This weekend at New York Comic Con, I was able to speak with Dave Georgeson, the lead designer for the upcoming casual MMO from Gaia Online. Dave is an industry veteran whose previous credits include Tribes 2, the Mechwarrior II series, Planetside, and Heavy Gear 2. This is what he had to say about his current project.

Gaia Online started as an online community. What was it like taking this and transforming it into an MMO?

Well, it’s not like we’re transforming it into an MMO, it’s more like what we’re doing is just taking a bunch of features from the actual site that already existed, and kind of bringing it to life for everybody. So all the different elements that were already in the community we’re building into a big game. And then of course we’re adding a lot of extra stuff to it, because there’s a lot of gameplay and stuff that needs to be added to it. But it’s really like just breathing a new form of life into a site that already existed.

But on the other hand, I love it! You know there’s five million customers sitting there waiting for the game to be done, and all these people that are really rabid about the site and really like it, and they really want to play the game, and that’s a good feeling. And so we’re getting to build a game that’s kind of irreverent in tone, it makes fun of itself a lot… and you just don’t get to do that very often in the game industry. So this is a blast, really loving it.

What kind of gameplay can be expected from the MMO?

Well, technically it’s an RPG, so as a role-playing game you’re going to be advancing your character a lot, increasing statistics, getting new items, getting fat loot, all of that stuff, killing a bunch of monsters. But there’s also a lot of storyline, a lot of quests, there’s a lot of what I call “exploration components”, where people go out and there’s mini-games that they can take part in, there’s a lot of social things that I’ve never seen in any other game… it’s just a really different game than most other MMOs out there that I’ve played.

It has kind of a fun feel to it, and we encourage people to get together and know each other a lot more than you would get in, say, well, Planetside was the last MMO that I did, which was kind of a shooter. This is a very, very different experience than that. Am I losing track of your question?

Not at all! You actually started to answer my next question: what is going to set this apart from all of the other MMOs on the market?

That’s a good question! Most MMOs are built around the idea that what they’re trying to do is get their subscribers to not quit. So basically they’re just putting enough gameplay in there that you want to kind of hang out and find something that’s there. You don’t want to lose your character, so on and so forth.

We’re not really about that. What we’re doing is building a game that looks like a lot of fun to play. It’s free, there’s no download, you can just go on and play if you want to just try it out, and there’s a lot of fun factor to it. But it’s really kind of a gateway to that huge social community that we already have. It’s one of the biggest forums on the net… and there’s all those people that are already on there, we already have a bunch of minigames, we already have all these different elements that you can see on the site, and this MMO gets to take advantage of that in a way nobody else has ever gotten to do with an MMO.

Usually, you want to build the stuff that’s already on Gaia Online when you make a game, but you never have time, you don’t have the resources, you’re too busy making the game. Well, all that stuff already existed for us, all we had to do was make the game. So that’s what we’ve been concentrating on for the last year or so. It makes it a much more rich experience.

When you’re wandering around in the world, and you’re doing all the things that you’d expect in an MMO, you can come up to an area and talk to an NPC, and she’ll say “Hey, have you checked out the art arena?” And when you go to the art arena, you’ll see this place where these people can display all their artwork and contribute all this really cool stuff, and you can just go in and vote on it. Just click on a doorway and go into the art arena… you’d never get a feature like that in a regular MMO!

This is an MMO that has lots of good gameplay and a quality, good experience. In fact I would venture to say that we probably have more intricate, responsive gameplay than almost any other MMO. Most MMOs are a very canned experience, where you play the same thing over and over and over again and it never changes. Ours changes depending upon the number of players that are in the room, the things that you’ve done before, who’s on what quest, so on and so forth. It all changes dynamically as you’re going through the game and it makes it a very different experience.

This game has been described as a “casual” MMO. What does the “casual” element mean? What exactly is a casual MMO?

Well, that’s a really good question. Most MMOs kind of require you to play three or five hours a night in order to keep up with your friends. If you don’t play a lot, then your friends outpace you and all of the sudden you can’t play with your friends. To me, that kind of stinks. It’s not a good aspect of most MMOs.

We’re setting our game up so that if you only play a half hour a night, you’re still going to have a good experience. If your friends have been playing for four months, six months, a year down the line, and you’re completely new and you come into the game, they can give you different rings and stuff like that and power you up to be able to play at the same level that they’re playing. Or they can just put on un-powered rings and play at your level if they want to.

“You are what you wear” is the catchphrase that I say in this game a lot because it’s not you that is leveling up, it’s the rings that you wear that are your individual skills, and you can change those out at any time. So because you can change those out at any time, it’s a very casual experience. Also, of course, we take great effort to make sure that the game is easy to learn. The depth and the complexity that we do provide doesn’t come in for awhile; at the beginning it’s just kind of fun and you hang out. You can do a little bit of fighting and stuff like that. And then as you explore farther out, you’re going to find the areas that are more tuned to your tastes, and as you find those areas you’ll kind of hang out there or you’ll advance even further, and then you’ll find more and more deeper gameplay as you go.

What kind of demographic is this game going to be aimed at?

Well, our core demographic is 13 to 17. But that kind of extends upward depending upon how long people have been with Gaia, and how much they like it. So it really kind of extends upward to around 22 or so.

You’ve been working in the video game industry for a long time. How is working on a casual MMO different from all the other projects you’ve done? Did it take awhile to get adjusted?

Yeah, I’ll admit when I first came to Gaia, and I saw that it was mostly 2-D oriented, most of my games had been 3-D oriented. I was a bit of a graphics snob. So I looked at it and I thought, I don’t know, is this something I really want to do? But the more I found out about Gaia and its attitude, and the fact that there were five million people on the site that really wanted a game…

The hardcore industry is kind of losing track of what’s fun about making games. They’re concentrating on the graphics, and they’re doing it over and over again, because it costs $20 million to make a game, so nobody wants to take any risks. We’re concentrating on the gameplay here. We’re making a game that’s fun to play, that’s very socially-oriented, that’s gonna make people want to stick to it and come back to it over and over again.

I think it’s a completely different kind of game on a lot of levels… people are gonna have just flat-out fun with this game, and that was one of the big things that attracted me to the whole opportunity. I wanted to come here because we were gonna concentrate on the gameplay, because we had this huge audience available to check out the game, and the potential for success is just gigantic.

Is there anything else you’d like to add about Gaia Online before we go?

Gaia Online is a unique experience. I’ve never been to any place that’s like it. I’ve been around for a long time making games and I’ve seen a lot of communities… I’ve never had as much fun working with any company in my life, I’ve never had as much fun working around the community that it is, and I’m really excited for the game to come out.