Gamasutra has posted a lengthy interview with Ultima creator Richard Garriott, in which he discusses his plans to bring an “Ultima Online-like experience” to the social gaming scene, and how he wants that experience to be accessible to just about everyone.

“Even the kinds of games that you might think I would make, I don’t generally play, because they’re often just too much of a hassle to get into them,” says Garriott, of the current crop of MMOs.

Instead, he says, he spends his gaming time with the iPhone, and believes that the true evolution of games will be one that allows mainstream gamers to touch the depth of design that he and his compatriots are capable of.

So we can take this as confirmation of at least one thing; New Britannia, whatever it finally ends up looking like, will indeed be a multiplayer game, in the MMORPG mold, but easier to get into and (presumably) taking full advantage of the social features of its target platforms: Facebook, hi5, Twitter, and suchlike.

He also talks up the Portalarium concept a bit, in a way that I had not previously heard:

Now if you’re playing one Ville-like game and I’m playing a different Ville-like game, we don’t know about each other’s activities during those games until after I log out and look at my posts on my wall and I go, “Oh, at the same that I was playing, my friend was playing this other game; kind of wish I knew that.”

And so we’ve created an infrastructure — a standardized messaging system between all games — so that while you’re playing a game, I can get notifications of what you’ve done that I can either ignore, tell you congratulations or whatever else, or click on a link that lets me change games and jump right in and play right alongside you. So we believe that we’re trying to deepen the connections between you and your friends across all the games that you play.

This almost sounds like the way Valve’s Steam does things; I might fire up Torchlight or Mass Effect, and in behind these games the Steam framework fires up and hums quietly along. Periodically, in the lower right corner of the screen, I’ll see a notification pop up, informing me that one of my Steam contacts has begun playing Trine (or whatever; this is just an example).

It also goes way beyond what Steam offers; I can’t just click on the notification and suddenly play Trine alongside my contact. But things are a bit different with browser games, which don’t require large installs to get started in.

Garriott elaborates:

[O]ne of my personal goals is to create a more what I call an Ultima Online-like experience with the game that I’m hoping to do — the big game coming up. And that will again go back to making linear narrative somewhat of a challenge, just like it was a challenge in Ultima Online.

…[I]magine two games, one of which is Ultima Online the way it was shipped. You go to the store and pay 50 bucks for it — well first of all you have to drive to the store, pay 50 dollars, bring it home, install it, then you have to sign up to pay 10 dollars a month, and then you can play it.

Or here’s version 2: same exact game, but your friend sent you an email, click on this link and you can play. You click on it, you begin playing immediately, it’s streaming download — you don’t have to do the huge install to begin with, and only if you play past level 5 do I then find a way to charge you for it — for hopefully about the same amount of money.

Which of those games are you going to enjoy the most? Presumably, you’re going to enjoy them the same — because it’s the same game — but which one do you think is going to spread more easily? Well, clearly the one that you can just click on an email and play is going to spread more easily.

So that’s what I’m saying — don’t worry about the content of what you see so far. Think of it as a distribution method and a platform of access. The reason why I play so many games on this platform is because it’s so easy, and two to five bucks is an impulse purchase. I don’t even think of a price that I’m paying to play these games, even though in total, in a month, I pay a lot more for iPhone games than I ever did in PC games because I just buy a lot more of them. And so that’s fine.

I’ve talked up the potential that even a rube like me can see in the social gaming space before, and a lot of people have come back with the reply that, in effect, the current crop of social games (Zynga’s various offerings, Lord of Ultima, etc.) has more or less left them convinced that the scene is just a passing fad full of trite, unappealingly simple distractions. And I have in the past tried to express the potential of social gaming by using the metaphor of mobile phone games, which have become amazingly complex and graphically stunning despite their humble and overly simplstic beginnings.

Garriott comes right out and says it directly: “don’t worry about the content of what you see so far”, because that’s a distraction. Look at the power and ubiquity of the platform being used to deliver that content, instead. It’s just waiting — maybe begging — for a developer to come along and use it to its full potential, and to bring a hell of a great game to the social space which does just that.

More importantly, he goes on to discuss the advantage for developers, who — in coding these games and administering them as they run — will have access to all kinds of player information and metrics.

[N]o MMO developer should be excused from not knowing the answers to these questions because we had metrics then, too.

…[I]n Ultima Online we constantly used those metrics to redesign the game. For example, one of my favorite stories is, in Ultima Online, when the game shipped, you could use a fishing pole on the water and there was a 50/50 chance you’d get a fish. Beginning and end of simulation — literately use a pole, on water, 50/50, fish. Lots of people did it, tons of people did it.

And people began to believe apocryphal information about fishing; they began to believe that if you fished in a river versus in the ocean they were better chances of getting fish, which of course was not true. I told you the simulation use fishing pole, on water, 50/50, fish. That’s it!

But so many people were doing it, and so many people had these fictitious beliefs that we thought, “Wow, we should spend some time to make fishing better!” And we did. Over time we actually made the fishing simulation more improved, gave you different kinds of fish, and there really was a point to using different places, and then it became even more popular.

And there were things that we thought were really cool that we put in the game, that nobody noticed or cared about — very sad and tragic. But we either fixed and adressed those, or often, we just removed them from the game.

This level of information could be gathered back in the 1990s. Today, even developers of single-player titles run all kinds of analytics utilities in the background as players play, and will tweak game balance mechanics, enemy and power-up placements, and other details of the game in patches and updates based on the information they collect. All of this goes toward making the games incrementally better for players as they play through them.

Just imagine how possible that would be in a social game, especially given the amount of information people will reveal about themselves and their tastes on some social networks (e.g. Facebook). For a developer who wants to make games which promote emergent gameplay and respond to the unique tastes of players, that’s a gold mine!

So…what’s next for Garriott and Portalarium? If you’ve been following the news, or even just following Aiera, you already know:

We’re just about to release our first truly original game, which is still a very light game in a sense of social media type game, but not a farming game, not a cafÈ operation game, not a pet management game, but a truly original game; it’s still quite light by what people might expect from Lord British standards.

That game is called Ultimate Collector. And then we’re going to roll into what I call the next, you know, big Lord British virtual world game (Lord Britishís New Britannia).

Ultimate Collector, set in a contemporary world/theme, will be out sometime this summer and is a unique social media style game which will have some of the same conventions (asynchronous play, sharing accomplishments and information with your friends, etc.) that are part of successful social media games today.

I will soon begin development of my new Lord British-style RPG for social media and mobile platforms in the very near future. Lord British’s New Britannia, which was mentioned in our SXSW Accelerator presentation in March, is a working title for that product.

As I said, you all should have known this already. From the sound of it, we’ll all be able to play New Britannia on our iPads and iPhones, too; Garriott remarks that they are working on versions of the Portalarium player for both devices, and one can only assume that the list of target platforms extends beyond iOS devices as well.