Slouching Towards the Perfect Role-playing Interface:

An Opinionated Discussion Of UO, DSO, and Other Alternities

By Boro Smallwood

Most of you are certainly aware that Ultima Online is now widely available. Some of you have eagerly rushed to your local shopkeeper and said "hi buy" to get a copy.

So here we are, a few weeks into the official release, and what is the state of the game? Sure, there have been lag, bugs galore, and obnoxious pronouncements from the staff (what else did you expect after all?). But UO continues to be enormously popular, more and more people enter Brittania every day, and Origins has been setting up a new server on the average of one a week. The mechanics of the game will settle down, sooner than later, I suspect, because of the quick response of Origins to gameplay iss ues and their use of auto-patching. But is UO a good role-playing game? And what makes a good role-playing game, after all? And how is a computer role-playing game (CRPG) different from, and similar to, face-to-face gaming?

First, you need to know that I love tactical simulation games like Quake and Dungeon Keeper. I certainly wouldn't mind if UO were just another good tactical game, albeit massively multi-player. But of course it isn't. It claims to be something more, a "role-playing" game, and as such offers its dedicated followers a chance to shed their mundane lives and step into another universe.

Of course UO is not the first such game to do this. The most popular, and the first, was Dungeons and Dragons, way back in 1975. Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) interestingly enough got into the business of making fantasies come true by designing a tactical simulation, a set of rules for medieval miniature battles called Chainmail. These rules included a small fantasy section that had rules for wizards casting spells --- and the popularity of these were so great that they were expanded into a boxed set of 3 small books called Dungeons and Dragons.

The initial books had very few rules. The dungeon master, and the players, really had to fill in many gaps. I remember well that there was something called a "Giant Toad" on the encounter table in the D&D books but no rules to tell you how many hit points it had, or exactly what it looked like. I painstakingly drew what I thought the Giant Toad would look like. I envisioned an imperial creature, with a crown, surrounded by hundreds of small poisonous frogs. Luckily it was not prone to eat ing adventurers, but rather preferred giant insects as food.

People, gathering together with nothing but paper and pencil, concocted fabulous universes. The essence of the game was communication between people. Interestingly, communication took many forms. Some expressed themselves in words, others by painstakingly creating detailed miniature figures. One of my favorite dungeons was themed to the Michael Jackson "Thriller" album, and the DM played a different song in every room. Music as communication. There were rules, to be sure, but the rules were fl uid, and changed (and became less important) as the players became more experienced. In fact the rules were often in the way, as players and DM's disputed fine points.

Okay, sometime between 1975 and now people started porting these kinds of games to computers. Of course, they weren't anything like D&D until networks and multi-player gaming came along. Now we have lots of "role-playing games" like DSO, UO, and the like, filling our hard drives. But do they work as promised?

The most successful games are communication intensive. The better the chat interface, and the easier it is to use, the better the role-playing experience. Some of the most intense roleplaying on-line requires no "game" in the sense of graphics running around beating on each other. I have noticed that in Sierra's Realm, the "in-character" channel (much like an IRC channel, actually --- a separate window that is at the bottom of the game screen) always has fairly interesting dialogue bu t only rarely corresponds to what the icons in- game are actually doing. In MUD's characters will stand a long time in a single area and just chat. Dark Sun online shares this advantage as well, with a chat interface super-imposed on the game window. The text scrolls line by line (5 lines max) directly on the upper left side of the game screen and is easy to read and identify while playing. Players can easily chat with anyone in the game by using a feature called "ESP", which requires no magic ski ll. Dark Sun further customizes chat by providing some cheezy yet fun text icons for things like a smile, a frown, treasure, weapons, etc. However, despite the excellent chat interface, nothing else is customizable, and that is where DSO fails.

UO is in some ways a completely different paradigm than DSO. In UO, the character icons, as well as parts of the environment, are customizable in sundry ways (hair color, length, clothing style, color, armor, masks, and many other things). Character text floats over each character's head. Characters cannot chat with each other unless they are close, and when they are close, their text overwrites their neighbor's. Think about it: I have to be near you to say something, but being too near makes my text con flict with yours. On top of that difficulty, chat only lasts a few seconds on-screen and then disappears. If I turn my view offscreen for a moment, I will miss all that you had said. There is a journal function that can be used to record messages, but it is on an opaque scroll that covers about one-fourth of the screen.

The UO chat interface is difficult to master. For effective communication, it is necessary to have an unrelated program like ICQ or IRC running in the background. This makes in-game discussion even more frustrating, because you are constantly switching to another window and losing the bursts of text that float momentarily over people's heads.

Making communication difficult in a role-playing game is nearly the kiss of death. The result is that role-playing barely exists in UO. Most of the roleplaying appears to be offline, as people develop extraordinary web pages. I fear that UO will not be a good "role-playing" game until the problems with the chat interface are addressed.

The ideal role-playing interface has yet to be developed. UO is not the best yet, but shows the most potential. I only hope that the coding gnomes at Origins realize that communication is the key. Until that happens, role-play will be better in other universes.