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'Threshold' of a dream

FANTASY WORLD FOR GAMERS IS CREATED IN LEXINGTON BASEMENT

By Scott Sloan ssloan@herald-leader.com,by scott sloan

Inside a home off Richmond Road in Lexington stands a portal. It's a gate to medieval times. To pandemics. To battles. To ancient religions.

Working in their basement, homeowners Michael and Pang Hartman have crafted and continue to shape a fantasy realm that 5,000 people worldwide inhabit.

It's Threshold, a 13-year-old, text-only, role-playing computer game, and it's about to have a sequel.

The Hartmans and the 11 freelance staffers of their company, Frogdice, have built Primordiax, a new game launching in the next month that continues the fantasy world of Threshold.

Threshold grew out of Michael Hartman's time spent playing "multi-user dungeon" computer games, or MUDs. The games, which began in the 1970s with the forerunners of personal computers, require players to interact with each other by typing commands.

Unlike today's video games, they have no graphics. Just words.

Hartman began developing Threshold about 1994 while he was in law school at the University of Georgia.

"In the classic entrepreneurial spirit, I thought I could build a better mousetrap," he said.

He taught himself computer programming and soon found that he liked it much more than the law. "I eventually just said that I really hate being a lawyer, and I really love making games," he said.

By 1996, he was full-time in the video game business. And while work on many of today's video games end right as they hit store shelves, Hartman, 37, and his wife, Pang, 33, have spent years keeping Threshold fresh.

The game contains the elements of any standard role-playing game: quests, leveling up characters, purchasing goods and more. Players join guilds, or clans, and try to become the most influential. They also take part in a religion system.

"We're always adding more content," Michael Hartman said.

A recent example was an invasion of a town near one of the world's capital cities."The players have to figure out why it's being invaded and whether they would help," he said. "What kind of help they give will change how we react.

"We try to keep the world really dynamic. It's another thing you can do in text that's really hard to do in graphics; we let the players have a real effect on the world."

One rule that sets Threshold and soon Primordiax apart from other computer role-playing games is that players must stay in character.

"You can't talk out of character. You can't say, 'How about those Cats?'" said Hartman. "I think it raises the maturity level and creates kind of a tighter community."

The games also provide a far more complex experience than typical graphics-intensive games, said player Meghan O'Malley, who is a student at Michigan State University.

"When I explain to friends that I play a 'text-based game' and get the blank stares, I always describe it as a sort of book that you're writing with other people," O'Malley said. "You get to read and interact with what other people have come up with, and you get to add your own ideas to the world, influencing what happens."

O'Malley, who plays graphical RPGs like World of Warcraft, said her first love has always been reading and her "very active imagination" makes her prefer "picturing things in my imagination rather than looking at someone else's interpretation."

The characters also present a level of complexity not in other games.

Take the character, for instance, of Brownell Combs, who lives in Fairfax, Va., but began playing shortly after graduating from Centre College in Danville in 1997.

In the game, he's a "justicar," basically a mix between a police officer and criminal prosecutor.

"In other games, you get your equipment and you go kill things," he said. "As a justicar, I get to write legal briefs. It's all based on precedent. You would go back and review the previous cases in Threshold and cite old case law to support your current position."

It's a complexity that plays to the game's demographics. The average age of a player is 33, said Pang Hartman, and the company doesn't allow people younger than 18 to play.