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Richard Garriott is best known as the creator of the Ultima RPG series, and he says that his experiences in the early days of game creation give him the multidisciplinary oversight into major content problems that today's designers often lack.
He's turning his attention from major MMOs, in the wake of the closure of his long-in-the-coming, short-in-the-operating Tabula Rasa, and instead joining the ranks of developers moving into the social gaming space -- a place where he sees not just business opportunity, but also a place to aim expertise honed both in the early days of gaming and at the onset of the MMO revolution.
His new company, Portalarium, will be a test of his ideas about game development, which he shares freely in this wide-ranging interview.
Conducted at the DICE 2010 summit, where he delivered a lamentation on the state of games writing, this in-depth Gamasutra interview with Garriott takes in his view of the mainstream games industry of 2010 and where the real opportunities lie -- and why.
Why Facebook?
Richard Garriott: Well, the target is not specifically Facebook. The target is really what I would call broadly the explosively growing market -- the new market of players -- which I'll call broadly casual and social network players.
You know, I kind of look at it and go, "I feel like I've now lived through three major shifts in the gaming industry." Number one is the beginning of the industry, [laughs] you know, where I was lucky enough to be one of the first developers of games. And so, with that came great opportunity and revolutions.
The second one was the emergence of online gaming. Now, I would argue that Ultima Online was a major stepping-stone in convincing people that online gaming was relevant. At the time I was trying to get it going, no one supported it. It was very hard to get going, but when it finally shipped, it ultimately ended up making ten times the revenue of all the previous Ultima games combined.
That has now for the last decade been by far the dominant growth area of gaming at all. I mean, look at things like World of Warcraft, and it's now ten to a hundred times bigger than Ultima Online.
But if you look at this new casual and/or social media gaming, a lot of people in this building still either pooh-pooh it or don't get it or don't understand it, yet already the number of players on these games is dramatically in excess of even things like World of Warcraft.
 The amount of money flow on this side of the fence is already dramatically in excess of almost any game anybody in this room ever develops. And yet, you know, people still here are still in the mode, just like in my mind they were with online gaming before the models were proven, thinking, "Oh, you know, the quality level is not there yet," or, "Oh, the types of games offered really aren't interesting to me yet."
And I'm going like, "Well, yeah, that's true -- it might not be yet, but I assure you it will be and very soon. And it's one of these coming juggernauts that you either need to learn to understand and participate in the evolution of or you're left behind, just like online gaming."
What is your ultimate goal for your company right now?
RG: So, I believe the casual gamer and the social gaming platform represents the largest ever yet seen emergence or change within the gaming industry. And all of us in the development community have a choice to either participate and lead in this journey or get left behind.
I believe that my group, which helped start gaming back in the early days of Origin and Ultima that helped begin and grow the online gaming space, which has been the main motivator for the last 10 years, is perfectly suited to also jump in to contribute here with this new emergence. And so I believe we'll be able to bring very high quality play experiences to a consumer base that is growing the fastest and demanding play options faster than any previous group has had.
It's interesting to me -- it seems a lot of people from that era that feel the same.
RG: We were just talking to Sid Meier.
Sid Meier. Steve Woita. All these people are getting back in there because...
RG: Because we did it. And I think everybody else is still a little too egotistical to realize it.
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Good morning, Remo. :)
So true, but I wonder how that compares to, say, aspiring movie director & producers? On the one hand they do the same thing to an extent. On the other, many are research-oriented and those are usually the ones that make the biggest contributions because they draw from outside the industry.
'And so designers have no job qualifications really, if you know what I mean. And so everybody wants to be one and nobody's skilled at it. '
I'm not sure about this. I think this is a conflation of production skill with game design skill. It seems to be me core game design skill is just that - the art of designing core activities for players to do, which are fun/interesting/compelling. And then being able to communicate these activity-sets to the team in a way that they work with existing art and technology. It's a soft, nearly intangible skill. But just because it's soft and intangible doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
The state of Facebook games is such that they're indirectly interactive. I do nice things for you, you do nice things for me, but even if we're both interacting with the same Farm at the same time, we don't see each other and can't talk.
Closing the gap, giving people things to do together, and still keeping the game casual, now that would be a design challenge.
It is nice to hear someone like Garriott affirming the importance of research. Now I feel my tendancy to obsess about fully knowing something I wish to design around has more weight than my own conjecture.
John, isn’t it even more of a design challenge to come up with gameplay that’s fun for friends *despite* having only asynchronous communication?
There’s nothing wrong with designing games around friends interacting in real-time. I’m just not sure that capability is right for the architecture of social networks like Facebook.
It seems to me that if social nets like FB are to become the Next Big Thing in gaming as Richard Garriott predicts, it’s the very asynchronous nature of friends casually communicating with each other -- as distinct from single-player or massively-multiplayer architectures -- that will enable this result. So that’s probably where design creativity needs to be directed.
Speaking of which, it’s nice to hear an Industry Figure sticking up for designers as people who have a unique gift of understanding how systems fit together to achieve an overall purpose.
IMO (and since my opinion is free, take it for what it's worth) is as follows.
VGA Planets. Trade Wars.
In comtemplating Facebook games, we also step back in time to the days of dialup services and BBSes. Gaming occurred in these enviornments (VGA Planets being one of the most notable) and ought to have some wisdom for us to take forward into Facebook.
I don't want to excessively downplay the challenges of developing asynchronous multiplayer games for Facebook. The challenges ARE there. If nothing else the potential scale of the world is many orders of magnitude larger than any BBS game. How do you keep an asynchronous story straight when you and a friend happen to be playing at the same time? Farmville doesn't have the sort of story progression that can be thrown off by multiple players stirring the pot at once.
It's just not totally unexplored territory.
That Facebook presents such a limited platform for synchronous activity is *why* such content is the greater challenge in my mind. Clearly any Facebook game that accomodated synchonous multiplayer play would also have to handle the asycnhronous case. Keeping the two modes straight and complemntary in a story-format is also a challenge.
Me, I gave up on FarmVille and I am just about ready to jump Café World (friends who want to play with me be damned). Why? Zynga, as much as I like these guys, are FLOODING you with spam. The first Minute of FarmVille these days is clicking away pop-ups. If you're not careful, you click on more ads in the playing field. And Café World is nearly there, too.
I do understand and respect that they need to maintain a business and micro transactions is what they live from. However, all it has done for me so far was drive me away from their games.
Once you introduce sync games, casual play becomes more difficult to maintain. In particular, if we look at the MMO model, players become dependent on other players to get some content done and they need to invest a lot of time in the game as well.
Is there a middle ground? There sure is! I have a lot of ideas and some include sync play.
@Andrew. I think there is going to be a lot of competition in this space and that will/should cause companies to back off on the amount of spam.
@Bob. The game/entertainment industry is evolving as it always has. So, imo its not a fad, simply another step in evolution. Keep in mind the majority of folks playing these social games would never bother with a PC or console game, so there is no 'everyone to get back to regular games'. This is why this space is pulling is so much crazy money, its expanded the player base dramatically.
I don't think I'm the only one who know at least a couple hundred people playing these games that either use their work PC to play or have a PC at home that could not handle a game created within the past 3 years.
@John Trauger "could be so good at design that he doesn't need to play Farmville to figure it out. "
With that approach you are missing 90% of features that make a game social: virality & retention & events that you couldn't "figure out" unless you'll play it.
@Gesine You'll come back to the game as soon as it will provide enough of new content and meta-game layers. Or you'll see new beautiful pics in news feed :)
What I would say to you is this: What things have you done outside of the game industry? What outside world experience can you bring that will let you make something meaningful and interesting?
The article sez RG has been playing a lot of phone games. He may be assuming that Facebook games are similar. Now I don't play games on my phone, but it strikes me that phone games are more like games from the pre-internet days of desktop computer games. I don't know (or not know) that phone games play to the social/viral aspects of Facebook that Farmville does. Based on some fo RG's comments, he's thinking of essentially moving casual internet gaming portals to a facebook app.
If true --and it may or may not be, my telepathy is down today--RG would be missing what makes Facebook unique and sometimes annoying (Farmville does indeed want to put a whole lot of sheer carp on your wall if you let it. I only publicized opportunities for myself or other players like lost animals barn-raisings or when I levelled to a number divisble by 5).
I'm about due to check in with Farmville and see if the server has erased my farm yet. I'm about 3 months clean and sober, now. :)
I don't "play" Farmville myself but I have in the past.
That said, if he hasn't studied it and doesn't have intentions to it is in direct violation of his own statement of how essential extensive research is.
But from a guy who did Ultima 4 in early eighties, one of the first real moral games at least (what makes Bioshock and Mass Effect decisions system a kid's play) and foresee in Ultima 7 a living world that would take place in the pioneering Ultima Online, i can really expect from him something more than Farmville's watching and copying from the others.
Being a failure or a sucess, he doesn't have to knock on the door to ask for permissions.