Lord British In The New Yorker

bigfatlamer writes "This week's New Yorker has an interview/article with Richard Garriot about the world of Ultima Online. Nothing here is going to be news to slashdotters, but it's well written and worth a read. There's another article on viruses in the issue but it's only available in print."

Comments

Re:Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, PSO

[Golias]

Note: while your comment inspired the following rant, it is not neccessarilly directed specifically at you...

I work forty hours a week, and spend another 30 hours online building chairs, how much sense does this make? Yet, somehow manual labor at the click of a mouse is fun, who knew?

Any Psych 101 student knows (or should know, if they passed the class) that the best way to reinforce a behavior is by rewarding it some of the time. Just as slot machines gobble up the retirement funds of old folks in Reno, killing a monster in an online game sometimes rewards you with "treasure", and sometimes you see your skill go up incrementally. The warm fuzzy feeling you occationally get keeps you going back and pulling the lever again, hoping for the food pellet.

While the rewards of gratification seem to come at a slow-ish pace in online RPG's, they are still much faster than in real life. To learn how to play the trumpet well enough that anybody really wants to listen to you takes a solid five years for most people, but you can create a Bard in EQ and be tooting away in a matter of days.

The problem is, the hours and hours you spend waiting for the chance to score that coveted pair of magic boots may give you the feeling of having accomplished something, but the truth is that you were just playing a game. You perhaps could have written three chapters of a novel in the time that it took, a task which would be no less tedious for most people, and you would have something to show for it when you were done. Those magic boots might impress your "friends" in the game (who are people you don't actually know from places you might never be), but your real friends will start to avoid talking to you at parties when they find that you keep steering the conversation back to the exploits of your 43rd-level Necromancer, because that's all you have going on in your life to talk about anymore.

I don't want to sound too critical of UO and EQ addicts... Everybody who gets into these games goes through a phase of getting too much into them (I got it out of my system back in college, when MUD's were all the rage), but some people really need to take a look at what they are doing. Are you really enjoying the time you spend making virtual jewelry or camping a spawns-once-every-two-weeks monster, or are you just telling yourself "once I accomplish goal 'x', this game will be soooo much fun!"

Here is what I reccomend to anybody who plays one of these games more that five or six hours a week: Take a month off. Don't even cancel the account, it's only 10 bucks anyway, just stop playing for a month. Among those who have, the vast majority came back and found that the game was not really as much fun as they remember thinking it was.

Virtual living can be kind of amusing, but it is no substitute for real life.

Has the author even played UO ??

[UnknownSoldier]

> At the worst point in the crisis, Britannia's monetary system virtually collapsed, and players all over the kingdom were reduced to bartering.

No they weren't. Money was (and is) still used for buying. I have never seen (or heard) of anyone bartering goods. (This isn't Diablo 2, where people refuse to take money for items, strangely enough.)

I was there in Apr 98, and the economy never "collapsed." (A good friend of mine played from Beta to Gold) Is the economy screwed, yes. Money grows on trees in UO. Prices of things have just steadly increased (aka hyper-inflation.) Hint to wanna-be-game designers: Don't put gold on EVERY monster in an RPG.

> Britannia has suffered a wave of extinctions, paralyzing hoarding, and a crime problem so intractable that at one point the game was forced to, in effect, split itself in half.

No kidding about the "PK problem." Gee, maybe because:
a) there was NO way to track down the murderers. (You would get gang-banged by 5 PKs, they take your stuff, and recall out. All in a matter of minutes.)
b) An expercienced PK could take on DOZENS of inexpercienced warriors and win.

I lost a lot of friends who quit UO because getting PK'd was NOT FUN, and they had no choice to abstain from it, unless they quit the game. Guess what a lot of people did.

> Early on, more experienced players figured out how to identify new characters, or, as they are called, "newbies."

They are called "noobs" cuz they tend to ask a lot of annoying questions (Can you give me money, Can you give me a item, etc.) and are ignorant about the game mechanics.

Noobs are dead easy to identity. If they don't have magic armor/clothing, or GM made equipment, they are newbies.

> In addition to being unfamiliar with the landscape, newbies cannot defend themselves against older characters who have had more time to collect skill points.

That USED to be true before mid 2000. ALL new characters start in "Trammel", a "mirror" of the world where you can't engage in PvP (Player vs Player) combat, unless you are in a guild, or factions.

> Players can they can have pets and train them to do tricks;
Tricks?! "Stay" does NOT count as a trick.

> .. and they tend to use a combination of pseudo Middle English and computerese, slipping from "thee" and "thou" to ...

Hahah. Yeah right. Old English is dead in UO. I have seen a FEW characters who were role-playing, but this is a RARE sight.

> "You have to realize that the world is what you make of it."
Sort of. Player's really can't shape the world. Trees CAN NOT be cut down, you can't destroy an enemies house, you can mine but can't make the caves any deeper, People walking do NOT leave well-worn trails, You can NOT place a house over landscape that has trees, etc.

> Now the game is programmed so that the servers continually add more ore and sheep and wolves to the landscape.
This is called "respawning". Ore, Wood, and other resources spawn every 15 mins. Daily rares only spawn once a day at server startup.

A good article. Would be better if it was accurate and told more of the background, though.

"nothing new here"

[schussat]

The "nothing new here" comment does some injustice to the article. It's very well-written for either tech- or non-tech-oriented readers, particularly in its consideration of the social problems that arise in MMORPGS, like resource shortages, player-killing, and so forth. It's too bad that more people who come from technical fields can't write as thoughtfully as the author of this piece. It's refreshing to see "outsider" journalists write interesting articles about subjects with which so many regular slashdot readers are so familiar.

There's also a sidebar interview with the article's author which is also an interesting read.

-schussat