#mehul

You know, you were always the shorter of us two, I wonder what it'd feel like if I was the tiny one~

~@werejustcutethatway

In case many ever wondered, the OG Mehul is still alive and kicking! Just so happens, one of our dedicated players, Frosty, managed an interview with him! Check out the interview below! And thanks Frosty!!

1.  Do you ever play, or feel inclined to play, Utopia?  Just out of curiosity?

Honestly, outside of the first few years running it, I really didn't play it much even when managing it. I would participate in the sense that I'd have an account and kind of watch the dynamics of how players interacted and if there were any imbalances in gameplay, but I wasn't an active gameplayer. Since selling it, I haven't ever played it. I've checked out the website occasionally just to see how things are going, but actually hadn't done that in a few years now either. This interview led me to do a deeper dive into the game today and it's pretty neat to see how it's evolved with Discord chats, an android app, etc but also how much of the original core game has survived!  But I haven't tried playing it as of yet.

2.  Are you still in touch with Blake?  I think Blake deleted my provinces more than once.

Absolutely - he was one of my close friends when he joined Swirve and still remains so. I'm in contact with him regularly and see him a few times a year. If you'd ever like to interview him, I can reach out and see if he has any interest! 

3.  Are you interested in ever making a new online game? 

I've had lots of ideas and think I still understand game design and mechanics really well. But I don't really play computer games these days, so I don't have a good sense of the industry, and my programming skills are still late 1990s, early 2000's level, so there'd be no way to develop a game in today's world the way I'd want to. One of the things I enjoyed in creating Utopia is that I could create it entirely in my head and then turn into code, do the (very limited) graphic design, and every other part of the website and business myself (before we grew and added Blake). Earth:2025 went from "I should try to make a webgame" to release in something like 6 weeks. Utopia was a bit longer, but conceptually similar. That kind of pace and environment is what I thrive in. Today's games seem to require entire teams of developers and designers and so many things to coordinate and the timeline to develop seems to be measured in years. None of that is really appealing to me, unfortunately.

4.  You manage escape rooms in Austin.  How do you develop those, how has Covid affected the industry, and how has your online game development affected your perspective in developing escape room scenarios?

Some friends and I launched an escape room around 2016 and it's one of the most fun projects I've been involved in. I love creating unique and interesting forms of entertainment. Swirve existed in a time when the internet wasn't really social - it was used for information and there were occasional message boards and such, but there was no social media, no real interaction between people of different backgrounds or cultures or things like that. So that's what I really focused on - Earth was interactive, but in a limited way. Utopia was kind of the fulfillment of that vision of bringing people together in a totally new way. 

Escape Rooms exist in kind of the opposite world. Now everyone interacts on screens and phones, and every corner of the world is accessible to everyone.  But in the process, we lost some of the human-to-human interactions. So the escape room was an opportunity to bring my strength in game design to a different world - taking out the screens and the tech and getting people laughing and struggling together face-to-face. Every aspect of it was fun - watching people play and seeing the joy they got, designing the games to create unique and quirky themes and puzzles, etc. For me, it was an opportunity to take my understanding of "what's fun" from the online gaming world and try to turn that into a real-life scenario. A lot of the outputs are very different, but the core ideas of what makes something interesting and addictive and gets people excited are very similar underneath. We had an amazing team of owners and employees that made the whole thing a blast and really successful.

Unfortunately, Covid hit in the middle of it all, and putting people in a room with strangers and having them touch things that other random people had touched all day long was basically the single least Covid-friendly activity you could come up with. We were built to be a high volume business that was fully booked all the time, and unfortunately, it couldn't survive the pandemic. So we shut it down in 2020 and ended up selling it to a company looking to expand their global presence. But, even post-pandemic, I don't think escape room popularity has returned to where it was prior (for a whole host of reasons relating to how covid changed people's entertainment preferences and spending).

5.  Do you see any future in text-based games?  Utopia's numbers keep dwindling despite being one of the best games ever made.  How can text-based compete with "modern" games?

Its hard to imagine, honestly. If you asked me in 2000 whether the game would be around 25 years later, I'd have laughed. I knew it was something special, but technology ultimately moves forward. Utopia survives because it has such a loyal following and works well enough on a smaller scale with a few thousand people. But if it had never existed and we tried to launch the same game today, no one would give it a chance. So it's incredibly fortituous that it had the right timing and grew enough in its heyday to maintain itself through today. And great ownership by whoever runs it these days to understand what makes it work and keep improving things while not losing that essence. It would be very tempting to try to turn it into something it's not to target a broader audience, and I think that would destroy it pretty quickly, so I'm glad they haven't pursed that.

That said, one area where I think text-based games could play an interesting role is with the massive growth in AI. Having the game be able to interact with players in a human way opens a whole new interesting set of doors of how to design games. For example, you could design a game done entirely through conversations on SMS between players and a virtual game host. I think of things like Dungeons & Dragons campaigns that could be modernized with technology but still be conversation or text focused. I haven't thought through it well enough to have a cohesive game idea, but that's an area where text can still dominate and create some unique value.

6.  Utopia has changed so much but has also remained the same over the 25 years I've been playing.  Real-life connections have been forged...marriages and friendships.  Did you forsee this?  (I know you have already been asked this...but it still boggles my mind.)   (Combining with 8.  What are our or more of your favorite Utopia (or Swirve in general) moments)

Not even for a second. Utopia is now older than I was when I wrote it, which is kind of insane to think about. As I mentioned earlier, doing this interview led me to do a bit of research just to see what the game looks like now and such. Seeing so many things added and new ways to interact with the game is really neat. At the same time, the logo is the original logo from our early years - that, to me, is crazy and really cool to see what's survived.

When I was started it, I was also pretty young and focused more on the game and business development. While I loved how much fun it was for everyone and had a pretty good sense that I was creating something fairly unique, I don't think I had the life experience to really understand the full impact the games would ultimately have. The friendships - I had hoped for that and that was part of the core design. But marriages? My favorite was hearing about a pair from literally opposite sides of the globe - Sweden and the Philippines - ultimately meeting and getting married.  The long-term post-game connections people have maintained are amazing. I was just looking at some reddit forums and to see people still talking about how they played the games 20 years ago and that they still have an emotional attachment to those experiences is kind of incredible.

Some of the things I didn't appreciate as much at the time but now still remember decades later are things like teachers sharing how they used Utopia and Earth to connect with students and teach them everything from math to social skills. And parents using the game to bond with their adopted kids and things like that. Creating fun is great, but actually having an impact on lives on a broader scale is a feeling that's hard to match - and not something I went into Utopia thinking would ever be the case. But that idea of helping impact people's lives in some unique way is something that's become an important part of any project I've worked on since and will do in the future.

7.  Game changes must be exhausting to conceptualize.  There are issues of balance (to fix flaws in the mechanics) and also a kind of intentional chaos (change for the sake of change).  How did you navigate this?

This was actually a really fun part of game design for me. With the Ages system and the game restarting every few months, this whole thing was like an laboratory for me. I could just kind of do whatever I wanted and even if it ended up unbalanced, it would take people a month to figure it out and then in another month or two, we'd just start fresh. People took each age and each change way more seriously than I did and would routinely get upset with things before seeing how they played out. But while I got plenty of things wrong, I think I had a reasonably good intuitive sense if something was going to work OK or being way too destablizing or whatnot that nothing went too, too haywire.

9.  Everyone asked this, but I feel I know the answer: Would you ever consider purchasing the game if you had the option to do so?

I think from a nostalgia perspective, it would be cool. I've often looked to see if I could buy back the swirve.com domain, but it's now in use by another business. But it would be disservice to the player base today because I'm not remotely qualified at this point to keep developing the game! I think if ownership needed to change again, some combination of active players with game-design and/or programming background would be the ideal. One of my big concerns when I sold the games originally was if the people taking it over really understood exactly what it was that made the games and community so unique and how to cultivate that. I think if I were to try to take over today, I'd be in that same position since I've been away so long.

10.  You have supported various causes, such as Restoration Collective (If I am correct.) In any case, what organizations or causes would you like to mention?

I know not why these people accost you with such hateful, bigoted statements.

In the time I have known you, and with our darling son, you have been filled to the brim with your own special love for us and treasure almost nothing else more.

I am yours, I could not belong to any other, and I am incandescently happy for it.

Your Healer,

Marius

PS: Enclosed in this letter is a card from Mehul (it has a crayon colored aro flag and "I love you Papa" inside it)

@werejustcutethatway

😘😘😘 thank you, my love, for your words of encouragement. Unfortunately, bigotry is nothing new to me; many have hated me for one reason or another in my long life. This is simply the first time it has happened here.

I love you too, little seashell!

Mehul's card, for those interested: