Interviews

Richard Garriott discusses the nuances of creating games – Part 1

By Michael Lafferty

 

Legendary game designer talks about his personal evolution toward creating games with cause-and-affect elements

 

To see Richard Garriott at a game developer’s conference would likely be similar to seeing Gene Roddenberry show up at a Star Trek convention. There are crowds gathered about him, praising, asking questions, and through it all Garriott smiles and takes time to answer as many questions as possible before he has to move along.

 

After all, when one is talking about the RPG and MMO genres of videogames, who better to talk to than Garriott? This is the man that started the role-playing genre on its way with his Ultima series, which also was one of the first online games in the then-fledgling videogame genre.

 

Garriott began his career into the videogame industry with a little title called Akalabeth – a project that earned him the tidy sum of $150,000 as a high school senior. From there it was to Ultima, and the rest is part of the legend.

 

Garriott was recently one of the featured speakers at the Austin Game Conference, a gathering in Texas for those interested in discussing and learning about the business. His chosen area of discussion dealt with creating intellectual property (http://www.gamezone.com/news/09_10_04_09_42AM.htm). On several occasions throughout the course of his discussion, Garriott invoked the name of J.R.R. Tolkien. What better place to kick off a conversation with Garriott later than by beginning with Tolkien?

 

The Lord of the Rings author once stated, in a published work entitled Tree and Leaf, that in creating fantasy there are no rules other than those the author creates, but that once created, those rules must remain steadfast for the duration of the tale. Garriott was asked if that idea was applicable to the world of MMOs and videogaming.

 

“Because I try to deal with philosophical questions and social issues in the game,” he said, “I’ve given a lot a thought to what does it mean, in a broad sense, and what is my personal philosophy. If you are going to put something into a game, you want to make sure that first of all people like it, that is clearly important, but you also want to make sure you put something in that serves the right purpose – that motivates people to both participate and to feel like they got something out of it.

 

“I’ve done a lot of deconstructionist-philosophical analysis to try to break down what I really think are not just truths of the universe but more importantly something that is defensible. To create a world that reacts logically – and what I mean is if you think of a couple of moral precepts like don’t have pre-marital sex. If you tell your kids don’t have pre-marital sex because God said so, you can go, well, without regard to whether that is true or not, it is hard to rationalize, it is hard to show the cause and effect unless you can show them the afterlife that they are damned now because they did something wrong, whereas if you tell them don’t have pre-marital sex because it is dangerous, well, the dangerous aspect you can demonstrate in a game. Therefore, showing the logical repercussions of the decisions you make are the way I develop the situations and philosophies that I put into the games.

 

“I’m a big believer that the inter-personal cultural standards that we, as humans have evolved, have evolved because they are true or not true in a profound sense … All I try to do is make sure that what I put together are rationally defensible – to make sure that the proper cause and effect occurs.”

 

The standards, philosophies and concepts that Garriott creates within the games could obviously not have taken place had that high-school senior only seen the dollar signs from the sale of the first title. What made him start to consider a broader picture in regards to creating games with moral choices and/or philosophical backbone?

 

“It’s two parts – one of which we will call family underpinnings,” he said. “My mother was a professional artist and very involved with kids and the community. She was the local Den Mother and always got us out doing social projects, so to speak, in our community. So there was an underpinning of that already. But the specific circumstances that kind of turned it was Akalabeth and Ultimas 1 and 2 were all sold through another company. Ultima 3 was the first product Origin published, meaning I published, and an interesting thing happened at that time. When you are publishing yourself, it also means that you get all the user commentary. In Akalabeth and Ultima 1 and 2, I never really saw it. When I released Ultima 3, I was stunned by the nature of the letters that Origin would receive based upon the Ultima series.

 

“There were a variety of kinds. One kind I’ll call fan mail. Fan mail in this industry is very interesting in that it is usually one paragraph of ‘hey, I really loved your game,’ and then 10 pages of ‘here’s what you did wrong, here’s how to make it better.’ It was both flattering and very critical. But another kind of mail is hate mail – very specific hate mail. Especially at the time of the early Ultimas, this was a time when D&D was still growing in popularity and there were a lot of groups running around decrying that these role-playing games were converting their children to devil worship, and so, of course, I was now among those people who was labeled as causing the downfall of society.

 

“And as I looked at that, of course I didn’t believe it … but it did give me cause to pause and think about what is the message that I have in my games. Prior to that moment there really wasn’t a message in the games. However, I was creating a game where you were supposed to be the good guy but in fact, people generally weren’t being the good guys. And that’s when I said ‘Ok, I would find it more compelling personally to play a game where if I’m supposed to be the good guy, I’m supposed to walk the thin line, or at least, if I don’t walk the thin line, the world reacts appropriately to whatever line I do walk. So that is what started me on Ultima IV, was to create this game that responded realistically – to make the game more interesting, not to really have any sort of social commentary, which evolved in further steps.”

 

Garriott’s next project is Tabula Rasa, for NCsoft. Tabula Rasa has undergone some changes in the design, but not in the fundamental concepts of the game. In part two of this chat with Garriott, the topic will be Tabula Rasa.