lot of metrics on the players that we would study every day. And we would study the
trends on these metrics, in terms of which objects they’re buying, what they’re doing,
what social interactions they’re choosing, how many friends do they have, and all these
things, looking for patterns. It was amazing how sometimes just one little thing that
was unbalanced would radically change the play pattern of everybody. And these were
mostly economic balance issues, some of them involving exploits. Somebody would
find an exploit based around one of the job objects in the game, and all of a sudden the
next week everybody would be using that job object and nobody would be using any of
the other ones. We actually probably found a lot of our exploits and bugs quicker
through the metrics than we did through players reporting it or testers finding it.
So did the change in your audience over time make the game hard to balance?
It felt like we were always trying to balance against a moving target. Sometimes we’d
try to lead the target, but I’d say it was always a fairly chaotic process. We could usually
look at the metrics and say, OK, that’s out of balance, and then we’d have two or three
different possibilities for bringing it into balance. And as we started balancing that thing
out, all of a sudden something else would kind of go wacky, and we’d look at that. And of
course it’s all interrelated too. There were some social trends too that were lon-
ger-term things, fads that happened in the world, that nobody foresaw at all and that
started affecting things.
What would be an example of that?
There’s a map in the game where you can see thumbnails of the houses as you scroll
across this map. The thumbnails are about 50 pixels across or so. At some point, some-
body decided to decorate their roof, and they did it in a way where they used different
colors on the roof tiles, and when you made the thumbnail of it, it ended up as this nice
little picture. Somebody did Madonna or Michael Jackson or something. So somebody
did that one day, and then everybody said that’s cool, and then within two weeks there
were ten of these in the world, and two weeks later every other roof was decorated with
some image. It was just one of those things that nobody had really foreseen, and it took
one player to figure this out. Somebody wrote a program that would actually scan an
image and then automatically configure a roof in the game. But things like that were
happening all the time.
Did you like to see those sort of emergent behaviors?
Oh yeah, that was really what we wanted to encourage as much as possible. Especially
ones like that, that weren’t affecting other people. There are other ones that were more
problematic, like there was this whole mafia organization that started in the game,
which became a big deal. It became probably the largest point of conflict in the entire
game. It was pretty organized; they actually had capos and this whole hierarchy report-
ing structure, and there were hundreds of players involved in it. And they saw
themselves as the guardians of the game. They actually would go out and grief players
that they thought weren’t playing it right or that were trying to ruin the game. So they
were basically vigilantes. But then other people thought they were just picking on peo-
ple for no apparent reason. And so there was this other group pissed off by the mafia
442 Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright