Interview: SOE’s Laralyn McWilliams Discusses the Design and Concept Behind Free Realms

By Steven Crews | August 22, 2008 | | Filed under: Features, Interviews

The MMO Gamer: I seem to remember, when the game was first announced—and correct me if I’m wrong, because my memory is as fallible as anyone else’s—that John Smedley seemed to indicate that the game was going to be vectored more towards girls than boys.

But, looking at it today, it seems that it tries to appeal to both genders equally.

Laralyn McWilliams: Absolutely.

The MMO Gamer: Was I just mistaken in that preconception, or did something change along the way in the development process?

Laralyn McWilliams: Well, John tends to talk about what’s going on and exciting in the game right now. We have a really large team working on Free Realms, and it has a great toolset, it’s really flexible, and that means we can make a lot of changes in the game quickly.

For people who go to our press shows, you’ll notice substantial changes every time you see the game. At the time he was doing the initial interviews we were just getting in Flash games, and we were just talking about pets, and talking about all the things that are really appealing to girls.

We wanted to not make the fundamental mistake of making the same MMO that appeals to boys. We emphasized those things in the beginning to make sure the team understood they were important, and we absolutely needed to have those in at launch.

But now, we have more elements in the game, and it’s kind of evened out. Our intention from the start was always to be 50/50 male/female. If you talk to John now in interviews, he’s probably talking about kart racing, and soccer, and things that sound more boy-oriented because those are the things that are going in the game now.

The MMO Gamer: So with two sides, boy and girl, is it all one big unified game that happens to have elements appealing to each?

Or, is it you walk into one area and it’s Sanrio World, and you walk into the next area and it’s bloody heads on a pike?

Laralyn McWilliams: This is a little design geek answer, so forgive the geekiness of it.

The approach that we’re taking is, we look at an element of the game like combat, for example. We decide who we’re aiming that feature at. Who is it for. Combat, for example, is for boys.

What we do is we design the mechanics in a way that boys will enjoy playing it. Once we know we’ve nailed that, then we design content and elements of it for girls, as well.

Racing is a great example: Kart racing is probably a little more boy-oriented, the cars that you race are hotrods, and a lot of them are pretty masculine, they come from our Dwarves, and they’re kind of bad-ass Harley Davidson riding Leather Dwarves, right?

So, it’s kind of boy-oriented. But, once we nailed the features of it so that racing a kart is fun, there will totally be pink karts that pop out flower petal exhaust, and there’s nothing more satisfying as a girl than kicking a boy’s ass in a car that’s pink and puffing out flower petals.

There are a lot of things in there to appeal to both genders. Like Flash games. The Flash games we know are primarily played by girls, so we’re designing some of them to be kind of girly, about cooking and that kind of stuff.

But at the same time, we take the cooking mechanics and use that for making swords. So it is very even-handed in how we do it, and we really strive to make a game that appeals to both genders without being super-generic.

That was our fear. We don’t want to pick a middle path, we don’t want to try to make every single element equally appealing to both genders, because you end up with something that nobody’s super crazy about.

We’re carefully targeting, and we’re making sure that if you want to be a girl and play demolition derby, you have a way to do that and express yourself.

The MMO Gamer: In a lot of projects there’s an overriding design philosophy. Vanguard had “The Vision.”

Is there anything like that in Free Realms? Is there a single overriding tenet that you all work under?

Laralyn McWilliams: We have a couple. One of them is the gender issue, we want to make sure that we have content that appeals to both boys and girls, and they’re equally important to us.

Another one is that we, as designers, are not going to tell you how to play our game. We can *not* tell you how to play our game.

What that means is, if you want to be the kind of player who plays a casual game like Bejeweled all day long in Free Realms, you should absolutely do that.

We’re going to let you level up doing that, we’re going to let you invest in that, that is as meaningful to us as killing a hundred enemies. Those are all equally valid to us. That’s really true across the board. We invest in socializing, we want you to be able to level up by socializing and adding friends to your friends list.

Who says that’s less valid than killing enemies, right? It’s not, it’s equally valid. That’s really the underlying tenet to the decisions that we make in Free Realms.

The MMO Gamer: I like to end my interviews on a more philosophical note, as opposed to, “What are your features, when is it coming out, and how many exclusives are you going to give me?”

So, my standard inquiry: Why do you make games? Why do you wake up every morning, go in to SOE, and do what it is you do?

Laralyn McWilliams: For me, it’s because I want to make worlds, and I want to entertain people. When I was a really young child I went to Disneyland, and it was a profound experience to me.

I went on Pirates of the Caribbean, and Haunted Mansion, and realized that they were creating worlds that you could experience. That was really profound, and I knew that was what I wanted to do.

I immediately got a computer and started trying to program, and it’s always what I knew I wanted to do. A game like Free Realms is awesome because, it’s free. So there are literally going to be millions and millions of people playing it.

There’s nothing more exciting, I don’t think, as a game developer than knowing that you’re going to have millions of people playing your game, and that it’s a live game and you have the opportunity to change things, and make new things and continue to entertain them.

I find that really exciting.

The MMO Gamer: Thank you very much for joining us, we appreciate it, and we hope we can do it again some time.

Laralyn McWilliams: Thank you!

Stay tuned to The MMO Gamer for further Free Realms coverage.