Combat

Combat is an important feature of most game-oriented virtual worlds. It embodies conflict, drama, risk, bravery, friendship, honor, glory—it has everything! Indeed, in some virtual worlds it is everything; there’s very little to do apart from move from one battle to the next. As explained in Chapter 3, by no means all virtual worlds are like this, of course: Merely having combat ¹ doesn’t inevitably mean that the virtual world will end up being “all about” it. Nevertheless, many virtual worlds are indeed “all about” combat; this causes an ideological conflict with worlds that are “all about” something else (for example, role-playing), and annoys the balanced worlds who are lumped in with them even though they may be anti-conflict ².

The subject of combat in virtual worlds brings out some of the most passionate arguments in the whole field. Let’s take a look at it in detail.

How Combat Works

Taking a wide perspective, combat involves many activities: Magic-users cast spells, archers shoot arrows, clerics patch up the injured. Important and battle-winning that these may be, they are nevertheless mere adjuncts to the central conflict: Two individuals standing toe to toe, slugging it out with close-up weapons. The reason for this is simple: Hand-to-hand combat is more thrilling than ranged combat. The monsters are in your face. Yes, the wizard cranking up the spell that will nuke the bad guys is excited, but it’s an excitement borne by what’s going on at the front line: If the tanks aren’t excited by the fight, the wizard won’t be either.

For this reason ¹, most virtual worlds that have combat put hand-to-hand at the forefront. This defines the basic mechanism and the measures for success or failure. Ranged combat conforms to the same system, as does magic (whether the offensive or defensive kind). In discussing combat, therefore, it makes sense to focus on the hand-to-hand variety.

Here’s how MUD1 did hand-to-hand combat:

• One character attacks another player in the same location.

• An automatic fight sequence begins, in which characters take turns hitting each other.

• The chance of hitting is based on the character’s dexterity attribute.

• The damage done is based on the character’s strength attribute.

• Damage is deducted from the character’s stamina ² property.

• When one character’s stamina falls below 1, that character dies and the fight ends.

This is still pretty much the paradigm. Damage can be increased by weapons and reduced by armor and shields; spells can buff attributes, repair injuries, and do the opposite (to opponents); some combatants may have multiple attacks (dragons can breathe fire while clawing at you); skills may allow for additional special actions. In all these, the underlying mechanism remains basically the same.

Why did MUD1 do it this way? It looks suspiciously like the way that Dungeons & Dragons combat works—so similar that many virtual worlds openly refer to characters’ health as “hit points,” in the D&D tradition.

MUD1 did it this way because it delivered the gameplay. Roy wanted combat to proceed as exchanges of blows—I swing, you swing, I swing, you swing—because that was the most appropriate level of abstraction. He wanted it automated because otherwise it would have been tedious for players continually to type “hit them ³.” When one character swings at another character, there has to be some chance of hitting: This was encapsulated by the dexterity attribute. As for what to do when a hit got through, well, obviously there had to be some damage.

Roy and I discussed how to handle this. Although I knew the D&D combat system well, I also knew other ways to do this kind of thing (I didn’t only play D&D, after all). Come to that, I’d already designed board games and a computer game ⁴ that used different mechanisms. Overall, though, the classic approach won on the basis of simplicity. When you’re in a fight, you want an instant readout on how well you’re doing. Anything too complicated wouldn’t give players enough time to absorb it; anything much simpler and combat wouldn’t have been any fun.

We decided, therefore, to give characters a number of “lives.” Whenever a character was hit successfully, one life would be removed. To make this less predictable than it sounds, we scaled up everything by a factor of ten and added some randomness. Thus, although your character could usually survive ten blows, sometimes they’d hold out for longer and sometimes they’d capitulate sooner. We did some tuning to make sure that battles neither ground on too slowly nor ended too quickly to be fun, and that was that. Everything else—spells, weapons, artifacts—followed.

As a game mechanic, this worked well. As a representation of reality, it was somewhat off the mark. Real-life combat with hand weapons is not a gradual wearing down, a cut here, a nick there, until eventually someone dies of attrition. Instead, most blows are blocked, dodged, or parried, and when one does finally land it either has little effect or it effectively incapacitates the recipient. In real-world medieval warfare, once someone suffered a telling wound they could take no further part in the battle and were fairly certain to die even if no one finished them off (medical science couldn’t deal with infection). Virtual worlds set in different periods or having some kind of magic available in them don’t have to stick with these facts, of course, but they still need a fiction to rationalize it.

So what other combat systems are available that retain the gameplay but make more rational sense?

Enhanced Combat Systems

Actually, the MUD1-style approach does make some sense if, instead of stamina/health/ hit points, armor/shield is used. You bash at people until their armor comes to pieces, then the next blow hits their body and they’ve lost. Where characters’ injuries would heal with rest after a fight, “wounded” armor is repaired.

Of course, to be “realistic” some hits should possibly get through despite the armor, but even so they might not do fatal damage, yet fatigue can set in and…blah blah blah.

Combat systems can rapidly get very complex. However, the same approaches crop up time and time again, not only in virtual worlds but also in single-player and tabletop games. Here’s a run-down:

• Reaction and recovery times. Traditional combat is round-based, in that characters trade blows either in turn or simultaneously. This is unrealistic, because some weapons take longer to recover from than others. In the time it takes you to raise your two-handed sword, I might have been able to run you through twice with my rapier. Defense also can have reaction and recovery times: Your heavy shield may take more damage, but if I switch the point of my attack you might not be able to bring it into play before I strike.

• One-off attacks. Instead of having fights proceed automatically after the first blow has been struck, each one must be performed manually. If I throw my axe at you, I can hardly do so round after round anyway—it’s a one-off attack. Special boosted attacks (such as stunning punches or called shots) are usually treated as one-offs.

• Stances. These are a crude mechanism for trading offense against defense. If you want to hold out until your allies come, you increase your defense but pay for it with a reduced offense. If you want a fight to be over quickly and can take excess punishment, you raise your offense ¹ but your defense suffers as a result.

• Hit location. The damage you do depends on what you hit. A blow to the leg is not as bad as one to the head. This brings in the possibility of having hit points for individual body parts instead of one value for the whole character. Where a blow lands depends on the weapon, the characters’ skills, the relative sizes of the characters, the relative sizes of the body parts, and (the strategy bit) where the player aimed.

• Damage types. The theory here is that different weapons do different kinds of damage, to which different armors (or, combined with a hit location system, different parts of the body) are differently susceptible. Heads can take less crushing damage (for example, from a mace) than they can slashing damage (for example, from a longsword). If you’re armed with a mace, you should therefore target the head rather than, say, the midriff. Characters may have special quirks that make particular blow type/location combinations unusually effective (for example, a “glass jaw”).

• Wound levels. This approach gets away from the hit points idea entirely. Wounds are instead rated by category—for example light, medium, heavy, disabling, destructive. They compound, so several light wounds make a medium wound, and so on. Heavy wounds may lead to some loss of functionality, and disabling wounds will lead to an entire loss of it. Destructive wounds disable permanently. Thus at light level your hand may be cut, at medium it may be gashed, at heavy it may be fractured (you couldn’t write with it, but you can still hold a sword), at disabling it may be smashed (you can’t do anything with it), and at destructive level it might be severed. Different weapons have different wound profiles for different body parts. A mace may have a greater chance of disabling a head than does a sword, but a sword has a (small) chance to decapitate.

• Critical hits. Critical hits incorporate hit location and wound levels into a hit points system. Combat proceeds in the traditional “death of a thousand cuts’ style,” but if a character hits well enough (maybe one time in 20, depending on the location), they do special damage (usually equivalent to a disabling or destructive wound). Opponents who weren’t even breaking into a sweat can suddenly be knocked unconscious by a well-aimed blow. Thus, players who are losing a fight might stay rather than flee, in the hope that they can pull out a critical hit and win.

• Afflictions. These are temporary side effects from blows/ spells that impact on a character’s ability to conduct combat. If combatants accumulate enough of these, it makes taking them down a lot easier. A few knocks on the head won’t necessarily do much damage in themselves, but if they make you dizzy then that could reduce your ability to parry something more serious.

• Combat scripts. This approach owes much to pencil-and-paper role-playing games such as En Garde! ². Combat commands are entered into a queue, and executed in order simultaneously for each combatant. Combinations of commands can be prewritten and hot-keyed, so that players can have time to think rather than relying on first-person shooter twitch skills. If you have a script effective against a particular kind of opponent, you can call it up instead of your default one. Of course, if you don’t but they have one effective against you, it could be problematical. This “program your battle” approach was adopted by Star Wars Galaxies, so it’s likely to become more popular as clones of this game appear ³.

All these ideas can be (and often are) incorporated into gloriously complex wholes. The level of detail can become so great that the rest of the virtual world pales by comparison. Few virtual worlds with an immensely complicated combat system avoid being completely dominated by it—Achaea is the best-known exception.

Although these combat systems are intended for melee, they can be used for other forms of combat, too. In particular, if characters control or are crewmembers of fighting vessels (spacecraft, pirate ships, mechs, and so on) then similar mechanisms can apply. “Number One: Take out their hyperdrive.”

As I mentioned earlier, whatever combat system is adopted for hand-to-hand combat underpins all other forms of combat. If you’re using a hit points system for sword fighting, then arrows will also cause characters hit point loss; if you’re using a wound level system, then damage-causing combat spells will have to use it too. These secondary combat activities come with their own issues, of course (arguments over the range and accuracy of crossbows versus longbows being particularly prone to starting flame wars). Weapon statistics aside, though, combat systems face in general a common set of difficulties of which designers should be aware.

Problems with Combat

There are many social problems with combat, which I shall come to shortly. First, though, I’ll briefly address some purely practical concerns.

• Equalizer weapons. Anyone who can flip off a safety catch and pull a trigger can kill someone else. Highly trained individuals have a better chance of success, but even complete novices—children playing with daddy’s pistol—are in with a good chance. Equalizer weapons brook no defense except a physical barrier (a good shot is no better at avoiding bullets than is a poor shot) and the damage they do tends heavily towards the disabling and destructive levels. Unless a convincing fiction for why this isn’t so can be produced ¹, equalizer weapons take a lot of the fun out of (combat-oriented) virtual worlds.

• Multiple weapon types. You might find that swords work best with a hit points system, but muskets work best using a wounds-based approach. Which do you use? What do you do when someone using a sword attacks someone who is using a musket?

• Over-robust defense. How long does it take for a newbie to kill an old-timer who isn’t putting up a defense? Typically, it will take much longer than it ought to. The unarmed veteran stands yawning while the newbie repeatedly swings their sword; when they hit, the damage done is merely a fraction of that necessary for victory. It would be like chopping down a tree if it weren’t for the fact that you frequently miss the target completely.

• Concurrent combat. How many creatures can you fight at once? Do you get the same number of attacks against each one, or do you have to share them out. Do you defend equally against all of them, or against some more than others? How do you stop people from ganging up in large numbers and beating the stuffing out of their foes?

• Targeting. Do I aim at an individual or at a point in space? As pointed out in Chapter 2, “How to Make Virtual Worlds,” there are implementational considerations here. There’s also the issue of consistency: If I aim an arrow at a point rather than at a character, then the same solution should be used for hand-to-hand combat. What about semi-autonomous weapons, though—for example heat-seeking missiles? Are both relative and absolute targeting systems needed? Who is hit if someone fires a bullet into a crowd?

• Area effects. If I throw a grenade or cast a fireball spell, the result affects everyone in an area. The whole point of such an attack is to avoid the targeting issue. What happens, then, if there is someone in the area who is on your side? Can you be blown up by your own bomb? This is mainly a problem for graphical worlds, because textual ones don’t commit to exactly where anyone is standing.

• Twitch. First-person shooter games rely on the skill of the players. There are two components to this: experience and twitch. Experience comes from having done something often enough that you know what to expect. Twitch comes from having fast reactions, good manual dexterity, and reasonable vision. Both experience and twitch transfer to virtual worlds, but neither ought strictly to be there: The knowledge and speed of a character shouldn’t be that of the player. Twitch is the more annoying ², especially when coupled with client hacks or go-faster macros that can make someone almost unbeatable. Where should you put the threshold, though? How many seconds is it reasonable to make people wait before you process their next combat command? What effect will lag have on this?

• Combat skills. My character can do things I can’t. What are these things, and how do they affect combat? If there are too many or too few, it could send players the wrong message. What can I do while I’m waiting for the next combat round? Will it occur instead of or in addition to my attempt to hit my enemy?

• Disengaging. When fights are handled automatically, under what conditions do they end? Can I simply run away? Do you get to hack at me while I do? Can I surrender or be captured? If so, how could I escape and why wouldn’t you just kill me anyway? What happens if I’m stunned, but not actually dead? Does the fight end there or does it wait until you strike the killing blow?

There are, of course, many other tedious-but-important decisions that designers have to make about combat. If the planned system is deep and complicated, these can take up disproportionate amounts of time to resolve—not because of complex interactions between components of the system, but because designers can become so involved that they try to treat what are essentially subjective choices objectively.

The main thing is to be able to step back, look at a combat system, and ask three things:

• Will it work?

• Will it keep players immersed?

• Will it be fun?

If the answer to all these questions is “yes,” go with it.

There is a fourth question we could ask, which on the face of it looks like it follows from the preceding three. It has deeper implications of its own, however.

Will players accept it?

To find out why this is important, we need to consider two notions: opposition and consequences.

Opposition

Conflict concerns opposition. Combat is the most obvious manifestation of this, but it occurs throughout virtual worlds. Two people wanting to get through the same turnstile at once are in conflict; two people aiming for the same job are in conflict; two merchants pitching to the same potential customers are in conflict. Combat may be one way to resolve this conflict, but others tend to work better.

In virtual worlds, conflict is typically categorized in terms of opposition: Who is in conflict with whom? There are three main possibilities:

• Player versus Environment (PvE). Players are opposed by the environment—that is, the virtual world. In a combat situation, this means player characters (PCs) fight monsters.

• Player versus Player (PvP). Players are opposed by other players. In a combat situation, this means PCs can fight each other.

• Group versus Group (GvG). Players are members of groups that are in conflict with other groups. In a combat situation, this means PCs can fight any PCs who are members of enemy groups but not those who are members of their own (or a neutral) group ¹.

PvP and GvG both assume PvE. GvG is a restricted version of PvP that will usually operate within other limits too, for reasons that we shall come to shortly.

The difference between PvE and PvP is central to virtual worlds. In a strictly PvE environment, PCs can do nothing to other PCs. In a strictly PvP environment, PCs can do to other PCs whatever they could do to NPCs or monsters—and potentially a lot more.

Why the distinction? The answer is, fundamentally, consensuality: Players don’t want other players doing things to their character without permission. It’s one thing for a trident-wielding NPC mermaid to attack you, but another thing entirely for a PC to do it. Hard role-playing virtual worlds solve this almost trivially: If a player wants to do something to another player’s character, they ask on an out-of-character channel first. Other virtual worlds don’t have this luxury.

In a pure PvP world, there is no consensuality: People can try to mess you about, whether or not you like it; they may run the risk of being attacked by you, your friends, and perhaps the local police force too as a result, but they can still try. In a PvE world, the world itself prevents anyone from messing you about in the first place (and you from messing them about).

In practice, absolute PvE is untenable. If I want to pick up some treasure lying on the ground and you get to it first, you have interfered with my enjoyment of the virtual world and I am entitled to feel peeved as a result (even more so if you did it deliberately just to annoy me). Weak forms of PvP such as this (looting) are always present in multi-player environments, otherwise there would be no way of knowing they were multi-player. The question is not whether to have PvP at all, but how much PvP to have?

The issue of consent becomes blurred here. Plainly, players have to put up with some degree of interference from other players merely by virtue of sharing the virtual world with them; in this sense, entering the virtual world can be regarded as offering implicit consent that a player is willing to accept the PvP it supports. Unfortunately for designers, players will still complain if they are the victims of what they see as a violation of their character, even if they knew it was a possibility when they signed up.

The problems are compounded by the fact that different players have different ideas of what’s okay and what’s not okay. Some players may think it’s fine that characters can’t walk through each other, because that’s how reality works; others may dislike it because it means access to locations through pinch-points (for example, doors) can be blocked. Then again, some of these people may relax their point of view in cases where 50 characters have just killed a monster then some non-combatant with maxed-out running skills races through the mob and steals whatever reward was dropped. Is a reasonable compromise solution to allow characters to move through other characters but at a greatly reduced speed? A gang could still totally surround someone and continually move around them so that wherever they were headed there would always be people in the way.

Some abuses of PvP can be stopped by giving people switches they can toggle. Generally, players are fine with allowing strangers to speak to them, but not if this is used as an offensive weapon (for example, spamming). Thus, some ability to squelch or gag incoming messages from other characters is often incorporated into virtual worlds. This works, but it’s not always realistic (if your character is asleep, then why would one person’s voice wake them up but not someone else’s?). Stopping people from spamming in the first place is a better answer, but one harder to implement.

This idea can be extended to a system of permission levels. Every character has a disposition to every other character, ranging from “they don’t exist as far as I’m concerned” to “they can mind-control me into doing anything they want.” The default for meeting a complete stranger might perhaps be to allow communication but no physical contact. Permissions can be changed either explicitly (using a “change permission” command) or implicitly (if I offer you my hand to shake, I am implicitly giving you permission to make formal physical contact with me). If someone tries to act beyond the permission level you have set for them, you get the option to turn them down (“Gilead declines to shake your hand”), to allow the individual action, or to raise the permission level (“You shake hands with Gilead”).

The “they don’t exist” permission level raises an interesting question: If virtual hearing can be selectively filtered, what about other virtual senses? One very good way to annoy a player is to follow their character around. In a strongly PvE world, there’s no way to stop it except by running faster; it feels like an invasion of privacy (which of course it is), but the virtual world engine can’t distinguish between friends, stalkers, and strangers who just happen to be heading the same direction. Giving players the ability to squelch the images of other characters would sort the problem out, but again it stresses the fiction.

Fiction is the main enemy of PvE. If you can do something to NPCs, why (in the context of the virtual world) can’t you do it to PCs too? If I create a rogue-class character with high thieving skills, why can I apply them to any NPC from the lowest to the highest, but not to a single PC? The real answer is that NPCs won’t complain but PCs will, but in the virtual world NPCs and PCs are supposed to be the same thing (characters). Although it’s possible to make a formal, fictional distinction between them (for example, NPCs are “normal people” and PCs are somehow “gifted by the gods”), most virtual worlds that impose this kind of restraint don’t bother; it’s justified by its existence. If players moan that this is unrealistic, well, okay, so do they want to hold a vote on whether to allow PvP?

The extent to which PvP is permitted in virtual worlds is historically defined by three factors:

• How much freedom to be pains in the asses the prevailing culture of the majority of players allows.

• What the players say they want.

• What the community management staff can handle.

These are in increasing order of refinement. The real-world culture of players gives them notions of personal liberty in some kind of balance with the rights of other people; players are prepared, in principle, to accept these as the default for the virtual world. Virtual world culture is unlike real world culture, though, because of the anonymity that virtual worlds afford. Some behaviors that would be unwise in the real world because of the repercussions are “who cares?” issues in virtual worlds.

Therefore, the players will suggest changes. If this is the first virtual world they’ve played, they’ll immediately think of the most obvious (but not necessarily the best) solutions; if it’s everyone’s first virtual world, everyone will think of these same solutions and it will become a tidal wave of opinion that the live team will find hard to resist. The changes will be added—some for better, some for worse—and tinkering will take place until some kind of consensus is reached.

The tinkering will stop when the noise from players is down to sufficient levels that the live team can cope with (hopefully before the end of the open beta). Players will occasionally get into conflict, but not so frequently that the community managers can’t sort them out. This degree of PvP becomes the standard for the virtual world; designers of later virtual worlds will consider it as a prototype (or even a paradigm) for the “prevailing culture” of PvP/PvE with which they begin.

This would all be fine except for one thing: Virtual worlds with more PvP are manifestly more exciting than virtual worlds without it. There are two reasons for this: Players are more intelligent than mobiles; players have feelings and mobiles don’t. If you’re in conflict with an intelligent opponent, it makes success and failure more meaningful; if you win or lose to an opponent with emotions, your own emotions are affected.

PvP is “me against you;” PvE is “me against random number generator.” Which is the more thrilling?

Recognizing this, strongly PvE virtual worlds have tried to developed ways to have the good bits of PvP (the excitement) without the bad bits (lack of consensuality). There are basically two ways to do it: arenas and character flags ². With arenas, different locations of the virtual world have different PvP rules. To enter a location where the rules are different from the norm, you must give your consent. This will either be explicit (you won’t get into the gladiator pits unless you confirm you understand what could happen) or implicit (you should expect to be robbed if you walk into the thieves’ guildhouse). Arenas don’t have to be small: Huge swathes of Dark Age of Camelot and Shadowbane are effectively arenas, for example. With character flags, players elect to be PvP-able, and can therefore interact in PvP ways with any other players who have flagged their characters thus.

Neither of these solutions really works. One problem is that there’s no tangible reason to do it: Why accept full-blown PvP when you’re no better off than those who don’t? Sure, you get the extra intangible content that PvP delivers, but while PvPers are taking kit from each other PvEers are getting new kit from monsters with less effort. If everyone else has it easy, why not have it easy yourself?

The big virtual worlds tried to counter this attitude by devoting whole incarnations (shards) to PvP, so every character you met could be PvPed. This didn’t help, though, because players still advanced faster in the strongly PvE incarnations. PvPers felt they were taking on more opponents and being penalized for it. They might have been happier if they were compensated somehow—for example, by a higher level cap (even if it was only one level higher than a PvEer could get); the PvEers wouldn’t have accepted this, though. Besides, a virtual world designed for PvP has different requirements to one designed for PvE; they’re similar, but by no means identical ³.

This is where GvG comes in. The idea here is that the virtual world is divided into sections (the “realms” of RvR), within which “normal” PvE rules apply. There is a further section to which these are connected, however, in which PvP rules are in force (except between characters hailing from the same realm). There is typically a reward for combat success in this area, which means that characters who enter it do get an advantage over those who don’t. Entry into the PvP arena isn’t mandatory—you don’t have to do it—but you’ll benefit in terms of increased stats or whatever if you do. The fact that you can enter with a bunch of guaranteed-trustworthy friends and stay there for only as long as you want makes it far more palatable.

The term RvR comes from Dark Age of Camelot, but it’s not the only virtual world to use this approach; indeed, it’s not the only big, graphical world to do so. Anarchy Online has characters divided into three groups, with people meeting in PvP areas for combat. Lineage has clan-like groups called bloodpledges ⁴, which can conquer castles from one another in (scheduled) sieges; success here has material results, in that owners of castles get tax income they can invest in preparing for the next siege. Shadowbane is trying something similar for western audiences with its guild versus guild mechanic: PCs can build cities, rule countries, lead armies against other countries, and so on.

GvG does add some of the features that PvP has but PvE lacks. It still misses out on an overall point, though, in that in most GvG virtual worlds it’s impossible for any side actually to be wiped out. In DAoC, for example, Midgard is never going to conquer Albion or Hibernia. This is for various reasons, the main two being content and balance.

Preventing defeat to keep content is understandable. If a virtual world has been advertising itself as having three realms, if strategy guides are out in the shops describing the three realms, if each realm has distinct styles of architecture and dress that took months to create, then yes, one realm’s annihilation of another would be a mite inconvenient.

Balance is not a good reason to keep realms from beating on one another too much. Strictly speaking, it doesn’t matter if one side completely conquers another as long as the resulting empire can split through civil war ⁵. If for content reasons you don’t want realms to be obliterated, though, the aim should still be equilibrium rather than balance. It doesn’t matter if one side can win some of another side’s home territory, so long as it becomes increasingly harder to do so the more they advance. It’s like two fencers dueling with bungee ropes tied to their waists: There comes a point when the elastic pulling on the better fencer is so strong that the worse fencer can win and push them back. They don’t even have to have the same strength elastic—equilibrium will eventually be reached.

A problem with GvG combat is what to do if one or more sides give up and don’t get involved in it. Does the virtual world save them, by not allowing enemies to pass a frontier? Does the live team save them, stepping in to avoid putting all that beautiful elf artwork to waste? Or does the opposition sweep through in an orgy of destruction and pillage?

The main problem with all these PvE solutions to PvP is that there are two levels of consensuality at work here: Consensuality in principle, and consensuality in fact. The former is when you accept that something may happen to you, but you’re not necessarily going to like it when it does happen and it had better not happen too often; the latter says that you expect something will happen to you and therefore won’t be too bothered when it does. Part of PvP’s appeal comes from the assumption that a foe has accepted the principle but won’t easily accept the fact unless they win; this is equally true for attackers and defenders—neither will be pleased if they lose, but both will be over the moon if they win. In PvE-based PvP solutions, consensuality is by fact; in full-blown PvP, it’s by principle. Unless players are prepared to accept the principle, they’ll have to make do with the fact.

Unfortunately, they may accept the principle but still have a justifiable grievance. This is best illustrated by what has come to be known as Marian’s tailor problem ⁶. If a rich virtual world offers characters careers in both non-adventuring and adventuring, how are the non-adventurers protected from the adventurers? Marian’s character is a tailor because Marian likes creating clothes for other characters and the opportunities for interaction that this affords. She understands that there are other players who prefer hacking monsters (and each other) to pieces with sharp weapons. She understands and accepts that other players may on occasion attack her. What she doesn’t accept is that they can do so indiscriminately, on a whim. She is completely unable to defend herself, so will always lose. Is her only recourse to take up arms? If so, what’s the point of putting in tailoring as a career if everyone is eventually forced to become a fighter anyway?

The issue of opposition (PvE, PvP, GvG) is wider than combat, but combat nevertheless is the litmus test that decides whether a virtual world “is” PvE or PvP. If you can attack other player characters, it’s PvP; if you can’t, it’s PvE. There may be other PvP elements—for example, casting nasty spells on characters, or nice ones on the mobiles they’re fighting—but combat is the issue that tips the scales. Who you fight, however, is only part of the issue. The arguments really begin in considering what happens if you lose.

Consequences

Different locations have different risks associated with them. A PvP arena, for example, has a greater risk associated with it than a marketplace; a dragon’s lair comes with a greater risk than, raccoon’s.

Players like to know their risks in advance. They like to be able to tell by looking whether or not they can beat a potential foe in combat. Some virtual worlds helpfully color-code PCs and mobiles to make it easier to check them out. Although in real life you might not be able to tell a martial arts expert from anyone else merely by looking, in virtual worlds you often can. If there’s no fiction explaining why you might be able to do so, well, you still probably can.

Risk makes things exciting, but it’s only part of the equation. Equally important are the stake (what you stand to lose) and the prize (what you stand to win).

In virtual world combat, what you stand to win can be anything the designer chooses. There are constraints imposed by other areas of the design (for example, the economy) and by the combat system itself (high-risk or high-stake fights should have high-stake rewards), but this still leaves a lot of leeway.

So, what do you stand to lose?

This is harder, because it must be something that you already have. It should also be commensurate with the risk and what you stand to win. It’s okay to favor the player statistically, because otherwise characters will not advance. In real life, if you stand to win $10 on the toss of a coin, then $5 is a fair stake. In virtual world combat, it’s like you get four tosses of the coin to win $10 for a $5 stake—the odds are stacked so you’re generally going to win. However, (in this example) one time in 16 you’re going to lose. If it’s only $5, who cares? The problem with virtual world combat is the size of the stake.

Fights can have three outcomes: victory, inconclusiveness, defeat. Most fights with mobiles end in victory; most fights with characters (where PvP is allowed) end inconclusively; a very small number of fights against whatever opponent end in defeat. Defeat can mean many things—capture, injury, loss of possessions, loss of prestige, loss of time, and so on. For mobiles it means death. Does it mean death for PCs?

As with PvP, character death is not entirely a combat issue: It can occur in other ways, too. In the real world, most people die through disease, old age, or in accidents. The number one cause of peacetime death among British men under the age of 35 is suicide ¹. Death happens to everyone in the real world, combat or no combat.

Virtual worlds, however, are not real ones. Characters don’t “have to die.”

Old age in virtual worlds can traditionally be eliminated without the need for any explanation because only very long-term characters would ever qualify for it. Disease and illness, while okay as a temporary inconvenience ², also don’t have to be anything more than that; this is just as well, because players would seethe with rage if their characters were merely confined to bed with influenza, let alone if they were dying of something incurable.

This leaves death by accident (deliberate or otherwise) and death by being killed.

In virtual worlds, characters are in theory physically capable of doing acts that would, in the real world, result in their death. They can jump off cliffs, stand in bonfires, swallow plutonium, throw a grenade short of its blast radius…. The virtual world can of course be crafted so as to prevent such events from ever occurring, albeit at a cost in realism. If someone in full armor is paddling a coracle across a wide river and they decide to light a fire, they really should expect to drown. Nevertheless, this can be prevented—for example, by not making coracles ignite while people are in them. It can be programmed round.

Death by being killed can’t be programmed round. You stick a mobile full of holes and it dies; a mobile sticks your character full of holes and it also dies—it wouldn’t make sense otherwise. Is it the same kind of death, though?

When a mobile dies, it ceases to exist. It is permanently gone. Some reinitialized version may appear at its spawning site after a period, or when the virtual world resets; it’s not the same mobile, though—it has none of the experience or possessions it had when it died. At best, it’s a clone.

Never-to-return death is called permanent death, or PD ³. It’s the single most controversial subject in virtual worlds.

Permanent Death

PD is not the same as PvP. PvP means that one PC can do things to another PC that the latter didn’t agree to; PD means that if a PC suffers death, it is consigned to oblivion. When PvP and PD are combined the result is player killing (PKing): One PC can directly cause the PD of another PC ¹. Players often use PD and PvP as euphemisms for PKing, but the distinction is there and is very important. Many of the benefits that advocates of PKing cite are primarily due to PD; some of the strongest objections to PKing are due to its PvP element, rather than to PD.

Like PvP, PD has consent issues. These are not, however, with other players; rather, they are with the virtual world itself. As our Chapter 4 analysis of virtual world physics showed, players are normally quite happy for the virtual world to model the real one, because it reinforces their immersive experience. In the real world, though, none of a virtual world’s players have had the experience of dying.

Because the whole aim of virtual worlds is to bring the character and the player together as a persona, players will routinely consider their character to be themselves. On the face of it, then, their character’s PD would thus be like their own death in reality. In practice, players at the persona level of immersion don’t feel anywhere near as bad as players who are approaching it, because they have the duality of player/character sorted out. The character has died, but the player is the character, and the player (clearly) hasn’t died, therefore the character hasn’t either. The character can be reborn in a new manifestation, much as a PD mobile respawns from scratch. It’s not a pleasant experience—it’s like losing three months’ work while trying to back up your computer’s hard drive ²; frustrating, but not the end of the world. Players who are near to total immersion but aren’t quite there will suffer the most, because not only do they lose the work, but they also feel they’ve lost a dear friend. The word “gutted” is frequently used to describe the experience, but even that doesn’t come close to how bad it can feel. Unlike the death of a real person, though, virtual PD grief can be overcome relatively quickly. Players usually can rationalize what has happened and come to terms with it after giving it some thought; the emotional impact is strong, but at an intellectual level all that’s gone is a chunk of over-anthropomorphized computer data. If they can cope with the emotional hit, the intellectual gain can more than make up for the loss. If they can cope with the emotional hit….

There is a quantitative difference between the emotion felt at losing a character to the virtual world and that of losing it to another PC. In the former case, players will be incredibly annoyed but will rapidly conclude that it was either their own fault or the result of incredible bad luck ³. In the latter case, though, they’ll be angry, too ⁴. For long-term PKers (as opposed to newbies), if they started the fight and got killed, then their self-image will fall even lower than it was before. For the victim of a PKer (or, worse, a pack of them), there is the sense of unfairness that the heavily armed attacker will have selected a victim on the basis of their likelihood of winning, and therefore the odds were stacked from the beginning. Unprovoked attacks cause enough indignation to blow an industrial indignationometer.

Consent is an issue. Emotional attachment is an issue. Wasted effort is an issue. None, however, are the issue. The issue is that people don’t like losing. PD amounts to a statement of total, that’s-all-folks loss. There’s no wheedling out of it; it’s final. That’s what people dislike about it. Whether this is merely a passing phase due to virtual worlds’ comparative immaturity or a permanent situation rooted deep in the human psyche we shall examine presently.

For the moment, the important thing to come out with from all this is the sense that PD is not popular. People who fear it are as much—if not more—against it than people to whose characters it has actually happened. Returning to the gambling metaphor, if PD is the potential result of losing a fight, players are wagering a very, very high stake.

Such a stake is constant across all combat, because in a PD world it’s the only thing a player can bet. Because of this, the risks of losing must be small or the rewards for winning must be high (or both). Unfortunately, this can make matters even worse because it means PD actually occurs only very infrequently. Players aren’t expecting it to happen, therefore when it does, there’s the shock to contend with, too.

In real-life gambling, if a risk looks too great you can usually pull out of the bet and lose only a fraction of your stake. In virtual worlds, it should always be possible to cut your losses and flee from a fight. There may be tangible consequences for the partial defeat, but the main loss will probably be your pride. Only if you decided to stay (for example, because your opponent looks like they’re going to die sooner than you are) would you risk losing your whole stake.

PD is not appropriate for all virtual worlds. It would be ridiculous in most non-game contexts, and doesn’t add greatly to games without combat, either. For virtual worlds where non-PCs can (and regularly do) suffer PD, though, it has serious contributions to make.

Approaches to Permanent Death

Let’s assume for the moment that a designer has decided they want permanent death to feature in their virtual world. The reasons why they might (or might not) make such a decision we’ll go into shortly, but for the moment we’ll suppose they’ve done it. What are the various ways it can be incorporated into a design?

It all depends on how you intend to ensure that a death is “fair.” Here are the classic ways to do it (most of which also can be applied to PvP):

• Unmoderated. If your character dies, that’s it. There’s no comeback: It’s gone. PK versions of such worlds will frequently descend into barbaric slashfests, although this is not inevitable: If fleeing is not unlikely to succeed and the player base is too small to support gang warfare, an unmoderated world can thrive (and with a vibrancy it’s hard to match elsewhere).

• Post-moderated. PCs can appeal to administrators to be resurrected if they feel they were harshly treated. The classic reason is because of communications difficulties (lag, line noise, cosmic rays, whatever) that prevented a character from fleeing at a critical moment. The administrators will look at logs to determine whether the player has a case. In worlds with PKing, there may be a justification system in place to ensure that high-level characters don’t wipe out low-level ones indiscriminately, but they can nevertheless avenge intolerable acts (for example, you stole my stuff). Again, administrators would normally enforce this on appeal. This approach also works, but is only sound in small-scale virtual worlds that can log absolutely everything (that is, textual ones).

• World-moderated. The idea here is to implement a justification system by tracking player actions. Unfortunately, it can only ever track tangible actions: If someone insults your ancestry and you hit them, the virtual world will flag you as the aggressor. There are several ways to have a virtual world moderate PvP and PKing, none of which ever really work: Karma systems and NPC justice systems are the most popular. Grudge systems are the most interesting, because they allow slights to be traded: If I hit you, you get a grudge against me that you might sell to someone else who can beat five kinds of Hades out of me. This makes people think twice about performing unprovoked attacks, but has the disadvantage that it’s blatantly unrealistic.

• Player-moderated. These approaches don’t work either, at least not yet. Here, the decision as to whether a character has done wrong is made by players, not by the virtual world (although the world will act on what the players have said—for example, by making NPC shopkeepers charge more to people with low reputations). In player justice systems, there may or may not be NPC enforcers available to make sure that justice is done. The problem with player-moderated systems is that they are too easily undermined by groups of players acting in concert. If 100 players say that some random other player is a thief, that player is going to have a problem clearing their name. There are experiments under way to circumscribe this problem. Sure, it works for eBay, but eBay doesn’t have 10% of its user base trying to screw it over for fun.

• Opt-in. This is the classic response of designers who disabled PD or PvP and then came to regret it. They re-enable it, but only in certain arenas or between consenting duelists. It fails to deliver any of the major benefits of either PD or PvP. If your virtual world has no PvP or PD, you’ve already handed it over to people who don’t want it; adding it is not going to make them happy, nor will it attract people who do want it.

• Opt-out. This is an approach that ought to work but which has yet to find favor. The idea is that by default PD and/or PvP applies (moderated using one of the other approaches) but characters can flick a “pacifist switch” to opt out—some kind of “holy person” fiction covers for it. They pay for this security by having a lower level cap than characters for whom the gloves are off. While this seems fair to non-pacifists, it’s deeply unpopular among pacifists: They want the benefits of not getting killed but don’t agree that they should give up anything to do so. If higher level content is available, they should have access to it.

• Inevitable, but distant. Characters have a shelf-life, after which they die of old age, retire, or otherwise cease to exist except as a memory. This form of PD serves only one purpose: To force people to start afresh instead of staying on with the same, stale character indefinitely. Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, even at accelerated timescales it would probably take several real years for a character to “die,” and guaranteed impending death would dishearten everyone—even newbies.

The preceding is the main approaches to PD. They all treat dead PCs as “gone forever,” resurrection being limited to external factors such as bugs, rule violations, and the occasional act of gross favoritism by members of the live team.

Most virtual worlds don’t go for PD, however; this is fairly clear from the fact that it’s PD that has the acronym, not “NPD” (which is just “death”). In non-PD virtual worlds, PCs do die in combat (and perhaps in other ways) but it’s not the same kind of death that the cookie-cutter NPCs suffer. What exactly it is instead, however, varies.

Alternatives to Permanent Death

Let’s assume now that a designer ¹ has decided they don’t want permanent death to feature in their virtual world. If there’s no NPC death either (because of world’s genre or application), that’s it, end of story, skip to the next section.

If there is NPC or (in most cases) monster death, the designer has to find some non-PD equivalent for PCs. If your character fights a monster and loses in the worst possible way, what happens to it?

Okay, well the big mistake is to say the character dies. It doesn’t die. If it did die, that would be PD ². One of the absolute, defining features of death is that the dead don’t recover from it ³. Whatever it is that happens to the character, if it can continue its existence afterward, then it hasn’t died.

The words “kill” and “death” have all kinds of powerful emotional connotations that often in no way resemble how the concept is handled in a non-PD world. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but it becomes one when designers transfer too many of those connotations to something that doesn’t merit them. Sadly, this is something they are wont to do when discussing alternatives to PD.

Merely labeling something as “death” doesn’t make it a serious matter. In many cases (particularly in large-scale graphical worlds), the penalties for losing a fight are so lax that even the word “hurt” would overstate them. When I act as a consultant to in-development virtual worlds that don’t have PD, I insist that the designers don’t use the word “death” or “kill” in relation to PCs. This concentrates the mind on the mechanics and not the ideal. If someone says “when a mobile kills a PC,” I’ll correct them based on how they plan on handling it; unhappily, more often than not this means “when a mobile wuss-slaps a PC.” It may be sarcastic, but it leaves them in no doubt as to what they’re actually talking about, rather than what they thought they were talking about.

Okay, so let’s look at the usual ways that non-PD virtual worlds handle what they call “death” but isn’t:

• Resurrection. PCs that die come back to life, perhaps in a worse condition than they were in at the point of death, perhaps not. As with most forms of death evasion, in PvP worlds the exact penalties may vary depending on whether the PC was the aggressor.

• Insurance. This is a form of resurrection that PCs pay for in advance. It’s popular among Science Fiction worlds such as Federation II, but can work in Fantasy ones too. In DragonsGate, for example, players can accumulate “favors” by doing quests “for the gods,” which can be translated into resurrections. Sometimes, insurance works on a “save game” principle, whereby resurrection is only to the state the character was at when it was last insured; this means characters will regularly pay for new insurance, thus giving the economy a healthy cash sink.

• Ghosts and spirits. The fiction here is that PCs’ bodies die, but their spirit lives on. The spirit is usually separated from the body (appearing at some local last-save point or generic shrine) and has to find it to affect a resurrection. In the meantime, other PCs or mobiles can loot the body and steal the “dead” PC’s gear. Losing a fight therefore means a time penalty (you have to find the body) and possible tangible loss (if people loot it).

• Realm of the dead. This is a variation on the ghosts and spirits approach. “Dead” characters appear in some other dimension (that is, they’re teleported to a set of locations disconnected from the main part of the virtual world). They have to find/fight their way out, whereupon their soul returns to their body and they’re back to life again. Their body has taken the opportunity to recover from its massive system failure, too. Again, it’s mainly a time penalty to stop people who have just been “killed” in a battle from immediately wading back into the fray.

• Left for dead. Although PCs are clever enough to know when a mobile is faking death, mobiles are universally stupid. They think that the moment a PC hits the deck it’s Game Over. However, the PC is only stunned or unconscious or winded or otherwise wuss-slapped, and will be right as rain in no time!

• It wasn’t a fight to the death. This is absolutely fine in PvP situations, where it doesn’t really stretch the imagination too much to envisage duelers or gladiators who honorably fail to deliver the final death blow of a fight. It makes no sense against mobiles though unless the mobiles also accrue the benefits of it.

• Inheritance. Lefty gets killed. He really is PD gone. However, he happened to have a relative to whom ownership of all his kit passes. The relative is very close in looks, skills, and experience to the character who just died. Welcome, Lefty II! This works best in materialistic virtual worlds that define characters by their possessions more than by their attributes. The character may be nominally dead, but the player is no worse off for it. This is perhaps the best of these alternatives to PD because it offers some opportunity for players to start new characters when their old ones are wuss-slapped. Instead of Lefty III, you might go for Leftina instead (not that many players do—they treat it basically as resurrection). The fiction is basically sound, too, although it’s invariably stretched so thin as to be transparent.

• No believable fictional explanation. Characters who “die” bounce back with whatever time, movement, kit, experience points, and skills that the designers decide. There’s no sound rationalization, they just do. Asheron’s Call 2 with its progressive attitude that penalties for death in virtual worlds are “outdated” is the jaw-dropping epitome of this approach.

All these are alternatives to PD. However, the concept of actual PD is surprisingly incomprehensible to many players, who can’t quite bring themselves to believe that there are virtual worlds in which death really does mean death; occasionally, therefore, some of the preceding will be described as being PD even though they’re not. I’ve read reviews that described an insurance system as being PD, presumably on the grounds that your character is actually not there for a short period before rematerializing.

There also seems to be a good deal of denial among designers of virtual worlds. I’ve sat in on meetings where designers agreed among themselves to go with a PD system, then started to think of ways they could get around it (“Maybe we could have like a soul ring, that stores a character’s essence and…”).

As a designer, either you want or you don’t want PD in your virtual world. If you do, bite the bullet and have it. Don’t argue that what you have instead is “as good as” PD, or that it “hurts just as much as” PD; it isn’t and it doesn’t unless it is PD. If you don’t want PD, that’s your call; don’t refer to the effects of a wuss-slap as “death,” though, or you’ll be perceiving consequences that aren’t there.

It may seem from the preceding that I’m a die-hard PD fan unable to move with the times. Actually, it’s not so much that I’m a fan of PD as that I’m an unfan of the alternatives as they are often used—that is, with complete ignorance. In many cases, PD should indeed rightly be off the agenda; I have no problem with that ⁴. What infuriates me is when people put up ill-considered alternatives to PD without addressing the consequences, setting unwise precedents that the equally badly informed designers who follow slavishly copy.

If you want PD, you must understand what it buys you, and what you have to pay for it. Likewise, if you don’t want PD then you also must understand what that buys you, and what you have to pay for it. If the consequences of PD are too hideous to contemplate, fair enough, go for non-PD; however, if you do so you should make sure you can address the consequences of not having PD, too, or you may end up with something equally hideous.

So, let’s take a look at these consequences.

The Unfortunate Consequences of

Permanent Death

People really do not like it when their character dies. That’s really do not like it. Not only will they say they’ll leave if it happens, some of them actually will leave. There’s ample evidence of this from virtual worlds that launched with PD but toned it down in the face of player opposition. You can take steps to minimize this—keep the incidence of PD low but the awareness of its possibility high—but it’ll still happen. Even non-PD PvP was softened in early flagship graphical worlds. People don’t like to lose, they don’t like to suffer, and they especially don’t like other people making them suffer.

It’s easy to dismiss this as a short-term thing, and that once players “mature enough” to see the benefits that PD brings they will be willing to tolerate it; there’s informal evidence to support this position from long-term textual worlds with PD. However, even supposing that it’s correct, this still doesn’t help. Virtual worlds rely on newbies for their survival. Newbies are, by definition, immature (in their appreciation of virtual worlds). Given the choice between a virtual world that they can explore in complete safety and one where it seems a moment’s lapse of concentration could undo weeks of play, well, they’ll take the safe one, thank you very much.

Ah, the argument continues, but in time people will come to realize that such virtual worlds are unsatisfying, and, although they may be newbies to my virtual world, they won’t be newbies to virtual worlds in general. They will be mature enough to give PD a chance. Well, perhaps, yes, but remember that people view all virtual worlds in the context of the virtual world with which they started. If they began with a virtual world that had no PD, they’ll judge your virtual world from that standpoint ¹. It had better be a damned good one if they’re to give it a try.

Even if they are “mature enough” for PD, their attitude is analogous to the way that people in the real world view public transport. I like the idea of public transport, so do you, so does everyone else. I like it because the more that other people travel by bus, the roads will be less congested for me to travel by car. So do you, so does everyone else. We’re all in favor of it, but only for other people. So it is with PD: It’s fine when it happens to you, but not so fine when it happens to me.

Another issue is that PD is regularly confused with PvP. Players of Ultima Online didn’t like it when their characters were attacked by large numbers of PCs operating in well co-ordinated gangs. It was unfair: These PKers were ruining the game. That’s true, it was unfair and they were ruining the game; but it’s a PvP issue, not a PD issue—those “PKers” weren’t actually PKing. Nevertheless, because PvP and PD are so often combined to such disastrous effect, in many players’ minds they’re two sides of the same coin. Most players today haven’t even experienced PD but are categorically opposed to it.

So, PD has an (not entirely unjustified) image problem which means players will probably stay away. Furthermore, if it occurs too often or too unexpectedly, so that players feel it’s either arbitrary or unavoidable, even those players who came may decide to go. This is why developers of virtual worlds are rarely keen on PD.

There is, however, another reason why PD (in combination with PvP) is off-putting: The need for a very strong elder game. Players who manage to survive to “the end” need something to occupy them fully. If the designers don’t provide it, they’ll make their own entertainment. This may well take the form of employing their finely honed combat skills (possibly using a secondary character) to attack other PCs. A single, highly skilled killer can literally empty a small virtual world of other players, and it’s very hard for administrators to stop them. After all, they’re not exactly cheating. The fact that they want to protect the integrity of their rank by ensuring no “undeserving” characters reach it is, to them, incidental. For larger virtual worlds, these people would probably lead mobs rather than work alone, but the effect is the same: Other players quit to avoid the intimidation. As Chapter 3 pointed out, there is often a place in virtual worlds for small numbers of players of this type. Beyond a certain threshold, though, they can rapidly bring a virtual world to its knees. If you let fun PKing become your virtual world’s elder game, prepare for the worst.

Despite all this, PD nevertheless has a lot going for it. Quite how much is best shown by considering what happens when it’s taken away.

The Unfortunate Consequences of Non- Permanent Death

Let’s imagine what the real world would be like if the philosophers of ancient Greece had discovered the secret of eternal life. If you take your daily dose of elixir, you won’t age and will live forever. How would today’s society be different?

Well, it’s almost impossible to say, but one thing is for sure: Alexander the Great would still be in charge.

In virtual worlds, this is called sandboxing—the people who are first to positions of power get to keep them. There is no opportunity for change. Ensigns on the Star Trek spaceship Voyager (which was transported millions of light years from home) did not have a great career path no matter how able they were.

With no permanent death, virtual worlds consist of relentless progress toward either “the end” or some point of equilibrium (where the losses from whatever replaces permanent death balance the gains accrued in between such pseudo-deaths). When players feel they aren’t advancing, they can become very frustrated; most virtual worlds without permanent death therefore endeavor to keep losses lower than gains. This keeps players’ sense of achievement intact until they reach “the end,” although a side effect is that it devalues what that achievement means: If anyone can plod to success, no one successful gets bragging rights.

What happens at “the end” is also problematical. “The end” is when highly experienced (or highly plodding) players run out of content. Ideally, these characters should be retired and new ones started. That, however, is too much like PD for many players to stomach. Remorting is a way of restarting with an existing character (as a different class), but it’s a cop-out that really only delays the inevitable.

This irresistible rise problem is endemic in DikuMUDs. Eventually, high-level players will either join their virtual world’s administrators or find something else to do with their lives. Interestingly, this may involve starting a new DikuMUD of their own. Thus, although it may be bad for an individual DikuMUD that players leave when they run out of content, it could be good for the species of DikuMUDs as a whole.

This isn’t possible for players of large-scale graphical virtual worlds; it would be like a big-shot movie director telling a complaining member of an audience that if they don’t like what they see on the screen they should go away and make their own movie instead. That said, there are many graphical worlds being developed by people who cut their teeth playing EverQuest, so in a sense the same well-worn path is being taken.

Of course, if you’re a business that makes its money running an individual virtual world, you may not want your players to leave and set up ones in competition. Therefore, you need to encourage them to stay. The only solution not involving PD is to create new content, which is (as ever) expensive.

There is theory behind this, which anecdotal evidence from EverQuest suggests has some basis. The idea is that when new high-level content is added, it benefits not only the players for whom it was created, but also those that follow. It’s called the trickledown effect, although it’s perhaps a misnomer in that content doesn’t trickle down so much as characters trickle up to meet it. Nevertheless, the point is that although it may seem that content is being added only for the benefit of a few very powerful players, eventually all players will benefit from it as they reach that level. It’s like building a road as people walk along it: The ones at the back of the line eventually get to use what was created for the people at the front of the line.

It sounds all well and good, but it’s not without flaws:

• To newbies, the finishing post looks very, very distant. It may indeed look so distant to some that they decide not to bother embarking on the journey.

• Newbies (and not-so-newbies) feel they can never catch up. The people in front will always be in front, and there’s no way to overtake them.

• The horizon advances at the speed you approach it. You’re a donkey following a carrot on a stick.

It’s like running a city marathon. You know from the start that it’s a very long way, and not for the unfit or faint-hearted. You won’t beat any of the people who started two hours before you, so you can only judge your performance at a personal level. Oh, and the course keeps lengthening, so you’re not actually ever going to finish anyway.

In a virtual world with no PD, you only get to experience a body of content once. After you’ve consumed it, you rise in power such that the old content is no longer a challenge, so you go on to the next content. Aside from the fact that this is a huge waste of resources (players will repeat content many more times if they can come at it from different angles, for example, with different characters or different strategies), it’s not necessarily even the content as it was originally formulated. When greater monsters are created, greater treasure must also be created as a reward. Any weapons, armor, or other kit that’s better than what a character has will be retained, and their old equipment sold on to characters at a lower level. These, in turn, will sell their old stuff to yet lower-level characters, and so on.

The result of this is that characters often have better gear than they ought to have for their level of experience. They can better tackle the adversities they face, and when victorious the rewards they obtain may be less useful than what they have already. Thus, they’ll sell those on, too. It’s a form of inflation that devalues objects at lower content levels.

The situation is not as bad as it sounds, in that there are more characters at lower levels than at higher ones and therefore they can’t all have overpowered equipment. However, it’s also worse because of deliberate twinking. Formally, twinked characters ¹ are ones that have acquired equipment that they couldn’t ever have obtained through the normal channels; in EQ’s case, this means killing monsters and trading with other characters. Although strictly speaking even trading to buy a better sword than you “should” have is a form of twinking, most people use the term to mean using your own high-level character to obtain goods for your low-level character.

Twinking isn’t necessarily bad for a virtual world’s economy (especially if objects can wear out), but it throws a dark shadow over content. Newbies who are twinked by a high-level stranger are often very impressed; they’ll like the virtual world much more as a result. However, newbies who don’t have a higher-level benefactor are resentful of people who do—especially when those people don’t seem to see anything wrong with it. It’s like a Hollywood actor researching a role as a homeless person, who turns up at a soup kitchen, takes a bowl of soup, then produces a freshly baked baguette and some croutons to eat with it. That soup was meant for a homeless person, not a Hollywood actor; similarly, newbies who see experienced players consuming their content aided by luxuries no one else has will feel resentful. No amount of “I worked hard for this” is going to mollify them. It exposes the newbie experience as worthless.

Even at higher levels, it’s an issue. If you experience content with a twink (or otherwise overpowered character), you have an easier time of it than the designers planned. It’s like taking a calculator into a mental arithmetic test: You’ll finish sooner and get all the answers right, but you won’t learn as much. Players with twinks won’t necessarily see anything wrong with this, of course, because in their eyes they already sat the test once without a calculator, their main character. However, that assumes that only the answers are important; in terms of immersion, how you answer can be more telling than what you answer.

Twinking happens in virtual worlds with PD, but not to the same extent. This is because PD usually involves the total loss of all the kit you had with you when you died. If you get eaten by a dragon, the dragon gets whatever of your stuff survived; if your new character wants it, they’ll have to take it off the dragon. It’s not inherent to PD that object loss on death is implemented, but it usually is because it makes more sense. Virtual worlds without PD have moved slowly in the opposite direction, ensuring that even if you do “die” you won’t lose certain bound items to looters, lessening the impact of “death” even more. In some virtual worlds, you don’t lose anything tangible at all if a monster “kills” you. The trickle-down effect requires that new content be added. The highest-level characters, for whom it is intended after all, will invariably want input on this. It’s very tempting to listen to them. Power gamers ² are an excellent resource for regular computer games, and their opinions on possible changes will regularly be sought. Discussions on web sites devoted to Sid Meier’s Civilization III ³ have led directly to several code modifications released in the official patches. Unfortunately, however, in a virtual world where people can plod to the top without exhibiting the slightest sign of imagination, it is not guaranteed that the players of highest-level characters are power gamers; they could just be people with a lot of time on their hands. If you do listen to your highest-level players in determining content issues, make sure you can distinguish between the ones who have good ideas and the ones who merely think they do.

Note that these aren’t reasons why your virtual world should have PD; rather, they’re the situations you must tackle if you decide not to have it.

One of the biggest things you’ll need to decide is what to do with the fiction. I listed earlier the more popular ways of explaining how come PCs recover from mortal blows, but the problem doesn’t stop there. In particular, if you want a rational fiction then you’ll need to produce some reason why the mobiles that the characters kill don’t recover when they die and why they themselves don’t go up levels when they “kill” characters ⁴. Note that saying nothing may be better than saying something unconvincing, as at least it leaves open the possibility that a plausible fiction exists; if you pass off some cock-and-bull nonsense instead, you’re stuck with it ⁵.

It is particularly hard to reconcile non-death with historical or licensed worlds. When authenticity is a selling point, the inauthentic can be jarring. For example, setting a virtual world in war-torn France with PCs as members of the resistance could work, but it would rather lose something if the PCs weren’t ever in any danger of being killed. If the real-life French guerillas had been indestructible, the Nazis wouldn’t even have invaded. Non-PD isn’t the only authenticity issue with historical scenarios, of course (the fact that Paris was occupied for only 50 months somewhat limits the lifespan of a resistance scenario); it is, however, the biggest one.

Even in original fictional worlds, effective immortality has major implications. Society would develop in entirely different ways if everyone knew they weren’t going to die. What careers would people have? How would laws be made and enforced? Would science advance faster or slower? Would there be war? If not, how would groups resolve their differences? Would there be religions? Jesus’ resurrection would be no big deal if the same thing routinely happened to everyone. Where would everybody live? What would children do when they grew up?

Most designers take the point of view that these are not questions that need to be answered. The loss of immersion delivered from saying nothing on the subject is minuscule compared to the loss that would be incurred by dumping players into a virtual world that followed through the implications of immortality—it would be seriously alien to players’ real-world experiences. Under the circumstances, this is therefore the most sensible approach.

Pro-PD people may still urge caution, in that systems which work fine in the real world may behave less well when applied in a virtual world with no PD. Example: If no one died it would play havoc with the housing market. It’s often the case that churn will take on the role that death does in the real world, though: Characters do die when their players quit, therefore a house will go back on the market if its owner cancels his or her account.

There are some exceptions (for example, no PC would take out life insurance, therefore insurance companies would not be as rich as in the real world, therefore investment in stocks and shares would be lower) but these are invariably swamped by other factors anyway.

A virtual world without PD can be created to address all these issues, some of which are, frankly, of the “clutching at straws” variety anyway. Most virtual worlds do, in fact—worlds without PD greatly outnumber those with it. You can have a successful non-PD world.

So why is it, then, that time after time designers and long-term players will sense there is something missing from their virtual world, take a good, hard look at it, and conclude that, you know, maybe PD really isn’t all that bad?

Why Permanent Death?

Players are against PD because they don’t want to die. Although some socializers wishing to flaunt their loving and caring credentials might disagree, players in general don’t care if someone else dies—they just don’t want it to happen to them. Because no one wants it to happen to them, it doesn’t happen to anyone. So everyone is happy, right?

For a time, yes. Then, the fact that the whole experience is vacuous begins to nag at them.

Achievement—and with it a sense of personal advancement—can come in two ways in virtual worlds, neither of which occurs without PD or some equivalent. Characters can either advance gradually via a series of small actions done well, or heroically through single, life-changing events. Without PD, “small actions” are steps on a treadmill and “done well” means you move slightly faster than people who have “done badly.”

Heroism is no such thing—it’s just another example of a “small action.” This is the root cause of the dissatisfaction that many players of non-PD virtual worlds develop.

Players play virtual worlds to explore and celebrate their identity. The undertaking of courageous acts, whether for gain or to help others, can make highly significant contributions to personal development. It’s the uneasy realization that actually these acts weren’t as courageous as you thought they were that can cause the problems.

Note that it’s not the immediate thrill that’s important. Fights in EverQuest wouldn’t necessarily be any more exciting if death really meant death. It’s in the rationalization where it differs. When failure at an action means oblivion, you can say more about someone who attempts it than you can when all they’ll suffer is a wuss-slap. The difference is of immense importance, because they’re not only putting their tangible character on the line, they’re putting their nascent identity on the line too.

People may not want to undertake such risks. This is fair enough—bravery doesn’t have to mean stupidity. In a PD world, players assess the chance they’ll escape with their lives: If it’s too low ¹, they’ll pass. In a non-PD world, players don’t want the risk but still want to perform the action. The penalty for failure is therefore lowered to acceptable levels. Even stupid players won’t lose their characters. Failure may be annoying, but it takes more than that to make success heroic.

Acts are only heroic when there is a significant, perceived chance of real loss and no easier alternative. The following acts are not heroic:

• Standing in the way of a runaway cat. (No chance of real loss.)

• Walking across a minefield you didn’t know was there. (No perceived danger.)

• Swimming across a crocodile-infested river next to a bridge. (Brave, but unnecessary.)

Putting PD into a virtual world does not make people heroic. It does, however, ensure that those who talk heroic are heroic. The designers of virtual worlds can make all their players immortal, but they can’t make any of them heroes. Only players can make themselves heroes. If they later come to realize they’re not the heroes they thought they were, disenchantment sets in.

The most compelling reason for having PD is that it makes a virtual world meaningful in its own terms. Players can always construct meanings for activities in their virtual world, but these are not intrinsic to it or (crucially) to the real world. Without PD, a virtual world can still be real-world meaningful, but in external contexts only (for example, it’s a dating agency).

Virtual worlds are about identity; if you can’t lose something, you don’t value it; therefore, you can never value your identity in a non-PD world as much as you can in a PD world. This is less fierce than it sounds, in that immersion to persona level can provide the external context that makes a virtual world meaningful (to the immersed player); it’s just harder to reach that level of immersion in a virtual world that doesn’t have PD.

Meaningfulness is the fuel that powers the engine of identity development. It helps you get where you’re going. Without it, you either have to freewheel (non-PD) or get out and push (role-play).

Pleasure only works if there is pain against which to compare it. For many players, the virtual world is the pleasure and the real world is the pain; these players don’t want to experience pain in the virtual world too, hence the issue of consent is important. However, withdrawing consent also withdraws meaning—not just from the withdrawer, but from everyone else, too. It violates the “no easier alternative” requirement of heroism. Mechanisms to prevent this aren’t hard to propose—a simple level cap for immortal characters would do it—but the problem is that many players won’t stand for it: They want meaning without consenting to what’s required to give it to them. If the virtual world can’t provide it, they have to provide it for themselves. Is it surprising that they often end up dissatisfied?

You can see their point of view, of course. As far as they are concerned, they are role-playing a hero in a virtual world built for heroes ². Heroes are special people who don’t get killed, ergo their character shouldn’t get killed either. Players may be nobodies in real life, but in virtual worlds they’re somebody.

In the Gilbert and Sullivan musical The Gondoliers ³, there is a celebrated song, “There Lived a King.” It tells the tale of a monarch who, determining it to be unfair that he can drink Rhenish wine while other people have to drink toddy, promotes all his subjects to the highest ranks. The kingdom swarms with lord chancellors, bishops, ambassadors, prime ministers, dukes, field marshals, lord lieutenants, admirals, and party leaders.

The result isn’t hard to predict:

In short, whoever you may be, To this conclusion you’ll agree, When every one is somebodee, Then no one’s anybody!

If everyone is a hero, no one is.

This argument is very pessimistic. It suggests that everyone can’t be a hero even if they do heroic things: Everyone does heroic things, everyone becomes a hero, heroism is commonplace, therefore no one is truly a hero. The meaning has been stripped by its ubiquity.

Heroism does have a saving throw, though. It’s true that if everyone were a hero then no one would be. The thing is, everyone can be a hero, just not at the same time.

The Hero’s Journey

In his influential book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces ¹, academic Joseph Campbell asserted that the various heroic myths of all cultures follow the same, basic storyline. His theory was that myths are tied to the human psyche; they are cultural expressions of the universal need to explain the same, fundamental concepts of social, worldly, and other-worldly realities. Not all narratives follow the basic pattern (which is called the hero’s journey ²), but all myths and epics do. Famously, the movie Star Wars follows the hero’s journey almost to the letter.

Many of the steps in the hero’s journey are symbolic or metaphoric, so it may take a student of myth to recognize some of the more subtle ones. Once they have been identified, however, the basic sequence will usually be the same. Occasionally, steps may be omitted or reversed in order, but on the whole the overall structure of the myth will be the same. Heroes are heroes because they complete the hero’s journey.

This is a different perspective on heroism to that understood by players of virtual worlds. The hero’s journey includes heroic acts, but these alone don’t make someone a hero. If you risk life and limb—even in a PD world—to save an innocent, that’s an heroic act. People may regard you as a hero, but it’s a simile: They’re holding you in the same esteem they would hold a hero of ancient myth. If you want to be a hero, though, you have to complete the hero’s journey.

This, you can do. Let’s examine how.

The hero’s journey consists of a number of steps. Some of these are more significant than others, some take longer to occur than others, some have more symbolic connotations than others. They are grouped into three phases: departure, initiation, and return. Here’s a brief description of the steps.

Departure

• The call to adventure. The hero is given an indication that everything is going to change. The call may be symbolic, and the hero doesn’t have to realize what it means.

• Refusal of the call. The hero is required to act, but initially refuses. This can be through fear, duty, or a whole bunch of other things. If the hero holds out, they may be subjected to assault until they take the hint.

• Supernatural aid. Once the hero accepts the call, a supernatural guide is revealed to help them. Now they can enter the world of their quest.

• The crossing of the first threshold. The hero leaves their own world and enters that of their adventure. This is a dangerous place, with unknown rules and unknown limits. The new realm may have a guardian that the hero has to defeat or befriend to get past the threshold.

• The belly of the whale. This is symbolic, representing the final separation of the hero’s old world, old self, and a developing new world, new self. By entering the belly of the whale (or anything womb-like), the hero is committing to rebirth and transformation.

Initiation

• The road of trials. These are a series of (often three) ordeals that the hero must undergo to begin their metamorphosis. They could well fail at least one.

• The meeting with the goddess. This is another highly symbolic step. The goddess represents the totality of knowledge; if the hero is not consumed by exposure to it, they are liberated by it. This is usually described in terms of the hero’s experiencing absolute, unconditional love. The understanding the hero gains leads to a “union of opposites;” the hero’s self-image begins coalesce as the hero gains awareness of the forces of life and death, of mortal and spiritual.

• Woman as the temptress. Woman here is a metaphor for the temptations that may cause the hero to stray from their journey. The hero’s old-world origins are at odds with the new world, but the hero overcomes the urge to return to them.

• Atonement with the father. This is the key point of the journey, in which the hero faces whatever entity has the supreme power in their life. The hero recognizes the darkness in his or herself and discovers the light. The hero’s old self is killed (literally or metaphorically) and the new self steps forth.

• Apotheosis. A period of peace, rest, and bliss that the hero experiences before commencing the return home. Old cultural assumptions are finally broken, and old prejudices forgotten.

• The ultimate boon. Although the hero has already achieved the real aim of their quest, this is where they pick up the object they set out to acquire. The boon is often a token for which the hero is now sufficiently pure to obtain. They must bring it back for the benefit of all.

Return

• Refusal of the return. Life in the new world is so pleasant and carefree that the hero doesn’t see any reason to go home.

• The magic flight. The hero can’t stay and have the boon. This is the exciting escape with it.

• Rescue from without. The hero still doesn’t want to return, is prevented from returning, or is too weak to return. Powerful friends or allies help it happen.

• The crossing of the return threshold. The hero returns to their old world and old life. How will they reconcile the old and the new? How will they apply their newfound wisdom?

• Master of the two worlds. The hero achieves a serene or transcendental balance between the old, material world and the new, spiritual one. They accept their destiny.

• Freedom to live. Due to their mastery, the hero no longer fears death; they can live for the moment, unconcerned with whatever the past has held and whatever the future holds. It’s the journey that’s important, not the destination.

In the context of virtual worlds, the hero’s journey is normally discussed in terms of its relevance (or lack thereof) to story arcs. That’s not how I shall be applying it here.

The hero’s adventurous journey betokens a journey to find the self. It’s the same journey that players of virtual worlds undertake. They play to have fun, but they gain much more than that: They develop as people.

Let’s take a look at the steps as they apply to virtual worlds.

Departure

In this discussion, the “old world” is the real world and the “new world” is the virtual world. The departure action therefore takes place in real world.

• The call to adventure. Something triggers the would-be player’s attention. It may be a specific advertisement, testimonial, shelf unit, cover disk, magazine article, or pushy friend—it doesn’t really matter. The point is that the player now finds the idea of virtual worlds appealing when previously either they didn’t or they hadn’t thought about it.

• Refusal of the call. There are lots of reasons not to enter a virtual world: expense, time, fears of inadequacy, a social life. However, the appeal of the virtual world grows. The player really wants to try one.

• Supernatural aid. This step may be skipped if the player concedes to their desire. Where it isn’t, it’s likely that the player will know someone else who already plays and is able to help, or is a member of a group of friends who decide to try the virtual world together.

• The crossing of the first threshold. The player installs the software on their computer and powers up. They enter the virtual world, which is a dangerous place with unknown rules and unknown limits. The quality of the interface determines whether or not it counts as a guardian.

• The belly of the whale. The character generation system. The player creates a new self for the new world. It’s a formal rebirth; the player is undertaking to become someone else.

Initiation

This stage takes place in the virtual world, and is therefore the one that is most important to virtual world designers (more important than they may realize!). You may want to look back at the player development tracks shown in Figure 3.5 before you read this. You also might like to refer to the review of Hedron’s Six Circles, because this (at last!) is why I mentioned it ¹.

• The road of trials. The player finds their feet. This is the opportunist/griefer step, where players meet and respond to small challenges to determine the extent of their abilities. Their success or failure at these will establish their course of future action.

• The meeting with the goddess. The player seeks knowledge, either through experimentation (as a scientist) or from others (as a networker). The more that players learn about the virtual world and its inhabitants, the more they learn about themselves. If they can handle what they learn, they are stronger for it. They begin the process of immersion—that is, of coalescing their real-life self with their virtual self.

• Woman as the temptress. Once players have learned enough to become accomplished, they are at last informed enough to judge whether they want to attempt to complete it. Are they in it for the long haul, or is their academic curiosity sufficiently satisfied that they don’t feel they need to continue? This step covers the transition from discovery to application, from learning to doing.

• Atonement with the father. This is the step that players spend most of their time taking, putting the skills they have acquired into practice. It’s where the planner-type achievers and politician-type socializers strive to improve and impress. The virtual world’s achievement metric (for example, character level) charts the players’ progress to their goal. When they reach the end as the virtual world defines it, they “win.” It is the key moment in their virtual existence. The “father” who they are confronting is the virtual world’s (lead) designer, whose will is expressed by the virtual world and who wields its ultimate power. When the designer (through the implementation of the virtual world) accepts them, then they have the closure they need to move on to the final, serene state of total immersion.

• Apotheosis. Players wind up here as friend-type socializers or hacker-type explorers. They understand the virtual world, its people, and themselves; they are at peace with all. Challenges from the virtual world, when they arise, are no longer important.

• The ultimate boon. Oh dear. Virtual worlds don’t have an ultimate boon. Players have no token of their achievement. They have skills and wisdom that they can bring back with them into the real world, but nothing formal to symbolize it.

Return

This final stage accounts for players’ return from the virtual world to reality (or, perhaps more tellingly, the acceptance of players that the virtual world is part of reality).

• Refusal of the return. The player has power, respect, friends, and peace. Why would they want to return to the real world?

• The magic flight. The live team will usually not want a player to leave, and may provide a compelling elder game to try to ensnare them. They don’t, however, want their boon back (or wouldn’t, if they had one in the first place) and the barriers they erect are of the temptation variety rather than the physical or emotional of common myth.

• Rescue from without. Your parents, your workmates, your significant other—“Stop spending so much time on that computer!”

• The crossing of the return threshold. The player finally separates from the virtual world. Contrary to what many players think, this rarely involves a “burn all your bridges” deletion of characters (that will typically happen in the atonement step). If it involves an account cancellation, it’s for practical rather than symbolic reasons. The player stops playing simply because they don’t need to play any more.

• Master of the two worlds. The player’s virtual and real self are the same. The player can return to the virtual world, but it’s a place like any other. It has lost its mythical significance (to that player).

• Freedom to live. Players can finally be themselves.

Apart from the problem with the boon, this all looks very neat and tidy. The very general nature of the hero’s journey, however, with its mythical and symbolic components, means that with a little imagination it can be applied to stylized sequences of action where perhaps it isn’t really appropriate ¹. To what extent is this true for its use concerning player development tracks?

Analysis

Conjecture: Playing virtual worlds is a kind of hill-climbing activity through identity space; the hero’s journey is an algorithm for finding a very good local maximum, if not necessarily a global one.

I believe that the hero’s journey does directly apply to player development in virtual worlds. However, the fit is not exact. Given that the hero’s journey has evolved independently in all cultures through the millennia, should some effort be made to try and make the fit better? Or is the fit not exact because in truth it isn’t a fit at all?

I’ll go through what I perceive to be the main issues. This is all speculative; see what you think:

• The belly of the whale. Although it’s fine to identify the character creation screen as “womb-like” in its effect, normally a myth would have something that was suggestive of a womb in appearance, too. A cave, a pit, a log cabin, a belly of a whale…. Would making character creation take place in such an environment speak more deeply to players’ subconsciousnesses? Or does the fact it’s called “character creation” do away with the need for such symbolism as it’s pretty obvious what’s happening anyway?

• The meeting with the goddess. It’s very tempting to equate the addiction that many players feel about virtual worlds with the “unconditional love” metaphor here, but sadly it doesn’t work. Not only does addiction share none of the qualities that unconditional love is meant to symbolize, but it doesn’t really bite until the next stage anyway, where the player gets to use their new-found powers. That said, then, what is the virtual world’s equivalent of “unconditional love?” The goddess could be a player’s guide or a web site or some other fount of knowledge, but where does love come in? It’s a very common metaphor in myth.

• Woman as temptress. This is a stage that all players go through, but it’s not really any more special than the transition from griefer/opportunist to networker/ scientist.

If we lost lots of players here who decided that now they know the rules they don’t want to play, fair enough; but we don’t. Why is this step important for the hero’s journey but less important (although still present) in player development terms?

• Atonement with the father (I). The mere existence of this step suggests that the player’s presence in the virtual world must come to an end; players need the closure, they can’t go on forever. This is not something with which the developers of virtual worlds would necessarily concur. They don’t want players to leave ¹, so they continually add new content—thereby denying atonement and initiation. In such circumstances, players have huge difficulties satisfactorily completing their hero’s journey: They can only do so by rejecting the father (who has rejected them), which is not pleasant.

• Atonement with the father (II). Atonement implies that acceptance isn’t automatic: The player must “deserve” it. This is where a PD world delivers and a non-PD one doesn’t. If success is guaranteed with time, acceptance isn’t in question.

• Atonement with the father (III). Virtual worlds can only measure tangible things. For planner-type achievers this is easy enough (experience levels, skill levels, possessions, and so on), but for politician-type socializers, how do they gain final acceptance by the designer?

• Atonement with the father (IV). What happens when control of the virtual world is wrested from the design team and handed to, say, the marketing or the community service group? An individual can act as a foster-father figure, but they didn’t actually create the virtual world. Has the father abandoned the hero?

• The ultimate boon. The reason that most virtual worlds don’t have this is because developers don’t want people to leave. Although some players may accept the inevitability of their departure, most developers don’t. It wouldn’t be hard to give players recognition either within the virtual world or without it; indeed, some virtual worlds do this ². It doesn’t have to be the player’s ticket home, but it should be something special that players can only ever obtain once.

• The magic flight (I). Without a boon, this still sort of goes to plan: Players try to leave against the wishes of the guardians of the virtual world. With a boon, the magic flight would perhaps work counter to this. It’s easy to see how forcing a player to retire would lead to attempts by that player to continue to play. Secondary accounts would be opened then closed, attempts to masquerade as a new player would be made then detected, and so on until eventually the player would get the message and stay away. This is not how magical flights normally work! Heroes will usually have to break out of the new world to reach the old, rather than be stuck in the old because they fail to break back into the new.

• The magic flight (II). If players don’t leave, does not their continuing presence interfere with the progress of other players? Can heaven become full? Doesn’t the sheer number of heroes still wandering around debase the currency of heroism ³? Perhaps trying to keep players involved indefinitely is actually bad for a virtual world in the long term?

• Master of the two worlds. The keepers of the virtual world can’t give anything to the player that is of material use or value in the real world because people will cheat to get it (imagine what would happen if there were a substantial cash prize for reaching the level cap, for example). Unlike the new world of myth, people really can enter virtual worlds; what’s more, they can visit it with their buddies and bring out boons by the truckload. Players take from the virtual world the confidence, self-esteem, friendships, and life skills they picked up there, but that’s all that’s of any use. It’s up to them what they do with these.

• General. Players can achieve immersion without following all these steps. If there is no formal end-point, for example, that doesn’t stop people from reaching full immersion; it might be harder or more frustrating for them, but they can still do it. This may be a template for a hero’s journey, but you can become a hero by following your own path, too.

You don’t have to leave a virtual world if you don’t want to (they’re just places, after all), but for some people it’s a necessary closure. Is denying an exit—through the design of the world—therefore immoral? As you’ve probably come to expect now, this is discussed later in Chapter 8.

Not everyone can complete the hero’s journey; not everyone can be—or wants to be—a hero. People can and do stop beforehand; some may even be heroes before they start. Everyone can try to be a hero, though, and a well-designed virtual world gives them a better chance of succeeding than almost anything else available to ordinary people.

The critical thing is, although you can do heroic deeds in the virtual world, you have to leave for them to count. You visit the virtual world to become a hero, but you can only be a hero in the real one. The virtual world is a part of the real world.

Warriors are only heroes when the battle is over. While the battle is raging, they’re just trying to stay alive.

Attitudes to Permanent Death

Will attitudes to permanent death change?

If some way could be found to retain the desirable consequences of PD while losing the undesirable ones, attitudes wouldn’t need to change. With our current knowledge of PD, however, this seems unlikely.

Change will have to occur, however, if virtual worlds are to remain faithful to their essence, at least in combat-oriented worlds. Dilution of the virtual world “product” will leave people unsatisfied. Will they stop playing all virtual worlds, or continually drift from one to the next, forever unable to find something that satisfies their long-term aims without violating their short-term criteria?

Existing virtual world culture is anti-PD. Upcoming virtual worlds are therefore also likely to be anti-PD. This is primarily due to imperfect early implementations ¹ and bad customer service decisions; nevertheless, the legacy is there. Trying to stop it is like trying to prevent a herd of cattle stampeding toward an oasis in the desert: You know they’re going to drink it dry and then they won’t be able to make it to the distant but flowing river you want them to go to. But if you stand in their way you’re only going to get trampled.

Players, fortunately, are not cattle. Those who think about the subject—what they want and what they don’t want—may change their views and (reluctantly) support PD. Then again, they may become even stronger in their opposition to it. Change would amount to a paradigm shift, however, which is very hard to effect. That said, we’ve already had one the other way (early MUDs had PD) so it’s not impossible.

Many designers feel that the reason PD fails is because it isn’t “done right,” at least on the large scale. They could be correct. However, they also believe that the way they plan on implementing it is right. When it turns out to be wrong, they set back the cause of PD even more. The more that designers know about PD and non-PD, the more they can base their decisions on experience rather than hope. With any luck, this section has gone some way toward helping inform such decisions, whichever way they eventually go.

I have one last thing to say before I leave the subject, which I present here without comment. It’s a statistical observation from a well-known, large-scale graphical virtual world:

A change from PD to non-PD has no effect on the number of customer service complaints.

Draw your own conclusions.