Questions on Game Design
I've always been interested in games - when I was at college a lot of my misspent time was taken up playing bridge in the coffee bar and Diplomacy in the evening. For many years I played war games, and when home computers (as they were then) came along I saw them as a potential tool for writing games. My first computer was a UK101, a kit based on the Nascom computer. It came with Microsoft Basic and 4K of user memory. Once I had built it and got it working, the first thing I programmed was an Air traffic control simulation. There were no graphics in those days, of course, so the aircraft were represented by letters and the terrain by other symbols - carets (^) for the mountains, etc. You had to land the planes before they ran out of fuel, avoid flying into the mountains, and schedule enough take-offs that there was space for incoming planes to land! All pretty crude stuff, but it took me weeks to get my computer back from the other people in the house after I showed it to them. There was little chance of doing other computer related jobs at the time. The only other types of computer apart from the terribly unsophisticated home computers (and there weren't many of them) were the very expensive - $10K to $10million - minis and mainframes . To use them you had to have a computer science degree, and, anyway, they were only used for boring things, like working out tax. Micro-computers, once they became powerful enough to do real work, opened the doors to a tremendous outpouring of productivity on the part of people who earlier would have never got a look in.
Well, most games are derivative in one way or another. 'Frontline', my first (and so far only) commercial single-player game, was derived from a whole host of squad level board war games. These in turn were all derivations from the original 'Squad Leader' published by Avalon Hill. Federation was a little more complex. There were a number of space-based role-playing games around - both boxed games and single player computer games. Federation isn't really derived from any of them, although it has elements of several of them. In itself though it is unique. Some idea of the uniqueness can be gained from the fact that in the nearly fifteen years that it's been around, no one has yet succeeded in producing a viable Federation clone! Iron Wolves, which is now run by Online Entertainment plc, was a more conventional game. There are plenty of submarine simulations out there - single player ones - and we just looked at them and took what we needed to create a multi-player game. I'm not really all that happy with the game, since I think it lacks true multi-player structures. The commercial pressures of doing work for someone else who had their own ideas of what should be caused my original design to be distorted. (The original of Iron Wolves was commissioned by a now-defunct US games network.) Age of Adventure is different again. It obviously has its roots in generic role playing games. To that extent all role playing games are derivative! Really though, I cut it from the whole cloth, and there isn't anything specific that it comes from. One of the reasons I chose to write it was because as a sociologist (I majored in Sociology) I find the period fascinating. It was a time when ordinary people were coming on to the world stage for the first time with the rise of mass literacy and the beginnings of political organisation. Of course, choosing to deal with this period means that we have to deal with the politics of the era, many of which are considered totally unacceptable now. That was partly why we decided to move the game to a parallel world, similar, but not quite the same. That gave us a handle to deal with the role of women at that time. Other issues include Victorian sexuality, racism, and, of course, imperialism.
I think Federation, in particular, had an influence on other massively multi-player games in three areas. The first is in allowing players to extend the game. The idea that you gave players the tools - and the facilities - to write and add areas of their own to a commercial multi-player game was completely unheard of when I introduced it into Federation. The perceived wisdom was that players couldn't be trusted, and that they would completely destroy the game. This is a classic example of mainframe mentality (not surprising, since at that time you needed mainframes to run multi-player games). This mentality says that users are not to be trusted and must be kept away from any interaction with the computer that is not supervised. The fact that Federation was able to allow player-designed and controlled areas without collapsing into complete anarchy, came as a stunning shock to those who had predicted dire consequences! The second is that Federation was the first multi-player game that didn't follow either of the two 'bash the orcs' patterns. At that time there were two strands in multi-player gaming - what I call the European and the American strands. The European pattern was derived from Crowther & Woods 'Colossal Cave Adventure', where a single player adventured in search of goodies. Similarly, in the European style multi-player adventure the individual players adventured, competing against one another for treasure. The original MUD is a classic example of this genre. The American pattern was based on AD&D and its derivatives - parties, rather than individuals, are the ones who do the adventuring. This has a number of advantages in so far as couch potatoes can be signed up as 'clerics', and be dragged around by the party leader until someone is hurt, at which time they take on the role of a mobile first aid kit, and then lapse back into lethargy. As an aside, I have to say that clerics are undoubtedly the worst player roles in fantasy adventure games! None the less, both variants had one thing in common - they were all games where you had to fight orcs/dwarves/elves etc. in order to progress. Federation was one of the first, and the very first commercial game, to break away from this and pick a different genre and a totally different philosophy. Because Federation is an economic simulation, fighting is only a secondary activity. Indeed, for the first year or so of its life Federation didn't have any facilities for fighting at all. This flew in the face of perceived wisdom, to put it mildly. What Federation proved was that it was possible to have a commercially viable game which didn't have slaying fantasy characters as its raison d'etre. The third thing that Federation did was to set a pattern for game management. I'm not going to say much about this, because it was really designed by Fi (Hazed), and you need to ask her if you want more details. I'll just point out that most of the original game management staff of Sony's Everquest were trained by sending them through the management staff training course we ran when Federation was on AOL! In addition, most of their terms and conditions are remarkably similar to the ones we had at the time...
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