Lawra Clark said in her lecture that Ultima Online is one percent Ultima and 99 percent Online. I think that ratio describes somewhat accurately of the game’s structure. It’s about players instead of quests or missions or escorts – the world is designed to make players encounter, and then the game gives you tools to sustain the connection that emerged from that encounter. That’s why an MMO is never really “finished” in a way that a single-player game is. It only “finishes” when people stop showing up, and it’s ending is quieter, and more gruesome than a simple credits screen.
Raph Koster designed encounters in Ultima Online to happen through players’ needs. Everyone in Ultima Online has something to do – bank, sell, buy stuff, or repair, and the game has those functions in shared places that anyone can come and walk into. Britain’s bank is a crowded room (I believe, in the older days), and the world can count as one large gathering where the bank is a smaller sub-gathering with specific functionalities that fix specific needs. That goes the same for taverns and other shops in the game. For instance, if I need help with an escort mission, the intuitive action is to go wherever most players go – the bank, or a common vendor/shop. I could come across a fully armored stranger playing chess on a nearby table who looks like they clearly know their way through the game – so I need his attention, but I can’t attack him as that’d send the wrong message and probably get me killed. What I have instead is a keyboard, pair of hands that can type, and the text that floats over my head which only the people near me can read it. The chat system is a miniature socialization attempt, in the sense of an attempt to open a two-way channel with a stranger. I believe other people may have stricter definitions of socialization, and I’d probably agree with them, but socialization begins with the effort of communication regardless.
Making the encounter last long enough and through the game is a harder job, which is where other systems come in. Ultima Online unfortunately doesn’t have them, so players opted to external software such as ICQ and mIRC – the rudimentary form of guilds and friend lists that we all know and love today. Sure, people may’ve used them to scam, but it establishes a weird improvised trust system – and the channel barely matters. Big Walk, which is NOT an MMO but I think deserves an honorable mention here, has puzzle rooms that neither chat or VOIP will help, and players uses the game’s gestures mechanics for signaling instead. Players always find a way to communicate, and the game gives players a reason to.
So, how does a game with no foreseeable ending “end”? Certainly, not with a boss, or many bosses. You can beat all of them, and you’ve now seen all the content of the game, and have helped newcomers – but now, helping them never felt like your own first encounters. Something weird happens to your brain – it is somehow able now to predict how each mission resolve before you can accept it. Then, in the silence, painlessly, you forget to log in one day. Something real may’ve gotten in the way, a matter that required your full attention – then another day. Then days turn into months, months turn to years. But, let’s say players do come back. One day, you’ve accidentally stumbled upon this game again, and for nostalgia’s sake, you log in again. There’s two versions of what you’ll find.
In the first, everything is where you left it – your base, guild, friends list of forty-something names, most with last-online dates either dating months of years. While you were gone, someone looked at your name in their list, and saw you offline for months. They may’ve needed you at some point in the past, but you weren’t there. They wondered, and then forgot, and then followed suit.
“Something great happened here, but it’s over with.”
-- Kevin Killen, KMOX
The game is finished in the only sense that counts.
The second version, everything’s changed. The equipment you and your friends spent days or months grinding is now worthless because something better dropped in an update that happened months of years before, when the developers had suddenly decided to bloat the economy. The new thing was now everywhere, which feels like an uppercut to your crotch from the developers. Better yet, they removed the gathering places that mattered to you and your friends, or have gated them, or replaced by something that lost the feel of gathering together. Lawra Clark mentions this in his “World of Menus” part of the lecture, where convenience bought at the cost of meeting fewer people on the way. You feel like the game has been reshaped like clay pressed into other colors of play-dough, and you regret missing it, yet a small and annoying part of you is glad that you did.
"0.000% of Communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself sad. He is starting to suspect Kras Mazov fucked him over personally with his socio-economic theory. It has, however, made him into a very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Truth. Instead of building Communism, he now builds a precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous world."
-- Disco Elysium, Mazovian Socio-Economics Thought, internalized
I suspect Lawra has been through the similar experience, and I certainly have, and I believe other players have had this as well. As the lecture ended, friction is human, and the game slowly fades away when the friction dissipates.