Originally published December 8 to December 12, 2003, here.
Last week I spent a lot of time online in Second Life doing a set of things I never thought I'd ever do online again at all, let alone in Second Life. I spent a lot of time killing monsters, leveling up, acquiring gold, buying weapons and supplies, and healing my depleted hit points.
I spent a lot of time, in other words, playing Second Life like it was any other online fantasy role playing game.
To play "Dark Life", a user-made game within a game, you purchase a backpack and basic weaponry from a store near the dungeon area. The backpack itself comes equipped with a fairly complex bloc of Linden Language Script, which tallies and displays traditional RPG elements of Hit Points, Experience Points, inventory, and so on, while it's worn. Once equipped, you're ready to go questing.
Dark Life is the brainchild of designer/artist Pirate Cotton and programmer Mark Busch, and an extension of Dark World, a medieval town created and inhabited by a group of dedicated residents in the sim of the same name. "We want to liven up Dark World," says Pirate, "'cause it's a great town. And it looks the part, ya know."
But Pirate had another motivation in this, as well. "I was flying around Second Life," he says, "and while interesting, it made me think that what people had made was a 'Dali-esque shopping nightmare! Lots of odd stuff to look at, but not much to do if you got bored of building, or chatting up the ladies," he finishes, laughing. "So I figured, 'I bet you can make a [RPG] dungeon!' Ignorance convinced me it was possible."
Other residents have surely thought of doing something like this--in fact, as we'll learn in coming weeks, Dark Life isn't the only resident-made game in development-- but Pirate is uniquely suited for the task. Professionally speaking, when he's not in Second Life, Pirate Cotton is a developer for a major MMORPG. (He declines to state which one, for the record, but hardcore fans of the genre would probably recognize it immediately.) His co-workers don't quite understand why he's devoted so much time in his spare time to creating Dark Life. "I think when you code and art and world-build for a living it seems madness to do so for free," he says, smiling. But they do look over his shoulder, when he has a chance to work on his Second Life project from the office. "They love the technology, the programmers are in awe... and the artists have been impressed with my bugs and monsters, which is flattering! Hired one to make the [Dark Life] logo."
"Are you creatively frustrated in the day job MMORPG?" I ask Pirate.
"Actually, I'd say no. Right now, I have four hundred more quests to write [at the office]. So I get creative," he says, laughing. "But a forty-plus person team means I can't say 'let's do this' and two hours later, it's done or in testing. With Mark coding we can come up with ideas and it's done. Also, my involvement is more personal. I do all sounds and most building... yeah, there's a more personal involvement there."
After a mutual friend introduced him to Mark Busch, who also works for a game company, the duo set to work, with Pirate on design, sound, and art, and Busch on coding. After two weeks of effort ("the backpack has close to two thousand lines of code I think," says Pirate, impressed) they had a rough Beta of their game to show Haney Linden, the company's community magistrate.
By the time I had a chance to try out Dark Life, a few weeks after it had been opened for testing, it had already become an unambiguous success, despite its unavoidable shortcomings as an early Beta. A hundred-plus residents had played it, many frequently. Indeed, as I spoke with Pirate outside the main shop, residents streamed past us, on their way to adventure.
"Love it," a goblin called AstriX Fate told me, "if I had the skills, I'd help make it better." I noticed the Hit Points counter above his head was already at 317. Getting it up that high must have taken dozens of hours.
"Whoa," I said. "How long have you been playing?"
Pirate laughed. "I think I've seen someone with 900."
Before my career as Second Life's embedded journalist, I wrote a Salon article on the future of MMOGs. The only way they'd thrive, I suggested there, was by getting away from the Dungeons & Dragons-esque model of "leveling up" a heroic alter ego in a Tolkienesque world--the kind of thing that had limited appeal outside fans of the genre. The future of the medium, I suggested, should be non-genre online worlds where the users spend less time leveling up on the monster-bashing treadmill, and way more time creating the content of their reality.
But one leading designer of fantasy MMORPGs didn't like that thesis one bit, and he rather heatedly e-mailed me after the story was published, to explain why. "Leveling up" or something like it would still be a necessary function, he argued, even in the next generation of online worlds: "The player's ability to affect change in these future virtual worlds," he wrote, "will be directly related to the amount of time and effort they invest in that change. And, given human nature, people will want approval from others." They got this through the leveling up process, in traditional MMORPGs, or in non-genre games, through leader boards, where the wealthiest/most popular/etc. players are numerically ranked for all to see.
"But in a world which emphasized user-created content," I replied (in words to this effect), "levels and ranks won't matter. They'll be having too much fun creating, for example, a haunted house, whether it makes them popular or not. "
"Assuming somewhat equal 'creative abilities' or what have you," he replied, "the person who spends 50 hours adding content to and just making 'cool' her haunted house will end up with an experience an order of magnitude more compelling and entertaining than the person who invested 5 hours… the treadmill's still there, the time invested is still there, and the result of the time invested is still being communicated to the player in the form of improving traits and/or abilities in gradual steps (regardless of whether the traits are associated with the player's persona or their property, i.e., their haunted house."
In other words, he believed the time invested to build a haunted house online was qualitatively the same as the time invested to, say, get your half-Elf Ranger to level 10.
After all, as he added later, "Life is a treadmill, James. It takes time. Effort. Fortitude."
We agreed to disagree on that point. But I had to admit I was thinking about it, when I bought my backpack, and was led by Dark World citizen valacia Leviathan toward the place where Dark Life is played: a castle occupied by all manner of supernatural beasts.
You know, like a haunted house.