Back in 2002, I had a long conversation with Will Wright, who was then helping release The Sims Online and quietly developing what would eventually become Spore. While TSO ultimately did not succeed, Wright described his original vision for that virtual world, much of which is applicable to user-generated worlds like Second Life or less open-ended but much larger worlds which emphasize user creativity, such as Habbo and Club Penguin. This interview was incorporated into a much larger Salon story on MMORPGs, but Wright's thoughts below stand on their own:
The main limitations on the MMORPG market really seem to be self-imposed: Most developers can't shake the fantasy/sci-fi mindset or conceive of an alternative way of playing. Very few role-playing games have deviated far from the world imagined by that somewhat dotty, Hobbit-fixated Oxford professor 50 years ago, or strayed much from the central conceit of "leveling up" -- that is, improving the traits and abilities of your persona in gradual steps -- originally invented by Gary Gygax for Dungeons & Dragons more than 25 years ago.
"I think they're all kind of mining the same hardcore group," says Will Wright, chief designer at Maxis Studios, speaking of the current roster of MMORPGs. "I don't think they're bringing a lot of new players in."
A networked variation of Wright's game, The Sims Online arrives at a time when the original title is still a bestseller (two years after its release), joined by numerous expansion packs -- 6 million and 8 million sold so far, respectively, easily making it the most popular game of all time. Expectation has been building on the games' numerous fansite communities. (Wright says with winning understatement, "If we can convert a good percentage of that community to Online, then it'll probably do very well.")
What you do there is entirely at your discretion. "Naked-clown beauty pageants, superhero cowboy bars, and exclusive mountain hideaways are just a few of the many strange possibilities this game offers," says Computer Gaming World's Robert Coffey. This is because the game comes with no overarching theme. Wright's idea is to provide tools that are robust enough for players to shape their own world, at their own leisure. "We're trying to make [success] more correlated to your creativity than your time investment. What I want is a game where people play three, four, maybe five hours a week, and feel like they're getting a lot out of it."
While the world is laid out in a way that'll call to mind Sim City, Wright's earlier hit, the game itself is expansive enough to include genre elements of other MMORPGs. "A lot of neighborhoods will be themed areas," says Wright. He envisions players with like tastes naturally migrating together, and using the diverse range of objects (homes, furniture, and so on) to create their own unique communities. "So I look at the neighborhood, and I see, say, Western town, or Futureville, or whatever... And that'll give me a good sense of, 'Oh, if I'm into science fiction, I should go to Futureville,' and I zoom down to Futureville ... and if I'm really into that, I probably would want to move there and build my futuristic house in that area You can buy a chair that looks like it came off a starship, you can buy a chair that looks like it came out of a castle or one that looks like it came out of a Las Vegas casino. I think the range of objects that people have to build with are going to suggest the breadth of theme that we hope to see in the world."
There will be no segregation between hardcore and casual players; rather, Wright is working to make their differing preferences complement each other. "If you have everybody in one area, and they're all trying to do the exact same thing, that's when it starts feeling kind of repetitive. But when you have people all mixed in pursuing different goals entirely, then it starts feeling like, you know, the real world." He guesses that the more dedicated gamers will devote their time to creating fictional businesses or pursuing other economic goals. But doing this creates, in his words, a "pyramid of dependency." A group of hardcore gamers can unite their properties to create a grand theme park with rides and entertainment, for example -- then sell tickets to casual gamers. "I'd like to keep the game structured so that the hardcore people are continually interacting with the casual people."
The user objects are designed so that players can even create their own games within the larger game. "You could easily build a treasure hunt with this one object that we're making," says Wright, "and strew clues all over the world, and you kind of have to search the world and find the clues. Or play a game like Assassin, where everybody has an envelope and a name in it, and you have to go find that person ... We want to have a lot of activities that kind of span the world."
As with the original version of The Sims, another feature in the online version enables players to define their relationship to other people. But in the multiplayer realm, the function allows for all kinds of wacky sociological chess games. During a testing session, for instance, Wright competed with a member of his team to become the most popular Sim on the server. "So we were being nice to everybody, and they were making us their friends," he says. "We both got very competitive about it, and we started paying people to be our friends. And from that point it kind of escalated, and we started hiring people [to become an enemy of the other person] ... It was kind of twisted."
Unlike every other game on the market, The Sims enjoys a fan base that's roughly equal male and female. Which must be partly why Wright has devoted so much attention to the griefer problem. While the Ignore/Ban function allows players to summarily remove offending persons from their lot, he's gone a bit further with The Sims Online: Wright is trying to grief his own game. "Lately I've been trying to play as a grief player in our internal tests of TSO," he says, "both to explore what the likely tactics will be and also to get a sense for how motivating or satisfying it is to play that way -- and, hence, how to make it less so."
"But as they start to diversify into these other themes," Wright continues, "I think potentially the market is much bigger than it is now. Maybe ten times bigger." This has proven true in the Asian market, at least, where games like Lineage (recently imported into the U.S. by Ultima creator Richard Garriott) enjoy subscribers in the millions.
The first step [to growing the MMO market] might be for designers to confront their mania to become micromanagerial gods in the universes of their own design. Wright suggests it may require confronting a "moviemaker wannabe" streak evident in many developers: "You know: 'Well, George Lucas made his world -- here's my world!' And of course for them, in their background and their interest, a cool world usually is either postapocalyptic science fiction, or it's Tolkienesque ... Somehow we keep falling into these two well-worn themes over and over and over and it's getting a little, you know, worn out.
"I think another approach to this whole thing is that you give the players that canvas," Wright says, "and let the players create the back story and the theme and whatever, and you focus on being innovative through the [game] mechanisms." The future, in other words, may depend on an equal collaboration between game players and game developers, working together to create worlds that neither could dream up alone.
Originally published in a different form on Salon. Image credit from The New Yorker profile of Wright, also worth reading.
I wish TSO had been a smash hit. It would have emboldened other creators of social sandbox environments, perhaps enough to offset the rise of the theme-park monolith, World of Warcraft.
But it flopped... not because it was a social sandbox, but mostly because it was a social sandbox that was not agile enough to respond to the desires of the players.
I believe the failure of TSO had a profound impact on the virtual world/MMO environment, with ripple effects that are still being felt today.
Posted by: Arcadia Codesmith | Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 12:49 PM