Postmortems, a new book by renowned MMO game designer Raph Koster, recounts his many years building classic virtual worlds like Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and Metaplace -- his attempt to build the metaverse -- and the lessons they impart to current virtual communities. (3D, VR, or otherwise.) Reprinted with permission of the author, how player killing in Ultima Online relates to Twitter and Facebook, and why Metaplace failed to grow.
As I was working on the book, I was struck repeatedly by how relevant so many of the old lessons were to what’s going on today on the Internet. For example, the many revelations about social media manipulation and the utter ineffectiveness of major operators like Facebook and Twitter to control bad behavior on the part of their users was much on my mind as I wrote about the history of Ultima OnlineUO was notorious for freeform playerkilling, which the market rejected decisively even though the game offered freedoms and fun that simply couldn’t be had in other games. That tension between freedom and griefing continues to play out…
If a player was killed by another player (and wasn’t a criminal at the time, and was of good notoriety, and so on), a window would pop up letting them report the crime. A player could choose to not report it, if they felt it was an accident or the incident was an instance of good roleplaying, but honestly, this just about never happened. People always reported.
Once the killer got too many reports, everything in their bank was instantly confiscated. Any gold they had became a bounty on their head. They instantly became a Dread Lord along with all the penalties that accrued thereto. And their name, description (hair color, skin tone, and so on) went on the local bulletin board, along with the bounty on their head.
Reports could age out, so you could avoid a bounty by spacing out your kills, but bounties never went away. And if you kept getting reported, your bank account would be repeatedly confiscated and the gold added on. Eventually, victims were able to add their own gold to the reward as well.
If a murderer was killed by a player who had less murders than they and who was neutral or better in notoriety, they suffered an immediate loss of 10% of all of their advancement. And their head was chopped off and put in the backpack of their killer. Returning the head to a city guard near wherever the bounty was posted resulted in the reward being given to the bounty hunter.
The update notes cheerfully noted:
Bounties may remain posted in other cities even though the reward has been claimed, but a given bounty can only be claimed once in the world, unless the killer returns to their ways. This will likely result in a killer who has bounties in multiple cities getting killed over and over again by eager reward claimants, for no gain. Our advice is, don't end up with lots of bounties on your head. :)
Ah, frontier justice. And there were indeed high hopes that these penalties, which seemed extravagant at the time, would do the trick.
Spoiler: they didn’t.
Murderers quickly figured out the threshold number of reports and how quickly they aged out, to dance along the line. Then they started making a point of storing all their valuables in their houses instead of in a bank, so that there was no reward or confiscation to worry about. When players started supplying their own money for the rewards, the murderers simply began treating the bounty boards as a twisted form of high score table. They would coordinate with another player who would create a new character with a spotless record, allow the murderer to be slain, swallow the stat loss death penalty, and split the money!
If all of this sounds hilarious, consider that it’s basically the same patterns that are used today on sites like Reddit and Twitter. Only there are no admins who actually answer when you call for help.
Today, with the resurgence of interest in social virtual worlds driven by networked VR, it’s easy to see people incredibly fascinated by the potential. But there are still pretty significant audience hurdles between what we have now (as popular as they may be with those who already “get it”) and the dream of the widely adopted metaverse.
Further, it looks increasingly like we already live in an ambient metaverse of sorts, one without all the heavy barriers of dedicated clients and 3d rendering, much less goggles and headsets.
Up next: The rise fall of Metaplace -- and the rise of the everywhere metaverse:
