Thursday, June 28, 2007
Rich and Randy Hang at the Gamestop
It really irritates me when people say things like "we don't need stars in the game industry." What they generally mean is "so-and-so acted like an idiot and I don't like that," or alternatively "I don't want to have to pay you more." The fact is that, we have stars. We just don't acknowledge them. Which is why this is both hilarious and sad.
posted by Greg at 11:03 AM
33 comments
33 Comments:
Damit, If I had known Youtube was going to exist I'd have kept my promotional video for Habitat and put it up. It was amazing and it ran on a Commodore 64 over a modem!
Man - it should probably disturb me that I immediately identify with the old guys, now, instead of the cashier.
And you kids get offa my lawn!
Without D&D, none of these games would have existed. The folks who created early MUD's and those who evolved them should be credited and known for what they did, but they, in turn, should always give credit to the game they lifted the concept and the leveling and combat rules from. Dungeons & Dragons.
Now, these two guys may have at various points, and they may do, I don't know, but it always irks me when folks who were or are involved in MUD's and MMORPG's don't. It's like saying yeah, we invented rock 'n' roll without a nod to blues, C&W or R&B.
There are stars, of course. Many, perhaps too many, fade in memory with time. But they do make it into the history books, so to speak, if their contributions are truly important, and this is the way of things. It becomes fodder for academics.
Some do not get the recognition they deserve. Some names are lost in the mists of time. Unfair maybe, but I guess that's why it's up to all of us to help to keep their names in circulation.
So, go update that Wikipedia page! And for those "in the industry," when you have a chance to do an interview, article, lecture or book --and if it's appropriate-- bring them up and bring their contributions back into the light.
Guys, it goes way, way back. Probably to the dawn of DNA.
War and wargames, models and miniatures.
Check out chess, Qin Shi Huangdi, and his Terracotta army.
Given ancient Indian origin, I wouldn't be surprised if chess was a survivor from before the last ice age.
We all stand on the shoulders of giants.
When Chip and I were honored with the first "First Penguin Award", we did give credit to everyone back along the chain (Bartle, Gygax, Rodenberry, etc.) to Tolkien. I think that was far enough - anything before that is assumed. :-)
Randy
I was going to mention Tolkien, but then I figured that the commonality of most cultures' myth and legend also indicates a probable origin from pre-fimbulwinter times.
Shoulders of giants indeed.
So people being arrogant pricks to some poor kid working the counter at EB is why we need game industry stars? There aren't enough arrogant pricks so we need to create more?
They guys aren't stars, they are self-congratulatory shitheads who broke some kids balls for not knowing how oh so very important they were at inventing something they didn't invent.
Rich>Without D&D, none of these games would have existed.
Roy Trubshaw never played D&D.
>The folks who created early MUD's and those who evolved them should be credited and known for what they did, but they, in turn, should always give credit to the game they lifted the concept and the leveling and combat rules from. Dungeons & Dragons.
I did lift the levelling from D&D, but not the combat rules. I've said so many times. I didn't take much else from D&D, though. I took more from a role-playing game of my own devising that I'd played for several years prior to discovering D&D.
Both Roy and I are far more indebted to Tolkien, not because we ripped off his world (there were no orcs nor elves in MUD1), but because he gave us proof of concept: he showed you can create a self-consistent, richly-imagined world as a work unto itself. That's what we drew from it - the vision of creating our own world.
Richard
Anonymous>So people being arrogant pricks to some poor kid working the counter at EB is why we need game industry stars?
It was a regular game shop, not EB.
The kid on the counter was being patronising. If he hadn't been treating us as if we were doddering old fools, we wouldn't have said anything. He did, so we did.
>They guys aren't stars, they are self-congratulatory shitheads who broke some kids balls for not knowing how oh so very important they were at inventing something they didn't invent.
We know we're not stars, we never said we were. We don't think we're important - virtual worlds would always have been invented whether we were there or not. We did invent what we did invent, though, by definition. The kid didn't get his balls broken, he was just prevented from trying to break ours.
Richard
Oh, well, no need to respond, really. These are the Intarwebs. A certain amount of assholery is inevitable, and hardly worthy of comment.
But never mind D&D... Sure you'd played Colossal Cave/Adventure?
Very little springs, like Athene from the forehead of Zeus, with no antecedents. Which to my mind does in no way diminish the accomplishments of those who build on others. For my part, I -like- the fact that we owe everything to Neolithics drawing lines in the ground and casting binary lots. That says our form is of equal antiquity with stories and painting.
greg>But never mind D&D... Sure you'd played Colossal Cave/Adventure?
I'd played D&D quite a lot - it was a way of getting other people to be able to enter my own, personal worlds (the role-playing games of my own invention had me playing all the roles myself). Roy hadn't played it, though, and it was he who started MUD.
We had indeed both played Colossal Cave, or ADVENT as we knew it. Indeed, Roy based the definition language he used for MUD ("MUDDL") on the one in ADVENT. ADVENT basically gave us the interface, but the nature of the world we wanted was quite different to ADVENT's - we were aiming for what we called "open-endedness" rather than puzzle-solving.
ADVENT was more of an influence than D&D, although mainly in terms of implementation rather than design. That said, Roy added a thief to MUD in homage to ADVENT.
Tolkien was still the main influence, though, because of the vision he gave us of what was possible. We didn't use any of his tropes, though, basing instead our design on English/European folk lore. For example, almost uniquely among virtual worlds, the dwarfs in MUD were indeed dwarfs, not dwarves.
Richard
Your arrogance goes both ways and that seems lost on you. Your claim of D&D not influencing you, well who cares? But to say it had no influence on WoW because it didn't influence you? That is the arrogance you displayed to the clerk and continue to claim here.
That your singular idea was the grounding of WoW, not the wealth of similar influences that have existed before and after you.
anonymous>Your arrogance goes both ways and that seems lost on you.
What's lost on me is what that statement is supposed to mean.
>Your claim of D&D not influencing you, well who cares?
Well Rich, whose assertion I was commenting on, might. Otherwise, why would he have mentioned it? I was saying that we would have had these games without D&D, because the first one was started by someone who had never played D&D. OK, we wouldn't have had them in the form we have them, but we would still have had them.
>But to say it had no influence on WoW because it didn't influence you? That is the arrogance you displayed to the clerk and continue to claim here.
I made no such claim. WoW was indeed influenced by D&D because it came out of EverQuest, which in turn came out of DikuMUD, which did indeed pull a huge chunk of gameplay ideas from D&D.
>That your singular idea was the grounding of WoW, not the wealth of similar influences that have existed before and after you.
You're criticising statements I never made (quite to the contrary, in fact - you're criticising me for not having said things I have actually said elsewhere).
Richard
Please don't take what I said as assholery ; ). It was not meant to be hurtful or smarmy.
Perhaps my slight cynicism comes from the fact that I've been arguing the D&D origin point (and all too often unsuccessfully) with crpg and mmorpg developers for a decade (and I rabidly read articles and interviews with these folks as well) and while some cite Tolkien as a prime reference --which is true in some cases (love your comment about dawrfs vs. dwarves, Richard), but also a dodge in others-- regardless, I just rarely hear Gygax or Arneson mentioned.
Sometimes it seems like a kind of snobbery. As if G&A's contributions are perceived as not being significant enough anymore to mention. As if electronic rpg's have evolved beyond the point of any comparison. I've run into this a lot in fact, well, or so it seems.
Feel free to correct me if y'all think I'm wrong or off base about this stuff. Seriously.
But it is irksome when you see hit points, armor class, the typical D&D stats, D&D monsters right out of the books, D&D races (not just Tolkien races), D&D character classes, leveling, and even damage represented as die roll figures (ie, 2D6+1)...and more...in their games.
I just want to take 'em and shake 'em sometimes. ; )
I like the point about Adventure, btw, and Richard's follow-up which is great stuff to read after all these years.
Richard and Randy, I very much appreciate your comments. I was hoping to provoke a response, and yours were good and worthy ones. Thanks for elaborating, for more details, and for standing up for yourselves and your work.
I dig that and where your egos are at muchly. ; )
Rich>Please don't take what I said as assholery ; ). It was not meant to be hurtful or smarmy.
Oh, I didn't take it like that - sorry if I gave that impression.
>But it is irksome when you see hit points, armor class, the typical D&D stats, D&D monsters right out of the books, D&D races (not just Tolkien races), D&D character classes, leveling, and even damage represented as die roll figures (ie, 2D6+1)...and more...in their games.
Oh, I agree. There was actually debate among developers of early virtual worlds as to whether to D&Dise them or not. The consensus was that it was a bad idea because making the worlds more gamey would have alienated many players. When we got the schism between gamers and socialisers around 1989/90, though, there was no need to hold onto the less game-oriented players as they'd gone off to play MOOs and other TinyMUD derivatives. This meant the new game worlds could go hardcore, which is what they did. DikuMUD borrowed extensively from D&D (I believe - it's hard to see how that couldn't have happened), and the result is the style of gameplay we see in game worlds today. D&D deserves due credit for that.
What D&D doesn't deserve, however, is credit for the actual creation of virtual worlds. We got them without D&D. Although this puts rather a dent in the "Dungeons and Dreamers" view that all computer Fantasy games stem ultimately from D&D, nevertheless it's true. D&D entered the game worlds pipeline some time later.
Richard
I've seen the Hollywood star machine from the inside, and I find it amusing to see anyone considering giving into temptation here to be "assholery", the very fact that the subjects of the story are posting here and engaging in conversation is so many light-years away from what a Hollywood star system would allow that I think it trumps any such accusations.
To address the spirit of Greg's original topic though, a little story of my own: A couple of years ago I was in Palo Alto, early for a meeting, and ducked into a Starbucks for a coffee and a quick email download. As I was leaving I saw a guy and thought, "He looks a lot like Will Wright, but Will wouldn't normally be in this part of the Bay Area" - and realized it WAS Will, looking at me and thinking something parallel. We said hello and chatted for a moment, then parted ways. But what hit me is that although I'd lay odds that 90% of the people in there had heard of The Sims and Sim City - probably conservatively half had played them - no one but me had a remote chance of recognizing Will. Since then he's been on a few magazine covers and perhaps he does get recognized, but still no where near as much as someone like, for example, Steven Spielberg or James Cameron. And frankly, I think that's one of the good things about our industry. I've seen first-hand what guys like that put up with, and although there are compensations, overall I think they'd be happy to trade a lot of wealth and fame for some anonymity.
"D&D entered the game worlds pipeline some time later."
That whole story is fascinating and I stand, or sit, corrected. Thanks.
You know, when I think back to the first MUD I played, Dragon Realms, it was nothing like D&D, which delighted me. But I thought it was an aberration. ; )
rich>You know, when I think back to the first MUD I played, Dragon Realms, it was nothing like D&D, which delighted me. But I thought it was an aberration. ; )
I don't know much about the history of DragonRealms, but as a Simutronics game the chances are that it derived ultimately from Sceptre of Goth, not MUD. That being the case, it could actually have had more of a D&D influence on it than the early MUD line did (I don't know how much Alan Klietz drew from D&D).
Richard
I was using the MUD abbreviation generically, but right, I don't think it has any connection.
The only thing I recall that rang of D&D in DragonRealms is that besides the races unique to DragonRealms you can play an elf, a "halfling" or a dwarf. Though I'm not sure, it almost seemed like an afterthought to include these races to help some people feel more at home.
Beyond that there are few comparisons one could make. The combat system in DragonRealms is easily the most complex and detailed systems I have ever played, electronically speaking. (Now where did I put that vocoder?)
It's all about slices, bashes, pokes and parries, with injuries --not hit points per se-- and hit locations. Crits are real honest to gosh critical hits because they can smash bones and sever limbs and more, not just do "double damage" or whatever. There's a separate brawling system. You never see numbers during combat. And...well, it's all much more involved and visceral but also uses none of the conventions of vanilla D&D combat.
The skill system and skill advancement system is nothing like D&D either. Class levels don't exist, nor do overall levels (ie. I'm level 44). Instead, as skills are used, proficiencies increase in a kind of point bucket and spigot way which is very interesting.
Actually, now that I think about it, DragonRealms is probably my favorite online roleplaying experience of all time.
The only reason I stopped playing it was that I got stuck in a dungeon maze trap and couldn't get out. I mean I couldn't figure a way out.
After a couple of weeks of trying I asked the admins if they could help extricate me in some fashion with an appropriate penalty but they would have none of it --and the fanbase is notoriously hush hush about these things, so...I stopped.
Fantastic game though. Utterly fascinating and challenging and awesome, in a living breathing world where players must actually roleplay to flourish, and players can through their actions change the world, affecting the game for others globally, as well.
I'll never forget logging on one night, hanging out in the Bard's guild telling stories and performing with and for the other folks when, on the running tally list of deaths in the world, PC's began dying at an alarming rate. Names were flying by once per second or two, and this kept up. What was going on?
Turns out some players had defaced a holy shrine out in the wilds somewhere and the god associated with that altar was offended and punished the local area with meteor strikes for a few minutes. Maybe ten or so.
Anyone caught outside when this happened would surely die, and so they did by the dozens and dozens until the god was satisfied.
Harsh. Scary. Fun!
Another time --this is another example of players affecting the world-- some players decided to destroy the bridge leading into one of the main towns one day.
They successfully did so and the bridge remained unusable for months of real time while it was being rebuilt. Wonderful stuff.
But I digress, as I often do. ; )
Greg said: It really irritates me when people say things like "we don't need stars in the game industry." What they generally mean is "so-and-so acted like an idiot and I don't like that," or alternatively "I don't want to have to pay you more."
I'd add: Or "I'm jealous of so-and-so's success" or "I believe a generation gap is a real thing" or "the so-called giants upon whose shoulders we stand are irrelevant today."
There's some uncomfortable but --in terms of human nature and maturity level-- understandable reasons behind why people (in the game industry, which is who I assume you were referring to, Greg) sometimes disavow "stars."
- - - - - - - - - -
There's different connotations of the word star. Some of them aren't so hot. Other similar words come to mind, like guru (which isn't used much anymore; some are uncomfortable with that one too), master (well...), expert, veteran, and I'm sure others, that we could use. Might head some of this sort of stigma off at the pass.
I always reference Habitat as the "Doug Engelbart 1968 Demo" of Virtual Worlds. That is, it did a lot with a lesser technology base that a lot of world builders are today picking up as if they were brand new.
i am with u on this one...
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