Not all the prerelease hype has gone to Star Wars Galaxies. "In addition to Galaxies and The Sims Online," says Brown, "we're also very interested in World of Warcraft, which will of course be huge." No doubt, given the phenomenal success of the strategy games that inspired it -- but given Blizzard Studio's equally phenomenal release delays, it's anyone's guess when Warcraft will manifest. Another potential standout may be Asheron's Call 2, set a hundred years after the first game, when the world has declined into a chaotic wasteland -- which players must work together to tame and rebuild.

"Game journalists are hardcore gamers," says Peterson, who attended E3, the game industry's premier expo, held last month in Los Angeles. According to him, the title with the most buzz among his peers (after Galaxies) was City of Heroes, in which players take the personae of costumed superheroes fighting crime and evil in a virtual metropolis. "Despite the prevalence of fantasy tropes in online games," says Rick Dakan, lead designer for Heroes, "very few people can actually relate to what it's like to be an elf or wizard or what have you. Players immediately understand superpowered heroes."

But gamers understand The Sims even more. A networked variation of Wright's game, The Sims Online arrives at a time when the original title is still a bestseller (two years after its release), joined by numerous expansion packs -- 6 million and 8 million sold so far, respectively, easily making it the most popular game of all time. Expectation has been building on the games' numerous fansite communities. (Wright says with winning understatement, "If we can convert a good percentage of that community to Online, then it'll probably do very well.")

"Fans are already posting for roommates!" said the producer demoing the game for me at E3, as she maneuvered her space alien alter ego through her ornately furnished apartment, pausing to dance with, then slap, a gentleman caller. As in the single-player game, you can buy your own property, or share a lot with several housemates.

What you do there is entirely at your discretion. "Naked-clown beauty pageants, superhero cowboy bars, and exclusive mountain hideaways are just a few of the many strange possibilities this game offers," says Computer Gaming World's Robert Coffey. This is because the game comes with no overarching theme. Wright's idea is to provide tools that are robust enough for players to shape their own world, at their own leisure. "We're trying to make [success] more correlated to your creativity than your time investment. What I want is a game where people play three, four, maybe five hours a week, and feel like they're getting a lot out of it."

While the world is laid out in a way that'll call to mind Sim City, Wright's earlier hit, the game itself is expansive enough to include genre elements of other MMORPGs. "A lot of neighborhoods will be themed areas," says Wright. He envisions players with like tastes naturally migrating together, and using the diverse range of objects (homes, furniture, and so on) to create their own unique communities. "So I look at the neighborhood, and I see, say, Western town, or Futureville, or whatever... And that'll give me a good sense of, 'Oh, if I'm into science fiction, I should go to Futureville,' and I zoom down to Futureville ... and if I'm really into that, I probably would want to move there and build my futuristic house in that area  You can buy a chair that looks like it came off a starship, you can buy a chair that looks like it came out of a castle or one that looks like it came out of a Las Vegas casino. I think the range of objects that people have to build with are going to suggest the breadth of theme that we hope to see in the world."

There will be no segregation between hardcore and casual players; rather, Wright is working to make their differing preferences complement each other. "If you have everybody in one area, and they're all trying to do the exact same thing, that's when it starts feeling kind of repetitive. But when you have people all mixed in pursuing different goals entirely, then it starts feeling like, you know, the real world." He guesses that the more dedicated gamers will devote their time to creating fictional businesses or pursuing other economic goals. But doing this creates, in his words, a "pyramid of dependency." A group of hardcore gamers can unite their properties to create a grand theme park with rides and entertainment, for example -- then sell tickets to casual gamers. "I'd like to keep the game structured so that the hardcore people are continually interacting with the casual people."

The user objects are designed so that players can even create their own games within the larger game. "You could easily build a treasure hunt with this one object that we're making," says Wright, "and strew clues all over the world, and you kind of have to search the world and find the clues. Or play a game like Assassin, where everybody has an envelope and a name in it, and you have to go find that person ... We want to have a lot of activities that kind of span the world."

As with the original version of The Sims, another feature in the online version enables players to define their relationship to other people. But in the multiplayer realm, the function allows for all kinds of wacky sociological chess games. During a testing session, for instance, Wright competed with a member of his team to become the most popular Sim on the server. "So we were being nice to everybody, and they were making us their friends," he says. "We both got very competitive about it, and we started paying people to be our friends. And from that point it kind of escalated, and we started hiring people [to become an enemy of the other person] ... It was kind of twisted."

Unlike every other game on the market, The Sims enjoys a fan base that's roughly equal male and female. Which must be partly why Wright has devoted so much attention to the griefer problem. While the Ignore/Ban function allows players to summarily remove offending persons from their lot, he's gone a bit further with The Sims Online: Wright is trying to grief his own game. "Lately I've been trying to play as a grief player in our internal tests of TSO," he says, "both to explore what the likely tactics will be and also to get a sense for how motivating or satisfying it is to play that way -- and, hence, how to make it less so."

Some aren't so sure dedicated game fanatics will descend on Wright's game. "I doubt TSO will appeal much to hardcore gamers," says Computer Gaming World's Brown. "But I don't think that matters much. Millions of non-gamers have discovered the fun of playing games on their computer because of The Sims, and TSO may encourage many of them to try online gaming for the first time. That's good for consumers, good for game companies, and good for everyone except, possibly, TV executives."

But even if TSO and Galaxies are the blockbusters they'll surely become, it's unclear whether their success will mean a revolution in online games. They may just sponge up the market so thoroughly that the competition will be left to pursue increasingly smaller, unsupportable niches. ("The worst case, really," notes Wright, "is when you launch one of these things and its just marginally successful. Because then youre in a position where its hard to kill it, but you still have to incur the expense of just running it.") TSO and Galaxies may be perceived as too exceptional for others to follow the trail they blaze: Few developers, after all, have Wright's ambition or commercial track record, and no other film or book franchise has anywhere near the draw or scope of "Star Wars." (Except, perhaps, "Lord of the Rings," the MMORPG adaptation of which currently languishes somewhere in preproduction.)

But what happens when almost all of the upcoming fantasy/sci-fi MMOGs fail and investors lose countless millions? Publishers may cede the field to LucasArts, Maxis, and the current hits, convinced that the genre takes too much time and money to be worth the wager.

"If they're all in the mold of, you know, the men-in-tights Everquest model," says Wright, "we're pretty close to the limit right now." Perhaps hardcore fantasy gamers will move away from MMORPGs entirely, gravitating instead toward games that allow them to customize an online experience according to their own obsessive-compulsive calibrations. Toward titles like the long-awaited Neverwinter Nights, for example, which enables player to create and host mini-multiplayer worlds for up to 64 players.

"But as they start to diversify into these other themes," Wright continues, "I think potentially the market is much bigger than it is now. Maybe ten times bigger." This has proven true in the Asian market, at least, where games like Lineage (recently imported into the U.S. by Ultima creator Richard Garriott) enjoy subscribers in the millions.

But all that depends on whether developers are willing to risk creating games that appeal to other people besides themselves.

"Here's a little thought experiment," says designer Andrew L. Tepper. "Ask yourself which of these stories is more appealing:

"1. A story about saving your family. 2. A story about saving the world."

Tepper continues: "I can relate to a story about saving my family, and so can most casual game players. So why does every game designer insist on writing games about saving the world? MMORPG designers are especially guilty of this, and it's the reason they have trouble moving beyond the hardcore gamer market." Tepper is behind A Tale in the Desert, an MMORPG being developed by his staff of three. Besides The Sims Online, it was the only game that the GDC round table could point to as being truly innovative. "It is a game about building the perfect society," Tepper says. "After [life's] necessities are out of the way, you advance your character spiritually ... Once your character reaches a high enough spiritual level, you can lead large projects that advance the entire civilization."

"When massively multiplayer games become simpler to learn, offer more of a sense of online community and interpersonal communication and different rewards than just killing and leveling up," says Brown, "then these games will break through to a wider audience." Citing the massive sales of the sleeper single-player hit Roller Coaster Tycoon a couple years ago, Brown suggests "a massively multiplayer theme park game, where users of any age could ride other players' rides, build their own rides, and hang out with other park visitors."

But some prominent developers aren't sure the time for significant change is now. "To me," says Everquest creator Brad McQuaid, "'leveling up' ultimately just means a focus on character or persona development." And he considers it an inextricable part of the genre's appeal. "I'm not saying someone won't invent alternatives one day ... maybe they will. But, at least short term, I'd advise against it -- we need to see one or two more successful generations of MMOGs before we get too experimental." Presumably this will be a guideline for the online game McQuaid is working on now, under the auspices of Sigil Games Online, his new studio.

"When it comes to attracting women and the mass market in general," says City of Heroes designer Rick Drakan, "I think the games need to expand in both genre (out of the fantasy ghetto) and in gameplay (out of the repetitious cycle of killing and looting)."

But are they ready to give women what they want? According to longtime MMOG player Jennifer Powell, that means giving them "[a] safe environment, definitely. Free of harassment and most forms of vulgarity or verbal assault." But getting that might require a cultural shift that the industry isn't ready for: "In the past, continuing into the present, MMOGs have been designed and run mainly by game geeks ... they are great, fun people in many ways," she says, but "they are not for the most part socially skillful." It's part of what makes customer support for the games she's played, by her estimation, dictatorial and arbitrary. "I'd love to see that replaced with something less personalized and more equitable, not to mention more thoughtful. But that requires a level of maturity most customer support departments in MMOGs don't yet display." For now, there is no developer patch for social skills.

It might take some time to "level up" that social-skill stat. So the first step might be for designers to confront their mania to become micromanagerial gods in the universes of their own design. Wright suggests it may require confronting a "moviemaker wannabe" streak evident in many developers: "You know: 'Well, George Lucas made his world -- here's my world!' And of course for them, in their background and their interest, a cool world usually is either postapocalyptic science fiction, or it's Tolkienesque ... Somehow we keep falling into these two well-worn themes over and over and over and it's getting a little, you know, worn out.

"I think another approach to this whole thing is that you give the players that canvas," Wright says, "and let the players create the back story and the theme and whatever, and you focus on being innovative through the [game] mechanisms." The future, in other words, may depend on an equal collaboration between game players and game developers, working together to create worlds that neither could dream up alone.

Or they can continue as they always have, playing heroes in the tiny worlds they've made for themselves, designed to keep anyone unlike them outside, drawing their virtual swords, once more, to fend off the same stand-ins for innovation and genuine social intercourse, and -- as the economic realities threaten to pierce the veil -- keep whacking away.

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