Currently, this page features the following information, most of which was copied around 2000 from the MPath memorial page which is not online anymore today.

Table of contents

• Softography
  • Wheeler Dealers
  • Computer Quarterback
  • Cartels & Cutthroats
  • Cytron Masters
  • M.U.L.E.
  • Seven Cities of Gold
  • Heart of Africa
  • Robot Rascals
  • Modem Wars
  • Command HQ
  • Global Conquest
• Lecture for 1997 Computer Game Developer's Conference

Two interviews and a tribute by Brian Moriarty can be found on the second memorial page for reasons of viewability.

Softography

The comments to the game's are Dani's comments as they appeared once on the Ozarksoft page (not online anymore).

Wheeler Dealers

• Speakeasy Software, 1978
• Apple II
• It was my first game. It was also the first game to come out in a box when all others were published with the cassette (16K) and mimeographed rules in a zip-lock bag. Also included in the box was a custom input device that consisted of 4 push-buttons connected to the Apple II's gameport. This allowed the 4 players to compete in real-time auctions for stock in companies which the players managed via those same buttons. It was a great challenge to work out how to input data with nothing but a push button but it taught me that interface is less important than play value and that auctions are a compelling way to interact. While attempting to write the manual for "Wheelers" I ended up writing a word processor that came within a hair's breadth of being chosen as "Apple Writer". Instead it was published as "Scribe" and sold a handful compared to the hundreds of thousands for "Apple Writer". (Being rich was never my goal but it would have been nice<grin>).

Computer Quarterback

• Strategic Simulations, 1979
• Apple II
• It was based on a game I had written in FORTRAN on a Varian minicomputer when I worked for the National Science Foundation. It was the most thoroughly mathematically modeled game I ever did. I collected and analyzed tons of data to come up with statistical distributions to represent the expected outcomes for 36 offensive plays against 21 defenses. I was at the time planning to use the project as my master's thesis in systems simulation but then I got involved in the games biz and dropped out of graduate school. "Quarterback" was one of SSI best sellers for several months after it came out despite the fact that the solo play option was pretty lame. (It was really designed to be played by two humans).

Cartels & Cutthroats

• Strategic Simulations, 1981
• Apple II
• This is a business strategy game published in '81 by SSI. It was built to provide an easy input for cyclic business management. Only 6 decisions were required by players (up to 6 of them as well) to allow them to compete. The would set their price, advertising, R&D (which created opportunities to automate), build more production, etc. I used humor to increase it's appeal and naïve as I was then, I was amazed when it didn't sell as well as "Quarterback". In retrospect, it didn't do all that bad considering that all subsequent attempts by others to do business games (with far larger development and marketing budgets) didn't do much better. Evidently folks interested in playing with the stock market or business, do it in real-life instead.

Cytron Masters

• Strategic Simulations, 1982
• Apple II, Atari 800
• This was my first attempt at combining strategy and action elements in a single game. It was also my first fully graphical game (all previous ones were text based), my first machine language game (basic was sufficient before then) and the first game for the Atari 800 (Apple II was my platform before). "Cytrons" was published by SSI in '82. It was a very simple abstract wargame. I learned a lot about programming multi-thread software (all when it was necessary to write all your own interrupt handlers). I also discovered both how compelling real-time strategy gaming could be and how easy it was to loose your market. Rather than appealing to both action gamers and strategy gamers it seemed to fall in the crack between them.

M.U.L.E.

• Electronic Arts, 1983
• Atari 800, C64
• "M.U.L.E." was part of the group of games that launched Electronic Arts in '83. It won numerous awards (including Computer Gaming World's Hall of Fame) and sold reasonably well (despite being the "most pirated game" at the time according to the publisher of CGW). Curiously, it happened as a result of the fact that Trip Hawkins (the founder of EA) couldn't get SSI to sell him "Cartels and Cutthroats". I convinced him we (at that point I had formed Ozark Softscape and had 5 employees) could do it better. I took the auction from "Wheelers", the graphic real-time aspects from "Cytrons", some of the production ideas from "Cartels" and let it evolve where it needed to. This was the game that taught me the value of play-testing where you watch and talk to real people about the game while it's under development. After all, games are a form of communication that can only be confirmed by checking whether it works against an audience. A couple of design pieces really pleased me about this game. I think the auction with the sellers on top and the buyers on the bottom of the screen and a timer was particularly cool. Sellers would walk down the screen thereby lowering the price they were offering to sell at and buyers would walk up the screen raising their bid. When the two met, units of commodity would zip from the seller to the buyer. This led to a lot of dickering and cajoling by the players trying to get each other to move closer using all types of justifications to support their inability to move themselves. When the timer started running down, this could lead to a lot of frantic maneuvering. Another neat thing was the invention of the MULE itself. In order to make the auctions interesting, there had to be commodities that players needed and also made (so some became sellers and others buyers). From a strategic game model what was needed was some way for players to say "I want to produce commodity 'A' on plot 'X'" but text entry or even menu selection seemed uninteresting. What if your picked up a machine somewhere and dragged it to your property to produce what you wanted. This "machine" eventually became a "Multiple Use Labor Element" that you got from the coral in the town, dragged into an outfitter shop of the right kind for the commodity you wanted and took out to your land and deposited there. Voila we had the info the model needed and with the addition of a timer, we had an interesting play element. My only disappointment with the game is that it only exists on long defunct hardware and it looks awful (since those machines only offered 48K of memory and I used it mostly for program rather than graphics). I almost got a Sega Genesis version through EA in '93 but at the Alpha phase they insisted on adding guns and bombs (or something similar) to "bring it up to date". I was unable to comply. I'm still amazed at how well loved it is (there are a number of web sites devoted to it) and I'm hopeful I can find a way to bring it to life again - possibly on the internet.

Seven Cities of Gold

• Electronic Arts, 1984
• Apple II, Atari 800, C64
• This was my best selling game. It garnered a SPA Gold Disk and a number of minor awards. It was also my first game that didn't allow for more than one player. It was planned to be multi-player but during during development it lost that aspect, along with colonists and development. To keep it's focus (and allow for a really large world) it ended up just covering the early exploration and conquest of the new world. It was published in '84 by Electronic Arts and it was the game Trip Hawkins (founder of EA) coined the term "edu-tainment" to describe on the press tour introducing it. (Back then the term wasn't the kiss of death it is now). There are several things I'm proud of about that game. Unlike most strategy-adventure games then (and now as well) which load the player with numerous economic and logistical decisions, it only used four commodities to model the constraints and opportunities facing the Conquistadors (men, food, trade goods and gold). I also like the way I was able to reflect the unique interactions between natives and Conquistadors when they shared neither a language nor cultural values in common. I came up with a simple arcade element which also included a number of subtle "secret" opportunities that I was quite gratified to learn that folks found on their own. Finally, the fact that our "New World" was randomly generated (and so large it required disk caching and overlays) made exploring a challenge fraught with peril and surprises. It sufficiently captured the sense of panic that comes from being lost in the wilderness and running out of supplies as well as the joy of rescue (which was something I experienced once backpacking and wanted to make a touchstone of this design). Our biggest frustration with this product was that it was developed in the days when you had to write a number of different versions since no platform was pre-eminent. There were Atari 800, C64, Apple, Mac and IBM PC versions of the game put out but the only "full" version was on the Atari. On the others we did the best we could with what we had.

Heart of Africa

• Electronic Arts, 1985
• C64
• "Heart of Africa" was the only true sequel I ever did and it was done to please EA (and get the $5K bonus they offered). It ended up as a C64 game only but on that platform it sold almost as well as "7Cities". It was published in '85 by EA and it was my last solo only game. I was never a fan of the adventure game genre which always seemed too much like guessing games where the player's job was to read the mind of the designer. However, this was my only published attempt at that genre. (A detective game that I also worked on got canceled at the prototype phase). I like a couple of things I invented for this product in particular. The player had a journal into which the game automatically entered events such as "Giant Python attacked and I lost my compass but got away with only minor scratches. These took the place of difficult to render graphic events and were almost as satisfying to the player. I also like the idea of messing with the player's interface to reflect ways in which their character was being effected. Two of the best were if you stayed in the desert too long you began to go sun blind which resulted in increasingly more pixels of the screen taking on the yellow terrain background color (and hence obscuring any features there) until the whole screen was yellow. Your only hope at that point was to stumble into a village or town where the natives would cure you. The other was that if you went too long without water you would become delirious and we would "mess with" your joystick inputs such that they would wander away from the direction you were pushing. However, if you held to a consistent direction long enough (and resisted your instinct to compensate for the wander) you would make better progress. It was really fun to watch play-testers as they stumbled into these effects and not only figured out what they meant but how to deal with them by bringing some vague "real-world" intuition into the game. One other thing I thought was a cool feature from this game was the way I "saved" beginners from their frustration of not making any progress. The essence of the game was exploring Africa to find locations that weren't visible per se but using clues and landmarks could be found. If I noticed that a player was struggling too long trying to find one, I would "move" it to where they were. This only happened the first game played and only early in the quest because adventures after all are about meeting a challenge but I thought it was an elegant solution to keep people feeling like they were doing OK which is really important in the early stages of play. What this game suffered most from was that the attempt to make a replayable adventure game made for a shallow product (which seems true in every other case designers have tried it as well). I guess that if elements are such that they can be randomly shifted then they are substantive enough to make for a compelling game. So, even though I don't like linear games, they seem necessary to have the depth a good story needs.

Robot Rascals

• Electronic Arts, 1986
• C64, PC
• This was my most experimental game and as far as I know is still the only computer game published by a major publisher that had no solo-play option. Admittedly, the solo opponent built into my games was never very good but Electronic Arts in '86 was a lot more willing to take risks than they were since. What I tried to do with "Rascals" was find the minimum set of elements that would still make a multi-player game that was fun. It had some similarities to "M.U.L.E." but I tried to get rid of anything that made "M.U.L.E." initially a bit daunting and hard to learn. In "Rascals" there were no prices, no money, no commodities. What it became during development was a scavenger hunt for items buried in the playing area. Your avatar (a robot that your frat house or sorority entered into the contest) could "scan" for items like the "binary boot", the "digital donut", etc. It was terminally "cute". It used subtle but simple elements that players could learn easily and master as time went on. For instance, when asked to scan for an item, the robot spun around twice pointing until it pointed in one of the 4 main directions. It turns out the faster the robot turned was a cue as to how far the item was which the player could use to decide if it was better to go to a teleport station or to walk that direction immediately. I've always enjoyed inventing these type of subtle visual and audio cues for players and have been impressed repeatedly at how satisfying it is to players to "learn" them and leverage them in their performance in the game. Not to beat this idea to death but in that same visual effect (the spinning and pointing), the fact that the robot pointed only in the four ordinal directions also offered the player another opportunity to exercise their "insight". A player as they gained experience would walk their robot in the direction pointed for a while and then scan again. If this resulted in point in a direction perpendicular to the original direction then the player knew the item they were looking for was diagonal from them and they could cut their search time significantly. Now, from a design point of view this wasn't a major breakthrough but I was amazed at how this little "skill" gave play-testers from grade-school age on up to adult a certain satisfaction when they mastered it. It told me that a good game is as much about making the "process" of play interesting as making the "goal" of winning meaningful. There were a couple of other quirky attempts at making this game accessible. It included two decks of cards. One deck was of the items that were stored in the playfield. This was the way players found out what items they needed to find in order to win the game and it allowed players to keep their list secret from each other. (Hidden information is difficult to accomplish when all players are sharing the same computer without the silly device of hiding their eyes at certain times). The other cards were "luck cards" that had things like "Steal a card from any player" which let you pick a card from them and return one you didn't want. There was also a "Pass the trash to the right" which allowed all players to mess with each other's list of items to get to win. Taken together these items made a very simple game become intriguing. I think it was a successful experiment although the sales that EA was able to generate (despite a worthy marketing effort) were disappointing. It didn't have a solo-play option was everyone's rationale for the "failure". I can't argue with that but I also think the fact that it didn't have an identifiable "genre" or audience certainly didn't help. I thought of it as a "Family Game" but that's evidently not a demographic that turns up at retail outlets.

Modem Wars

• Electronic Arts, 1988
• C64, PC
• This was one of my favorite games to develop and to play (second only to "M.U.L.E."). It was the last of my designs published by EA. (Ironically, I quit them because Trip wouldn't let me do M.U.L.E. for the Nintendo because he said EA wasn't going to do cartridge games. This is the company that now makes more than half their revenue from cartridges!) "Modem Wars" came out '88 and was the last C64 title I did and the first PC one (platforms were shifting again). "War" as we wanted it called (or "Sport of War" was our working title) was inspired by playing soldiers in the dirt with my brothers when I was a kid. It didn't have any of the complicated rules and relationships wargames at the time had and it ran in real-time without turns or pauses. It was just "click" on a unit (or group) to select it and click on it's destination. The unit would shoot at any enemy it encountered but that was about it. I had the simple infantry, artillery and cavalry mix from the Napoleonic era as well as hills where your guys saw further and forests where they didn't. It was the first of my online games (if 2 players being connected via modems qualifies) and it was the first time a major publisher published such a product. What I though was neat was that players' each had full time active use of their own machines (all my previous multi-player games included either turns or multiple inputs and shared output on one screen). This kind of play was a real kick for us the first time we tried and as it has turned out now it's a kick for a lot more folks now that modems and ways to connect are much common. In fact that was "Modem Wars" biggest problem — the lack of modems in '88. By the time they started showing up en masse in the '90s, "Modem Wars" was out of the EA catalog and out of date. (It was written when EGA was the new thing and a mouse was very rare on a PC). There were several neat things about the game that I carried forward. The interface while exceedingly simple - click to select, click to set destination - also had more advanced options. If you double clicked, you could get a menu that let you do more sophisticated things like create your own groups, tell them to dig-in, etc. In addition, I like the way there were various features that allowed different players to use their own skills to compete. Not since "M.U.L.E." was I able to build that kind of aspect into a game. In "Modem Wars" there was the battle planning and strategy involved in managing your armies. But there was also eye-hand coordination in the drones (slow flying "buzz bombs") that players could fly and the missiles (fast rockets) that shot them down. In addition there was a radar-like display that players could pick out hidden units if they were good at pattern and change recognition. And with the spy type unit there was subterfuge and counter-espionage. What all this meant was that various aspects of a player and their unique combination of skills meant that each person had their own specialized style of play. Another thing that I thought was cool came as a consequence of the fact that "Modem Wars" was written to work with 300 baud C64 modems and hence very little data could be sent between the players. Each machine had to run independently and the only info sent between them was what is called the "deltas". Since the robots all behaved under very strict rules, the deltas in this design were limited to the commands from the players. Nothing about the screen or interface of the other player was shared. If a player for instance gave a unit a destination, nothing about the process of clicking and positioning the cursor was sent, just the result. This took only four bytes - one each for: the move command, the unit ID#, the destination X and the destination Y. This meant that the time thinking about what to do and the time giving the unit it's new command could be reduced to 4 bytes. This meant that the entire game could be stored in only 4K! And since the game engine had to run on it's own with only those "deltas" at the right times, you could turn the process into a way to "replay" the game by just running the game out of the stored data rather than the inputs from the players. This "Game Film", as we called it, turned out to be a really popular feature. It allowed players to look at what happened from any perspective (theirs, their enemy's or omniscient) and to slow it down or even pause it. Frequently this was the first chance players had to see much of what was going on during the battle since they were only aware of their own robots and the few enemy ones within range. I was amazed how people used this opportunity the game films offered to rationalize their loss and to create stories out the intense and ephemeral experience of the battle. These two things are both things that players need to make their play more meaningful and I hadn't realized it till the pitiful C64 modem forced me to learn them. Now, when I give talks about designing multi-player games at conference I tell them that if we want to make multi-player games that people can really enjoy, we have give them a way to save face as well as ways to make legends out of their best performances. (I ended up including this feature in both "Command HQ" and "Global Conquest"). The most frustrating thing about this game was trying to get the intensity factor just right. In the days before "Doom", people weren't accustomed to adrenaline rushes that lasted several minutes. That reminds me of another neat thing about the game - it had a time limit after which a winner was declared (30 minutes was the longest game). This seemed (and still seems) like a good idea. Anyway, back to the intensity issue. I was convinced by several of the reactions from reviewers and play-testers that part of "Modem Wars" problem (you always thinks a game has "problems" when it doesn't sell as well as expected) was that it was too intense. The next two games where attempts to slow things down to get more market. That seems foolish now but such is life. I'm currently working as a consultant for a company who is implementing a new 8 player version of this design for the internet through Mplayer and I'm hoping it'll be out in late '97. In the meantime you're welcome to the old version if you promise not to be too hard on it (it's almost a decade behind the state of the art) because despite it's surface it has a good heart.

Command HQ

• Microprose, 1990
• PC
• This was the first game I designed for Microprose and it was published in 1990 and it was my second best seller and won the "Wargame of the Year" award from "Computer Gaming World". I enjoyed working with Microprose and especially was glad for the opportunity of interacting regularly with one of my favorite game designers in the business - Sid Meir. His games "Pirates" and "Civilization" were both designs I had on the back burner but never got around to. I have total admiration for what he did with those products but if I had done them, they would have both been multi-player games from the start and likely had a whole different feel. (I hope that doesn't sound like sour grapes. Maybe my admiration is twinged with a bit of envy too. <grin>). "Command HQ" was a fairly straight-forward design job of taking aspects of "Modem War's" (namely the modem connection and real-time play) and adding a highly abstracted World War II wargame model to it. I have to admit to being influenced by the board game "Axis and Allies" which I thought was a very sophisticated piece of design work. Nonetheless, I'm proud of "Command HQ" for a number of reasons. This was one of the few games where I fully followed the KISS maxim ("Keep it Simple Stupid"). The world was the Mercator projection of the globe with only polar, plain, mountain, forest, jungle and water terrains (each of which had very obvious and intuitive effects on the units). The units consisted of infantry, tanks, subs, cruisers, carriers and airplanes and how the behaved has nicely stereotyped but also subtle. For instance subs that weren't moving weren't visible to the enemy until they shot them which meant that a sub could take out any lone ship most of the time. Several areas of possible complication were avoided in the design. For instance planes could act as transports, paradrop carriers, bombers or fighters depending on what target was selected. Land units that moved to sea became transport ships and to simulate the difficulty of moving them ashore or off without a port, a large time delay was imposed unless they moved through a city before taking to (or returning from) the water. These sort of modest but elegant design elements kept the game very easy to play. The resources involved in the game were limited to money which came from the number of cities you owned and oil which came from the number of oil fields you owned. Despite the simplicity of these features the game was a fairly accurate simulator of WW I, WW II and WW III (the one that never happened but Tom Clancy fantasized in Red Storm Rising but I included nuclear weapons). I threw in two more world wars which varied the capitols as well as the starting conditions. Besides the structural elements that kept this game simple it had an extremely clean interface (in my humble opinion). It was the first "PC only" game I did and the first with a mouse interface (which makes strategic gaming much simpler than a joystick). It featured the "click to select" and "click to set destination" of "Modem Wars" but since oceans could intervene between the origin and destination, it required a slick bit of coding to allow ships to navigate the oceans in reasonable patterns. Also, unlike "Modem Wars" there were no additional layers of complexity (eg no "groups" since unit counts were kept low, and no extra menus). In addition, I solved the problem of scale which hounds all "large world" games with a simple mechanic. The basic view of the game showed the whole world at 320x200 (these were the days of EGA and the Tandy graphics system) with units as 3x3 pixel squares. This was great for an overview but you couldn't tell anything other than whose unit it was. If you clicked the right button an enlarged view exploded at your cursor so you could actually manage your forces. Click again and it went away. This allowed players to easily manage wars that took place all over the globe. The final piece of interface that I liked was the small status window that showed you the detail of the terrain and any unit under your cursor as you just rolled it around. One of the weak points of "Command HQ" was that it included no animation. The units were iconic squares that looked like "counters" from old paper wargames. Their only animation was to change position (as a result of moves) and to flash their backgrounds (as a result of being attacked). Microprose artists contributed some short animations that took place in a small window to show significant events which was a nice touch. This game did well enough that there was an upgrade (done by a group of fans with my permission). There was even a plan by Microprose to do a Win95 version but when they were bought out by Mindscape it was canceled.

Global Conquest

• Microprose, 1992
• PC
• "Global Conquest" was published by Microprose in '92. It was the first four player network game by a major publisher. Although this game was a lot of fun to play, especially with 4 players, I think of it as my worst game. The design started out as one further attempt to "slow down" the real-time aspect of "Modem Wars" and "Command HQ". It was also supposed to include aspects of all my favorite designs. It would have the exploration of a random world of "Seven Cities of Gold", it would have the clean interface and simple wargame model of "Command HQ", it would have the random events and humor of "M.U.L.E.", it would have several of neat features of "Modem Wars" (including the Spy and Comcen) and it would have better graphics (640x400) drawn by contract artists. As it turned out, this game was a hodgepodge rather than an integration. It was just the opposite of the KISS doctrine. It was kitchen sink design. It had everything. It was more "construction set" than game. Build your own game by struggling through several options menus. It was also a case where my play-testers got the better of me. I was trying to design to please them rather than following my own instincts. I can attribute some of this to the turmoil in my personal life at the time (I was going through a divorce and contemplating the sex-change that I eventually underwent) but there's little question in my mind that I screwed up with this game. I'm not saying that it's not fun to play or that there aren't a few neat features in it. It just suffers from lack of focus. I don't think design by committee ever works and it sure didn't in this case. The last point in the "Global Conquest" debacle was that somehow Microprose "mastered" the wrong disks and wouldn't recall them when we discovered that the version shipped had several fatal bugs. You can get a shareware copy of the good version and try it out for yourself. Let me know if there are any gems in the rough in it. To me, my games are like my children. They each took over a year of serious attention to "birth". I hate that the last one I delivered for the box market had serious birth defects.

Lecture for 1997 Computer Game Developer's Conference

A Lecture for the 1997 Computer Game Developers Conference, Copyright 1997, by Dani Bunten Berry

I started out my career as speaker at this conference by delivering the banquet keynote address in 1990. I told everyone that if we want to reach the mass market in this industry we're going to have to become part of the main stream and stop being such nerds. I recommended that they go home, meet their neighbors, get married, have kids and to stop spending all their time alone in front of computers. I said something pompous like "Only when our products come out of a deep connection with real-life will they resonate with the mass market". I think that was when I coined the morbid quote that "No one on their death bed ever says 'I wish I'd spent more time alone with my computer'" to highlight the "people orientation" of the real world vs. the "thing orientation" of our business. Not mentioned in my bio is the fact that 4 years ago I changed pronouns. I tell you this partly so that those of you who "know" don't feel any anxiety about telling or not telling those of you who don't since I hate that kind of awkwardness. But a sex change also offered me enough humbling experiences to make me less willing to pontificate about what other people need to do. I switched instead to just sharing my insights on specific game areas. I've done round-tables and seminars on various aspects of designing and developing games. However, I've loved the big lectures given by my friends Chris Crawford, Brian Moriarty and a few others that eviscerate our industry, cajole us to think differently and galvanize us to try harder. For myself, I haven't felt driven enough by my beliefs, sure enough of my experience nor confident enough in my ability to climb back into that pulpit again — till now.

What kicked me into motion was a conversation with a "marketing specialist" at a recent online game conference. He said something innocently grandiose about how great it is that the online service he worked for has got the full gamut of games to cover all possible demographic groups. In his view, as new products come up all he'll have to do is drop it in one of his genre slots and connect the dots between who's out there (audience) and the what they can play (content). I was dumbstruck. It's true that they had things from card games through "Warcraft" to "Doom" that featured different levels of intensity and abstraction. However, from my point of view all those games were holdovers from the pre-online era. I believed we had barely tapped the virgin territory of a whole new medium. Here was a 20 something whiz kid telling me it was all over but to stock those cyber-shelves and rake in the cash. Once I recognized this "new" point of view of his, I started seeing it in a lot of other places. Like the lack of desire by publishers and capitalists to underwrite even small experimental products. All they wanted to talk about were the fully fledged, competitively executed products that looked a lot like what was selling in the PC CD market. They were more willing to spend a million bucks on a "C&C" clone than under $100K on a promising concept for an original product. As the self-appointed life-long defender of people-oriented games in this business I had to speak up to save this potential new medium from being turned into another silicon valley meets Hollywood "sequel-itis" wasteland.

So that's why I'm motivated to preach. But am I qualified? In these days where spending six months with an internet service provider is enough to proclaim yourself an expert in the online world, it's a good question. I've done more original multi-player games than anybody else in the games business and the one thing we're sure about online games is that they will be multi-player. Of the dozen games that I've had published by Strategic Simulations, Electronic Arts and Microprose, 10 were multi-player. The first 7 of them used shared or simultaneous input (depending on the platform) and shared output. (In other words players were grouped around a computer with their own joysticks when possible or passing it when not). There were (and still are) numerous possibilities for social interaction and interesting play with the shared computer kind of design. However, there were a number of logistical issues related to getting groups of people playing games around a single computer (such as, it's not usually centrally located and people need to be "invited"). Online games "fix" these problems while still offering several of the social advantages of multi-player games. Thus, as soon as possible I switched to writing online games and my last 3 were of the type that each player had their own machine connected by modems. (Specifically, they were server-less, synchronous-state, real-time action-strategy games where all the code ran on the client machines). I did the first point-to-point game and the first four player network games published by major publishers. The last several years I've been a design consultant specializing in multi-player online games.

There are my motivations and my qualifications to speak. How about my confidence to deliver this tirade? On that I'm too stubborn not to try.

We're going to attempt to uncover why online games suck and what to do about it. First, I should share the good news about online games. A lot of people are having a lot of fun playing the online games they are being offered. "Quake", "Warcraft", "C&C", "Diablo" and their clones are doing an amazing job of convincing people that the age of online multi-player games is upon us. A whole sub-industry is being developed to bring more folks into that realm and to make money off them. Compared to this time last year, we now know that tens of thousands of people are willing to sign up and pay some amount just to play games online. Although, we still don't know the ideal system for financing online play we at least have some notions about mixing ads and box-office to fund the system.

What I mean in my title, "Imaginary Playmates in Real-time", is that for nearly all intents and purposes the current crop of games (and even the next crop that I'm aware of) have simply taken standard computer game genres from the pre-online era and replaced the AI opponents with humans. If you're playing one of those games, your interaction with those humans is at the same level as it was with the AI ones. What we're experiencing now is just the fact that people make better opponents. They will do more interesting things than any algorithm. Those of us who have been pushing multi-player games for years have known this part. It's just that this is such a tiny aspect of what having human playmates can mean. People can make you feel welcome and accepted. People can teach you and share with you. They can touch you emotionally. But in the current online games they are nothing but a few pixels on the screen and an occasional stream of text. So, I guess what I'm saying is that online games suck in comparison to what they can become. So, it appears I was exaggerating in my sub-title "or Why Online Games Suck". Guilty as charged. But, I got you here and paying attention and I promise to give you some suggestions on how we can create an online games medium that will make what's happening now look "sucky" by comparison.

The Distribution Monster

Let me start by describing some of the institutional and structural problems of how computer games are currently being designed and built that we need to overcome in order to bring this new medium to life. The biggest and most threatening monster in our path is the distribution system that garners almost 80% of the revenue stream of games for virtually no value added. That's pretty harsh isn't it?!

What we have now is a multi-billion dollar computer game business. Lets look at where that money moves. Most of the accumulation of wealth occurs as a result of the sales and distribution of our designs. Retailers, who display our games to their audience, take the lions share of the revenue stream - between 50% and 60%. For this they present the edges of boxes on shelves under labels they consider descriptive. At this particular point in time those labels are thematic more often than not. You'll find our games categorized under Science Fiction, Sports, War, etc. Under these titles you will find everything mixed together. I've even seen "Command and Conquer", "Duke Nukem" and "Myst" under Science Fiction for God's sake! How do retailers not know that our audience fall into categories by whether they like strategy, action or adventure games not whether it deals with the future? I can't imagine how players find games they are likely to enjoy these days.

The next big player in terms of accumulation of wealth in our industry are the publisher/distributors. They take 35% to 40% of the pie. For this they put our software on CD's, put them in boxes and ship them to retailers. This is not to say they don't make a creative contribution. They turn their marketing gurus loose to invent the packaging that makes our games sound like something they want to sell. (Not that they constrain themselves to describing the actual game they are putting in the box.) The backs of boxes seem to be designed to make it harder rather than easier to figure out what the game is about or how it really plays. It's goal is to get that box off the shelf and whatever it takes to do that seems fine to the publisher. There are also the full-page, content-free ads that the marketing folks invent as another of the publisher's offerings to the success of our products. But by far the main contribution of the publishers is their input into our design process. They help us follow the lead of the last big seller. Without their help we might flounder around and make something original.

Thus, about 80% of the money goes to people who make their "votes" based on those superficial things that make the "sizzle" but not the "substance". Now, I don't want to imply that cool animated cut-scenes and appealing segues are not nice things to have in a product. They can help players get into the story-line and enjoy the rest of the product. It's just that in too many cases products are getting sold just for their icing regardless of whether there is cake underneath it or not. (A friend described that as "A big hole where the fun should be"). And I would contend it's the screwy distribution system that not only allows it but encourages it. In additions, corporate buyers, like all "market analysts" only know what sold last quarter and that's what they base their decisions on for this quarter. Hence, the chute is greased for sequels and "me too" games. Add to all this the data point that most computer software is bought when a computer is first purchased. I've heard numbers that say 80% of all software is sold to new users within a month of buying their computer. What that means is that sellers don't even have to worry about delivering trash and pissing off their buyers. They're not coming back and will be replaced by the next sucker in line anyway! A final new trend is that very few retailers will let you exchange anything but defective software in a "like for like" swap these days. I think you can see how the system has nailed the coffin shut on innovation. It has ensured both the continued success of "sizzle" and the fact that most "steak" is tough if not rank.

OK, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit. But none of these aspects of the current system favor success in the new online medium we would like to envision. The shelf-space online will be unlimited and deception will be punished by players not returning to your site. Originality will be required but "publishing" is unnecessary. Although sizzle won't hurt, substance in the form of addictive playability over time is essential. Instead of software that is primarily sold to new owners, the online environment will be peopled by savvy consumers who are wired into their own interest groups. Revenue accumulation with almost all expected financial models rewards repeat customers in the online world more than initial sales.

The Solo Trap

I'm aware of only one "multi-player only" game that was published by a major publisher - my own Robot Rascals by Electronic Arts. There's a reason. Solo sells. Or at least it has until now. All our metaphors, imagery and concepts as designers have gone to support the single player game as the prime feature of our products with multi-player as an occasional option. Solo games have a whole different style. Solo-games could concentrate on entertaining just one user so all the resources of the machine could be devoted to that end.

Brilliant graphics and sounds could be used to set the scene for players making their experience more compelling. Segues and cut-scenes are triggered as appropriate to that audience of one. No provision needed to be made as to what the other players would be doing while the awards ceremony visuals were running. Pandering to the only player didn't create any tension with the others who might not be doing as well. In solo-games they were all AI stand-ins who would mindlessly wait while you gorged on eye candy. And the pandering didn't stop with their ego's either, solo games needed to push the platform too since one of the biggest perks for many hard-core players was showing off their hardware.

The features of a solo-player's game are geared to take advantage of the "learning curve" involved in the process of mastering a new game and its environment. There can be whole groups of features that only show up in certain environments as the player advances and learns to play. Players of those designs not only accepted the idea that more was better, they demanded complexity for it's own sake or else they thought they were being cheated.

"Kitchen sink" design also has an advantage to solo-player games besides the titillation of the player. Designers could hide the limitations of the AI opponent behind the veil of added game elements that kept challenging the player when his opponent couldn't. Another aspect of the AI also influenced solo-game design. Although subtle nuances of pattern recognition might be trivial for a human player, the most blatant patterns could be a nightmare for AI. Hence, there's a tendency to make the externals of solo-games very conventional. Designers discard opportunities for interactions with audio-visual cues in favor of algorithmic and concrete presentations. Rather than allude to something with subtle patterns or sounds that humans excel at, designers used the same kind of logic in their representations as they used in their artificial opponent's analysis of the world. There aren't "maybes". There are only "zeros" and "ones". In addition, the need for competent AI required that the internal models be computational which computers "love" rather than heuristic which humans enjoy.

Taken together these design elements may make good solo games but they conspire to make games that are poorly suited to humans playing with humans. Rather than "over the top" production values, online games will reward small downloads, good multi-player balance and smooth play experiences. These will preclude pauses for "cut-scenes" and pandering to a single player's ego or hardware vanity. Since people derive much of their challenge while playing with each other from anticipating each other's actions, complex feature sets are unnecessary. Simple sets of rules, consistent over time make multi-player games more accessible. However, subtle nuances in audio/visual presentation of products make for much richer play experiences for human opponents. And, finally, heuristic (rules of thumb based) models are much more appealing to players than complex numeric systems and once again play to the strengths of our brains while not sacrificing playability.

Those are the two biggest obstacles to be overcome in order to bring online games up to their potential. Both are very daunting and will probably keep a lot of good talent from coming to this area or being effective here. It's even possible that the distribution monster will attempt to sabotage this medium to protect its turf. Just the simple fact that their financial model sells the CD but gives away the "play time" makes "pay as you play" and "advertiser supported play" less appealing. However, I believe once we have some content designed specifically for online multi-player play, it will be no contest which kind of product people want to play. The concept of continuing to tack the online option to basically solo CD games will look pitiful by comparison. Even if the online media creators have to move to some kind of sales of their software, without middlemen, manufacturing and shipping we could be pretty darn competitive. I used to tell folks who bought my games that by the time EA got done with it all, I only got about $2 a copy so if they ever wanted to clear their conscience for pirating "M.U.L.E." they could just send the $2 straight to me. The shareware distribution folks seem to make much better than that per copy.

Small Creative Shops

One of my favorite game designers is Sid Meier. When I met him in '89 and was going to do a new game for Microprose I told him I was torn between doing one of two games. They were both board games whose design while solid in their own medium would be very interesting to work out in the computer game field. I wanted to do either "Axis and Allies" or "Civilization". Sid talked me into doing the WWII game (Command HQ it was called) and he did Civilization. Not that I would have done the amazing job that Sid did with that game but it does give one pause to consider the ways fate works out. Well, anyway, Sid just did a "Soapbox" piece for the magazine "Game Developer" where he applauded the current situation that is allowing small creative shops to take a prominent place in the design of innovative products. I assume he's alluding to groups like Blizzard, Westwood, ID and his own Firaxis and to a certain degree I agree with him. To whatever extent the big boys (EA et al) will farm out money to these groups to do original stuff, it is more likely to succeed than trying to push a new idea through their in-house development system. However, the budgets (and hence the resources) that are required to build products for the CD market are so large that risk must be reduced and thus wild impulses constrained.

I think a much better case can be made that small creative shops will be the province of the new online medium where so much is unknown about what will work and hunches, instincts and wild impulses can and must be followed. The budgets need not be the astronomical numbers ($1million plus) that are talked about for CD products. Online games need to be small (under 10 meg) so the download won't be prohibitive. Since they are multi-player they need to be simple to play, without complex expanding features that make testing and debugging a nightmare during development. There's no place for fancy cinematic segues and cut scenes so the art requirement is just what's needed to support game play. And, finally since rev's are no problem when you don't have to master a CD and ship it to several thousand retailers in time for the ads to hit, you can make the whole development process iterative. The game project can evolve and be financed in stages and still be productive. Taken together, I think these items create a wonderful opportunity for innovative products financed inventively. To me, it's a situation very much reminiscent of when Trip Hawkins was founding Electronic Arts. He approached several game designers (including myself) in the early '80's to empower us to do the creative things that he believed the new medium (at that time floppy-based-games) could accomplish. (The "Can a computer make you cry?" ad was the hallmark of that era). A lot of neat stuff was done before the business was taken over by it's distribution system. We need another "Trip" to seed this next growth spurt. If the new "Trip" is in the audience, would he or she see me after this talk. Have I got a deal for you?!

The New Whos in Whoville

Another opportunity that I believe the online medium offers is a new demographic landscape. Although to look at the "successful" games online at this point you'd think we were stuck with the 18 to 35 year old male audience that populates the CD games world, it ain't so. The demographic of web-browsing (see "Online Magazine") has an average age of 33 and is 31% female. They come primarily from educational and computer-related occupations. Almost 60% have a college degree or better. They are information consumers and have an average household income of $59,000 (these two numbers make advertisers excited). They have grown 10 fold in the last year and Nick Donatello of Odyssey Research predicts online entertainment will exceed $1 billion in revenue by 2000. Those are some impressive numbers! Designing games to reach them will be an amazing challenge. We will need to think creatively about what a game is. Unfortunately, I have no idea what might be. I can tell you some of the pieces that make for good multi-player games but my guess is that the big breakthrough will be as like our current games as "Doom" is like "Pong".

Good Multi-player Design Elements

Here comes my annual punch list of things to consider when designing multi-player games updated and expanded from last year based on what we've learned:

• Build in the "Norm Effect" if at all possible. This is named for the character from "Cheers" who when he enters the bar is greeted by everyone calling his name in unison. Pitiful old IRC chat-rooms can provide some of this effect so surely we can find some way to welcome people into our game environments.
• "Zero sum" is bad. Games where I win and you lose are bad. Worse still is "I win and all the rest of you lose". Notwithstanding the current cultural obsession with endzone strutting by winners, losers do not enjoy themselves and if you can help take the sting out of it, you should. Alliances, cooperative play, ranked "winners" rather than "A winner" with a bunch of losers are all options.
• Pacing needs variety. Slow periods should follow intense ones and forced "time-outs" can offer opportunities to socialize, catch your breath and anticipate things to come. Remember, the players no longer have a "pause key" as they did in a solo-game.
• Strategies need "wiggle room". People have different personal styles and when playing against each other it's great to let them "do it their own way" rather than a single approach that all must follow. If possible you should balance the game such that a strategic planner for instance might not always beat the joystick jockey or the detailed tactical type. A game that allows for diverse people to play diverse ways is always best.
• Legends must grow. Provide ways for players to carry their experiences with them. "Game films" are an excellent (and reasonably cost-effective option) in games where what's sent between the player's computers is a stream of "deltas". Saving that stream and running it back through the game engine provides an opportunity to review what happened during the game. This turns an ephemeral, fast paced experience into a story that can be used to "save face" if the player lost, to learn how to win or just to chronicle their accomplishments. At the very least, try to include ongoing statistics or character attributes outside the environment of a single game execution.
• Court your newbies. Nothing will destroy a player's interest in your game quicker than being humiliated a few times when they are just trying to figure out what to do. If possible build in inducements for advanced players to help newbies in order to get something to advance further in the game environment — like taking an "apprentice" might be the only path to "master rank". At the very least try to make starting as safe on player's egos as you can.
• Allow personalization. Let players define their own icons that the others see or somehow personalize their own game space. A big part of the enjoyment of being with others is expressing yourself. A bunch of player avatars all dressed from the same menu gives me the creeps. Encourage graffiti.
• Keep the features down. When humans play each other there's this "he thinks that I think that he thinks …" kind of mental gymnastics taking place. This is far more interesting than another unit type or another option to evaluate to almost everyone.
• Include audio/visual subtleties. People are remarkably good at recognizing patterns almost subconsciously and they also find it rewarding. A couple of pixels blinking in the corner of the screen and a small sound effect that allude to a possibility allows a player to feel very astute when they can put it together with an outcome. This can also facilitate the personal playing style mentioned above since some folks are better at it than others.
• Avoid numbers. Almost no one enjoys calculations. (At least no one "normal"). Humans prefer heuristic (rules of thumb) relationships or continuous equations far more. The heuristics feel good when you figure them out and the continuous equations can only be predicted which also seems to scratch an itch in our brains.
• Include spectators. Leave room for "lurkers" to watch games being played and even to effect them in minor ways if possible. A design that includes taking turns, which makes the other players spectators for part of the time, can be interesting if what the player is doing has an effect on them, is interesting to watch and they can tease, taunt and kibitz while watching.
• Facilitate relationships. Allow players to form clubs, clans, groups and facilitate scheduled as well impromptu meetings online. Help strangers mix and friends find each other.
• Use time limits. Whenever possible design your game so it can be played within a fixed time limit. This will allow people to schedule their involvement. A game you can play a couple of times in an evening would be a good design goal. If you can't end the game at specific times try to at least facilitate a graceful exit opportunity such that a player quits while they are having fun and not after they're so exhausted they'll never come back again.
• Include chance. Although most players hate the idea of random events that will destroy their nice safe predictable strategies, nothing keeps a game alive like a wrench in the works. Do not allow players to decide this issue. They don't know it but we're offering them an excuse for when they lose ("It was that damn random event that did me in!") and an opportunity to "beat the odds" when they win.
• Keep the balance. Try to keep the distance between the losers and the winners small enough that the outcome is in doubt as long as possible. You can adjust random events, attrition factors or whatever. They'll thank you for keeping the games interesting even though you should probably not tell them what you're doing.
• Include cooperation. Even in basically competitive games you can allow for alliances, collusion or at least less cutthroat behavior. In M.U.L.E. I used an interesting trick that would not allow a "Winner" unless a certain threshold of colony success was reached. In order to win players had to sometimes help each other out so the whole colony would thrive thus making the balance closer and play more interesting.
• Make 'em stay. Figure out incentives to keep players to stay till the end of a game. It ruins everyone's fun when players bail out prematurely. At the very least you can publish the percent of the time they bailed.
• Allow handicapping. Let players handicap themselves if they want. Some players are willing to play with one hand behind their back so let them. (The most common use of this will be parents and kids playing together).
• Facilitate special events. "Magical appearances" (scheduled and otherwise) in FRPs are cool. Strategy game tournaments (sanctioned and not) are too.
• Leave room for ads. Banners will be around for a while. You might even want to let Nike outfit your monsters with shoes - for a price.
• Be creative.

Don't forget to go to the second part of the memorial page.

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