In our continuing series on video game addiction, we talk to renowned video game designer Bill Roper and get an insider's perspective on what goes into creating a successful game, including game mechanics, demographic considerations, and more. We specifically ask him his thoughts on video game addiction as well.

This transcript of an interview with Bill Roper is part of The Balanced Mind Foundation's podcast series on video games and addiction. To listen to the audio version, click here.

The Balanced Mind Foundation - Flipswitch: In the world of gaming, MMORPGs hold a special place. MMORPG stands for "massively multiplayer online role-playing game." Developed on the subscription model where users log on and pay a monthly fee, from their very beginnings, these games consisted of players from all over the world coming together in a community to explore imaginary worlds.

In the realm of MMORPGs, you might not find a more experienced and accomplished game creator than Bill Roper. Roper has been involved in MMORPGs since the earliest days, with credits for working on such popular games as the Warcraft Series, Starcraft, Diablo, and more. Currently, he is the Chief Creative Officer at Cryptic Studios where he oversees design and production of popular online games like Champions Online, Star Trek Online, and more.

Roper joined Cryptic in 2008 while working on Champions Online, an MMORPG that allows a user to become a superhero of their own design. Currently, he is listed as number 41 on IGN's Top 100 Game Creators of All Time. If you need a fantasy interactive world set up from the ground up, Bill Roper is your man, and he joins us today. Welcome, Bill.

 Bill Roper: Thank you. Really nice to be on the show.

The Balanced Mind Foundation - Flipswitch: So very quickly, how would you describe MMORPGs being different than traditional console games?

 Bill Roper: I think really the biggest difference between an MMO and a single-player RPG obviously is the second M, right, so it's "massively multiplayer." I think really the evolution of RPGs have led us to where we are within the MMO space. When you're younger, you get together. If you're playing a paper and pencil RPG, whether that's something like Dungeons & Dragons or Champions or GURPS or Savage Worlds or any of the hundred of systems that exist; you go out and play those because you want to get together and spend time with your friends and play a game.

 And then usually what happens: you get older, maybe you don't have the same friends anymore and it's tougher to make that time.  What evolved out of that  10 or 15 years ago, when we started having these very powerful devices called "computers" in our houses; people were able to then create that same role-playing experience for an individual. You go and buy a cool RPG, and you'd play it where the computer represented all the enemies, as opposed to a game-master across the table, one of your buddies doing it, or maybe you doing it. All of the sudden, you have the computer that did that.

 Once connectivity really increased and the internet really came into its own, game developers realized, "Hey, we could bring back that idea of having you playing with multiple people." And that's where the MMO really came in -- where you could take that setting, that fantasy environment or that science fiction environment or that western, or whatever it is that you wanted to have in terms of worlds you've built, and then the computer would still be the arbiter of all the monsters and the quests and the treasure and everything else that came out; but now, you were able to play, as opposed to having to get everybody together in the same room on a Saturday night. You could just go online, play with your friends there, meet new people, and have this huge/gigantic, graphically-rich world that's there.

 So I think, really, the biggest difference between old console games and some of the really excellent RPGs  we still see today, games like Dragon Age for instance is a really great recent example both on the console and the PC which has that rich story element, and there is that experience for a single player with the MMO. It's all about how do we get a ton of people together and then get them to play in this persistent living world that is online where you can really literally hang out with your friends from all over the world.

The Balanced Mind Foundation - Flipswitch: Along that same line, one of the early alarming things to parents when their teens or young adults would always play video games was that on console games, they tended to sometimes, when overplayed, be very isolating.  But MMORPGs by definition are kinds of social entities. Do you really think of this type of interaction that occurs in MMORPGs as truly social in the way people have traditionally thought about it?

Bill Roper: I think it really is for the most part. Obviously, the difference that you have is there's no actual physical proximity or contact. I can't literally reach across and give my friend a high five when we do something together in the game, because he might be in a different part of the state or a different part of the world altogether, but they are amazingly social. In fact, it's very common,  if the game does not support it internally on its own, for players to be using programs like Ventrilo to have chat going on at the same time, or Skype. So you'll have a whole group of people on talking with each other, having that verbal communication and those cues. And a lot of people, even if you're not doing that, then you're typing back and forth.

So, it's basically just a different medium but you have all those fantastic things about typical social networks. In fact, one of the biggest focuses that you'll hear if you ever sit down and talk with developers of MMOs is "How do we make sure that this is a very social experience, that there are ways for players to help each other, to reach out, to share experiences?"  It's all about building a community, so I think that's a really fun and strong part about that. You see that not only happen on the most casual instances, but you can meet people that have, just like in any other social setting, met through MMOs, developed long-lasting relationships, and in some cases got married. 

The Balanced Mind Foundation - Flipswitch: The MMO is based on a subscription model. You pay a monthly fee or however interval fee to get online and play the game. So for MMORs, even more then console game specifically, it's more important or at least as important to get the person not just to try the game out but to continue playing once they've started playing. How do you attack that problem as a game producer?

Bill Roper: Well, I think there's a couple of different ways that you go at that. The single biggest one is by having the game itself be a fun and compelling experience so that you enjoy doing it, and want to come back and do more. I think that it in itself, though it sounds simple, is a huge challenge especially in the MMO space where there is a lot of competition. When you first launch a massively multiplayer game, you're hoping to launch with a couple of hundred hours of things for players to do, which is kind of crazy, so they could log on, and on the first day they say, "Oh, I've got 200 hours of content that I can go through, places I can go, and things that I can do." And then past that then you want to have something that's engaging for them when their character has reached the maximum level.

It's really this giant monster you have to feed, right? You're constantly having to make new content and provide new experiences and come up with new game play systems. And that's really a huge challenge, but it's something that you need to engage players.

 And then once you've hopefully got a good foundation for that or have accomplished that, the other thing really is making sure that there are really good ways for players to have those social interactions. That's why it's so important that the subscription fee is really there as the continuing business model, which allows the development companies to keep making more and more and more stuff for the players to go experience. But really the thing that keeps them there is the community that builds up, which is more than the relationship between the player and the game or the game developer but [between] the players and each other.

So you really have to find ways to encourage and reward the players for getting together and doing stuff and joining a group of other friends and making a guild, or teaming up even just randomly with other people. And I think that there is a lot of tools that are required for that and a lot of things that we learn as game developers from other social networks that aren't even games, social networks like Facebook or even just how people normally interact with each other. There's an interesting amount of psychology that gets kind of thrown in the mix when you're designing an MMO. 

The Balanced Mind Foundation- Flipswitch: Along those same lines then, are there things that even the public would not even notice, but as a game designer, you go in knowing that this is something you have to take care of? Are there little cognitive considerations that go into game designing that are designed not necessarily to create content as much as just to keep you interested a little bit and keep you playing?  Little things like maybe if you were to go a store, you would notice that they don't necessarily have clocks everywhere so that you are always going to keep buying. Do you have little considerations like that whenever you develop a game?

 Bill Roper: Yeah, there definitely are. There's all kinds of things you're thinking of. One that I think that is always very powerful is showing players something they're going to be able to get that they can't quite get yet -- whether that is something that they could buy in a store in the game, whether that's an area that they can't to, whether that's when you get a cape in a superhero game or when you get a mount in a fantasy game, or when you're able to unlock a headquarters for your team. When you join a guild, you get some great flashy new effect on your character.

 Whether there is achievements is another great one. For example, in World of Warcraft, if you were in a guild and while you're just playing, if someone in your guild accomplishes an achievement, some milestone in their character's career, it notifies everyone in the guild. You get a message on your screen there. It could read like, "Hey, whoo! Congratulations! Way to go! You did a great job." And then you're like, "Man, what was that?" You can click on it and see what that achievement is and go "Oh, I want to go do that. That looks really cool." So, there's a lot of ways where you are kind of constantly showing players that there is so much more they can go do and that even can be as simple as creating game play spaces where players will always return to. Having a central hub for commerce and social interaction in a game so that a player at level 5 is going to see a player who is level 70, right, and he'll see that other character and just say, "Wow! That guy has got some really cool stuff. I want to go get that." So, it's really one of the ways we really try to do that is by constantly kind of giving you little sneak peeks into other things you can go do in the world. That thing gets you excited to stick around and do that.

The Balanced Mind Foundation - Flipswitch: We now return to our interview with video game designer Bill Roper. In this half of the interview, we asked him about demographic shifts and his thoughts on video game addiction.

In the games at least that you've been involved in, have you noted any kind of demographic trends of ratios of men to women or shifting demographic trends and who is playing MMORPGs and how it's emerging?

Bill Roper: Yeah, absolutely. I've been in the industry forever now, 16 years, and when I first started in the games industry, it was incredibly predominantly male, like probably on the order of 95% of our audience were males between the ages of 16 and 22. Now, I think the interesting part of that is over the last say 10 to 15 years, gaming isn't the dirty little secret that you keep buried under the stairs. It used to be sort of when I grew up and people would say, "Oh, well, what do you do for a living?" when I first got in the industry. "Oh, I make video games," and they're like, "Oh, you make video games. Do you have a backup career plan?" And now, I go, "I make video games." "Oh, what game? Oh, cool. Could you get me in the beta?"

And you know, we all grow up playing games, and I think that now what we're seeing is that there is an increased acceptance for that. Now, it's actually perfectly fine for playing video games or playing MMOs to be your recreation, just like reading, going to movies, or watching your favorite TV show. You came to be a gamer and that's not a weird thing anymore. And so, I think that's really a huge change in what we've seen and it's increased our demographic. Now, we see that the average gamer range is literally in that depending on the game and the genre, but it is classically that 16 to 35 range. It's that big demographics that advertisers like. It has definitely skewed much more towards having women play more than just men.

 So, depending on the game, if you're looking at an MMORPG, you might have somewhere in the 15% to 20% of players that are female. If you're going over on to Facebook applications games like Farmville, more than 50% of their players are women and they tend to be even older. They tend to start falling, into that what gets thrown around as the soccer mom category -- women in their early 30s, for example.

And so, it's really changed, and I think that's the thing that's exciting about it -- that we continue to broaden the scope of people we make games for.  And you can even see that in MMOs. A lot of MMOs get made classically with like here .We're making an MMO for that male demographic for those guys we're used to making games for, but we've seen a lot of other and most of them have been successful over the years. Toontown is one that comes to mind for me. That was an MMO that was made specifically for kids kind of up to the preteen years that Disney did, and they made a lot of considerations that took into account the age of their market.

They wouldn't let you freely chat for example. You had pull-downs that you would choose from, so they were able to make sure they're in order on things that they didn't want their audience to see but the content was all geared towards that. The difficulty was geared towards that, and the social interactions were geared towards that. So, I think as we are now getting into this generation, there are now parents who are raising their kids and both of them game and they game together, and that to me is the really awesome thing. Just like 20 years ago, Dad would be out in the yard, throwing the ball back and forth to his son. Now, it's also very likely that they're raiding together, trying to kill a dragon in an MMO.

The Balanced Mind Foundation - Flipswitch: You've been in the field quite a while now. Over your time, what are your thoughts on this kind of emerging idea of video game addiction? Do you think it's something that you have seen increase or decrease? And what should people be on the lookout for from an inside the designer's perspective of that type of issue?

Bill Roper: I definitely think that it is just like anything else you can overindulge in, just like you can spend too much time doing anything,  just like you can eat too much, watch too much TV, and not go outside. It's that all things in moderation, right? So, I think that by design, MMOs are engaging. We're working very hard to make it something that people see value in and wanting to do every day if they want, even for just a little bit every day. They want to come back and keep playing and build up those social interactions. And I think that there is that opportunity with the video game just like in many other great things in life for someone who kind of has that personality, and that you can kind of "get addicted." You're like, "Oh man, I came with your complaint and now I came to this."

And it really does have to be that all things in moderation. I find that people react that way to games. They will have that happen with many, many other things in their life. They're that same person you talked to, and as soon as they get into something new, they have dived in whole hog, and they are doing it at every waking moment and that is their life right then. And so gaming happens to be the thing that they're doing now or whatever game they're playing.

So, you see a lot of things that game companies do now to try to kind of combat that, putting your clock somewhere in your interface so you could actually see what time it is easily or have a way to easily call up the clock. So it's the clocks that they talk about in Las Vegas, for example -- no clocks anywhere. So you never know what time it is and you're like, "Oh!" And it's always kind of looked the same and oh, sure, it could be 4 in the morning but I don't really realize it because of the atmosphere there.

 It's actually interesting in Asia, and China very specifically actually has a lot of regulations that you have to build into your game, even to the point where every two hours, it will pop up a message to the player reminding them they might want to take a break and go outside or walk around or step away from the computer for a little while, because they're very concerned with that concept, and they have that worry that people will sit there and play for 6, 8, 10, 12, 14 hours. But I think of that as just like in anything, you're going to find people that have extreme reactions or are going to be in that addictive mindset. So, I do think you can see that and I think it's actually something that the games industry is very aware of and we actually take steps to -- we want our players around for a long time. We don't want them addictive and destructive.

The Balanced Mind Foundation - Flipswitch: Finally, you guys got a market in online gaming. One thing we see with consoles and MMORPGs and even more just social networking sites in general is that they're all starting to overlap. Do you foresee a time when like Champions Online will be able to be played on the Xbox, and you'll be able to just access it from a button on Facebook and then just be able to seamlessly interact? No matter where you go, you'll be able to do it.

Bill Roper: I think that there are certainly pushes in that direction, the biggest challenge of course being the differences in the platforms. The PC and the Xbox are actually pretty close. The biggest challenge is  it starts coming down to business models, which is maybe a little dry and boring, but it's easier now to make a game that is as playable and accessible on the PC as it is to console. For example, because the Xbox and the PC are so close together, you can have them playing against each other fairly easily as long as it's a game that the interfaces where a mouse  to the keyboard doesn't give you some kind of advantage over each other. But the actual technology of playing and the compatibility is relatively simple. The challenges that happen there is getting your publisher to work with Microsoft and how do people get paid and blah, blah, blah, and a lot of stuff.

In terms of them linking in with things like playing the same game through Facebook and browser and things, then you're just starting to deal with "Can I do the same thing on Facebook as I can on my Xbox?"  I think that there is an area where the technology all crosses over enough, where games were simple enough. I mean, certainly, if you look at the more simple perennial games. I'll use Scrabble as an example. I can play that anywhere. I can play it on my PC, on my Xbox, on my iPhone or through Facebook. If that was a push for someone who said, "Hey, we made this really fun game mechanic that you can play over and over again or I can do it from anywhere," there's no reason you couldn't have people from all those areas not only playing against each other but then comparing statistics from all those different areas, you can have the World Scrabble Championship and no matter where you're playing from.

We're also starting to see devices interact with each other. So, what actually made me think of Scrabble was that there is a Scrabble game that's on the iPad that also works with your iPhone or iTouch and you hold your iPhone or your iTouch and that's what your tiles are that you look at. And when you want to play them, the iPad is actually the game board, so you take them, flip them from your phone, and it uses the Bluetooth technology and goes oh, foomp, there it goes. It goes on the table and you move it around the iPad. Right now, that's an extremely expensive Scrabble game.

 But the thing is right now game designers are starting to look at how we can take different pieces of technology, whether they're associative like iPad and iPhone are, whether they're disparate technologies like Facebook and cell phones and PC games and link them up. I mean, you do see applications that are already designed to in some ways link those together. On my Android, I can call up my World of Warcraft character and show it to somebody. So I can go and grab that information and display it on my phone.

There will be a time very soon where you'll some part of the game at least able to be accessed and played from my phone. It will be a very simple thing, for example, to maybe have an MMO where crafting is important, where building things is part of the game play, or I could actually just have an app on my phone that let me just do the building of things mechanic. Maybe I can't go explore the world everywhere and fight and do all that kind of stuff, but it's like, oh, right, I want to craft for my character. Oh, I'm going to sit here at lunch or on a bus ride to work and I'm going to do some crafting 'cause that's a much easier interface, but then it links back into my character in the PC games. When I log in, oh, there's all those stuff I've just bought for myself. So I think we'll definitely see that in the extremely near future.

The Balanced Mind Foundation - Flipswitch: Bill Roper, thank you so much.

Bill Roper: My pleasure. This has been a lot of fun.