You have been graduated in English and Spanish literatures. Now, you work at Origin as the lead designer of Ultima Online. But what have you do between those two periods? After I finished my Bachelor's degree, I went on to graduate school. There I studied literature and writing. My graduate degree is actually in creative writing (a Master of Fine Arts). It's s strange degree in that it is harder to get (more time) than a regular Master of Arts, but not as hard as a doctorate.

Have you immediately work in the gaming industry? I came to work for Origin after completing the Master of Fine Arts degree.

Is your current work due to passion? To hazard? I had been working as a hobbyist in the realm of online games for some time by that point. So it was a matter of my hobby becoming my job.

Before being a roleplaying game, Ultima Online is a virtual world (I think). We know Richard Garriott has always tried to create living breathing worlds with the Ultima series. We also know he thinks about Virtual Reality for a long time. Have you ever consider VR MUDs? What do you think about VR MUDs? I think they are definitely going to happen someday. But I think the interface with which you look at a virtual world is not nearly as important as the actual content. Because of that, I think that "virtual reality" is actually here now--all online worlds are virtual realities. It's more a question of how the world is displayed and how you interact with it.

When we see some gamers playing UO 10 hours a days, aren't you afraid by the consequences they [the VR MUDs] could have on some people? Yes. There are many concerns about the move to virtual realities that is occurring at many levels of our society. Already there are virtual spaces that serve as social spaces, educational institutions, areas for commerce, and so on. So there are already virtual realities being used for many common purposes of everyday life. Given that this is happening, I think the key problems for us to tackle are the social issues that arise within virtual spaces, and the psychological issues that arise for those using those spaces. Research is divided thus far on whether or not online games have therapeutic benefit or whether they are pernicious. My own feeling is that virtual spaces and online games are here to stay, and so we need to solve the issues that they raise.

With the coming of the commercial MUDs like UO and their great number of players appeared a problem : the lack of roleplayers (also known as the "kewldood" issue). As Koster's Law (hehe) says : "The quality of roleplaying is inversely proportional to the number of people playing." Do you think this problem is unsolvable, partially solvable or even entirely solvable? What are your solutions in general and more particularly in UO? I didn't name that law. :) Mike Sellers, one of the guys behind Meridian 59, named it after me. There are a couple of different issues here. First, roleplaying is a matter of a group of people immersing themselves in a shared fiction. The more people you get, the harder it will be to maintain that sense of a shared fiction. If you limit your game to only those who agree in advance on what the fiction is, you can manage a full roleplay environment--but your game is not likely to appeal to a very large group, because the sad fact is that there just aren't that many good roleplayers in the world, and not that many who want to do exactly what you do. Within UO, we recognize that the scale and scope of UO make mandating roleplay impossible. What we encourage is multiple groups with different goals co-existing. Sometimes the friction or competition for resources on the part of these groups is very interesting. Sometimes it is rude or ruins the experience for people. We have tried to set up rules which encourage players to behave in a certain way towards one another--J C Lawrence calls this "functional roleplaying". If you are made by the game to behave in a particular manner, then you might as well be roleplaying it.

If today you could change one thing in UO (without taking care of any limitation like money, time, player reactions, just a thing that would make you happy), what would it be? Tough question! There are so many things I would like to do...! A more dynamic world; more support for roleplayers, particularly those founding cities; redo the skill system...

This question has already being asked to RG, I find it pretty fun and interesting, so I ask it to you now. If you were on a desert island without any access to the Internet, what would be the three video games you would bring with you? And, of course, why? If I were by myself on a desert island, I probably wouldn't play games at all. I mostly enjoy games when I play with other people. Hmm. Probably Civilization, Tetris, and Something With A Lot Of Customizability. :) The former two because one is deep and complex and has a lot to offer and the other is simple and straightforward and amazingly addictive. The latter would be something with an embedded language (like QuakeC or UnrealScript) and level-building abilities so I could make my own game.

How will be the seers on the euro shards chosen? Will they be seers from the US shards? Will the euro shards have no seers until great roleplayers are found on these shards? Will there be French, German, Dutch seers?... Or only English speaking people? Can we hope to see polyglot (French, German, Spanish, etc.) GMs on the euro servers? Have you any information on how will be the technical/commercial assistance handled in Europe? Will we have to call in the USA like currently (very expensive)? Will there be polyglot people (not all the UO players talk English)? With the new servers, the French community will very likely play on only one shard to avoid the division that happened when Catskill opened. But with the new counselor law "You can't council on a shard where you play", is OSI aware that no French counselors will never be able to help French speaking people? All of these questions really need to go to GMs, not me. :)

Will UOT2A only support English, German and Japanese? Or will there be also French, Spanish, Italian (and other languages) versions? For now, it will only support English, German, and Japanese, but other languages are indeed a possibility for the future.

Unlike UO, UOT2A will be sold with a true playguide. Will this guide be translated in others languages than English? French for instance? Only if the game is officially released in France.

Why did it take so long to distribute UO and to open servers in Europe? UO is a very expensive venture. We have to be very careful about expansion, to make sure that the servers are sustained by an adequate size population of players.

Is it possible to have an idea of how many copies on UO has been sold in France, UK, Germany and others European countries? I can't give you exact breakdowns, but I can tell you that over 20% of the players in UO are from outside the United States.

Some spells are clearly too powerful and have imbalanced the game since the launch of UO. Have you any concrete plans for spells like Recall, Gate Travel and Blade Spirit? For instance, making Recall and Blade Spirit lvl 7 and Gate lvl 8 or making Blade not poison anymore and recall teleports you to the last visited town? All of these ideas have floated around for quite some time. There is an alternate concern, that if we fiddle with it too much, mages may be ruined. We continue to try to find solutions for this dilemma.

What are you plans about the ecological simulation? One day, will we see plants growing, animals hunting when hungry? Can we hope to see a starving Ancient Wyrm going out of Destard and looking for food in the woods of Trinsic? Yes, you will see this, if we can make it visible enough that the effort (and the CPU cycles) are worth it.

Furs have been removed from the game. So, it's likely you have also abandoned the fur clothes idea at short term. Are the effects of the environment on players still planed? Will one day cold makes you lose hps if you're not protected enough? Running in swamps makes you lose stamina? Yes, these are also still planned for someday. :)

Being a ranger in UO is something very hard : your pets are very stupid, you can't sell them to NPCs, Adept Rangers can only tame bulls to raise their skill to Master... Have you any plans to make a Ranger viable by himself and not only a horse/llama/ostard seller? Pets have been fixed on Test Center, and they are much more responsive. So you may want to try them out again. :)

You told that it was planned to let the monsters loot houses when trapped. After the gate modification is it still planned? I receive frequent complains about monsters spawning inside friend houses. Is OSI aware of this problem and the disaster it could create if the "house looter monsters" were installed? Clearly, before we do this we need to make sure that no monsters spawn within houses.

The "un-nerfed" weapons patch has been splited in two parts. When can we hope to see the second part of the patch? (stamina loss, shields that parry arrows and spells, "Last Target", "Equip/Unequip" macros, etc.) It will probably take another month at least before we are ready to begin work on this.

You told that the reputation was an intermediate step before a virtue-based system. Have you any news about this virtue system? Not yet. We currently have housing as our highest priority.

The reputation system was supposed to curb the PKilling (Dread Lords) and to make the NPKilling (Vortexer, Dishonorable Killers, etc.) impossible. This system was a success against the rampant PKilling but a failure against the NPkilling issue. Majority of the ex-Dreads are now NPkers (Blade Spirit shovers, Fire Field runner, flagged thieves, blue PK, etc). Before the patch, the bad guys were red, now they are blue. Have you any project to solve this NPKilling problem? Yes; we are looking at ways to solve the "blue pkiller" problem by tracking patterns of behavior. In other words, if someone repeatedly kills while staying blue, they could turn red anyway--and permanently.

Will beards and hairs eventually grow and barbers appear? And why not link that to an aging system? Aging systems are mostly annoying; people use youth spells and the like to get to the optimum age for their character and stay there. We do plan to allow players to change hairstyle and the like eventually.

Can you tell us what will be the next big patches after the ownership revision? Races addition? Respawn map redoing? Skills revamping? There will be those other combat revisions coming along after housing. Races are also a real possibility.

Many questions have divided the UO players (wipes, houses, pks, town fights, etc.) Some websites conduct polls about these questions, but there are never really accurate (never more than 1% of the players answers them, some sites have specific type of readers...) Why don't you add a polling system to UO? Each time something important is planned, the players could be polled at login. This way players would think they really influence the game and you, at OSI, could exactly know what customers think about your projects for the game. This is something I've wanted for a long time, but we haven't had to chance to put in yet.

In case of a player-run town, players may face many problems concerning : multi-owners property, keeping the place free from "undesirable" houses... What players should do if thay have such a project and need help on these points ? We are looking at many player proposals for "townstones" and the ability to create and make townships official. These would include capabilities to handle some o the things you describe. But some are just part of the world: you can't necessarily keep an obnoxious neighbor out of your town, for example.

When will OSI release informations about UO2? You talked about it 6 months ago and since, no other word. Will UO2 only be new GFX/SFX/TCP engines for UO? Or will it also have a new skill system to avoid macroting, new play mechanisms, new background, new maps? Will it use a Tomb Raider 3rd person or an UO 3/4 perspective? In other words, what can you tell us about UO2 beside it will be in 3D? What UO2? :)