My GDC 2024 talk Revisiting Fun: 20 Years of a Theory of Fun is now posted here. [Edit: GDC has posted the video up for free on the GDCVault.]

Once again, I had a lot of fun drawing cartoon heads of lots of people who feature in the talk.

The talk really is a direct sequel to the one from a decade ago, Ten Years Later. Unlike last time, there is no updated edition just yet, though I was asked by lots of people if there was!

Since the original book came out, it has gone from being controversial, to being dogma to rebel against, to being “obvious” according to many. It’s available in nine languages, and continues to sell just about as well as it did when it first came out.

The talk mostly covers objections and concerns people have had with the original book, a discussion of some of the newer science and ways in which is updates or makes obsolete parts of the original, and a hefty section on how to apply the principles in the book in a practical way. This latter one draws heavily on the recent article on the NYT game Connections, but also on several other talks I have given in the last decade or so.

Someday, I’ll get around to the three sequels I have planned out in my head!

The new daily game at the New York Times is called Connections, and I’ve seen a few people comment that they just don’t like it as much as Wordle or Spelling Bee. That the difficulty is inconsistent and it often makes you just feel stupid.

I thought it would be interesting to contrast this to Word Dad, a puzzle game made by my friend, master game designer John Cutter.

A brief aside on puzzles

All three of these are more correctly called puzzles, of course. The main difference between a game and a puzzle is that a puzzle has one real solution, an optimal way through the challenge. In a game, finding an optimal way through the challenge is known as a degenerate strategy or even “solving the game” if you’re a mathematician. This means that really, puzzles and games are terms that are matters of degree, not kind.

In A Theory of Fun I term games “a series of puzzles,” partly because a game is presenting you with lots of decisions, each of which has a theoretical optimum choice. In practices, most good puzzles also have many decisions, because you tend to play the same ruleset repeatedly, but with different statistical variations in the content. In that sense, like a game atom, puzzle are usually one logical ruleset, and have just one way in which the puzzle operates, which is a systemic machine that can take data variations. Sudoku is a machine; a given Sudoku layout is an individual puzzle. A Rubik’s Cube always has the same verbs and the same logic, but it has a ton of possible starting states. Not that different from fighting one monster versus another using the same combat system in an RPG! You get the same verbs, the same affordances.

But a puzzle’s output is usually pretty binary. You either got the answer or you didn’t. A game will give you finer-grained feedback, you can do better or worse at it. Many puzzle games try to offer an efficiency metric to give you a gauge instead. This is going to be important for our design comparison.

Connections

Connections is a game with a grid of 16 words. They’re jumbled around, but they are actually four sets of four. The trick is, you don’t know what the grouping terms are. The rules somewhat misleadingly give examples that are essentially noun-based: group all fish together, group all compound words starting with “fire” together. But then it says “categories will always be more specific than ‘five letter words,’ ‘names,’ or ‘verbs.'”

The trick of course is that words might well belong to many categories at once.

If that were all, the game would be much like Set, a game of set-building by examining the “stats” on the individual items and grouping them. Set, however, uses essentially numbers as its stats. A fixed list of colors, a fixed list of shapes. The permutation space is sizable but still small: there are only 81 distinct cards in Set. This is larger than a standard deck of cards, but also smaller in some key ways. (Doing the exercise of tallying up the number of “fields” and how large the “scale” is on each in a standard deck versus a Set deck is a worthy system design exercise I leave to the reader).

Word games have really really large, unbounded scales and fields. As the game rules mentioned, number of letters in the word is one such field. Meanings is another. Spellings is another. Heck, Connections could make a set of four words out of whether or not they use the dʒ, tʃ, or ŋ phonemes.

The learning loop

If we go back to Theory of Fun again, the core premise of the theory is that iteratively tackling a problem helps you come to understand the systemic machine in an intuitive way, and fun is the reward for that. All those varying Sudoku puzzles are there so you learn the generic methods of solving all Sudoku puzzles. The variations are like touching more parts of the elephant with your eyes closed. The more parts you touch, the closer you get to understanding the shape underneath.

So you loop over the game, and do it again with a slightly different problem set, and you keep doing it until you master the underlying logic. After that, you may only enjoy the game as a way to practice, or to mindlessly meditate. A larger game might scaffold you to more sophisticated problems by making this mastered element be simply one brick in a larger edifice of understanding. (Dan Cook has a great article walking through structures like this).

Ah, but what happens when a puzzle depends on your knowing facts, as opposed to methods?

Trivia games have this problem, so do spelling games, and games like Scrabble. They call for a large quantity of crystallized intelligence — large vocabularies, historical minutiae, memorized stuff. Games can help you learn memorized stuff, for sure! Anyone who has kids who learned the name and statistics of every Pokemon knows how that goes! But we learn those things in the service of mastering the loop.

Different people come to a game not only with different amounts of experience in systemic rulesets — which is why they bounce off of some genres — but also with differing amounts of crystallized knowledge. A core issue with trivia games, though, is that the statistical space of a trivia game is so large that playing more trivia games doesn’t particularly help you get better at trivia. This is why so many trivia games (such as Jackpot Trivia, the one I worked on with NTN Buzztime) have other mechanics alongside, in order to help people who may not bring a huge memorization library to the table when they play. In Trivial Pursuit you have a degree of control over the category, and you have control over which direction to travel. These effectively add more variables in the game so that a player with less trivia knowledge can outplay a player with more, through smart movement and concentrating questions on their strengths.

Can you learn to get better?

If Connections only relied on crystallized knowledge for the words, that would be one thing. But in practice, the set-building criteria themselves are often dependent on crystallized knowledge. Let’s look at yesterday’s puzzle. The words are:

• Flute
• Coffee
• Pound
• Oboe
• Stein
• Fricassee
• Bishop
• Tumbler
• Bassoon
• Frost
• Goblet
• Clarinet
• Olds
• Snifter
• Saxophone
• Balloon

The trick, of course, is that many of the words clump very easily into groups, and can belong to many groups. There are five wind instruments: flute, oboe, bassoon, clarinet, saxophone. Ah, but four of those five are reed instruments — which is trivia knowledge, relatively esoteric to anyone not a musician with a particular sort of training. And all five are woodwinds even though saxes are made of brass! All of those are things you blow on or into, but so are coffee and balloons! There are four drinking vessels for alcohol: stein, snifter, goblet, and tumbler. Ah, but Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, and Ezra Pound all jump out as famous poets. Those last names are like a card in a deck being both an ace — all poets — while all being of different suits, where the suits are other categories they could belong to.

You get the idea — the more you know, the more categories you see. The puzzle is trying to teach a form of orthogonal thinking, to push players to find unusual ways to group things. But it’s fundamentally elitist — it basically requires you to have a broad education to find the categories in the first place.

The success/failure metric

If you had unlimited tries, this wouldn’t matter. You could essentially brute force the puzzle. Create a set of four. See if you can find a set in the remaining. Repeat. Any time you cannot, back out a level, undo the set you already tried. Over time, this algorithm will in fact give you the result, probably along with a lot of Googling.

The fact that the puzzle is susceptible to a brute force search isn’t a problem — so is Sudoku! Lots of games are like that, actually. Crosswords are! In fact, A Theory of Fun would argue that learning how to do that is in fact the lesson the game teaches, since it can’t teach you modernist poets or the difference between classical wind instruments itself. No, what it can teach you is how to be methodical, and the value of research.

But in order to add a sense of challenge, the designers of this puzzle decided to not let you use that algorithm. If you make an incorrect set more than four times, you lose. Now the game is handicapped in teaching you its intrinsic lessons! (You can still do it, but the puzzle affordances push you not to. You could make index cards with the words, sit with Google, try to solve it offline, then once you do, input your solution. But this is a pain in the ass).

Fundamentally, the game invites you to make guesses, but punishes you for them — and a missed guess doesn’t help you prune the logic space, only the trivia space.

As a result, it is entirely possible to build a solve that is all wrong, based entirely on valid category groupings that aren’t the ones that the puzzle designer intended.

Inconsistent difficulty

But building a good puzzle of this sort is very very hard. Do you feel clever when you notice that fricassee, balloon, coffee, and bassoon all use doubled vowels? Probably — the thrill of seeing a pattern you knew must exist. But did the designer mean to also have four words with two O’s in them? Balloon, bassoon, oboe, and saxophone do. It’s a valid pattern that is a red herring. A well-designed puzzle of this sort should have fewer red herrings than the number of mistakes it allows. But no puzzle maker will be able to anticipate all the valid groupings a knowledgeable and clever person will be able to find.

Out of those five wind instruments, by the way, the right answer was flute, clarinet, oboe, and saxophone. To the player, this can’t help but feel arbitrary — the only reason bassoon isn’t valid is because of the constraints of a different set.

When I said this was an elitist’s puzzle, I meant it. It demands a lot of knowledge, or a lot of time, it basically makes you “do the crossword in pen,” and it’s basically not something you can ever expect to have a good learning loop. It will always feel like it is inconsistent in difficulty, and that’s why we are seeing the reception we are.

I am not sure you can fix the basic premise here, to solve these issues. You’d need to have a fixed list of category types, and that would render the problem space trivial rather quickly over time. One approach might be to gather data on the the wrong solves players assemble, so that over time you can get a sense of which set types are harder than others. But it’d be a lot of manual labor, probably. Maybe ChatGPT could deduce what a submission was meant to group as… Maybe.

Over time, I expect that players will start to deduce the rules the NYT authors themselves use for authoring… what they consider to be an easy versus hard category. They have such a rubric — supposedly the four sets are each of a different difficulty level. But… the easy one this time was supposed to be the woodwinds. So… I suspect there’s a lot to learn about what actually makes for hard versus easy categories. Big Data may be the only way to actually arrive at a valid answer in order to smooth out the play experience.

As an aside, the advanced style of NYT crossword has many similar elements to this. But there are several things that help: difficulty ratings on the puzzles, learning puzzle authors’ styles, and the wide availability of easier crosswords out there, which help you learn the underlying logic (which at the advanced level, includes truly esoteric trivia, often multilingualism, advanced degrees, and a keen sensitivity for wordplay). If the only crossword puzzles in the world were like advanced NYT ones, few people would do crosswords.

Where a puzzle becomes a game

Word Dad has a very different approach. Unlike Connections, it does not have a singular answer to the puzzle. You see spaces for three words of varying length. You have a set of letters, exactly enough to fill all the spaces. You just need to make three words.

Once again, this is open-ended set building, and rewards crystallized knowledge in the sense of a wide vocabulary. The contrast to a typical puzzle is that the game accepts any valid solution that makes three words! Now, instead of the puzzle designer being in charge of the “category” axis, you are. This makes the words into verbs rather than content, which is the same move that is pulled by Scrabble and Boggle and countless other classics.

You have a success metric, too. All valid words, you see, fall into one of three levels: common, uncommon, and rare. This gives an implicit “score” you can get. If we assign 1 point for common, 2 for uncommon, and 3 for rare, you can solve the puzzle with any score from 3 though 9. (The game doesn’t actually show you a numerical score this way, but players have gravitated quickly towards aiming for scores of 9 — i.e. three rare words). Rare words, by the way, are not all that rare! You will almost never need to reach for a dictionary.

You also get only one submission — so you can experiment all you like, iteratively finding an optimal solution — and even better, there are frequently several solves worth 9 points! Invalid words are quietly rejected with no penalty.

Word Dad rewards you with a groaner dad joke or pun when you solve the puzzle, which is a nice bit of feedback that strongly themes the game. But the underlying problem space is already pleasing. You feel in control, you can iteratively learn the patterns to to go for. In this case, the logic rulesets you are deducing are “which words tend to be common and rare in a corpus?”, “what is the letter frequency of words in English” which is a nicely bounded statistical space to master, and a fun resource allocation problem across that landscape with vowels. You quickly learn tactics that turn STUB (uncommon) into BUST (still uncommon) into BUTS (rare!).

A fun wrinkle: given a dictionary of valid words, you can procedurally generate Word Dad puzzles, and guarantee 9 point solves. You just pick three rare words and scramble them! So it’s easy to make more content for, rather than hard. This is a virtue.

Making it even better

Word Dad uses word length as its difficulty metric. Over the course of the week, the words get longer. But I don’t think this is actually the right metric at all.

In practice, the thing that most affects difficulty is “how many valid solves there are.” The more there are, the more opportunities for players to deploy their vocabulary verbs, the more chances to feel smart by finding more solutions. If a given layout only had one solution, given that the words are generated by starting with three rares, the puzzle would be extremely hard, and back to binary: either you score 9 or you lose.

You could address this by adding a solver to your generation routine: have an unscrambler check the layout, and see how many valid solves it can find. Reject puzzles with less than a certain threshold. Ideally, reject them unless they permit the full range of scores from 3 to 9. Personally, I would also reject puzzles that only have one 9-point solve.

You could also make your generator better. The main thing that constrains the possible solutions landscape is the number of vowels. One of the things that currently messes up the difficulty ramp from the early week easy puzzle to the hard end of week puzzle is that you might get an “easy” puzzle with very few vowels. This cuts the possible solutions down dramatically, and starts favoring “trivia” knowledge like “Scrabble words with no vowels” and the like.

Lastly, there would be a big win in expanding the scoring scale. A decent player can start scoring 9 every single day without too much effort. In that sense, the game is too easy. This is no major sin: There is lots of room in the world for an easy daily diversion, but designers have to eat, so improving the game’s retention is still a worthy goal. Easy ways to add “skill ceiling” would include

• Including time as a score component: a higher score goes to a 9 point solve in a shorter time — this rewards one sort of player
• Having rarity within solutions: there are often several 9 point solves. Grant more score for esoteric, unusual solutions compared to the commonest solution the playerbase arrived at. This would reward a creative impulse and add a whole new logic puzzle to solve (“how do other players of this game tend to think?”)
• Bonuses for unusual words: a solve that included a word no one else used could provide a different sort of thrill to a player, and provide an orthogonal goal to pursue.

None of these need conflict with one another, and they’d all add to the game’s depth and replayability. It’s probably not hard to come up with more.

Game grammar

Anyway… I didn’t really mean to spend my Saturday afternoon doing a close systems analysis, but it’s been a while since I did anything of the sort. Or posted on the blog at all!

If you are a game systems designer, these are ways of thinking you should learn. Learn to see how games — even word games — are built out of common elements like set formation, tokens as verbs, statistical distributions, learning loops, and all the other concepts I’ve mentioned here. This is what I call game grammar: the underlying rules all games share. This same analysis can be done on a platformer or an RPG, a tabletop game or a sport. They’re all games in the end.

Well, twenty-five years is a long time. Half a life, in fact!

Given that I actually started work on UO on September 1st 1995, it’s actually more than half. The fact that the game is still running is a testament to the devoted community and the ongoing maintenance over the years from countless people.

I note a lack of thinkpieces and articles, this time around. The fact of the matter is that the most frequently targeted gamer audience wasn’t born when UO came out. A lot of the folks streaming about games weren’t born yet either.

I saw a post on Reddit yesterday that asked “how come no other MMOs have done open world housing, besides ArcheAge?” Ah well….

In many ways the influence of UO is so pervasive that it isn’t visible. Whether it’s Runescape, Minecraft, Eve, DayZ or Neopets, those younger folks probably played something that was inspired by UO in some fashion, and don’t realize how big a shift from prior games it represented. These days, when people say they are sick of crafting being in everything — it makes me want to apologize a little bit. Won’t apologize for games that let you sit, decorate a house, or go fishing, though.

I’m running low on specific stories about UO and its development, so instead, I’ll just point back at older ones:

First of course, has to be the postmortem we did at GDC for the 20th anniversary:

This postmortem drew pretty heavily on the article “Ultima Online’s Influence,” published on this blog five years ago at the 20th anniversary. If you’re one of those people too young to know why UO mattered, this article is probably the place to start.

That video wasn’t the only time we did a GDC postmortem though! There was another one back at the 15th anniversary in 2012 as well, which is available on the GDCVault. The session was very informal — don’t expect a lot of actually useful development takeaways, five things that went well and five poorly in Gamasutra-approved format, any of that. Instead, it’s mostly war stories and anecdotes.

A thing you cannot see in the vid — when at the very start Starr asks how many people in the room worked on UO, a lot of people in the room stood up. And when asked who played — it was almost everyone. A nice moment.

At the twentieth anniversary, I recommended these articles in a blog post, and I think they’re still the place to go if you want to read more on this site about the game’s development, philosophy, and challenges.

• UO’s resource system parts one, two and three. These describe how the underlying world of UO works — from the “infamous dragon example” that never came to fruition, to how it still underpins crafting and AI.
• A UO postmortem of sorts, which is a written one I did and not the same as either of the above videos
• The evolution of UO’s economy. Every time I turn around on social media, I see another Web3 enthusiast saying that they are drawing all their inspiration for digital economies from their childhood playing Ultima Online. Really not sure that’s the right takeaway…
• Database ‘sharding’ came from UO?
• How UO rares were born
• Random UO anecdote #2, which periodically goes viral on Twitter
• Random UO anecdote #1
• Ultima Online is fifteen, which has a host of stories about the game development.
• The end of the world covers several games, but includes the story of the end of beta.

Since that list was put together, I’d also add “A Brief History of Murder,” which is over at Game Developer. It’s an excerpt from Postmortems, my book that has a bunch more material on the history of UO.

UO when it first came out got a pretty mixed reception. Including picking up the “Coaster of the Year” award (which made more sense when games came on CDs). But it did pick up plenty of awards at the time.

But since then its legacy has gone on to be cemented by being named one of the 100 most important games in history several times over, by both gamer sites like PC Gamer and Polygon, and by big mainstream press like TIME Magazine.

Not too bad, even if all the younger folk aren’t quite sure what it is.

That’s OK. Frankly, my sense is that in many ways, now is actually UO’s time, in that the ideas it represented (and still represents!) are actually everywhere in games. It just took a while for everyone else to catch up.

If you’re one of the oldbies yourself, try reviving your account over at Broadsword Games: they’re giving away a veteran reward for people who have quarter-century-old accounts.

I have some photos that various folks have sent me over the years from the early days. So here’s a few:

These first ones are all from E3 in 1997.

I just watched a couple of videos about sandbox vs themepark games (in particular one by NerdSlayer and another by Josh “Strife” Hayes)… One thing that struck me about the ways players often talk about this (because at this point the history is so old) is that people think of sandbox as the older version of MMOs, and themeparks as newer. But that’s not right – sandbox is not the older form.

Sandboxes are the evolution of themepark MMOs, not the antecedent.

Part of the reason why this isn’t clear is because most players today haven’t played what themeparks were originally, back on the text virtual worlds called MUDs that led directly to MMOs. Given that I suspect I am partly to blame for these two words having currency in the first place, I thought I’d put in my two cents.

MUDs had more “species” than MMOs do today. Caveat: I’m gonna really oversimplify this history here. If you really care, the MUD Wiki on Fandom, started in the wake of the great Wikipedia purge of MUD content, has you covered. At peak in the early 1990s, MUDs had mostly abandoned some of the older sorts (such as “talkers” and “scavenger hunts”) and solidified around a few types.

There were creative worlds such as MOOs where anyone could build anything. Today’s inheritor to this tradition is something like Second Life. Maaaybe Roblox could be considered this, but really Roblox is more oriented around making games than any MOO was.

Many many MOOs ended up less about creativity than they were about just hanging out – basically, the progenitors of social worlds ranging from Habbo Hotel to There.com, and eventually even the hellsites known as Facebook and Twitter.

There were pure roleplaying environments, usually on MUSHes — an activity that these days happens more on Discord probably! Or in GTA Online, weirdly. These usually had LARP-style combat, with mutual-consent style systems for interaction.

There were a few roleplay combat MUDs like Armageddon where you had to apply to even be allowed to play, with a full roleplaying background. They had all the gameplay of the combat games, but you could be banned for breaking character!

Then there were pure hack n slash games, the Diku model but also most LPMuds. These were about starting out at level 1, going to zones for your level, killing mobs to lvl up, then off to the new zones that you could now handle with your increased power. While there were tough encounters (the “raids” of their day) the levelling was the principal gameplay. There wasn’t usually a major narrative element there, though – it wasn’t until World of Warcraft that we saw what I call the “quest-led game.”

Combat MUD zones were assembled more or less carefully to supply the right level of challenge for players or groups of a given level range, reward with gear of the appropriate power, and were assumed to be “run” over and over until you got diminishing returns. Each zone was often fictionally themed, and usually they made no sense sitting next to one another. If you want to analogize to a “land” in a theme park, you are really not far off at all. And hence some of the origins of the term…

Earlier in MUD design, these zones even “repopped” all at once. That is to say, players ran in, and killed stuff, and the zone respawned all the mobs at once, on a timer. It was like resetting a little stage-play; the NPC actors hit their marks and reappeared at their start location. It was actually seen as a notable innovation when individual mobs repopped on their own timers. Why did something like that come to be? Well, because many of us who were making MUDs wanted more… realism. More immersion.

Here’s where the history gets interesting. MOOs and LPMuds were highly scriptable – the former exposed it to users, the latter to builders. But either one was radically different in that way than the most popular game engine, which was the Diku style (we called them “codebases” back then).

Dikus were entirely hardcoded. All the content in the game was just data in fields. And that meant you had to be a programmer who knew how to code C on a Unix machine to add any new behavior to the system. On the flip side, adding data was really easy. On MOOs and LPMuds, you had a lower barrier for adding features, but you also had a higher barrier for “just making content.” Most Dikus could, with minor text editing, share their zone files, because they almost all played exactly the same!

(Ironically, the high barrier for LPMuds actually led to something similar, where because adding consistent functionality to games was hard, people released “mudlibs” of functionality, which resulted in lots of clone games there too).

As you might guess, pretty soon this led to more Dikus than any other type of MUD. But it also led to… envy. LPMuds usually pioneered the cool features in combat MUDs, because they could. They also had (gasp!) quests. Not a new idea, of course…Quests had existed in the earlier MUDs predating the whole LP/Diku/Tiny ecosystem… they were in fact implicit in the scavenger hunt model that went all the back to gathering items to put in a display case in Zork; and present in the design of MUD2 (it had eight of them by 1991, and you had to solve some to become a wizard).

So… DikuMUDs started to add scripting systems, which were generally much more limited than the ones on LPMuds, but fit better with the whole “fill out some rows in a form to add content” development model. Some of this was used to just add nicer NPCs, with conversations, reactions to the environment, etc. But on a few Dikus, it led to making quests too, and it was actually a lot easier to build quests in a “quest system” than to one-off hand code them in an LP mudlib that didn’t implement a “system” for it.

I played on Worlds of Carnage, the first DikuMUD to have scripting like this, and then worked on LegendMUD, which was one of the very next to have scripting – and Legend’s was quite a bit more powerful, apparently.

Carnage is the first Diku game where you really see stuff comparable to quests from World of Warcraft. But it was still very much a Diku! We would sit at the fountain waiting for the spider queen or whatever to repop, which we would check by typing the HUNT command over and over. Then we’d zoom over and kill it in order to maximize our XP per hour. But you could also have a newbie sword that talked to you and gave you advice, or visit a zone based on Romeo and Juliet full of quotes from the play… and kill ‘em all. The scripting on WoC made for better combat too, because you weren’t stuck with just the built-in combat AI for your enemies. AI had more sophisticated combat tactics, because designers could add fresh behaviors to the monsters.

On LegendMUD, though, we chased after something else. We pushed the Diku style to add things like… a tavern where you could play blackjack. An entire instanced Last Man Standing minigame. (Pretty sure we lifted that from an LPMud). An out of character lounge where you could attend a lecture series. When a famous player character retired, we could create a bot with their name AND give it all the catchphrases and RP the player had developed, and set it loose.

And above all… quests. Real ones. Stuff that in many ways was quite a bit fancier than what WoW eventually did. This, in fact, was what my signature design style was. Highly narrative, intricate puzzles, and immersive storytelling. It would take a looong time before any MMORPG had anything comparable. If you follow that link, you’ll see open world events occurring as the quest proceeds, done without zone or quest locking, etc. Heck, there was one quest that redid the entire zone spawn.

These were absolutely “rides” the player went on. And I loved them, and loved making them. But they were also a ton of work. And we and other MUD designers were wondering how to get more of this stuff to happen without having to hand-code it all.

Enter “simulationism.” We used the term actively on MUD-Dev back in the day, making the distinction between simulation and “stagecraft.” Simulationism was the idea that you could get the MUD’s basic behavior to the point where cool stuff happened organically. MUD2 had far more simulation than MUDs did in the 90s… or any MMOs today!

A key inspiration in the mid-90s was a game called DartMUD, which featured farming! And crafting! Crafting in other games was mostly one-off stuff tied to quests, or really simple magic item creation. DartMUD tried for a fuller player economy.

The state of the art has moved on so far that it’s hard to convey how important the idea of “let’s make these behaviors generic” was. An example from a bit later, from EverQuest 2: they had dogs that chased cats. Simulationism says “dogs dislike cats, and attack them. Cats flee when attacked by dogs.” In fact, it says “mobs have hates, and aversions.” It’s generic. But the old scripted way was hand coded, so it only worked with that cat and that dog.

In fact, EQ2 did in fact just hardcode some cats running a loop around the city, with some dogs running the same loop a few feet behind them, and called that “virtual ecology.” Contrast that with Ultima Online, a simulationist game where wolves actually did hunt rabbits.. and at first, the rabbits learned from the experience, and got stronger!

When people today say sandbox versus themepark, they mostly mean simulationism versus stagecraft. WoW is a giant amazing piece of stagecraft. So is FFXIV. But Eve is basically simulationist. The tradeoffs were evident early on.

So simulationism was born as a way to make fantasy worlds richer, more immersive… in a sense, to “make the ride better.” Despite the knock against it today, it was not seen as a way to offload the effort onto players – back then, that’s what MOOs were for. In fact, UO was fully intended to have the same sorts of quest content that LegendMUD did. You can even find the bones of it – a hedge maze here, some inscriptions in a dungeon there. But we simply did not have time to make any of it, and so you got a freeform “sim world.”

You might enjoy this MUD-Dev post from 1998, which contains boggling moments like “nobody’s really tried a good storytelling MMO” and astonishment that “there’s now an EXCHANGE RATE between UO gold and real world money…”

Contrast this to EverQuest. EverQuest was based on Diku gameplay, end to end. At launch, it had no quests, really, despite the name. Zones had level ranges (though infamously, lots of “zone sweeper” mobs). It famously only added any crafting because the dev team saw it in UO during beta. Today some folks like to say it is “sandboxy” but I’m here to tell you that it was absolutely a Diku-style themepark, of the pre-scripting period.

Hence why I say that to some degree, the terms are my fault. Not that I coined them, of course; the concepts were very much in the air.

The result: when we put linear narrative quest content into Star Wars Galaxies, we called those portions of the map where those narratives lived “themeparks.” We didn’t have anywhere near enough of them, because ironically, we didn’t pick up the Diku lesson and have nice templatized quest systems.

But then along came World of Warcraft, and the whole game was linear narrative quest content. How? By spending around five times more money than any other virtual world developer ever had in the history of mankind. Before WoW, you played a Diku-style game to kill ten rats. After World of Warcraft, you had a quest to kill ten rats. It seriously changed everything, because both sandboxy and themeparky games had a problem with guiding players.

It’s hard to get across how big a revolution that was. We had chased simulation in part because of cost and scalability, which was a horrendous problem for us all, a problem that both Josh Hayes and Nerdslayer specifically called out in modern themeparks. And a problem EQ blithely inherited.

Now, WoW made MMOs accessible by fundamentally making them linear. Oh, not totally. But classic WoW actually punished you for leaving the quest line. WoW was less explorable at low levels than vanilla EQ, for example, precisely because of how carefully and well done the level scaling of content was.

Which brings me to the other terms I used to use: “worldy” versus “gamey.” The MUDs that wanted to seem more immersive, more like an alternate world, they didn’t color-code your opponents (there was a “consider” command but you had to invoke it manually). They definitely didn’t color code your gear. You didn’t march through “progression sets” of gear at all, really. A lot of gear was easy come easy go, actually. There was a general design consensus that even if a MUD was telling a story in its quests, the world was definitely not “your story.”

It was a world. Worlds do tend to be larger and more confusing and less approachable than games, for sure.

One last thing – these days, because UO set the template for “sandboxes,” and then Eve reinforced it, a lot of people identify sandbox gameplay with ganking, full player vs player environments. But they aren’t equivalent. UO had that for simulation reasons. Galaxies did not. Any given game can decide where to draw that simulation line. UO was trying to solve governance problems using simulation, out of a belief that to do it by controlling players would be too expensive. We were mostly wrong.

I say mostly, because social media today shows we were partly right also. 

Bottom line: sandbox does not equal PvP combat.

These days, if you are a hardcore enough aficionado of online worlds, you might see reference to the term “sandpark,” often applied to games like Runescape, Black Desert Online, or ArcheAge. That definition is actually what sandbox meant originally. (Runescape at launch was basically very much like UO btw.)

You can build linear narrative themeparky content on top of a rich simulation. And sandbox does not have to be devoid of content. But it is impossible to do the reverse. Linear narrative themepark stuff is by definition breaking the rules of the sim.

Today, that simulationist impulse is visible in Minecraft. In Roblox, which is built on a physics sim, at heart. In No Man’s Sky and in Fallout 76. But it’s also visible in the Holodeck, or in anime like Sword Art Online (which was directly inspired by Ultima Online!).

In fact, it’s visible in pretty much every other fictional depiction of online worlds. When we dream of alternate virtual realities, they are always simulationist, because the whole point of dreaming is to dream of richer worlds and richer experiences, ones with more internal consistency.

This doesn’t mean that the guided onramp, the clear progression, and the crisp goal-setting of themeparks is bad. Hardly. It’s necessary for broader audiences. Even Minecraft has a much clearer starter set of goals than UO did. But!

Sandboxy stuff – worldy stuff – simulated stuff – is how your themeparks get better. And the biggest reason why the themepark line has dominated is because it tackles mostly solved problems, compared to building a true alternate world. It’s stuff that single-player game designers know how to do. Breadcrumbs, dialogue trees, cutscenes, progression paths. Expensive, but at heart predictable for the developer. Alas, also for the player, after a few run-throughs.

Me personally… I’ve been visiting these worlds for thirty years. I was done with predictable a long time ago.

— crossposted from the Playable Worlds website

This paper on “Mastering uncertainty: A predictive processing account of enjoying uncertain success in video game play” is very worth a read if you are interested in the frontiers of figuring out what “fun” is. Luckily for me, it doesn’t say I’ve been on the wrong track for decades.

It does raise interesting questions given its framework — I’d love to see slot machines explained — though there is some stuff on affect that likely ties in. It also teases out some of why I have never felt comfortable with the “flow = fun” equation.

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Another interesting intersection with other material would be motivations (a la Bartle/Quantic Foundry) and personal goal-setting. Players DO grind, after all, as they optimize, and tho the paper mentions people don’t get stuck in “popping bubble wrap,” they do for a lot longer than one would expect.

For me the answer to that ties back to the lemma/heuristic model of pruning possibility that is usually discussed in the context of “what is game depth.” I’ve come to see forward strategy and perception of depth as being about indeterminacy and a sense of “victory parity” tilting back and forth as we project. There’s something to tease out in that plus motivations plus this paper that could be useful in thinking about how to construct game metas in particular.

Anyway, I encourage the read. It ties nicely to other work such as OpenAI’s RND.

One of the niftiest parts of my career has been seeing pieces of my work turn up as building blocks for others (such as AI systems trying to mathematically implement Theory of Fun). Always feels good when your stuff is built on. Nothing gets to stay at the pinnacle for very long, but getting to be a piece of foundation is a pretty cool and a lot better than the alternative.

Dan Cook also has thoughts on this paper that are worth a read, and open yet more rabbit holes to explore.