Think Like A Game Designer - Richard Bartle — Pioneering Virtual Worlds: From M.U.D. to MMOs, Understanding Player Motivations, and Navigating the Ethical Maze of Online Interactions (#36)

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

Richard Bartle is a legend among game designers. He has a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and is the co-creator of the first virtual world ever to exist, a game called Multi-Use Dungeon or M.U.D. Richard authored the book Designing Virtual Worlds and his most recent book is How to be a god: A Guide for Would Be Deities, in which he examines the history, ethics, structure, and technology of MMOs. His research on player personalities and what’s called the Bartle Test had a significant impact on my designs, which is why I’m so excited to interview him today. This episode is a fascinating one, that focuses on virtual worlds: past, present, and future! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry, with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. In today's episode, I speak with Richard Bartle. Richard is a legend among game designers. He has a PhD in artificial intelligence and is co-creator of the first

virtual world ever called mud or multi-user dungeon. He authored the book Designing Virtual Worlds, and his most recent book is How to Be a God, a Guide for Would Be Deities, and really practical tips for how to create your own virtual worlds and to what the ethical ramifications are and the technology and everything. It's all really fascinating. And this is a really huge honor for me, and one of the reasons why I love doing this podcast, because it gave me an excuse to get to talk to Richard, I talk about Richard's Bartle Test in my own book, Think Like a Game Designer, is one of the first processes that broke down players into different categories. And we talk about here, like how do you psychographically analyze your players?

What are the things that break that down? And how does that help you design better games? He really has created so much of the foundational architecture of thought that all game designers use. And so it was a real honor to get to talk to him. and we dive deep. Not only do we talk about his history and origins and a lot of the lessons that he's taught over the years,

but we also project out into the future. And we talk about what is the future of virtual worlds and how do things like Web 3 and NFTs and tokenomics impact it? What is up with the metaverse? And how is that going to change things and interoperability between these games? It's a really fascinating breakdown of the fundamentals of game design

and the history of all of the thought that I've been talking about here and that all of us have adopted, as well as a look into what the future might hold. And to get Richard's insights on this has been amazing. We really get into it, and I intentionally kind of push back at him and start some interesting debate really towards the end of the podcast. So definitely stick around for that. And I'm really hoping I can get him back for a second time so we can even continue that debate. But there's plenty of meat to chew on here. So I hope you enjoy as much as I do this conversation with Richard Bartle. Hello and welcome.

I am here with Richard Bartle. Richard, it is such an honor to have you here. I have been following your work for my entire life, basically, the entire time I've been interested in games. It's really fantastic to get to chat with you now. Well, it's good to be here. Obviously, it's good to have lived long enough that people can spend their entire lives better.

Yeah. Yeah, it's good. I like talking about games. I like games in general, so I'm looking forward to finding out what questions you're going to spring from me out of nowhere. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm going to start with the easy ones, in part because I think a lot of my audience may not be as familiar with you. So, you know, I wrote a book called Think Like a Game Designer, which is the same name as this podcast. And in it, I created my own kind of categorizations of player motivations. but the very first thing I have to reference is your categorizations of player motivations as I believe as far as my research can tell me, it's the first of its kind.

Maybe there is some others, but it was kind of a revolutionary thing that when you started to create that kind of achiever, explorer, socializer, killer categories. And we'll dig into it, but really, you know, as far as the entire genre

of massively multiplayer online games exists today, you're pretty much, you know, the co-creator at the very least, of pretty much everything that we now take for granted today as part of the online world. So maybe we can just start, just talk a little bit about that so people can kind of get caught up and understand where your origin story is, if you will.

Yeah, okay, so I've always been a gamer. My dad's a gamer, so we used to play board games back in the day. For those of you who haven't Googled me yet, I'm 62 years old and I'm therefore close to death. But the, so when I was a kid, we didn't have computers, so we used to play board games and we used to play board games every weekend, two or three of them. So that was me, my dad and my brother, and we always used to play them.

So I was always a game player. But the more games you play, especially at a younger age, the more you come to understand what games are about, and do you want to make your own games? And some people want to make games just because they want to play them. Other people want to make games for other people to play.

And the former are sort of players who are moving towards becoming designers, testing the waters, and the latter are the ones who are game designers. They're creating games as a way of communicating something to the people who are playing it. And the thing could be quite simple, like, isn't this cool, but it could be more sophisticated.

You could be saying, this is how things work, or this is how things should work, or wouldn't it be great if people acted like this, or wouldn't it be bad if we set people in these conditions? So there's all sorts of things you can say through games, because they're a procedural model, that you can't say through other things. Games are interactive. So, yeah, you can have a movie which makes a point, but it's essentially ramming it down your throat.

Whereas with a game, you can interact with it and you can adjust your play so that it gives you the responses you're looking for rather than the ones that have been decreed as the ones you're going to get. So I always wanted to, play games and wanted to make games after a while. My first ones worked very good, but then nobody else's are when you start off either.

I mean, my baby with plasticine pieces and things and cards taken out of other games and pieces and dice out of other games. But also, in addition to games, I was interested in creating worlds, paracosoms, as they're called. So a lot of kids create their own. own imaginary worlds. And so it's not unusual. A lot of famous authors did it. Bronte sisters did it. Dewe H. Orden, the poet, did it. E. Nesbit, the author did it. You can just name many of them we did it. Now, in most cases, once people grow up, they lose interest in creating worlds. My brother did, for example. But I didn't, because I didn't actually.

like the real world. I thought it was not particularly well designed from my perspective. Let's put it like that. Because I didn't come from a very wealthy background. I mean, I didn't have a bad childhood because we didn't know any better. But when you're watching television and you see somebody on the television who's described as being poor and they've got better things than you have and you think, well, hold on, just a moment, that can't be right. So the more that I came to understand the world, the less I thought that it was fair and I wanted to make a better world. Back in the day when I was, sorry, you can stop me if this is like a rant of an biography,

but anyway, back. No, it's great. That's great. I'll definitely want to pick apart bits of it, but I love it. Keep going. I'll talk more. Well, okay. Well, I'll carry on with my origin myth.

So at school, I was very good academically because, well, basically, I'm a genius. Of course, of course. Yes. But the school that I went to hadn't been used to teaching good children. They got all the second level. children because all the best ones used to go to another school, then they'd change the exact system. So I was in the first year where they had students who were a lot smarter than they were used to teaching. They didn't, not many people used to go to university back then, about one in seven of

the population, and most of those would be middle class, not working class. But one of the advantages of being in a pokey little school out in the middle of nowhere, was that there was a chemical works about 15 miles away run by BP. And in order to try and modify the local population for pumping chemicals into the air, they gave some schools access to computers. So even though I was out, I mean, 15 miles east of nowhere, there was, I had access to a computer over an acoustic coupler, 110 board. So I could learn to program when I was 16, found out it was really, really good at it.

Passed my exams within different results because it turned out that to get marks in a mathematics exam, you don't get marks for putting the correct answer down. well you do you get one but you don't get the four marks you would have got if you'd have written how you worked out the answer we thought that you'd get more marks for um doing it in your head but no you get more marks for showing that you're so stupid you have to write things down so yeah I passed within different marks but nevertheless they were good enough to get me into Essex University, where I met several other people who were similarly interested in computers. Most of them were from working class backgrounds because the UK wanted people to do software engineering

and were prepared to allow people who were not from middle-class backgrounds to do it because people who were middle-class backgrounds wanted to do something else like philosophy or English or economics, sociology, if they weren't all that bright. But they didn't want them to do engineers, and engineering are all mathematics. Now, when I joined, I went to university to do mathematics, but there was something like 300 people in my cohort doing maths, and two of them were better than me. So I thought, I'm not going to do that.

I'm going to switch to computer science because there wasn't any better than me in computer science. So I switched at the end of the second year, but I'd always been wanting to do computing. It was a joint first year, so I could do it as well. So are the other people who were doing computer science? Back then you had to have a particular world view to do it. Essentially, you had to be imaginative and creative and love technology. And there weren't many people around like that.

A lot of those was from lesser off backgrounds or from better off backgrounds in defiance of our parents. And we all had this similar attitude that it's that chaotic good in Dungeons of Dragons terms where we didn't want to be told what to do but we wanted to do well we wanted to do good for the world

I want to dig in a little bit there if you don't mind you mentioned this a couple of times where games as an art form and the ability to communicate something to the players and ability to sort of say something of meaning not just necessarily hey it's cool and that you from a very young age wanted to create worlds because you wanted to make a better world.

And then that theme has recurred here, right? Even through now in college and at university, that you want to create a better world. Was this a continuous thread where you felt this world design? Was that there for it? And also I'm interested because you mentioned, you grew up playing board games, and board games is definitely the heart of where I live

most of my designs are as well. Was Dungeons and Dragons an early part of that as well in the world creation? Did that come later? Because that's been a common theme from a lot of the designers I've spoken to, that that was one of the inspirations that made it feel possible to create an immersive world like this. I did play Dungeons and Dragons. I got one of the first few sets, me and my friends clubbed together,

and it costs something like six pounds, which was an enormous amount back then. It was two weekends of wages for me. in my job as a working as a bingo caller in an amusement arcade. So we clubbed together and bought some. But although I got some things out of Dungeons of Dragons, some new mechanics from it, that wasn't what made me think,

you know, I could make a world that would work, a wholly consistent world. I'd already invented for my own personal use, what would you probably now call a role-playing game, but it was just a single-player one. What I did was I built an imaginary continent on bits of paper, stuck them all together with sticky tape, turned it over because you can't draw on felt-tip pen with sticky tape.

and then I did all the surrounding of it and made a big long, straggly continent out of this basically what was writing paper because people didn't use to send emails, they used to write letters. And then I would start at one point on it, and I would move to the other point. I was playing a character called Dr. Toddy Stone, based on Dr. Livingstone.

and I made a pair of compasses out of two pins and some sticky tape and so the tips of the pins were three centimetres apart and I'd gone with the mixed units of one millimeter equals one mile and I figured the guy could probably go about 30 miles a day in practice people can probably go about 20 miles a day but I didn't know that that then so I used to stick a pin in and I'd figure where the guy was trying to go and I'd stick the pin where he was going to go, then I'd draw a line, and then I would write the diary entry, what happened to him.

And so I'd write paragraph or two. And in so doing, I would create my own story through playing through this imaginary world that I created. So that showed me that you could use a game to tell a story. When you read the story afterwards, it was dead on the page. but playing it was the interesting part. That was where the fun was. Also, there was Lord of the Rings, the book. I read that three times in my teams,

not because it was a good book, it isn't, but because it showed that you could create a fully realized, believable world. It was doable. And that's why I was interesting. in that. I'd also subscribe to a, my father subscribed to a magazine called Games and Puzzles

and one of the issues of that was it number 18 had an article in there about a what today would be online but that then was postal fantasy campaign so it was a

game with 100 more players each one of them controlling a character in the world of Conan, Robert Howard. So I thought, that sounds really good. And I started to design my own campaign world for that. So there was a number of things that I did.

Dungeons and Dragons came along and, yeah, played a lot of that at the time. But that wasn't my inspiration. I'd already been inspired by other things. and I'd only been driven by the fact that I didn't like the real world as it was. Yeah, I think that's fantastic. I really love, so, you know, there's a couple of things I just, you know, a core principle, you mentioned this earlier, but I always just like to underline it, right?

You know, you start by just making these kinds of prototypes and just doing it, and they are terrible at first, and it is through that sort of iteration and repetition that they become better over time, and that's kind of how you start to sort of learn this craft. And I think it's also really interesting, again, most of the designers that people come up in my era, we have tons of examples of professional game designers and people who have written about design. There's this sort of craft and world and professional world that exists, but that was pretty much non-existent when you were growing up. But even seeing these things where a play-by-male multiplayer fantasy campaign as a precursor to now the technology exists where we can do this

in an online forum, that makes a lot of sense as kind of a connect-the-dots element, right, take what you could build from your own world and what you've seen from Lord of the Rings and a multiplayer game, and now the kind of dots sort of connect to what you were then able to do

with Roy and building the first mud, but maybe I'm getting ahead a little bit. So I'll let you continue the story. Well, yeah, no, yeah, what you've said pretty well. That's how it was. When I was a kid, there wasn't really a genre of fantasy Sword and Sorcery was something that was applied to movies and some books so I mean we knew about Conan we knew about Farford and the Grey Mouser

we knew about Ursula Kela Gwynn and of course we knew about Tolkien but we didn't really know much about anything else back then and the genre that later became known as fantasy or high fantasy, that wasn't really a thing. I was more, it was more to do with, um, fairy stories based in English folklore. Someone like Enid Blighton, he used to write all these stories for, for kids.

Her imaginary worlds were quite, um, important to, to show, um, you can have what you like in these. Another one that was really good was, um, believe it or not, Rupert the Bear. because he lived in this world that was completely consistent and fully realized and there were these pictures of them, you know, there'd be some rope bridge walkways going up high into the trees and you could see them all about. And they were really evocative. So when I was designing the campaign that I was going to create, I thought when I get to university, I am so going to implement all this on a conference. computer because I didn't have a computer, obviously.

And then I got to university and I was chatting to the chairman of the Computers Society, who is now on the board of ICANN. So, yeah, he's done well for himself, Nigel. And I was explaining what I wanted to do. And then he mentioned this game called Advent or Adventure. colossal cave. And I said, oh, yeah, I knew about that because I'd seen a transcript of it in a postal gains magazine called Bellicus that I used to subscribe to. And then he said, well, what I was proposing to write was a bit like what his friend Roy, who was the secretary of the competing

society, what he was doing, which was similar to Advent, but it was a shared world. and I thought, so I met up with Roy and we discussed things and I thought, well, there's no point in me doing what I was going to do because Roy's doing the same thing. Roy was doing it essentially bottom up and I was coming more top down. I thought, well, this is what I want to do. This is, if Roy is successful here, then that will give me what I want to be able to create worlds that are, people can inhabit rather than the real world because the real world is not a good place. So Roy was letting some of us create content. He wasn't called content about there, but he was letting us create things for his world.

And so Nigel put some things in and I put some things in. I was very good at putting things in because I'd already designed plenty of games and knew instinctively what to put in. So Roy did most of the work until, this would be 78, 1978 when we started. Roy did most of it until 1980. He rewrote it because he'd been writing it in assembly language and it was getting hard to manage. He rewrote it in language BCPL, which, The language C is based on the language called B,

which was based on BCPL. But beautiful language. I love BCPL. Anyway, it was getting around Easter, and I thought, you know, maybe I should write my final year project now. Otherwise, I'll fail my degree. So he passed over ownership of Mudd to me, mud being the game that he'd written,

multi-user dungeon. So I took it over And Then I ran it ever since then So it's not like Roy's baby He's the one who created it If he hadn't have done I would have created something Myself anyway but it wouldn't have been quite like mud

Well there's a couple of interesting things there Because I know from this narrative It's not just that you know sort of Roy had this idea And built it from bottom up You wanted to build it from top down And there were several other designers around that time that were all sort of doing the same kind of thing. And within a few years, it was, you know, a lot of people were trying to do the same thing. And something that that's occurred to me around it as I've seen, you know, even just in kind of my time in the industry, you know, as technology advances, there's these kind of threshold moments where this new possibility of doing the same fundamental things that we as a species have tried to do forever, right?

We want to tell better stories. we want to be able to connect with other people. We want to be able to, this urge to kind of build worlds and share this with other people and interact and kind of test ourselves within them. All of those things are pretty universal in that when for you,

they sort of online text-based items were available and suddenly coming to life and then eventually the same was true when video and animated and visual things were coming to life. As they, you know, maybe VR is on the cusp, maybe

we can talk about that. But I think there's this really interesting threshold that occurs over time. And I wonder if you have thoughts on, you know, how much that technology and the transition of where you were played a role in your creation at the time. And then even more interestingly for me now, it's like what do you see as those technological thresholds

that we're about to encompass or what's kind of what do you see this headed in the near future? Yes. Well, what you're saying is right. Yes, you do get to the stage where things become within reach. But they're not within easy reach. So the people who start working on things initially are the ones that really, really want to get what it is that's just out of reach. So, yes, lots of people could have created virtual worlds back when Roy and I did mud, and other people did.

Some of them, the concept isn't as if it's unique and it's only ever going to be developed once, because there's at least five other examples I know of where virtual worlds were invented independently. with none of the people writing them, knew anything about the others. So, but they, some of them were, I like Dungeons and Dragons,

let's make a computer version of it, but others were I want to build a society that people can visit online because not everybody can. Then there's others where I can give people power here that they don't have in the real world, so they can become themselves.

Now, all of those have happened. I mean, the latter one was like, was that's pretty well Island and Kesmei. The middle one was Habitat. First one's probably more like Avatar. And to people who want to make these games, if they're, if they've got the passion about it, and the technology is just there,

then they will do it. I mean, Mark Jacobs, who the mythic guy, Dikeaj of Camilla, he was a lawyer and he gave that up, taught himself programming just so he could make those games. Now, that shows a kind of level of commitment that somebody, it's something that's clicked, they definitely want to do this. And so it was with Roy and I, we weren't just doing it for fun. We actually wanted to make that game world.

Now, when things start off and you're working as a pioneer, the pioneers never make all the money, it's all the people who come afterwards, you're setting the ground rules, you're making all the mistakes, you're finding out what to do, but because you know you've got a strong vision, that's directing you in ways that people who are just doing it because, hey, wouldn't it be cool and we could make some money, aren't doing it. Now, after a while, people start developing tools that you can use, and the tools make it easier to create the world. And then they start using the tools to make components,

and you can use the components to make your world. And after a while, you can just get the world yourself, a stock game, and tinker with it a little bit, customize it in some ways. And each one of these steps democratizes the process of making the world, the game, the product, but it also reduces the capacity for innovation. So, for example, today I've got a couple of students who are making games for their finally projects and they're just regular games for the phone and they're both using the Unreal

Engine 4 and that's good because it means they can create a lot of content the trouble is if Unreal Engine doesn't want you to do it you don't do it it it gives you all these tools all these components, but if you want to do something that it doesn't give you, it's pretty hard. Unity's even worse in that regard. It's great if you want to do what unity wants you to do,

but it's not so great if you don't want to do what Unity wants you to do. You just want to do most of what Unity will let you do. So again, you get these where people think, well, let me do it, I'll just do what. it lets, but other people will be thinking, no, I'm going to fight you, I'm going to force you to do what I want to do because what I want to do is important.

It's important to me for reasons I can't explain. I just know that I want to do that. And so you do still get these. It's just out of reach, but if you're passionate enough and you grab it, then you take things in a different direction. Yeah, I think this is an interesting, interesting path here because I again, you speak to this sort of this passion, this creative impulse, this desire to sort of communicate something and push the boundaries. But when I teach game design and aspiring designers, I think there's actually value in forcing people to play in a box at first, especially, right?

There's value to having to battle with the creative restrictions. That's why even for you, or, you know, practicing and learning on making tabletop games and telling stories on your own gave you those instincts that allowed you to be more easily telling stories within the mud or this forcing these people to be able to kind of bootstrap games and entire worlds with something like Unreal or Unity can kind of really get you the chops that you need to do something

like build outside the box, you know, new world experiences. So I think there's really, I mean, I always just think, you know, creativity is generally, speaking enhanced by restrictions rather than than shut down by it. Well, it's like games themselves, aren't they? I mean, games themselves have, they've got sets of rules. And if the rules are too weak and it's an easy game to play, people aren't interested. If the rules are too strong and it's too hard to play, people get frustrated.

But there's a sweet spot in the middle where the rules restrict you just enough to open up freedoms to do things you couldn't have done without the rules, but without tightening it so much that you've got little room to play, play in the sense of the play of a tool in a hole, you know, it's that sort of room to move around. And so that's the rules are giving you a space within which to operate. And when it comes to game designing, yeah, it's a similar thing. If you restrict what people are going to be creating to fit in a particular container, then if you restrict it enough, then that can open up new opportunities that people couldn't have done if they'd have just been a completely free form.

But if you give them too much and it's restricting them too much, then you're going to frustrate people and they're going to think, Why am I making games when I've been forced to do this task that I don't want to do that is of no interest to me that I can't say anything with or even that I don't like? And it can be frustrating for people. So you've got to find that sweet spot. But in general, though, there's two kinds of people who design games. There's game designers, and then there's designers of games.

The designers of games have got the craft. They're very good at making a game to fit a specification. But they're not so much interested in using that to communicate something to the players. They're more interested in the problem solving involved in creating a design that fits the specification. Now, a game designer is someone who's an artist in the sense of they want to create games because that's the medium of their medium of expression. And often game designers are good at other things as well. I mean, they might write stories, they might compose music, they might sing, they might act,

they might do comedy. But the medium of games, it's got something that nothing. else has and that's gameplay. And if what you want to say comes through gameplay, then you want to be a game designer. Now, if you haven't got the craft, obviously you're not going to be very successful in that regard because you can't make the games. You know what you want to say, but you don't have the vocabulary. But if you're made to work in an environment where you are constantly implementing

rules, designs that have been handed down to you from people who don't know about game design, so company high-ups, then yes, you end up being more of a designer of games, even though you're a game designer. You're frustrated within. And that's why so many indie games are more creative than the AAA games, because the game designers have got a freedom there. Obviously, they've got a freedom to mess up and do a terrible job of things. If the only cost is their own sweat equity, then that's not quite as bad as if they just lost somebody $30 million. Yeah, this is a really interesting distinction,

and there's a whole separate conversation around the scale and cost of games and that business side. But the designers of games versus game designers, my guess would be that most people have some of each, those people who are in this role, as some of each within them. And I found that, at least when I'm introspective about it, my own designs,

there's kind of a similar message that I tend to try to communicate. In many ways, it's like I'm trying to kind of perfect the same game over and over again in a lot of different ways in different genres and different categories. Would you find that that's true for you? And is it this core message you talked about from your youth of you kind of want to show that there can be a better world and craft that world for people?

Well, my driving motivation was freedom, freedom to be yourself, to be and become yourself. That's what my games tend to be about. Not always, I can make a game just because I think it's fun or to try a new mechanic. I mean, everybody makes toy games or game designers do anyway I might make it because I wanted to teach my kids

the geography in Europe or I might make it because oh well that's a good idea and what can I might just want to explore something but typically when I'm saying something through my game designs it's going to be something about the freedom to be yourself and if you don't know who yourself

who you are then the freedom to find out who you are and then be yourself. So that's my overall artistic drive. That's my impulsive that's pushing me. Great. Now other people, yeah. Yeah, no, sorry, I don't want to interrupt, but actually I think it's a great jumping off point

to talking about who people are and that player profiles and psychology deeper dive. This is something that I've been fascinated by, and I think that has a very rich discussion through it, which is that why, who people really are, right? And you broke it down famously into the four categories. And again, I don't know, and please let me know if I'm wrong, but as far as I know, you're the first person to do this

in grouping and player motivations. People have been trying to categorize human motivations for a long time, and I feel like it's a similar project, but maybe you can talk a little bit about how you came up with those categories and if that's the kind of way that you view when you say people are finding out who they are, is that what you mean, that you are one or some combination of these four traits, or is there something deeper there?

Well, there is something deeper, but I didn't know that at the time. So what happened was these were players of Mudd II in about 19, 90, 91, something like that, one of the senior players, Henry Mueller, played a skiff, asked the question, what do people want out of

a mud? And the reason was because some of the senior players were arguing over whether it was a good idea to try to make the game fun for the regular players, the mortals, rather than the

models. And so you're saying, well, what do, essentially saying, what do people find fun? What is it that they do that they enjoy in these games with a view to, well, that's how we should try and treat them as the admins? So we have this long discussion of all of the senior players, well, we don't know all of them, but most of them. And after it run its course after five months or something, I summarised it and I went through categorised, well not category, I was lumping together different ideas that people had said. And I noticed that some of the ideas were that this is a proper game that you're trying to win and

some of them were that they liked exploring and seeing the extent of the depth of the game world and some players were there just for the other players. The game gave them a context to interact. Then there are other players who played because they're like being dicks. And so I summarised that and then I thought,

how do I know I've got all the categories here? And I noticed that you could fit them on a graph. Because two of them were clearly interested more in the game world. And that was the explorers and the achievers, as I later called them, and the other two socializers were only

interested in the people in the game world. They weren't interested in the world as much as the people. But then there were some of them who liked acting on other people, and some of them who liked or acting on the world. They're like trying to bend, they wanted to bend things to their will. So the achievers are trying to get the game world to do things for them, and the killers were trying to do things to other players, whereas the socializers and explorers are more responsive. And I had trouble labeling that axis. I originally went with active and passive,

but it didn't really fit. Anyway, a few years later, I published this in a magazine, Coms Plus, or something it was called, in the UK. And yeah, people saw it and said, yeah, that seems fair enough, yeah. But it didn't really cause a splash. A bit later, I sent it off to GDC and didn't get a reply. But then there was this Journal of Mud Research came out. well, I want to support that, so I shall write up my ideas as these player types. And the editor said, why don't you call your vertical dimension acting and interacting?

I thought, yeah, that's better than active and passive. So that's why it says that. But the thing was, I didn't publish the article to say these are the four categories of fun that people these are I wasn't trying to categorise the players so much as what the players find fun

and because that's intrinsic to somebody it's very hard to measure you can't watch somebody and see if what they're doing they're finding fun and even if you can

because they're excited or in some way you don't know what it is that they're doing about the world that's fun. You just know that something they're doing is fun. So it was about fun. But I wasn't trying to say these are the four categories of things that people find fun. What I was trying to say is there is more than one category. Because back then, most game designers created games that they personally found fun, which is great because that I mean, at least one person is going to find it fun. But as a game designer, you shouldn't be trying to make the game that you want to play.

You should be trying to make games that people want to play because that way you're speaking to them, not speaking to yourself. Now, if you're using game design as some form of them trying to understand yourself, then that's great. You can go ahead and do that. And a lot of art games, actually, no, not a lot of art games. I like that. They're a bit more self-conscious.

But you can do that. I'm not saying that's not something that people should be doing. But if you've developed as a game designer, then your aim should be to create games that people in general want to play, not just you. Because if games are only ever written by people who wanted to play, and then five-year-olds would be making games for five-year-olds, but they aren't.

Oh, it's not very good ones. The... So that was the aim and I thought, well, I'll stick my head above the parapet. I'll say, look, everybody should be creating game. So when you're creating games, should be for not just the type of fun you want, but if it's a virtual world, you need at least more than one, because the life of the world comes from the interaction between the different types of fun that people are having.

I wasn't expected. I think that's very valuable as a tool. Regardless, like, yeah, whether it's, you know, these are, I really appreciate the breakdown here. And that's, you know, you weren't expecting this to be the end-all-be-all of the categories. I thought six months later somebody would come out with a better one and then might would be dumped. But I didn't care because the end result of a better one would be we'd get better games

and better virtual worlds, which is what I wanted. But it seems that I struck lucky and that my four types are actually valid. Yeah. Yeah, the way I look at it, I think a lot of the times that people categorize

personal human psychology, which is really what we're talking about here, right? What are the things that motivate people? I think that there is a very long list And I think that there's many different ways you can group those things, right? I know Raf Koster, who's also been on the podcast, really talks about learning and growth as one of the kind of primary things that why we play games in the first place. You know, I think that the immersiveness in story and telling stories is a big part of it. There's all these different areas and lenses through which you can look at the game.

I think the main value that I found is regardless of whether the categories are exactly right, you know, and encompass everything, forcing yourself to get out of your own head and think about things through different lenses, through different player categories, through different motivations is just a powerful tool to make your games better. And I think that's what I heard you saying, and I think that's just a really powerful point to underline.

It is. But I also said that there's more to it than this. Because the player types that I did develop were specifically for months, so for virtual worlds, MMOs, as we call them now. So, and when people started to criticize it, which obviously they did, they were pointing out that there's some, look, there's more than one type of killer because some people want to act on other people to be jerks, but other people want to act on them to get them to do things. So like guild leaders, they're acting on other people, but they're, you wouldn't call them killers because they're not really doing it malevolently. Likewise, some of the people who are exploring are doing it in order to understand the game world so that then they can go on and to become achievers, whereas other ones are exploring just to reveal the meaning

that the game designers put in it, with this kind of end game players. Some people are socialised in order to try and form a network in order to learn more about the game and more about the important things within the important people. They can learn about the world, but they learn about the people, they learn about how things work. They can form groups, and they're kind of networking.

But other people have just, they've been there playing for years, and they've got these friends that they hang out with, like, army buddies who've been, if you've been in the trenches with somebody, and they've saved your life, then you're going to be friends with them for the rest of your life.

Anybody who's survived under fire with, I mean, there's people today who were around in the Korean war and they're still buddies with the people in the Korean War with. But most of my students at university,

when they leave, don't keep in touch with their friends there because there were ships that passed in the night. So, there's these different categories. And I was looking at how to address these and I did it by adding an extra dimension

so instead of four types added an extra dimension which was whether something's done implicitly or explicitly meaning I do you have to think about it so it's explicit or is it something you just do automatic which is implicit

and that gave me eight types now I know I was going to use eight types because it's too big a number but it can be used to explain why people are playing because when people don't stay at the same player type all the time they move and what's more

they follow particular paths even before we had playotypes we used to notice that the first things players did when they started in the game was generally to try and kill each other and because mud had perma death they succeeded but they also succeeded in learning that when you yourself get killed

you've lost everything, so it's not actually quite as much fun as you thought it was. Then they'd start exploring to avoid the other killers and to find out where they could get points to go up levels so they'd be better off at defeating the people who were, anybody who was after them. And once they'd explored and got to learn the lay of the land and the gear that they could use and the commands, how to do things, then they would sit down, knuckle down, and try to get to the end game, which in mud meant you just got the end,

and then you were raised to the level of administrator. So they would keep on doing that, but after a while, either they'd make it to the end and become an administrator and sit around chatting to other admins all the time, or they wouldn't really care about it, and they just keep on playing, creating new characters, and chatting to their friends.

So people essentially always follow the same path, which was killer to explorer, to achiever, to socialiser. That's the main sequence. But they also followed other ones. Some people never did any socialising. They just started off by probing the world. What can I do? Can I open the door?

Can I jump off a cliff? Can I swallow this whiskey? What can I do? And then after that, they started. started exploring, and then they would go back to achieving a game, and then they'd come back to being like a guru explorer. Other people were socializers. Started off, what are the social boundaries of this world?

Can I kill people? Can I swear at them? How beastly can I be? What are the boundaries? Once they'd learn the boundaries, then they'd start networking with their friends. Well, they'd be making friends, making acquaintances. they then rise to some position in like a guild. We call them houses in mud, and they were quite a late edition,

but they'd go to that sort of position as a guild leader. And then once they'd done that, had their fill of that, and learned all there was about managing other people, then they'd hang around with their best mates and do whatever they'd fancy. Yeah. Yeah. So I... Oh, sorry, go ahead.

Oh, yeah, sorry. I'm trying to be as quick as I can. But essentially, if you follow this path, that path is part of a, essentially, it's the hero's journey from mythic story. It's that path from the initial opportunist killer, griefer thing through explorer and, like, networker as, as, as, and scientists through to Achiever and guild leader, politician, through to guru and friend thing. That's the middle section of the hero's journey, which is this mythical thing.

It's been quite badly bastardized by the movie industry. So when you Google it, you're not going to get what the original system was. Yeah, I recommend everybody. Yeah, I mean, for Joseph Campbell's work, I'm very familiar with, for those that are not highly recommend both Hero with thousands of faces and the power of myth, which dive deep into this principle.

So essentially, what the hero's journey is, is the path to self-identity, first discovery. And that's what's happening here in virtual worlds. I mean, I can go into details, but I don't want to bore your listeners any more than I have already. No, no, no. I mean, I find this sort of stuff fascinating, right? We talked about you, you know, being able to express,

the designer expressing their identity and message through a game and the players really expressing their own identity and going through these paths. I think that sort of stuff is really quite fascinating. I am happy to dive deeper into this, and then maybe we can start to weave in parts of some of the narrative and ideas from your newest book,

How to Be a God, and this role that we as designers have because how you create the world, how you set the systems up, has this huge impact on the path that people explore and how that process goes through. So I'd love to, you know, we could bounce around these different ideas because I think that, you know, when you start to see it in this way,

that when people are playing these games interacting, it is really them exploring different parts of their own identity and maybe growing and going through this kind of mythic journey for themselves, then it really does matter the container that you put them in and the ways that it lends people towards and the kinds of messages that they pick up from it. So, yeah, let's let's, let's, let's, let's, continue and kind of loop that in because I think there's going to be key lessons for

designers out there as they, you know, understand this craft as the kind of meaningful piece of art than it is. Yeah. Well, the hero's journey thing, I won't go to do anymore, but the fact that it was to do with that it's a path to self-discovery, that was a surprise to me because I'd always created to be a path to self-disclosure. so that you could throw off whatever bad hand reality had given you, and you could play the game and be the person you always were that society wouldn't let you be. So the fact that I could now prove it was quite a revelation. It doesn't seem to impress anybody else much, but did me,

because that was my artistic motivation behind it. And it wasn't so much that I was trying to create a world that was to show how we could make a better world. I just wanted to cut out the middleman and say, look, I had it with you, reality. I could do a better job. And I had to go at it. Of course, being an angry young man,

I had to go at it and rapidly reach the conclusion that I needed a more powerful conclusion. computer and now I need more money. But yeah, so that ended, that validated what I was trying to do, at least in my view. So I was quite happy with that. Now, players types get used everywhere now and they get used for non-MMOs. I can't explain why they would work for a non-MMO, but I can't explain why they work for MMOs.

I only ever apply to virtual worlds myself. I never apply playotypes to anything else. If people want to use it for gamification, well, great, knock yourself out. It's the only tool in the box. You may as well use it, but there's probably

better tools. I don't understand why that would be a thing. I mean, look, when you're saying, I know you have a kind of a specific definition when it comes to these virtual worlds, but I feel like, you know, anytime you're in the magic circle of a game, there's going to be different things that motivate you. Like, why am I here in doing this?

So I don't see why that categories would be any less meaningful, whether it be a tabletop game or an MMO or whatever. Any game where you're socializing with others and have objectives and a space to explore, this stuff is going to be meaningful. Well, yes, the first thing is that you said with others, so that immediately cuts out all single-player games anyway. The game world's got to have sufficient.

context that you can play it regularly, you know, two to four hours every night for most nights of the week. Other people watch telly, you play the games. Because if you don't do that, then you're not going to get the benefit of finding out who you are by pretending to be somebody else. So, particularly in short-term experiences, for a short-term experience, for a short-term experience, Yeah, you can have a game that's only for socialisers, only for achievers. But for a longer game, then that's when you need the balance. That's where you need the socializers to be doing things that if they weren't doing them, then the achievers wouldn't be having much fun.

Because the achievers, if you're an achiever, that means you want to be better than other players. And if there's no one to be better than, then the people at the bottom eventually fall off. They say, I'm not playing this. As I improve, everybody else improves, and I still get, I'm still bottom of the pile, so why keep playing? But if you've got socialisers, then the socialisers are like a hem.

So there's always someone to be better than. So you do need different player types for longer experiences. And there may well be better views of what people want from regular games. Because I'm looking at fun, what people find fun. And what they find fun is precisely that which is moving them towards their journey of self-discovery at that moment.

This is in line with what Raf says to do with games and learning, because what you're trying to learn is who you are. The other kinds of playotypes that come out tend to map on. I just want to run that way. What they find fun is what moves them along their journey of personal discovery. You feel like that's the overarching thing where all fun comes from? In virtual worlds, yeah, not all fun. Obviously, pushing a toddler over is fun, but it's not kind of in the same way that.

Well, you're learning about who you are. For sure. Yeah, gorgeing yourself on chocolates fun, but, oh, yes, afterwards you might pay for it. But if you're playing a virtual world, that's the nature of the fun. If you're playing the game for fun, that's why you're doing it. If you're playing it for other reasons like gold farming or journalism or teaching, then it's not relevant. It doesn't count.

but other motivations tend to map onto the player types there's usually a mapping between them I mean the the ones that you see are using is quite a lot in a contract foundries there for example you can map those on to playotypes although they're looking at motivations

and I'm not looking at motivations I'm looking at fun so that there is a discrepancy between what we're looking at But in general, there is usually some way you can put them on there. And I'm sure that psychologists have got some understanding of the real world that maps onto it too if somebody there was to look. I can't believe that those four types haven't been around for ages. I mean, you can map them onto telitubbies. You can map them on to the human. of medieval times.

You can map them onto the players in nights of the dinner tables. There's lots of things that you can map them on to. So, yeah, it's... Sure, yeah. No, I mean, it's even, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. There's overlaps here. There's a lot of different ways about how we so, you know, what drives people.

So what I, then I kind of just, yeah, I want to shift the discussion then towards, you know, how we do a better job of, crafting these spaces, right? I think that's like, you talk about it not just as a how to be a god, doesn't even just talk about the mechanics of it, but also talks about the morality of it, which I think is also fascinating, right?

This idea that it's a responsibility that we take on when we craft these virtual worlds. So maybe we can talk a little bit about that, the A, just sort of what it is, what, you know, so just to sort of give something concrete, right? The killers in the worlds are the assholes very often that are ruining things for a lot of people, right? The difference between a game community and game world where it is toxic and hostile, which we've seen a lot of communities become, versus one that's supportive and, you know, helps people and, you know, creates a positive environment community, radically different.

And very hard to achieve the latter. maybe, you know, I'd love kind of concrete lessons from you on what we can do to foster those kinds of communities or those kinds of traits we want, or how do you, you know, create those healthy channels for exploring the dark side and what does that look like? Well, the thing that killers, griefers, they're like pepper on. food. So if you're eating food and it's a bit bland, you might put a bit of pepper on it, and then it spices it up. What you don't want is the full pepper pot. Now, so virtual worlds that have got cloying niceness to them are going to be just as bad as ones that are fully

toxic because if you're trying to be cloy, trying everything to be nice and positive, and everything. Then anybody who remotely steps out of the way, you have to slap them down and suddenly you're the griefer because you're slapping them down. So there has to be room for individual eccentricities. It's when people group together in large groups

to dominate others that you can get problems. It's when it becomes part of the culture so that it's been passed down from one generation to the, next and this is how you behave that you get a problem. And it's when you create the environment such that it encourages the behaviours that lead to the issues that you get a problem. Now, some of the knee-jerk reactions that people did initially to try and get rid of toxic behaviour themselves

I mean they get rid of the symptoms but they don't get rid of the cause in fact they can help leading to the cause they can help cause things like so in mud for example it's got permadeath now people wouldn't play a game today with permadeath

they might play a single player game with permadeff and it's a rogue roadlike game and then you know perma death's part of the thing they might play some Iron Man mode or Iron Person mode whatever they they want to call it these days a version of a single player game where there's no saving and resaving.

But in an MMO, you expect that if you get killed, then you come back with a wrist slap. Oh, oh dear, I've got to run back to my corpse. Oh, no, I've got to pay some money to have my items repaired. It's anodyne. Now, the thing was in mud, though, that if anybody was a jerk, you could take them on. And if people were killers and they went around killing everybody else, eventually they would get killed and that was end of story. Because now they were back to nothing. And people learned that killing was not a winning strategy.

Now, that doesn't scale up to a world with 10,000 players at the same time. because you can get gangs of killers roaming around at the same moment. But on the other hand, do we want worlds with 10,000 players in at once? Why do we want a virtual world that's got that number of players? It seems to be that people just expect it, but why? There were 2,000 Dicu muds around in 1991, and muds were 11% of the bits on the internet world, belong to Muds.

But the why is it that we've got why would you have a million players split into 10,000 player servers when you could split them into

1,000 player servers and just have 10 times as many. It's a good question, right? Because I mean, this ties in, you know, if you look at the way that the big tech and the society feels like it's moving, you know, the multiverse, you know, gets thrown around as this sort of, you know, the metaverse, sorry, the metaverse gets thrown around as this concept at that people are now going to go live in this, you know, ready player one like everyone's in the same virtual world, you know, model. if that's so people seem to be moving in that direction or at least that's the that's what our tech overlords want us to believe so there's a there's a trend where not only is this going to be meaningful from a sense of you know virtual worlds and enjoyable experiences

and you know self-realization but also just a very real is this how we're going to live well I'm not a fan of the metaverse as a concept I mean I'm a fan of it in the sense that it'll deliver a lot of things which are going to be useful from virtual worlds. But it doesn't, it's a solution looking for a problem at a moment. The people who are all in favour of it, currently in favour of it because they want it to be their metaverse. The idea of moving things between virtual worlds has been thought of before.

I mean, it used to be a patent on it. I think it's expired now. but we had intermud protocols and if you can move from one virtual world to another virtual world and take all your stuff with you while you've basically just got one virtual world and that's not going to happen

because... Are you saying that's not going to be because the people who create them don't want it to happen or it's not going to happen? Yes, it's not going to happen. Yeah. I mean, you can see how it would work as some kind of business thing

where you know, a very large second life. but no one's they're not going to let you go into Eve online taking characters from World of Warcraft that have been translated into spaceship language they're not just not going to do that because it would spoil the game

likewise World of Warcraft is not going to import characters from my mud even people might have been playing my game for 25 years and think oh I fancy a change I'll just take everything I've got got from here and go into World of Warcraft. Well, they wouldn't actually have any equipment, but they'd be a super godlike powerful being.

World of Warcraft, why would they ever allow that? They wouldn't, because it would spoil the game. I can make my own game with my own equipment and then port it into them. Well, no, no. There'd have to be some kind of... So for the most part, no, no, no, this is great, and this is one of the things I actually... I was excited to dig it to you.

because for the most part, I agree with you, and most designers I speak to are the same thing. As a game designer, it's a game publisher, why in God's name would I ever let you take the stuff in this game and take it somewhere that's not here? It doesn't make sense. It's not something I'm incentivized to do, or let alone take in things from other people

that are not going to be balanced or story appropriate or whatever and fit within my world. But there's scenarios now that I can't imagine this happening. So I'll walk you through something. You can maybe react. So now there are games that are being built on the block chain and that's where a lot of this talk is happening, right? Where my objects and my resources and the story and who I am and all of that is public. It's open and people can see it. Now, I is a new

designer that want to bring in players to my game and bootstrap a social community, right? I could say, hey, everybody, I'm building a new thing. Everybody over there, you could just come right on over and all your stuff's going to work and all your stuff's going to have a place here. Now, that's a tough design challenge to do it well, but I can imagine now an incentive for an incumbent to try to take down an incumbent in this space because the data is public and I, as a newcomer, want to bring you in. Well, first of all, you're talking to the privilege to the people who have the stuff. Secondly, why would you even need, if you, if you want, you've got all this stuff in that

virtual world, you can come to this virtual world and you can take it with you. Well, why, I could give you anything you want. You didn't have to be on a blockchain. If you've got something on a blockchain yet, sure, I can translate it, you can take it into my world, but I can give that to anybody. Everybody, people who didn't buy it, they can come into the world. Look, come to my world and I give you this abundant conuncopia of things. No, but scarcity matters. You know that. Scarcity matters. And, and status matters. If everybody gets it,

that it's not, then I don't care, right? The players don't care. They care about being able to. The players care if they don't have it. And if I go into a game world, if I'm a nobody in this game world, and I start another game world,

and I'm a nobody there, because everybody with all the money comes in with me, why am I playing that other world? Most people are nobodies. Yeah. Well, the nobodies are going to go, there'll be two things, right? There's one is to say,

there's something here that's just intrinsically appealing to me, which is the classic way I sell a game, right? Like, hey, look how cool this is for X, Y, or Z reason, the art, the story, the play, the tech, something. Or they're going to go there because, hey, everybody else is already here. When I first learned about World of Warcraft, it was because everybody is playing World of Warcraft at the time,

so of course I'm going to play World of Warcraft. Or even something as simple as the wordal, I don't know how much you've been exposed to wordal these days, right? Everyone on my social media feed is posting these stupid block pictures. So, okay, I'm going to go play Wardle. It's got American spelling. Failure with no you, Pat.

But my point is that the social matters, right? The social proof matters, the community matters. And so anything that you can do to bootstrap your community, even if that is giving the halves become half boards, which I agree with you is a problem. But it's a reason and a plausible story where, you know, newcomer A will want to come and bring, you know, the players over from incumbent B, and then that would repeat itself over time because that exclusivity and the bringing the whales over

and the haves over will create a large enough community that the have-nots will want to be a part of it. No, I disagree. And the reason I disagree is because you, if you're attracting, people who are disloyal. In other words, they're playing a game and you're attracting them by saying you can leave that game world and come to my game world because you can take your stuff with you. You're essentially saying you're disloyal to your game world. And if someone is disloyal to that game world, they're going to be disloyal to yours.

Someone's going to come along and poach them from you. That's not a basis for creating a world. You can take your stuff with you. isn't a basis for creating a world, it's a basis for extending an existing world. Now, I'm not saying that there aren't applications for that, but for a virtual world, a game world, then if you bring in things from other worlds, then you're not creating a world, you're just creating an addition to someone else's world. It's not standalone in that sense.

imagine that you're super powerful in World of Warcraft and you want to go and play another game and be super powerful in that other game. Okay, well, that's fair enough. But if you try to make the argument that, well, World of Warcraft's just as pocket reality and Final Fantasy 14 is a pocket reality. And reality itself is just a reality.

Why can't I take my stuff from World of Warcraft into the real world? Why can't I convert my powerful things in World of Warcraft into real powerful things? Look, I've got a block token here that says I've got a supercharged wand. Why can't I convert that into a super powerful gun in the real world? And the answer is because it's not the same world. The physics are different. it's not the same world. Now, if you want to move all your crap from World of Warcraft

into Final Fantasy 14, Guild Wars II, Secret World, whatever, it's not the same world. Well, yes, but so the question is, can you build things that are, you know, is there a semi-permeable membrane here, right? Where, okay, this world has certain rules and advantages, but some things transfer over, right? Just like I could sell my powerful magic wand

or sell gold in World of Warcrafts for real world money, which I could use to buy a pretty nice gun or car or whatever in the real world. There are ways to transmit things from one zone, one reality to another that are not necessarily whole hog transitions. Or I could control maybe the specifics of what my avatar looks like in a world that is otherwise, you know, more constrained in ways. Fortnite, I think still the most popular game right now,

or certainly was recently, is a world that has certain rules and aesthetics, but you can buy an Ariana Grande skin if you want and be that, or you can be a giant tarantula. And that's all fine because they give you that space of this world allows for those sorts of things. So it doesn't necessarily have to mean my world has no definition if I allow other genres or other fungible elements of other worlds to come into mind. Yes, that's true, but if there's only one Ariana Grande item skin, then would you be able to take that one with you?

The game developers can give you whatever they want. They are the gods of their worlds, and they can... If it's so great that anybody can take something from one world into another, and the only argument you've got against not allowing them to do that is that scarcity matters. Well, scarcity only matters when it's impossible to create something. if you're introducing artificial scarcity, well, I could make scarcity matter by saying only 20 people around to play my game. I'd soon find out how much lack of scarcity mattered then.

Yes. Every game world you want. In a capitalist sense, if you are somebody who completely defines themselves by their possessions, well, yes, for you, possession of something you want to take it with you. Yeah, great. I've, in real life, I've got a collection of playing cards that are probably worth exactly what I paid for them. Could I sell one of those and then use the money to buy one in a virtual world?

Yes, I could, but then I haven't got the original one anymore. I've just got the copy. If I want the original one, back I have to sell the copy and then use the money to buy the original one if the original one person will sell it to me now. I can't just move from one thing to another thing, take my everything with me. So you want scarcity on one hand, but then you don't want it on the other.

Either something scarce or it's not. And in a world where I can give you anything that you want, I mean, gold farming is an example. People buying advantages in a game world, It's like buying a save file from a civilization game, two turns from the end, playing them and claiming you've won civilization. It's not what you do. I mean, that's what gold farmers are doing. They're getting gold and they're selling them to players, and then their players use them to buy things, to buy status, advancement items in a game world.

But if it was so good, if it didn't. didn't matter that people were getting these objects through ways other than play, well, the game designers could just create a web page and said, click on anything you want, and we'll give it to you. No, you're right. I mean, like, it's not, you know, the, when I talk about scarcity in this context, I mean, not just, you know, the only people who are wealthy can buy it, but like anything that's worth, you know, I could give you all the time,

top-level characters and all the goodies and everything you want, the game and you're going to get bored of that very quickly because what you want is to be hard to achieve. You want to feel like you've earned it. Don't take that stuff with me to another game. Well, you know, this to be able to show that, you know, you're able to show the status that, hey, I earned this in this other game and I'm bringing it over here. No, you didn't earn it to the other game. You paid money for it in a game three games ago. You paid real money for it. And now you're claiming you own it. And now you take it with you. Look, I've got the status. You haven't got the You could sell that to anybody for any amount of money, and they don't have, they haven't done it.

It's not like a medal that they wear that you only get because you've been wounded in a battle. Anybody can wear your medal. It's not like, oh, I don't need my PhD anymore. I'm retiring. I'll sell my PhD to someone who's so busy they don't have time to study for three years. I can't do that. These are things which are attached to individuals. And if you're claiming that scarcity is some kind of proof of a qualification,

well, it's not a qualification because people can buy it. Yeah, scarcity alone is not going to provide the real value here, but I do think it is part of the recipe, something that being difficult to get and that not everyone has makes it more valuable and worth achieving. Now, whether there's a deeper question of the capitalist piece, this which is like can I just buy it or can I earn it or is it both and how do I determine one from the other or lock out the two within a game which unfortunately

we probably don't have enough time to get into here but I I I I yeah well yeah as I say there are applications where this would be working perfectly fine but these are applications within a game context where there are additional rules that surround the game world that are what make that world what it is. Now, you could design worlds where that did happen, but they would essentially, they'd have to, there would have to be standards, things that you would accept.

You'd have to, I will accept items that follow standard 53, because I know that standard 53 is signed up to by the, only by these other games companies that I trust. Right. Yeah, I think about it in the way that, like we, games that have user-created content, whether that be second life or games with mods that can be put in.

Each game creates its rules within which you can now play in the sandbox and create a whole variety of things that the designers never intended or never imagined anyway. I think that there could be a similar structure for a future game universe, whether you want to call it a metaverse or not,

definitely a loaded term, where something like what you're saying, There are sort of rules, there's a sandbox that you can play in, but it allows this interoperability in a sense. And again, I appreciate you going and play in this game with me, because for the most part, I agree with you. And every designer I talk to kind of is on the same boat, but the universe is, the broader world is pushing in a different direction.

And so I like pushing that. The broader world has a lesson to learn. If the broader world, if they taught more game designs, then the broader world would be aware that This was not a good idea. Well, it's a good idea if you want to make money quick. But even using a blockchain, I mean, every time you add something to a blockchain, it's just a little bit more work than it was to add something to the blockchain the previous time.

And so you end up with a potlatch. Every time you do something, it's got to be more than the previous time, and that grows and grows and grows. and once we get the quantum apocalypse and the entire blockchain keys can be decoded in an instant by resolute hackers and that's the end of your blockchain. Well, I think we have bigger problems than just a blockchain game worlds in that scenario.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. The nuclear codes are also fair game at that point. but you know. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, I love this kind of discussion. You know, I kind of felt like I had to provide the precursors and the buildup for our audience that didn't know you at the beginning, but really being able to sort of deep dive into a lot of these questions and pushing back and forth.

It's just one of the things I love and I want to just acknowledge and thank you for playing around with me in this part of the podcast. and for everything that you've contributed to the genre, to the world, and to the things that I do every day and that I love deeply. So thank you for that. And for other people that want to find you and learn more and read more and consume more of your stuff, I've already mentioned, of course, your most recent book. Where can they find you? Where should they go to learn more and see more of your stuff?

Okay, well, my... antique web page, website is mud.co. uk.uk slash Richard. My How to Be a God book is at How to Be a God.com. If they want to email me, it's just Richard

at mud.co.uk. Unless they're academics, then they can or want to risk the university's anti-spam systems, in which case they would be R.A. Bartle at Essex.ac.ac. Atac.ac.ac. I mean, quite easy to find.

you just have to Google me and you'll find me. Mind you, there are some other Richard Bartels around. So there's an artist and there's a man who breeds cattle and there's one who writes books about World War III. And then there's a petty thief in Newcastle. You're doing a fine job. You're doing a fine job of dominating the Google rankings for your name. So it's always interesting when you start to see someone else, like criminal records start to come up around your name.

I've had that experience as well. You're like, wait a minute, I didn't do that. Okay. Well, anyway, I do hope that we get a chance to do this again, maybe with just a full-time set aside for debating some of the finer points of where the worlds and games are headed because this has been fantastic. So thanks so much, Richard. Okay, you're welcome, and thanks for listening to my rant. Thank you so much for listening.

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