Long before World of Warcraft, there was Ultima Online, the first MMO. How did this highly innovative & influential game come to be? And what can we learn from its successes and failures?
Starr Long is a game designer and producer who directed the team that built Ultima Online, the first popular Massively Multiplayer Online game. In this in-depth interview, you'll learn how a theater major became a game designer, how Ultima IV blew player's minds, and the shocking things players did early the development of Ultima Online.
Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/nzlNq_yiO2Y
Long before World of Warcraft, there was Ultima Online, the first MMO. How did this highly innovative & influential game come to be? And what can we learn from its successes and failures?
Starr Long is a game designer and producer who directed the team that built Ultima Online, the first popular Massively Multiplayer Online game. In this in-depth interview, you'll learn how a theater major became a game designer, how Ultima IV blew player's minds, and the shocking things players did early the development of Ultima Online.
Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/nzlNq_yiO2Y
[00:00:20.5]
Amy: If you build an open world simulation game where players can do anything they want, there's gonna be some unintended consequences. Just ask Starr Long, co-creator of Ultima Online, the first popular massively multiplayer online game.
Starr: During the testing phase, we got all sorts of shocking experiences. This is the most famous one is where Lord British, Richard Garriott's character, while we were like going around giving a state of the union address throughout the world, his character was assassinated.
You know, many people are like, well, surely that was like an orchestrated or narrated event and like, Like that you plan for is like, [00:01:00] no, if you have a high level of simulation, meaning these things will interact with these things and do these things, players are going to take advantage of that.
And they're going to do what they want to do.
Amy: So how did the Ultima team respond to this unexpected crisis? And how did their struggles and solutions like lead into modern MMOs like World of Warcraft? Find out in my interview with Star Long, where we reflect together on the lessons we learned working on the pioneering MMO, Ultima Online.
Amy: I am here with the legendary Star Long. Star, thank you so much for joining me today.
Starr: My pleasure.
Amy: So you and I worked together long ago in another lifetime on Ultima Online, which was a pivotal MMO in the history of games. We're gonna talk about that as well as many other things you've done in your career.
But I wanna get started by winding it [00:02:00] way back and finding out what first motivated you to get into design and tech and gaming. What was your background?
Starr: Well, how far do we want to go back? Do we want to go back to like, Star Long was born in the deep south, that far back,.
Amy: Let's do the helicopter view. I did not know you were born in the deep south. So, let's do a helicopter view and then get into what during, say college, what kind of pulled you toward what you're doing now?
Starr: So, my interest in games and technology started I would say, growing up we were a family of game players and I then became interested in video games as many of us of my generation. You know, I had an Atari 2,600, I played games, coin op games, and then I took a computer programming class in middle [00:03:00] school, but it was at the college because my middle school didn't have a computer programming class and so I had to take one at the college.
It was Fortran and my crowning achievement in that class was to make a tie fighter on the dot matrix printer. Cuz it was a dumb terminal to the mainframe at the college. And from there, fast forward to college where I actually didn't get a degree in any kind of computer science or technology. By that time I was in theater. So my muse had taken me to become a theater major where I did some acting, but mainly my path had taken me to the stage management and lighting and set design side of things. So kind of the organizational side of things and the design side of things. So I was doing lighting and set design and stage management.
[00:04:00] Got my degree in theater. That was my bachelor's degree and then I decided I was gonna get a graduate degree and become a technical director in live theater, maybe to film and television. But I was gonna take a year off. I had friends who lived in Austin, Texas, and I was like, I had visited it there once on when I had gone to see Lollapalooza, a big music festival.
And I was like that Austin was a great town. They had some community theater there. I'll get some pickup work doing lighting and set design. and anybody who's been involved with live theater knows that's, that's not like a sustainable living per se, especially starting out. So, I was looking for like steady work and my friends and I found this want ad that said video game testers wanted.
And we thought this was, we were joking around and we were like, this has got to be some sort [00:05:00] of University of Texas psychology experiment. I would show up and there would be like guys in the lab code and they'd be like, oh, this is great. We were doing a demographic test to see who would, what kind of person would show up for this.
Can you answer a bunch of psychology questions? But no, it was a real job and it was at Words and Systems, which was where Richard Gar Lord British worked. It was where the ultimate games were made. And I was like, oh my God, cuz it didn't say on the ad, it just said video game tester one. It didn't say Origin Systems.
I was like, oh, well great. this will be fun. and then I got started in quality assurance and testing games, which, sounds like a lot of fun. No, you just get to play video games. But no, it's a real job and most of the games are half done and broken and you play the first 10 minutes a million times in a row.
And that's how it got started.
Amy: Wow. So couple of questions. One, you said your family was a bunch of gamers. What kind of games were you playing with your family when [00:06:00] you were a kid?
Starr: We were playing board games, the traditional like sort of chess checkers, monopoly, those kinds of games. And my father was an art and antique steeler, and my mother was a research librarian. And so one of the things that I credit them for is this kind of fostering, always learning kind of mentality in the household.
So like, whenever I would express a passion in anything, like the next day my mom would have gotten us, if I liked dinosaurs, my mom would have facilitated this with a big giant stack of books about Paleontology. And then my father would like, as a art and antiquities dealer, he would've been like, look, I've got you a bunch of fossils.
And so there was this great, like both physical and literary combination of like always, pursue your passion if you like something, learn about it [00:07:00] and do a lot of research, which is how I feel like I've been able to constantly learn about things whenever I've had to make something.
Amy: What a great gift for parents to give a kid, you know, that passion for diving deep and also just knowing how to learn something.
Starr: Yeah, absolutely. It's been great.
Amy: So you have a background in programming and theater, and then you got your foot in the door as a game tester. Now, this was before, UO. Was UO the first game you worked on or did you work on other games as a designer before that?
Starr: So I started in the testing department for a few years, and, this is early nineties, so 92 and, this is still fairly early in the game industry and a lot of the techniques of game development were, let's just work as hard as we can until it's done.
[00:08:00] There wasn't a lot of, I would say technique or science to game development and being, the fresh out of college dude, it was funny when I was applying, they were like, wait, you have a college degree? You're like, why are you applying to be a game tester?
But one of the things I kept doing as the annoying tester who was always saying, Hey isn't there a better way for us to do this? Could we be more organized? You know, there's books about management, like project management, know, so we could be more organized about how we do these things.
There's things like milestones and project management theories and things like that. And also I was notorious of the kinds of bugs I would write up. Like I would write up a bug about this trap is broken, but I would also say, this trap is maybe in the wrong place in the dungeon. Like maybe it should be a little further on because it's a little too difficult.
And they'd be like, who is this guy? Like, why is he giving us game design feedback? And so, this was the old adage, do the job that you want. So I started doing the job that I wanted cuz I wanted [00:09:00] to be in game development. You know, I liked being game tester, but I really wanted to make the games and I really wanted to help organize game development.
That was like really what I wanted to do. And so eventually, Richard had these sorts of infamous haunted houses that he would do at his own.
Amy: Richard Garriott
Starr: Gar. Yeah. So, the founder of Origin Systems. And so
Amy: Mm-hmm.
Starr: having a theater background doing lighting design, I, myself and this guy, Steve Hemphill, who also worked, George, and we were doing lighting design and all these special effects for one of his haunted houses.
And Richard, I got to know Richard through doing one of these haunted houses, and he is like, oh, you're the guy who's like always like giving us critiques about how we're doing things. Like why don't you know, why don't you put your money where your mouth is? And so he asked me to come be an associate producer on Ultima IX, which was gonna be the trilogy of Trilogies, of the Ultima [00:10:00] series.
And so I was like, great, I'm gonna prove everything I've, I've been thinking about. But then while we were working on that, one of the other producers at the company, this guy Kim Dees, had been noticing this phenomena on the internet of people were playing games on the internet, they were like on AOL and things like that.
And he and I had worked on a game called Bioforge. I was the lead tester on Bioforge. And I also wore the motion capture suit. It was like one of the first games to ever use motion capture. I was like this avid doom player at the time, and I was like really passionate about multiplayer games.
And I was like, and I had played a lot of D&D and Ultima for me had always been like, well, we've got this single player computer role-playing game that's really just simulating. With a single player game, what we experienced playing D&D with our Dungeons and Dragons party, but it's all as a single player experience.
Like it would, what I really want is a computer role playing game [00:11:00] that lets me do play D&D but with other players. And he is like, yes, that's what the internet can do. And I was like, great, we should do that. And so he convinced me that instead of being the associate producer on Ultima IX, we should make a multiplayer Ultima.
And we codenamed it Tima and for a while, for a long time it was actually called Malama for the first like maybe three to four months. So that was kind of how Ultima, so it was, me playing Doom and wanting to like recreate Dungeons and Dragons and. Ken, you know, ES seeing all what's happening with know, gemstone on, AOL and Air Warrior, and all these other like muds and things like that were happening.
But the, everyone at Origin at the time, we were all, single player game developers and I mean, none of us had built anything multiplayer yet. Although we had done a Wing Commander Academy, we had done Wing Commander [00:12:00] Academy, which had, was like, a two player, dog fighting. So we had done, we had a little bit of experience, but not anything over the
Amy: Two-player couch co-op.
Starr: No, it was two player dog fighter.
Amy: Side? Two-player, or
Starr: Two-player dog, LAN, two-player LAN, dog fighting. Yeah.
Starr: And but none of us had done anything like over the internet, and certainly not what would ultimately be called massively multiplayer game. And so we quickly realized we would need to like bring in somebody from the outside and that's when we brought in like the first sort of outside expert, which was this guy Rick Smidt, who had worked on legends, the Legends mud with what would've would allegedly be Ralph Coster and Kristen Coster, who had also worked on that.
And that's how we built the nascent Ultima online team.
Amy: And what year was this?
Starr: This was 90 end of 94, beginning of 95.
Amy: So [00:13:00] some people listening might not know the history of the Ultima Games and what the Ultima Games stood for and meant in the industry and what Richard stood for. Because when you look at Ultima Online and you say, how the heck did they pull that off? What? how did that come to be? One of the biggest challenges was bringing the core ethos of the ultimate games into a multiplayer arena.
Right? So, talk to me a little bit or share with our audience what those games were all about and why they were interesting.
Starr: Sure, great point about Ultimata Games. So going back to Ultima I, was one of the very first graphical computer role-playing games ever back in the eighties.
And then there were a whole series of them all the way up and, know, Ultima I through eventually IX. But IX hadn't been built yet. By the time we were UL, Ultima VIII was the latest one. By the time we were [00:14:00] building Ultima Online and starting with Ultima IV was, Ultima I, II, III was what Richard called him learning how to make a game.
And they were, but they were still really innovative because they were the first, what now are considered open world games. That they were games where you could basically go anywhere and do anything and they were, simulations. So they were games where, the idea was to build a world that you could then adventure in.
And there was a narrative, but then Ultima IV was this the point where he had observed people playing the games and because of the levels of simulation, And he watched people play other role-playing games. And it was, people would optimize their play experience. And by optimize that means, well, if I can get stronger faster by killing innocent villagers or, and, but, killing [00:15:00] villagers gives me gold, then I'm gonna do that.
It doesn't matter if it's evil or good. It's irrelevant to me. And Richard balked at that idea, because he wanted to create a game where you are playing the hero, where what you did mattered, your ethical and moral choices were relevant to the narrative. And so he kind of went back to the drawing board, did a bunch of research, went to like Joseph Campbell and the Hero's Journey and and, kil LeBron.
I mean, went to a bunch of sources to create a game where your choices matter. So if you went and killed villagers, the rest of the villagers won't talk to you. The shopkeepers won't sell to you. They, you can't, literally cannot complete the game if you kill certain characters. and that, that became Ultima IV and all of the games after that, and that, and those were the first games where there was a reputation system.
And now we sort of take that for [00:16:00] granted, like of a lot of all the games from then of know, the Skyrim and the moral wins and the final fantasies and all the games that have reputation system. They all model. And that all comes from Ultima IV at going forward. And so the Ultima Games were also games that had a party system in it.
So a bunch of NPCs that would follow you around. And those NPCs were all modeled after real world friends of Richard. He was in this group called the Society of Creative, an Mechanism, and they all had alternate. So Richard's alternate character was Lord British and he had a friend who was named Dupre and blah, blah blah.
And so all those characters were your party in the game. And so they were all recreated in the game and they carried around and they all played D&D together. And that again, that was where this whole like recreating the experience of playing touches and dragons or LARPing, but in a digital experience.
And again, it's stuff we take for granted. This is one of the very first games that had a party system.
Amy: [00:17:00] Wow. So it's so fascinating to hear where the ideas come from. When I was, working on Ultima Online, one of the things I did a lot of is interview players so we could learn more about their experience and use that to make the game better.
Over and over again, I heard from people that Ultima IV blew their minds open.
They had just of how to think about a game and also how to deliver emotional impact beyond just mechanics. So, it's an amazing, background now taking, oh, let's make it like D&D online. Oh, we've got this Ultima model we can build on. So you have these building blocks, right? And then you head into making an MMO.
Starr: Yeah.
Amy: And all the things you thought were gonna work don't work. Right. It just, it's so complex.
So tell us, I know you can't tell us everything, we would be here for many [00:18:00] hours, but tell us some of the really key moments for you as you were bringing Alta online to life and then running it live and finding out, oh wow, that's not how we thought that was gonna play out.
What were some of the highlights and like big AHAs or maybe key struggles within the team as you did that monumental effort?
Starr: The, yeah, so we could, we could be here a really long time, but I think the key things are, what made it work were those very high aspirational goals, right?
So we were trying to recreate that feeling of playing a role-playing game with your friends, with, the computer being the dungeon master. You know, we were making multi-user dungeon that's text-based, but with pictures. And we were wrapping all of that in this really deep lore of Ultima that not a lot of other people had that advantage, right?
And we had the backing of this really big company of electronic arts, right? [00:19:00] And so, and we were doing it with this high level of simulation, meaning that players could make furniture that was made out of wood, that, that had actual wood properties, so that's kind of all the things that would make it work. But what we quickly learned is, with that level of simulation comes a lot of unintended consequences and a lot of player behavior that we didn't quite know what to do with at first. And so when we started, we really didn't understand the manpower it was gonna take to run this thing.
Like again, we, most of us had come from a single player like Boxed good kind of background where you like make the game and you put it on the shelf and then you're done and you go on to the next game. And [00:20:00] so one of the biggest culture shocks and learning things for us was, oh, once we ship, that's kind of just the start.
We, and we learned that luckily during the testing phase where we got all sorts of shocking, experiences of the players just sort of taking over, I mean, the most obvious one and the most famous one is where Lord British, Richard Garriott's character, while we were like going around giving a, a State of the Union a address throughout the world, his character was assassinated.
And, many people are like, well, surely that was like an orchestrated or narrated event and that you plan for. No, like the server, like this, the server. Because one, we didn't take enough time to, in the back of our schedule, which I think we'll talk about later is like always take enough time to like test, balance and abolish, which we didn't.
So the server went down during this state of the union because so many people were online and like concentrated in small areas, which [00:21:00] this game couldn't handle. So it went down, came back up. Richard didn't turn on his (in) vulnerability, immortality flag. He's giving a speech.
His character reigns a fire field. Richard's haha, you can't hurt me. Ah. And he dies. And we're all like, oh, Lord British is dead. And this was just this real AHA. Well, two things we AHA moments for that. One is if you have a high level of simulation, meaning these things will interact with these things and do these things, players are gonna do what?
Take advantage of that. And they're gonna do what they want to do. Moderation takes a lot of work. You, we made a bad decision after that. Like we banned that character. That was a terrible decision. He didn't do anything wrong. He just used the simulation to do a thing. There, there was like, there, there was no rule [00:22:00] that said you cannot assassinate the head of state.
That was not in the terms of service. So we, why did we ban him? There was no reason to, but we made this knee jerk decision that he had disrupted this event. We, another, what I think is a great example of where we handle it correctly were, so there were safe zones in the cities and unsafe zones outside the cities.
We kind of, we originally modeled it like, kind of like the wild west, where in the cities there were guards and if you tried to rob somebody in the cities, the guards would attack you. And outside the cities it was unsafe. So people, and then the way the game worked, it was like 2d, isometric, like dollhouse effect where when you would walk inside a building, the roof of the building would pop off, but performance wise, it would take a moment for the roof of the building to pop off.
And so players, [00:23:00] some clever robber players figured out that if they put a teleport gate right inside the doorway of the building, There was a moment where players running into the bank with loaded up with all their loot from their adventures and about to deposit their goods,
They'd run into the teleport gate before they would see it. They'd be outside in an unsafe area among the pile of bodies. They'd be murdered and all their stuff would be taken. And again, there was this big debate, the, know the moderation. Like the leaders were like, well, we should ban these players for doing it.
I'm like, no, they're just using the simulation. We should change the way the teleport gates work to add a confirmation to say, Hey, you're about to leave an unsafe zone, which is what we did. But that was an example of where the rules evolved based on player behavior versus us punishing players. So the point of that being is one, moderation takes work and careful consideration [00:24:00] and discussion based on how player behavior evolves with your simulation.
So, if you're gonna build a high level of simulation, you also need to balance that with time to discuss how players are gonna react to it, and then make sure you have the bandwidth and the manpower to adjust your rules and not just punish players for using your simulation. Did that answer your question?
Amy: You build it. Yeah, if you build it, they will exploit it.
Starr: Right, and don't punish them for doing that. Make sure you can adapt and change as they do that.
Amy: Well, I know why you guys banned the player in the first instance, which I agree. Know that's a terrible decision, but it's also completely understandable. It's too scary and threatening to face your own responsibility at that point and go oh.
Starr: Yeah.
Amy: Cuz it's completely the creator's responsibility.
But you know, we're emotional beings [00:25:00] and the desire to blame other people is just always there. And so you said something, I know we're gonna come back to it, but I need to drill into it cuz that's a thread I really wanna pull.
Starr: Okay.
Amy: You need to take the time to test and tune and integrate your game. I see this all the time with my clients and I even see it with very experienced game developers.
That's not necessarily the fun part, right? But like 90% of what makes a good game, especially multiplayer.
Starr: Absolutely.
Amy: This in your own words? Do you see people blowing past it and like it's, I'm always trying to figure out ways to communicate about this better and support my clients, et cetera, but, and that my catchphrase is, 5% design, 95% tuning.
Starr: Yeah, it is a constant. And it's not just in games, it's any product [00:26:00] full stop. It, it doesn't matter whether it's games, it doesn't matter whether it's technology, it's any product needs to have. And, I say it's at the very least, it needs to be thirds, right? So, a third in prototyping, a third in development, and a third in testing slash, polish slash balance at a minimum.
Like it should be way more than that, like half and half of like. Make it and test it, but at a minimum it's and a third and a third, and I don't even see them. I don't even see people doing that. And another thing I always tell people is one of my mantras is no one ever remembers when you ship.
Everyone remembers how you ship. So me and the translation of that is the quality of the product at the time you deliver it is what everyone remembers. [00:27:00] No, no one remembers the actual date it happened. And so at the, this pressure to meet a deadline, and yes, I understand there are budgetary considerations, but that's where your dial of scope comes in.
And the, And the one thing I've, I will, always push the team and push clients and say is, you have to prioritize you have. If you're gonna give yourself enough time, is like just adjust scope. And you may think you need all of this stuff, but you don't. And if I could go back in time on every, literally every single product I have ever made, I would reduce scope.
There's not a si-, there's literally not a single product I've ever made that I felt like it didn't have enough stuff in it.
Amy: Yeah, the problem is to reduce scope, you have to [00:28:00] prioritize and to prioritize. You have to know what's important, and that's hard.
Starr: Yeah.
Amy: It's just, it's hard.
Starr: And so one of the things I, one of the, that's one of the, like literally the first thing I make every team do and every client is make a top 10 list and they, and revisit it every sprint. What I try to get them to understand is it's not gonna be right the first time.
And that's okay. You just make it, and it's okay if you don't get it right. and sometimes they'll get over that hump to if you coach 'em and say, look, you're, it's okay. You're gonna put things in the wrong order and we're just gonna adjust it every month and you're gonna move things up and down.
But what it gives you is this tool to say things at the bottom are gonna fall off. And that's okay. Cause, and this is a sort of also a common theme in, again, every product I've ever made is your most powerful [00:29:00] tool of any, of making anything is edit. And I think that's one thing that I, I coach everyone, anyone who wants to ask me about making is reduction is your most powerful tool.
It's not creation, it's reduction.
Amy: Yep. Yeah. you're speaking my language and you know, as a system designer, reduction means reducing the number of interacting systems. But I also know that a lot of people, especially people that come outta web. It's hard for them to think in systems and so they look at reduction as which features rather than these three features fit together into a system, know, that we can look at coherently.
Is that something you run into with your clients as well?
Starr: Yeah, I do. and so what I try to get people to understand is it's not just the number of [00:30:00] features, it's content within them as well. And like you said, it's how they interact with each other and, know, when, if it's in a technical discussion, I'll use the term use case, so we always reducing the number of use cases, especially in the beginning.
Like how many different cases are we trying to solve at the beginning? Because the simpler we can make it, the number of edge cases, the we're, the narrower that funnel at the beginning, the one the easier we're gonna make it to test, but the easier we're gonna make it on the user as well because that everything about the user experience is going to be more streamlined.
The narrower you make those use cases, especially at the beginning, you can always expand it. it's, it is kind of like the same argument [00:31:00] for mobile first, right? Because you mobile first forces you reduce the number of clicks. And the number of screens and if you're designing a website for mobile, for example, like it, the re the reductions you have to make is so much different than if you're designing a, like a website for a computer and it's the same kind of idea, right?
Amy: Yep. Yeah, totally. So one of the things that powers all great creations or partnerships and teamwork, right? It's a real team sport, what we do, and you have a longstanding partnership with Richard Garriott through a number of projects. And we talked a little bit about Ultima online. I'd also like to talk about shroud of the avatar, what you learned from that.
But start with talking about your relationship with Richard. I mean, I sense in a form it's a form of role-playing in itself, Cuz what makes great partnerships is often complimentary skills, just like in an RPG. [00:32:00] So what makes your relationship with Richard work? Like when you worked so closely and so successfully on UO.
Starr: A great question. So yeah, So Richard and I, Richard, Gary and I have worked together, in various capacities since I started Origin Systems back in 1992 in Quality shirts, where my, the very first game I tested was ruins a virtue.
Which was the Ultima on a Game Boy. And so my first interactions with Richard was me playing Ruins of Virtue on a Game Boy with him looking over Mitchell. And since then, then our first game development projects together were Ultima IX, as me as associate producer briefly before we worked together on Ultima Online, and [00:33:00] then we worked at NCSoft together on Tab Rasa.
And then we worked on Charlie, the Avatar together. And I would say that where we compliment each other is, Richard is this creative visionary. I, he really deeply thinks about what the worlds he wants to create and how he wants those worlds to react to the user. The sort of level of simulation. The narrative he wants to create for the user.
And he, know, he used to do it all himself. I mean, up until Ultima IV, he wrote it all. He programmed it all, he did all the art. And even through IV, he was still contributing [00:34:00] heavily. And it wasn't until Ultima IV that other resources sort of transitioned onto those projects and started assisting him and helping out.
And Ultima V was the first one where he was mostly in a oversight, creative oversight role. And where I think, know, I compliment each other is, I have much more organizational bent to you know, my powers are like one, helping everyone understand like, what is the most important, like what is the most important things we need to get done?
What are the sequence we need to get those done in, and how, and also how are we gonna make that, how? You know, as technology has advanced and the size of the teams have grown, that need for that kind of organizational skill and power has kind of grown, I mean the team from [00:35:00] Ultima for IV was like, 10 people and then like on, Tabby the Ross, we had a hundred and if you count like outsourcing, we had two or 300 people at one point.
So, the way to organize and to run those teams changed dramatically. But I think we, it was interesting. There was a pretty blurry outline about we also shared a lot of creative roles in that job. He and I would brainstorm a lot cuz like, one of the things that I'm also really good at is like visual brainstorming on like a whiteboard.
So as in, when we have to like, again figure out how to do something. One of the things I'm really good at know, sitting in a room in a, with a team. And or just like me and Richard and like going, okay, well these are the 10 things we have to do. How are we gonna do 'em? What's your idea this system and how are we gonna like flowchart that out?
So that's, I think that answered the question.
Amy: Yeah, that's [00:36:00] interesting. So you bring ideas to life and get them organized and get teams organized
Starr: Yeah.
Amy: And you're not (not), I mean, I'm sure you also have a lot of your own ideas, especially now. But when you're working with a creative genius like that with a background, there's a special skill in being able to work with that person and all the things you talked about before.
Scope down. When people have big visions, it can be very challenging to scope down. Right.
Starr: Yeah. I mean, that, that is, when you have, a creative lead or an executive or a management team, that wants a lot within a certain timeframe. Your job as the product lead is all about scope. Honestly. It's all about managing that scope to what's the absolute most important parts of the [00:37:00] project that fulfill the vision and getting consensus amongst the product owners of what that is and it's not a fixed target.
I mean, that's the other thing that's important for people to understand is it's a moving target and it's a moving target that's based on what those internal product owners are. But it's also the external product owners, right? It's the audience. So you, it's a fallacy to think that you're gonna a single answer and it's gonna remain fixed.
Starr: And I think that's a mistake that people make.
Amy: That's really interesting, man. We could do a whole episode on that, because scoping is so much of the problems that I see people show up on my doorstep and just dramatically over scoped projects and again and again and again. And so just the strategies and mechanics of sorting through that is so [00:38:00] juicy and not that many people are good at it know, who talks a ton about scoping is Jesse Schell as well.
And it's like both of you have so much experience and so it's really that experience that's speaking to it. But again, you're also better able to prioritize than probably people with less experience. So, I wanna bring it back to your relationship with Richard and the challenges of being the scoping guy when you're working with a creative genius and what you learned from shroud of the avatar.
There was so much to learn from that. Tell us that story and like your big takeaway learnings that you're putting into practice now.
Starr: Sure. So Shroud, the avatar who, those who are not familiar was, that's the most recent project that Richard Garrett and I worked on. And it was a crowdfunded project. We started on Kickstarter. We raised about 1.9 million there. And then we shifted [00:39:00] to crowdfunding directly from our website, and we raised about approximately another 10 million there.
Uh, so, I believe still to this date, it's the second highest crowdfunded videogame to ship. There's, you know, Star Citizen is still the highest crowdfunded project ever, but it's still in Alpha. And it's a computer role-playing game. And the pitch was, we're gonna make a modern successor to Ultima Online, but it's also going to have a single player narrative ala the Ultima Series.
So it's gonna be Ultima, both single player and Ultima online in all. But name and one of the big high aspirational goals for that, in addition to the, we're gonna make an MMO and a single player game all in one.
The other big high aspirational goals was we were gonna be very [00:40:00] transparent about how we were making the project, and we were gonna do constant, product deliveries while we were in development. So we could both be delivering constantly and that the players could give us feedback and we could sort of update and pivot.
So, those are kind of the good things I would say the biggest learnings. I would in no particular order, although I will attach importance as I explain these, is one big thing we learned, is we made one big mistaken assumption about our audience size fairly early on and then never adjusted it, which is we made this assumption that our crowdfunding audience would be like this core super [00:41:00] fan, our stands, and then post launch we would then acquire some larger audience commensurate to Ultima's audience size that turns out to have happened was that core audience we got during crowdfunding was our total audience size.
And we had a few people whispering in our ear prior to launching. By the way, some of the data that's coming up now is showing that a lot of crowdfunding projects, their total audience size is the crowdfunding audience.
There is no post crowdfund launch audience. You're not gonna get a bunch of other people, and there's a few exceptions to that, but turns out most crowdfunded projects, the people who crowdfund them, that's all they get. They don't get another audience post-launch. And that's true for I [00:42:00] think like anywhere between 75 to 90% of crowdfunded projects.
It's a rare exception.
Amy: That is very, that's a really important business insight.
Starr: Yeah. And which had we known we would've made some very different business decisions, and that it's a rare exception that you, now there are exceptions. There are, as in everything there are educated, but it's 10% then go on to be a normal product where they have a bunch of like bigger sales, but it's pretty much 90% of crowdfunding projects that's their audience full stop.
So we made a lot of financial decisions based on this audience size that then turns out, hurt us badly. Second, not second, but again, I said these were no particular words. We were very transparent about our, you know, we did weekly [00:43:00] updates. We, again, monthly releases. We did these constant live streams about what was happening.
So, we felt we were very transparent, but we had made a bunch of goal, you know, here's what we're gonna deliver to the audience, including like during the Kickstarter, like we got into this fever of, and then on our own website too, of delivering content to make more money.
Here's a bunch of things. You'll get if you give us money. Like you're gonna get this house and you're gonna get this mount. And it worked like we made money doing that, but that constant like ladder of we need more money, so let's make more stuff to make more money. Some of it worked fine for like how much effort it was versus the return versus the work we needed to do just to make the game.
But a lot of it was underwater, like especially [00:44:00] stretch goals we made. And what I'll say is the ones we made at the beginning, the goals we told the players during the Kickstarter especially of what we would deliver versus ones we did later were totally backwards as far as level of effort versus the generating the money we needed to make the game.
And what we should have done in 2020 hindsight is periodically gone back, revisited those and said, you know what? We've looked at these, the level of effort, it will take us, we'll do irreparable harm to the actual development of the game. It would be irresponsible of us to spend your money on that, even though we told you, we promised you we were gonna give you that, we're gonna give you something else instead.
That's a better spend of your money. but we didn't and we felt like we would, there would've been too much of a public backlash, which we were [00:45:00] already getting as it was. There was already a bunch of controversy around us we were getting. Yeah. Lots of negative feedback about how long it was taking and what we were delivering Anyway, that wasn't quite matching what we said.
And it, and what this, all of this leads to is back to what I was talking about before, is your most powerful tool as a creator is the ability to edit your ability to reduce and or even just change and pivot and crowdfunding because of the pro. Cuz what crowdfunding requires you to do is define your product at the beginning.
When you're at the beginning of your product, it's by definition, the time, it should be the least defined, the most amorphous. So you can iterate against it. But you have to tell people, here's what I'm gonna give you for the money. And if you deviate from what you told them, you're gonna give them from your money.
They're like, well, you cheated me. I gave you money for this [00:46:00] thing. And if you change that, I want my money back because that's not the thing I told you I was gonna give you the money for. But that's not how product development works. Product development says, okay, well I thought I was gonna make this thing, but now that I'm making this thing, well, it's not really fun.
Or it costs too much to make this so I need to pivot so I can make this thing instead. But you, so you're locked into this basically untenable position. And that's where we ended up in this, we had to meet this laundry list of goals that were uneconomical in some cases, maybe not even the most fun or the best product that we could have delivered for the money, but they met the letter of the law of what was on the product list, and we felt the cost to change would've been too reputationally expensive and or maybe even legally expensive.
[00:47:00] That's the other thing. There's a whole legal aspect to it where maybe we would've been sued. You get into this like legal conundrum to the point where I don't think I would ever do a crowdfunded game again, ever because of all of those issues.
Unless it was like I would be really amorphous about it. But then who's gonna give you money for being like really amorphous? It's this catch 2.0.
Amy: You know what's crazy? You just described 80% of crypto gaming. They ran like you were experiencing you're such a frigging pioneer on the edge star. You experienced all that before crypto gaming, but I had a lot of crypto gaming clients last few years. Same dynamic, same. It's crowdfunding 2.0.
Starr: Yeah.
Amy: What are some of the really common mistakes that you see first time designers making?
Starr: One is getting stuck with an early [00:48:00] idea and not willing to pivot. So, we work as creatives. As makers, we, there's a lot of emotion tied to making and so we will obviously let our emotion connect us to our creation.
Starr: And so when we make, when we design something, we have to be able to let go. Of things and pivot as we go, not listening to users. So, you have to listen to the people who are actually interacting either with your design or your prototype or actual game. Another one is letting, and I'm gonna use narrative in a very, uh, meta term, letting the narrative rule over interaction.
So the way users interact with your product, I believe, [00:49:00] has to trump a lot of what you’re, the narrative or the story you're trying to tell the story has to adapt. The narrative has to adapt to those interactions. and then finally, and this one, you'll love because it echoes what you and I have talked about since the ancient times, is balancing extrinsic versus intrinsic reward structures.
And I constantly see this struggle with teams and clients of wanting to just throw extrinsic reward structures towards users without making the actual interactions and joyful and delightful. So that's my laundry list.
Amy: Those are great things to watch out for and I very, of course very much relate, but I love the way you put it. It was so [00:50:00] clear. What are some of the lessons you've learned about building and tuning in game economies?
Starr: The biggest lesson we learned out of Ultima Online is people love to hoard and people do not like to give up stuff. A game economy needs faucets and trains. Meaning that there has to be inputs and outputs, and there has to be a very strong incentive for that output because it, it is completely opposite of human nature.
People do not want, once they get something, they will not want to give it up unless there's a very strong incentive to do so. It is very easy to design a game economy that will encourage a grind and meaning that your players will do things that are, they will do behavior that is not joyful, [00:51:00] and that will, in over the long haul, will drive them from your game.
And so, when you're designing your game economy, you have to make sure that the things that are producing extrinsic rewards like currency are intrinsically rewarding that they are fun.
Amy: Right. That is incredibly good foundational advice because all the other advice, if you don't get that right, won't matter. Right?
Starr: Yeah.
Amy: So, you mentioned testing a bunch of times and you have to pay attention to players and it's a big mistake not to and couldn't agree more. Testing is like my heart and soul in a way, but one of the other things I learned over time that I wanna get your take on is not all testers are created equal.
And in fact, part of scoping down is deciding who you're gonna listen to and who you're not, like who your audience is, [00:52:00] and everybody wants to serve everybody, but that's the opposite of innovating successfully. So when you're bringing a product to life, how do you decide and how do you help your clients decide who to listen to and who to ignore?
Starr: That, that's a great question.
To be innovative. I'm always gonna be listening downwards and outwards, meaning, I'm usually listening to my team and my audience, and I'm rarely gonna listen upwards. And that's cost me politically, by the way, a lot. And when I'm talking about upwards, I'm talking about executive and management, even though they're my product owners.
The other piece of advice I would say is data is valuable except when it's not. Data is great when you are creating a product or a mechanic that is very much like an existing mechanic or an existing product, but data is [00:53:00] all but useless If you are creating something that is disrupting a category or disrupting a mechanic.
The classic example I like to give is the sales forecast for Ultima Online. So our sales forecast for Ultima Online was 30,000 units lifetime because they based that sales data on the Air Warrior Genie Air Warrior, which had 30,000 users and we had 50,000 beta testers sign up in four days.
So my point being that, ultimately your job as the product leader is you really ultimately need to listen to yourself and you can take these data inputs like from your team and from your audience and from executive and from data. But if you are doing something truly disruptive and [00:54:00] innovative, that's your job.
Your job is to filter all of that and decide what needs to be done.
Amy: Yep. So what's catching your interest these days? Of what trends are you following? What are you excited about?
Starr: I'm gonna start with, creator economies. So I'm really excited by what Fortnite has been doing recently. Roblox has been doing it for a long time, but Fortnite, has joined the fray recently. And then, I don't know if you've seen the Bank Heist game that just launched in Fortnite.
It's freaking amazing. So these guys basically just made payday, but in Fortnite, and so up until now the games like that have been made in Fortnite have really been like aim aiming trainers and things like that. I mean, they've been really simplistic, but like the Fortnite, know, Fortnite launched all these creator tools and they basically, they're like, they're trying to compete with Roblox, right?
Cuz Roblox has [00:55:00] had Rob robots and a whole a, a pretty robust creator economy. What is intriguing to me is there's been this democratization of game development it's kind of the tale of two cities. It's the best of times and the worst of times.
So everybody can make games, but everybody can make games. We've got this both good and bad issue, of which by the way is the same problem we have in all creator economies of like music and television. Like discovery is a huge problem. What's happening in game development we keep moving the ball, or the line.
So it was engines. So like we gave everybody Unity and unreal. And then we also gave everybody distribution platforms like, Appstore and Steam. We contrast this to like what it took us to make games in the eighties and nineties, right? It was like making movies around the turn of the century where they were literally inventing lights.
And cameras that's why when you see people making [00:56:00] movies at the turn century, they're in lab coats cuz they were literally scientists. The lights would explode. That's why they're wearing like goggles and stuff. So that's what it was like making games back then anyway.
But now we've taken it to this like crazy extreme where we're not even like making games in engines anymore. We're making games inside games. It's this meta of it is just mind blowing to me. So I'm very excited by that.
Digital Twins, which I was talking about is like, games are now making it so we can make the way we build cities, the way we build factories, the way we build, hospitals, all these things. If we can make those better for how people experiences those spaces using the technology we built for games I'm very excited by that.
And then, generative AI, I think it's also tale two cities, best times, worst times.
I, as with many, I'm concerned by how they were trained. But where, so where I'm [00:57:00] focused on is, but I also think it's inevitable. It, like everyone who decries it, I actually talk to people, even like people in the guilds in Hollywood who are striking right now. And then I talk to my friends who are in the industry and they're like, oh yeah, I use it.
And, if you're not incorporating some version of AI into your workflow, you're going to be disrupted. But I think we need to come up with solutions to how they're trained because of intellectual property issues. So, where I'm intrigued is the divergence of it into private instances.
So that's where I'm trying to focus my research and my work and even our agency's work where we're focused on where you can build your own private instance, where you're not training it on other people's IP. So that's where stuff I'm excited about.
Amy: Wow. This was so fascinating and you touched on a lot of issues that have a lot of depth and, uh, really [00:58:00] shared great insights with us. So appreciate your time.
Starr: It was my pleasure to be here. Thanks Amy Jo.