I’ve just been lucky enough to talk now with two of the driving forces behind Warhammer Online, and today MMOG Nation presents part one of a couple-part interview with EA Mythic’s Paul Barnett. Barnett is currently filling the role of Creative Director on the project, translating CEO Mark Jacobs’ ideas into game content and gameplay.

Mr. Barnett is an outspoken and enthusiastic fellow, precisely why I wanted to get him ‘in front of a microphone.’ We talk about Warhammer a little bit, but mostly this interview is a discussion with an inspired speaker about a series of subjects he feels very passionately about.

In this first interview, we discuss Paul’s connection with Mythic and Games Workshop, why WAR was moved back, the lack of reaction to that decision, and the rationale behind the inspiring phrase: “Fun, you F#ckers!”

Read on for Paul’s hilarious and lengthy responses, and come back tomorrow for Part 2 of our discussion.

MMOG Nation: For folks who don’t necessarily have a good grasp of where you’re coming from, could you give us a sense of what led you to your position on the Warhammer project?

Paul Barnett: Complete flukes, and mistakes and bureaucratic errors, and the inability for someone to look at the work I’ve done and realize I’m a charlatan and a fraud. How does that sound?

MG: Inaccurate.

Paul: Oh, you want something more than that? Okay then. Many years ago, before the internet was invented and computers were powered on chalk, I used to make bulletin board games, and then I ended up making what were called MUDs. They don’t exist anymore because if you look at the history of MMOs, particularly at Wikipedia, it actually says: WoW. I made some MUDs, and they were reasonably successful for their time. That’s a bit like saying that the penny farthing, which like five people bought it and it was the tour de france. I got a bit of cash, and then went off and did brick and mortar consultancy. I was something called a creative consultant? That means I was a liar, who basically used a white board. What I’d do, is I’d stand in front of people and say, “What’s the problem you want me to fix?”. And they’d say something like “Packaging!” And then you’d write on the white board the word “Packaging”, and then you’d ask the people, who are paying you money, “What does packaging make you think of?”. Then you’d right down all their answers, and you’d bill them for it. I did that successfully for ten years

But years ago I met Mark Jacobs. He made me a very generous offer, which I turned down. He’s now a multi-millionare, and I work for him. I’d like to think I got the best of the deal. And he rung me up and said he was interested in Warhammer, and at the time I was doing consultancy for Games Workshop. I was basically trying to help them figure out what to do with this ‘interweb thing’, and whether they should sell things through the mail and the post. He wanted to do a game, and I introduced him to the Games Workshop guys, they hit it off, and then Mark basically said “Would I like to go and help him?”, and the Games Workshop guys said “Would I like to go and help Mark?”. I thought, well it’d be a bit churlish to say no at this point. So I headed off to America, where I learned that men wear white socks, that sign posts only ever tell you where you can go rather than where you are, and you never talk to them about their guns.

And then I tried to explain to the Americans what Warhammer was, and that was really difficult, because Americans are like naturally optimistic that they can understand everything.

Steve Perkins (Mythic PR Guy): We do!

Paul: Yah know. A few thousand years of unrest in the Middle East, we can fix that, that’s no problem. So I had to sit down and explain to them what Warhammer was, relentlessly. “No, honestly you don’t understand. It’s like English posh people, it’s like soccer hooligans, it’s the northern working classes of England, it’s English posh people on drugs.” All that sort of stuff. They basically put me in a room and ignored me. How long did they ignore me for?

Steve: A while?

Paul: A while. So about six months. And I just kept writing down things, what I thought we should do. Lo and behold, they said “Alright then, we’ll give him an opportunity. Paul, what do you think about this?” And I’d give a suggestion, and they’d put it in, and they’d say “Oh, hey. That’s not bad. That seems to work quite well.” And then they needed someone to talk to the press, and they foolishly pointed a camera at me. I have an English accent, therefor anything I say must be very intelligent and incredibly funny.

MG: It’s very true.

Paul. Yeah. So that’s how I started off: License, Content Designer, Chained-up-idiot. And I mutated through that and eventually I’m now I’m Creative Director. So my job is to take Mark’s vision, Mark’s very much a vision person: don’t be rubbish, make it exciting, don’t make it crap. And off you go. So my job is to take that vision, and make people stay on target, while walking around and enthusing everyone to paint toy soldiers. I’ve basically been a a stealth agent for Games Workshop, and must be responsible for at least $30,000 in toy soldier sales at Mythic. I don’t know if I’ve done a good or a bad job there. And then: Boundless Enthusiasm! I stayed away from computer games for about fifteen years. As a result, I’m not the “ground-down, jaded, has-been, depressing, considering killing yourself by wrapping a mouse around your neck and throwing yourself off the roof, oh my god it’s just about franchises, all we’re going to do is add another number to it, do we really need to put a Wii controller effect on?” Oh my lord, Oh my lord.

I’m honestly quite happy about it. I’m actually quite happy about it. I think it’s quite jolly. We get paid loads of money for pretending to make entertainment. I also like the idea that the things we make, right? They don’t actually exist. It’s an interesting thing when you think about it. Computer games, particularly MMO experiences, only actually exist in people’s heads. There’s no tangible product, it’s on a screen, but the experience you’re having is in your brain. And every single person is having a different experience. It’s not like a book, with a book right you’ve got one person, they’re writing, they’re scribbling, they’re making things up. But it’s all happening just in their head, one person’s writing it. It’s like a Harry Potter novel written by 160 people. It’s crazy really. It’s a hell of a way to spend millions of dollars, I’ve figured that out.

MG: Okay, you’ve just answered my first four questions, so I’ll just strike those off the list.

Paul: Oh excellent.
[Laughing from the Mythic end.]

MG: Let’s see … the next more serious question I have is, moving the game back out until next year: that seems like an obvious, intelligent thing to do. But, can you give us some insight into what the decision-making process was there?

Paul: Yes, it’s about FARTs.

MG: Farts?

Paul: FARTs. It’s about FARTs. See, there’s Features, Resources, and Time, that’s the F and the R and the T, and that equals the Actions. FARTs. Now, the thing about farts are, if you’re not careful they’re very smelly, no one wants to take the blame for them, they leave a nasty mist, and you all feel really really bad. So, what you’ve got to do is realize you’re going to FART, you’ve got to say “How many Features have we got, how much Resources have we got, how much Time have we got?” And when you add all that together, you then say, “Therefor what action should we take?” Once you’ve done that and you’ve looked at this terrible FART we were going to have, the natural conclusion was: move the release date. Put more resources in, and make the game even better. Basically, without farting.

MG: Gotcha.

Eddiemae Jukes (PR Rep): Wow. I have never heard that before, I like that Paul.

Paul: I’m a paid consultant, this is what I do for a living. I should put that in the newsletter, about the farting. No, I mean it’s one of those things where: Before we were bought for EA … EA basically means that we have a ton of money. And we have more resources than we did before. So when Mythic was making it alone, it effectively had a resivovoir of cash, and it had a sort of marketing, and sort of resources and effectively had to make the best game it possibly could with that reality. With EA, and their bountiful riches, and their gold bullion that they send to us every week on the heads of slaves … we effectively were able to look at it again and say “Better tech, more money, bigger marketing, bigger marketing push”, and you started looking at the game and you say to yourself, “The best game possible we could have made as an independent was going to be a pretty good game. The best possible game with EA behind us could potentially be super-enormous.” That requires you to like, rethink things?

MG: Right.

Paul: You have to look at it again, and take a deep breath, and go “Actually, our game could be chuffing enormous!” Chuffing, good English word that. Comes from steam engines. We could be chuffing enormous! You take a look at your horizons and you reset them, and then you take a deep breath and you say “How brave do we feel?” And I tell you what, I feel pretty bloody brave.

MG: Excellent. The reaction to the move-back was pretty resoundingly positive. Do you think that people have had their expectations changed by the level of quality in games like WoW and LOTRO?

Paul: Well, the difficulty with our bloody game industry is that people keep spending more money and getting more talented people to work on them. As a result they keep getting irritatingly better. It’s really really unfair. And those bloody people who make the graphics cards won’t stop! They keep putting in bloom effects, and more MIPS, and better resolution! And the monitor people! The monitor people, for god’s sake! Will they not just leave it alone? Enormous clarity monitors. Bastards! So, you have that and then you add in the WoW factor. You know: hundreds of millions of dollars, five years in development, all they did was get 8 Million subscribers. You’d think they’d come up with a clever idea. And all of a sudden everybody realized you’ve got to do a lot better. It’s sort of like when movies moved to color with sound. All of a sudden the old ways are no longer acceptable. And so, yeah, of course you’ve got to try harder. You’ve got to try better. It’s not good enough to ‘get away with it’ any more. The customer – irritatingly – learns things!

:: MG and Steve laugh ::

Paul: You know, they get their expectations set. They start going, “You know what? It’s reasonable not to expect it to crash. It’s reasonable for it to look pretty. You know what? I think it should have an instruction manual!” You know, irritating things that add cost to a project. No ’slash commands.’ So what you’ve got to do is, and this is that whole EA thing. At least with EA you’re able to pause, and go “Yeah, yeah, well if we intend to win I suppose we have to commit.” And so it just leads back to the same place. If you’ve got a rich parent who’s benign, and you’re a talented precocious twelve-year-old, you’re going to get a shot at the title.

MG: Excellent. One of the things that I took away from one of the conference calls, I thought it was just inspiring: “Fun, F#ckers?”

Paul: “Fun, you F#ckers!” I tell you what, the amount of people who don’t get that just drives me mad! Right, it drives you mad. The people who work on this game, they have to understand that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. There are people all over the world who want our job. There are people who would kill to get our job. Look at where the planets are in alignment: we got a really good property, we’ve got the right timing, we’ve got good tech, we’ve got a good design, we’re going to win! And you sit there and you say to yourself, “It’s not going to happen again! It’s not going to happen for another 10 years, there isn’t another property out there. It’s … just unbelievably good.” So that’s a really good thing. So then you have to say, our job then is: don’t be crap. Make something what is not rubbish. So then you say, what’s important? It’s a weird thing, right? You talk to people about what’s important they get obsessed on the product. The get obsessed on the frames per second, the colors, the brightness, the usability of the interface. And you go: “It’s none of those things!” That’s just the dressing, that’s the just the stuff that makes you go: “Yes, yes, yes, I see, I see, I see.” What is at the core of it? FUN! Fun, you F#CKERS!

And that is what it’s about. Don’t give me another mechanic! Don’t give me another great design idea! Make sure it’s fun. Do I laugh, do I cry? Do I want to play? If I go down to QA, and they are are play RvR scenarios off their own back, and laughing, and keeping count, and bragging … if I walk round and find that the animators are giggling at their own animations, that they’re actually doing the quests and laughing about them … if I look around and see happy people … people that are overworked and underpaid, obviously, but happy people … then I get better. You’d be amazed … fun is this sort of nebulous thing, it’s like last on the agenda. So in the end we wrote it on the white board in great big letters. And you have to swear, because if you don’t swear they don’t take you sensibly. It’s like when people say “compelling”. And you go, “What the bloody hell does that mean?” Or they go “engaging.” No! FUN! You F#CKERS! You do that, they’ll play it, and they’ll love it, and it’ll be huge, and I won’t have wasted four years of my life.

Head on to part 2 of the interview ===>