GameFile: Future Of Online Worlds; Playing 'Halo 3' Early & More

Raph Koster thinks massively multiplayer online games could — and should — be more fun.

So what if that's the same thing a disgruntled "World of Warcraft" player or sour "Second Life" citizen or never-wanted-to-try-an-MMO "Tomb Raider" gamer might say? Koster is the one worth listening to.

He wrote a book on fun — literally. "The Theory of Fun," published in 2005, has a foreword by "Sims" creator Will Wright, someone who certainly is a good judge of fun. Koster was also the lead designer on 1997's "Ultima Online," the first MMO to hit it big in the U.S., and creative director of 2003's "Star Wars Galaxies," one of the most ambitious and high-profile MMOs — although not the most successful — of the last several years.

So fun and MMOs are something Kostner is on firm ground to discuss. He sees MMOs as places. "World of Warcraft" is the amazing land of Azeroth. "Star Wars Galaxies" is a galaxy far, far away. What people play are the games in those places. And as Koster starts work at a secretive new company that might just be working on an MMO, he says: "I think we often don't make the games as good as they should be. I think if you played most of the MMO games and you played them as single-player games, we'd grow bored of them really, really quickly."

What makes the MMOs enjoyable, he says, is visiting these worlds with friends. But are they really fun because they're great games? "I think because they are such cool places and so full of cool possibility ... it props up the games to some often large degree."

Koster spoke with GameFile a couple of weeks ago on the last workday before Christmas. He had just gone public with the name of his new company, Areae, and a vague company mission statement to do something with online worlds that embraces creativity, user feedback and fun. He agreed to talk about where the worlds of MMOs have been and where they might be taking players in the future.

"World of Warcraft" had 7 million users last year, and the blank-canvas world of "Second Life" hit 2 million, according to the respective corporate backers. But nothing new built or released in 2006 broke through. "[Last] year was kind of a blah year," Koster said. "I think everybody feels that. It wasn't a great year for MMOs." In 2006, he played and enjoyed "Seed," a cartoonish science-fiction online world, but it came and went. He spent time in "WoW" as well, along with "Dungeons and Dragons Online" and other MMOs like "Archlord," "Ryzom," "Silk Road Online" and a few others. He dabbled, and he experienced a significant professional change when he left Sony Online Entertainment, where he had worked for a half-decade on "Star Wars Galaxies" and other projects.

His chat with GameFile wasn't so much about him, though, as it was about the extremely popular style of game he was immersed in back when most gamers were playing "Mario," "Flight Simulator" or "Tetris." "By and large what we're seeing and still have been seeing and probably will still keep seeing is more and more of the same," he said, tracing the type of action featured in "World of Warcraft" to MMO precursors called MUDs (multi-user dungeons).

His description of a popular style called DikuMUDs that were formed around 1993 went as follows ("WoW" gamers, look for anything that sounds familiar): "Party-level combat with classes, with a tank, a nuker and a healer; [multiple character] levels; an item-centric game where you had to acquire more and more items to make your character more powerful. Very combat-centric. Not much of anything else. And to a varying degree some emphasis on quests."

Koster said he doesn't want to knock that — not completely. He gets why people still like that. But through the course of his career, he discovered gamers also wanted other things. For example, when he gave them a chance to play MMOs as professional hairdressers instead of bounty hunter scum, some were into it. "Was it completely incongruous and probably shouldn't have been in the game? Sure. But the point is there are people out there willing to do just about anything you can think of." When his "Galaxies" team implemented the ability to dance in its "Star Wars" game and let people center their characters around that, some people laughed. But now the average big MMO — and the biggest in the U.S., "WoW" — lets players dance.

Not every wild idea went well in Koster's career. Gamers seldom used the mechanisms of the small-group democracy he created in his games to vote other gamers out of power. Gamers in democratic guilds seemed to fear voting out a troubling leader because that leader at least would be dedicated enough to keep the group going. A system that enabled players to erect their own cities in "Galaxies" also let immigrants flood those cities, and when it comes to the virtual world, some people would rather keep foreigners outside. That aspect didn't go over that well. Too close to a real-world issue? Koster said players would reply: "I'm here to have fun. Why do I have to deal with that?"

Nevertheless, Koster has made a career out of trying new things. Back in grad school in the mid-'90s, he got over the more tried-and-true kind of MMO playing, the dominant style of grinding, of killing bad guys for points and items en route to the next level of power and the next round of kills and items to score. "Both my wife and I were totally hooked on this. And frankly it caused relationship issues. We had one computer. We fought who had the turn. We ended up going to different computer labs on campus — we were in grad school at the time — so we could play together by being apart." Also, the games Koster was grinding in let players hitting the max level join the development team. Once he became a creator, he ceased being a grinder.

Today, he's not sold on the grind. He's also not sold on blank-canvas-style creativity, the kind of make-whatever-you-want-in-our-world pitch to consumers that he thinks overlooks the fact that even most great artists, writers and other creative folk in the world spend even the bulk of their time consuming. There's got to be stuff to check out.

Otherwise? Well, a game designer in Austin, Texas, told GameFile back in October that Koster occasionally used the expression "Time to P---s" to rate MMOs. This was the amount of time it took players to become so bored with the online world presented to them that they found a way to create sex or sex objects in the game. It happens in all MMOs at some point.

"I don't actively use it as a metric," Koster said, laughing, "But I think it is a valid metric, kind of like 'Time to Crate' is in console games." (That's how long it takes to find a generic crate in the average action game, which often isn't long at all) " 'Time to P---s' helps you measure, is there enough to do here, or are you engaging in a failure of imagination that you have to resort to third-grade humor?"

So when's the MMO shakeup coming? Change is so hard to come by, Koster said. "One factor is how damn long and expensive it is to make an MMO," he said. "Playing on the triple-A MMO field is unquestionably at this point probably minimum 30 million to ante up. To really knock it out of the park, you probably have to double that. That breeds intense conservatism."

And it takes a while to build an online world. Koster points out that he's been making MMOs for a decade and only has just a few — finished or even incomplete — under his belt. "When am I going to apply the lessons I learned from 'WoW'? And the answer is, I get to apply them now and 'WoW' has been out two years. When will you see me applying them? In something you'll get to play a year or two years from now."

One massively multiplayer designer thinks the future should be much more fun.

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