Tim Cain on Carbine’s Mystery Project, and a Lifetime of Working and Teaching in the Gaming Industry

Timothy Cain is no stranger to the gaming industry.

After having worked on some of the most critically acclaimed titles of all time, including Fallout, Arcanum, and yes, Grand Slam Bridge, he is now bringing his experience to bear as the Design Director of Carbine Studios, and their unannounced next-generation MMO.

Read on for his thoughts on the genre, the industry, and his plans for future retirement as a corduroy jacket-wearing professor.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself to us and tell us a little bit about what it is you do at Carbine Studios.

Tim Cain: I’m Timothy Cain, I’m the Design Director. Which means I’m in charge of the design department, which we split into Systems, and World.

Systems is combat, creatures, items… basically everything that requires a specification. World is all the lore, and content.

The MMO Gamer: Let’s start right off with a nice big philosophy question: Do you consider yourself to be an artist, an entertainer, or something else entirely?

Tim Cain: I’m not an artist, so I must be an entertainer.

The MMO Gamer: Do you believe it’s possible for games to become art?

Tim Cain: Yes, it’s very possible for a game to be art.

The MMO Gamer: Do you believe that the game Carbine is working on rises to that level?

Tim Cain: I think the correct answer is I hope it’s art. We always strive for it to be art. However, I think if you’re not trying to make a work of art that is fun, and accessible, I don’t think you should try. You should worry less about the art, and more about how enjoyable it is.

I’ve seen some works of art that I wouldn’t care to actually have and look at every day.

The MMO Gamer: So then what is fun to you? Define “fun” in an MMO.

Tim Cain: Well, the reason I like playing MMOs, is for all my life I’ve played RPGs. I gravitate towards them, I’ve made a number of them in the past.

But, MMOs have that added dimension of you’re there with thousands of other people, they’re trying to do the same things you’re trying to do, and your friends are there too, witnessing you do this.

I think part of the fun that comes out of that is just, the fun of it being social, the fun of it being a communal effort.

Going back to single-player RPGs, you feel lonely. It’s like, “Did you see that cool thing I just did?” It’s much more fun playing these games in a group. I always have one character, I was saying earlier, that I make that I don’t tell anybody about.

I solo just to judge certain parts of these games on just some merits that I don’t want to do while—I don’t want to bore the people I’m playing with.

I’ll do every crafting skill, I’ll do achievements, and people don’t need to be with me while I do that. But, for the most part it’s 80-90% of the time I spend playing these games in a group. That’s just kind of the essence of these games.

The MMO Gamer: As you said, you were a big RPG guy in the past.

A lot of people may not be familiar with your name, but just about every RPG fan should be familiar with what you’ve worked on: Fallout, Arcanum, Temple of Elemental Evil, Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines… all very good single player RPGs.

Now here you are working on an MMO. The biggest difference, which you just hit on, is you are not the lone protagonist going off and saving the world by yourself. You are one of hundreds of thousands of protagonists, all playing together towards the same goals.

So, how do you get that storytelling element, the essence of RPG heroism in an MMO, when you’re not the lone protagonist any more, when you have 50,000 people all doing the same things you’re trying to do?

Tim Cain: That actually is the challenge. That’s one of the things we explore every day. I know how to tell a story in a single player RPG, I’ve done it multiple times. What’s fascinating to me about MMOs, is the first ones that were made were very sandbox.

There were no stories, there really weren’t even quests, the way a lot of people today would view quests.

They weren’t nearly as well-defined, and described as in the game as “Hey, you’re starting a quest now, here it is. Do this, this, and this, then return to me and I’ll give you this.”

That’s what people think of as a quest now. But EverQuest had nothing like that. You had to talk to someone, and hit on a keyword, then he’d say something to you and it didn’t go into a log book or anything. You just went off and did what he said, and hopefully you’d find something that he’d want.

I think that the direction MMOs are going is if we can actually figure out how to tell a story, so that you’re involved in a storyline, I think people will view that as kind of the next step, instead of just doing a set of quests.

That’s the kind of thing we’ve been trying to solve at Carbine, and I think we have a solution… but I can’t say what it is.

Next year I want to give a talk on it. I wanted to give it here, but we had to put it off until next year. It’s called, “I’m a Special Snowflake.”

The MMO Gamer: So, we’ve kind of evolved from “No story at all,” to “Kinda-sorta a story.”

But, the story as it exists in MMOs today is in a little two by five inch box, with five paragraphs of text which nobody actually reads.

Some games, like The Old Republic and to a lesser extent EQ2 have tried to circumvent that with voice acting, but that obviously starts getting extremely expensive, extremely fast.

Is there a way to tell a story in an MMO, to engage players, without the game either costing a billion dollars or putting people to sleep?

Tim Cain: Yes. We’ve got a way we’re trying to tell stories, so that not everyone may get the exact same ones. Some of the elements of what we did include…

A lot of MMOs, everyone goes to the same zone, does the same quests, and then leaves and never comes back. Our game won’t be like that.

We have a word for when you click on someone and get a big box of text, it’s called a lore bomb. We’re not doing lore bombs. I think there are other ways you can tell stories.

The people under me are the ones actually doing the design specs, so what I end up writing is what I call the design philosophy docs. I give them like, “This is what a quest should be.”

I’m not actually telling them how to make a quest. I’m saying: here’s what the essence of a quest is, and here’s what I want it to be in our game. I do the same for achievements, for storyline, for using instances in the game; this is where you use an instance and this is where you don’t.

The underlying thread behind all of them is I have a player who’s playing this game, and they want to feel like they’re moving forward toward some sort of progress.

It has to include even when you hit the level cap, so it can’t be that going up a level is your sense of progress. It can’t be finding items is your sense of progress.

There has to be some other progression in the game, and I think I’ve found several axis that you can measure progress along, that people measure themselves as making some progress in the game without having to wade through lore bombs, or having them wait to go on raids with 19 other people.

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