The Lord of the Rings Online Interview, Part Two
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The MMO Gamer: I'd like for you to tell us Turbine's overall design philosophy. Why you people go to work every day to make the games that you do.
But, do not use the words fun, creative, original, or innovative.
Jeffrey Steefel: [laughing] Fun, creative, original, or innovative? Ah, I don't do any of those things, anyway.
Well, I can tell you why I do. I've been in one kind of media or another my whole life. Started life as a sorry, you said go back to high school started life as a kid who wanted to be an astronaut, but who was a singer and a musician.
Ended up in college as an engineer, who graduated with a drama degree. Was a performer on Broadway for a long time while I was playing around with ten Amigas in my little tiny apartment in New York, teaching myself Lightwave and whatever.
This whole time I was involved in online social networking I spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars I didn't have on the GEnie Network playing Federation, which is this space-based MUD, just being with people all over the world and having that whole experience of what that's really, really like.
That's been a part of my DNA all along. The fact that I'm in a place that's building that, really it was interesting, I spoke at the Virtual Worlds Summit on Monday here, and the whole speech was about the fact that you don't stop talking about massively multiplayer games, and virtual worlds, and what's this one good for, and what's that one good for?
And I'm like, (Dude, same thing.) You know? Some virtual worlds are just like a big open sandbox with nothing in it, and that's not really good anyway, but we're building social worlds, we're building the social networking on this whole thing about Web 2.0 social networks, we've been building social networks for ten years.
So, what drives me is figuring out how to create these environments where people are interacting with each other, and increasingly getting more sophisticated in what that interaction's like. It's going to get really complicated going forward, because now we're starting to get different types of people together in these environments who don't want the same thing.
That's the next challenge, that's what I'm excited about. That's what gets me up in the morning.
