Raph Koster is an entrepreneur, game designer, and author of a Theory of Fun for Game Design. He is currently CEO of playable worlds. He was Lead Designer on pioneering MMO Ultima Online, and Creative Director of Star Wars Galaxies. He founded Metaplace in 2006, which was acquired by the social gaming company Playdom.
Raph Koster is an entrepreneur, game designer, and author of a Theory of Fun for Game Design. He is currently CEO of playable worlds. He was Lead Designer on pioneering MMO Ultima Online, and Creative Director of Star Wars Galaxies. He founded Metaplace in 2006, which was acquired by the social gaming company Playdom.
Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land. It's Getting2Alpha. The show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now, here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim.
Amy: Raf Koster is a renowned game designer and system designer, and author of the book, A Theory of Fun.
We worked together on Ultima Online. The first big, massively multiplayer online role playing game. After Ultima, Raph went on to lead the design of another massive online role playing game, Star Wars Galaxies. Now, one of the challenges in designing a game that serves thousands of players is to provide ways for many different types of people to enjoy doing what they want to do, yet have all the players interacting with each other.
Raph: If you're simulating a fantasy world, but the only way to advance in [00:01:00] the game is killing things, all of the ways of playing the game that we're carefully building have no advancement path.
And so we needed something that would allow players to play any of these different ways. If you want to be a bard, if you want to role play, if you want to make a living sewing caps for jugglers, then what do you do?
Amy: Listen to Raph tell the story of how he led the design of Ultima Online and made different design decisions for Star Wars Galaxies so he could achieve a different style of gameplay.
I'm here with my good friend Raph Koster. We worked together on Ultima Online. Today we're going to do a case study, to show you how the principles of game thinking came alive during that project. So let's zoom in on Ultima Online. What was your role on that project and what were some of the key design challenges that you really wrestled with in the early [00:02:00] days?
Raph: So I came on when we were a tiny little Sculkworks team. And I eventually became creative lead for the game, which was an interesting position because it meant that I owned the creative, but I couldn't actually tell people what to do. I had to persuade them. The producer was the only one who could give the orders.
Basically I led the creative. So I led a lot of the aspects of how the game design would work, how it would function, I interacted with the community quite a lot, everything from writing the patch notes to actually doing community management and an enormous amount of game design, of course.
Amy: What were some of the challenges in the early days as a creative lead that you were wrestling with as you brought that amazing project to life?
Raph: We were creating a new category. There had been text based virtual worlds on online services like America Online and Genie. And of course there'd been the non commercial text mods, which were mostly run by college students, graduate students on university campuses all over the world. There had not been large scale, well funded commercial online [00:03:00] worlds available.
Particularly through the gaming market, that was a new thing. Putting it on the internet was new because the internet up until around 1995 was still very much a niche kind of a thing. So we were essentially riding this wave and that meant changes all over the place. Even though we had a lot of experience in the older kinds of virtual worlds, everything changed when we were talking about the internet.
A gaming audience of the mass market.
Amy: So let's talk about how the community helped bring the game to life. Now I know in the early days during beta, there was a very passionate, avid community. That was helping test and give feedback on things. How did you gather that community together? How did you find those people and then mobilize them so that they were useful to you?
Raph: One of the interesting things about Ultima Online was that there was actually more than one community that came to it early on. That we then [00:04:00] leveraged forward as we were designing the game. The first of these were online gaming veterans. They had played either the text mods or the commercial online games that were around.
So they were very familiar with game design patterns, what it would be like, the experience overall, that kind of thing. And had very firm ideas about what sorts of things they would like to see. They also knew what ruts they wanted the products to break out of. They knew that they wanted more dynamic environments.
They wanted a sense of immersion and so on. Then we had the users who came along from the brand. Ultima was a well established role playing game brand. It isn't as well known today, but perhaps its prominence, you might say. Somewhere between Final Fantasy and the Elder Scrolls games like Skyrim. It was that big a deal during the eighties and nineties.
So there was a sizable audience that had all of the assumptions and preferences [00:05:00] that that brand conveys. And that doesn't just mean lore. It means thematic things. It means elements that they expect to see in the game. Fortunately, a lot of the things that we wanted to do design wise to meet the needs of the Uh, online gaming audience dovetailed nicely with the kinds of things that have been in the Ultima games.
So for example, for the online gamers, we wanted a world that was rich in simulation, had a dynamic economy and so on, Ultima players were used to being able to brew potions and bake bread. So those two things went together really well. We were able to take those two features and say, this meets both needs and comes together as a package.
Other things were a lot harder to fit together. The chief brand thing about the Ultima series is this ethical structure created by Richard Garriott, the original designer of Ultima, that the player is supposed to move through, called the Virtues. [00:06:00] But we knew from our experience in online games that if you just give players a list of quests to do, they'll just do them.
And they won't necessarily behave in the game by the virtues, just because they're taking items off on their quest checklist. And so there were tensions as well that came about from having these two distinct audiences.
Amy: One of the most difficult things for any game developer, but also for app developers and product developers, is transitioning from that early, passionate group of fans.
To a much larger group that's more mainstream and you're really talking about that because if you just do what the very early people want, you're not going to grow, but those early people are so crucial for getting your ideas into the world and bringing them to life. So looking back, how do you think about that dynamic?
What are some of the heuristics that you've developed for yourself that you would say, counsel other developers you're working with or bring to a new game to manage [00:07:00] that transition?
Raph: Yeah, I always say, and I think this is echoed in game thinking quite a lot, is that the path to the mass market lies through the hardcore.
That isn't the same thing as saying it stops at the hardcore, but you have to go through the hardcore. And so you can't just jump to a mass market audience. The world does not work that way. You have people who are passionate early evangelize it outwards. But if you only then cater to the early adopters, you're likely to end up with something niche.
You're likely to end up with something that caters to people who are way more sophisticated than the mass market, particularly if it's a new category. And the result of that is that you may end up with something over complex that tries to do too many detailed things in order to cater to that audience.
I like to say it grows, rococo and gains filigree that will satisfy that audience when often what you need for the larger audience is something more elegant because it needs to be approachable. If it's something [00:08:00] they've never seen before, they need to be able to wrap their heads around it quickly.
Amy: How do you manage that like boots on ground?
Do you develop it first with the hardcore and then start bringing in more mass market type people for playtesting, once you've got that beachhead going?
Raph: I think it's important to think about what is the core promise and really hold that central in your mind, because the core promise is actually more important than any of the given features and the core promise is what you hope will be the threat that leads you through the hardcore and on out into the larger market and the individual features, the filigree, the stuff that only caters to a really hardcore user, let's say. You do hope that eventually that mass market, as they gain incompetence, will gain mastery and start wanting those features too.
So, as you design, the thing that needs to be front and center regardless, the common element there is that core promise. Can I [00:09:00] do what I set out to do? In the case of a game, that's often an immersive fantasy or, you know, a particular experience, right? I want to live in a parallel fantasy world, for example.
So in the case of Ultima Online, that was a thread that was common from those hardcore early folks. All the way out to all of the MMO players who are out there today, which now is in the tens to hundreds of millions of people, but the specific questions of, Oh, it's more realistic if I can't carry this much stuff in my backpack, or, Oh, should we be able to drop tables on the ground?
Things like that. Those are more filigree, right? Those are now rococo. So it's important to think in terms of what are the features for that early adopter audience that fulfill the promise, that meet the promise, and that provide a leg up so that gradually over time people can work their way up to greater sophistication.
But if you try piling in level [00:10:00] 50 detail from the get go, Then you're liable to never progress. You'll never reach that larger audience. It'll be too much. It's very important to unveil the promise...
Amy: Over time.
Raph: Over time.
Amy: Let's talk about progression. Let's dig into that. So Ultima Online's promise is live a parallel fantasy life.
And many people did, myself included. How did you think through and craft and then tune the progression system for that promise?
Raph: Yeah. So, we had a few principles. We knew we didn't want to hugely separate players, and that was a change from earlier games.
Amy: How so?
Raph: Earlier games all used a level system.
Amy: Mm hmm.
Raph: You'd come in, you were level one, you slew kobolds and rats and little orcs and small things. And eventually, someday, you'd reach slaying dragons once you were level 50, and had magic swords and magic armor and rode a unicorn and who knows what else. [00:11:00] So what that means though, is that a level 50 player can't really play fruitfully with a level one player.
They're consuming different content, they have vastly different levels of power. It's like the Jedi hanging out with a bunny rabbit. They're just not comparable. The new player would get slaughtered if they met a dragon. They would not have a good experience. And that's a real challenge if people start the game at different times.
Have not yet met their friends. If one player has more time to play than another, social groups start to pull apart. So we knew we did not want that. Even though it was an extremely familiar, established, carefully tuned in design model, so very low risk to adopt, it just wouldn't solve the problem that we knew we would have.
So that was a key challenge. The other key problem with it is that you earn levels by earning experience points and you earn experience points. By doing some kind of activity over and over again. This is our core loop, right? And so the core loop [00:12:00] in all of the games was kill stuff, get loot. Your loot is better gear, better swords, better armor, so that you can go kill stuff that's bigger and tougher.
And that's a great loop. Well established, well proven, been working great since Dungeons and Dragons. But if you want to be a bard, if you want to role play, if you want to make a living sewing caps for jugglers and right, then what do you do? Right? So if you're simulating a fantasy world, but the only way to advance in the game is killing things.
Then all of the ways of playing the game that we're carefully building. Have no advancement path. And so we needed something that would allow players to play any of these different ways. And that was because we knew that to reach a larger audience and to meet the promise of a parallel fantasy world, if it's a parallel world where the only thing you can do is kill, we knew we were limiting our audience pretty [00:13:00] dramatically.
We knew there were a lot of players out there who wanted to role play. Who just wanted to chat, who wanted to explore, who wanted to quest, and so on. So the solution we arrived at was what is generally called a use based system, which is another RPG system of longstanding. It's something that has been used many times in game history, but it's not nearly as popular or widespread as the leveling system is.
Simply put, if you went and sheared sheep, you would get better at shearing sheep each time you did it. And if you swung a sword, you would get better at swinging a sword each time you did it. Which did lead to things like players standing in practice yards swinging swords at training dummies, which we had put there just so they could swing their swords and practice.
Incentives being what they are, players started turning towards grinding these things. I'm just going to sheer endless sheep to get better at something. I'm just going to swing a sword endlessly to get better at something. And they [00:14:00] would even run macro software overnight when they weren't playing in order to do that, which wasn't really the intent.
We did not want to create a world full of robots. On the other hand, we should have predicted it because, you know, if you start playing a musical instrument, what they tell you to go do is to go practice. That's the way to Cardinal Yule, right? So we managed to replicate a real world behavior, but in a way that led to odd social artifacts within the game.
So we then started adjusting it, we originally had the ability for you to get a little bit better at something by just watching somebody else. Do something interesting, and we took that out because players were watching people inadvertently and the way the system worked, we didn't want you to get good at everything.
So you basically, as you gained in one thing, you'd eventually hit a cap as to how much you could know across everything. If you kept gaining in one thing, it would [00:15:00] slowly push down the others as you specialized. And if players therefore started learning things that they didn't want to, It could mean losing hard earned progress in something else, which is actually, again, what happens in the real world, but it turned out not to be very satisfying to a game player who has an expectation.
Once I learned something, I don't ever want to lose it. Eventually we put in systems that locked your learning. You could specify, I want to learn this. I want these to stay. And that eventually gave players enough control over the system that they could manage what things they were trying to achieve.
Amy: Now, years later, you worked on Star Wars Galaxies, and it seems like you also struggle with similar issues on Star Wars Galaxies.
How did you take what you had learned from all this tweaking and tuning and wrestling with these issues into the skill system on Star Wars?
Raph: So on Star Wars, what we decided to do was bring back experience [00:16:00] points rather than the use based system. We didn't want people to sit there endlessly swinging a sword in order to get better.
The virtue of experience points is that they grant you a reward for results, not just for trying. So we wanted to move to that results based kind of solution. But. We still wanted all of those other goals in terms of diversity of play types and all of the rest. So instead of building one kind of experience point.
We actually made a tailoring experience point, a crafting experience point, a combat experience point, a dancing experience point, even a mentoring experience point, and so we had experience points across all of the different kinds of professions and specializations. And then as you achieve certain thresholds in them, it allowed you to buy what we call the skill box.
And that was basically a threshold that locked you in. I now have these capabilities. So I worked my way up. Now I can do this. And these branched and grew out in a tree so [00:17:00] that you could work your way through, make choices. It's called a skill tree system. Also a common RPG paradigm. We still capped how many skill boxes you could have.
But you manually gave them up when the time came that you wanted to reorient your character. So now all the control is in the hands of the players instead.
Amy: You really express beautifully the core game thinking principles, the idea of finding your superfans and moving through the hardcore into the mainstream, how you craft an authentic and compelling progression system, and the importance of that core loop, the learning loop, so that you can get better at something within the experience.
How do you feel product designers can benefit from these ideas, which came from games, but apply much more broadly?
Raph: I think in product design, as in anything, what you want is a product that stretches as the user does. That's really what the user wants. They are coming with a need. They [00:18:00] are pushing it some boundaries and they want something that does what they need.
And turns out does exactly the new thing that they didn't quite know they would do. So in that sense, I think that the patterns are really about underlying human cognition and thinking and motivation. It's not that they're specific to games or to products. It's actually how we ideally interact with everything.
I feel this way when I play a musical instrument. I feel this way when I play a game as opposed to creating a game. These are fundamental human truths about the way in which we enjoy things and the way in which we interact with things and learn about things. So I think product designers absolutely benefit from thinking about that, and if it means that their products get a bit more fun along the way, even better.
Amy: Thank you so much for sharing your stories and your wisdom with us. I can't wait to play what you build next.
Outro: [00:19:00] Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim, the shows that help you innovate faster and smarter. Be sure to check out our website, getting2alpha.com. That's getting2alpha.com for more great resources and podcast episodes.