To spur them on, Garriott is sending out e-mail invitations to the player guilds of Ultima Online and Everquest, among others, to join him in Lineage, and help him overthrow the pretender princes.

Which brings us back to what Garriott's persona actually signifies, for himself and for the games he creates for his near-omnipotent alter ego. "Lord British really is my personal emissary into gaming," he says.

"But what about you does he represent?" I ask.

"The evangelist for specific philosophical objectives within gaming, which I'll call parables. ... Lord British is the promoter of the identifying heroic attributes within individual players -- promoting their true heroism vs. mindless slaughter or mundane behavior."

I point out that Ultima Online was notorious for that very thing, with noxious gamers hell-bent on slaughtering hapless newcomers to the game, while other players sat around catching virtual fish, or sewing leather tunics.

"You're quite correct," Garriott says. "Player killing, as well as what I'll call repetitive, monotonous behavior, are rampant in these online games. ... Even worse than Ultima Online are games like Everquest, which is, despite its popularity, largely based on standing around holding your repeat button down to kill monsters over and over again until you finally level up. ... And I just think that's not the way to create the future of gaming."

Having wasted a few dozen hours on the Everquest gerbil wheel of illusionary progress, myself, I'll subscribe to that. It's a flaw Garriott hopes to address in Tabula Rasa, which is now in development, but about two years away from completion. Among his goals are "finding ways to reward players for the quality of their contributions, not the quantity of monotonous behavior they're willing to endure." While he won't go into particulars, he says this means "a highly scripted series of events, to lead you to the next level of specialness within the world." Linking these is a space shared by all Tabula Rasa players, a compact hub from which to launch off into further adventures.

This sounds suspiciously like Everquest's generic theme park version of a fantasy world, but Garriott insists this ability to leap from one quest to the next will be consistent with the game's internal narrative. "The whole logic as to why the hub space is compact and how you get to these instantiated adventures is of course part of the theme of the whole game ... your accomplishments on those adventures all add up to a grand accomplishment for you and the grand civilization within the hub space."

Linked to this will be an in-game philosophy, to give these accomplishments a deeper meaning. This concern for morality is a recurring theme in Garriott's games. In the Ultima series, he went so far as to invent eight cardinal virtues of good player behavior -- which, to my mind, sometimes came across as presumptuous moralizing, coupled with a vaguely creepy, pseudo-religious feel. (Though, granted, both qualities had the effect of generating a cultish fan base around him and the games.)

But as he tells it, the ethics associated with Tabula Rasa will have far more substance. "In the new game we're actually trying to more closely relate things that we believe are defensible as a truth or fundamental philosophy. ... The Dalai Lama is probably our No. 1 source at the moment." While Garriott's not a Buddhist himself, "I absolutely have much more affinity for Buddhism than for any of the other major religions in the world ... with its philosophy of life where the purpose of life is happiness, and the path to happiness is compassion toward other people."

His team is also drawing upon "The Power of Myth" by Joseph Campbell and the work of Lebanese mystic Khalil Gibran ("Actually, his writings were also very influential for the Ultima series"). Garriott also mentions Greek philosophers, and even puts the phone down to check the current stock of classic references in his NCSoft office. "We've been pulling from 'The Republic,' 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey.'" Also Dante's "Inferno", though "less for that sort of inspiration and more for game mechanics ... We do not intend to take it as far as, if you go murder somebody, your character gets sent to character hell and tortured ... however, we do intend for there to be examples of things to see and interact with that might give you that overtone."

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the game industry (like Hollywood) went through a brief bout of soul searching, trying to decide what kind of games it can and should develop in this newly resensitized era. So I ask Garriott how recent events might have changed the kind of games we want to create. As with EA's failure to capture the online market, Garriott greets this ethical reorientation with a sense of vindication. "[I] already was on the side of feeling that social responsibility and ethical parables were the right way to go in online gaming ... I just think that role-playing games in particular, where you're creating these virtual realities, and especially to the degree they're played by younger and younger people, do have the innate ability to teach behavior, whether you like it or not."

"In the real world, people role-play all the time. If you think of kids out role playing in the sandbox, that's how they learn the good and bad kinds of social interaction. They learn that when they push each other and they fall down it hurts, and that they cry, or how feelings can be hurt; they learn to not enjoy doing things which take away happiness from the people around them ... And I believe that there is a danger in creating an artificial reality that does not have those social feedback mechanisms in it. Even if it's not a moral imperative to put it in every role-playing game that exists, it is at least an opportunity missed not to."

After the Lineage demo, I walk Lord British and David, his P.R. rep, back to their rental car. About this time last year, San Francisco's Mission district was one of the city's focal points for dot-com excess, crowded with Internet start-ups built on foolhardy business plans, lined with upscale restaurants to serve its employees. Now, money and start-ups gone, it feels like a rougher place than it was before that rush of moneyed hubris came rolling through town. And it occurs to me that Garriott is standing here on 19th and Mission, a street corner caked with garbage and human poo, as one more refugee of that receding tide.

Electronic Arts wanted a way to convert his content into sticky eyeballs, to use last year's gibbering parlance, and instead, for whatever reason, he bolted. That's why he's here, in his new role as a kind of cultural emissary, for his new partners from the Far East. Which provokes another chain of thoughts, rooted in Lineage's provenance.

Summarizing wildly, an Oxford scholar named Tolkien wove Northern European and British folk myth into a fantasy trilogy published in the 1950s that was acclaimed by America's alternative subculture in the '60s, which in turn influenced Gary Gygax's Dungeons & Dragons in the late '70s, which then went on to influence Garriott's Ultima games, beginning in the '80s.

These games became a worldwide phenomenon that eventually inspired a Korean programmer, in the late '90s, to create Lineage, a game acclaimed throughout Asian popular culture, despite (or because of) a European mythology Asians only know fourth- or fifth-hand.

And now Garriott's working for the Korean he inspired. It's not coming full circle, perhaps, but it's close enough. Just one more thumbnail sketch of how far we've come, as a global culture, and how interlocked our imaginations have become, during the journey.

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