In keeping with Garriott’s Tolkienism, Ultima Online is also extraordinarily detailed, down to its most banal features. Players can design clothes for their avatars; they can have pets and train them to do tricks; and they can construct elaborate houses, which, if they have the wherewithal, they can decorate with paintings and rugs and candelabra and tchotchkes. They “talk” to one another by typing—the words appear suspended above the characters’ heads—and they tend to use a combination of pseudo Middle English and computerese, slipping from “thee” and “thou” to “LOL” (Laughing out loud) and “WTF” (What the fuck?).

Many familiar elements of the Ultima Series, like Lord British, reappear in Ultima Online, but the logic of the enterprise is inverted. In place of the goal-driven narratives of the earlier games is an open-endedness that leaves the player free to do pretty much whatever he pleases—slay dragons, raise the dead, or make shirts. U.O. features a kind of fishing, which involves gripping a virtual pole and clicking on some virtual water. (Virtual fish bite according to a fixed algorithm.) The activity has proved extremely popular.

As Garriott pointed out to me, U.O. is one of the few unambiguously profitable uses of the Internet, other than pornography. Still, moving the game online has not been without its costs. In the original Ultima games, the player might have been all alone, but he did get to be the hero. In U.O., the player has to struggle for recognition. “Playing a virtual-world game takes some getting used to,” Garriott told me. “You have to realize that the world is what you make of it. Unfortunately, that means most likely you’re going to have a relatively mediocre life.”

Britannia has some thirty “game masters,” who work in round-the-clock shifts out of a large room on the third floor of Origin’s headquarters. The room has two rows of carrels, and each carrel is outfitted with two computers. Three-quarters of the game masters are young men, and they seem to subsist mainly on cigarettes and litre-sized cups of soda. One day, I spent several hours in the room, sitting next to the young man who plays Game Master Quinnly. Game Master Quinnly wears a red robe and tries to remain courtly even under difficult circumstances. “Hail, I’m GM Quinnly,” he told one young knight accused of killing a friend and then looting his corpse. “GMs suck ass,” the knight responded.

Queries come into the game masters’ queue from all over the world—”Ich sitze hier in Jail und weiss nicht weiter” was one that I saw—and on every conceivable topic. Often, players accuse each other of “macroing”—operating a character on an automatic program, which is against the rules—or of exploiting bugs in the programming to circumvent the game’s limitations. There were complaints of harassment and stealing and scamming and also several reports of foul language—for example, “A guy named Sebell called me a faggot,” and “Feodoric is continuing to call me a bedwetter”—which is another violation of game protocol.

Running the game masters’ room is a big expense for Origin and, to a large degree, an unanticipated one. Britannia was supposed to be self-policing, but instead it kept veering toward anarchy. Early on, more experienced players figured out how to identify new characters, or, as they are called, “newbies.” In addition to being unfamiliar with the landscape, newbies cannot defend themselves against older characters who have had more time to collect skill points. Some players were luring newbies out into the woods, beyond the protection of the town guards, and killing them; others were encouraging newbies to commit crimes, and then letting the guards kill them. The result was a lot of players whose experience of the game consisted mostly of being dead, a condition that discouraged them from continuing to pay their monthly fees.

In response to the slaughter, U.O.’s designers introduced the “notoriety” system—a version of “Megan’s law.” The server was reprogrammed to note when one character killed another and to gradually turn a murderer’s name—characters’ names appear above their heads—from very blue to very red. The problem with the notoriety system was that player-killers, or PKs, soon figured out a way to foil it. Killing a player-killer was considered by the servers to be not a bad deed but a good one, so PKs paired up to do each other in. The more times they did this, the bluer their names became. “You’d see this person and you’d go, ‘Hey, it’s Mother Teresa,’ and then he’d stab you in the back,” one of the designers of the system told me.

”Notoriety” was subsequently modified to “reputation,” a system similar to that used on eBay, by which victims could rate their murderers. The problem with this system was that everyone handed out murder counts, no matter what the circumstances of the killing. (Dead characters can be resurrected by characters skilled in healing.) The counts eroded over time, so PKs were keeping their characters logged on, doing nothing, as a form of self-imposed jail time. Eventually, a bounty system was introduced, but this, too, proved vulnerable to manipulation: PKs would have their friends kill them and split the bounty.

Finally, last year, U.O. gave up on the notion of self-policing. Britannia these days exists in two parallel versions, or “facets”—Felucca, where killing other players is O.K., and Trammel, where, except under very limited circumstances, it is not. Four-fifths of all players choose Trammel.

The facet system has succeeded in reducing unwanted player-versus-player violence, but, if the time I spent with the game masters is any indication, it has certainly not eliminated it. One complaint received by Game Master Quinnly concerned a character named Gaudemus, who, it was reported, was sicking his dragon on other characters. (Dragons can be tamed and kept as pets.) Quinnly hastened to the scene:

GAUDEMUS: WTF. GM QUINNLY: Let’s discuss your releasing dragons to kill other players. GAUDEMUS: That’s illegal. GM QUINNLY: Quite. GAUDEMUS: I released it because I don’t want it. It was a crappy dragon. GM QUINNLY: I am releasing you on this warning.

One night in Austin, I went out to dinner with Raph Koster, U.O.’s former lead designer, and Rich Vogel, the game’s former producer. Both now work for Verant, which is owned by Sony and produces EverQuest, U.O.’s main rival. The two are on the development team for a game based on the “Star Wars” fiction, which is scheduled to launch next year. Vogel, who is thirty-two, is tall and fair and reticent; Koster, who is twenty-nine, is short and dark and voluble. The restaurant that we went to served American cuisine, and was decorated, somewhat incongruously, as a ski lodge, with snowshoes on the wall and a fire roaring in the hearth.

Austin these days is a major high-tech center—the direct flight between the city and San Jose, California, is referred to as the “nerd bird”—and it has become a hub of electronic gaming. The city’s gaming world is a close one, whose inhabitants all seem to have one another’s numbers programmed into their cell phones.

Like almost everyone else I met who had been associated with U.O., Vogel and Koster referred to themselves as “gamers,” by which they seemed to mean not just that they liked to play computer games but that they didn’t really see them as games. Koster was an aficionado of MUDs, or multi-user dungeons, while Vogel had been an early addict of a game called Dragon’s Gate, which operated on the computer service Genie and was billed on a per-hour basis. When his habit was at its height, Vogel told me, he had run up bills of several hundred dollars a month.

U.O. took more than two years to design, and, according to Koster, who joined the development team in 1995, a great deal of that time went into trying to perfect what was known as the “resource system.” Under this system, both natural and man-made objects were coded according to the imaginary resources that went into them—a sheep, for example, was a couple of units of meat and a couple of units of wool—and the total pool of each resource was fixed, so that there would always be a certain amount of meat in the world and a certain amount of wool. One of the goals of the system was to produce a naturalistic and therefore dynamic environment: the sheep would get eaten by wolves, and as the wolf population grew the sheep would decline.