Originally, I designed Vikingr as a sort of “Viking Wars”—a turn-based, asynchronous social game in the vein of BBS or text-heavy web games (e.g. Legend of the Red Dragon, Archmage) or, more recently, hybridized graphical games like Mafia Wars. This would progress at a pace of one year per day, granting players 52 turns per day, and subject characters to the ravages of age and permanent death so that players would move on to a new character roughly once per month. I would also introduce additional limitations to emphasize the quotidian nature of most of Viking life: For example, raiding and long-distance trade expeditions had to be conducted when little could be done at home, so activities like farming would be performed during springtime turns and the expeditions would take place in summer.

My goal was to take the above, sprinkle in some social mechanics, and play up the fact that everyone was contributing to one massive shared history with their gameplay actions. By giving players a little context for these histories, we could be off to the races with a novel web-game that doesn’t just permit player-generated stories to emerge but acknowledges them and incorporates them into its gameplay.

Unfortunately for me, when I started prototyping all this—a website, a server in my programming language of choice, a bunch of equations and formulae, decisions made for scalability’s sake, research into hosting and APIs and this and that, lists of features to implement—I realized that I was thinking like an engineer, not a game designer. So I went to paper and did a sort of simulation RPG about budgeting one’s time between preparing for raids and going on them. This felt far more like accountancy or event planning than viking, so it forced me to reexamine my base assumptions.

Ultimately, I came to an inescapable conclusion: “Take a new technology and apply it to an existing genre in an uncommon fictional context” is an incremental way of thinking. There’s a time and a place for incremental improvement, but a 12-month MFA thesis is emphatically not it. So I went back to the drawing board: If I wanted players to create and share stories about being Vikings (and to use my game and my technology to do it), what must I help them to feel? The answer to that had to merge historical reality with literary fantasy.