The MMO Gamer: For a man known for working on RPGs, I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that you’ve played some pen and paper, in your time.
Tim Cain: I have all the D&D books from First Edition up to Four, keep dice in my office… in fact, one of the first booth I went to here was the Chessex booth. I don’t need to buy any more dice, I have enough, but for some reason I like looking at it.
That’s what actually got me into the industry, too; I played D&D a lot. I came out to California to go to grad school, and I just wasn’t getting into it. I went and worked at a game company, Interplay, mainly because they were doing a lot of single player RPGs.
That was pretty much my gateway drug to computer games, D&D, GURPS, Champions, Gamma World which was a weird precursor of Fallout, I suppose. Those kind of games, I just loved them.
The MMO Gamer: I find it interesting that the MMO had its roots in pen and paper, but the genre now seems to have turned its back on traditional RPGs.
The role-playing aspect in most modern MMOs is almost completely absent, and it’s just become you playing a spreadsheet, obsessing over min-maxing your stats, rather than actually developing a character.
Tim Cain: Right.
The MMO Gamer: Having that pen and paper background as you do, is Carbine trying to bring back some of that non-spreadsheet feel, where you don’t have to be a min-maxer, and can actually play a character, as opposed to just counting its stats?
Tim Cain: Yes. That’s how I play these MMOs…
I told you I made solo characters to play, but when I play with a group, I always role-play the group. My EverQuest group was The Spicy Girls, where everyone was named after a Spice Girl. I was Posh, I was a bard, played my own music.
In City of Heroes we role-played little girls from a ballet school that got inundated with radiation from the nuclear plant next door.
The first WoW guild I joined was Obscure Simpsons Characters. I played Girl Bart.
My group right now are called The Shorties, where you have to be playing one of the short characters to be in it, a dwarf or a gnome, otherwise you’re not allowed. We had a draenei join us temporarily, but we made him eat a high level piece of food called the Small Feast, so he shrunk for an hour, and then when he grew again we kicked him out.
There’s nothing that prevents you from role-playing in any of these games. I just don’t think there’s enough hooks to do it. We’ve thought of some things that would encourage people to want to role-play again, develop a theme for their character, and… more than their character…
When you play the game, you feel like you have kind of this, vibe about your character going on, that is obvious from… stuff. [He is unable to continue this line of thought further, for now.]
That adds so much to the game, when people start role-playing and get off the beaten path.
The MMO Gamer: Honestly, the reason I don’t role-play in modern MMOs is the lack of choice. When you’re sitting around a table with your friends, you can do anything within the limits of the rulebook, and how good of a DM you have.
In an MMO, your choice is, “Do I accept this quest, or do I not accept this quest?”
If you accept it, you have to do exactly what it tells you to do, in exactly the order it wants you to, and then you come back for your reward, and that’s that.
And if you don’t accept it, that’s not much of a choice, you just don’t do anything.
Tim Cain: There’s two things I like about ways you could role-play in an MMO. One is emergent behavior. If players can find ways of solving a quest that you didn’t plan for, don’t look at that as a bad thing. You should leave it in.
I love when QA finds ways of solving quests I didn’t think of.
And the other one is just, when my designers are designing a quest I usually ask them, “Well, what if I do this, instead?” and usually they try to say, “Okay, we’re going to prevent them from doing that.”
“What if you didn’t? What if I went and did that? How would the NPC react when I came back?”
It’s frustrating for me, when I play a game, that within the rules they set up I should be allowed to do something, and the only reason I can’t is the designers didn’t want to deal with that possibility.
So, we’ve tried to come up with optional things to do, things that aren’t on the beaten path, a certain percentage of the game…
When we do this next time, I’ll actually show concrete examples of what I mean. We’re trying to do that in the game, and not make it so that you got to level 60 the same way your friend got to level 60.
Troy Hewitt [Carbine Community Lead]: One of the things I found interesting when I spent some time getting to know Tim, is he has never had a job that didn’t involve gaming. He didn’t work fast food, he went right into gaming, right out of the chute.
I find that a fascinating historical fact.
Tim Cain: The reason that comes up is a lot of the guys who work for me have done other things. And occasionally it turns out to be a good thing.
One guy was doing something with a spreadsheet, and I’m like “Where’d you learn to do that?” “I used to work in an accounting office.” “That’s really cool. I didn’t know you could do that in Excel.”
One guy had a very exacting way of putting together creature abilities, and he said it was something he had picked up at an engineering firm he’d worked in, where things were broken down into little components and then reassembled into things, and I thought “Wow, I’ve never had an opportunity to learn anything other than games.”
The first game I got offered, from before I could drive, was at a game company. And I didn’t know how to drive, so I couldn’t get to them. This was way back with the Atari 800, dating myself.
They called me on my birthday and said, “You have your driver license now?” And I’m like yeah, “Yeah.” “Okay, come in.”
That job paid for college, and grad school, because I worked there nights and weekends when I was in high school, and then I worked there summers when I was in college.
I made a lot of games, I made a game for EA: Grand Slam Bridge. And I didn’t even know how to play bridge.
They hired a guy who could play, and he and I would sit in a room, and he would tell me things like, “Here’s how you bid.” It seemed nonsensical, but he would give me all these rules, and I’d put them in.
And it plays a pretty good game of Bridge. For years it was considered one of the best card playing programs… but my name isn’t in the credits.
Because I went off to college, and came back the next year and it had shipped. I didn’t know my name wasn’t in the credits until I applied for my job at Interplay. They pulled the game off the shelf, and couldn’t find my name in the credits and thought I was lying to them. I had to call someone…
The MMO Gamer: Lying about Bridge, that would be pretty low.
Tim Cain: [laughs] Yeah. But that’s the only job I’ve ever had. It’s either that, or teaching programming or game design at a university.
Troy Hewitt: You were on track for a PhD.
Tim Cain: I was next in line to get a PhD, and my professor was trying to get tenure. The way you get tenure is you have to get so many students out the door with a PhD, and I was next in line to get mine.
By “next in line,” I mean like two years off. When you’re 25, two years is a million years. I just said no, I’m going to go make games. He was really mad.
Then he calls me, two or three years later, and he says, “Hey, do you want to come back and teach a class on game design?”
I’m like, “Wait a minute, you haven’t spoken to me in three years, and you want me to come back and teach a class?”
He says, “You know, I think you’re right about this whole game thing. I think it’s taking off.”
This is 1998. So now, 11 years later, yeah, I think it’s taken off.
The MMO Gamer: How does one teach game design? I was always under the impression that it was some ephemeral thing that can only be learned by doing.
Tim Cain: I made them do it. Basically it’s a ten week class, we mess around for two weeks where I talk about lots of different things that they have to deal with, like UI, and coding issues like making a message pump, and dealing with things as events.
The things game programmers just know, that they don’t even remember they didn’t know at some point.
After those two weeks I make them break up into groups, and they have to produce a spec. So week four, I basically tell them pretend I’m a publisher, and you have to pitch me game design ideas.
Then I pick one from each group, and they have the last six weeks of the class to make the game. We got some really cool stuff made. And now it’s a regularly taught class, and a professor over at UCI teaches it.
A few of them went on into the game industry, and they said that class was what it really felt like.
They would get really mad at me, like, “Well my group sucks. This guy doesn’t do any work, and he’s not showing up to any meetings.”
I’m like, “What do you think happens when you start working at a game company?”
When you’re in the programming department there’s always that one guy who’s not working, and one guy’s talking to his girlfriend on the phone all the time, and this guy puts in the weird hours, and he says he was here working late, but you don’t know.
It’s no different in the class. At the end of the milestone, if you don’t produce something to show to the publisher, you don’t eat. And I graded accordingly.
The MMO Gamer: You ever think about going back and finishing your PhD, becoming Dr. Cain?
Tim Cain: Sometimes. I can see myself in one of those jackets with the patches. I think I can do the whole middle-aged Professor Cain and his cadre of undergraduate game project majors… but I’d probably just ruin them.
When Troika went under I actually thought about it, then. But I wasn’t ready then. I still want to actually make a game, I’m not ready to just sit back and watch other people make games, yet.
The MMO Gamer: Alright, well thank you very much for joining us, we appreciate it, and we hope we can do it again some time.
Carbine Studios is currently working on an unannounced MMO project. More information will be published on The MMO Gamer as soon as it becomes available. In the meantime, you can visit the company’s official website at: http://www.carbinestudios.com
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