Building a Community--Even a Virtual One--Takes Work

With so many virtual storefronts flailing on the Internet, some investors are looking to online games as the answer to their prayers for profit. The success of online games such as “EverQuest,” “Ultima Online” and “Asheron’s Call” helped spawn numerous copycats looking to reap monthly subscription fees from hundreds of thousands of players, many of whom end up playing the game for years. Upcoming titles include “Sims Online,” “Lord of the Rings,” “Earth and Beyond” and “Galaxies.”

At first glance, the business model appears tempting. Make a game, throw up a few servers and watch the fees roll in every month. How hard could it possibly be? As it turns out, it’s nearly rocket science. The games themselves are no small feat to create, costing tens of millions of dollars and taking several years to develop.

But making the game is only half the battle. Companies must have enough servers to handle thousands of simultaneous users, retain an army of technical support staff for the constant stream of customer calls, keep the game fresh with new features and defend against hackers, cheaters and so-called “grief players,” whose sole mission is to ruin the fun of others.

In addition, the pool of expertise capable of pulling this off is quite small. Few know this genre and its perils better than Raph Koster, creative director for the Austin Studio of Sony Online Entertainment. Koster, 30, was lead designer for “Ultima Online” and is working on “Galaxies,” a LucasArts game based on the “Star Wars” universe set to launch next year.

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Q: How do you manage online communities?

Just like in any other community, you need to make sure that people get along. There are so many reasons people can rub each other wrong. But you’re not there to stop that from happening. You’re there to keep people civil, to keep things from getting nasty. On message boards, this can be as simple as stepping in and saying, “Cool it.” If someone is repeatedly disruptive, it may not be worth it to have them around. That’s why we have tools such as suspension and banning.

It’s not unlike setting up laws. We define terms of conduct, the scale of the punishment. Usually, there is a warning system. The interesting trick comes when things come up that you never thought of. If there’s no law or rule against it, that’s challenging. People will say, “Well, it’s not against the rules, and I’m paying my subscription money. So why can’t I do it?” Then you have to say, “It’s not in the spirit of the game,” which makes you look arbitrary. But you have to do it anyway.

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Q: A certain amount of conflict is good for a role-playing game. How do you make sure the conflict doesn’t get out of hand?

People like conflict in the context of the game, which means it is essential to the game’s story or mechanics. They don’t like conflict that comes from outside the game. But the criteria that define what is a valid conflict within a game really depend on the game and the player’s opinion about it. It can be hard, and it will often end up being a judgment call.

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Q: What do you do about so-called grief players who try to ruin others’ fun and hackers who try to crack into the computer system?

These games are magnets for hackers. There’s always utility out there to bring the servers down. We have to spend a lot of effort in making sure they are secure. “Diablo” had a very, very bad case of hacks. All kinds of cheats were possible. A lot of gamers were frustrated by that. You have to be extraordinarily paranoid because players will tend to stay away from games that have been hacked because they perceive that it’s not fair. There’s a hack out there that messes around with the internal clock of your computer to accelerate time. Someone using this hack becomes the Flash in “Superman.”

You really have to stay on top of it. We pay attention to the bad guys. They’re very organized. They’ll put up Web sites with their hacks. Sometimes they let you in and publish your bugs so you can fix them faster. Developers hate that because what it actually means is that we will be inundated, and we will never catch up. It takes longer to plug a hole than to post it on the message board.

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Q: How do you keep your game fresh after so many years?

That takes having a team. We call it a live team devoted to doing nothing but developing new content and fixing problems with current content. It includes programmers, artists, designers. And it has to work very closely with the customer service department. The approach most companies take is to periodically release expansion discs, then add an ongoing stream of updates given to everybody for free. The expansion disc keeps your brand name out there. It helps to have a box on the shelf that magazines will review.

But ongoing content is also important. It’s your chance to be more responsive to players. It’s a way to reward the people for staying with you. The name of the game is retention, not just acquisition. It costs a lot of money to get new subscribers. Once you have someone, you need to keep them around.

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Q: How else do you retain players?

Giving recognition to them. We note what they do to reward them and call attention to them. The more tied into the community a player is, the longer they tend to subscribe. The game gets them in the door. What keeps them there is the other people. You have to do positive feedback as well as negative. It’s not just about punishment for violating rules; it’s also about rewarding good people. That’s a very powerful tool.

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Q: How do you attract more mainstream players?

One of the main ways is to reduce the amount of time these games take. These games right now have pretty intensive time requirements. It’s not unusual for an average player to spend 20 hours a week playing one of these games. I don’t have that kind of time, personally. I imagine a lot of people out there don’t either. In “Ultima Online,” we have resource mining, where you literally click repetitively on the mountainside to extract metal. In “EverQuest,” people camped for hours waiting for a monster to appear. Starting these games, it can take an hour to get a group of people together and get going. We’re trying to make that process easier so someone who has kids tugging at their clothes can still play.

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Q: Are there differences between how women and men play?

There do appear to be differences, but a lot of it seems to be anecdotal rather than hard data. The general impression is that women value the community a lot. It’s not at all unusual to find that central community leaders in these games are female. They’re also interested in a broader array of activities in the game, not just kill, kill, kill. Every time I ask women what they like in a game, they are quick to say they enjoy combat too, but they also look for other things to do.

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Times staff writer Alex Pham covers the video game industry.