COMPUTERS WEREN’T FOR frivolous activities like playing video games. They were for academia, research, and other forms of productivity. So Alan VanCouvering believed when his brother purchased a computer during their childhood, and he, Alan, had stuck to using it for homework.
Then a friend at University of California, Irvine introduced him to a new function of computers: To boldly go where no—or at least few—students had gone before.
“I got hooked on computers when a friend who worked at UCI in their lab called me a Star Trek-type thing on their mainframe. It was very simplistic, but it was a Star Trek simulator. You had shields, and you had to fly across space to fight each other.”
The Star Trek game unfolded across a simple grid of coordinates. VanCouvering never found another play to duel, nor did he know where he was going or what he was doing as he felt his way there. That was fine. He was lost in the fantasy of roaming the stars.
Star Trek was his gateway into more complex gaming experiences. “I was more into RPGs and that stuff. It was a big leap for me. I don't have a CS degree like a lot of my colleagues, so I had to self-teach myself. It was a big hurdle, and I've always been a bit surprised I was able to pick it up.”
VanCouvering signed up as a beta tester for a game called Tanarus, a 3D world where players piloted tanks. When the studio’s next game, EverQuest, entered its own beta phase, VanCouvering registered, was selected to play, and dedicated every minute of his spare time to tracking down and logging bugs. His devotion to the task attracted the attention of Charles Flock, EQ’s lead tester, and got VanCouvering’s foot in the door of the online game he supported so passionately.
EverQuest’s developers knew of VanCouvering through another outlet. He was a regular contributor to EverQuest Express, a website whose small editorial team published fanfiction, posted screenshots, and rounded up rumors. “The guy who ran that disappeared one day. He lived in Europe, said ‘I've got to move,’ and never came back, so I inherited the website and ran it for a year and a half or so, up until I took a job here. I got noticed that way.”
Fanfic was EQ Express’s bread and butter, and it took multiple forms. A friend of VanCouvering’s wrote and illustrated a comic strip called Little Archie; he also produced fake advertisements as another outlet for his artistic skills. When his friend or other contributors submitted content, VanCouvering read through and revised them. Most centered on origin stories for player-characters used in EverQuest.
“At some point these writers would send us screenshots, saying, ‘Here's a picture for my story about an elf killing a snake’ or whatever. We'd run them in a sequence, three to four stories. It was a weekly thing, but we didn't produce thousands of pages. It was a couple pages' worth of storytelling each thing.”
VanCouvering brought more than a passion for EverQuest to the team. His previous job had been outside the games industry, as a computer specialist for the government. “Basically, I taught old people how to use computers. Twenty years ago, there were people who'd never used a computer before, so my job was to walk over to them and tell them where the buttons were, whatever. It was an easy job. Boring job. At some point, somebody decided [EQ] needed a community manager, so they called me.”
Verant’s culture when VanCouvering joined was, in a word, frantic. He joined in late 2000, after EverQuest had been available for over a year and a half. The dev team had taken little time off. They were already committed to cranking out at least two expansions every year. VanCouvering’s first would be Scars of Velious, which would present a smorgasbord of high-level content such as powerful monsters and brand-new, ultra-tough zones meant to be tackled by groups of adventurers.
VanCouvering learned the ropes by watching designer Steve Burke build content. Scars of Velious’s terrain was icy, and a city inhabited by dwarves would come under attack by giants. Players could help the dwarves defend their city, and the outcome of the attack would influence the in-game world.
“If the giants won, there'd be dead dwarves everywhere, and the city would be wiped out. It took him months to do that. We didn't have a scripting system. An NPC would spawn, other NPCs would hear it spawn, and they'd respond by spawning more characters. It was crazy how hard it was for him to do that; he spent months on it. Everybody was doing something like that, deep in their work, trying to do something they or nobody else had ever done before.”
The downside to being the newest and lowest developer on the totem pole was that everyone was too busy to do more than invite VanCouvering to learn by watching. “I was like, ‘I need help,’ but people were too busy to just chat. Lunch was a big thing. We'd all try to go out, but it was all about, ‘I've got to get my thing done.’” If he wanted to get hands-on experience, he’d have to dive in.
VanCouvering was taking over the role of community manager from a developer who was supposed to be programming full-time, but had been interacting with the community out of necessity. “I sat on the edge of the desk in the aisle, and I got about a foot of space on his desk to write down notes. I watched him work for a week or so. Nobody else was really doing it. Community management wasn't really a thing about then.”
The programmer broke down the job simply: VanCouvering would gather feedback from players, disseminate it to the dev team in a way they could understand, then convert their answer from programmer-speak to English for the players. It was a big job, but a vital one.
“Part of the problem was there was so much work to be done that there was no time to talk about stuff. A lot of issues existed in people's memories rather than on paper. You had to find the guy who knew, talk to him, and then translate it to English and put it out there. A lot of that stuff is in cultural memory rather than documented someplace, which is a loss, really. I'd love to know the thought process behind a number of things that happened back then, but again, we were jamming out expansions—sometimes two a year. It was hectic at best.”
One of VanCouvering’s biggest tests in his newly minted role as liaison was getting to the root of an alchemy recipe that appeared to be broken. The recipe involved mixing a lot of ingredients, many of which could be difficult to acquire, so he could understand players’ frustration when the recipe didn’t produce the intended product.
He took the bug to a developer, who tested it and pulled it off without a hitch.
“It works fine,” the programmer said.
VanCouvering took his response back to the community, only to be told by several more players that, no, the recipe was completely broken. He went back to the programmer, only to receive the same verdict: It was working fine. VanCouvering figured the players must be doing something wrong or missing a step.
After a protracted back-and-forth, VanCouvering hit on the problem. One of the recipe’s ingredients was a flask of water, but there were several different flasks of water in the game. Each item was assigned a unique ID code in the game’s database, and the recipe only worked if players used a particular flask.
“I was wrong, because back then I didn't know how to interpret what players were telling me, and I wasn't careful enough to ask how the developer was testing it internally. I'd handle that totally differently now, but it was a big deal for players at the time because we were telling them the wrong thing and they were rightfully upset about it. That taught me a lot about how to parse information from both sides of the fence.”
VanCouvering’s misunderstanding, and the confusion it caused within the community, was an accidental but nevertheless effective example of non-authorial storytelling, an event unplanned by the designers that takes on a life of its own. VanCouvering has since moved on from community management to design, and has found he prefers crafting small, player-driven stories evocative of the types of quests he observed—and unintentionally triggered—during his early days working on the game.
“I think the team is always focused on the bigger picture, because you have to be. The key to me was the little stories that weren't necessarily part of the planned arc, but you'd find a little story that someone had planned for one of the zones.”
When VanCouvering or another designer plans a quest, they try to imbue it with a momentum that comes across as organic. One way they accomplish this is by keeping explanations to a minimum. For instance, players may find a dress discarded in the sewers. Later, they may cross paths with a girl who’s been looking for the article of clothing.
“Back then, nobody knew anything. There was no Internet to tell you answers to every question you typed in. You had to figure things out yourself. That was the interesting part for me: It wasn't linear storytelling. It could have been, but it wasn't, necessarily. A lot of times you'd find a thing and relate it to another story later. You were learning about the world without it telling you exactly where to go.”
VanCouvering believes the key to designing anything in EQ, from quests to zones, is leaving enough space for the content to breathe. Within that space, players can come up with experiences that no designer ever intended, or the opposite of what was intended, such as opting to let giants slaughter dwarves just to see what happens.
“There's always going to be somebody who will tell you a story,” VanCouvering explained. An expansion may present a story arc without divulging all of the background information that led players to the quest line’s point of ingress. In that case, VanCouvering or another designer could have an NPC, or even objects such as magical artifacts, relay information to players curious about a place, people, or event.
Still other players opt to disregard EQ’s built-in content and do their own thing. That, too, is something VanCouvering and the other designers reserve space for within their designs. One player may set up shop as a makeshift vendor outside a zone, selling rare goods at a premium to adventurers willing to pay for them. Other impromptu activities may not have any basis in EQ’s world at all, but are equally viable.
“If they just want to play hide-and-go-seek, they don't need me for that. I'm just trying to give them a setting to play in. Building an MMO area is rougher than telling a story, I think, because you need places that feel like people live there, monsters that belong in that space, and places for players to run around and do whatever they want outside the story.”
TIMES HAVE CHANGED, and so has the EQ development team’s frantic schedule—in that it’s much less frantic than it was in the halcyon days of EverQuest ’99, the launch of EverQuest II, and the first dozen or so expansion sets.
“We know how to manage our time better,” VanCouvering said. “We're significantly more efficient, and our tools are better, so there aren't a lot of late nights and weekends. I think we get along better because we're not so stressed all the time. There's stress, but things aren't frantic. It's easier for us to sit down, have lunch, and chat. It's more of a family than it was back then.”
One thing that remains constant for VanCouvering is the emotions he feels when players share how deeply EverQuest has touched their lives. “A mother wrote in to say that the only time her son, who'd been diagnosed with cancer, was happy was when he was playing the game. That was amazing and sad.”
Other notes are less emotional, and more didactic. On one occasion, developers received a 13-page letter from a player listing myriad ways the game could be improved. Far from being annoyed or defensive, VanCouvering was impressed.
“Think about that: Somebody took the time to write that, printed it out, put it in a tube, and mailed it to us. They could have just typed something on the forums, but they sent us an actual letter. We get cake and cookies almost every year from somebody. It's always nice to realize somebody still cares.”
