Ted Lord

Ever since the first time I ever saw an MMORPG, I've been fascinated by the whole idea of on-line communities. Not so much for their commercial impact but just for the way that they allow people from widely varying backgrounds from all across the planet interact in a common framework; it was staggering to me.

I've been in various on-line "communities" before -- usenet groups, BBSs, etc., but Clan Lord was different. First, it was a game, in a genre that I enjoy (fantasy RPG, a sort of Dungeons & Dragons-esque thing, but interactive and live, on-line) but, more importantly, Clan Lord was designed from the git-go to foster community. In fact, the game-part was almost secondary -- really a back-drop for the community of cyber-citizens that inhabit the imaginary island of Puddleby. By today's standards, this 1995 game is hopelessly dated with its isometric-view sprite-based graphics but, despite WoW and all the triple-A titles out there, I still think it's one of the best games available. Heck, there are people who've been active accounts for coming-up on ten years! Now, WoW is fun -- I was totally crack-like addicted -- but I'm not still playing like the 1st week, now [almost] 2 years later, and I doubt I'll still have an account in 5, let alone 10 years. But CL is captivating, that way.

But it's also far from perfect so, of course, I often fantasize about making my own variation: Ted Lord. Actually, I play a character named Chum on CL, so I refer to it in those circles, when it comes up, as Chum Lord (has a certain ring to it, don't you think...? :)

Of course, Chum Lord will correct every failing of Clan Lord (not to mention any found in WoW, EQ and all the others), as well as implementing all of my own new, brilliant ideas -- that much goes without saying. But, even ignoring the technological hurdles (and those are shrinking every day), it's an amazing amount of effort to design an on-line community, regardless of whether or not you wrap a game around it.

To begin with -- the ideal, of course, would be that the Island Of Ted [Chum] would be completely free of annoying people. Hmm. I wonder if that includes me, on the days I find myself being annoying. This could turn out to be the world's smallest Massively Multiplayer anything.

Actually, I've got some ideas about a niche I hope to one day fill -- I think I can probably lock it in. This niche, while plenty big enough to support a small group (like, say, me and the handful of people who form the company to bring it into being), is no where near the size needed to pay the bills on a triple-A title, so I don't have to worry about Blizzard or Sony or Microsoft or anyone else throwing an army of people at the idea. Heh -- I don't mean to be coy, but I'd rather not talk about my niche and how I plan to satiate them until I'm a bit further along in development. Mostly because (a) I am a bit slow to get going and (b) because it'd be a fairly simple matter for a small group of interested folk to beat me to the punch. Anyway, I'm certain that you can dream-up your own niche for your own island where there are no people who annoy you.

But I didn't want to talk about Ted Lord [Chum Lord], per se, so much as the idea that a large portion of people who enjoy these games also enjoy the idea of dreaming up their own variation. There's World of Fred and SallyQuest and Skirwan Lord and a host of other pipe-dreams -- it seems everyone's got an idea for how to make these great things just a little bit better. Heh, there's a [rather substantial] niche for you: create a game where the game-part is that the players get to create a game to foist onto others. Actually, that's pretty much what the folks over at Project DarkStar are doing. If you're not into the techie-geek part of creating the game engine, and just want to make content, then maybe you'd rather play Second Life, which is all about player/user content creation.

It's funny, don't you think, that so many people who really-really enjoy cyber-communities in their various forms simultaneously have a desire to hole-up and spend oodles of time creating an "even better" cyber-community which, let's face it, they're not going to compete with WoW or AIM or even There, so we're really talking about a much tinier community and it sort of rings a little like "wouldn't it be cool if I could create a world that was, in essence, Cult Of Me?"

Except I don't think that's quite it; there's more to it than just fleeting fame from being the Big Fish in a rather tiny pond. Maybe. Or maybe it really is just the idea that many of us would like to create a world where we set the rules and then merrily watch as others thrive in our Utopia. Hmmm...

Actually, I think a very large bit of it is that whatever it is that makes this phenomanon -- the one where people swarm to an online community and become totally addicted to it -- happen is an interesting thing to think about. On the one hand, there's the "what is it about this program that makes it call to me, practically control my actions?" angle, which can easily evolve into "if I could write a program like that, could I control other people?" which, even if you're not an evil-overlord-wannabe, is sort of an interesthing thing to think about. But I think it's even more abstract than that. The whole "why are we like this? Why do we do the things we do?" angle of it is pretty interesting and, by playing with programs which embody algorithms that we can analyse (so goes the illusion which ignores the impact of a group of participants and their emergent behaviour), we can learn more about ourselves, our inner-gerwürkkens and, somehow, that makes us happy.

Hmmm... that's not quite it, either, but I think I'm getting close.

I'm going to have to stew on this one for a while. But there's definitely something there...