Why was Faldon abandoned for so long anyway

During college I worked on the game here and there, but mostly I coded for fun and what was interesting instead of trying to make a go of the game. No business sense.

After college I had about $10K in savings and did work on the new client pretty well that year, but I ran out of money and had to get real work.

I also discovered that if I code for more than (say) 10 hours a day, I start to get carpal tunnel symptoms. I can't risk not being able to provide an income (so, 8 hours of coding spoken for) for any game.

Besides that, I remember some guy dropped out of school to play the game. And another guy camping a monster spot for monsters to get an item that, turns out, actually wasn't on the drop list. (I added it so that he got it and stopped.) I started to feel bad about the effect creating an MMORPG has on other peoples' lives and what they would otherwise have done with their time.

This time around I've been trying to improve the game at a very slow and sustainable pace. Who knows if it'll go anywhere, but if I keep improving it, it may end up a fun little game my kids can enjoy, and hopefully other people too, a bit of a penance for making it in the first place. We'll see.

Do MMORPGs have to be addictive like that, though? IS that their nature, or do people just copy each others' design decisions unthinkingly?

I used to read a game development website called Gamasutra -- it was fairly technical at the time -- and it published an article that was real wake-up call to me. It framed, quite enthusiastically, various MMORPG game design choices in terms of Skinner boxes. There is, in that way of thinking, no love for mankind.

I'm glad you got some enjoyment from the game. But to me at least, there's still that awful question, what would you otherwise have accomplished with the time spent? By creating this game, what good things have I taken out of the world? You can see why I didn't go into game development as a profession

Interesting insight.

I played this game some 25 years ago, and online gaming (particularly the world of Ultima Online) did hurt me as I pursued my collegiate studies.  It was not the only thing that hurt of course- you discover a lot of fun but distracting and often destructive things in your late teenage years, and that's part of growing up.  Eventually I got serious about school and career, and things turned out ok, though not without some bumps and changes of direction.  Could I have gotten myself on the correct path sooner, if I hadn't spent so much time playing games, or doing other silly young person things?  Maybe, but when you're 18, 20, it's hard to really know what you want to be or do forever.  Plus life is about making some mistakes.

Thanks for sharing your self-reflection, James.  I think your video game creation did bring enjoyment to many, and contributed to the social experiment that is the Internet.  People's reactions to the game, whether they be addictive or not, seems more of a reflection on them than on the game itself.

It's important to note that this cuts both ways - you also have to ask the question of what potentially bad things you took out of the world, and what good things you might've brought into it (outside the game itself). I'm sure there a ton of folks who would cite the sense of community that they found, but I have even a few examples that are more concrete than that.

I grew up in a rough neighborhood, and went to schools with high levels of gang violence and very low graduation rates. Time that I spent in middle and high school on my computer, in virtual worlds (Faldon, Ultima Online, etc), was time that I was not spending getting into bad situations. In retrospect, there's a pivot point in my life's timeline right around Faldon's heyday where things could've gone a very different direction.

More concrete - it's impossible to talk about my career path without talking about Faldon. I had zero employment experience in the field I went into after college, but I got the internship as an SDET that opened the door specifically by talking about my participation in the couple of beta tests that we did for various Faldon iterations. The fact that I was already familiar with bug tracking tools, searching for edge cases, etc gave me a leg up. I've been contentedly employed at the same company for nearly 15 years, but again, my path would've been different without Faldon.

Finally, on a more subjective topic - my time as a GM (specifically, building maps and running events for the players) was really enlightening for me personally. I hadn't realized until that time that I had stories I needed to tell, or the joy that I get from organizing events.

None of this is to downplay the flipside - MMO addiction is a real, documented thing, and I think your reaction to learning about it was reasonable. But it's also not the only side of the story...