Over 10 years later, Gabe Newell's advice to devs still holds up

In 2013, Valve head honcho Gabe Newell spoke to students at the LBJ School of Public Affairs in Austin about “Productivity, Economics, Political Institutions & The Future of Corporations.” It was a much more interesting topic than that makes it sounds, and has been doing the rounds again thanks to being sliced up into shorts by the Webknower channel.

One clip that’s been going around is Newell’s response to being asked about how easy it is for hackers to get into game worlds and do things the creators don’t want them to do: “One of the biggest mistakes game developers make is to mistake hacking, or to mistake a genuinely entertaining action by a player as hacking. So the example game developers tell each other is when Lord British was killed during his first speech in Ultima Online they rolled the world back rather than recognizing that it was the coolest thing that had ever happened in Ultima Online.”

In the early singleplayer Ultima games, Lord British had huge amounts of hit points and other defenses to discourage players from attacking him, which of course made some of those players see it as a challenge. Blasting him from offshore with a shipboard cannon or using a magic artifact called the Skull of Mondain were a couple of the classic techniques.

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In Ultima Online, where Lord British was controlled by Ultima creator Richard Garriott, his murder also took some doing. A player named Rainz waited for Lord British to give a speech, and used his high-level pickpocketing skill to steal a scroll with the fire field spell from someone in the crowd. He didn’t know it would work, but after the server reset immediately before the event, Garriott had forgotten to toggle his character’s invincibility back on. Lord British caught fire and died, and Rainz was banned from the game as if he’d cheated when actually what he’d done is contribute to the lore that gave Ultima Online its reputation.

Newell’s point is that if Ultima Online had embraced that, rather than resetting the server and pretending it never happened, the player-led storytelling would have made for something more interesting than the ongoing plot of Ultima Online. Which is forgotten today, while the assassination of Lord British is a central text of MMO lore. Game designers will be telling that story to new hires for years to come.

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