Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research has published a special issue, EQ: Ten Years Later. Among the articles:

• Nick Yee on “Befriending Ogres and Wood-Elves: Relationship Formation and The Social Architecture of Norrath”
• Greg Lastowka on “Planes of Power: EverQuest as Text, Game and Community”
• Sal Humphreys on “Norrath: New Forms, Old Institutions”
• Lisbeth Klastrup on “The Worldness of EverQuest: Exploring a 21st Century Fiction”
• Bart Simon, Kelly Boudreau, & Mark Silverman on “Two Players: Biography and “Played Sociality” in EverQuest”
• Eric Hayot and Edward Wesp on “Towards a Critical Aesthetic of Virtual-World Geographies”

There are also interviews with Chris Lena (with whom I worked in the R&D group at SOE back in the day, and who was producer on EQ for years); and with Brad McQuaid and Kevin McPherson. The interviews don’t appear to be recent, but they still give some great insight.

BMQ: Back when designing EverQuest and coming up with the various playable races, we looked at the more human-like races and decided purposely to make them in appearance similar to real world races. This is true also for the architecture, a lot of the background, etc. But the important point is that what we were trying achieve was familiarity. In other words, the Barbarians in EQ might have had a Scottish flavor to them, but they are not Scots; likewise the pyramids on Luclin might appear to be Egyptian in flavor or style to a degree, but there is no real relationship. This allows the game designer (or fantasy author, for that matter) to create races, cultures, architectures, etc. that draw on the richness of the real world in terms of depth, without actually being constrained by actual real life history or stories or, hopefully, if done right, too many preconceived stereotypes.