At this year's GDC, Richard Vogel essentially gave a talk about how difficult it is to develop a systems-driven multiplayer game. And if anyone should know, it's this guy: after working on the first 3D MMO, the groundbreaking "Meridian 59," Vogel was headhunted to join Origin Systems, where he was one of the most important and interesting MMOs, "Ultima Online" (UO) as senior producer. Twenty-six years after its release, UO is still going strong (opens in new tab), has produced some great stories (opens in new tab), and is a lesson for those who seek to build the virtual worlds of tomorrow.

But it wasn't launched that way; UO was rushed to market by EA, and its launch period became a war zone as developers felt they needed more time to put it in the oven. Developers were trying to get the game to a more stable place while simultaneously dealing with the consequences of how people behaved in the world they had created. The biggest problem we realized after launch was that it was an open-world PvP sandbox. 'What could go wrong? The assassination of Lord British was a really important shadowing moment for what this game was going to be."

Vogel is referring to the infamous incident in which Ultima creator Richard Garriott, who had a presence in all games as Lord British, was killed by a player throwing a fireball at him. Garriott's avatar had a God Mode that prevented him from being killed, but he forgot to turn it on, and Lord British was burned to death that day. Admirably, Garriott decided so: he was killed fair and square and never resurrected.

"We learned about player behavior like no one else ever learned. We learned how toxic players can be when there are no boundaries." The ugly side of human behavior was a big part of this game. We said at launch, 'There are no boundaries. There was a system in the game that was designed to actually cause grief. There were assistants that were like pets. You could kill someone's pet, skin it, and give it to that person. Why would you do that?

"I got a call from a lady, her daughter was eight years old, and she had lost her pet. She was very shocked. I said, 'Yes, I know. We returned the pet. We returned another one, but she was shocked that someone came up to her and killed her 8-year-old pet and gave her its flesh."

Other findings may not have been so surprising: the time it takes the average player to type certain words in chat, for example. 'In this game, the standard time for a penis is one minute and 23 seconds. ' I actually counted it. Okay, how long does it take someone to do that?

"What we've learned is that the more power you give the players, the harder it is to control them: if you're going to do metaverse, keep that in mind. Because that's reality. The ugly side of humanity comes out in the virtual world. I don't care what it was then. Even today, I think it is more amplified."

Vogel recounted the terribly tight conditions under which his team was working at the time, making the startling claim that the team of about 64 had been reduced to eight people working on an MMO that was generating about $30 million in annual revenue about three months into the post-launch death march. The turnaround from a rocky start-up was also a time when the team was looking for ways to deal with these unanticipated behaviors. One of the solutions was to bring the rule of law to Britannia.

"To rebuild the game, you have to regain the trust of the players. 'The only way to do that is to change the game. So we set up a police force. Yes, we called the GMs the police. We had to keep an eye on people who were harassing people in the game and doing all kinds of evil things. There were real gangs on the Pacific and East coasts. The middle part was great. They were role playing, harmonious, and beautiful ...... The east and west coasts were toxic.

"And it blew my mind. But the East Coast guilds got together with the West Coast guilds and invaded the central servers. But all the central people got together and kicked them out. But this is also an emergent behavior. And that's a great thing in a systems-based game."

Vogel's love for UO is evident, and he would go on to work on many more classic games, including Star Wars Galaxies. But when looking at UO's longevity, it really seems to stem from how central freedom was from the beginning: a game that resisted the urge to control and manage player behavior, until it became clear that certain behaviors simply had to be managed. That is why the game remains to this day a treasure trove of rich stories, the best of which are simply fascinating. Like when the developers identified all the item dopers in the game and burned everything they owned to ashes (opens in new tab): "It felt great.