Richard Garriott on systems thinking and meaningful challenges

Richard Garriott is a pioneering game designer, gifted world-builder second-generation astronaut, arctic explorer - and ever-inspiring creative force. I first met Richard when I was teaching online community design at Stanford; half my class was in the Beta for Ultima Online, and I jumped in enthusiastically to learn the ropes. I ended up working with Richard, Raph Koster and their amazing crew of developers through the launch & growth of that early graphic MMO. Like many great game designers, Richard is a sophisticated systems thinker who sees the world through a unique lens that's on full display in this far-ranging & fascinating conversation.

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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: Welcome. I'm glad you're here today. You're in for a treat. We're hanging out with Richard Garriott, pioneering game designer, gifted world builder, second generation astronaut.

Arctic Explorer, an ever inspiring creative force. I first met Richard when I was teaching online community design at Stanford University. Half my class was in the beta for Ultima Online and I jumped in enthusiastically to learn the ropes. I ended up working with Richard and Raph Koster and their amazing crew of developers through the launch and growth of that early graphic MMO.

Like many great designers, Richard is a sophisticated systems thinker who [00:01:00] sees the world through that lens. Listen to him describe his take on digital urban planning. 

Richard: If you look at a neighborhood on Google Earth, so you just zoom in on a neighborhood, pick any suburban neighborhood, you will see houses arranged in city blocks, and those blocks are almost universally houses back to back in a row of, you know, six to 12, uh, back to back houses with a road around them, a street around them.

And then that, that sort of pattern of blocks of back to back houses will be repeated. And the reason why that's repeated is very practical. Everybody needs access to the road, but everybody only needs one access to the road. And so you try to not waste money building roads that you don't need and but still give everybody frontage.

And that's sort of the net result of that. But if you haven't thought that through or noticed that about the real world, then if you're sitting down to make a city in a, in a game, you might make a single row of houses and put a row on the front and on the back. And when I come down over and see that, I'm going like, well, that's wrong.[00:02:00] 

And it's wrong because, you know, even though in the, in the game world, it didn't cost you anything to build that extra road. In the real world, it costs you to make that extra road. And so they just urban planners just wouldn't do it. And these are the sort of youthful or inexperienced mistakes that the way you don't make them is you become a student of as diverse a set of everything you can.

Amy: I always learn something new and I get a chance to hang out with Richard and I know you will too. 

Welcome Richard to the Getting2Alpha podcast. 

Richard: Thank you, Amy Jo. I'm so excited to be with you today. 

Amy: It's wonderful to reconnect. You're very well known in the gaming industry and you're one of my personal mentors and heroes as well as a friend. So, for those who don't know you, give us a whirlwind tour of your background, in particular, how did you first get started in design and tech, [00:03:00] and what were those pivot points along the way that really led you to where you are now?

Richard: I consider myself a very lucky individual, especially by my age. I was a teenager right as personal computers emerged when I was in high school. And what was so fortunate about that is You know, not only have I then therefore gotten to ride the kind of growth of this new technology and new art forms with video game development, but no one older than me really had nearly the opportunities I did.

And so it was really pivotal to me that, you know, the high school I attended had a, for the first few years, merely a teletype, not even a personal computer, and only in my senior year did they actually have one of those newfangled Apple II computers. And no one else in the school really knew much about it.

There was no classes that really used it, no teachers that taught it. But I was so fascinated by it that I picked it up and kind of learned it all myself. Uh, as many others of my era did, you know, by just poking around on it and seeing what made it [00:04:00] tick and by becoming or having the opportunity to become one of the first experts.

With this new technology, you know, it's allowed me to help create video games that were some of the first video games at all Some of the first role playing games that allowed me to create some of the jargon even that we use in the industry now I've had the good fortune to uh have periodic top sellers that have kept me in business and excited about Continuing to make games now almost for 40 years. 

Amy: Amazing. One of the things about you is that you've been on the forefront of innovation. You don't just make games, you make very innovative games that open up new genres and that introduce new ideas. We could talk about that for another five hours, all your wonderful, innovative games. But looking back now, after you've shipped so many games, And if you're out there on the forefront, what do you wish you had known 20 years ago, 30 years ago about successful innovation that you really know now?

Richard: Well, you know, it's interesting because, um, you know, most [00:05:00] of the hard lessons, the lessons you only, you know, learn by either stumbling into the right answer or by making, you know, choosing the wrong answer a few times and you learn where not to go. Most of those, you know, lucky or hard fought answers.

Frankly, it'd be hard to imagine a way to have known it ahead of time, only because we really were inventing virgin territory in oh so many ways. But a couple of the big ones that I think we could have done better, or I could have done better, had we stumbled upon them or learned them earlier, would be a couple of primary metaphors that now I use very consciously.

You know, one is, my devotion to research and research outside of the primary area of the development of computer games in this case, and what I mean by that is a lot of people naturally would get their inspiration from making their next computer game from other computer games, or if you're making movies, you might take it from other movies.

But one of the things I learned relatively early on was that if you really want to make something that's new and original and [00:06:00] compelling, you need to go far afield to find inspiration. And so, uh, for the best things I put into my games are the things I reflect on as the biggest moments and that I'm most proud of.

They're fairly universally things that I took from either exploration of the real world that we live in or digging through history or science. Or, you know, watching some late night B movie that while the movie itself was terrible, you can tell the person who was inspired to make this thing originally had one great idea that they, you know, at least we're trying to express.

And by taking your inspiration from very, very diverse fields, I think you can then find a way to, into your own field of endeavor, in my case, computer games, and create something that's powerful and original. So that's, that's, that's sort of one. And the other is sort of a corollary to it. Which was when I first began, my earliest games were really kind of a, you know, a hodgepodge of, uh, things I saw around me that, uh, kind of, frankly, I kind of, uh, lifted ideas out of, you know, my early [00:07:00] Ultimas included Star Wars, lightsabers and landspeeders and time bandits, time travel, and, you know, almost anything that I saw around me that was, uh, unique versus being crafted into a compelling whole.

And so another part of that is, uh, and probably described as a corollary to that research. Is how to make something truly your own, how to not just pick up pieces of that you might consider plagiarized in a sense. Uh, but how to really create a universal whole that will stand on its own as something worthy and unique on its own.

And that's sort of a care to the process of craft. 

Amy: That's so interesting. That coherence that great art has or that a really good game has versus the thrown together version of interesting ideas that don't quite add up to something larger. That's such a, uh, a key issue for product designers and game designers and everyone who gets caught up in featuritis, right?

Richard: No, that's exactly right. And, and, you know, if I can even expand on that too, it's natural to see how we get to the [00:08:00] other extreme. This art form is still so young, uh, you know, even, even, even having been in for the four years of its life. We, you know, the vast majority of games, and I would probably even be self critical and say the vast majority of things I put in my own games still don't live up to that ideal.

And that, I think, is just because of the youth of the art form. You know, if you look at movies, you know, the art form of movies is now 140 years old, and the only movies that adhere to these principles Make it above the chaff at all. And, uh, still, I would argue the majority of games that are successful still don't meet this criteria.

And if they get away with not having to meet this criteria, uh, again, just because of, uh, there's so few masters of it yet. 

Amy: Let's talk a little bit about what happened with Ultima IV. That was a phase shift for you. 

Richard: It sure was. 

Amy: And I think the most coherent of the games up till that point. How did that one come to have that coherence?

Richard: Well, absolutely. In fact, that to me was sort of the big, the break point [00:09:00] in my career. And even just how I reflect on my own work. You know, prior to Ultima IV, all my games, while I think they were reasonably good games and they sold reasonably well, people seemed to enjoy them, but they really were the standard role playing trope that is still the standard role playing trope to this day.

You're supposedly a great hero, you know so because you're told in the instructions or in the, you know, the initial screens of the game. Your job is to defeat the big evil bad guy. And you know, here's your beginner sword and shield, you know, good luck on your adventures and players get in and they level up by killing monsters and collecting treasure in order to go kill the bad guy.

But the bad guy isn't really doing anything bad. They're just sort of waiting for you on the final level. And players along their journey are probably doing whatever it is that min maxes their journey to the, to power. And if that means to lie and cheat and steal, they will be happy to do that. They're just trying to become powerful enough to defeat the bad guy.

You know, and while there's nothing wrong with that from a gameplay standpoint, it's a bit hollow. [00:10:00] And in my case, I realized it was a bit hollow when I, with the publication of the previous game, Ultima III, Which was the first game published by my own company, but my brother and I formed Origin, and our first product that we self published was Ultima III.

And so suddenly I realized that players were not playing very heroically, in fact they were playing fairly dastardly, and the bad guys were just kind of hanging out waiting for them. And I realized it was something more shallow than was at least in my mind's eye when I was crafting these original experiences.

But I realized they were playing according to the rules that I put forth. So there's no one to blame for how they play. And what the path to success is other than myself. I gave them that path to success and no surprise they used it. 

Amy: Hello, incentive systems. 

Richard: Yes, exactly right. And so, uh, I sat down and what was interesting about the development of Ultima IV is as soon as anyone in my company, that's, this starts with my brother, kind of spilled over to my parents, all of the [00:11:00] QA staff, anybody else around me.

So these were, so when I did these by myself, so I didn't really have Other programmers or artists or designers working with me. It was it was really pretty much a solo effort still and When people began to realize that I was going to make a game Where if you lied cheat and stole you would lose you actually could not succeed And that there was no big evil bad guy to go defeat It really was a prove yourself to be a person of good virtue and the game was sort of seducing you Into you know the shorter quicker paths of ill gotten gains You Uh, and then, you know, kind of punishing you for it if you chose it.

As soon as people around me realized that's what I was doing, to a person, their counsel was, you're doing the wrong thing. To a person, they would come to me and say, Richard, you have all this fan mail we've just received, where people are telling you this is how they like playing your game. They're explicitly telling you how much fun they had slaughtering all the villagers and stealing from all the [00:12:00] shops.

And even killing your character Lord British. Uh, and you're about to make a game that basically punishes them for exactly what they told you they like about your games. And, uh, it was a very soul searching time. It was one of these times where I'm going like, you know what? I just believe this is the right thing to do.

And at that same time, all the elves and dwarves and standard roleplaying creatures left my games and I only began to bring in things that were unique to mine. Anything I could think of that was sort of lifted out of other intellectual property went away. And only my true, you know, what I felt were my own original creations stayed in.

And I created this, uh, you know, much deeper, much more cohesive plot line in the game where I really had something to say to the player who was playing the game and while up to the day that it launched, everyone around me thought this was a bad idea and I was counseled regularly, including by the QA, the final, you know, white gloving of QA.

I was advised. You know, things I should [00:13:00] remove from the game because I thought it was too, you know, puritanical, shall we say. And then when it launched, it actually became my first number one bestseller. 

Amy: What happened? Why did it become a bestseller? 

Richard: Well, I think that people understood it quickly. I can't tell you how many times I had had people, especially of course, back in the day, described to me personally their moment of revelation.

They would sit down to play the game. They would sit down to play it like every other game they've ever played, including all of my games that ever, ever played. And I did let them lie and cheat and steal. And the clever part, I think that one of the most clever parts of the game was how I gave those incentives that you were mentioning, where, as opposed to as you steal, having an alarm go off and slap you on the wrist, if you did it in private, it actually allowed it to work.

And, and as far as you knew, you were successfully stealing. But of course it's a computer game, so the computer knows that you're stealing. It just, uh, it didn't say anything to you about it, but rather it [00:14:00] just kind of recorded it and kept sort of a karmic log, uh, behind the scenes. And a little bit later, if you needed to go, you know, get a, some, some help from the person you've been stealing from, they might go, you know, I'd, I'd love to help the hero that's here to save our lands, but you're the most dishonest thieving scumbag I've ever met, so no way I'm gonna help you.

A moment like that was almost universally a very powerful revelation to the players where they realized that they were correctly being judged for a truly inappropriate behavior that they were truly manifesting in the game. And as soon as they realized that the game was capable of sort of seeing into their soul in a sense, And really seeing their motivation and the game was going to provide that kind of analytics to what they were doing that moment.

They realized we're in for a very special experience and became invested in the journey once they realized [00:15:00] that their free ride was over. 

Amy: So then let's fast forward to Ultima Online. So you, Ultima IV was a breakthrough game in the industry and you did many other games as well as Origin. And then you did one of the very earliest graphical MMOs, Ultima Online.

That was when you and I worked together, and there was this very interesting influx of players who had played a lot of Doom, who were very similar to those people you're talking about, you know, in Ultima III, who wanted to cause havoc. So, how did you navigate through that as you were bringing Ultima Online to life?

Another genre defining breakthrough product. 

Richard: And of course, you know, plenty more, more lessons learned the hard way. I mean, you, you were, you were sitting with us as we were learning. Oh, so many of these lessons live, uh, you know, not just the ultimate online, but some of the other online communities you've studied, but what was [00:16:00] interesting about this moment, you know, ultimate online by no means was the first online game.

It was not the first. multiplayer role playing game online, but all those that came before it, uh, there was something unique about its moment in time. For a decade prior to Ultima Online, we discussed and debated whether the time was ripe to create Ultima Online. We used to call it Multima, as in multiplayer Ultima.

So is this the year that we're going to make the multiplayer Ultima, Multima? And we would always look over at our friends and colleagues who are making their text muds, text based multi user dungeons, and we Or a few of these very primitive graphic multi user dungeons And all of those were generally being supported on a pay by the minute dial up bulletin board service kind of technology Which made them very expensive to play meant they didn't have very many users And so we kept looking at it going, you know, we we can't really make a triple a frontline game yet Because the backbone to even bring people together isn't ready.

And in the middle of 1990s, we, [00:17:00] we saw the internet starting to pick up and we said, okay, now's the time. And so we put together the visual presentations that we'd already been doing a lot with the style graphics of the, some previous Ultimas. And while we didn't explicitly put the virtue system into it from Ultima, It sort of inherited the feeling that the role players of the community kind of came to it with the assumption that this world was a world of virtue and that people would need to, that the good players would be playing in this route, or in this method, or with these ideals.

But, as you noted, an online community, you know, not just the Doom and Quake folks who came across, or any of the other, you know, first person shooter PvP type players, But just in general, online communities always have a mixture, as we've discussed previously, of the Bartle's four player types, for example.

You know, Explorers, and Achievers, and Roleplayers, and the fourth category I like to call Dissidents. You know, the people who are saying, you know, I'm here to muck it up because that's how I have fun, is to kind of mess with other [00:18:00] people's status quo. And so we created a game that we knew, in fact, we put in features that allowed you to do things like steal and pickpocket out of other people's homes or off their person.

And we put in the ability for people to attack each other and capture some reward out of the bodies, the corpse of the person that you killed. So we actually put in these features that allowed. Aggression and, uh, interference. But what was interesting to see is how that manifested. The world very quickly became very much like the American, you know, or at least my interpretation of, uh, the American Wild West, where lawlessness and the law of might makes right sort of became the standard.

Because the game itself, the protections we tried to put into the game were completely insufficient to For managing the reality of what happened within the game. And so, for example, we would make it to where it was safe in the towns. You couldn't attack each other in the towns and it was dangerous. Once you went [00:19:00] out into the woods.

And we actually originally thought that was a very good idea. I still think it's a pretty good idea with some caveats. Uh, but what happened was or you know first what we intended was that you know If you were a blacksmith making weapons and armor in a town You might need to hire some miners to go to the caves and bring up some iron ore And those miners might need to hire some fighters and mages to protect them on the way back and forth to the city The mines, which means they have to pay those people.

And of course, those miners coming back with the ore could sell the ore to the craftsman. And thus, we had this big loop going where, you know, money would be circulating, you know, clockwise and resources would be circulating counterclockwise. And thus, this virtual economy would be rich and interdependent.

What began to happen Is people began to become more and more clever with the ways that they would take advantage of other people and whether that was Psychological games where people would say hey. Oh, I see you're a beginner. You know, I'm [00:20:00] an experienced player. Let me help you out here Let me even give you something.

I might give you a sword or give you a new shield It's way better than that beginner sword but why don't you come out with me out into the woods and i'll kind of show you how to hunt and Then they would get ganked And, you know, and that's, that was just the beginning. It actually got much, much, the cleverness of people to do harm or interfere with each other was staggering.

It is still staggering. And it was actually a lot of fun to watch. But the problem is that if you're a ranked beginner, it's not very, very fun to be the victim. And so the challenge became how do you let beginners get a solid footing And or how do you let role players who just don't like that to play and participate in the game and yet also leave it the world rich enough to where you can leave some of this excitement and danger present without destroying the fun for those who don't like to be preyed?

Amy: Yep, that's the question. And I remember it makes a hell of a [00:21:00] balancing challenge for the reputation system. 

Richard: It sure does because you can't interpret always what somebody's true motivations are. 

Amy: Yeah, how do you now think about reputation systems given that? Because that's one of the most interesting and rich and important and tricky areas of system design is, you know, that kind of reputation system.

Richard: Yeah, well, to some degree, we have to lean on the real world in the following way. I mean, there are certain things that are clearly illegal that, you know, police can protect And in a game you can actually just block the habit of if we wanted to say murdering another person is just illegal. We could actually just prevent players from attacking each other and we're done with it however, if you decide that Players versus other players is a fun play dynamic Then you have to turn it on at least some part of the time and as soon as you turn that on some part of The time you immediately go.

Okay, well the players are have the ability to harm each other How do you really know each other's motivations because if you assume that's always bad. Well, then some [00:22:00] people like to have a bad reputation and they'll just agree to meet out in the woods somewhere and take turns killing each other and drive up their negative reputation so they appear to be a You know a dread lord, you know some epic bad guy to go fight even though they really just kind of stood in the woods and whacked each other and so one of the ways we do that or you know one of the I think one of the most Interestingly the most reliable way is don't try to put a system in to second guess people's motivations. 

You let the real world sort that out I mean, it's If you think about the real world and who you decide you want to do business with, if they haven't done things that are illegal, which you could probably track down, if they just have a business habit you don't appreciate, you only really find that out by doing some diligence on that person and listening to the rumors about that person. Or you know, looking at some of the decisions they've made and decide if that's somebody you really want to do business with.

And so, what you need to do is give players the tools to make those evaluations, uh, themselves. And you need to provide the strong mechanisms to protect those that really just don't ever want to [00:23:00] get involved with this. And so, for example, on my new game, Shroud of the Avatar, it's a game where there are some areas of the world that are like the Wild West.

You cannot go into them without risking being, you know, hurt by another player. And there are some players who are just going like, you know, I just don't want to go there. I'm just, I don't want to participate in player versus player combat risk. And whether it's because they feel like prayer, that's just not the way they like to play, they like to stay separated.

But then we have the problem of, well, the people like PVP, the only fun of player versus player is if other people come in and, uh, and it's more fun if those people aren't expecting you. And so what we do is we try to encourage the mixing at those boundaries as much as we can by putting incentives in the high risk areas.

But, but again, that has to be carefully managed because, uh, the people who are just the role players who don't want to go involved in PvP say, look, if you put something that they get, which I don't, then it's not fair, you've made part of the game available to them, or some rewards in the game that are available to [00:24:00] them, that are not available to me, so you're telling me I'm a second class citizen.

And so the way we manage that Is we usually make a longer back door that does not involve the player versus player risk that can get you to that same reward. And so what we do is we make the easiest path to get those special things to also face those risks. But if you really don't want to, there is a harder path, which will achieve you the same results.

Amy: That's really interesting. That's a real evolution in your thinking. And yet there's a common thread. 

Richard: Well, the roots of it go back, you know, this game of chess goes back to, you know, 1997. It's the same game, but you know, the sophistication, the subtlety of frankly, both sides, the perpetrators and the defenders, the sophistication is increased, the subtlety is increased, but that's still one of the primary.

You know, if you look at our community web pages, that's still one of the number one most contentious. Issues to this day is how much of a free for all should it be and how protected should it be 

Amy: That contentiousness keeps it [00:25:00] interesting. 

Richard: Well, we we believe so too But if you ask people on either side It's it's sort of a religious argument in many senses of the word the people who believe that life should be safe And those others should be just kept far far far away Those people feel very passionate about that and the people who enjoy pvp You Uh, you know, I'm pretty passionate about that.

This really is, you know, the core of what makes a game interesting and exciting to them. And if you try to complete, you could imagine just 100 percent segregating those people. But as you noted earlier, we believe, as the developers of the world, having watched the data of what keeps people engaged, not just talking on the websites, but coming back and supporting their friends, is that risk.

Risk needs, it just needs to be managed. You, you know, you know what you don't wanna have happen is somebody putting on a, a wedding in the game, a role playing a really nice wedding and have some, you know, a jerk, you know, managed to come through and break through the behavior fences that we have [00:26:00] and really disrupt something truly beautiful and personal to that group.

So you wanna, you wanna give enough protection to make sure people can do that with confidence. On the other hand, you do wanna make sure that. The easiest way to, you know, get the treasure at the end of a journey is just to walk into the potential danger that doesn't look dangerous, but you know, in your heart of hearts that it is.

And so when you walk in there, good odds, you'll be able to get in and get out without any trouble, but there's some odds there's somebody gonna be hiding behind that tree to take it from me as soon as you pick it up. And, and you want that because that means you knew you were in a risk area. You thought you'd get away with it.

You often do, but in this case, you didn't. But now you have somebody to complain about. You know, like that person stole my treasure and I'm now going to talk about it and I'm going to get my friends online and we are going to hunt that guy down and get my treasure back or get even or whatever it might be.

Those are the things that actually keep both sides, you know, really engaged and fire it up about [00:27:00] carrying on the good fight of virtue versus vice within the games. Uh, that is sort of the core of the storytelling that we like to do. 

Amy: I want to dig into this dynamic you're talking about with the PVP and the people who want to be safe.

So one of the, um, insights I've had in the last few years is that Bartle's model, which I really Deeply and on a gut level learned working on Ultima Online because there's a lot of griefers. There's a lot of people that want to, you know, take your gold and kill you in the woods. That type of person doesn't show up in every online community.

Um, there are some where that isn't a type, like they just are repelled by the nature of the community. The stakes aren't that interesting, for instance, academic communities, that sort of thing. There are people that like to disrupt things, but I realized that What was missing from Bartle's model was a really clear distinction between zero sum and non zero sum play styles.

Richard: Yeah, that's interesting because uh, you're correct. Uh, the thing I latched on in [00:28:00] particular you said is there's just not enough there to be of interest to the distance. I mean, again, if we didn't allow player versus player combat or player versus player theft, you know, then they'd be relinquished to them trying to mess up their decorations of their houses.

And if they can't muck with the decorations of their houses, then, you know, where's the fun for them? So they would, we could immediately, Get rid of them. And so managing them out of the game is actually not necessarily that hard. We just find it has been, at least for us, has been better to provide them an outlet which adds spice to the world versus ban them entirely.

Amy: You're also using them to create a cooperative game for the other side. So that's the thing that I want to dig into because it's so interesting to me. If you don't know, not you, Richard, but you, uh, listening, if you don't know what zero sum and non zero sum is very briefly, zero sum games are where.

Players compete for limited resource for dominance, basically winning, losing. And a lot of people like that. A lot of sports are built around that, but sports also [00:29:00] have a non zero sum component and non zero sum play styles are where a group of people cooperates. Thanks. To accomplish something they couldn't do on their own, right?

Richard: Yes, and what's interesting about that is, um, I'll be careful not to allude to the plot of, uh, With Shroud of the Avatar, episode one is the one we'll be releasing this summer. And as players conclude episode one and begin to be teased about episode two, it plays into exactly what we're now at the moment of discussing.

Which is, if you assume there's a relatively smaller number of these dissidents. And a relatively larger, uh, amount of the communal types, which, uh, is what we've at least historically had and seem to be common in, in role playing, uh, communities, uh, that allow player conflict. Our next big release of, uh, Shroud of the Avatar is specifically how to almost create two separate kinds of games.

One for those dissidents [00:30:00] to compete for power with each other and one for the community to rise as a group to face that competition broadly. It's a new way to kind of sort the community in a way that we think will, will be particularly good at creating this entanglement between the two groups. 

Amy: Exactly. And what I notice in gaming is there's a real rise in cooperative gaming. Part of it's the influx of women. Exactly. And females, they tend to gravitate toward those style. We used to call that socializers in Bartle's model. And I've come to realize it's actually people that enjoy cooperative gaming. They, it's not that they don't enjoy having goals and really struggling.

They just want to do it coop. 

Richard: I know. I agree with that too. You know, what's interesting is just speaking of women in gaming, that made me just think of the following. I like to believe that I have occasionally been a trendsetter, not only just on kind of game design principles. And technical techniques for getting, you know, graphics on screen, for example, but also on kind of corporate and [00:31:00] business and inclusiveness in gaming.

And I'm proud to at least believe that, uh, you know, Ultima's have historically had a better mix of genders playing than many other games. And Ultima three was the first game, you know, where you could choose your gender as male, female, or other, which I wasn't doing at the time to think I was being progressive in any way.

It's just because your character was a tiny little stick figure and you really couldn't tell what gender it was. And, you know, I just thought it was cute to leave you the option, but I was at a industry community event in Austin, Texas, and, uh, I was lamenting the fact that, you know, the majority of my employees are still Caucasian males.

And while over the years, I've done a good job of getting women into management positions within the company, but I've had a harder time getting them in as developers. And I actually think that harms development skills of my team. And I was actually challenged by one of the younger women who was in this development community group, and she explained to me, she said, well, you realize it's self inflicted, and I can tell you exactly why.

And I was like, I was shocked. I'm like, okay, well, you know, I [00:32:00] think I'm being progressive. Tell me why I've done this. Or have done this. And she said, well, look, I'll bet if I looked at the ads, you've placed for hiring, that you basically demand anyone to even look at the resume has to have 10 years of experience.

And I'm going like, yeah, we usually do. And he goes like, well, there's your problem. It means you're only hiring into the diversity that was there 10 years ago, as opposed to what's graduating today. And so you're missing out on the now equal graduation statistics that people who are willing to hire greener people than you are, are benefiting from.

And, and I actually think she was right. And so, uh, you know, we're now changing our hiring habits to make sure we can get better diversity, even throughout our development team. 

Amy: Yeah. That's a light bulb moment. 

Richard: Yeah. It's one of these things where you, you know, hit yourself on the forehead and go like, well, how can I be so stupid?

But you know, we still, we all still make mistakes. 

Amy: Well, you're iterating, you iterated, you took the data and you iterated. Yeah. That's, and that's again, like to me, one of those big secrets of innovation success. You know, you don't [00:33:00] like get the idea and it's a straight line, right? It's like tons of listening to your market and knowing who to listen to at what stage and all that stuff.

Richard: Exactly so.

Amy: Let's talk about your superpowers because I think that there really is that red thread as they say in Europe, that through line in your career and in your creativity. To me, one of your real superpowers is as a world builder. 

Richard: Yeah, you know, um, it seems I agree with that and you know, it's interesting.

I just released a book, uh, last month. 

Amy: Oh, yeah, tell us about that. 

Richard: It's called Explore, Create. And, you know, I've, I've thought about writing something, you know, for a long time, but I've never made the time because I wasn't even really exactly sure what I wanted to say. I mean, I knew I was living through some unique times having been at the foundation of this industry, but I, I hadn't really thought through what is my superpower to put it another way.

And how can I articulate that in a way that is helpful, first of all, interesting and hopefully helpful to [00:34:00] others who either want to do what I do in this business or how it might be applied in other segments. And one of the things I, I began to realize is something I was alluding to earlier, this concept of research, this, this belief I have that you, you must study everything everything.

Everything. In order to do anything and that comes up a lot. I get reminded of this when for example I might hire a new world builder and when I watch a new world builder come in these guys are often young gamers They've you maybe have a game design degree from university. They've already played a lot of games They've made some other games and I will watch them laying out a town a city And they will do things that I believe are errors that I believe I recognize as errors because I've sort of studied civic plannings because I've almost, almost anything I've had to manifest in a game.

I've gone and researched that subject in the real world. And it's not to say I'm necessarily an expert at it, but here's, here's an example, [00:35:00] you know, if you, if you look at a neighborhood on Google earth, so you just get a, you know, zoom in on a neighborhood, any pick any suburban neighborhood, you will see houses arranged in city blocks.

And those blocks are almost universally houses back to back in a row of, you know, six to 12, uh, back to back houses with a road around them, a street around them. And then that, that sort of pattern of blocks of back to back houses will be repeated. And the reason why that's repeated is very practical.

Everybody needs access to the road, but everybody only needs one access to the road. And so you try to not waste money building roads that you don't need and, but still give everybody frontage. And that's sort of the net result of that. But if you haven't thought that through or noticed that about the real world, then if you're sitting down to make a city in a, in a game, you might make a single row of houses and put a row on the front and on the back.

And when I come down over and see that, I'm going like, well, that's wrong. And it's wrong because, you know, even though in the, in the game world, it didn't cost you anything to build that extra road [00:36:00] in the real world, it costs you to make that extra road. And so they just urban planners just wouldn't do it.

And these are the sort of youthful or inexperienced mistakes that the way you don't make them is you become a student of as diverse a set of everything you can. And so, you know, one of the things I noticed about myself and now pride myself on is, you know, when I walk around in a city or travel, you know, whether it's in a remote primitive areas or, you know, modern urban areas.

I pay attention to all of the infrastructure around how power is brought in, how pipes work, where the water towers are, where the cell phone towers are, you know, any box that is sitting around on street corners or other things, I look at it and I'm kind of curious as to what it is and why is it there.

And when I first started spending some time up here in New York, which is where I'm speaking to you from now, almost immediately I noticed that there are six foot tall, three foot around liquid nitrogen [00:37:00] tanks. On about every fifth or eighth street corner, and they didn't go away. They were, they were there all the time, you know, month after month.

And so I began to go, you know, why are they there? And I couldn't actually figure it out on my own. I actually had to Google it. But it turns out it's, it's for the internet infrastructure. It's they use it to pressurize pipes. Under the streets that otherwise might have water invade in them and and hurt the the newfangled internet structure And there's no plan for these to go away They're not a permanent part of the city with its aging underground infrastructure that needs this pressure to keep water out And most new yorkers walk by it and have no idea You know if you literally walk to any new yorker has been here their whole life Say, do you, have you noticed these liquid nitrogen tanks that most of them will tell you I've never noticed.

Amy: That's systems thinking in a nutshell, what you just said. And that's something that I'm working hard to help people learn how to do because it's so fundamental for building products that have interesting systems in them. But most [00:38:00] people don't really think that way. Or that, that's what I've noticed.

What have you noticed? 

Richard: Yeah, no, I, I agree with that completely. And I would even add the following little metaphor to it too, that, uh, that's sort of sprung out of Ultima Online. When you have a team of, you know, some tens of people that go build a world, you, you not only do you have to decide what's in this world and what's out of this world, but then the things that you decide to put in the world, you decide everything there is to decide about them.

And you decide all of those things before anyone is there to play it. And so, for example, if there is going to be stores that sell candy bars, you know, you've invented the existence of candy bars, the shape of the candy bar, the shelf of the candy bar, you put the candy bar on the shelf, and you probably set the price for the candy bar that's sitting on that shelf.

And you did, and you did that not with just with candy bars, but clothing and houses and swords and shields and food and, uh, you know, if there was electricity or water or sewage or any of the other services that a city might have. You know, where all the roads are, you know, you, you've decided all of it.

And then when you [00:39:00] invite in people to move in, unlike the real world, which evolves, you know, a city doesn't get built overnight in the real world, the city, you know, someone builds a house in the, you know, out in the Prairie somewhere, and, you know, over a hundred years, uh, people slowly move in and around them and build the city.

The streets and they occasionally tear things down to make room for the bypasses, you know, whatever it might be that evolves the existence that city and so when you build it all yourself, the odds of doing it right when the million people move in is close to zero. But one of the things that helps a lot is to make sure you.

Uh, only put in those things that you can and do think of their interactions. So if you, if you decided that candy bars are important, you need to know, well, if I put it, if that candy bar is going to be 25 cents, how much does that represent compared to how are people going to earn the money to pay that 25 cents and what actions are they going to do to earn that 25 cents and what other things could they do with that 25 cents?

They're going to be [00:40:00] competing against buying that candy bar. And, you know, and if you think about the real world, that's of course, what economists have to do in the real world also. A game is really no different. Every lever that exists, the saving grace for a game is you have put whatever levers exist, you put them there and you can minimize the number of levers by choosing not to put that lever in the game with creeping featurism that at least I know I'm prone to, uh, but so, so, so many other game developers, it's, it's hard not to put in more levers than you can manage.

But minimizing those levers by all means makes it far better, far easier to manage. 

Amy: You're a very experienced game designer and you're also more than that. You're a mentor, you lead teams, you're an investor. Earlier you mentioned some of the mistakes that you see level builders making that you could, you know, tell them how to fix and encourage them to learn.

What are some of the other really common mistakes that you see first time entrepreneurs [00:41:00] and new game designers make when they're in the early stages of bringing their ideas to life? 

Richard: Well, I would say the number one mistake that I see almost everyone make, and we're all prone to it, I'm not even saying I'm not at risk of making this mistake, but the number one mistake I see in almost every game proposal I look at is that somebody starts with a proposal that is an homage to something they really liked.

With the improvements that they naturally thought of making to it by being someone who loved the The kind of game player the product type that they're wanting to go rebuild And so, you know a worst case example of this might be You know if I like first person shooters and I go, you know, hey the new halo was my favorite game ever But the thing that I think would have really made it great Is if it had a better diversity of weapons or more med packs or more different kinds of med packs or something You know if that's where you [00:42:00] start with your game design idea is let me do something somebody else did but iterate on it I think you were already guaranteed to lose And then and that's still the majority of what I see when people are you know I'm looking at whether it's in school projects or professional proposals.

They almost all are that you and the problem with that is, um, it comes at many levels. My, my first problem is if your example really was, let me do halo, but better. Well, the team doing halo was trying to do halo, but better. And they already have their team together. They're, they're incredibly skilled at making things like halos and good odds, they're thinking of the same things you thought of, I mean, they haven't, they're not blind to the feedback.

And so you're by definition, entering a race. That you're setting yourself up to lose in that race. So fundamentally, I think that's just a terrible idea as a place to start. But more importantly, it misses out on what I think is really the right place to start. Which is to sit back and, games I admire most, whether they're big or small, [00:43:00] many of them are very small.

Like, uh, you know, Monument Valley. Or, uh, uh, there was a game called, uh, well the recent one is called The Instant, A Dark Room was the original one, purely text. And there's all these games that I can point to that fit what I think is a far better model. And the model is, how can I take something that has, you know, that has not been thought of as a game, or not been included at all in games, And how can I use that as an inspiration to make an interactive environment that's compelling?

And I'll use, say, Monument Valley as a good case study. You know, Monument Valley, I can only assume, was inspired by M. C. Escher drawings of, you know, how your brain, given certain sets of visual information, Can remap a reality in a variety of different ways. And then they set up some tools to let you wander through a maze that, uh, you know, changed the nature of reality around it.

And as I played that game, you know, I immediately thought, wow, what a really clever idea in addition. [00:44:00] To build the editor for it and actually know how to map it I'm going like I'm not even trying to solve that so they solved a really cool technical problem And then on top of that I thought about level design on top of that.

I'm going wow I enjoy these levels, but if I had to make one, I don't even know how where I'd start I mean, I I could not personally have made levels Nearly as good as the person who could bend their mind This way has managed to do to come up with these levels You And to me, that's exactly the way game design ought to be.

Take your inspiration, not from other games, take your inspiration from, in this case, it was probably art and find a way to wrap that into a game design. 

Amy: So where are you getting your inspiration these days? What are you seeing that's new and exciting and inspires you? 

Richard: Well, what's interesting about my inspirations is they, mine, mine come right off of the news and newspapers.

And, and that has, that has been true back to the time of Ultima IV. Ultima IV. And [00:45:00] I can pretty much tell you with every game I've done since Ultima IV, what was happening in the world that compelled me to put that story in my games, despite the fact that if you were playing it at the time, you might not see the inspiration yourself as a player.

Many of them were veiled pretty deeply. But let me give you one that wasn't veiled that deeply, which would have been Ultima 6, The False Prophet. And with Ultima 6, You know, I'd already sort of told a story about virtue. I'd already told a story about complexity of beliefs and what was going on in the world to me was like now, oddly, there was a time where racism or at least even if not race based, you know, just bigotries of various kinds were common in the news and were strongly felt by me personally as something I wanted to speak to.

So what I set up in the game is I set up. Uh, this race of gargoyles, you know, horned, [00:46:00] banged, leathery winged, long clawed, bad guys, obviously visually bad guys. Who began the game attacking you and attacking the humans of Britannia, and you were set up to defend these people who really were being attacked and fight off these, you know, obviously behaving malevolently gargoyles.

But as you play the game, they keep coming up out of the ground forever, you know, and you're kind of at a stalemate. If you don't, if you don't find a way to stop them at their source, they're going to just stay attacking forever. And so stopping to the source means go down into the underground where they're coming from.

And when you go down to the underground, you find that they have cities, and towns, and families, and architecture, and written works, and a language they speak, which seems like verbally good to you. But, if you sit down and actually try to read it, You find out that it in fact really is a language and we made up an entire language for them that you can decipher with great pain, [00:47:00] but if you do, you find out that the reason why they're attacking is because they have a set of prophecies that calls you the false prophet and that you are going to come down into their underworld and you are going to commit genocide and wipe out the Gargoyle race, which is exactly what you're doing.

And so that, that storyline was one of my favorite stories of, of all Ultimas is to realize, you know, you're, you're set up to lose the game by the starting conditions. And to me, it's really a story about racism and bigotry. But, uh, you know, by the time I got the inspiration, you know, it was probably two, you know, two years, maybe or longer by the time it came out.

And so most people wouldn't see the contemporary social events and the specific, uh, they wouldn't think about that at the time they played the game. But I do, and that's still what I do to this day. 

Amy: You've got some exciting things coming up. You've got a book out and we'll make sure to put all the info about how to get that in the episode notes, and you've got an episode of your new game getting released, tell us about that.

Richard: Shroud of [00:48:00] the Avatar, subtitled Forsaken Virtues, is the first episode of what we plan to be about five episodes of Shroud of the Avatar, which to me is sort of the spiritual successor of all things Ultima. It has a deep solo player story within it that harkens in many ways back to Ultima IV through Ultima 7, which I think is sort of the sweet spot of storytelling and in Ultimas, but it's also set in a multiplayer reality.

So it has the Ultima Online kind of feel to it. So, uh, it's a homage or spiritual successor to those as well. And we've done it in a game that you can literally in real time. Throttle up and down between solo player and massively multiplayer. The game does it on its own if it wants you to have a solo Moment with the king in the throne room It just only lets one player at a time into the throne room to get their marching orders for what their next activity is So that they feel unique and special as an individual, but when they walk out of the throne [00:49:00] room and back on the streets of the city, they see all their friends around them.

And as opposed to being broken up into shards, as a lot of MMOs traditionally are, where, you know, people playing on the east coast don't see people playing on the west coast. Ours is all, everybody in the world is in the same global reality, but we can manage that because the game is so good about spinning up private instances or additional instances temporarily only as demand needs and only in the place that it's needed that it just as quickly undoes as soon as it can.

And so it's, it's technologically kind of a unique game in the way that it operates. We believe it's got the benefits of both letting you play with all your friends, but also being able to tell you a personally handcrafted story. And that's coming out. The story should be complete in July. You know, we're still debating exactly what to call that moment in time.

You know, the old fashioned terms of Alpha, Beta, and, you know, Gold Master or Launch don't really apply as much in these online days. So, uh, we don't know exactly what we're [00:50:00] calling it, but the next big milestone anyway is coming up this summer. 

Amy: Excellent. We'll make sure to include info about how to go and join that.

Thank you so much, Richard, for sharing your time and your stories and your great insights with us. It's been a total pleasure. 

Richard: Oh, the pleasure is mine. And of course, I'd love to come back and chat anytime we get a chance to do it again soon. 

Amy: Let's make it happen. All right. Talk to you soon. 

Outro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim, the shows that help you innovate faster and smarter.

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