Raph Koster Interview
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Q: Okay, let's move on from the MMO rants and talk a bit about Metaplace, your current project. You're proposing a system where gamers can basically build their own mini MMOs using a toolset provided by your company, and access it through a web browser, any browser, on any system. But how did you come to the conclusion that this is what you wanted to do? When did you decide that gamers needed to be able to make this stuff themselves?
A: Well, back in 1998 we were thinking about what should be in the expansion for Ultima Online. Back then there were a bunch of players who were trying to reverse engineer the code to create their own servers with their own quests and dialogue. And the game was already do a lot to empower games, with content like player housing. It was back then that I said (hey, why don't we just release the tools for making all this stuff, let gamers build up their own shards and then link it all together). So the idea is basically that old, for me. Also it goes back to the way we used to do it in MUDs. Players graduated to being content creators, and the boundary was highly permeable: there was never the stance about being the big media corporation who had control. I've /always/ pushed user-input in my games.
But then there was the Web 2.0 stuff. When that started becoming common currency for everybody what we saw happening with everything from literature to video was that it became democratised. But it wasn't happening for games. I was attending all these (how the web works) conferences and seeing how these things worked, and it all clicked into place. Here was this opportunity to harness this energy and get the same kind of results from the web that we've seen with thriving indie musicians, or all these other creative people who were previously gated by infrastructure. It's all been coming out. It made me want to do that for games. I'd been developing a bunch of small games at the weekend, and said to myself (this is easy for me because I'm a game developer, but for most people it's hard). I want to fix that. For most people the tools aren't there, the infrastructure isn't there, and in particular for MMOs. I mean, if you want to make your own MMO, just forget it. It's an insurmountable barrier. It it was.
