Richard 'Lord British' Garriott has been away for too long. An outspoken eccentric with a passion for videogames, he was one of the first people to bring RPGs to the PC with Akalabeth, which grew into the nine-part Ultima epic. He co-founded developer/publisher Origin, arguably one of the most important developers of all time. Son of an astronaut and an artist, he gives the impression of being genuine American royalty.
They don't make them like Garriott any more, which makes his return with Tabula Rasa all the more important. An online sci-fi RPG that attempts not only to introduce a whole new world to gamers, but to make them care about it. Can he pull it off?
You've clearly designed the world in great detail. How do you convey this to the players? Is this depth necessary?
Richard Garriott: I'm a big believer in what I call 'Tolkien' game design. I believe we - as developers - must know much more about the science and the philosophy and language and history than ever comes out in the game. That's a big part of my work on the game - I have a whole research library.
When I developed the Logos language [Tabula Rasa's in-game sign-script of a long-gone alien race - Ed], I did a lot of research into hieroglyphics and other pictographic historical languages, contemporary languages which are used to communicate with the handicapped, and ancient Chinese calligraphy.
Similarly, how wormholes work or the Force-like superpowers. They aren't like magic powers I've just made up. They have a basis in a science-fiction history that we built. We've done that again through culture, history, ecology and the sciences that built each planet.
Games often end up being either stereotypical or unfathomable. Do you worry about people not 'getting' it?
Garriott: We had one substantial false start for the first 18 months of development. While the gameplay principles persisted throughout, the visual and historical wrapper we put around it was completely scrapped - specifically for the reason you describe.
We originally set out to have one universal visual and historical archetype... and it really was so new and so different, you couldn't even cursorily tie it to contemporary Earth, or Star Wars or Star Trek. What we came up with was so missing in important touchstones it wasn't really successful. We unwound being quite that different, then rebuilt.
We were originally much further in the future with much more Eastern philosophy. Instead, we backed up to something more contemporary, in terms of military and interpretations of science fiction. Start with things they find familiar like pistols and rocket launchers... then move onto the more exotic weapons. We still have them, but you grow into them.
You were showing me your display of Asian-culture characters... How do you go about developing a game for multiple cultures?
Garriott: When we first started building the game we thought that since we have such expertise in the Asian market and the US and European markets in the company, we felt that surely we could come up with one game which is powerful for everyone concurrently. Over time, it's interesting to see what happened.
For example, when we tried to do temples, putting in a curved roofline, which you may think of as an Asian roof style, we would constantly get commentary back from our Asian office saying "We see what you're trying to do... but it really doesn't look right." Eventually they told us why. Imagine we were trying to make a nice European castle, and instead of giving it straight edges, we gave it marshmallow ones, so it was a little puffy. Puffy crenelations. We would look at that as comical, but they would look at it as a castle.
When you're trying to make things that are eastern, without the experience of growing up within the culture, you miss by just enough that this problem manifests itself... We ultimately decided we should do games that we know - US games, frankly, that we're very comfortable and confident with, and make sure that we appreciate it, then go and try and work out how to translate it into other cultures.
I'm not entirely convinced aiming for pan-cultural ideas is a good thing. Isn't there a risk of mono-culture?
Garriott: I think it's desirable to have diversity in art. It enriches everyone to see it. However, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with something having universal appeal. Think about why these cultures were different anyway - it's because they were isolated. It makes sense if the real innovation in France happened visually and the real innovation in - say - the US happened in certain aspects of game mechanics, it would make sense that those unique ideas and advantages would get repeated and built on before those cultures met.
However, once you're sharing your games, it's quite reasonable that people will grow to appreciate certain bits of art. Then, while there's a downside to the homogenisation of the cultural aspects of gameplay, you now have twice as many innovators in the metapool of creators - both groups are becoming experts in each other's fields - and there are twice as many opportunities for advancement and learning from each other. I actually think that in many ways the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.
And when one culture does take another's ideas, it metabolises them into something different.
Garriott: Korea originally wasn't interested in any first-person style game. They just wanted a game with a top-down view, and you'd click where you wanted to walk over to. It's because everyone is playing in these PC games rooms, and they want to have their other hand free to be smoking a cigarette or be around their girlfriend, who for some strange reason is willing to hang around all day watching their boyfriend play these games.
When you tried to do a 3D game with WASD controls, it required too physical a connection... so people just weren't interested.
You're trying to create an MMO that actually tells stories. Other people have struggled with this. If you're playing Guild Wars in a group, and a cutscene pops up, you often find everyone pressing the skip button.
Garriott: First of all, we don't pause for long cutscenes so don't have that particular issue, for better or worse. But generally, I think storytelling is unattempted by most games. When we talk about roleplaying games, I think there's two kinds. I personally use the word 'RPG' when I'm talking about a game like Diablo. Diablo is a statistics-based game.
One of the things which Blizzard do phenomenally well is what I call the slot-machine mechanic. You face just enough challenge to get just enough reward to feel just powerful enough to go and face a slightly bigger challenge. They do that masterfully.
If you go back to every game I've ever developed, I don't think mine have ever come close to the skill for RPG-balance that the Blizzard guys manage. That being said, I think I'm one of the only people who really, truly attempts to create story content that is not only worthy of reading or participating in, but challenges you to think about the story as it's unfolding and participate in a meaningful moment of that story where what you do actually matters...
Lots of great games have nothing to do with literature. Tetris clearly has nothing to do with literature. It's a physical game mechanic. By no means are games required to ever go beyond that. Great games - in fact, most games - fit in to the game mechanic.
But that's not what your interests are?
Garriott: My personal interest is to do games which have more of a literary backbone. If you look at any piece of classical literature every written then you hit Joseph Campbell Hero's Journey type of issues.
The hero starts with a big goal that is well beyond their capabilities - and they have some substantial personality flaws which mean they're not even an appropriate person to consider tackling the problem.
Instead, along the journey, they discover things about themselves - and they change themselves. In fact, the whole story is really about the hero. Them saving the world is almost secondary to the character change... and that's what I try to do inside my games.
And even though I don't do a particularly great job of it compared to true literature, by at least trying it, I think I make a game which feels more relevant to you and feels like something you really want to be a part of.
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