Stewart: Well, the original idea to make a game something like this was mine — but the idea evolved pretty far during development of the prototype and our charrettes (intensive all-day design meetings which usually go on over a weekend plus a few extra days). What actually came out in the prototype was probably only 10% my idea.
 
Thank me for Bentown, all forms of mash, most of the UI and the social index.

Alice: Most of my involvement was in world creation, especially the early stages. I helped think up hubs and stores, named roads (yes, every street had a name, though they never appeared in the game!), created many items and item verb effects, made houses, etc. And other stuff :)

Jason: I built “making” and most of the transformations. This was based on making type skills from Ultima Online (with many modifications). I built the admin website that the players never get to see :) This is where the “God Talk” stuff takes place. I did some of the verb effects. Some of the overall concepts were co-brainstormed with Stewart in the very first prototype which we put together in a weekend at my apartment back in March 2002. I helped with the DB schema and routine backups, optimizations. Later on during the prototype development I helped Eric with using a multi-threaded COM object for the events (instead of using a DB table).

Caterina: It’s really difficult after everything was built to say who did what. It was a very collaborative process from the start; we’d all sit around brainstorming and throwing out ideas. I drew the initial map, named lots of the hubs, wrote up descriptions, made some items…I hardly know what I did any more.

Stewart: I started thinking about a game like this in early 2002. In the spring I started talking about it with some friends (Derek and Jason) and after a weekend of geeking out Jason and I built a very simple dhtml MUD. Voila! We knew we could do it in the browser!
 
We decided to make a go of it and in mid-June Ben came up to Vancouver, Eric flew in for a few days, Alice and Caterina and Derek and Dinka and many others came by for five days of intense thinking. At 2:00AM on the last night Eric and I wrote out the entire database schema with magic marker on flip charts non-stop. Very little of that ever changed. By July we had started work on what became the protoype.

Caterina: Parties. Who invented parties? What a great idea! These are the kinds of things we couldn’t anticipate would happen when we were designing the game.

Stewart: Well, we expected that people would like it, but we didn’t expect that people would like it so much! And for so long! We thought there were 10–20 hours of entertainment in the prototype and that people would get the idea and move on. Instead, a very large group of people kept coming back. Day after day.
 
(At least one player — not mentioning any names — put in more than 40 hours a week pretty consistently since close to the time we launched the prototype. And this person had a full time job.)
 
This was great, but it had a down side — we didn’t promote the game as much as we would have liked since we were often pretty close to the maximum traffic the prototype could handle. On the other hand, we feel like the core community really came together, and we know that will make as big a difference for the final product as anything we could come up with.

Jason: The rapid emergence of fan sites by players. We were all amazed by that. Domains being paid for, mugs and t-shirts for sale etc.

Alice: I’ve said this before, but it’s true: the best thing was seeing the positive reaction from the players. I don’t think we ever dreamed it would spawn such great fanzines and such a great community. It didn’t feel like “just a prototype.”

Caterina: A fellow getting upset at the “Jesus H. Christ” moniker.

Stewart: When we were developing the prototype, it was amazing how fast we went. The core was built in a month, and it was probably less than a month to come up with all the content and rules and put it all together.
 
However, once we launched, we learned how hard it is to keep adding features and content while the game is live. We budgeted in time for bug fixing and preventing hacking, etc., but we had no idea have actual players (!) would slow us down so much. It’s not all bad though — it is much better that we learned this now than later.

Jason: The SQL worm that ate up lots of our bandwidth (this was kinda my fault for not keeping up with sql patches). Also people hacking the database and doing sql injection :)

Alice: Is it too cliche to say that nothing bad happened? The whole thing was a fun — dare I say it? —“learning experience.”

Jason: The positive attitude of players and how they passed that on to new players as they came into the game, such as congratz messages for leveling and showing others how to level up or make money.

Stewart: All the generosity! The congratulation ritual for players going up a level, the parties, the contest prizes, the random gift giving. We love this and we hope to see this culture continue.

Caterina: The art installations. They were excellent! Brilliant stuff.

Alice: I innocently razed some forests in the name of urban development — and people didn’t like it!

Jason: Not that I know of.

Stewart: It is hard to tell at this point: so many hours and so many meetings and so much documentation has gone into planning that it all kind of blurs together — the only specific thing that I know we are not doing as a result of our experience in the protype is keys (special objects that you can use to unlock things).

Stewart: Yes!

Caterina: Ooooo, tons. But I’m not sure which will be implemented, so I’m afraid to say anything about them.

Jason: More focus on the house builder and houses in general. An avatar creation tool will have more focus due to people enjoying customization.

Caterina: Hmmmm. Derek and I started working on a whole cosmology for the game, a biography of Herbert W. Herbert the MIA mayor, the significance of Ol’ Pulpy, the Xorex corporation. But it never was implemented.

Stewart: There are three things that were almost in the prototype but never made it: lockers (in Centraal Station) where people could store stuff; transportation devices (there were remnants of this all over the place and the code was all written — it didn’t get in for UI reasons) and “cartage devices”: things like wheelbarrows or robot donkeys that you could use to haul stuff around.

Jason: The first would allow you to carry more stuff and the second to allow you to travel 2 hubs at a time (or reduce the energy required to move a single hub). Since the map was so small and people found it easy to keep their energy up it never got put in. Many other player requested features, such as houses and notes, took precedence. We wanted to also have two competing currencies but never did (unless you count the color paper stuff).

Alice: Yes, though I tried not to. It’s too easy to get sucked in and distracted from non-play activities. Just being an observer is interesting, too.

Stewart: I did. I often got in trouble from other team members for spending so much time in the prototype. (I even found myself making paper and examining genomes when I could easily adjust any of my character’s attributes from the admin interface …)

Caterina: What a great bunch of people! I loved talking to everyone in the game, everyone was very fun, very funny, very smart.

Jason: I enjoyed talking to many of the players when I had the spare time (which was not very often). It was nice to meet some of them in real life also.

Stewart: Trying to find a balance between putting stuff on the client (the player’s web browser) to speed things up and putting stuff on the server (to prevent hacking and data loss).

Jason: Due to the stateless nature of http, polling ate up LOTS of bandwidth. The event distribution in an optimal way was also quite tricky. Congratz to Eric for making an amazing client!

Stewart: Dynamically balancing the load when there are thousands of players in the game and suddenly something interest happens in one spot — and everyone rushes there.

Jason: Making the game scale from 10,000 active users to 100,000 active users without re-writing one line of code (simply adding hardware). While keeping the code clean, documented, agile, and maintainable. Many other MMOGs take an easy way out of this by creating 10–20 shards or copies of the world to make thier game scale. We want one BIG world that everyone plays in.

Caterina: Yes indeed. It was just wonderful! I can’t wait to see the things everyone will invent next.

Jason: Yes. I’m Amazed :)

Stewart: Yes. And we love you.

Jason: The chicken. Because when you squeeze it you get eggs!

Alice: The hedgehammer! I loved that you could walk around and whack karma into people (at the expense of your own karma, which is a selfless act that should increase your karma, but who said life is fair?).

Stewart: Wombat rifle! The thing I loved about it was this: one day I was playing away and someone gave me a wombat rifle. I had never seen one in the game before (there were many different people working on the game items and verbs). So I fired it and out came the shrunken wombat’s head. Cool! I’d never seen that before either. So I tickled it and it turned into a monk fish. Again, another thing I had never seen in the game. I inquired of the monkfish and got some enlightenment.
 
I thought this was a really cool chain, so I immediately fired off an email to our internal dev mailing list asking who came up with it. Three people answered, one for each step in the chain: they had all done their part without any knowledge of what the others had done and no-one had noticed it up till that point. This is when I knew the possibilities for creative people working together and adding their own things in could result in some amazing emergent fun.

Caterina: Aw shucks. Well, then Dos Pesos!

Stewart: Okay.

Caterina: Oh yes! And possibly playing a bigger role than before.

Caterina: Hm, the description I wrote myself for Making A Mint Bail Bonds always made me laugh whenever I saw it. It’s sort of funny to laugh at a joke you make yourself, but whenever I found myself in there by design or by accident, I always laughed. It said: “This room has seen some legendary criminals and their families: Wild Bill Hiccups was here once as well as the famous team Butch Lass and The Can’t Dance Kid.” It’s not that funny, but nonetheless, I was always tickled.

Stewart: The Glums. I have no idea.

Alice: Port Dentry. The water looked pretty and there was rarely anybody there, so it was peaceful (introverted west coaster alert!).

Jason: City Undersea, because it looks so freakin nice/different and because it’s nice and far away from the busy downtown core. Also because I love the ocean.

Caterina: Bobbleton. :)

Caterina: I wanted to demonstrate what the hubs could look like if they were designed by different artists — we want people to be able to design their own buildings and what. Heaven was another attempt at novelty too.

Caterina: Tigger Downs was named after a childhood friend of mind who died when we were in high school. He was not so posh — in the game Tigger Downs is a fancy neighborhood.
 
Merry Gambols is named after something Johan Huizinga said in “homo ludens” — that you could see that play was universal in animals by watching dogs and their ‘merry gambols’ — so it’s really a Dos Pesos tribute.
 
I initially had a hub named “Lingam” to go with “Yoni”, but decided the world had enough Lingams, and needed more Yonis to bring the yin-yang distribution back into balance.
 
Ben invented the names “Soso” and “Twee” and “Instancia” and some others I’m not thinking of right now.
 
Stencilton is an oblique reference to Herbert Stencil of Thomas Pynchon’s V.
 
Stewart’s given name at birth was “Dharma” — he changed it when he was 12. Thus “Dharmaville”. When he was born his parents were hippies who made candles, thus “Norma’s Candle Shoppe”. They’ve since cut their hair.
 
There are tons of references behind various names of various things. I can’t think of them all right now.
 
I had named all of the hubs that are now forest Clearings and firefields and terrain types — some of my favorite names were lost in that process, but c’est la vie. I’m looking forward to the names people give their hubs when they establish them ITRG.

Alice: The “orange” is probably the only item without some kind of backstory.

Stewart: Nothing dramatic. We are doing all the regular start-up things: working late, trying to close our last round of financing, sourcing hardware, making deals, writing code … The first few days after the prototype it was pretty sad and we still all miss it (thinking about it all while I answer these questions makes me pretty nostalgic) but all sacrifices are worth the big game! And we are making very good progress towards the first tests of pieces of the big game.

Jason: It is sad that the prototype is over but it allows the team to focus on the big game and the big picture. Although I did see 1 player (Eric) inside the prototype today.

Stewart: I have — and people sent me the dumbest instant messages whenever I was showing a potential investor, partner or employee the prototype! Another good reason to include “away” flags in the big game’s communication system.

Jason: I don’t claim to be an artist.

Jason: Hell yeah.

Jason: The database got completely nuked one day by someone. My every 4 hour backups saved the day!

Jason: I was against hacking for gain. That said, I’m for hacking that tries to find bugs that are then reported. The js hacks that certain people used to increase burden to cheat were very lame. In the big game there will be harsh penalties for abusing bugs.

Jason: I thought Stewart was? I have a nice what?

Stewart: Er, no.

Jason: Tell 10 friends (that currently don’t know about the game) to signup for our mailing list.

Caterina: Thanks for all the generosity. And I look forward to seeing everyone again soon! I still can’t believe I only made it to Level 7 in the prototype! The shame!

Alice: I wish I’d been there to witness the End of the World, but I was out of town — sorry I missed it! Thanks for all the feedback, whether positive or constructively critical :)

Stewart: You are really, really, really fantastic. GNE is a great idea because you are great (and if you are all morons it may have been a dumb idea).