Customer service liaison Cliff Hicks challenges naysayers to put their games where their mouths are. You know where to find him: [email protected].

　　Intelligence comes in many forms. Some psychologists theorize that more than 150 different forms of intelligence exist. But, apparently, the intelligence involved in creating all-new products, new social movements, and new social structures isn't really in demand right now. I want a 21st-century version of the kind of toe-to-toe technology war we saw with Tesla versus Edison, where we don't just have fancier mousetraps. We need creativity. We need the next important technological revolution. It may be scary to some, and it may create a mountain of things that no once cares about, but it's out of these absurdities that we find that next piece of the puzzle that becomes indispensable in the ever-changing course of human history. If conflict is a powerful driver of progress, then what we need to see is a real technology war between death ray that can destroy 250 planes at 100 miles versus a stereoscopic undead communicator, or something.

　　Welcome to your future home as a game designer: the cubicle.

　　One of the hurdles that has hampered games for years is that everyone had to do it all. You had to be a software engineer to get into making games in the beginning, and this limited the number of ideas that could come in, because engineers were the ones who understood the rules. Many of the greatest inventions come from people who don't know they're up against someone else's wall. Tell an engineer your idea for a game design, and he or she may want to tell you it can't be done. But it can...probably.

　　Theoretically, anything you can design in your head is doable, but there is a question as to whether it's worth doing in the first place, and just how much time it will take to do it. It's like movies, films, music, and any other form of mass entertainment. Welcome to the big world, kids, and that means you're going to have to fight to get your game together. And you have to know how. Decide first if you want to tell a story (like most adventure games), or if you want to give an experience (say, Civilization IV). Both are entirely valid game design start points, but the two don't often mix well.

　　You see trees, I see a game waiting to be developed.

　　Here's a few things to keep in mind before you go around claiming you have the next Doom or EverQuest. First, you're not going to make your masterpiece out of the gate. If you want to make games, be prepared to put in a few years in the trenches: testing, interface coding, art finishes, and so on. There are lots of little jobs in this industry where you can start cutting your teeth and see how games are put together. Second, you're not going to be rich and famous. If you're getting into games to be the next Miyamoto or Carmack, quit now. There are easier, faster ways of getting famous or rich, like taking an offer from one of those swell bankers from Nigeria I'm always getting e-mails from instead. Lastly, prepare to meet a lot of resistance. This is a tough, tough, tough business. According to this 2001 article (registration required), the average term of an employee at a game studio is two years, or so. It's a harsh reality, but one that's important you know coming in. If you want more stability, get into accounting or something. And be prepared to encounter a lot of resistance if you want a life outside of your job (but don't get pushed around on this, since the best game makers are happy game makers, and the game industry needs to learn how to work within a 40-hour work week). But most importantly, don't be afraid to shoot for the moon with your game design.

　　Let me tell you about a game design that a friend of mine and I put together once, not so very long ago, to show you what I mean by aiming high. (If there's a development studio out there interested in this, take it, make it, free of charge...just give me a thank-you in the credits.) One of the things about massively multiplayer games that has always amazed me is how little impact players can actually have on the environment around them. Don't get me wrong, I love my World of Warcraft, but I rarely feel like I'm changing the world itself, even as the head of a 300-plus-member guild. We, as a guild, don't alter the world itself. We can't. So what if a game world evolved? Imagine if your guild, as a group, could explore new land, settle there, control the resources, and strike up trade routes with other groups? Imagine if the world existed around you, not as an individual, but as a group of individuals. And it changed.

　　If you look at our world right now, you'll see some basic rules beneath the surface that you could apply to this MMORPG I'm suggesting be created. Say a guild stakes out a mountain, and from that mountain, they mine a mineral that they find can be used to generate fire. They jack the prices up and finally another group gets so upset that they invade and take over the mountain. And somewhere, across the continent, a chemist fiddling around with a small sample of the stone discovers how to make a projectile weapon out of it. Enter the new superpower, just like that. They build a city. Then another. Another guild buys small amounts of land and sets up transportation lines, building a high-speed train and using the same stones as fuel. But what happens when the stone mine runs dry? And just when the continent gets settled, cities are constructed and some ships show up. Players from another continent have built boats and come over in search of new land. And after two or three months of siege, the invading army crushes the major resistance and controls the continent. Except that the rebels work in secret, attempting to overthrow the existing government. And they sent someone to remove the head of the existing faction. Not long after that, a massive storm destroys the major city. Not a player-driven storm, it's just a random act of nature. And, eventually, players get into space. What then?

　　Economy. Invention. Ecology. Politics. War. Assassination. The game would have to be as open-ended as you could possibly make it. No two servers would be even vaguely alike. You could even establish random physics sets for each server--what worked as a power source on one server could only function as a paperweight on another, and so on. Recipes, formulas, flora/fauna populations, even basic geography--each could be randomized with each new server, and each would have to be discovered. Players would cultivate skills, not stats or loot. Players would have roles based on the talents they worked on, like traders, farmers, warriors, smugglers, guards, businessmen, bankers, and politicians. The rules would be there, but they would be invisible. No levels, no power gaming, just development. The key to make it work would be to make the interface relatively simple and the game easy to get into, unlike, say, Second Life. Resources would be limited, so eventually you'd run out and have to find new ones. We called our game "Frontier."

　　If we want to evolve games, we have to make sure that we bring in men and women with radical ideas; we have to give ideas away without thinking of the almighty dollar; and we need to compete with each other for the next big thing. Big game publishers can set up Skunk Works teams, people whose job it is to do nothing but sit around and innovate. Or, better still...

　　In the late '90s, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence league tried a new project, called distributed computing. The idea was that people had computers sitting around doing nothing but running flying toasters, when instead they could be working. All that computing power that had been doing nothing started filling a void. What if there were some way to apply this concept to game players? All those people who've been playing games for years would start contributing to the process of making games. Each generation of new players that gets into game design gets a little crazier, which could be a good thing. The more people who get into making games, the more diverse and original they're going to get. It'd be anarchy at first, but all radical social changes come with at least a little uprising. I stand on what I've said for years, "We'll burn that bridge when we cross it!" Just like Cortez, who scuttled his ships when they reached the new land so there could be no turning back...

　　Next Up: Design by Committee by Greg Kasavin