co-creator of U.O., remembered his own
reaction when he learned prostitution had been introduced:
"Awesome!"

On all Origin business cards and stationery appears the slogan "We
Create Worlds." One possible justification for this self-important
claim is the way so many people live through their avatars, getting
married and putting on pet shows and hanging out in bars online
rather than in real life. But what makes the game's social
dysfunction so compelling is that it cannot be explained by anything
as simple as the desire for a happier world. The mark of a true
simulation is that it produces something unwanted, yet recognizable,
which is why to lose control has to be, finally, the creative goal
of any project like U.O.

On the last night that I was in Austin, Garriott held a party on an
enormous piece of land that he owns just down the hill from his
house, on the banks of the Colorado River. He is planning to build a
new home on the property, which is going to be at least five times
the size of the old one and will have a moat. By the time I got to
the party, it was dark, and there was a sliver of a moon hanging
over the river. Somebody had built a bonfire that was sending sparks
in all directions.

The party was billed as a "wake" for Origin, which is not actually
disappearing but is being absorbed ever more completely into
Electronic Arts. Just a week earlier, the parent company had
cancelled a game known informally at Origin as U.O.2, citing fears
that the new game would end up competing with the original
U.O. Electronic Arts had laid off U.O.2's development staff, of more
than fifty people, and most of them, it seemed, were at the party. I
couldn't tell whether the event was an expression of morbid fun or
another reflection of the gaming world's perverse optimism, but,
whichever it was, the mood was upbeat. No one I spoke to appeared
terribly concerned about finding a new job, and perhaps with good
reason. I hung around for a while listening to Garriott theorize
about the future of the gaming industry, and then I headed back up
the hill to my rental car, past the bonfire, now cheerfully
consuming a seven-foot-high stack of useless U.O.2 documents.
--<cut>--
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