The Elder Game

There comes a point when players have advanced so far that they feel they have achieved everything that they set out to achieve. They are no longer interested in the activities that used to occupy their time: They feel they have “made it.” The question then arises: What can they do instead?

Who Plays the Elder Game?

The content that occupies players in advanced states of immersion is known as the elder game ¹. It deals with four types of player, each with differing needs. In hero’s journey terms, these are those who are in the following states:

• Pre-apotheosis. Players whose characters have advanced quicker than they themselves have. This may be because the players have had too much help on the way, or they didn’t recognize/understand the atonement (that is, final achievement) process. These players will want more of the content that they were consuming before they reached the elder game, but which they have now exhausted.

• Apotheosis. The players for whom the elder game is primarily intended. They have succeeded in their goal, and are enjoying resting on their laurels prior to returning to the real world.

• Refusal of return. They don’t want to stop playing, and the live team usually doesn’t want them to go either. However, they’ve either used all the elder game content or are self-generating it.

• Post-crossing of the return threshold. These players can return happily to the virtual world at any level. They have nothing to prove, and can therefore play how and when they want for the sheer joy of it.

Let’s take these in order.

Looking back to Figure 3.5’s player development tracks, the main types of player in a pre-apotheosis state will be politicians and planners. Politics has long been promoted as one of the two great elder games for large-scale virtual worlds ², because it self-generates content: Players do things that impact one another, which leads to new courses of action with different impacts, indefinitely. Self-generated content is inexpensive and long-lasting. Evidence from textual worlds suggests that politics ³ is indeed a good elder game for players with conveyor-belt characters that traveled at the wrong speed; it’s also a useful delaying pursuit for players at the refusal to return step. It doesn’t really help those in apotheosis, though.

The other pre-apotheosis player type likely to have characters in advance of their degree of immersion are planners. These are the achiever types who went at it too mechanistically and matured their characters before they matured themselves. They’re still looking to achieve. For these players, remorting is probably the best solution, as it at least holds out the prospect that they’ll reach a sense of fulfillment at some point; however, the existence of remorting as a possibility may lead other players not to feel they have “finished” when perhaps before they might, therefore they’ll head off on another dispiriting achievement ladder that will do them no favors at all.

For some virtual worlds, the reason that planner-type achievers reach the elder game is because the virtual world itself has no formal indication that they have reached “the end.” In this situation, the human thing to do would be to add a recognition that the player has undergone a rite of initiation. The inhuman thing to do would be to add more content to keep the players achieving. Sadly, the latter is not uncommon, particularly in commercial virtual worlds.

Players who are in a state of apotheosis will be either hacker-type explorers or friends-type socializers. The former can usually be catered for by allowing building privileges (assuming that they didn’t have them already; if they did, building is part of “the game” rather than “the elder game,” so won’t be of much use here). Building may be only a limited option in a commercial virtual world, where real-world copyright laws could be enforced to devastating effect. Legal solutions are likely to be found, however, which will remedy this situation.

Friends-type socializers will want to sit around chatting to one another, and are therefore easy to deal with as long as they have something in-context to chat about. Historically, chat content has been generated by the snoop command, which allows one player to see what another player sees without that player’s knowledge. Again, although this works for hobbyist virtual worlds, there may be legal problems if it were tried in commercial ones; people value their privacy, even if they’ve signed an end-user agreement that says they don’t.

As mentioned earlier, politics works well for players who are refusing to return. It gives them something vaguely meaningful to do, which they can practice almost indefinitely (even when, as a party leader, they lose an election and are rejected by their party—at least it gives them a goal to reclaim what they’ve lost). Unlike the situation for politician-type socializers, it is unlikely that post-apotheosis players will actually enjoy what they are doing, however, and resentment could well build up. The end, when it comes, could be acrimonious.

Players who have crossed the threshold are the easiest to deal with as they require no new content; their elder game, if it can be called that, is to do whatever they like doing the most. Responses vary. At one extreme, they may never feel the need to enter the virtual world ever again; at the other, they might take up residence and spend their whole time exploring or helping newbies or politicking or whatever (hopefully not slaughtering newbies). Some may become members of the live team.

Player Interest and the Elder Game

I mentioned in Chapter 3, while deriving a third dimension for the player interest graph, that MUD2’ s wizzes are griefers, politicians, networkers, or friends: They are not the world-oriented types of planners, opportunists, hackers, and scientists. Why is this? Shouldn’t they be hacker-type explorers or friends-type socializers?

MUD2 has rules about what wizzes can and cannot do. To prevent abuses of their (considerable) powers, they are not allowed to use them to play “normally” as a non-wiz (that is, a mortal). In other words, if a wiz wants to play in the mortal world as a mortal, they can’t use their special wiz abilities; they have to use a different, non-wiz character. In the discussion from which the original player types graph was derived, wizzes therefore considered what they did as a wiz to be separate from what they did as a mortal. Some of them spent most of their time as a wiz; some spent most of it as a mortal. The rules forbade them from doing achiever or explorer things as wizzes, which is why they didn’t show up in the analysis of what wizzes did. In fact, these players did all these activities, just not using their wiz personae ¹.

The reason that wizzes weren’t exclusively hackers or friends was because many of them had crossed the threshold and were no longer in apotheosis; they were playing merely because they enjoyed playing. Some things they could do using wiz powers; others they couldn’t, so they did them as mortals. This is why Figure 3.3 doesn’t include any world-oriented player types—it only lists what wiz-level players were allowed to do using their wiz-level characters.

MUD2’s wizzes were automatically co-opted to the live team, a duty they could dispatch to whatever degree they cared. They could only use their wiz characters, because wiz-owned mortals had to remain incognito so as not to compromise them ². Thus, there were only four ways to behave as wizzes. Here they are:

• Griefers. Griefers with power will either use it responsibly ³ or abuse it and be banned. In a well-designed virtual world, griefers who are unable to move on will rarely reach the elder game anyway; those griefers-at-heart that do will understand that they can act explicitly on other players in a benevolent fashion, even if the delights of malevolence ultimately prove too tempting. In MUD2, for example, griefer wizzes would try to make the lives of mortals more interesting by tinkering with the virtual world itself in subtle, undetectable ways. Done well, it was like being guided through trials by your own, personal angel; done badly, it was like being tormented in perpetuity by your own, personal devil.

• Politicians. These people see themselves as good guys, organizing fun activities like leaders at a children’s holiday camp. These activities can be invaluable as bonding exercises, but they also can be immersion-busting and incredibly irritating to those who don’t want to take part. Politicians tend not to get on with other politicians, whose events (and even presence) clash with their own endeavors.

• Networkers. These are oracle-like players, who are happy to help others by sharing what they have learned, yet rarely in a boastful kind of way. Unlike explorer types, for whom the acquisition of knowledge is itself intrinsically fun, these people give it away for free. Although their help and advice is limited to low-level activities that help people get involved with a virtual world, it’s generally fine. If they spout less well-known information, this will annoy achiever types (who see people getting an easy ride) and some explorers (who see the dissemination of information as taking away the potential fun of other explorers).

• Friends. They snoop on mortals, they chat, they laugh, they complain about how things aren’t the same as they were when they were a mortal. They like each other’s company, and don’t like it when other wizzes fall out.

To this list, we should add hackers and scientists. Hackers use their knowledge to create things, but aren’t all that bothered in exploiting it. Whereas politicians will build a whole new area and dump players in it to have fun, hackers do it because the creativity itself is the interesting part—they don’t care if players actually use it, except maybe so they can test its functionality.

Scientists are like friends-type socializers, in that they snoop a lot. However, this is because they can find out more about the virtual world, rather than finding out about the players. Scientists use snooping like it was a documentary; friends use it like it was a soap opera.

So the wizzes did, in fact, spend their time doing more than four things. If players have mastery of both worlds, they can live how they see fit. That means they have passed beyond the confines of player development tracks (which stop after apotheosis), and can be themselves. They can be any of the eight player types—it’s just that these didn’t show up in the analysis. When playing as achievers, they looked just like any other achiever; when playing as hackers, they were mistaken for politicians; when playing as scientists they were mixed in with socializer-type friends. So the analysis that led to the inclusion of a third player types dimension was, while not exactly flawed, a little incomplete.

Well, it’s complete (for) now.

Player-Created Content

Most content in virtual worlds is created by the development team (to the specifications of the designers). Some is created by the live team ¹. Some is created as a community statement because the players will it ². Some is created by the players themselves.

Players “add content” whenever they play by their in-context actions. Anything they do that affects the virtual world or its inhabitants is adding content. There’s always a positive effect to this, even if the action as a whole is detrimental to the virtual world: In the same way that any publicity is good publicity, it can be said that any content is good content (because it’s better than no content).

Content that arises from the natural actions of players within the design framework is said to be emergent or self-generating. Although designers recognize its importance, normally when they talk about player-created content they mean content explicitly created by players; players as designers and developers, in other words.

Player-created content is extremely sticky, at least for those who do the creating ³. This makes it prime elder game material. Some virtual worlds have player-created content from the very beginning, of course; these can’t really use content creation as an elder game, unless it’s a different kind of creation.

From a designer’s perspective (especially one working on a commercial virtual world), allowing only experienced players to create content lessens the chances of its consisting of the low-quality, inconsistent, illiterate, out-of-context, gratuitously profane, sporadic, incomplete, atmosphere-snapping, unimaginative nonsense that experience has shown is inevitable if people can (effectively) self-publish their creations. In practice, using only experienced players does indeed raise the overall quality of what’s created; at least they’re not going to try to subvert, mock, or otherwise deliberately undermine the source material. Nevertheless, their creations are still very hit and miss; some are bad, some are good, but without training ⁴ even the excellent ones are prone to making the same errors that professional designers spend all their time trying to avoid (particularly selective depth).

In one sense, it doesn’t matter. If people like doing this, why stop them? A single virtual world could act as a content aggregator for thousands of individual demi-worlds in various states of permanency. Then again, experience with TinyMUDs has shown that virtual worlds that couple unrestricted building with unrestricted access have tended to have short (albeit occasionally glorious) lives. Restricting building to only the most experienced players will remove a lot of the in-fighting that dogs content addition, but it won’t guarantee quality.

It’s the quality issue that bites hardest. Players are harsh judges. It doesn’t matter to them that a fellow player spent eight weeks creating a castle in the air: If they think it sucks they’ll either say so or keep away ⁵. In virtual worlds where players have been cosseted up until this point, such a reaction can be something of a shock. There’s no point in complaining, either: “I’m not playing if a character I spent two months building up can die!” may galvanize a live team, but “I’m not playing if an area I spent two months building isn’t played” won’t.

The answer might be to have all content vetted for quality before it is accepted into a virtual world. Most books have one author, but some have two, three, or more. When there are several authors, there will usually be an editor involved to ensure that the writing is consistent, complete, and correct. Even books with just one author will have a publisher-appointed editor to make sure everything fits the house style. Even this book has such an editor (hi, Stephanie!). If content for virtual worlds were subjected to the rigors of an editorial process, the result would be much higher-quality material.

Unfortunately, the central reason why developers like player-created content is not because it’s sticky, or because it works as an elder game; they like it because it’s free. If it stops being free (for example, because an editor is spending time looking at it), it becomes less attractive. Why employ someone to look for diamonds in the rough when you could employ someone else to make those diamonds for you ⁶?

Power to the Player

Chapter 1 stated that players can create content in a number of ways, which can usefully be categorized as being either in-context (you put a minotaur on retainer and hire a bunch of NPC peasants to construct your labyrinth) or out-of-context (you manifest a minotaur and a labyrinth from nothing). People with the ability to make out-of-context changes are “builders.” An analysis of who can build and how long their creations last determines who “owns” a virtual world.

Although the switch between in-context and out-of-context creation is a step change, on either side of the discontinuity the power to change is more continuous. Again, although designers do consider content creation using in-context methods to be important—especially for the elder game—they don’t mean that when they talk about player-created content. Player-created content means building, and there is an escalating scale of what can and can’t be done using it. In describing this, the important concepts are

• Objects. Tangible virtual world entities, including mobiles and geography.

• Functionality. Code that changes the properties of objects.

• Building blocks. Prefabricated components that are combined to make a whole.

• Free-form. New components can be constructed from nothing. In increasing power of expression, these can be combined as follows:

• Objects from predefined components. A musket is a heavy, antique, two-handed firearm. Its default weight, value, and accuracy have these new default values: mass=8000, value=125, ammo=ball, and so on.

• Functionality from predefined components. To load a musket, you must put in the gunpowder, the wadding, and the ball, in that order. Only then can you fire it.

• Free-form functionality. When you fire a musket, there’s a chance it could explode and cause a new kind of damage to your hands, arms, torso, and face. The noise could deafen people close by.

• Free-form objects. There’s this entirely new object, a grenade. When you release the trigger, you have 10 seconds before it explodes. It has entirely new properties for blast radius and the distance it can be thrown, with these default values: mass=250, delay=10, blastradius=50, and so on.

The latter two can perhaps be combined, because for functionality to be truly free-form it would include the ability to create objects anyway. Free-form object creation appears last because it cannot occur without free-form functionality.

In-context object creation occurs by combining components within the (possibly loose) constraints of a recipe, therefore it’s not hard to extend to out-of-context creation. You may get some fairly bizarre constructions, but they’re not going to cause the virtual world to crash.

Functionality additions are more problematical. If they’re from components, again your virtual world should be fairly safe. So long as you ensure that there’s no danger of recursion (for example, your new “load musket” function contains a call to “load musket” ¹), all should be well.

Free-form functionality is dangerous. People can do things that cause crashes (for example, dividing by zero) or hangs (for example, non-terminating loops). Crashes can be trapped, but the state of the virtual world after a function has aborted mid-way through will not necessarily be consistent. Loops can’t be detected, only assumed: The virtual world’s engine can stop a player-created loop after a million iterations only to screw up everything because the critical million-and-oneth iteration never got to execute. Resource hogging also can be a problem: Players really will create 99 red balloons ² without a moment’s thought, and if that works they’ll go for 1,001 Arabian Knights (that’s humor for you).

TinyMUDs and their ilk have evolved mechanisms to prevent these issues from becoming too problematical, using approaches similar to those adopted in the old days of mainframe computer timesharing systems. Crashes are handled by the operating system’s interrupt mechanism. Hangs and processor-hogging are handled by interrupting functions after they have exceeded some guaranteed minimum amount of processor time. Disk and memory usage is limited by the number of objects (and, optionally, properties and functions) that an individual can create in total—you have to delete old stuff to make room for new stuff once your quota is reached. Some virtual worlds have allocation committees to decide who gets what resources.

The more powerful player-created content forms are prevalent only in textual worlds. This is for practical reasons more than anything: Everyone who plays the virtual world can by definition type, therefore they can all create word-based content. For graphical virtual worlds, few of the players can draw (and, unlike the situation with writing, it’s usually apparent even to them ³ that they can’t). This isn’t to say that their ideas are no good; it merely means that they are unable to put them into practice. Given that most people can’t even take professional-quality photographs, this situation would likely prevail even were the best graphics-creation tools to be made available to players.

For the time being, graphical worlds that want to allow some degree of building are therefore pretty well stuck with using predefined components or restricting creation to artistically blessed players. That’s for object creation; new functionality would need to be hugely controlled if it were to escape being employed as a tool for abuse—so much so that it hardly seems worth bothering implementing.

The first 3D graphical virtual world to take player-created content seriously is World Fusion’s Atriarch ⁴. This Science Fiction world has modifiable terrain and allows characters to purchase components for the construction of buildings. Construction is open to all who can obtain the components ⁵, therefore it’s neither an end-game thing nor even out-of-context. Still, it’s a start ⁶.

Another approach is to push the problem one level back. This is the tactic adopted by Bioware with Neverwinter Nights ⁷. The idea is to make the necessary development tools for virtual worlds available to players so they can create their own independent (in this case) games. Bioware makes its money from selling the boxed sets and from hosting secure servers for characters (so they can move from one mini-world to another ⁸). It’s a business model that has potential, but each virtual world is limited to 64 simultaneous players, so it’s hardly going to challenge the likes of EverQuest on that basis ⁹.

Also, as I said, it pushes the problem one level back. Bioware are the developers of the game engine and they maintain network operations for players, but that’s all. The same design and customer service issues that apply to virtual worlds still apply, just to the (from Bioware’s perspective) players. It’s like the way that Dungeons & Dragons defines a gaming system but the players themselves design and (within the confines of that system) develop the individual game worlds; this is perhaps not surprising, given that NWN is a D&D license and implements the 3 rd Edition D&D rule set.

This tool-oriented attitude is set to become increasingly important in the development of virtual worlds. If cheap engines are available to run the virtual worlds and enough customizable predefined artwork exists to satisfy most needs, at a stroke the two most expensive development costs are removed. Hobbyist designers will be able to create their own graphical virtual worlds in the same way that for years they have been creating textual ones. A start has been made with the use of virtual reality VR viewing software (Active Worlds ¹⁰, for example, allows people to create custom, shared virtual spaces, albeit not ones you can do much in except look around). If actual game engines are made open source, we’ll see the same codebase branching occurring that drives much textual world development, too. There is some movement in that direction, most notably with Nevrax’s ¹¹ decision to make its NeL (Nevrax Library) development toolkit available under the GNU General Public License ¹² (GPL). They stop short of giving their server source code away, however.

A way to introduce some element of freeform player creation while maintaining the integrity of the virtual world is to allow link-outs to the general Internet. Depending on the degree to which developers are willing to sacrifice design control and immersiveness, there are many possible scenarios. Some examples:

• Clicking on a character extracts data from a file on the player’s own web site and presents it as a biographical description of that character.

• Clicking on a character’s shop opens a browser window showing the prices of the goods available for sale.

• Clicking on a player’s castle reads the definition of its interior layout from files on its web site.

• Clicking on a magic portal teleports your character to another virtual world entirely.

• Clicking on a web site queries the virtual world and produces data that can be incorporated into the web site (for example, prices, character name lists, remote views).

There is, obviously, great scope for abuse here. Instead of prices, that browser window might contain pornography, for example. In small, tight, role-playing virtual worlds, misbehavior can be controlled relatively easily because players know that there is a line of people waiting who would be only too happy to replace someone who was spoiling things for others. In large-scale commercial worlds, this measure of restraint is simply not going to happen except perhaps when players have a lot to lose (for example, in the elder game).

The Content Conundrum

Player-generated content is popular with those who design it, aspirational for those who see it being designed, inexpensive for developers, and it satisfies a perceived need (that is, a constant flow on new content to prevent a virtual world from becoming stale). Arrayed against it are concerns about quality, which, although legitimate, can to some extent be alleviated by the provision of design tools, documentation, testing facilities, and a person to act as content editor. Given the advantages, why aren’t more virtual worlds looking at this as an option?

It’s because of intellectual property (IP). People who create content can claim certain rights over it. For in-context creations (for example, planting differently-colored virtual flowers in such a way that they grow to show a picture) this isn’t a problem ¹ because all works can be considered to be transient; you can no more complain that someone dug up your virtual flowers than a pavement artist can complain that the rain washed away their chalk masterpiece. If the context of the virtual world allows it, then by creating within that context you have no redress.

It gets much, much trickier when out-of-context creation is considered. Different laws apply in different countries and different states, but basically:

• If work is done honestly and for hire (that is, they were contracted to do it) then you get the most rights. They can ask that their name be taken off the credits, but that’s about it. The downside is that individuals must be paid whatever minimum wages apply for work to be considered for hire, and “a free account” is below this level.

• If work is bought when complete (as you might buy a painting from a gallery), the artist retains more rights. They could, for example, object if you used it in such a way as to affect their reputation adversely. A photographer might have grounds for complaint were you to display his or her amusing images of clothed farm animals in an exhibition about bestiality.

• Paid-for licensed content (for example, a Star Wars franchise) will typically state the boundaries within which content must operate. It may also give the license-holder a veto over aspects of the virtual world’s design (for example, no one gets to kill Luke Skywalker), but as long as it operates within these formal constraints the developer still has a reasonably high degree of freedom.

• If work is donated for free, the artists may have even more rights. You might have to ask their permission before you make any changes affecting it; in extreme cases, this could mean all patches to the virtual world, on the grounds that they alter the context of the work and therefore its meaning. Also, just because they gave it to you for free, that doesn’t mean it’s not an asset—you can still be taxed on it.

• Content with sufficient creative input from the developer can be considered to have joint copyright. This means you ought to be able to do whatever you like with it, whether the other copyright holder objects or not. However, so can they. Disrespect them and you could come heavily to regret it.

• Content created without any formal signing over of ownership gives you very few rights. You can throw it out if you don’t like it, but provided that you invited its creation there’s little else you can do. If I put up a sign saying that passers-by can create sculptures in my garden, I don’t get to alter—or even necessarily move—them. All I can do is demand that the sculptor take their work away. A sledgehammer is not a legal option.

• Virtual worlds that are paid to show content have least control over it; this is effectively sponsorship. If the Brown Fizzy Drink Company pays you to put cans of virtual Brown Fizzy Drink in your virtual world, it can claim copyright abuse when the players buy those cans and arrange them to look like cartoons of suggestive parts of the human anatomy.

For non-commercial virtual worlds, none of this is normally much of an issue (basically because they have no money and are therefore not worth beating on ²). For commercial virtual worlds, many of whose players could well be lawyers themselves, it’s frightening. The legal situation is by no means clear, and nobody wants to be the one who has to empty the bank paying lawyers’ fees to determine the precedents. Consequently, developers are very keen not to dilute their IP with anyone else’s ³.

Chapter 6 has more on the new legal issues that virtual worlds are raising. Chapter 7 looks at some of the effects of player-created content on storytelling within virtual worlds.