Journalism Interview: Tom

Tom: DUNG was a hobby project that was supposed to be occupy us for one summer after graduating college in 1996. But the Internet just happened to explode around that time and the temptation of it becoming really big was too great to pass up. Also, the networking technology was very fascinating to me; a few years prior I had no idea people could talk to each other on computers.

Tom: Is the pope Catholic?

Tom: I don't play many games (BYOND or otherwise). Around 2000-ish we had an influx of some very creative developers who produced some cool games. Most of these games (eg: LodeWars, Tanks, Shapeshifter, Settlers) are still available. In my memory, these are the best BYOND has produced, but my memory is biased. You have to consider the context: at that time there weren't many competing venues for Internet games, so these kinds of creations really were innovative. Also, we didn't have that big of a community so when anyone made a game, they'd just announce it to the forums and people would go try it out. Now things are a lot bigger so it's harder for the little original creations to stand out. Whenever I get on BYOND to peek into games, I'm pretty impressed. I played NEStalgia a bit and thought that it was quite well done. Actually, that's a pretty good example of what I mean: that game is likely better than its predecessor DWO in nearly every way, but it probably isn't getting the same reaction because of the changes in the community.

Tom: Like I said above, I don't really play games, but I'll popin from time to time just to see what kinds of new things people are up to. I usually just go in under my own key but for a while I was trying out Anime games as DBZ5150, I think it was. Then someone used WizNet to expose me!

Tom: When we first started this project I was more of a player, and my ambition was to create a D&D-ish strategy game kind of like WarCraft I. But when I started writing it the language was really limited (you had to use reverse polish notation for everything and fundamental commands like locate() didn't even exist). So my first attempt was rather demoralizing and I didn't end up revisiting it, even 14 years later.

Tom:Well, truthfully the language hasn't changed much. We've tried to put out tutorials for the newer stuff, like the skins and the new map elements. DM itself is really just a specialized version of other languages out there. If you read through a good Python book you could make the transition with ease, I think. It would be nice to have a more complete "bible" on everything BYOND but I wouldn't say it's essential.

Tom:See above. Other users have made some attempts to update it, and I can stand behind that.

Tom:I'm not sure if we ever sold anything from it. I know I never saw a check.

Tom:I don't have a problem with that (they can keep the money). But I think this is not really the way to market BYOND. Since BYOND is a game-building tool, it makes more sense to just make a good game and promote that.

Tom:This is a tricky question. I wouldn't say byond.com isn't needed. Technically, the website is important for 1) advertising/introducing people to BYOND, 2) listing/describing games, and 3) fielding questions/faqs/complaints. Where we may have gone overboard is with all of the social networking (but hey, who didn't get caught up in that when it exploded in 2003?) We have now a die-hard contingent of users who like (or are obsessed with) the BYOND drama experience and probably don't even have the software installed. It is amusing and entertaining but it also can be a big pain in the *** so...

Tom:Well, basically that came down to money. In 2004 or so, we realized that this project had to bring in some income to keep going. A few years prior we had tried implementing a wildly original internal commerce scheme (this predated all of the crap you see on Facebook) but it was ahead of its time-- we didn't have the audience to support it (still don't) and it ended up costing us thousands of dollars and thousands of hours of time. So we decided to go with something simpler, which was basically "donate money to keep us alive". We decided to bundle that with a few perks, one of which became the blogs. This coincided with the explosion of Myspace and social networking so it seemed like a logical direction at the time. People still seem to like them, even though pretty much every site has a blog these days.

Tom:We don't encourage games (fan games or otherwise) charging for anything that might result in a game imbalance. For games abusing copyrights, we simply respect the wishes of the copyright holder. We had one issue a cease-and-desist and we complied by removing the entry from the hub. That's really all of the jurisdiction we have since games aren't hosted or stored on our site.

Tom:I think they speak Portuguese in Brazil. We have trouble enough maintaining the English site right now.

Tom:Festivus for the rest of us.

Tom:We're working on a Flash version of the client. It should be ready by about the time Flash is dead. J/K... it actually is coming along quite nicely, but I'm not going to commit to any deadlines just yet.

Tom:See above.

Tom:If not, I'll just hide their complaints.

Tom:I'm hoping we can spend less time worrying about the 1% of users who depend on BYOND for their daily drama. That said, we have some minor features in the works to make the moderation more transparent by listing the reasons for hidden posts and allowing others to view them if desired.

Tom:I don't think Airjoe is an "a hole"; that's not nice. Affordable game hosting seems like something that would appeal to a lot of developers, and I have discussed integrating that into the site. Airjoe needs to get back to me, though (Airjoe: check your email!)

Tom:If there is a demand for this, sure, we could make that happen.

Tom:Dan is off being a family man & doing physics in Wisconsin (last I checked).

Tom:They were users of the software, just like you. After working briefly in the corporate world, I realized that you only want to hire people who are legitimately enthusiastic about the project you are working on, so what better way to find help than from within the community?

Tom: I don't think I could kill BYOND if I tried at this point.

Tom: My opinion on this has actually changed over the years. I used to have a very laissez-faire approach to this: the public would drive the games, and clones would only survive if that's what they was in demand. We'd stay out of it and what happened, happened. I guess I was a lot more optimistic back then, because deep down I believed that people would flock to the original games and the system would right itself.

Now it's clear the clones are a problem; not so much for the frequent BYOND user who knows what games he likes, but for incoming users who become discouraged when they see that the community is really a lot smaller than it first appears, once you remove all of the rip volume. We have taken measures to try to remedy this: if you actually look at what gets returned in listings and searches and such, it's pretty chock-full of original games (or at least original when given the context of the other games on BYOND). The problem is that the player base is still concentrated in rips, because that's where the demand is. I suspect that if we can get some more mainstream traffic-- something I'm hoping to do with more social network integration with the new Flash stuff-- this effect will be mitigated. But it's a bit of a chicken/egg problem, because right now we're surely driving away users due to this first impression.

Tom: I probably would have gone on to get an advanced degree, maybe a PhD in Comp. Sci. I was a physics major but realized midway through my third year that I am only smart enough to fake like I know physics to people slightly more clueless than me.

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have been able to hang in a corporate environment regardless. I did try that for a few years and found the experience to be very unsettling, even though the job was pretty damn good (and the only time in my life I've had any money). What I realized was that there is a lot of unjustified money out there (excessive gov. funds, big lawsuit payouts, that kind of thing), and this stuff drives the big corporate salaries (including what I was drawing, which wasn't even that big relatively speaking). I just don't want to be a part of that. I like the barter system where you do pay what you think is fair. Unfortunately it's hard to make minimum wage in this system because what service can I provide that's worth $10 an hour to someone?

To support myself during the many years BYOND hasn't made anything, I've had to do little contract jobs through university connections and so forth, so maybe I would have ended up doing that in a full-time capacity. I've been spending a bit of time on a little spinoff idea that hopefully can pay some dividends (financial or otherwise) down the line (this, while I make Lummox JR do all of the real work, mwuahahaha).

Tom: The bug & feature trackers (created by the brilliant Mike H.) have been wonderfully useful. We try to address bugs as quickly as we can and I think we've done a decent job at that. The features obviously don't get looked into as frequently, since we have a lot of stuff already on the docket, but it does give us a good glimpse into the community and we keep that in mind when deciding what to work on next.

Tom: Sadly (and I think this is true of just about any startup), the best times were just in the first few months, when we started formulating this project. It was just supposed to be a game, you see, a NETWORKED GRAPHICAL GAME (this was REVOLUTIONARY in 1995, I tells ya!) I remember going online to find out if this had ever been done (which was hard because there was no Google) and the best I could find was a MUD that someone had tacked on these scene-graphics to. So when, in the first week, we already had a guy moving around on a screen, that was very exciting!

I gave a talk to my old college in 1997, after we'd been working full-time on this project for about a year, and that was a lot of fun. I was really enthusiastic then and starting to see the real potential of the Internet, and I think some of the students there saw it too. I feel like Dan & I were really close to something big-- right time, right general arena, but not enough foresight to get some financial backing and probably too pigeonholed to this concept when there were zillions of good ideas out there.

I can't think of one particular hardest thing. People will tell you that doing a startup project is hard, but it really isn't if you are willing to live cheap. You get to do pretty much what you want and you do have either have a little money (my parents gave me a chunk to start, which was amazing) or a way to generate some (that took a while). Really, the hardest thing for me is the lifestyle. You work alone most of the time and when the project gets tedious, it is a very, very lonely existence. If I were to try another startup, I wouldn't try to bootstrap it and I'd make sure to have a few friends involved from the get-go, so there'd always be dialogue. Without that, you end up going crazy and talking to yourself. Right? Right.

Tom: I hike and bike with Mike H. and the BIKE GODS (http://www.bikegods.org), but it never really gets my mind off things.

Tom: I really idolized my dad when I was a kid (still do, he's a great guy). He's a scientist, so that's what I wanted to do. It just seemed like the most noble profession-- having all the answers to the universe.

But I didn't realize until much later (in college), that I'm just not very good at science. It is humbling how many really smart people there are out in that world. I mean, I was a pretty damn good student but sometimes I'd be talking to my fellow students or a professor or something and thinking, "when is he going to figure out that I don't know WTF he's even talking about?" The worst thing is, my dad is one of those guys!

I got lucky (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it), getting into computers. I worked for my dad for about six summers and had access to these fantastic 256-color (!) graphics powerhouses called SGI Indigos, and that's where I learned C and graphics programming. At the time (I don't know if this is still the case), they didn't really teach programming in school, just computer science theory, so I had a real edge on the other kids and that gave me some confidence. Ironically, I was probably very well qualified for to get an industry job then, just because I had some experience. Now, with every kid starting to program when they are 10, it's a little more competitive!

When I stare at the darkness at night, I think that I would have liked to be a novelist or a filmmaker. Maybe one day.