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May
05, 2003
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We all know what happened to MUDs. The text-based online dungeon
crawls of yesteryear begat Meridian
59, Ultima Online and finally EverQuest, which begat so much
raw cash that it spawned an industry within an industry. But what
happened to MOOs? Based on the MUD Object Oriented code created
by Pavel Curtis at PARC (whose test case, LambdaMOO, was the site
of the "Rape In Cyberspace" of Julian
Dibbell's famous article), MOOs fulfill the other side of the
promise of immersive worlds (AKA cyberspace, the Metaverse, or whatever
you want to call it). EverQuest puts you in someone else's world,
but in a MOO, the world was yours to help create. Perhaps for that
reason, MOOs tended only to attract the upper echelon of intelligent,
technical freaks - the sort of people who have weblogs these days.
You just know that Stewart
Butterfield was on a MOO way back when. His collegiate studies
were in cognitive science and philosophy, and I can say from experience
that those types were drawn to the MOO's questions of constructed
reality and social illusion like low-level EQ fighters to a mob-spawn
point. When early versions of Mosaic and Netscape sucked all the
casual users out of MOOs (and MUDs, for that matter) in the mid-90's,
many who might eventually have hacked MOOcode started hacking JavaScript
and server-side Perl instead. Not only was Butterfield blogging
before it was cool, but he created a contest called The
5K that was equal parts political statement against web-bloat,
and demo
scene for JavaScripters.
Now he's taken the surprising move of entering the most cutthroat
business in computing - games - with a company called Ludicorp
and a multiplayer online world called the Game
Neverending. GNE takes the social focus of MOOs and combines
them with the Web technologies the MOO tribe has adopted since.
The game that will result later this year just might hit the massively
multiplayer gaming market in its blind spot.
Butterfield took time out from his young company's frantic push
towards beta to exchange a few emails with Mindjack.
Mike Sugarbaker: What kinds of games did you play growing up,
and how did they lead you to the idea in Ludicorp's mission statement?
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"The
secret is, even though it's called Game Neverending, it's
not really a game at all. It's a social space designed to
facilitate and enable play."
- Ludicorp CEO Stewart Butterfield
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Stewart Butterfield: When I was really little I had an Intellivision,
and though I enjoyed the car racing game, Astrosmash, and Advanced
D&D, it was Utopia
(a very early sim game where you controlled an island and tried
to build a good society) that really caught my attention.
A few years later we got an Apple II and I played Hard Hat Mac,
Aztec and Drol (classics all) while learning a lot of useless AppleBasic.
Still later, I played some arcade games (none more than Galaga)
but it was when the second generation of Macs came out that I got
inspired. Balance of Power was great, but it was Sim City that started
me on this course.
Even then I thought about what a game like Sim City would be like
if you replaced the probabilistic functions which represented the
populace whither people making real decisions - and that's a big
part of what we are trying to build now. I like to think of it as
a God game without the God.
But I think Ludicorp's mission comes from something a little more
encompassing that games: play is a much larger and more fundamental
concept. We play all the time, even when there is nothing like a
formal game going on - think of great conversations and all the
verbal play,of "goofing around," of flirting, of musicians jamming:
these are all moments where the creativity is flowing, you feel
completely alive, and you are able to fully express yourself at
the peak of your ability without even trying. It is the new possibilities
for these kinds of states that we are trying to create.
The secret is, even though it's called Game Neverending, it's
not really a game at all. It's a social space designed to facilitate
and enable play. The game-elements are there to provide both the
constraints and the building blocks of interaction - since the thing
you'll notice about the kind of play I'm talking about above is
that it is the kind of thing that goes on between people.
Ludicorp was started because we imagine all kinds of social computing
applications that we'd love to use and participate in, and no one
else seems to be building them.
MS: GNE's aesthetic, at least as far as a browse through the
prototype's item encyclopedia
shows, takes after the absurdist postmodern ethos of places like
LambdaMOO - an aesthetic which stands to reason there, given that
nearly anyone who could code was allowed to. Unless I'm wrong, GNE
players are restricted to building social structures and "decorating"
pre-fabbed objects, rather than building features onto the world
in game terms. Is that likely to change, and in your opinion, does
it matter?
SB: Well, there are lots of questions there: we will
be offering lots of ways for the players to build features into
the game, though this probably won't start with the first release
(we'll start offering more advanced APIs once we have gone through
the initial stabilization period).
There's been a few
threads
on our message boards about this topic and we are working with a
few of the players to get a sense of their priorities for parts
of the game for us to open up to outside programmers - sometime
in the next few months we'll be announcing a developer network with
resources, documentation and support for adding on to the world.
This is something that is really important for us - although it
will never get as free-form as a MOO since the resource constraints
are one of the things that provide the tension which make the whole
thing game-like, we want to gradually free the game world from our
control. When we start, we'll have developed about 0.1% of the land
on the map --the rest is up to the players: they'll be creating
new hubs and building the connections between them.
More importantly, once there is a mature political system in place,
we'll start handing control over to the political leaders - it may
end up that different countries, continents or city-states in the
game operate by totally different rules.
As one player said:
"By all means, provide an 'Object Wizard' for non-programmers to
use when the game starts, but leave the task of building the 'Killer
Object App' to the players. You guys at Ludicorp are smart, but
we are many, and clearly have time on our hands." This is very true:
and as much as possible we are going to leave it open for the community
to build the tools which enable the community to evolve and extend
the game. This includes everything from group management tools to
software for creating game objects.
Finally, we will be offering things like gateways to external
instant messaging networks, weblogs and email so people can participate
in the game without actually logging in - as much as possible, we
want to blur the lines between the game and the rest of the internet.
MS: How will GNE interact with weblogs? Aren't they too static
a form of "social software" to be a part of a living, breathing
game? How can a game such as GNE add context to a relationship between
weblogs, that goes beyond the stark binary nature of 'I linked you
or I didn't'?
SB: Well, there are lots of things we could do. To be honest,
at this point I'm not sure which things will make it off the drawing
board and into the system. We made a decision on the technical side
early on that every action in the system could be asynchronous.
That means, for example, if I request to 'make your acquaintance'
(the basic form of making contacts and forming relationships in
the game) I can come across you in some place in the game world
and do it real time, when we are both logged in, and you will get
a message right away that asks you whether you'd like to become
acquainted.
Or, I can stumble across your weblog in my daily surf, notice
that you have a GNE widget on your site, and make the request from
there. You may not be logged in to the game right then, but the
request will be there waiting for you next time you log in and you
can reply at your leisure. (You could also choose to have messages
like that directed to your email or instant messaging client.)
In the prototype we had this widget that GNE testers could include
on their personal sites which would display their online status
(in the game) and allow visitors to their site to send them messages
in the game � the messages were "notes" which were game objects
that people could pick and drop and pass back and forth. Getting
my first note in real time from this method was a bit of a thrill
because I had never had that kind of interaction with a reader of
my site.
These are pretty simple examples, but there is a lot more along
the same lines: the widget could indicate what other GNE players
were currently viewing the same weblog at that moment and allow
you to launch a message session with them. Or it could list things
you have available for sale in your store (using live inventory
data) and offer directions and a map for how to get there. Or it
could list trades you were willing to make and allow people to initiate
the trade right from your site, without having to log in to the
game.
We are batting around a lot of ideas in the space, some of which
we're not ready to make public, and most of which won't happen in
the first release. But it is an area which I think holds a lot of
long term potential. Most of it requires people going to the trouble
of including snippets of our code on their site and the ideal would
be to integrate at the level of the weblogging software that our
players are using and we're in discussions with some makers of that
software right now. Either way, some simple forms of GNE-to-weblog
interaction will happen right away and some more interesting things
will happen in the first few years of GNE's post-launch development.
MS: GNE seems to want to integrate itself into the lives of
its players (it's played in an ordinary web browser window, and
has gateways to all these communications media we're already using),
rather than blotting it out with a full-screen window like traditional
online games (EQ and the like). Obviously, if Ludicorp felt that
isolating players into "another world" in the game were more valuable,
you would have done so, but can you speak to some of the social
tradeoffs of integrating a game into the real world?
SB: I see a continuum of possible modes which players can
adopt when engaging with game: from the completely anonymous player
who offers no information or pointers tying them to an email address
or a website, or even a gender or nation, to those who use their
real names in the game and point to weblogs with about pages that
reveal more or less everything there is to about the person.
One of the motivations for making GNE browser-based in the first
place was interoperability with other internet applications, but
even that doesn't necessarily mean revealing any real world personal
information. For example, instant message conversations will talk
place through proxy-bots - programs that collect and distribute
messages from a group of people, any member of which may be inside
or outside the game at any moment - so other players would only
see the name that you used in the game, not your real instant messaging
account.
Since a big part of the game is creating things - house, parts
of the map, groups, new objects, etc., there is a real motivation
for people to be able to take credit. And to whatever extent an
individual player wants to be able to say "I, Milton J. Arbuckle
of Minneapolis created this thing", it should be possible. (On the
flip side, if someone develops a really cool fan site, than a formal
(but simple) way should exist for me to follow a link from their
creation outside the actual game space to their character in the
game.)
Finally, because the game has lots of social possibilities, having
a really ambiguous relationship between player (real person) and
character (game person) was something that appealed to us. We want
people to be able to think of their character sometimes as an avatar
(i.e., their direct representative in the game world) and sometimes
as an agent - doing stuff behind the scenes, even when the player
is not connected to the game and a puppet under the players' complete
control when they are logged in.
At this point it is too early to be able to know what the consequences
will be, but we're betting that the ability make an explicit and
externally-viewable bond between yourself and the character you
are playing will make things much more interesting for a lot people
who already live a good deal of their lives online.
MS: Are you at all worried about the interaction between GNE's
economy and the real world's economy? Can you see anyone setting
up a purple-paper sweatshop and hitting eBay, and would you care?
SB: I am unworried! Que sera sera. We have always been
against the idea of selling stuff in the game for real money ourselves
since it ... just seems lame (though I guess, like anything else,
this could change). So, if people have the wherewithal to hoard
and eBay their stuff, and if the buyers are there, then it'll happen.
However, I don't think it'll happen. We are trying to design the
game so that relationships, reputation, skills and general who
you are counts for more than the what stuff you have, so there
should be less incentive for someone to good looking to convert
their real-world currency to game things.
MS: Recently, the graphical MMPOG A Tale In The Desert created
a voting
system, in which players can write and pass laws which are actually
binding for the developers of the game code. But in the days of
LambdaMOO, the binding voting system devolved into a source of stress
for everyone. With respect to the kinds of human interactions GNE
wants to encourage, what might a democratic process in GNE look
like?
SB: This is by far the aspect of the world that is hardest
to design and the area that we have had the most unresolved debates,
arguments, proposals, discussions and pillowfights. (I have a saying:
"It is easy to make software that does something. It is almost impossible
to write software that will do anything.") This is very complex.
Therefore, I had to turn this question over to Ludicorp's most
passionate advocate for democratic complexity, Ben Cerveny. Ben
says:
Questions on voting open up one of the fundamental curiosities
we're poking at in the design of the game, "what is the nature of
human social self-organization?" Part of what characterizes the
'play' of a game like GNE is communal experimentation with and exploration
of the mechanisms and boundaries that define the social process.
Inherent in the proposition of 'Neverending'-ness is the assumption
that the Game will remain engaging through constant transformation,
which will originate for the most part in the minds of its own participants.
Of course, we are also concerned about the prospect of self-organization
for more practical reasons. Like Pavel Curtis and the LambdaMOO
wizards, we hope to abdicate much of the responsibility (and minutiae)
of world cultural mechanics and maintenance to empowered players
once we set the platform for narrative interaction in motion.
In an attempt to avoid the gradual messiness that befell LambdaMOO
after the introduction of its voting mechanism, we are implementing
some low-level 'social balancing' mechanisms we hope will be somewhat
self-correcting.
The rules of our game can be broken down into two broad categories,
cultural laws and 'natural game mechanics' (physics, 'making'
recipes, et cetera). In GNE, the world will be big enough to accommodate
a diversity of cultural laws, scoped by the bounds of nations
created by players within the game. Within the context of nations,
the respective governments will be empowered to enact binding
social laws that apply to all players interacting therein. These
governments will be formed through mechanisms of group formation
and the players' ability to bequeath their trust to individuals
and to these groups. A player or group is empowered to make decisions
relative to the amount of trust he/it has received.
The system of natural laws can be transformed through a less
direct approach. As players gain skills in GNE, they are able
to 'make' objects of ever-growing utility and complexity using
available resources and recipes in the game world. Eventually,
their skills mature into an ability to 'invent' new objects. These
new inventions may have the ability to affect some of the more
basic dynamics of the game (movement costs, production of resources,
etc). The invention process itself will be constrained (probably
as a game-within-the-game) such that game balance cannot be grossly
disturbed. As new player capabilities are added into the world,
guilds will arise to regulate the development and availability
of such enabling objects.
MS: If Ludicorp were forced at gunpoint to make an action shooter
for the Xbox-or-something, and money were no object, what would you
make?
SB: After a long discussion around the office we settled
on three concepts - all of which should be available sometime in
2009.
- Paleolithica! - A "shooter" (slings, spears, rocks)
of Cro-magnon vs Neanderthal, set in and around the Pyrenees,
Catalonia, Basque Country and the Langedouc. Advance your combat
skills by developing new linguistic practices to co-ordinate with
your fellow fighters. (You could also get into hand-to-hand combat
and rip out each others' throats! Quest for Clans of Cave Bear
Fires!!)
- Library Bookbomber! - Set in the Library of Babel,
you play Borges the nearly-blind Librarian battling a non-denumerable
infinity of foreign-speaking janitors while hopping from low-ceilinged
hexagonal room to low-ceilinged hexagonal room. Drop books on
them, throw books at them: do anything you can do prevent them
from kicking you out and bringing on the cataclysmic "closing
time".
- Nanoswarm! - If the budget really allowed for
exploration, custom hardware would be the way to go! Imagine some
kind of consumer productization of a local positioning system
[like a spatially tracked ring or stylus] that gave the players
gestural expression. Then, the game could involve gesturally shaping
the behavior of billowing swarms of nanobots dancing in the air
between combatants.
But first, we will finish GNE.
bio:
Mike Sugarbaker is a
writer, coder and Certified Slacker-Futurist who lives in Oakland
and at gibberish.com.
He previously covered the second Open
Source Content Management Conference for Mindjack.
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