An old university lecture from Valve boss Gabe Newell is making the rounds online, with clip merchant WebKnower racking up millions of views on YouTube sharing snippets of Newell’s advice. The talk is still interesting today, and in one especially popular clip, Newell examines “the biggest mistakes game developers make.”
The video circulating, “Gabe Newell Explains Game Developers [sic] Biggest Mistake,” might be a bit of a reach, but Newell’s argument is reasonable. You’re better off watching the full talk on the YouTube channel for the LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas, where Newell spoke to students in 2013. This particular comment comes up around 51:30 into the video.
One presumed student asks Newell about security and tech concerns around games as interactive, digital products. “It sounds like, with building these worlds, that it would almost be easy for a hacker to figure out how to use your world to do something that you really, really, really don’t want them to do,” the off-screen person says.
In his response, Newell argues that, “First of all, there are multiple kinds of hacking. One of the biggest mistakes game developers make is to mistake a genuinely entertaining action by a player as hacking.”
He brings up an “example game developers tell each other” with regards to hacking: “When Lord British was killed during his first speech in Ultima Online, they rolled the world back rather than recognizing that it was the coolest thing that had ever happened in Ultima Online.”
On August 9, 1997, the character of video game forerunner Richard Garriott, often known as Lord British and embodied in Ultima Online under the persona, was killed by another player in what’s come to be known as a grand assassination.
The Branson universe wiki has a useful summary of the event (there’s also a good archive and video from Razimus Gaming). After a crash interrupted a server event, the invincibility for the character of Lord British was mistakenly left disabled when Garriott logged in again, leaving him vulnerable to other players. One onlooker, a player named Rainz, hit Lord British with a fire spell and killed him. Ever since, killing Lord British in Ultima games has become an Easter egg and a tradition.
“After Lord British was killed, fellow Ultima Online developer Starr Long (also known in-game as Lord Blackthorn) summoned some demons, who attacked innocent bystanders. This led to beta testers protesting both the indiscriminate killing and the banning of the assassin,” the wiki adds.
Final Fantasy 14 boss Naoki “Yoshi-P” Yoshida was actually present for the assassination of Lord British, a milestone in MMO history. Many years later, Yoshida would lead the Herculean effort to turn the MMO Final Fantasy 14 into a fun video game known as Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn.
“They should have let that instance turn into whatever an instance turned into after they killed off Lord British,” Newell said. “So you have to be really careful. Second, it’s a general characteristic of social systems that people have to have confidence in the future, and that’s true whether it’s your house and the stuff that you have inside of your house – if property rights are provisional, then your value of property changes accordingly … so yes it’s important, yes there are a whole bunch of technical problems to it, and the degree to which you fail to provide adequate security, those consequences will ripple throughout the entire meta world.”
Newell’s argument – that the devs of Ultimate Online could’ve found a way to work this assassination into the MMO’s story – finds support in the YouTube comments on the clip of his talk. “Yeah they should’ve moved forward following that,” reads the top reply. “An assassination had happened. They should’ve rolled with the punches and incorporated that into the story moving forward.”