Influence Through Design

Virtual world design is about consequences. Every decision that a designer makes will have effects; some effects will be desirable, some will be undesirable, and some will be unforeseen. The direct consequences of a design decision can often be made with a high degree of certainty: If you give players lock-picking skills that go from 0 to 100 and create certain locks that require a skill of 110 to pick, you can be fairly sure that the integrity of those locks will not be compromised unless someone gets hold of the key you’ve given to the boss mobile. The indirect consequences may be trickier to predict: Will thief-class characters ignore lock-picking skills and max out pickpocketing instead so they can steal the keys they need?

Making judgments about the likely reactions of players is difficult, even with behavioral models to help. Designers have total control with regard to the tangible aspects of a virtual world, but with intangibles they can only hope to influence players, not to force them (which is probably just as well). Thus, designers present their most favored options favorably and their most unfavored options unfavorably, but ultimately players decide for themselves what to do.

Immersion and community are the great intangibles. How can designers influence them?

Churn, Sink, and Drift

Churn is the rate at which people leave a virtual community. The greater the level of community, the lower the churn, because the stronger the bonds that hold the community together. Most churn occurs in a newbie’s early days: They play, decide they don’t like the virtual world, and leave. This cause of churn is called sink: Newbies show up, play a little, don’t like it, and sink without trace. They may flit into a few communities, but none of these gain enough of a hold. (Indeed, they may loosen them: The virtual world itself might be compelling but have thoroughly obnoxious players.)

If players take a bite of a virtual world and decide they like the taste, they’ll stay longer. For most commercial virtual worlds, there’s a formal start to this: When their free suck-it-and-see starter period runs out and they have to commit to paying a monthly fee. From this point, they’ll only leave the virtual world if there are real-world reasons (e.g., they get married) or because they lose interest in the virtual world. This cause of churn is called drift.

Contrary to what many players and some community managers believe, most established players do not leave after blazing, public rows. Most of them simply disconnect and drift away. Players who complain the loudest care the most; they’re complaining because they see faults that they perceive as a threat to their world and their community, so of course they’re not going to leave! They may threaten to leave, and may even act on that threat, but in most cases they’re back within two weeks if they do.

No, most players—the “silent majority”—simply drift away without a word. They appear less and less frequently, until eventually they don’t appear at all. For a commercial virtual world, players may have to cancel their subscription explicitly for a break to become formal—a decision they’re often reluctant to make because of the investment they’ve made in their characters (it amounts to killing them). However, eventually the bonds fade so much that even this is not important any more.

Virtual world designers usually want to do as much as they can to minimize both sink and drift. Much sink is often impossible to address, being the result of marketing (direct, indirect, or viral) that draws to the virtual world people who simply aren’t ever going to like it. Beyond that, the more barriers to entry there are, the fewer people will care to surmount them; a virtual world with a beautiful character creation system still needs an “auto” button so that people who just want to play have the opportunity to do so.

Strategies for inveigling players after they’ve made it through the door include giving them a mentor the moment they’ve caught their breath, showing them “wow!” environmental effects within five minutes and rewarding them for absolutely anything they do. Good help facilities, easy early goals, and gentle hand-holding will increase the chance that they’ll make the decision to stay for a while; I’ll mention a few others later in this book.

For most virtual worlds, the newbie experience is not all that great, however. It can be argued that this may be good in the long term, as it means that those players who persevere really do like the world and are therefore worth investing time in; unfortunately, if three times this number of newbies are put off who would have grown to like the world had they spent longer in it, filtering in such a manner isn’t necessarily a wonderful idea.

Sink is about why people want to play virtual worlds; drift is about why they stop wanting to play them.

Immersion and community are the hooks that pull people in and the anchors that keep them there. Both can be used to address sink and drift. Remember, though, that they aren’t themselves the core issues, they’re just expressions of them. Immersion is a freedom thing; community is a friendship thing. Freedom and friendship are what designers should really be concerned with; immersion and community are convenient visualizations that can be used to overlay structure on the two more fundamental concepts.

With that in mind, we can look at specific ways for designers to influence community development and individual immersion.

Influencing Community Development

The first decision that designers must make in looking at their virtual world in terms of community is how large they want their community to be. The rule of thumb here is that beyond 250 members, a community of interest is going to fragment into sub-communities of sub-interests no matter what you do (and most fragment much sooner ¹). Most communities will be communities of interest and/or practice, with overlapping subcommunities of commitment. Very few spiritual communities will exist, and when they do they’ll be very small (just a handful of players).

If you’re looking at a large user base, therefore, the question becomes: How large do you want your basic communities of interest and practice to be?

Large communities are:

• More robust. In times of stress they can spin off smaller communities instead of shattering.

• Easier for newbies to join. They have more people out recruiting.

• More accommodating. There’s always “room for one more.”

• Fewer in number. You don’t have to provide so many interests about which they can form.

• Easier to merchandise to. Sell 50 baseball caps instead of 5.

• Easier to link to reality. People visit their web sites and attend their meets.

• More powerful. Therefore their actions are more dramatic.

• Inclusive. Socializers and achievers prefer them.

Small communities are:

• More intense. Someone who is 10% of a community has a bigger say than someone who is 1% of it.

• Quicker to develop. Fewer people make for a more streamlined passage through community levels.

• Friendlier. Newbies are treated by all members at a personal level.

• Less fractious. If a small community erupts into civil war, fewer people are caught in the crossfire.

• More diverse. The special interests are more special.

• Exclusive. Killers and explorers prefer them.

Of course, you’ll get a range of community sizes whatever you do; your influence comes in pushing the bell curve toward larger or smaller communities.

You can do this in two ways: By providing or failing to provide in-context community management tools for the players (bigger communities need more tools, therefore if you don’t give them these tools it’s harder to keep such communities coherent); by setting the natural lines of partition. In general, failing to provide tools for no reason other than you don’t want players to use them is a bad idea. Partitioning is therefore the favored approach for determining average community size.

Lines of partition vary. The most obvious (because of the way basic communication works in virtual worlds) is to use geographic partitioning. Players who are in the same communication space, with access to the same kind of resources and experiences as other people in that space, will find it easier to form communities with one another than with people in spaces that are remote. Therefore, by providing boundaries to spaces a designer can foment community within the population penned in by the space.

Examples of geographic boundaries (in decreasing strength) are

• Physical. Walls, impassable mountains.

• Resource-based. Expensive boat rides, hard-to-find single-use keys.

• Mental. Tiresome-to-cross forests and deserts.

• Relative. Your magical powers diminish as you move further from your mana source.

The most popular ² way to effect partitions is by functionality. This comes in two flavors: Those who have similar functions (mages all join the mages’ guild) and those who have complementary functions (someone to take damage, someone to cause damage, someone to repair damage). The former tends to lead to large, clearing-house communities of interest that then form sub-communities (while remaining part of the community as a whole); the latter will lead to smaller communities of commitment fairly rapidly.

In theory it’s possible to take any tangible property of a character and use it as a basis for forming a community. It’s conceivable to have communities based on character gender, character race, character strength, color of character’s hair, whether the character’s name begins with J—the list is endless. In practice, though, only character experience happens often enough to be significant: Relative newbies will often join with other relative newbies on the basis that they can’t join up with anyone else. Although mixed-ability groups are possible, providing mixed-ability content for them is awkward, so many designers prefer players to hang out with their peers anyway.

These are communities formed about in-context interests, of course. Many communities form for out-of-context reasons. There may, for example, be communities of real-life friends, of people who speak some foreign language, of fans of some TV series, or of people who share the same real-life gender ³. There is little that designers can do to stop such communities from forming, even though they can spoil immersion for non-members (and for members, too).

Partitions can be formal or informal. Formal partitions are ones that the virtual world provides itself, hardwired in. Most geographic partitioning is formal, although the weaker ones can be informal. Functional partitioning can be both. Typically, a virtual world will come with some prefabricated placeholders for communities that the designer wants or that the fiction demands. For example, all villages may be defined to have a “leader” office, the holder of which is responsible for setting local rates and deciding on what to spend the resulting income. The purpose of this role might be to give politician-type players something to shoot for, but because leaders are elected by other players ⁴ a “natural” pressure for a geographic community of interests exists. This would be a formal partition. Alternatively, a group of players may get together and become bandits, raiding plump wagon trains. They, too, will choose a leader. This would be an informal partition. The designer may have deliberately created plump wagon trains with the intention of inciting players to become bandits, but unless there’s a tangible, bandit-specific construct involved, the community of bandits is informal.

Communities made up of members with complementary functionality are generally informal, but there is often a “winning formula” that ensures they gravitate toward a common make-up. By careful composition of gameplay elements ⁵, designers can predefine roles without necessarily hardwiring them. The fighter/magic-user/cleric triple may be classic, but it’s not the only possibility even for combat (the real world’s traditional infantry/cavalry/archer triple is arguably better for gameplay purposes, as it’s more stone/paper/scissors).

The point, though, is that by engineering a need for team play at this level—whatever the roles involved–designers can encourage players to seek out members to complete their team. This means unattached players are actively sought out and brought into communities, rather than left to mope around until someone takes pity on them. Once the team is formed, the barriers go up and its members are relatively insulated from social contact with members of other teams; this usually leads to the speedy formation of a community of commitment. The approach can work spectacularly well (see EverQuest), but suffers in that not everyone wants to play as a team the whole time.

Another decision that designers need to make concerning their groups is how modular or intertwined to make them. If players can be members of more than one community, that gives them multiple possibilities for finding the one that’s right for them. More cynically, it gives them multiple reasons for not leaving. If communities are modular, the argument goes that they provide a hot-house atmosphere, with nowhere for players to go to cool down, therefore disputes come to a head and are resolved rapidly instead of brewing for weeks. Thus, they will grow to a spiritual level that much more quickly. Unfortunately, if a community is modular then it can leave a virtual world as a module if its members so decide, setting itself up in some other virtual world instead.

To entwine communities is fairly easy once you’ve made the decision to do it: You simply provide orthogonal interests that some members of a community might share but that others won’t. A player may bond most tightly to their regular party members, but also have friends in the fighters’ guild, the army, the swordsmith co-operative, the Northlands expatriates club and the glove collectors’ society. If you want to encourage some of them further, build formal hierarchies that have preconfigured cross-links (“Sorry, we only buy old swords from members of the fighters’ guild”).

To modularize communities is easier in one sense, in that it means less design work overall, but it’s quite hard to achieve in practice because of the constraints it imposes on the rest of the design of the virtual world. The DikuMUD paradigm of party roles (as exemplified by EverQuest) is one way, and the fealty hierarchy of Asheron’s Call is another. The key is to stop players from “leaking out” of their tight little groups without stifling them to the extent that they feel they’ve joined some weird mind-control cult. Unfortunately, the more variety a designer provides, the greater the urge players have to pursue disparate interests. EverQuest overcame this by having one overarching interest (kill things to get stuff so you can kill more things). Asheron’s Call attempted it by not providing mechanisms for players to organize outside the central hierarchy, but found to its cost that this caused frustration and resentment. It’s one thing to provide only carrots to eat, quite another to provide a variety of food but only let people eat the carrots.

Big communities will hold together better if they have structure. Structure will also help formal communities come into being, as it gives them a framework to flesh out. On the other hand, structured communities can’t always form in an impromptu fashion and their overt lack of equality is a barrier to achieving spiritual level. Designers realize that structure is important for communities and will often provide a number of methods by which groups can be formed, merged, and unformed, by which positions can be created and players promoted, demoted, or shifted sideward, and by which members can be admitted or expelled. Communication channels, group ownership of property and bank accounts, group-specific iconography—all these can be added to help structure. The only caveat is that it should still be possible for groups not to have structure if they don’t want it. A bunch of mages who meet in a pub and decide on the spur of the moment to go off and try to take down some trolls without a tank, just for the hell of it, don’t want to have to buy a guildhouse in order to get a private communications channel to use.

Chapter 5 discusses different ideas for formal and informal hierarchies and other social arrangements that can be used to help crystallize communities about them. For now, though, we’ll conclude our look at communities by considering ways to promote community in general.

Ways to Promote Community

Having ways to shape communities is all well and good, but you need to have communities in the first place. Communities will form whether or not you want them to, of course, but except in very particular cases (for example, psychological or anthropological studies) you should do everything you can to promote them. Note that’s “promote,” not “force.”

Here are some suggestions.

Communication

The more that people communicate, the more they will develop relationships. The more relationships that develop, the stronger the community becomes. Remember that it’s individual friendships that are important: Community is just an emergent consequence of these friendships.

Provide channels. Let people receive messages by their names, their locations, their character’s properties, the groups they’re members of, by topic—the more the merrier. Let them do it using real-time typing, through message boards, through email—however you can. Let them opt out of channels that don’t interest them so they can focus on the ones that do. If none of this fits with the virtual world fiction, change the fiction. It’s that important.

Supply ways for them to exhibit non-verbal cues. Studies of real life communication always show the importance of body language, facial cues, tone of voice, and so on at conveying meaning. People will use gestures while on the phone, even though the person at the other end can’t see them, because it helps them express their thoughts. You can’t take such things into the virtual world, but you can provide substitutes that allow for players to articulate themselves without using words. Use “smile,” “weep,” and every expression of emotion in between that you can find in your thesaurus. If they need tangible effects to support them, add these. Include modifiers, so you can “annoy Gilead” or “praise Gilead.” Allow adverbs, “say ‘hi there’ sarcastically.” Put in freeform emotes/poses: It doesn’t matter if your graphical world can’t depict “emote bares his fangs in a gesture of territorial defiance,” just let the guy type it. MUD2 has used emoticons,:-), as commands for years. Look at other people’s virtual worlds for ideas.

Filtered Communication

This isn’t as important as communication itself, but by allowing communication itself to be a topic of communication, further communication can be stimulated. Communication filters are fine if they don’t remove too much meaning from the message and don’t become the default. If your virtual world has a “say” command, add “lisp,” “stammer,” “stutter,” and anything else you can think of. If characters drink 10 bottles of ale, replace all occurrences of the letter “s” in their speech with “sh.” It’s only a diversion, but if it prompts only one conversation in 10,000 it’s worth it.

Be very careful about adding barriers to communication. These can be unifying if done carefully, but they also can be counter-productive. Players communicate with one another in (usually) English, but their characters might theoretically be speaking Elvish. Therefore, if another character comes along who doesn’t speak Elvish, they shouldn’t see the English (“Thorina says something in Elvish”). Thus, the players with characters who can speak Elvish can operate as a community closed to those that can’t; it gives them an in-context secrecy filter that works naturally as a community boundary.

Providing a “common tongue” that all players can speak (in addition to one or more other in-context languages) is a way to enable communities to form across these language barriers; allowing characters to learn other languages is another way. If you do decide to use language as a community partition (as Dark Age of Camelot does between its three realms), you have to be confident in advance that you’ll have a player base large enough to withstand such partitioning.

Mutual Dependencies (Characters)

If characters are dependent on other characters to succeed, then players will come to trust those characters who don’t let them down. Bonds will be formed, and (if these are reinforced often enough) communities will arise. All members of an adventuring party should depend on one another to some degree, but there are plenty of other ways to promote mutual dependencies. Simple economic need is a favorite: Miners need blacksmiths to buy their iron, and blacksmiths need miners to provide the raw materials they need. This can be extended in different directions, for example temples may need worshippers to cause deities to give their priests powers, and worshippers may need those priests to cure diseases, purify water, and vaporize undead.

There’s a danger of going too far and forcing players to maintain such a web of contacts that they never get anything done. If you need to source 50 components to make a cart, you’re not going to make any carts.

Remember that the idea is to promote dependencies, not to enforce them. Some people like being independent, and will resent being made to rely on others. If blacksmiths want to dig their own iron ore, it should be possible for them to do so.

The dependencies here are gameplay ones. It’s possible to create social dependencies, but these always seem “forced;” besides, socializers will group together anyway without prompting. The exception is when the dependencies are between community newbies and community oldbies. For example, suppose characters lose status for living in a dirty city, but lose even more status if they sweep the streets clean. Newbies, who have no status, can clean the streets without losing status, for the benefit of the community. It’s therefore in the interests of oldbies to attract newbies to their city, so they don’t lose status. The oldbies depend on the newbies (which is the reverse of the normal state of affairs).

Coupled with the idea of dependencies, find ways to allow players to do each other favors. Player A may not depend on player B to achieve some goal, but player B can make it a lot easier for player A by helping in some trivial way. Acts of kindness are the currency of friendships.

Mutual Dependencies (Communities)

As well as dependencies between individuals, create dependencies between communities. Again, the simplest way to do this is economically: The elves make the bows and arrows that the humans use to hunt boar so they can sell the meat to the elves. It doesn’t have to be this clear cut, though: The sorcerers and the necromancers keep apart so as not to contaminate each other’s magic wells.

Dependencies that are threatened can give cause for conflict. If humans cut down trees to make fires on which to roast their boars, this may impact the elves. If there are so many sorcerers that a single magic well is not enough, they may need to set up a second well nearer the necromancers.

Dependencies are about resources. Although some won’t be physical (“the secret of fire”), most will be. Miners convert land into iron; blacksmiths convert iron into swords; soldiers convert swords into land. Characters can be resources: Priests convert worshippers into powers ¹.

Economics and related issues are discussed in Chapter 4, “World Design.”

Reconnection

If you miss a session in the virtual world because your cat was ill, the rest of your party may have moved elsewhere. How are you going to find them? Even if you know exactly where they are, it’s not really pleasant to spend half an hour trekking through swampland to hook up with them.

If people are members of a community of interest, they need to be able to communicate with one another; if it’s a community of practice, they need to be able to access one another’s data; if it’s a community of commitment, they need to be able to act in concert with one another; if it’s a spiritual community, they just need each other. The domain in which these proceedings take place is the community space for that community. For mages passing spell sequences between each other telepathically, all action and interactions takes place through the telepathic network, therefore that would be the community space. In most cases, though, the virtual world itself is the community space. In order to participate in a community, members need to be proximate to the rest of the community in its community space; for virtual worlds, therefore, this means that characters must be able to reach the same (virtual) physical location as other members with relative ease. In other words, they have to be able to teleport to them.

There are two main problems with this. First, it’s often fiction-breaking. If it took eight of us five hours to reach the oasis and it took seven of us another five hours to reach the pyramid, how come it takes one of us only five seconds to make the second half of the journey? Magical explanations are always possible, of course, but the players will view them as the cop-out that they are, spoiling immersion. The second problem is that if characters can appear anywhere at a moment’s notice it makes everywhere local to everywhere else; this plays merry hell with economic systems.

Fortunately, there are ways to promote connection without screwing either the fiction or the economics too badly. These are discussed in Chapter 5 in some detail, but they essentially involve finessing everything through the medium of offline action. When you’re not playing, your character is still active. When you restart, you decide where your character traveled during your offline period and appear there.

Jargon

Jargon consists of new (or specialized meanings for old) words, terms, and phrases; it comes with communities of practice. Although often seen as a barrier (if you don’t speak the language, you’re not ready to join), jargon can be a very effective way of making players feel they really are part of something. It serves to draw in people: You hear someone say “rotate aggro” and you want to know what it means ¹. Acquiring the vocabulary gives you a badge that says, “Hey, I’m one of you.”

Don’t consciously create your own jargon—let it evolve. That way, you’ll get terms that fill a genuine need. The important thing is to record anything that sticks, and make the record available to players. Journalists called the jargon used by MUD1 players MUDspeke, so for MUD2 I compiled the MUDspeke Dictionary, accessible from within the virtual world itself as an out-of-context command ². People look up what words mean, and can use them themselves. It helps them become accepted; it makes them part of the club.

Don’t dismiss jargon as unimportant. Try speaking to a fellow designer without knowing what PvP, PvE, RvR, PD, and PK mean, and see how far you get….

Communal Activities

Sadly, players can’t gather round a camp fire and have a good sing-song; lag, if nothing else, prevents players from acting in concert to this degree. Nevertheless, there are things that players can do together as (virtual) leisure activities, and designers should support them.

For example, players like to tell stories. This doesn’t mean that there should be a bard class and everyone should be obliged to listen politely to their excruciating poetry. It does mean that there should be venues and situations conducive to storytelling and suggestions as to how to go about it. A somewhat overt approach would be to have a Storyteller’s Hall, for example, containing a variety of atmospheric rooms, each with a Storyteller Stone that bears the legend “tell your part of the story, then pass me on.” It’s crude, but it works.

Another example: Provide players with musical instruments. When someone plays the instrument, generate music. It doesn’t have to be complicated (although you can allow some MIDI-style composition if you wish). Playing an instrument is tangible: If someone else in the vicinity plays another instrument, you can lock it in to the same time and rhythm as the other player, lag or no lag. It’s possible to build up bands and orchestras this way. Other players can dance to the music. They’re communal activities that serve no gameplay purpose (although one could be devised). They’re popular because they bring people together. Asheron’s Call 2 features the playing of musical instruments precisely for this reason.

When people have done something exhausting, they want to relax. In the real world, that can mean going to the virtual world for some fun. Sometimes, though, the nature of this fun can itself be exhausting, and players need a way to relax within the virtual world. Give them ways to do it, or they’ll log off and find a real-world alternative.

Stake-Holding

Members of communities act and interact in community space. If they own some of that community space, it can help them feel like they’re a permanent part of that community. For virtual worlds, that generally means they should own some virtual place of residence. It shows they care for the community space, and therefore (by extension) for the community.

Textual worlds introduced the idea of owning property; indeed, building their own house was a major preoccupation of players of TinyMUDs from the very beginning. Many MUDs using codebases that didn’t let players access content-generation tools also allowed characters to own houses, although the practice was not widespread. Its importance was only really highlighted by its inclusion in Ultima Online, where it proved a galloping success ¹.

Stake-holding is good for other reasons, too. Like any property, players see housing as an investment. If they spent weeks collecting the necessary resources, found the perfect plot and designed exactly how they wanted their building to look, they will be loath to quit and leave it to decay.

From the live team’s point of view, property can be a useful indicator of a community’s well-being. If the area where all the bards congregate is run-down, with few people on the streets, something is wrong in bardland and it merits investigation.

I’m talking about stake-holding in terms of housing here, but it doesn’t have to be just that. Players who create in-world works of art, or who have acquired some (other) unique piece of content, will often feel that they have more of a stake in the virtual world than those who don’t.

There are no major reasons not to have housing (or some equivalent) but plenty of major reasons to have it. Unless you have a compact or highly content-driven virtual world, put it in.

Things to Demote

Some things are generally good for communities, and some things are generally bad. There are any number of real-world reasons you wouldn’t want these anyway, but players being players they’ll sometimes occur. Designers should make every effort to prevent this from happening unless explicitly trying to make some kind of point or working with precisely controlled gameplay mechanics.

The main ones to watch out for are:

• Xenophobia

• Prejudice

• Oppression

Xenophobia can cause an individual community to become stronger within itself, but it will be isolated from the rest of the virtual world in a way that other communities aren’t. In some virtual worlds, modular communities often have no motive to interact with other communities, but that’s quite different from having a motive not to interact with them. A party of EverQuest adventurers might keep itself to itself, but if some other party asked to team up for a while to tackle a particularly tough monster, they’d generally give the suggestion a fair hearing. A system that made it easy for the second party to slaughter members of the first party once they’d gained their trust would cause these communities to become more tightly woven (which sounds good) while treating every other community as a threat (which may also sound good, but is most certainly not). People don’t like having to be on their guard the whole time. Under this kind of pressure, modular communities will emigrate to some other virtual world where they’re not going to have to watch their back.

Prejudice is another problem, and one that is harder to deal with as it relies on real-world points of view. An adventurer might consider all socializers to be lazy cowards and a socializer might consider all adventurers to be one-dimensional primitives. Making socializers and adventurers have some mutual dependency would help if done well, but done badly it could cause resentment and make matters even worse. You have to be very careful, but it’s tractable.

When prejudice is based on the real-life attributes of players (“She’s a real girl, they’re unreliable”) there’s very little that can be done; when it’s perceived as a response to prejudice (“We don’t want your male prejudices in our group”) there’s even less. The only strategy available is to make the virtual world sufficiently engrossing and immersive that people leave their real-world prejudices behind; if they form new ones in the virtual world, well, at least your community-promoting strategies are there to address it.

Prejudice is bad because it uses the community-promoting tools to undermine community. What causes bonds can be used to break them. Communication is good, but not when what is being communicated is an ill-judged message not to communicate with someone else. Some people really are detestable, of course, and deserve their fate; prejudice metes out the same fate on those who don’t deserve it. Again, this could strengthen a community under attack, but it can provoke xenophobia while doing so and drive the community out.

Finally, oppression is not to be encouraged. Again, some idealistic designers might see it as the ideal way to fuel community. Under the heel of the despot, the players form tight, close-knit groups as they plot the revolution. Then, suddenly, they rise up as one, depose the tyrant and form a spiritual community that lasts in perpetuity.

Unfortunately, players intensely dislike being given orders by other players or having to hand over their property. The only reason they’ll put up with it for extended periods is if they figure that at some point they’ll get to have a slice of the oppressor’s power themselves. In the real world, oppressed peoples have no escape except revolution or liberation; in virtual worlds, they just go somewhere more conducive to having fun. Thus, designers should strike out anything in the virtual world that allows any player unfettered access to mechanisms by which they can make the lives of other players a misery. Always have checks and balances.

Influencing Immersion

People want to be immersed. Designers want them to be immersed. Therefore, designers and players can collude to make immersion happen. In this sense, immersion is easier to design for than community, because it mainly involves telling players what they want to hear. You don’t have to worry about how much immersion you want, or how quickly to deliver it—just give them as much as you can as quickly as you can, and they’ll do the rest.

The key to immersion is persuasion. The more persuasive an environment is, the easier it is to become immersed in it. The biggest weapon in the designer’s armory of persuasion is familiarity. You might at an intellectual level know you’re in a virtual world, but if everything acts just like it would in the real world then you gradually find yourself treating the world as if it were real while knowing it isn’t. Because you do know it isn’t real, you can still behave as an individual in ways that you wouldn’t if it were the real world, yet because it feels real you can nevertheless believe you’re in it. When knowledge and belief coincide, that’s immersion ¹.

Although similarity to reality is a good way to influence immersion, it suffers from the fact that at first glance players don’t want reality; if they did, they could have it by default for free—they wouldn’t be in the virtual world. Historical, magical, and futuristic virtual worlds by necessity must differ from reality; however, that doesn’t mean they don’t intersect with reality. Players can still be given a strong sense of familiarity, which will smooth their path to immersion just as much as it would in a present-day setting.

This “similarity to reality” approach to inducing immersion seems to suggest that graphical virtual worlds have the edge on textual ones, because they have pictures (like reality) whereas textual worlds don’t. Although in the short term they are indeed patently more like reality, in the long term the situation is not so clear cut. The constructs that designers are creating exist only in the minds of players: Graphics put it there through the senses; text puts it there through the imagination. Text can convey nuances that graphics can’t; indeed, it can convey nuances that reality can’t except through language. Text is also harder to deny. It is not, however, anywhere near as immediate as graphics. On the whole, therefore, text gives the more immersive experience, but it starts too slowly for many people. With graphics, you can still reach immersion, and you start off halfway there already.

The more that players don’t have to think about interacting with their environment, the less they will think about it, and therefore the more immersive their time in the world will be. As an example, consider gravity. There’s no inherent reason why a virtual world should have gravity pulling people down—it could just as easily pull them clockwise around the planet. If it pulls them down, though, players take it for granted. They know what will happen when they drop something. They know what will happen when they jump off the ledge. They don’t even have to think about it, as it matches their model of real-world physics. It enhances immersion.

If they know it, they don’t have to learn it; if it works like reality, it seems more real; if functionality is transparent, it won’t be seen. When players say that a virtual world is unrealistic, they’re complaining that it is breaking their immersion ². Magic doesn’t happen in real life, but in a Fantasy virtual world it’s not unrealistic; if it appeared in a Cyberpunk setting, that would indeed make it unrealistic.

Let players use their intellect to operate within the context of the virtual world; don’t force them to use it to maintain the illusion of reality for themselves.

Ways to Promote Immersion

Immersion will happen almost by default in a virtual world eventually. Nevertheless, designers shouldn’t take this for granted. Here are some ways by which to promote immersion. Again, note that’s “promote,” not “force.”

Control

The more immersed a player is, the less the virtual world can dictate to them. In particular, it can’t treat their characters as if they weren’t people.

If my character waves and the feedback is, “You wave enthusiastically,” that takes control away from me. I didn’t “wave enthusiastically;” what I did was “wave.” Virtual worlds should not presume to control my character for me.

The only exception is if I give my consent. If my character consumes alcohol, I’m explicitly relinquishing some degree of control. Loss of control is a well-understood property of alcohol. Therefore, if my character suddenly staggers off involuntarily in some direction after consuming a bottle of port, I’ve consented.

There is an implied consent to submit to environmental effects, but only in moderation. Your character may sneeze from dust, laugh when tickled, catch a bad cough—all these are acceptable if done infrequently, and help sustain the impression that the virtual world works like the real one. It’s just about okay to let characters faint if they spend too long near a powerful heat source. It’s not okay to have a mind-control spell go off that makes them attack their friends.

There’s a gray area covering the situation where players try to do something really stupid. If a newbie runs up to a cliff edge and doesn’t stop, what should the virtual world do? Let them continue running and fall to their doom? Or put some self-awareness into their character and have them pull up? If a newbie wants to attack a dragon alone, should the virtual world let them or should it point out they stand only a one in 20 billion chance of winning?

The best (albeit still not ideal) solution is to allow players to set a safety switch. If they decide at character-creation time to be prudent, then an attempt to jump off a cliff would be blocked (“You don’t think this would be prudent”). A reckless character would make the jump; a paranoid character wouldn’t drink an unlabeled potion. Later, the player could change their safety setting if it started getting in the way of play.

Another example of taking control from players is giving them goals they don’t have. This most often happens in training programs for newbies, where designers are trying to teach new players the ropes. New characters aren’t necessarily new players, so there should always be a way to decline a quest. “The first thing you need is a weapon. There is a shop….” No, the first thing I need is a teleport ring from a guy who owes me one, so I can meet my buddies up on the mountain where we’re tracking werebears.

Detail

More detail makes for more persuasiveness. There are two caveats: Detail should be non-contradictory, and it should be at a consistent level. Contradictions usually only arise when two different designers working on disjoint parts of the virtual world independently specify content that clashes; this problem is almost always easy to fix. Inconsistent levels of detail are another matter, though. They arise because designers focus on one feature without following through the implications. For example, it may be possible to fell a tree to expose a hollow core that you can climb down through, but not be possible to fell any other trees, even saplings. Players would accept the same level of depth throughout (that is, no fellable trees) but if one tree can be chopped down and others can’t, they’re reminded that they’re in a virtual world. Furthermore, it’s an incomplete one (from their point of view) because felling trees isn’t fully implemented. Better you can fell no trees than just one.

Detail in the virtual world is in terms of both depth and breadth. This means lots of things working in lots of ways, arranged together in an integrated fashion. Initially, everything in the virtual world should make sense. Alchemists making fire bombs wouldn’t live in crowded areas, loggers would have their depot next to a river, forest creatures wouldn’t all be carnivores. If players come across something out of place, it’s either out of place for a reason (“This tower is miles from civilization, how did they build it? Unless…”) or it’s because some player did it.

Critical to this is the sense that the virtual world has a past—that it was fully functioning before players came along. Most virtual worlds have a backstory to explain how and why things came to be the way they are. This serves two purposes: to introduce gameplay concepts that wouldn’t make sense otherwise; to set the context so that newbies know in advance what kind of world they’re entering (it may even attract some of them, especially if it’s a big license).

Backstory isn’t history, though. You may assert that in the time before the coming of the humans, elves, and dwarfs roamed the lands, but that doesn’t tell you which parts of the land they stalk now, and why that makes sense. A handy tip is to run a board game simulation ¹ of the virtual world’s history that can provide the necessary explanations. Use what the simulation implies in the virtual world: Why this area has a sizeable minority population of dwarfs; why that area has ancient reptilian monuments; why in those areas the humans speak Elvish. It all adds to the veracity of the detail that will enable players to buy into the world.

Detail is important. Having greater detail is one reason that textual virtual worlds can be more immersive than graphical ones.

Freedom of Choice

Designers decide what options to provide to players and the manner in which to provide them. This is how design influences players.

For promoting immersion, it’s slightly different. The whole point of identity play is that you’re free to make choices. Designers may suggest directions that you hadn’t considered, but they have to stop short of actually recommending any of them. It’s for you to make up your own mind.

Virtual worlds should be as open-ended as possible. Players should be able to try anything. They don’t have to succeed (there are too many killer-type players for that), but they do have to know they could have tried. The decision not to do something can be as life-changing as the decision to do it. Let players take their own path.

This particular way to promote immersion is one with which many designers feel uncomfortable. They don’t like giving players the freedom to make major decisions because, all too often, they make the wrong one. They then refuse to accept it’s their fault, sulk, and quit. The counter-argument is that these are the players who were going to quit after a short while anyway, so why pander to them? From this point of view, the question boils down to: Do you want their business for a couple of months or don’t you?

It’s actually a broader issue than that, though, involving concerns such as narrative, content, and (of course) community. Choice of action has implications beyond immersion that must be considered.

Choice promotes immersion. It’s up to individual designers to decide whether to act on the fact, though.

Self-Expression

Self-expression is another way to promote immersion. By giving players freeform ways to communicate themselves, designers can draw them more deeply into the world—they feel more of a part of it. Communication and stake-holding help players to exhibit self-expression in addition to being ways to promote community; the decision to have them therefore looks trivially easy.

Self-expression allows players to discover more about themselves, which is almost a definition of the goal of immersion. It also, to a lesser extent, lets them find out more about the virtual world; this, too promotes immersion.

The only real reason to curtail self-expression is the impact that it can have on other players. However, that is a very powerful reason. One person’s self-expression can be someone else’s “limbo dancing wasn’t a feature of life in ancient Rome.” The appearance in a recreation of Victorian London of a character called Ladyboy is going to unimmerse even those players who smile when they see the incongruity of it. It can undo hours of work: A designer may have agonized over the exact positioning of a field to create just the right sense of rural idyll from a neighboring hillock, but if someone has planted potatoes in it in the shape of a smiley face then it’s all to waste.

Self-expression will find a way, but promoting it will increase its prevalence. It helps immersion for individuals, although it can reduce immersion for other players. Whether this becomes a problem depends on the maturity of the player base and the vigilance of the community management representatives.

Things to Demote

The twin enemies of immersion are Reality and sterility.

If players are continually reminded that they’re in Reality, it will disrupt their sense of immersion. You can’t stop someone’s significant other from bringing them a mug of coffee, but you can stop your virtual world’s interface from being intrusive and you can prevent references to Reality from sneaking in. Keeping Reality out is why commercials are unacceptable in virtual worlds, but product placement is comparatively okay.

Demoting Reality can be tricky because designers often want to provide mechanisms to support other features (particularly community) that involve reference to it. Immersion usually loses out in these conflicts, because returning to it is relatively quick. When it does become necessary, designers must first consider whether they can hide it within the virtual world’s fiction. If they can, that’s fine; if they can’t, they should formally take it out of the virtual world in some way—a separate window, a different color of font—so that players perceive it as being distinct from where they were. When the screen returns to normal, they can then (hopefully) dive right back in where they left off.

Sterility is counter-immersive because it induces ennui. While they’re having fun, players are working toward immersion; when they become bored, the direction changes and they work away from it. Note that this does not happen in the face of unpleasantness, unless the unpleasantness is relentless; players accept change while immersed, but not fossilization. It’s as if you’re watching a movie and suddenly the projector locks in freeze-frame: You may not have been enjoying the movie, but at least you were absorbed by it; now, you’re out of it.

Of all the ways to kill a virtual world through bad design, boring the players is the one most guaranteed to succeed.