Loathsome game prospers

Wired on Friday: From the outside, it seems a very Walter Mitty kind of hobby. Jick, in his spare time, lords over the Kingdom of Loathing, a joke Web world he had imagined full of sly humour and puns. In the Kingdom of Loathing, you can climb Mount McLargeHuge, and the Dark and Dank and Sinister Cave, and the Misspelled Cemetary.

You fight Ninja Snowman with your Ridiculously Huge Sword. Those who win enough fights become Alligator Subjugators or Sub-Sub- Apprentice Accordion Thieves.

And if you don't want to fight, you can pursue more humble tasks - earning cash to buy new weapons by performing acts of drudgery. Or sell your hard-won goods at your own market stall, hoping to make a little profit from your campaigns. Or take vacations.

Taking vacations gets you frequent traveller awards, which are valuable within the game. Or you can just sit in the corner of the game, getting drunk.

Jick - real name Zack Johnson - created this world. He is not, however, all of the inhabitants. The inhabitants are other Web visitors, exploring and battling and making up their own jokes within the confines of his universe.

I've written a little before about such mini-universes before, back in April of last year. The generally accepted descriptive term for them is "Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games", although that mouthful is now being seriously tested with sites like Kingdom of Loathing. There's a bit of role-playing in Loathing, although most of the adopted roles are in-jokes.

What separates Jick from the usual definition of MMORPGs, however, is that while they are carefully crafted universes, created by major games companies, which charge a monthly subscription of anything between $10 and $20, Jick's world is for free. Jick himself started the game almost as a parody of such games.

"I wanted to make a game in a week, with no gameplay elements", he has said. "I had no idea what I was getting into."

Eighteen months later, the Kingdom of Loathing has nearly 100,000 active accounts. Jick may not have intended much gameplay, but his players have created their own - making suggestions, that he has implemented, and then testing them to destruction within the world.

Commercial MMORPG manufacturers have a terrible time balancing out new game elements and improvements to their world. Maintaining the "balance" of a long-playing game is paramount.

One tiny slip - perhaps making one in-game weapon a bit too powerful, or introducing a monster that is just a little too easy to defeat - and loyal players may find themselves losing all the points and prizes they have accumulated to those who know how to manipulate the new game. They then take angry vengeance on the company that took their money, but ruined their game.

There have been strikes and demonstrations in-game throughout the short history of MMORPGs. A recent protest in the LucasArts' "Star Wars: Galaxies" ended when the games' operators teleported the protesters in to space.

Other angry players have set about sabotaging the game to ruin it for everyone else.

Customer relations are never easy when your customers think they are space pirates.

Another stress on commercial games is this: when a player spends hundreds of real world hours building and buying in a virtual world, who owns the imaginary objects he has created online.

The knee-jerk response is to say that no-one does, because they don't really exist. But what happens when he tries to sell them online? And gets a good price for them.

Most commercial games companies frown on such behaviour, and insist these imaginary items "belong" (if they belong to anyone) to them. Auctions of virtual goods in games like Sony's Everquest are shut down by threats of copyright and trademark infringement.

But such controls are hard to maintain - and hard on the loyalty of players too.

Giving them a free rein can escalate into publicity nightmares too. In 2002, one enterprising group of MMORPG players opened a sweatshop in Tijuana, Mexico, where for a small wage, bemused Mexicans would build virtual objects in the world of Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot, which the proprietor would then sell on ebay.

Subscription MMORPGs remain highly lucrative. But sites like Jick's may yet establish their own niche. Jick doesn't care much if his world's internal economy crashes (as it has done, several times), or that people sell their Kingdom of Loathing artifacts elsewhere. More importantly, neither do his players - much.

A free game is a free game; Jick is happy to keep building his kingdom, and his players are happy to keep improvising within its chaotic and unguaranteed realm. The only return Jick gets is in T-shirt sales, and voluntary donations.

Well, almost. In fact, what money Jick has made from Kingdom Of Loathing is a fine example of the virtual trading that the big game companies would instantly stamp down on. To show you have donated, you receive, in game, a trinket - a "rare and powerful Mr Accessory".

It's an utterly useless good, even in the relatively high uselessness of most Loathing objects. But its owners see it as a badge of honour that they've contributed to the upkeep of the game.

That, of course, means, in a way, that Jick makes most of his money selling his own virtual objects, made from his own imagination, in a world that he created.

And he's doing quite well at it, too: last month he quit his job to live full-time off the proceeds. It's not in the same league as the millions that the big game companies pull in - but it's a trick Walter Mitty never quite managed to pull off.