Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 50

by John Joseph Adams

  I wonder to what extent some of these things were intended to be provocative. I mean, like, the box for Ultima Three features this big demon monster, and it has the word Exodus, this word out of the Bible, and this is at the height of the satanic panic of the 1980s. Were you intending to be provocative with that or just kind of going . . . ?

  Interestingly, for Ultima Three, that was not intended to be provocative. By the time we got around to Ultima Eight, it was purposefully provocative. It was happenstance early on. But, for example, if you go to a movie, it is not uncommon if you go to a scary movie to see a pentagram on the floor with candles in the corners and people pretending to do magic, and so in Ultima Eight, I wanted to, and did, put pentagrams in the floor, candles in the corner, and you perform magic. Immediately, I got a negative response from both the outside and employees. I had employees quit over what I just described to you. It’s interesting how the religious right often will look at this. I’ll even ask, “Why is it okay in a book? Why is it okay in a movie? And why is it not okay suddenly for me?” And their answer usually is, “It’s okay to read about it. It’s okay to write about it. It’s okay to make a film about it. What’s not okay is to pretend you’re doing it, even if you’re playacting, because that invites the devil into you.” To which I go, “I understand your rationale. I just don’t happen to agree with it.”

  Leading up to that, I was constantly doing things . . . just like with the game about the gargoyles, which tried to show you that you personally can be racist if I set your bigotry up by hiding proper details and expressing certain details in a way that defeats your filter of trying not to be. And similarly I think about pentagrams. A pentagram is just a symbol, as far as I’m concerned, and the fact that some people find it uncomfortable, I would like to show them that by the way you can write a game about virtue. You can write a game that is going to help your children grow up to be happy, healthy, positive adults, and that will not harm them. So I like this, being this provocateur that takes people out of their comfort zone to try to shake them up, to be a more thinking, rational being.

  Have you gotten a lot of letters over the years from players who’ve converted to devil worship after playing your games?

  [Laughter] Not a one. That’s hilarious. No, in fact, it is interesting: that Ultima Three cover that you asked if I did that one on purpose? I did get a couple of letters about that, because they just saw the image on the cover and assumed it was something devil worship-y. To which, by the way, the inspiration for that cover came from Disney’s Fantasia. If you remember Disney’s Fantasia, it has a big demon standing on a rock in a fire pit, and Ultima Three’s cover is a big demon sitting on a rock in a fire pit. And so I thought it was hilarious that Walt Disney—which is kind of seen as one of the most wholesome, positive American icons around—I used the same image and I’m called a devil worshipper.

  I really think it goes to the hypocrisy of people with this attitude. And pretty universally, those people aren’t playing the games. They’re just seeing the image and making a variety of assumptions. It is interesting, though: I did another accidental provocation that went into Ultima Three. You may remember the magic books, and one of the things I started doing in the Ultimas early on that now other games do, is I tried to make the manuals as fictional as possible. Instead of saying, “Hey, to cast a certain spell you use this key on the keyboard, and here are the numbers and parameters associated with it,” I actually tried to write the manuals as if this was real. So if it’s a magic book, you don’t say it’s a computer game, you just write it as if, yeah, it’s a magic book. If you want to resurrect somebody, you bring together these ingredients, and you boil them in a pot, and you pour them down his throat, and chant these words, and ta-da, your friend will be back to life. I tried to write it as “realistically” as possible.

  Of course I don’t believe that magic really exists, but in order to do research for what a magic book might look like, I bought tons of books from people who claimed they could do real magic. By the way, if you go buy some books about magic, you will find that they are incoherent. There’s really no pattern to it. It’s very hard to pull structure out of it in a way that . . . you could write a fictional magic book a lot more interesting and realistic-feeling compared to the “real” ones.

  But when I looked through those real ones, I pulled out certain kinds of images or icons, sigils and things, just because they looked cool. Sometimes people were good artists and would draw interesting shapes and things, so I’d actually pull from “real” sources some symbols that would be used in some of those early books. I did get messages—the one I’m remembering right now is actually from a Jewish rabbi who noted that I sealed the last few pages of the book; they literally had a tag over them that you had to tear open to get to the most powerful spells, and the cover of that sealed section had some writing on it, like some names written in a weird font. This rabbi called us up and said, “Hey, by the way, you really shouldn’t be printing those symbols in a book because those symbols are the word of God, Jehovah, written in” . . . I can’t remember what language it was, but according to Jewish faith, it’s a word you’re not supposed to write down, and so he was at least bringing that to attention. In our case, it was completely accidental. I was just using a funky-looking symbol.

  I’ve always thought it was so interesting—I believe that you’re not very religious at all, and the Ultima games are very sort of clear-sighted about some of the downsides of religion, and yet spirituality is one of the Eight Virtues.

  In fact, you’re correct on all fronts. I consider myself actually a very spiritual person, but it is with a unique definition of the word spiritual. What I use, and I tried to describe this in Ultima, what I used for the concept of spirituality is not religious spirituality, has nothing to do with God, has nothing to do with a soul, it really has to do with the introspection about your place and purpose in life. But again, not in a “beyond human understanding” way, but rather in the sense that I do care about the tracks I leave with my life on this Earth. I consider that spirituality. So it is, I know, a unique definition of the word that’s not commonplace, but I do consider myself a very positively spiritual person, but with that very specific definition.

  Your new project is called Shroud of the Avatar. Could you just tell us how is this related to the Ultima series and how is it different?

  What’s interesting is I’ve been making role-playing games, obviously, for a long time, forty years, and as we reflect back on the Ultima series, I think there were some really great things that other games, and even games I’ve worked, on have not continued, so part of Shroud of the Avatar is hearkening back to the past, where Ultima Four, Ultima Seven, and Ultima Online are the biggest touchstones. Ultima Seven, I think, is the best Ultima from the detail of the simulation of everything—you touch a sign or a lamp and it swings in the wind; every object in the game can be picked up, taken, interacted with, used, fill a vial with fluids or pour it out on the ground. The detail of the simulation is very good. Ultima Four, from the Virtues and making sure that the game really is not only espousing but judging you on the ethical behavior you perform with in the game. Ultima Online, in a sense of a very deeply simulated multiplayer environment where the roles that people can play are very diverse: from just a combatant collecting treasure, through the crafters who create the tools of the trade of all the adventurers out in the wilderness, and all of the other walks of life that are not only simulated but are deeply interconnected. To be successful you really rely on other players within the game.

  So that’s sort of the foundation, harkening back to the past. But we’re also trying to fix some problems that role-playing games, we think, have come up with, and take a good strong step into the future. Where I think a lot of role-playing games have become fairly brain-dead operations—and what I mean by that is that you’re dropped into a virtual world and you see an exclamation over the person’s head you really need to talk to. So you know
“I’ve got to go talk to him,” but when you talk to that character you don’t really pay attention to what they say; you just kind of click on the menu of things they have to say and avoid clicking on the ones that would make that person angry. At that point, anything you needed would be in your quest log, and your quest log will then put an arrow on the map to drive you through the world to the place you need to go for that quest—where it’s usually “farm the monsters.” A level-one quest for level-one monsters, and as soon as you do that one rapidly enough, you become level two and repeat the whole behavior.

  So the automation of these games makes you, the player, really not need to pay much attention to the game experience. You’re no longer exploring, you’re no longer actually problem-solving, you’re no longer actually thinking about why or how should I interact in a particular way in this particular situation. So we decided to work very hard to try to bring what we think of as role-playing back to role-playing. I think we’ve done a good job with the new kinds of conversation systems, new kinds of ways to track the knowledge that you have acquired during your adventuring, and hopefully we’re going to take a bold step into a new future for role-playing games.

  One of the things that you mentioned is that one of the selling points of the Ultima series are these rich stories and background of the world. Could you talk about what sort of a story you are putting together for Shroud of the Avatar?

  Absolutely. In fact, as I reflect on the stories in Ultimas, I’m very proud of the high concept of many of those stories. My critique of my own work is that, while I think I understand the high concept I’m trying to deal with, the main social issues I want to wrestle with in this story, I’m not and was not raised as a professional storyteller. I would like to argue that I am one of the leading storytellers in interactive games, yet I still, as I look at book authors in general, and a few in specific, I don’t see the prose that I wrote or the structure I put to story to be nearly as high-quality as some of them.

  So one of the things I did with Shroud of the Avatar is, Day One, we sat down, and I started talking with my dear friend Tracy Hickman, who I’ve admired for thirty-plus years, and we commonly would share stories and have worked together on some small projects, but never on a large project before. So I reached out to Tracy and said, “Hey Tracy, could you/would you be interested and willing to work with us here to craft the story for Shroud of the Avatar?” And he very enthusiastically said yes, and we put that in as one of our Kickstarter goals when we got the project going to have him not only help us internally with the story for Shroud of the Avatar, but also to write a book of the backstory that we’ve been working on together as well, called Blade of the Avatar.

  We’re doing Shroud of the Avatar as five episodes. This first episode is called “Forsaken Virtues,” and in this first episode, you-the-player return to the lands of Lord British. It’s been some time since you’ve played together in a world with Lord British, and when you return to this world you find that while Lord British still espouses the Virtues, a great deal of time has passed and the world has sort of moved on and thinks of them as quaint but a bit antiquated, and is now back on the practical business of rebuilding the world in which you have now returned. The game now, in this case, it’s still about virtue, but it allows you to explore virtue in sort of what you could call your own way.

  There’s a new force that we call The Oracle, this new advisor that you’ll find regularly reentering the story. I would describe this character as a lot like Aleister Crowley, if you remember Aleister Crowley. He was a witch, he believed, and he believed that you should become the best you that you could be no matter what that you was, and The Oracle is a force of this kind. The Oracle will sit and analyze your behavior, and ask you about the intentions of your behavior, and comment on whether your intentions and your behavior appear to be in line as far as The Oracle can determine by mechanically observing your behaviors in gameplay. So at the end of this first episode, the “Forsaken Virtues” episode, players will emerge with a variety of outcomes. If you think of most storylines in most games, you either win or you don’t, whatever has been scripted by the creators. This first episode is really where you effectively determine your own destiny by your actions in the game.

  I’ve read Blade of the Avatar, the sections that have been released so far. One thing that really strikes me is it seems really interesting on a meta level—in the game world you have the fall, and a lot of the old world has been swept away and is now forgotten, and it seems like that parallels the history of the Ultima games and the fall with Electronic Arts, and now coming out of that and rebuilding this new world.

  Exactly. In fact, of course you’re picking up on a rhythm which is not accidental. We obviously could not reference any intellectual property of the past, and so we had to sweep it away. Interestingly, if you remember Ultima Nine, the end of Ultima Nine actually ends with, effectively, the destruction of Britannia. It wasn’t even accidental. A little bit of scuttlebutt about the final days of my relationship with EA is, when we did Ultima Online, it was the best-selling PC game in Origin and EA history, so obviously that was a big hit. However, EA was not hot on role-playing games in general, especially not medieval style role-playing games. There had been a lot of other failures. There weren’t many fantasy movies coming out. The new Lord of the Rings movies had yet to be envisioned. The most popular movies were The Matrix and things of this nature, and the pressure was on. They were trying to get everybody to quit making men running around in tights because they didn’t think people wanted it anymore, and they really hoped we would go on and make Matrix-type games.

  At least for me, it was obvious that Ultima Nine was going to be the end. It was the end of the trilogy of trilogies. I’d been working on it at that point for about twenty-five years. It was obvious that I had lost the support and interest of my publisher. So I said, “Okay, this is really the end.” So I set that story up to sort of wipe the slate clean in some way, and I did, and then I walked away. [It was a] combination of they pushed me out of the company, and I walked away from medieval fantasy for a while.

  But in the ten years that have transpired since, I find it very shocking that, first of all, fantasy of course is not dead. I knew it never was. It was just the company that didn’t feel that medieval fantasy was relevant. It’s continued, obviously, to be enormously popular. But no one has really kind of followed in the Ultima mold. No one has followed in the mold of virtues. No one has really followed in the mold of these deep sandbox games where everything is interactive. No one has really taken the RPG roles that you can play as a character and try to make them so deeply interdependent on each other as we did even with Ultima Online.

  Over the years, as I kind of gained some distance from Ultima, I began to long, myself, to play or participate in the creation of another Ultima, began to get the pressure from the community to come back and go do that instead of science fiction or whatever else we might do next, and so this was just the right time. To come back full circle about your statement about Blade of the Avatar, Blade of the Avatar is meant to be that bridge. It’s meant to be: Look, we’re not going to reference anything about the past, the past really is gone, but what we’re going to do is, we’re going to start with the old world is gone, and how do we build the new history, the new reality, going forward? The one piece of continuity that we will bring back, that we do own, is Lord British, and so Lord British and the Virtues, which I personally espouse, will continue into the new world.

  Speaking of Lord British, I heard you say that when you were working on Ultima Seven that they wanted to give Lord British a wife and kid, and you say, “No, you can’t do that because I’m Lord British, and I don’t have a wife and kid.” But now you do have a wife and kid, so does that mean that now Lord British will have a wife and kid?

  Very interesting speculation, but I can’t tell the answer to that because it involves some of the plot of “Forsaken Virtues.” It is a reasonable suspicion,
but exactly the way that will play out you’ll have to find out in game.

  Interesting. One feature of this game I’m really looking forward to is that you’re bringing back the text parser. I grew up playing Ultima games and Sierra adventure games where you actually have to type in words, and I’m looking forward to that making a comeback.

  Yeah, me too. In fact, it’s interesting, I don’t know if you had a chance to have a good conversation with some of the characters in the game yet, but Scott Jennings, who is our main programmer on this facet of the game, significantly exceeded my hopes and expectations in a way that makes me very happy. I would have been frankly content with something very much like the old school Ultima: Just parse out a keyword one at a time and respond to one thing at a time. What he made instead is that, look, if we’re going to put in a parser at all we might as well put in something that’s a little bit more state of the art, and while it’s still looking for keywords in what you say, it can pull out whole sets of keywords that are presented even in complex sentences. So if you walk up to an empty seat and say, “Hello, I’m Richard Garriott. Your establishment here looks like a pub. If that’s true, what kind of beer do you have for sale? I’d like to buy one.” And it will go and it says, “Oh, hello Richard Garriott.” Since I said my real name, he will now permanently remember my real name. He’ll say, “Why, yes, this is a pub. This is Fire Lotus’ Tavern, and yes, we sell beer. We have twenty-four different types on tap. What would you like?” It actually goes through and responds to each of the keywords that it can pull out of separate sentences along the way in one fell swoop.