Paul Barnett Speaks, Part One: His Griefer Son, the Meaning of Creativity, and Dating Games Workshop’s Daughter

The MMO Gamer: Well, in the spirit of you getting ready for your talk as soon as possible, I suppose we should start talking about Warhammer.

Paul Barnett: Yes, isn’t it awesome?

The MMO Gamer: It is awesome.

Paul Barnett: Good. You’re playing it then?

The MMO Gamer: I was, yes.

Paul Barnett: Was?

The MMO Gamer: I don’t play as much as I once did, to tell you the truth.

Paul Barnett: Because you’ve got to write, and everything?

The MMO Gamer: I played from launch, even before launch, actually. I was in beta, and then head start. Got all my friends to play it, we got to 40 and then kind of burned out, right around the middle of November.

That was not an isolated occurrence, unfortunately. Our entire alliance burned out, a hundred guys were logging on one day, gone the next. They all ran off to play Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead, and then never came back.

Paul Barnett: Damn those stand-alone games! They’re a fad you know, never going to catch on. People going away and playing games on their own, I think it’s terrible… No wait a minute, no they couldn’t have been around for hundreds of years.

Thankfully, our game is continuing to go from strength to strength on performance issues, and extra content, and things to do on new level 40, and new guild issues.

Coming out with “Land of the Dead,” soon. Which is a basically an entire combat area that flips ownership, it’s owned by Order, or it’s owned by Destruction. And you do these dungeons and you kill other people, and then it flips owners and it becomes this aggressive RVR bloodbath.

So, Order’s in there doing its stuff building its pyramids, collecting its sand, killing its scorpions, and before you know it Destruction comes piling in their enormous fart balloons that we built for them.

And they land, the farts come out and the gas squigs burp, and they run around and slaughter and fight all the Order people to death, so that they can start pooing on the pyramids and stealing the sand and weeing in it and all the sort of things that Orcs want to do.

And Chaos I assume turns up and just grows tentacles off the pyramids, that’s how they like it.

And the Dark Elves, they just turn up and make biting remarks about the décor.

So it’s a great time if you played the first time around and felt you’d topped out on what to do, or weren’t too happy with some of the elements of the game. It’s a much more balanced and interesting RvR end-game experience. Aggressive RvR fun in the “Land of the Dead!”

So you should invite all of your alliance back, and come in for your ten day trial.

The MMO Gamer: Tentacles ought to appeal to the Japanese market. Have you guys launched in Japan, yet?

Paul Barnett: No we’re not in Japan yet, we’re in Thailand soon. I just came back from Korea where we’re slowly but surely trying to understand what the Korean market wants, the ways to make them happy.

The MMO Gamer: Bad graphics, grinding, and free-to-play, that’s about it. That’s what I’ve gleaned through my years of covering Korean games.

Paul Barnett: Well yeah, and for me, not being ill for half the trip would be a good start.

The MMO Gamer: It’s inevitable that you have to catch some foreign disease when you’re on another continent. I always manage to catch one when I’m at one of these conventions, and I don’t even have to leave California.

Paul Barnett: I travel everywhere, and Josh Drescher comes along with me every now and then. He’s a dark and terrible man, because he objects to my eating policy.

My eating policy is the same anywhere I go in the world. I get to the hotel I pick up the phone, I say “Is there in room dining? Yes? I would like a cheeseburger, and I would like it well-done please, so that I get a burnt cheeseburger to eat.”

He pointed out that was not in the spirit of multiculturalism and international travel. I said it’s served me well wherever I’ve gone. I think we should I have a cheeseburger in Korea in the hotel. But no, because of his belligerence we went out and sampled local cuisine.

The MMO Gamer: And you became violently ill as a result of it?

Paul Barnett: Violently ill for a day and a half. What I thought was ironic was on the morning out from Korea, after Josh had also been violently ill, he gets a craving and has to eat before he gets on the plane as a matter of urgency.

I said to him “Well, what would you like?” His answer: “A cheeseburger, well done.”

The MMO Gamer: Of course.

Paul Barnett: Of course it was. We came to a good place in the end.

The MMO Gamer: Anyway, I’d like to start off with what I think is the number one question on everyone’s mind at this point: Is your son still killing you repeatedly in RvR every chance he gets?

Paul Barnett: Yes. Callum is a vicious and terrifying opponent who understands the game far better than I ever will, and has the reactions of a sugared-up ten year old.

His history of gaming is quite interesting, actually. I played a lot of games when I was a little kid, in my golden period, book-ended by Empire Strikes Back to the movie Say Anything, that period.

Lots and lots of games, and lots and lots of defining games that came out in that period that were interesting. So, when my boy was born I made a conscious effort that I wanted him to experience proper gaming.

What I did, was I got my consoles and my computers out of the attic, tidied them up, and as he became old enough I would just put the relevant one in front of him and he would play with it.

So he played on a Master system, Alex Kidd in Miracle World, then I mutated him, and allowed him to play on an N64, so he played Goldeneye.

And because he was young, and he didn’t really have an understanding of brands awareness and the rest of it, he played them very willingly.

Because he was so young, and so responsive, I allowed him to play games that I thought were interesting. He progressed through Zelda, he finished Half-Life when he was six, although it was Half-Life Decay on the PlayStation one, but he finished it.

He quickly got into first person shooters. When he was about six years old, he was a hardcore Unreal shooter.

I used to take him to this LAN shop thing, where you could go in and book time on a computer, and they have teams and local playing. He would sit in his chair, and he was so tiny that it looked like there was no one in the chair, and he was obsessed with the shotgun. That was his particular weapon of choice, and he would run around and just shoot people with a shotgun with abandonment and glee.

And you would see these responses from people going “WHO IS IT WITH THE SHOTGUN!?” They would look around and they couldn’t really see him. Then they’d realize he’s there, he’s six and [imitating gun noises].

That meant he went through all sorts of stuff. I got him to play the original Command and Conquer, he progressed through Warcraft one, and two, and three.

Now that he’s ten, interesting things have started happening. He’s got all this backlog of the games his dad played. So we’re able to talk about them. And he’s played them, he’s completed quite a lot of them.

But, he’s also gone through all the stages in gaming. He’s actually completely over his first person shooterisms. He just doesn’t do it anymore. They bore him.

He’s into real-time strategy ,and he’s into Civilization and he’s into world building and base building. He finds everything exciting. And of course, he’s into MMOs. He plays mine, and he’s frighteningly good, and he hands it to me regularly.

It’s very irritating.

Continued on next page…

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