Interviews:Editor's Extended Interview at Ten Ton Hammer

From Stargate Worlds Wiki (SGW)

Interview at TenTonHammer

I had the pleasure of listening to the audio interview recorded at the Game Developers Conferece this year between Chris Klug, Creative Director at Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment and our very own Nicole Hamlett and Jeff Woleslagle .

It is quite possibly one of the most interesting interviews I have had the good fortune to listen to and that says something. Our original article on the interview can be found right here. I've been in the gaming industry for 12 years. Believe me when I tell you that not every game designer is meant to give interviews. Chris Klug on the other hand, could keep you hanging on every word.

I would like to share my impressions of both the game and of Chris Klug, a designer that many of you have probably never heard of, even though his background is first-class. Chris was candid, insightful and passionate. Consider him a hidden gem in an industry known for its costume jewellery.

First a little about his background, which takes him from rubbing shoulders with entertainment idols to building a winning MMO to teaching future designers the art of mixing drama with game design,

"I attended Carnegie Mellon University drama department with John Wells and Holly Hunter. I did professional theatre in New York for about five years, and then switched to game design where I started out doing a pencil and paper role playing game in 1981. My first MMO was Earth and Beyond. After Earth and Beyond Carnegie Mellon established a graduate program to train video game people. I went back for two years to teach, but the mixture of a television space and an online space intrigued me, so when this opportunity came, they inticed me to come back out and build this game. "

On his vision of what at its core, StarGate Worlds should be;

"From the moment you login, you will feel like you are living in the same world as the T.V. show."

Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment has the rights to cover StarGate SG-1 and StarGate Atlantis. Plans are to also cover any future spin-offs that may occur. Especially interesting to me was that not only would the television series have an effect on the game, but events in the game would have effects on the television series. The plan is to work cast members into the game as NPCs, but with the game is so far out who those personalities would be is unclear.

The gameworld will include Earth, other worlds accessible via the StarGate and space which will be accessible via spacecraft like Prometheus. The races that are planned may be surprising to some fans of MMOs.

"Plans for playable races include Humans, Jafa, Asgard, Symbiotes, Oonas, ...We want to deliver as many of the non-human races in the show as we possibly can. The list is obviously still in flux. What is really exciting is that the executive producers of the show see the online world as an opportunity to do things that they can't do in broadcast. It's pretty clear if you watch Thor on the show, that he shows up in a chair. He shows up and he stands behind a desk. At lot of that is driven by the fact that their CG budget is limited. One could speculate that our ability not to be limited in that way would free us up to do all sorts of storytelling with the character races that they can't really do on air.

Take a minute and imagine the hurdles that must be overcome to bring a successful television show to the massively multiplayer online game market, not only making the game successful, but keeping it true to its roots.

"Storytelling is change due to conflict and conflict comes when two dramatic characters want something different and this want brings them into conflict. In an online universe the 'want' is essentially to achieve a level of mastery in that universe and to then implement something at that high level, consume something you haven't consumed before, or to be able to affect certain level of achievement in the universe that heretofore has been unavailable to you.

If I have mapped the concept of the television show properly, as the players drive toward that level of mastery it mirrors the achievements and challenges that the show has presented the main characters in the broadcast episodes."

I can count on no fingers how many IPs (intellectual properties) have translated well from the passive mediums like television and movies to the interactive MMO medium. The underlying reason for many of their failures was that the designers tried to fit round pegs of scripted screenplays into the square holes available in the current MMO designs.

"I'm trying to deliver the tone and feeling of the show. The way in which players navigate the online space should evoke the same emotional response that their heroes in the T.V. show do when they navigate their world. There are certain activities that don't map really well. I don't think it's possible to deliver a game system that mirrors Sam Carter's search for a life partner. If the gaming experience is a series of problems and solutions, risks versus rewards, then when I define the problems and solutions, risks and rewards I want to use the same vocabulary and grammar that the show does."

And not only are current MMO designs an inappropriate blueprint for scripted entertainment, but they are built for the intricacies of fantasy universes, not science fiction ones.

We weave this tapesty of people, events, game systems so that you might drive through the game space in a different way than I do, but we are presented with the same basic core challenges and those core challenges have to find their basis in the show.

I'm a big believer that we're a science fiction show, not a fantasy show, so that means the challenges that I give the player have to be different. One of my challenges as as designer is in a space dominated by fantasy titles, getting the player to wrap his head around the fact that we're not going to have you hunt for rats and bats. That is a fantasy motif. Think about what that implies. It implies that we are in a hunter-gatherer society. You have to think about what the tasks are that make sense in your universe, so that the whole thing begins to knit together.

Remember that terrible science fiction show that you watched one episode of and then never watched again? It won't be made into a MMO any day soon. Successful entertainment franchises are another animal altogether and though none have become household names in the MMO industry, there are underlying reasons that they are successful television shows or movies. Chris delved into the StarGate universe and hopes to have pulled out the core components that have made it a success.

"To me there's a real difference between the incidental information about the show which I consider to be; What weapons do they use? What clothing do they wear? Where have they gone? Who do they know? That's all nice information to me, but I analyze an IP to try to find its emotional core, and so what I did initially was that I cherry picked my way with the advice of people who knew the show intimately through a lot of the seasons to find what I thought made the show work. What I was looking for was if every single show that had spaceships, aliens and exotic weaponry in it was successful, because if it was those things, no science fiction show would ever go off the air.

So, I had to throw that stuff in my head out and find out, 10 seasons of information and a successful run on T.V., why did that happen? So I concentrated my analysis on figuring that out. I created a document and the trip up to Vancouver was a chance to sit in the room with Robert Cooper to discuss that document and he basically said, "Oh, you understand the show" My purpose was successful to convince him that though I hadn't seen every single episode I understood why the show works."

The reason that the show works, and the reason that Chris has me excited about his game is simple, yet deeper than most television viewers probably realize.

"The show works because there are two layers to the story telling. There is the objective layer of the aliens, the ray-guns and the spaceships, but then there is this layer of humour and emotion that sits below that.

The scene that for me is the essence of the show is at the end of Season 7. O'Neill has been inundated with all of the Ancient knowledge and he is frantically, almost robotically putting together all of this technology and everyone thinks he is going to die because of the risk of all of this information. He is standing there and he is working on all of this stuff and Teal'c comes up to him and essentially says "O'Neill I want to tell you that I really love you", and O'Neill stops and puts his hand on the side of Teal'c's face and he doesn't say anything.

When I saw that moment I said, OK, I got the show. It's all this stuff up top, but it's really a show about friendship and loyalty and bonding and family underneath it. And, it's in a world where these people are just like you and I. They watch the Simpsons. They drink beer. They collect bottle-caps. They do all of this wonky stuff that we all do. They are not different from us.

From that analysis I dove deeper and went into; Who are the Wraith? Who are the Goauld? What is the core conflict in the series? So that I could then take that, extract it and push it out into the game."

With 10 seasons of backstory and lore to draw upon there are seemingly endless benefits, but also serious drawbacks. Suspension of disbelief will likely be harder in a modern day science fiction than in one where the developer can take more liberties with world issues. Roleplay is another aspect of MMOs that many players are vocal about. How will StarGate Worlds use the pre-built backstory?

"Is an MMO a roleplay game? I'm sort of an old-school roleplaying guy and I'll fess up and say to me a roleplaying game involves live humans sitting around a table with a game master.

So, that being said, to me the advantage of all that content is that on some level the task of moving the locations and trappings to the MMO space allows for lots of 'Oh, I remember when they were here in the show' kinds of experiences. The roleplaying aspect of that, to me involves activity. It gets back to the Daniel and Sam Carter stuff. Story to me is action and if I can deliver an experience where a character can adopt any of the paradigms they have seen in the show as a metaphor to navigate the space, that's a way to deliver the roleplaying experience. I guess I have to say that to me, that is separate from the environment. Environments are a wonderful boon to us and certainly it makes some aspect of our world creation easier, but the core of the show is about interactions."

When asked about building community within the game Chris replied,

"On a fundamental game system level the elder game play is going to be fundamentally tied to guild achievement. There are certain things in the world that you can only build as a guild. There will be individual crafting, but if you are going to build a Goa'uld mothership your guild is going to have to do that.

We are painfully aware of the fact that this is a dangerous thing to do in some ways, because people are people and have disagreements and not everyone does what you want them to do when you want them to do it, but in a science fiction universe there are some acheivements that we feel it is illogical to assume that an individual could accomplish. So when a guild builds its version of the Prometheus, they're going to have to get their act together to do it.

On an individual level it is really clear to us that the metaphor of the squad as a family is how the show is built. We're going to build a lot of systems into the game that will empower the squad as a unit."

But would playing with the same squad members regularly be an extra benefit?

"Absolutely, there will be mechanisms built in so that the bond between players is important to their careers."

And for those that prefer to play solo, rather in a group?

"There are going to be schwacks of content that are going to be inaccessible to them (solo players). Are they going to be able to go through their entire level career as a solo player? Yeah, I think that we would like to have that option, because I think that the reality of the gaming space is that if you go in a different direction you throw away the, 'it's 11 o'clock at night, I can play for a half hour. I just want to get on and hack away for a while before I go to bed' and if there is a forced grouping environment I think you cut down the potential options.

One of our goals is that whenever you logon for more than five minutes you can do something to advance your character. Will you see all the places you can see and go all the places you can go solo? No, I don't think so.

So much of the StarGate gameplay is Daniel alone with his library. We have a dual challenge. The first challenge is to make that gameplay experience reasonably engaging. The second challenge is to make that gameplay something valuable in a group setting. It wouldn't be StarGate without Sam pulling out the rack of crystals and rejiggering stuff. It wouldn't be StarGate without Daniel translating some Ancient text. Essentially, those by definition are soloable activities."

At this stage of development the design team has micro and macro goals that they are trying to accomplish.

"I'm thinking at 50,000 feet. I'm architecting these core conflicts and what the design team is doing is drilling down and saying, how does the tech tree of this universe work? What's the economy like? "

Chris pointed out one of the problems that seems simple on the surface, but that must be solved to create the foundation for the game.

"O.K., simple problem, you're working for the military. How do you get a gun? You request one. You don't buy a gun. In that space, what does money mean? A player economy has to have some sort of method of change, but if you're a military organization, never buying your equipment how do you reconcile that stuff? I'm operating on that level. How do I design a system that doesn't make it feel like it's a fantasy game. I'm wrestling with that problem. Once I have solved that problem I'll know how the money system works, how items get built, how items feed this tech tree..."

If the money part or the economy is tough to decipher be glad you don't have to deliver a looting system.

"Let's talk about looting, I need to help this local group, in this village, defend itself against a Jafa and Goauld attempt to take it over. Straight out of the show, typical situation. If I kill that Goauld, what does it drop? It's probably not dropping money, so what do you do? How do you balance that? All of these things start to ripple down from the basic decsion of what is the unit of exchange in the universe? How does that work? What are people doing to drive themselves through the economy? How do player crafted items feed into this economy? How does the looting system work is so far down the food chain from where we are working right now, that I'm confident that if we can solve the big issue we'll solve the 'how-to' issue. I would like the looting system to be dynamic. I would like the looting system to be context driven. I would like the looting system to do many things on a technical level, but I haven't defined what loot is yet."

Strangely enough, Chris Klug wasn't a hardcore fan of the StarGate series until about six months ago, a fact you would never guess when you listen to him speak about the franchise and the game. I appreciate that he took the time to talk to our team at GDC. At E3 I get this interview.