Garriott said he did the high-concept elements, letting the developers work on individual missions. One of his contributions was creating a pictographic language for the game that players need to master in order to succeed.

"If you are going to create a reality, you need to create that reality very completely," Garriott said, explaining the intensity of designing a game that is complex and compelling enough to keep players interested for hours at a time — and willing to keep paying the monthly subscription. "The designer, the developer and the writer need to understand that reality much deeper than ever necessarily shows up in the plot thread. That way, you can create something that is internally self-consistent and has a sense of history and culture and reality to it."