The Virtual Body

Players enter virtual worlds through the medium of their characters. Although in general the player determines the appearance of a character, characters are not merely ghostly projections of the spirit: They are tangible entities within the virtual world, as real (to it) as any other object. As representations of sentient beings, they have attributes and skills; however, they have other functionality merely by virtue of their being objects. From this point of view, the virtual body is a machine that the character lives in. What should this machine do? And what happens when it stops doing it?

Maintenance

You wake up, you visit the bathroom, you wash, you brush your teeth, you have breakfast.

You wake up because you went to sleep. You have to go to sleep because human (and most other animal) brains won’t work if you don’t.

You visit the bathroom because your body is powered by chemical reactions that generate waste products.

You wash and brush your teeth for cultural reasons. You don’t have to, although the chances are it’ll prolong your life considerably if you do. People used to die if they got an abscess on a tooth.

You have breakfast because you need fuel. You noticed you were breathing too?

This is an example of a maintenance schedule. It varies from person to person. Some people might include a bit of exercise, others might count their morning prayers as “maintenance for the soul.” The point is, it’s a routine. Except in special circumstances (for example, illness or vacation), it’s something you do daily; it’s not for fun, nor for gain, but to avoid the consequences of not doing it.

Should virtual bodies have maintenance routines like real ones? Characters have no need to sleep or eat or anything else unless designers say so. Why lock them into the same tyranny of routine that players must observe?

The only strong argument in favor is that of realism (that is, it helps immersion). Unfortunately, in this particular case it’s very powerful. Players don’t actually want to undertake a routine for their character, but they do need to know that their character has a routine, and that it’s being followed. It’s a general principle of virtual world design that if every player has to do exactly the same boring thing, none of them should have to do it. Thus, the solution suggested in Chapter 4, “World Design,” of abstracting the maintenance routine is a good one; furthermore, the fact that characters are charged for it means that players will notice, thereby reassuring them that these strongly ingrained but wholly irrelevant activities are taking place ¹.

There is a difference between abstracting and removing, though. A character who puts on make-up might want to wash it off right there and then; in this case, it’s not an act of general maintenance, but a normal action to achieve a specific purpose. Similarly, just because characters by default empty their bladders when their player is logged off, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be able to do it at other times: Urinating on a small campfire is as easy a way of putting it out as any other (at least for men) ². If characters want to eat, drink, and sleep explicitly rather than behind the scenes, they shouldn’t necessarily be prohibited from doing so.

To summarize, then: Routine maintenance should always be abstracted, but the actions that it abstracts should also be available independently (cultural circumstances permitting).

Survival

Don’t go to sleep on the ground if it’s covered in snow; if you do, you’ll get hypothermia and die. The same thing will happen if you swim in icy water. In a desert, if you don’t freeze to death at night you may bake to death during the day.

That’s in the real world. In virtual worlds, you will either suffer some minor, temporary skill or attribute degradation or you won’t notice any ill effects at all. Characters are generally immune to the environment.

So? Why be unpleasant to players just for the sake of it?

Why indeed….

Well, it’s because there are subtle side effects to this kind of automatic survival. For example, people live in houses primarily for shelter. If they don’t have anything from which to shelter, they don’t have to live in houses. Sure, they might want them as warehouses, but that’s hardly the stuff of which communities are made.

There are other survival reasons that cause people to want to live close to one another. If characters are going to live anyway, though, these don’t apply. Easy access to food and water is only an issue if players have maintenance schedules that need them; healthcare is only important if people can fall ill; mutual defense is unnecessary if attackers can’t hurt you.

In other words, some of the more primitive and tedious aspects of the real world that players don’t want to experience act, unfortunately, to set up some of the more advanced and enjoyable aspects that they do want to experience. This conflict between what players want and what they are prepared to put up with to get it is a constant that runs throughout virtual world design ¹.

Sensing the Virtual World

Traditionally, human beings have five senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. These are the means by which individuals can detect the world about them. Virtual worlds that have human or humanoid characters will usually want to account for these senses, with perhaps some additional ones for special cases (bat-like sonar, insect-like infravision, and so on).

Most virtual worlds, whether graphical or textual, emphasize vision. When a character enters a location, the player experiences what the character can see. They may also experience what their character can hear. Textual worlds also will make occasional reference to smells and tactile sensations (for example, heat from a fire), but taste only really comes into it when something is eaten or drunk.

In graphical worlds, the players’ senses double up as the characters’: Players actually see what their characters see ¹ and actually hear what their characters hear (plus the annoying soundtrack). In textual worlds, players are told what their characters see, hear, smell, and feel (through the skin—not emotionally). The scene is constructed in the imagination of the players, which paradoxically can lead to a more vivid experience. Although most players of textual worlds will of course use their own sight to read what is sent to them, this does not have to be the case: There are numerous examples of blind players using speech synthesizers or non-blind friends to read the text aloud; graphical worlds are not conducive to this.

Although textual worlds can utilize more senses and deliver a more compelling experience, graphical worlds have three main advantages over them:

• The graphical experience is more immediate: You don’t have to interpret what you see, you just see it.

• Graphical images can display more information of a certain kind than can textual images. Scanning 50 faces for a friend is easier (for most people) than scanning a list of names ².

• Graphical worlds use multiple channels. You can hear while you see. Textual worlds are essentially linear: You’re told what you see before or after you’re told what you hear.

For newbies in particular, text is unappealing. The fact that you can take photographs of smells in textual worlds is less relevant than the fact that you can see where you’re going in graphical ones.

Sometimes, senses are impaired or ineffective. In real life, for example, you can’t see in total darkness. What happens in virtual worlds?

Well, there are a number of solutions. Here are the most common:

• Suggest the impairment, but don’t enforce it. A graphical world may darken the screen, but not actually black it out.

• Provide a trivially easy remedy. Give everyone a portable light source.

• Make it temporary. If you enter a dark room from a light one, your eyes need to adjust to the dark before you can see; when you return, your eyes need to adjust to the light first. The process only takes a few seconds, but the wait can be scary. Popular in textual worlds.

• Play it straight. Actually black out the screen. Don’t send update packets, either, so players can’t hack the client to make it think it’s full daylight. Only relent if they’re under attack.

Impairment is one thing, but what happens when one or more of your character’s senses isn’t working at all? What if, as a result of accident or magic, your character loses the ability to see or hear?

In graphical worlds, the answer is simply “It Does Not Happen.” It would be possible to continue playing without sound, but without vision there simply isn’t enough other sensory information available to compensate.

In textual worlds, it’s a different story. You can try things and get feedback. If you walk into a wall, you can be told there’s a wall in the way (rather than a tree or a door or a dragon). Things that make noises or have smells or give off heat can still be described. You can pick up things and know what they are by their shape. Losing a sense could even be essential for solving a puzzle—for example, if you’re blind, then the snake-hair ugly woman can’t turn you to stone.

The way to do this is to use dynamic descriptions. Most textural virtual worlds, it should be noted, use static descriptions and therefore also have problems implementing lost senses (generally they take out too much information—blind characters can’t hear either). Here’s an example to illustrate what I mean.

A description of an object might be “Ticking in a corner is an antique grandfather clock.” If a deaf character (or one wearing ear defenders) came into the room, they wouldn’t know it was ticking. Should they see the description of the clock or not? Well, strictly speaking, not. If it were a static description, though, either the whole description stays or the whole description goes, neither of which is satisfactory. Dynamic descriptions individualize the text depending on the character’s sensory abilities. Thus, a deaf character would see “Standing in a corner is an antique grandfather clock;” a blind character (or one wearing a blindfold) would hear “Ticking nearby is a grandfather clock.” If the designer doesn’t consider ticking to be enough to identify an object, it might just be “Something ticks nearby.”

Dynamic descriptions allow for changes due to a character’s skills or knowledge, too. In the preceding example, the use of the adjective “antique” may depend on whether a character is an historian or not, for example. If a character is running, they may notice less than if they’re walking; if they’re concentrating or searching, they may notice more. A virtual world can incorporate this information into a dynamic description appropriate to each character.

Although senses can work below their normal levels, they also can be implemented to work beyond them. Characters can be given the ability to see like they were looking through a telescope, or to hear heartbeats at a hundred paces, or to taste the recipe that was used to create a dish. Superhuman senses in a world that contains superhumans do make, er, sense. Although there is no problem with this for active senses (ones you have to decide to invoke—for example, touching something to discover how it feels), passive senses can be more problematic. If you can hear heartbeats at a hundred paces and there are fifty people within a hundred paces, that’s a lot of heartbeats. For this reason, even passive senses will usually be considered active beyond a certain threshold. Switch on your bionic ear when you want to hear how many guards there are at the other side of the door, then switch it off afterward.

Body Composition

When a character picks up something, strangely this does not mean that the object teleports into their backpack. To make sense, they need to use their hand. Similarly, when they walk, their legs and arms move, when they look to one side their head moves, and when they’re fleeing in mindless panic every part of their body moves. The issues involved here extend beyond mere animation: If characters can move their hands, that implies they have hands to move.

It doesn’t take long following this line of argument to conclude that bodies must be regarded as assemblies, as discussed in Chapter 4. Following on from our look at senses, though, it’s natural to ask the question: What happens if a body part works above or below normal levels?

As with senses, the default is that every body component works to its full potential. Because of the way that they interact, it’s more difficult to make individual body parts superhuman than it is for senses; there may be comic potential in giving a character a hugely muscled ring finger, but it wouldn’t be a lot of use unless the rest of the hand and arm was muscle-bound too. For this reason, most of the consequences of having improved body parts in virtual worlds are abstracted as character attributes instead.

When body parts don’t work for whatever reason, it’s a different matter. Tedious though it may be from a programming perspective, it is nevertheless possible to put a guard on all commands to restrict their individual use if a body part (or assembly of parts) that is out of action ¹. For example, if your hands are tied behind your back and you want to pick something up, you can’t. You might be able to “get key with teeth,” but then you wouldn’t be able to use your mouth assembly until you’d let go of it. Note that some body parts are connected to senses. Most importantly, if a character’s eyes are shielded or missing, then they can’t see anything.

It’s tempting to use this idea to build an abstract anatomical model of a human body so that the effects of various events can be worked out. “Ah, when the nose and mouth are both blocked that means no air can reach the lungs, therefore no blood can be oxygenated, therefore no muscles can work, therefore death results.” In practice, though, this can be handled explicitly without the need for deduction. A spear through the chest means your character is dead—that’s really all you need to know.

Body parts can cease to function for three main reasons:

• Restraints. You can’t run because you’re wearing diving boots.

• Damage. You can’t run because a tiger ate your leg.

• Flaws. You can’t run because you have a club foot.

Damage can arise in some combat systems that allow for “critical hits” or “targeted damage.” Although ostensibly permanent, there will almost invariably be some means by which a lost limb can be recovered.

Flaws are the quirks that some virtual worlds allow players to assign to their characters in return for more pick points. Again, although these are supposed to be inherent aspects of a character’s identity, they can frequently be cured. The fact that quirks can (literally) “add character” is only of long-term interest to hard role-players; soft role-players may regret an early decision to take a flaw, and in a virtual world without permanent death they will complain rather than start anew.

Note that a character lacking one or more organs, limbs, or senses can be considered disabled ². There are ethical issues arising from this, discussed in Chapter 8.