Interview: Talking Gaia MMOG with Dave Georgeson, Sr. Producer

When Gaia Online CEO Craig Sherman announced in February that the youth-focused virtual world would be launching an MMOG this summer, there wasn't much more information available. Gaia has started ramping up for a closed beta, though, and Senior Producer Dave Georgeson took the time to explain why Gaia is looking in a new direction. "The first reason is that a couple years ago they polled the existing user base, about 1 million people at that time," he explained. "They got two really big top-of-the-heap answers. The users wanted pets and they wanted an MMO. There was all this fiction and background in the social community already. There were a lot of things they cared about in the plotline on the site. They wanted an MMO so they could get into it and feel like they were a bigger part of that world."

"The company talked about it for a while and realized that there are a couple of things that could be better about the site," Georgeson continued. "There are a ton of cool things to do on the site—the cinema, racing rallies, and the biggest forums on the 'Net—but it's still hard to have a concrete reason to brag to your friends about it. By building an MMO we're making this huge, non-downloadable, easy-to-play game, and that's an easy brag point. [The users] can say, 'I told you to check it out and now it's cool.'"

Of course, while it's great for the users to brag to their friends about how cool their online hangout is,  the business point goes beyond just viral marketing advantages.

"More people get integrated with the game and make friends," Georgeson said. "We're a social site so that makes us more successful. Then it makes it less likely for them to go elsewhere. It's a win-win."

Fitting an MMOG into a Virtual World

Gaia Online is described as a virtual world and a forum, which makes it seem more open-ended and unformed that it actually easy. There's  actually already a fairly extensive guild system, roleplaying community, and narrative  built into the world, though. It's just not always readily apparent. 

Part of the role of the MMO is to change that.

"One of the areas our community site could be improved is that we've very carefully hidden our back story from everyone but the hardcore users.," said Georgeson. "The MMO will be bringing the back story out to the front. There's a section in the news site that has all our old manga. It's all there, and the people that have been with the site and stick with it for 3-4 months, they get really involved in it, but in our casual social environment, it's kind of the hardcore feature. When we launch the MMO, it brings it to the fore and people can go back to the manga stockpile and read it and say, 'Oh, that's what it means.'"

Some users, though, may not feel comfortable making the jump to a game-based virtual world--if they're accustomed to their sandbox, they may not want to get out and play in the theme park.  One of Georgeson's goals, then, is to make Gaia a place for both sorts.

"The metaphor I use a lot is that Gaia is like a mall right now," he said. "It's got all these stores and it's a cool place to go, but not everyone knows about it. It's like we're building a big anchor store now. As you play the game, you'll naturally find the rest of the site. The forums, the arenas, all that's integrated into the game. You may show up to play the MMO, but you'll find all about this. You can go fight the Giant Dragon and when you're done take the same six people in your party and watch 'The Matrix' in the cinema or go race in the rallies."

Part of the reason that should work is that Georgeson envisions his project as  a Casual MMO. It's meant to be accessible to users who want to spend an hour or two each day or week--not 8 hours each night. The other reason he's excited about the prospects is that more and more MMOs are working to build in extra features like Gaia's (e.g., Lord of the Ring: Online's much-praised music making system). Gaia just has the advantage of working in the other direction.

"When you're building an MMO, you want to do all this stuff, but you never have the time or resources to do all that," said Georgeson. "Just building it on top of the existing community makes it all the richer."

Beyond the virtual world background for the casual mmo, Georgeson also highlights the fact that Gaia  offers more variety in its gameplay than some other MMOGs. Locations will behave differently according to the number of people present, monsters will spawn in different ways, and a wider variety of scripts, he says, create a sensation of spontaneity.

Also, there's golf.

"One of the other things I'm particularly proud of is that a lot of MMOs have the same experience wherever you go or no matter what you've done for how many people are in the area," said Georgeson. "It's a big treadmill of killing monsters and getting loot. We still have that, but we also have aboveground game like golf that people can play even if there's a battle raging around them."   

Selling a Casual MMOG and Selling Virtual Goods

Gaia has always made a portion of its revenue from selling virtual goods, though increasing amounts are coming from sponsorships. An MMOG offers plenty of new options to sell virtual goods, though it also raises questions of gameplay balancing. Even  more important, though, is the fact that Gaians have already developed their avatars according to personality, not functionality.

"One of the fundamental things about the site is that they already have characters and have dressed them up the way they like," said Georgeson. "We didn't want to bring them into the game and give them all this armor with powers and such. We didn't want them to feel like they had to wear it to play because that would change the characters personality."

Georgeson's solution is to create a system of virtual goods that change gameplay and help users play together without having to completely redesign their Gaia avatar. He looked at Battle Rings.

"You can use 8 rings as skills and change them at any time," said Georgeson. "If you're a veteran and have been playing for 6 months and your friend wants to start playing, you can take ff the rings and you're a newbie or you can give them to the user and he can play at the high level. We want to make it so users understand they didn't earn them—people are warned it's a newbie with veteran clothes on so to speak—but we want people to play however they want. That includes changing your skills and essentially reclassing yourself whenever you want. It makes a big free-form sandbox for them to do whatever they want."

That's not to say sponsorships will go away, they'll just likely take a back burner to microtransactions that enhance the experience without seriously affecting game balance. The goal is to keep things inexpensive.

"We are going to have optional microtransactions," said Georgeson. "There are things you can purchase for 30 cents or a buck that will make things easier or give you a short cut. Nothing is required and there are always ways to play with out that, but some people want to take shortcuts, and we'll let them. But we don't allow people to do things like buying battle rings and we don't charge for required gameplay. We haven't even decided if we'll charge for expansion packs. Probably not, but I wouldn't commit to it. "

At the heart, though, the MMOG is still about eyeballs and engagement.

"Honestly, the biggest way we'll make money is that if they like the game and stick in the community, everything we do is more effective," Georgeson said. "In a way the MMO is a big retention tool. If they stay, we win. All the sponsorship stuff we're doing, the virtual goods we've had previously, and optional microtransactions--the more people we have, the more revenue there is."

Making the MMO Social

Since Gaia already has a virtual world, guilds, and forums, it should be easy to promote a social environment in its MMOG. Users could simply take their communities over to the game and pick up where they left off in the virtual world.  Georgeson, though, is working on a system to make it even easier.

The way most users seem to make friends in MMOGs is to team up for a specific quest, evolve that party into a more regular group, and then, if things work out, transition that to a guild membership. Georgeson says that last step is still a doozy, though.

"We asked what it is about socialization that creates friendships in games," he said. "We've built some mechanisms to attract people to the right position and make friends more easily. If we're right, it's going to make it easy to find really good groups that can grow into solid guilds and turn into long-term friendships. A tight community makes a good game."

Unfortunately, he couldn't say much more since the system is still in development.

"I can tell you more in just a few weeks," he said.

The Future of Gaia

Gaia hasn't announced a name for the MMOG, but even at its first announcement, Craig Sherman was already predicting that it would quickly become a major player in the MMOG space. In part, that's because Gaia Online is already a major player in the virtual worlds space. Georgeson has a background in creating MMORPGs for Sony. Now he's glad to work for a hungry audience.

"You're usually begging 2000 people to go to the retail store and try [a game] out," said Georgeson. "Maybe they like it or maybe not. Our biggest issue is that Day 1 is going to be monstrous. Normally you get 20-30,000 users in the first week and then it trickles in after that. Here we've got 5 million people that have been waiting three years for a game. The day it launches, they're all going to want to play. It's a wonderful problem to have."

Hopefully for Gaia, that makes the biggest problem just keeping up with its users. The world's narrative is fairly open ended, blending sci-fi  elements with fantasy and a bit of self-referential humor  throughout.  It makes for a fairly unique environment, but it also keeps plenty of options open.

"Assuming we don't fall on our sword at launch, we have plans to grow the game continuously over the next years on a pretty aggressive basis," Georgeson said. "At the beginning we're launching the town and the surrounding areas. Even without making up another bit of background, we have three other cities which are very cool places and very different feels.  We don't have any attention of ever stopping. Learn form Blizzard: the bigger the world, the harder it is for people to leave."

As for a time line, Georgeson hopes to start showing the world off to press when it hits the late alpha or early beta mark. Past that, his goal is still still to make a summer launch. That, as he points out, is still relative.

"We announced at Comic-Con that we're going to launch the game in summer," he said. "For me in production, I looked at the calendar and the last day of summer is September 22. We're shooting for an earlier date, but things happen."

Comments

[Sidewinder]

OMG! Dave Georgeson? The man who killed the Tribes franchise? The man who was demoted, then fired from Planetside? The man who's last project got reviews that made Daikatana look good?

How does this smacktard keep finding jobs?