How FarmVille’s makers missed the boat on the next great era of gaming

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Before there were virtual farmers in FarmVille and virtual shop owners in CityVille, there was Ultima Online.

Considered to be one of the first successful
massively multiplayer online computer games, Ultima Online changed the
way many developers and players thought about gaming.

While it was created to be a place where people
could adventure — fighting goblins, raiding castles, hunting through
dungeons — it also became a place to set up virtual shops, dye clothes
or go fishing.

What started out as an online version of an
adventure game became a social experiment, one that showed that in-game
entertainment doesn’t always have to be so violent.

“Most of the games at the time were about combat,” said Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima series. “But Ultima Online was a place where people made careers that had nothing to do with combat.

“It was a bit like some Ville-style games — there was shopkeeping, farming, managing pets and displaying things in your house.”

When Zynga broke into gaming with its incredibly
popular FarmVille title, it tapped into that desire to do something
social and simple. But Garriott believes that Zynga’s games are already
getting too complicated, in some ways missing the point of casual
gaming.

“When I first saw FarmVille I thought it was too
simple,” he said. “The repetitive nature is too obvious and the depth
too minimal. FrontierVille was much better designed. CityVille is
already too complicated. There’s too much stuff happening, so many
bells and things going off.”

Garriott’s next game, developed by his new company, Portalarium, finds the sweet spot, he says.

“It’s a smallish game, in sense of scale of
features, diversity and depth,” he said. “It’s not farming, it’s not
pet management, it’s not shop management. It’s something original, but
right in that niche.”

The unannounced title is “targeted right at the heart of what we believe to be popular social gaming.”

“Once we get that game built, then we’re going to
move on to the next grand Lord British game,” he added, referring to
the name of his in-game persona for the classic role-playing games he’s
made in the past. “It will be the spiritual successor to the Ultima
legacy.”

Portalarium was founded around the notion that
social gaming is the next “grand era” of gaming. Garriortt says that
all of his companies were “devoted to one of the grand eras of gaming.”

Origin Systems created and published the Ultima
series of computer games, titles that flourished during the age of
single player titles, he said. Destination Games partnered with NCsoft
to developer and produce games like massively multiplayer titles City
of Heroes and Tabula Rasa, games tied to the growing popularity of
online gaming.

Portalarium is dedicated to social gaming — a grand era of gaming that also is marked by low cost or free titles, he said.

“Single player, multiplayer, with each of these eras
the market has gone up dramatically,” he said. “Social-media games are
about to pass a threshold to the hundreds of millions of players.

“That basically means everybody. Everybody is now a
gamer. The magic of this era is that we literally have all of humanity
in the gamer pool.”

But that means that developers need to find new ways
to entertain those of us with gaming experience while still capturing
and entertaining this new blossoming audience. It will, Garriott says,
lead not only to a change in the games we play, but in the way those
games will be made.

“Now that we’ve brought in all of humanity there is going to be another upheaval of the rules.”

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Brian Crecente is managing editor of Kotaku.com, a video-game Web site owned by Gawker Media. Join in the discussion at kotaku.com/tag/well-played.

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