I started recounting the BagHead incident, my epic experience with Herb Yang's thesis Kingpin prototype, early last fall. I don't think I've posted anything about it here since October. One side of me wanted to leave it at "Part Three", teetering just short of a conclusion, like the end of the Sopranos but without the comforting darkness. David Chase would have liked it that way.
But this isn't HBO, this isn't even television, this is a different beast entirely. It's likely I could've left the BagHead story unfinished and no one would've noticed... but the moral of the tale has kept me invested on a personal level in getting this sucker done. So, for the faithful who remember and the curious who will read anyway, here is the Punchline of the BagHead Chronicles, late but intact.
There I was, a veritable Kingpin of Kingpin. I had risen through the ranks with my secret secondary identity to become one of the major forces in Angeltown. To achieve success, I had "broken" the social circle of the game by bringing in an aggressive semi-friend from high school.
With his seemingly unlimited reserves of time and energy (plus a little unfair knowledge of PHP) David was steamrolling everyone in his path; together we expanded in an uneasy alliance. The closer the Butterfaces got to their revenge, however, the less excited I was at the prospect. I felt like I had betrayed some fundamental principle, like it was me, not Wilson Fisk, who had truly killed Misty Eyes LaBone and the Beauties. I had my reservations about our play style... but I fought on: I was the BagHead now. The BagHead didn't care about "fairness" or "treaties". The BagHead took care of himself. And he wanted the 2nd Year Masters' Students to realize, just before the end, the mistake they'd made in double-crossing the Beauties.
Everything was leading up to a climactic battle between the 2nd year alliance (Scott Gilles, manning the Greeks, and Mike Brazil aka Wilson Fisk manning the Toddlers). We had infiltrated their territory, and David was going in... in fact, David and his Genco Importers were attacking so fast I couldn't keep up. This was not what I wanted to happen... he was going to undermine my entire plan for revenge. It was the BagHead who needed to strike the final blow.
Finally, with a good chunk of their territory gone, the Second Years realized they were in trouble. They began to fight back against David, giving me the time I needed. I had a motley crew... Spider, Sammy the Bull, and Brakepad (a tear came to my eye when he showed up for recruiting... he had been one of the strongest of the Beauties, before the fall). I knew where their bases were, I had AK-47s and shotguns in stock, a good supply of cash. I braced myself for the last battle.
But it never came.
Because of a bug in Kingpin's combat, all the drama, all the energy we had collectively invested in that database city fizzled out into nothing.
To explain how this happened, we need to step outside the streets of Angeltown and return to the real world, where all my machinations amounted to mouse-clicks in a well-lit room.
The problem that eventually reached through the computer to strangle our fantasies had started weeks earlier, when the loading times started increasing to ridiculous intervals. By this point, we had to wait three minutes between every click and response. Turns which should take one minute took half and hour.
We talked to Herb about it, but he swamped with other work and couldn't find the time to fix it. He reasoned that since the playtest had started, it would be problematic to tweak the code.
Then the combat began to deteriorate. First random assailants would "pass through" other players, then, soon enough, fights stopped happening altogether. Characters would take damage at random as if to make up for this bizarre pacifist turf war.
I wrote Herb about this problem, got an apologetic response that there were lots of problems with the game and that he was busy at Pandemic.
Pretty soon the fiction had evaporated, and we were all aware that we were playing a busted system, not a game. Gilles and Brazil left their Kingpins behind. David destroyed their holding-pattern gangs and eliminated them from play, establishing himself as the dominant force of the game. But even before he messaged me to tell me Mike Brazil was out of the game it I realized: I didn't care anymore.
I'm not writing this to slam Herb as a designer. If he didn't have talent, I wouldn't have cared in the first place. I'm writing this because Herb's stated goal was to prototype an MMO that allowed for greater player investment and drama. I'd say Herb succeeded in this prototype, far beyond my expectations. But his almost-exemplary thesis taught me a valuable object lesson.
If you are going to ask people, implictly or explicity, to invest themselves in your work, you have an obligation to honor their investment. You OWE it to them to keep your game healthy while others are inside it.
This may seem like a strong statement, but I believe it. We are an ambitious bunch, us Interactive Media kids. We want to evolve games, to make them more fun, more resonant, and more meaningful, because we think: "That would be Sweet."
But we need to realize there's a catch to this Sweetness. If we willingly distribute an experience to people, invite them into a little corner of reality with its own rules, we own what happens to them there. It is our JOB to satisfy these people who have invested their time in our ideas... it's the law of hospitality.
If we tend to our players and help facilitate their experiences, we could be responsible for great things. Alter-egos, alliances, double-crosses... we will have given people we've never met stories and experiences they'll remember for years to come. If we don't, that potential vanishes, as do our once-enthusiastic players. And likely as not, they won't be back.
By now you are probably deep-sea diving in the irony of my posting SO FAR after my initial experience. If there was anyone out there was reading, I dropped the ball. But that's okay, I didn't post this to say "Hooray for me, I did it."
I posted this as a reminder of what I still need to do.