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Escapist interviewJuly 25th, 2006 |
The new issue of the Escapist has an interview with me in it, as well as interviews with John Romero, postmortems of Infocom and the Sims Online, and more.
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ROFL! That opening sidebar quote where you describe yourself as almost feeling “like I am dousing myself with gasoline and setting myself on fire, but here goes…” is hysterical.
But seriously, I hope I get to be the first one to thank you for laying all this out in a comprehensive form like this. I know the pain I had felt over losing the product I had poured a big chunk of my own creative juices into (pre-CU SWG) had motivated me to make some strong statements in these blogs; this interview… well, I feel better, having read it.
“You dance with the ones that brung ya, whether they are the market of your dreams or not”
True.
Hope you dont mind if I co-op this quote (re games) for later use (with attribution of course 
)
Great stuff in there, was unaware of the Grammer of Games work, should be relavent to any number of areas in the game industry.
I was interested in your idea about allowing players to control PvP rules in territory they control, which is something I’ve read about and discussed on various boards over time. As someone who came to online games via strategy PBeMs like Olympia and Atlantis, rather than via MUDs, player created physical game features are something I often miss. I think there is some relief for the content crunch in allowing players to control the world within well-considered boundries. On the other hand, PvP raises the bar on game builder execution by its very existance, since bugs quickly gain importance if they can be twisted to the player’s least advantage.
Now if you can just make a game that has not just persistance, but internal history of the player’s creation.
That was a great interview, and it’s been a long time coming. One question I had reading it though.
Do you feel that you were limited by the setting in both UO and SWG and that without that present, player expectations might have been different, and enabled you to do some things differently and potentially avoid some of the problems down the road? Both games used a very well known setting and players come to that with a set of expectations already in their head. Somehow I feel that if it had been an original setting, there wouldn’t have been as many problems with either game.
As a 3 year SWG player- I was really happy to read this interview.I bet it feels really good to finally communicate your side of the story with SWG & it should. BTW I found the link on the SWG boards.
We look forward to you bringing forth a game that reflects your creativity and vision. I am in my thirties and your perspectives have influenced me to design my own game for sheer creative outlet and pure fun.
I really enjoyed the article Raph. This was indeed what we had been dying to hear since November 2005. Saying the NGE was a mistake is, well… easy.
Now the tough question:
This is July 2006, the NGE has been around for 8 months, subscription numbers are falling and the player base is divided. You are in charge as producer and you have “carte blanche” with SWG… what do you do? In essence, what should SOE do at this point? I won’t even venture suggestions, you know them all, and you probably have your own.
*This* is the answer everyone is waiting for from someone like you.
Great quote about the NGE. I think you summed up the frustrations of many gamers in a few lines. It’s good to see somebody who worked at Sony say what we’ve all felt …
“I’ll make an exception for the NGE. I don’t think you can or should change a game that radically out from under a user base. You dance with the ones that brung ya, whether they are the market of your dreams or not. They have invested their passion and built expectations about where they want the game to go. Changing things out from under them isn’t fair in my mind, especially given how they have been loyal to you in times of trouble. It’s like dumping the girlfriend who has always been patient and loving to chase after the supermodel who probably won’t love you back.”
I’m puzzled why the figure with the title “Chief Creative Officer” doesn’t have control of the designs. Then who does? You’re quoted in the article as describing how you got to think up designs and launch them, but then you had to ‘work on PR’ or “R&D”. This doesn’t make sense. Doesn’t that belong to the work of another department. Why would CCO have to work on PR? Isn’t R&D, as tied as it is to the creative process and finding new ways to code cool stuff, I guess, still, something a little more mundane, or straightforward, than “creativity”. I guess I’m just not getting any of this. Isn’t a game company like an art house, a theater, a magazine? I could see in a small company, the art director or program director or managing editor would have to do some PR some times but it’s not as if Sony is tiny.
Is Chief Creative Officer just a title they give you to give you a sense of ownership over the mess?
Good to see you candid about this stuff and that your ties to SOE were not cut. It’s funny how many people think that someone leaves a company after having thrown a flowerpot at the boss. Does anyone ever really say what they truly would want to say to their most hated nemesis at a soon-to-be prior emplower?
Does anyone ever really say what they truly would want to say to their most hated nemesis at a soon-to-be prior emplower?
Yeah, I did that once. I don’t work in that field anymore. It was worth it.
In reply to Prokofy Neva’s comments and question:
Raph’s position as CCO meant that we was involved with new game designs and concepts for new engines and new games, not live games. By the time CU and NGE hit, SWG was already 22 and 28 months old. SWG had its own design team with producers and designers. People like Raph would develop new concepts, designs and test them through R&D and demos to explore their viability *before* any project used it or before any team was assembled.
As for the PR party, when you have new ideas, you have to sell them, internally and externally, sell them to the business folks, sell them to producers and other live designers, sell them to analysts and jounalists, sell them at events and conferences. Yes, the higher up you are in the food chain, and especially if you have a public name like Raph’s, the more involved you will be in PR activities. Correct me if I’m wrong Raph.
“Lead Designer” is the title for people who design stuff, I think. I also don’t think they were thinking about the creative process when they came up with the title; but I also don’t know what they were thinking about.
In large companies, CXO positions are typically focused on high-level strategy and public relations. Sometimes CXOs are merely spokespeople. For example, the CEO is considered the face and voice of the company and therefore is responsible for being the primary PR agent to investors, stockholders, and other stakeholders in addition to board room duties. The CCO position is typically responsible for being the PR agent for the creative function of the business, such as meeting with other top creatives, celebrities, or for simply serving as meat on the negotiation table to make or break the deal. Also remember that CXOs and other top executives are contracted for some determinable length of time. They usually cannot simply opt out of their contract and quit their job.
Job titles are generally not useful to describing what people actually do in business. The employment contract is far more important, and I think Raph pretty much described his duties at SOE. In other words, don’t read too much into the job title.
Henry Jenkins has posted a follow-up to this blog in his own blog site:
So What Happened to Star Wars Galaxies?
Jenkins cites Nancy MacIntyre’s now-infamous “Dumb Down SWG” quote as the most succinct example of the unfortunate shift in thinking behind pre-NGE SWG’s community relations, as developed by Raph and the early management team, and the company’s current approach to the game. He also gives his readers a taste of one sub-community within the greater SWG gamer community: a video of a large group of entertainers performing en masse. Quite an impressive sight, seeing all those synchronized dancers and musicians performing.
From there, he lists the following six lessons of what NOT to do in managing a community in the current era. And some of these points are so interesting, I couldn’t resist pasting the list here and commenting on them:
…MacIntyre’s comments represent a classic set of mistakes in thinking about how to build a fan community around a property:
1. Don’t confuse “accessibility” with simplicity. As Steve Johnson notes in his best-selling book, Everything Bad is Good For You or educator James Paul Gee argues in his new book, Video Games Are Good For the Soul, contemporary media audiences are searching for complexity, not simplicity. The video games that succeed in the market are the ones that demand the most of their players — not those that require the least. The key to successful games is not dumb content, but complexity that is organized and managed so that users can handle it.
2. Don’t underestimate the intelligence of your consumers. Gamers are not illiterate. They are not necessarily simply kids. Industry statistics suggest that the average gamer is in his/her late 20s or early 30s and all signs are that the game market is expanding as the initial generation of gamers ages. Star Wars Galaxies consumers skewed older and as such, they wanted something different from the game play experience than younger Star Wars fans. And if you do think your consumers are idiots, it is not bright to say so to New York Times reporters. (Iakimo: ROFL!!!) The fans do read newspapers and as members of a collective intelligence community, they have an enormous network for circulating information that matters to the group. These comments have come back to haunt the corporate executives many times over and probably did as much as anything else in creating a mass exodus from the game.
3. In an age of transmedia storytelling, don’t assume fans want the same experience from every installment of the same franchise. There are many films, books, comics, and games out there which focus on the experience of the central protagonists of the series. Koster wisely recognized that while individual players might want to BE Luke Skywalker or Hans Solo, a world where everyone was a Jedi would be boring for all involved. Instead, he created a game world where there were many different classes of players (including the Entertainer class) and where each of those roles interacted in a complicated ecology of experience.
4. Don’t underestimate the diversity of fan cultures. Contrary to what is often claimed, successful media properties do not appeal to the lowest common denominator. Rather, they draw together a coalition of micro-publics, each with their own interests in the material, each expressing their emotional bonds with the content in their own ways. Accordingly, Star Wars has a large, diverse audience interested in everything from the flora and fauna to interrelationships among characters. Given such diversity, why would you assume that the core market only wants to blow things up? The real sweet spot would be to /tap into/ these diverse audiences and sell even more copies. Why, given the richness of fan creative expression around Star Wars, would you assume that Luke Skywalker is the only role people care about? The goal should have been to expand the range of experiences available in the game rather than dismantle what appealed to one audience in hopes of attracting another.
5. Don’t underestimate the value of fan creative contributions to the success of contemporary media franchises. Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, the most successful game franchise of all time, has suggested that his success can be traced directly back to player contributions:
We see such benefit from interacting with our fans. They are not just people who buy our stuff. In a very real sense, they are people who helped to create our stuff… We are competing with other properties for these creative individuals. (Emphasis added – Iakimo) All of these different games are competing for communities, which in the long run are what will drive our sales…. Whichever game attracts the best community will enjoy the most success. What you can do to make the game more successful is not to make the game better but to make the community better.
Conversely, when you alienate your most active and creative fans — folks like Javier — then you severely damage the franchise as a whole. These people play valuable roles as grassroots intermediaries helping to build up interest in your property and as performers helping to shape the experience of other players.
6. Don’t sacrifice your existing fan base in search of a totally different market. The kind of robust and creative fan cultures Wright and Koster describe in their comments above are hard to build and even harder to rebuild. To some degree, fans have to find media properties which meets their needs, even though companies can adopt policies of fan relations which will make them more receptive to fans and can help to sustain such communities once they emerge. Koster worked hard to win over Star War fans who were skeptical about his efforts given the history of fairly simplistic action-oriented solo-player titles within the Star Wars franchises. Koster, himself, was fully aware that you could not institute large scale changes in such a game world without damaging the kind of trust he had helped to establish. Here’s what he told me when I interviewed him for my book: “Just like it is not a good idea for a government to make radical legal changes without a period of public comment, it is often not wise for an operator of an online world to do the same.”
I have just scratched the surface here. I suspect the rise and fall of Star Wars Galaxies will be studied for years to come as a textbook example of good and bad ways to deal with fan communities. Certainly our member companies should draw on it as a reference in framing and evaluating their own fan relations policies.
Just to nit-pick, there is a good reason to risk your current customers for a new group: If your current group is too small to keep the project going. I have no idea how long the Star Wars myth was licenced out for, but I’m sure sooner or later that pipper would need paid.
Rik that is something that needs to be considered from day one. You don’t make a game without researching your community first. If your community isn’t HUGE then don’t make a $50 million game! After release is NEVER the time to go searching for a different community.
Now there is an exception to this and that is BUILDING TOWARDS A COMMUNITY. You don’t suddenly drop a bunch of crap (NGE for example) on your ESTABLISHED community. You build over time with CLEAR AND STATED GOALS. A prefect example would be EVE Online and what they are planning to do. CCP (makers of EVE) have stated what they see wrong, what they are going to do to fix it, and most of all clearly stated it will TAKE TIME TO DO! Also CCP acknowledged that they can’t rip apart the game they have, but only work slowly towards becoming a better game. No matter how much they would love to make some radical changes to attract a new audience… they don’t because they budgeted for the size of community they have gotten. Now they are above expectations and growing the game.
If any other game does what SWG did… they will die off within a couple years.
I found a link to the following on the SWG Forum – a blog purportedly originating with John Smedley. In the midst of a muse about SOE’s diverse MMORPGs and its four upcoming titles, he inserts the following:
…With the exception of the DC Comics game we’re working on, each of these games is an original IP. Our teams in San Diego, Austin, Seattle and Taiwan are excited about working on game worlds that we’re developing ourselves. It’s often frustrating to work with (a) third party IP. There’s a constant battle over what the right direction is for the game, and from our own recent experience, it’s not something we enjoy. (Iakimo added the boldface.) It very often puts handcuffs on what we can and can’t do and, frankly speaking, it’s a lot harder to make great games when the IP holders don’t understand the online gaming market….
Is Smedley alluding to SWG? I’d ask him in his own blog, but the site apparently isn’t set up to allow comments from us plebs.
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really makes one feel sad for the Austin team. Genuinely, since they’re just working to run an otherwise good business case. I didn’t see Raph criticizing them or anyone in particular, but rather I think he was just trying to finally have his say. (see the discussion on his site). I’m pretty torn on SWG, since it ate 1.5 years or more of my life. But I must have had some fun to play that long. And I wasn’t just maintaining my harvesters. If anything, that level of involvement really pushed me to finally start writing about
And pinning the failure of the entire game on Raph because he left is too harsh. Blame him for what he did, but don’t blame him for what he didn’t do when he wasn’t there. (Link on Raph’s site with discussion here.)
[...] The Escapist Magazine published an interview with local game designer Raph Koster today. Raph talks about his books A Theory of Fun and A Grammar of Gameplay, his work on and expectations for Ultima Online, looking back at Star Wars Galaxies, and at the end briefly mentions that he is establishing a startup studio in San Diego! [...]
[...] Comments [...]
[...] Editorials: Ok, you can all let Raph off the hook alreadyFeedback forum || Email Editor@Warcry.comFiled 07/26/2006 by JR “Razor” SutichEnough already. Yes, I’m aware of The Escapist interview. And all the comments regarding it at Raph’s blog (edited it seems), and Lum’s blog (which is now more about proper usage), and the official SWG blog errr… forums (not even bothering to link, they will be gone). It’s been 3 years. Let it go. It’s not like the guy announced he was making you his bitch. Also, this quote sounded vaguely familiar: It’s like dumping the girlfriend who has always been patient and loving to chase after the supermodel who probably won’t love you back. Familar since I once equated the whole love/hate relationship with a gaming company to a real one. And yes, in the last line of that article when I mentioned SOE, it was about SWG. [...]