Doing that in that environment, where real-life people were
experiencing - to the minute - the content that you put in was a really
powerful experience. I wasn't one of those people who played a single
player game and said "I need to do that!" No, right from the get go I
was a multiplayer gaming guy.



I did that for about a year or so, then I went to work on the original
Gemstone that was released. After that I worked on Gemstone 2 and 3,
until I decided I should take a break and go to school for a little bit
to make sure I had something to fall back on if - as my dad put it -
"That whole gaming thing doesn't work out."



Fortunately, that "whole gaming thing" seems to have worked out just
fine. Really it's been all about multiplayer gaming even from the very
beginning of it all.



It's funny because people ask me, "How'd you get your start as
Technical Director when you only had three years experience to start
with?" The way gaming credits work, I just had never been a part of a
game that had a printed box where I could be credited. So the 10-12
years that I was doing my work with text games just aren't listed on
any credit site due to the lack of boxes.



Ten Ton Hammer: What kind
of schooling have you recieved? What was your educational focus and how
has it helped you with the development of MMOGs?



Scott:
Honestly, I wasn't the greatest student in the world and my education
experience can be called spotty at best. I have my own rant on my blog
about this, but I think the educational industry is ripe for its own
sort of revamp right now.

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style="font-style: italic;">Extensive
experience has helped Scott develop a holistic approach to development.

But I was really sort of the "Average Joe" sort of student at my
college. My background was engineering and I was programming before I
went to college, so I decided to go for a degree other than that
because I was already doing programming. I tried being a business
major, an electrical engineer, and a few other majors for about a year
and a half until I went into electrical engineering in computer systems
with a programming orientation also. I really liked it a lot, and it
was really all about starting with the absolute building blocks and it
built up from there until we were learning about microchips, computers,
and operating systems.



All of my experience prior to going to college was all about top-down,
high-end software systems. This was approaching the entire act of
computing from the bottom up - volts, currents, and resistors. By the
time my knowledge met up with the stuff I learned in school, it was
really neat having a complete picture of how the entire process comes
together. It really gave me an appreciation for looking at all the
systems
holistically.      
 



The same sort of systems really exist when you're looking at a team of
developers. You have to look at all the people working together as a
whole and understand how they function individually while also getting
them to work together as a complete system.



Ten Ton Hammer: Has your
gaming history influenced your work on Everquest 2? How has it helped?



Scott:
Having worked with various different gaming systems is actually fairly
fantastic. I was actually just contacted by the folks at the IMGDC to
give a talk on this very subject. There was a fairly heated argument on
the blogosphere a few weeks ago concerning scripting and whether its
right or wrong.



Once you've seen this implemented nine or ten times in the past, you
learn that things aren't necessarily right or wrong. It's all about
really pulling out the strengths and weaknesses that you're looking for
and finding the infinite number of solutions that are going to work for
your individual case.



Ten Ton Hammer: As a
player, what's your favorite aspect of Everquest 2?



Scott: I'm a
big fan of the fact that I can log in and I have a choice of what I'm
going to do that day. There are some days where I log in and I only
have a few minutes and I play the broker game and shop for particular
items that I may not have lying around.



I actually play on the same server as our tradeskill dev, and she
introduced me to the joys of house decoration, so there are some days
where I do just that. There are yet other days when I just want to go
hunting and there are other days where I group up and raid. I like the
fact that I have those choices in front of my when I log into the game.




Ten Ton Hammer:
Conversely, as a developer what's your favorite aspect of the game?



Scott: This
is a rough question, because I really don't see those things as two
different things. Personally, I think developers are at their best when
they see their games as players. Although I do think there are times
that devs need to separate themselves, but more often than not I think
it's important that dev can at least relate to their player base and
what they're going through. Only then can you really make something
that is going to be entertaining for the player.



Ten Ton Hammer: Do you
think you've created a game where it's easy to see things as a player
while still remaining a developer of the game?



Scott: Yes
and no. There are things about the game that are ridiculously easy to
make, yet there are portions of the game that are incredibly complex.
We've taken this game and really made it do things that it might not
have been originally intended to do all that well. I think that says
more about the team than about the software itself. It's good software,
but I think it's more about the individual will needed to get the job
done.



I think some people could have been content just making things in this
engine, but other have taken it as a way to really excel at their
particular area. A couple of engineers come to mind that have wrestled
our massive data set and come up with really cool ways for our
designers to work with it in the last year. They even created ways to
speed up our content placement - sometimes at twice the speed - that
really sped things up. Some of it really made Rise of Kunark possible
in this last year.



Ten Ton Hammer: Why
should a gamer play Everquest 2? How would you recommend the title to
someone who hasn't played it before? How about someone who left the
world awhile ago?

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style="font-style: italic;">Everquest 2's
diversity, depth, and breadth should bring players into the world.

Scott: That
one's easy. The big reason is to be online, in a world, where some of
the people are interested in what you want to do, while other players
are simply interested in what suits them. To me I view that as a big
positive. It's really all about that diversity, depth, and breadth of
the game.



I love that interaction between crafters and adventurers. I love the
intra-adventuring as people tackled new content. I love the sense of
communities that build around individual servers, and that includes
those that are built around their individual guilds. I love that we've
fostered these sort of connections through things like our guild tools
and our guild banks. We were the first of a kind in a lot of areas
there.



I think that anyone who's interested in a world where there's a lot of
things to see and hear and do and is regarded as one of the best in any
MMO that's out there should definitely have a compelling reason to come
and play.



Ten Ton Hammer:
Finally,  what's the best part about being in the MMOG
industry and what advice would you give to anyone else wanting to break
into the field?



Scott: It's
really neat being in an industry that's just figuring out how to BE and
industry. Everything is changing, everything is fluid. The movie
industry analogy that gets thrown around is we're in the time period
where movies were having to get new cameras and new lighting and new
effects every time they had to shoot a new movie.



Eventually we'll evolve to the point where we're just working solely on
content and not so much on the tools or the business models. I think
it's going to be a really interesting road to get there.



Pieces of advice: No matter what part of the industry you want to get
into, personality and drive mean SO much. I cannot emphasize how much.
Having a compulsive need to take ownership of things, and the need to
take control of things and do them immediately is how things get done
and get done right. If you can foster a way to feel bad when things
don't go well and then understanding how you can help things go better
in the future, that's a way people become great.



As weird as this one might sound, lots of people are spending a lot of
time on the Internet these days using correct spelling and punctuation.
It's that need to communicate clearly with your audience. So much of
our jobs are written down that invariably the people who write like
that also alter the way they think. And it's noticeable. So training
yourself to have quality, reflexive typing habits is a good thing.



Finally, I cannot recommend enough that you understand basic algebra.
We use a ton of it in game development. There's so much of production
level game development that takes place in Excel. As a guy who went to
engineering school, I can pretty much vouch for the fact that I didn't
need a whole lot of calculus once I got out of there, but the basics of
advanced math and basic algebra is something that will serve you for
the rest of your life.



There's my list of things people can do to try to get into the
business.



Ten Ton Hammer: Thanks
again, Scott, for letting us have the opportunity to chat with you, and
we look forward to our next conversation!

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