Above: Daly in Stars Reach
Matt Daly's early first-person explorations of Star's Reach, the sandbox MMO from Raph Koster and his company Playable Worlds, have been so intriguing (as featured here last week), I asked him to expand them in this guest post! – WJA
The whole reason many of us work in Games and Virtual Worlds is because of early experiences with wonder.
I grew up deep in the Quake 2 modder community (Loki’s Minions whereya at). As newly minted teens, my childhood BFF and I weren’t hanging at the mall as much as leading guilds, going to war, and fletching arrows or whatever in Telnet MUDS and M59.
Considering we had just been literally playing in literal sandboxes only a few years before (as literal children), this came quite naturally to us.
We didn’t need or care about revenue models or acquisition funnels. All of that sterile product science would come later in our careers and begin to hide some of the original wonder. But, spoiler: hyper-efficiency, liquid content and AI are creating an allergic reaction amongst player communities that’s bringing wonder back, baby (you won’t believe what happens next! 😲)
When Ultima Online launched in 1997, while we worked on haranguing my dad into buying us a 56k connection, BFF and I would sit at my kitchen table and pore over the cloth map of Brittania (right) that came with the UO guidebook. Our master plan (when we had proper internet and could actually play the game) was to overthrow the isle of Magincia, based only on a couple paragraphs about animal taming (which included dragons). Obviously we inevitably hit the reality of constraints that would prevent two children from taking over an entire island in a game millions would play.
The wonder, however, remained. It's followed me almost 30 years later to a pre-alpha MMO called Stars Reach, where I found a team and community who are leaning into the sloppy, undeniably human imperfection of an actual literal sandbox in search of their wonder.
Let’s dive in:
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 