Toward a Critical Aesthetic

Virtual worlds are works of art. I refer to their creators as “designers,” but that’s a misnomer; really they’re artists ¹. Although there is some debate over the distinction between art and design, it’s generally true that “design” has to convey a given package of information or utility whereas “art” is an end in itself. You tell a designer what you want; you ask an artist what they’ve got. What virtual world designers do is more Art than Design.

It’s like the difference between Science and Engineering: Scientists seek truth, whereas engineers seek solutions. If you ask an engineer to change a construct because you don’t like it, they’ll do so; if you ask a scientist to change a theory because

you don’t like it, they’ll stare at you blankly. Similarly, if you ask a designer to change a decoration because you don’t like it, they’ll do so; if you ask an artist to change a picture because you don’t like it, they’ll attack you with a hammer.

Virtual world designers must work within many constraints, and they do have to deliver a certain amount of utility. This is something they consider an intrinsic part of their art, though. If you want a formal portrait, you go to an artist who specializes in portraiture and considers that as part of their art; you don’t pick an artist at random from the Internet who might spend two weeks making preliminary sketches then present you with a wooden sculpture of a ship that is supposed somehow to capture your personality. Top virtual world designers create worlds because that’s how they express themselves artistically; utility is intrinsic what they design, in the same way that likeness is intrinsic to what a portrait artist paints. Designers who create worlds because they’ve been told to may still be able to put some self-expression or meaning into the product, but at the end they’re creating for you. Artists create for themselves.

I have a namesake who is a fully fledged professional artist ². His medium is acrylic and collage. His work involves cutting images from magazines, which he then laser-copies multiple times and incorporates into an artistic whole. The uniform reproduction of what are themselves mass-market images allows him to comment on things like commercialism, politics, stereotypes and many other things that interest him. He likens his process of creation to alchemy: He takes a base copy and turns it into art. As with any alchemy, this can only be achieved through a proper understanding of the materials involved and a meticulous approach to experimentation, hence all the painstaking cutting-out. The fastidious and craft-intense

process of creation gives him an understanding of the work he is creating, which enables him to embody it in the final artifact.

Virtual world designers might not have quite this degree of internalization about their work, but nevertheless if you plan to tell one of them mid-way through a project that you want them to drop something for marketing reasons, hide all the hammers first.

Some of what virtual world designers do really is design rather than art. Design is often used to create tools that can be used for making art, or to construct building-block objects that can be assembled in an artistic way. There are even theories for this ³. It can be regarded as part of the designer’s craft. It’s not why they do what they do, though; it isn’t itself Art.

Of course, virtual worlds are often such large-scale projects that many people have artistic input. The same also applies to movies; and in the same way that a movie’s director ⁴ ultimately holds artistic responsibility for that movie, the lead designer holds artistic responsibility for their virtual world. Actors and cinematographers, programmers and 3D modelers, they can all be artists; directors and designers, however, are the artist.

A Theory of Virtual Worlds

It’s all very well for me to make these pompous assertions that serve to glorify my own position. Unfortunately for me, it takes

more than slapping a pretentious label on something to make it Art ¹. Art may be expression, but it’s worthless unless it can be recognized as such. People don’t have to know what a piece of art “means,” but they do need to know how its meaning is conveyed. This requires the development of a critical aesthetic ².

Motivation

A critical aesthetic is a system of ascribing meaning to individual examples of an art form. When formalized, it amounts to a theory for that art.

The “aesthetic” here isn’t in the general sense: It’s not a branch of philosophy concerned with matters such as “beauty” and “taste.” Rather, it’s to do with the rules and principles that underlie an art (in this case, virtual world creation). A virtual world may look beautiful and have a great visual aesthetic, yet suck as a world. The art director controls the look, but the designer controls the world. Designers who want a particular look hire art directors whose work exhibits that look. The look is part of the overall aesthetic. Introducing the notion of criticism allows for rationalization of the communicative aspects of this aesthetic.

A legitimate question to ask is whether virtual worlds need such a theory. The number of professional practitioners of virtual world design is low, and they don’t have trouble interpreting each other’s work. Wouldn’t it be better to wait until the field has developed more before attempting to nail it down? It probably would, yes. I have three reasons for going ahead and trying to do it anyway:

• The virtual world community has a sense of inferiority in comparison to more established art forms. My Sunday newspaper is happy to spend two full pages discussing the merits of avant-garde glassware lamp stands, but what non-geek takes virtual worlds seriously? A critical aesthetic would demonstrate that there is more to virtual worlds than killing virtual monsters and learning written French.

• I want to get straight in my own mind how I judge a virtual world.

• If I don’t write all this down, someone else is only going to do it anyway.

The first of these mirrors the main reason that film theory was developed in the 1970s, but the other two are purely selfish. Fortunately, the first reason is good enough that I can indulge the other two.

The pro-art position is actually worse than I’ve made out in that there is some debate within the virtual world development community over whether treating virtual world design as art is counter-productive. In 2001, as major virtual world designers (particularly Raph Koster) made increasing pronouncements that took for granted the artistic nature of what they did, players began to express concern. Jessica Mulligan, the most long-standing and forthright proponent of players’ rights, voiced these opinions in her well-read Skotos column, Biting the Hand ¹. Her remarks caused a firestorm.

Jess’s argument was that players were becoming incidental to virtual world design. They signed up to play a game ², but they

were being misled; the grandiose ideas of designers were making players unwilling participants in experimental performance art. By treating players as mere objects to be controlled through the brilliance of their creativity, designers were showing staggering arrogance and contempt. This elitist attitude could ultimately be sourced in designers’ belief that they were creating art. It would be better if they were disabused of this belief.

Jess did accept that art was involved in the design of virtual worlds, because it’s fundamentally a creative exercise. What she objected to was the view that players were a part of the work. Players want to be entertained; if, while playing, some art form were to entertain them, fine, no problem. When they’re considered a component of the art form, or to be paying in order to experience the art form, that’s not so good. Designers shouldn’t try to impose their vision on players at the expense of what players actually want.

Skotos published two responses to this article.

The first, by Travis Casey ³, defended the pro-art point of view by considering whom virtual world designers ought to try to entertain. He concluded that of all the possibilities, the only one that guaranteed anyone at all would find the world entertaining was if designers designed to entertain themselves. Travis sees this as essentially an artistic stand: If you don’t like what’s being produced, you’re not one of the people for whom it was being produced. I’m ambivalent about this; most design teams do design for themselves, but a top-notch designer doesn’t get any

enduring pleasure from playing a virtual world, just from creating it.

The second response was by Raph Koster, in Jess’s own column at her invitation ⁴. Raph agreed that it was the first duty of a virtual world to be fun ⁵, but argued that art subsumes entertainment. Art can do many things, of which “entertain” is but one. Just because you do art, doesn’t mean you can’t do entertainment. Raph further argued that art brings an emphasis on craft, perfectionism, and ethics—things that the virtual world design community desperately needs. At a time when virtual worlds are struggling for legitimacy, attacking articulations of artistic purpose is not helpful.

Raph didn’t directly address Jess’s point that the objectifying of players leads to bad art, but from the passion of his argument it’s fairly clear that he doesn’t feel he himself is guilty of it. I personally don’t believe it is necessarily always a bad thing: Different problems can need different paradigms, and sometimes you do need sociology rather than psychology. It becomes inexcusable when it’s used inappropriately. Players are players first, components of an elaborate, orchestrated simulation only occasionally; however, “occasionally” is not “never.”

Designers that are the caliber of Raph Koster shouldn’t have to defend what they do. Players should be thinking, “this is a Raph

Koster game—I really want to play it!”; they shouldn’t be looking to prick what appears to be (but isn’t) a bubble of pomposity. Their concerns arise because although they have been immersed in virtual worlds, they have not been involved in the design process; the more they were to know about virtual world design, the more they would be able to appreciate the special qualities that individual designers bring to their creations. A critical aesthetic would help qualify what they should look for, if not dictate what they think when they see it.

There is a danger in having a critical aesthetic for an art in that it can take the edge off it, making it self-conscious. As a corollary, the more an art form is deconstructed, the less it means as a whole. As I noted in Chapter 2, “How to Make Virtual Worlds,” designers can’t play virtual worlds for fun (at least in the same sense that players do) because they can see too much of the machinery. They may be impressed by the way the virtual world is put together, by the nice touches and subtle nuances they perceive, but they aren’t going to get excited by mounting an expedition to rescue a villager from a bunch of hobgobbledygooks. They don’t get caught up in their world’s fiction. This is not a situation that it would be wise to imbue in players; it’s good if they can appreciate aspects of a design when they reflect on them, but bad if they’re into the aesthetic so deeply that they can’t appreciate the whole point of playing—that is, to have fun.

So if self-consciousness, leading to pretentiousness and humorlessness, is the disadvantage of having a critical aesthetic, what are the disadvantages of not having one?

Well, designers will make the same mistakes that other designers have made before; they’ll do things without knowing why, advance in directions that are doomed to disappoint—all the failings that I have been ranting on about throughout this

book ⁶. Designers like to think of themselves as creative people, who instinctively know what’s right and don’t need any “rules.” Without rules, though, how can you be a rule-breaker?

Virtual worlds need a critical aesthetic. Indeed, they may need more than one: I’m considering them as an art form in their entirety, but, as I pointed out, there is plenty of scope for creativity in their component parts. A player who designs their own area to fit into the greater design may work to some more specific aesthetic peculiar to that task. What is right for designers doesn’t have to be right for everyone else. It does, however, have to be right for designers.

This book is about the design of virtual worlds, and therefore the critical aesthetic I shall attempt to develop is for virtual worlds as a whole.

Some Questions

In developing a critical aesthetic for virtual worlds, we need to answer some difficult questions. I won’t pretend I answer any of them, but here they are anyway:

• How is the “value” of the virtual world experience determined?

• What do you need to understand when you have fun, and how do people with different understandings interact?

• What rules apply to all virtual worlds, and what are their limitations?

• What symbolism exists within the virtual world itself and within the way it is presented?

Earlier in this book, I advanced the theory that the value of the virtual world experience is that individuals come to understand more about themselves through the virtual world. This is only one interpretation, though: Players will rarely cite identity issues as the reason they play a virtual world. Then again, when players are asked what they do find fun, they come up with the same answers that gave rise to my player types model in the first place. When developers and publishers are asked to determine the value of the virtual world experience, they point to the length of time people keep active accounts; although this may be a metric, it’s not a value. I don’t want to know what people are prepared to lose in terms of time or money; I want to know what they gain.

The player development model I presented in Chapter 3, “Players,” describes what players need to understand when they have fun. It also showed the way that players at different stages of development interact with one another ¹. The result is as much of a formal Theory of Virtual Worlds that we have at the moment—that is, about half of a framework.

The third question has a facetious answer: The rules that apply to virtual worlds are those imposed by reality. Reality always wins. Although this is true, when it comes to playing virtual worlds, a number of “rules” are nevertheless in place. Designers don’t have to create a virtual world with a physics that looks kind of like real-life physics, but they do. They do it because these are part of the paradigm. I discussed the way virtual worlds hang together and the rationale behind it in Chapter 4, “World Design” and Chapter 5, “Life in the Virtual World;” this

isn’t to say that new paradigms won’t arise, but for the moment we’re still exploring what we have.

So that’s three questions out of the way.

I shall attempt to address the final question in the remainder of this chapter. Because it involves practice that has evolved over time in the design of virtual worlds, it doesn’t link directly into the rest of the theory, although it does touch on it. Nevertheless, its subject matter is as much a part of the theory as words are of language.

That doesn’t mean finding an answer is going to be easy, though.

Template Theories

It’s easier to create something new by beginning with something old than it is to start from nothing. In developing a critical aesthetic for virtual worlds, it makes sense to look at existing theories for related art forms and see what light they can shed. It’s unlikely that they’ll fit very closely, but nevertheless they could provide a framework on which to build. Perhaps the symbolism used in virtual worlds is gifted to us already through that of its nearest relatives?

I assert that the two closest art forms to virtual worlds are computer games and film ¹. Computer games don’t yet have a theoretical underpinning. Everything is still too transient because technology is always ahead. The reason your mobile phone has more computational power than the 1970s mainframe on which MUD1 was written is entirely due to

computer games. Business users didn’t push for faster CPUs, better sound, better graphics, higher-capacity portable media; computer gamers did. I bought my first CD-ROM drive after installing a game that came on nine floppies; because enough people like me did the same thing, the price of CD-ROM drives fell and new PCs started appearing with them fitted as standard. I didn’t buy a 19-inch monitor so I could keep more spreadsheet windows open at once; I bought it because it allowed me to see more of the Civilization II map. Early adopters—who will pay a premium for the latest technology if it means they can play the latest games—play games. Unfortunately, this implies the level of innovation is currently too high for a critical aesthetic to be viable.

The alternative view is that innovation is actually low because publishers too often play it safe, and a critical aesthetic doesn’t exist because no self-respecting academic would sacrifice their career to develop one.

Computer games do have critics, in the form of reviewers who describe the latest games in professional magazines. In comparing the various merits of games, clearly some aesthetic is in action (even if it’s moderated by the fact that many magazines are heavily reliant on income from advertising taken out by the publishers of the very games reviewed). Reviewers will in general comment on a game’s genre, its graphics and sound quality, its gameplay, any special features, any technical issues, and its relationship to similar games; mainly, though, they’re interested in whether it is fun to play. If it doesn’t engage them, they will criticize it; if it does, they’ll give it a high rating. Some magazines attempt to break down ratings into their contributing parts (graphics, sound, gameplay, and so on), but that’s as far as it goes.

Given that the form of reviews has now stabilized (you could take a review from five years ago, bring its references up to

date, and it would read like a review from today), there may well be the makings of a Theory of Computer Games here. Unfortunately, we don’t have one yet. Thus, although I can draw parallels between virtual worlds and computer games, clearly I can’t use any Theory of Computer Games as a foundation for looking at virtual worlds because there isn’t one.

For film, on the other hand, there does exist a mature critical aesthetic ². Because of this, movies can entertain and have meaning beyond entertainment. Although there’s nothing to stop computer games from having meaning beyond entertainment, their lack of a critical aesthetic makes this a rare occurrence; this is why when something entertaining does arrive that gives players cause to introspect, it’s regarded as something special ³.

I shall therefore base my analysis of virtual world aesthetics primarily on that of film theory. Those readers about to panic in fear that I’m justifying subjecting them to yet another dose of reference-heavy academic prose will doubtless be pleased to learn that no knowledge of film studies is assumed. You may need to know where I’m coming from, but you don’t need to know what I’m coming from….

Signs and Symbols

So, let’s start with symbols.

When movies were first made, directors had to develop a language and their audience had to learn it: Real life doesn’t have jump cuts. When something happens in the way information is presented on a movie screen, which runs counter

to the way that human senses accept information in the real world, this signals an interrupt that the mind needs to interpret consciously. By codifying the interrupts so they are always used under the same circumstances, the brain can learn what they “mean.” This done, subsequent occurrences of the interrupt don’t register unless they subvert the code in some way.

I recall as a child seeing a film on TV where the action started going on in several small mini-screens at once. I figured this meant the story had branched and I had a choice about which mini-screen to watch. Not knowing which story was going to turn out best, I asked my father for his advice. He explained that it was all part of the same story, and the activities shown were meant to be going on simultaneously; therefore I should try to pay attention to all of them at once. Nowadays when I see a split-screen effect, it doesn’t even record in my consciousness, I just “know” it means that several things are happening at once. It’s a symbol for which I have a reliable meaning. However, if early directors had gone a different way, a split-screen could have signified something entirely different.

The field of semiotics is concerned with the associating of meaning to signs. When the signs are structured according to a grammar, the result is a language; when they are merely systematized, the result is a vocabulary. For movies—and, as we shall see, virtual worlds—they aren’t organized even to that degree. Nevertheless, the codes do exist, and they do have meanings that have been implicitly agreed on by those who create and experience them.

Determining the meaning of the signs (that arise because of the difference between virtual world technology and the way reality works) is therefore important. You didn’t think virtual worlds had signs? When you watch a TV drama, you don’t think you’re actually a character participating in it, yet when you play a virtual world you do. Why? Is it merely because you control a

character? No: It’s because you accept that the character you control is a token that represents you. Accept it enough, and it becomes you (and you become it). Immersion is accepting the signifier as the signified. Those pixels on the screen are just pixels; you associate meaning with them.

For a critical aesthetic to be useful, it has to aim for universality. Everyone should understand the signs and their denotations in the same way. If I visit a textual world for the first time, I expect new conversational messages to appear below those I have already read ¹; I could play some other world that puts them above, but it would feel (to me) seriously weird. For textual worlds, there are reasons (ultimately to do with the way people read books) which explain why “above” connotes “before” and “below” connotes “after.” For graphical worlds, though, conversational messages don’t have to appear in a single window at all—they can (and do) appear in multiple embedded windows—for example, as speech bubbles ². These are still signs, though: Even though I can see words above some character’s head, I don’t assume I can pick them up like I could fruit hanging from a tree.

The coming of graphics to virtual worlds is like the coming of sound to movies. The same old rules apply, but the emphasis is different; there are also some new rules. These are rules, however, that are learned very early in a player’s career, if indeed they didn’t already know them from other art forms. It is possible (albeit tedious) to list them all, but doing so would only be of academic interest—a chart showing every color and its emotional impact doesn’t make everyone a landscape artist. Where signs are important to designers is in their use, and I shall therefore refer to them in this context rather than

enumerating the major ones here and continually referring back to the resulting table.

Symbols in virtual worlds have two roles. One is to make statements valid in the real world, and the other is to make statements valid in the virtual world. A virtual world that imposes a character class regime is “about” order and conformity; one that doesn’t is “about” choice and independence. Both of these are political statements, irrespective of designers’ bleatings to the contrary; they’re statements that the virtual world makes in the real world through its design. A room complex that has increasingly lower light levels, on the other hand, is a statement within the context of the virtual world itself: It says that these rooms are successively more dangerous, because darkness is a metaphor for danger.

I’ll address the external symbolism first, then move on to the internal symbolism.

Dimensions

External symbolism in virtual worlds can be explicit. You can create a virtual world where everyone is a dolphin trying to save the ocean from the evil oil companies that pollute the water ¹. This is not the kind of symbolism that I mean here, however. Rather, I’m concerned with the implicit kind, which are manifestations of the different views that designers hold regarding what is important about virtual worlds.

Debate—both verbally and through the action of design—takes place along several dimensions at once. Formally, these are

known as dialectics—opposing viewpoints, the eventual resolution of which leads (hopefully) to the development of new viewpoints and, consequently, new dialectics. Movements may spring up that oppose the consensus or propose new ways of looking at things; sometimes, these extend across several art forms (as did impressionism, for example).

So what are the dialectics for virtual worlds? Let’s look at our antecedents. In film theory, the main historical dialectics ² are/were

• Life versus drama. Should film be used to record life or to create fiction?

• Realism versus expressionism. Can more be said by showing the real or the artificial?

• Genre versus auteur. How is the demand for predefined, stylized story forms reconciled with the artistic feelings of film makers?

• Reality versus fantasy. What is the role and power of authenticity?

• Entertainment versus communication. Is it the purpose of film to entertain the audience or to change it?

• Innovation versus derivation. Should audiences be given what we think they want or what they think they want?

Computer games don’t have a formal theory, but two obvious themes that probably qualify as dialectics are

• Hard core versus mass market. Are games for games-players or for everybody?

• Graphics versus gameplay. How much substance should be sacrificed to form?

Scanning through these lists, some dialectics seem more appropriate to virtual worlds than others. Taking them in turn:

• Life versus drama. This is either a non-issue or an all-embracing meta-issue that highlights what makes virtual worlds different from all other art forms. From the point of view of the player, virtual worlds are clearly not real—they’re virtual!—therefore it’s a non-argument. Designers, while in the main also subscribe to this view, bear a responsibility for the consequences of their designs that players don’t. This means they must accept that virtual worlds and their players are part of reality, and that the fiction is part of the fact: What happens in the virtual can affect the real. It’s ridiculous to suggest that virtual worlds should record reality, yet in some sense reality can record the consequences of virtual worlds. That said, although this may be an important point, it’s not a dialectic. Designers are able to apply both paradigms as the context dictates.

• Realism versus expressionism. This is perhaps a dialectic-to-be. Currently, designers regard realism as a tool for immersion, and any attempt to express emotion through artificial devices would break this immersion. It may be that as virtual worlds develop, the bond between realism and immersion can be made more supple, in which case an expressionistic approach could be attempted. We shall have to wait and see.

• Genre versus auteur. This is an emerging dialectic. Most designers are happy to work within a predefined genre, or even a particular licensed franchise. What makes them less happy is when bumbling, opinionated, know-nothing manager types demand changes without appreciating the effects it would have on gameplay, let alone the implications

for the work as a whole ³. As designers gain reputations for their work, their power will increase. At that point, this dialectic will become an issue. When they’re strong enough to form their own development companies, it will cease to be one. You will have noted that this chapter comes down firmly on the side of auteur; whatever virtual world development companies may wish, ultimately the designers are going to win this argument.

• Reality versus fantasy. The main question here is that of authenticity. It concerns the degree to which the situations and issues depicted in the art form reflect those of reality. It doesn’t mean the same thing as life versus drama; it doesn’t present a record of reality, but it does say things about reality. For example, a virtual world in which players take on the role of members of a contemporary oppressed people struggling under a dictatorship might have powerful resonance with whatever real-life situation it is based on, giving players a deeper insight into the plight of the individuals who have to suffer that fate from day to day. Although there is a place for such virtual worlds, they are clearly unlikely to have any great artistic effect on the majority; they’re just too bleak to keep players in them for extended periods. Thus, any dialectic that does arise from looking at virtual worlds as social or political commentary is probably going to be of only minor importance.

• Entertainment versus communication. This is an ongoing dialectic in virtual worlds ⁴, as the exchanges between Jessica Mulligan and Raph Koster demonstrate. The crux of the matter is that what the players want syntactically (a virtual world that looks good, plays well, and is fun) is not what they want semantically (a virtual world that helps them define who they are). In fact, it’s probably a lot worse than this in that many players will reject outright the suggestion that they could be playing for any reason other than to have fun ⁵. Players and designers alike agree that it is axiomatic that virtual worlds should be entertaining. However, although designers might understand that there is no communication without entertainment, many players and publishers don’t accept that there is no entertainment without communication.

• Innovation versus derivation. The most spectacularly successful virtual worlds have been those significantly different from their predecessors. The same applies to the most spectacularly unsuccessful ones. Those who lack the time, money, or creativity to innovate prefer derivation, but players who prefer the comfort of the old to the uncertainty of the new also drive it. Codebases and middleware solutions can help deliver a virtual world that wouldn’t have existed otherwise, but if it means designers are forced to work within a moribund paradigm, then ultimately it’s a bad thing. This is one debate that is never, ever, going to be resolved.

• Hard core versus mass market. In the early days of online services, 10% of users provided 90% of revenues ⁶. Computer

games manufacturers noticed the same thing: A small number of dedicated, hard-core players bought far more games than did casual gamers. When games-only online services went for the hard core, they almost always failed; when computer games publishers went for the mass market, they almost always failed. Where does this leave virtual worlds? Should they target a well-served existing hard core of players, or spread their net further to tap the possibly ambivalent mass market? As with entertainment versus communication, this is an ongoing dialectic with an end that is not in doubt: Virtual worlds must become more mass-market, because luring players away from other virtual worlds is simply too hard ⁷. However, in so doing they will develop their own hard core of players, which cannot then be ignored.

• Graphics versus gameplay. How much of the available investment in a virtual world should be spent on making it look good as opposed to making it play well? In the computer games industry, graphics rule: Unless a product looks bang up to date, reviewers won’t review it and players won’t buy it. The same applies to virtual worlds that compete in the same marketplace, but with a sting: Regular computer games are fire-and-forget, in that once you (as a developer) have sold them you don’t care how great the long-term gameplay is—you already have the customer’s money. Virtual worlds, however, make their profits from subscriptions, which depend on good long-term gameplay for their success. So, do you go for graphics or gameplay? Or

do you spend double and go for both? The text/ graphics split of virtual worlds makes this apposite, but it’s not really a dialectic as such. Players want both looks and gameplay; the only question is whether the look is on the computer screen or in the player’s mind. Textual worlds may have the stronger intellectual claim on a construction versus reconstruction basis, but graphical ones have the players. So for this dialectic, graphical worlds win; end of argument.

Besides these dimensions of debate, virtual worlds have some of their own. The ones that attract the most tension are

• Direction versus non-direction. Should the designers and/or live team guide player activity explicitly?

• Responsibility versus liability. What do players agree to when they sign up to play a virtual world?

• Story versus history. To what extent are players part of the work or part of the production?

• Individual versus community. Is this a world for individuals or for groups of individuals?

Again, taking these one at a time:

• Direction versus non-direction. There is always some directedness in virtual worlds—even the most open-ended of them—because designers cannot create them neutrally even if they want to. Reality is neutral; anything else is mere interpretation. The degree of direction is in question, however. Players often find their choice of character type restricted, or their goals, or even their narrative. How much should designers hold players’ hands and how much should players be left to roam free ⁸?

• Responsibility versus liability. This is this issue of players’ perceived rights to do stuff, opposed by their rights not to have stuff done to them. It’s the dialectic that underlies PvP and PD. What risks to their characters and to themselves do players accept when they join a virtual world, and what happens when those risks bite? Are such risks necessary? Or are the consequences of not having them ultimately worse?

• Story versus history. Although this is sometimes linked with direction versus non-direction, the two are different. The question is whether virtual worlds are works of art that are handed over to players to do with as they will, or whether the players are themselves part of the work. Does the designer ever let go? Or is the virtual world designed so that whatever players do conforms to some greater vision?

• Individual versus community. What’s good for the individual is not necessarily good for the community, and vice versa. For example, selling characters on eBay may be good for the two people involved, but it can hurt the virtual world as a whole. Similarly, players who band together can rip through content quicker than can the same number of individuals playing independently. At the moment, this is a fairly dormant argument, but its issues have not yet been resolved and it could reawaken any time (especially if real-life court cases make enough noise).

So, having looked at all of these various dimensions along which opinion is (or may become) divided, which are the most important? Any answer can only be subjective, but my own opinion is that these are currently the top five:

• Genre versus auteur

• Entertainment versus communication

• Direction versus non-direction

• Responsibility versus liability

• Hard core versus mass market

This book advances an opinion on every one of these; you might want to bear that in mind when reading the rest of this chapter, because it is in the context of these dialectics that the discussion takes place.

I should also point out that even if people do agree on a position, their interpretation of it can differ radically. Asheron’s Call 2, for example, aims for the mainstream (good), but does so by imposing a cosseted blandness on everything. People don’t like it when their arrows run out during combat? Here, have an infinite supply! Is running to the shop to sell your loot too onerous? You can convert it to cash in your backpack! Turbine may believe that dumbing down is the way to make its world more appealing to a mass market, but it’s not apparent why it should be. Why do people play virtual worlds? No, really, why? What’s the fundamental reason? Clue: It’s not “to have fun,” and even if it were, removing any challenge by wrapping characters in virtual cotton wool wouldn’t deliver it.

Virtual world designers can have contrasting views on what virtual worlds are about, and contrasting views on how best to address those issues. They express their opinions in designs; the differences in philosophy lead to differences in design. By reading the differences in design, the differences in philosophy can be divined. If, when you look at a virtual world, you can associate a feature to a particular dialectic, you have the crucial insight you need to have a critical aesthetic. If not, you need to think about it until you do.

I could at this point produce a list of things to look out for (symbols) and link them to particular viewpoints (dialectics), thereby creating a system for interpreting what virtual world designers are saying with their worlds. Tempting though this is, I shall nevertheless refrain. This is a book for the designers of virtual worlds, not for their players. If designers were to create

virtual worlds deliberately to convey a particular message, it would make sense to explain the symbols through which this communication takes place. However, designers don’t do this. The message arises from their internal artistic conflicts along the various dialectic dimensions, and is merely revealed through their designs. Designers don’t think what to say and then figure a way to say it; they say it, and leave it to others to figure out what it means.

This isn’t to say that such an analysis isn’t worth undertaking; it would be a powerful aid to people looking at virtual worlds seriously for the first time and struggling to understand the competing philosophies. It’s just that this book is not the place to embark on such an exercise.

Whence the Symbols Come

An analysis of internal symbolism is justifiable here. Virtual world designers have many options available to them about what they put into a virtual world, what they leave out, how they put it in, and so on. In selecting between all the possibilities available to them, designers are employing their artistic faculties; furthermore, they are doing so deliberately. They want (for design/artistic reasons) to achieve an effect, therefore they arrange the virtual world to create it.

So what weapons do designers have in their armory? And how do they employ these to tell players things?

Well, first let’s look at what they don’t have in their armory. They don’t have the ability to cut, fade, or do anything else that shatters the basic “you are here” conceit. They have no pausing, saving, replaying, scene breaks, or acts. These limitations make them different from both film and computer games in fundamental ways.

Players get to pan, track, and zoom; players get to decide where they point the camera; players decide whether they see themselves in first, second, or third person. Designers give them this control, and don’t get it back. Although players can in theory record and edit their own content for public consumption, this facility is not available to designers; the nearest they get to it is the patch cycle, which is something of a blunt instrument (but nevertheless usable, as we shall see shortly).

So although film directors are concerned with what to shoot and how to shoot it ¹, virtual world designers are not because the players make those decisions. Instead, designers are concerned with what to cause to exist and how to cause it to exist ². Composition is of static objects and the starting locations of non-static objects (or restarting locations, for static spawns) ³.

It is important to distinguish between the art that the designer creates within the virtual world and the art created by others in the same context. If a designer lays out boulders in a certain way to imbue a location with a particular feel, that’s not the same as if a player takes those boulders and builds a statue out of them. They’re both works of art, but they’re not works of the same art; the former enables the latter. It’s not like sampling or collage, which reuses art in different ways; it’s art-within-art. Chapter 6, “It’s Not a Game, It’s a …,” mentioned virtual theater companies whose players ⁴ perform on the stage that virtual

worlds provide. Again, this is art in its own right, but again it differs from the art of the world’s designer. Why? Because the symbolism is different. The same objects mean different things to the different artistic traditions. There’s also the issue of ownership.

Developers can and do claim legal ownership of the entire database that defines their virtual world and all images generated from it. To reproduce so much as a screenshot, you need their permission. This has implications on art-within-art, in that an artist can’t claim ownership of their work even if it’s of higher quality than the art it is within. If Leonardo Da Vinci had painted The Last Supper on the sidewalk, he couldn’t have dug it up and taken it home. Why? Because it wasn’t his sidewalk. Similarly, any art created in virtual worlds is fundamentally transient, with the sole exception of that intrinsic to the virtual world itself. Sea level stays where it is until the designer says otherwise.

As a bit of an aside, although ownership of the bytes is not (or should not be) in dispute, ownership of the photons they generate is perhaps less defensible. Virtual worlds are places. If I visited New York and took a photograph of a street scene, I would not be violating anyone’s copyright. Sure, if I were doing something disruptive such as a movie shoot, then I’d need permission from the authorities first. For a snapshot, though, forget it! Furthermore, any artistic statement made by this would be all mine. The cult 1960s TV show The Prisoner was made in the Welsh village of Portmeirion and owed much of its other-worldliness to this location’s singular appearance. Its architect, Clough Williams-Ellis, did not “own” The Prisoner artistically, though; he made his statement through his architecture, and left its interpretation to individuals. Designers of virtual worlds need to let go; if they don’t they’re not creating virtual worlds, they’re creating something else.

Virtual world designers provide the tools and the toys. They covenant with the players that, within the virtual world, these:

• Have value

• Have meaning

• Make sense

When the sense they make is two-fold (text and subtext), that’s symbolism.

A Chemistry for Virtual Worlds

In screenplays, every action and every piece of dialogue must have a purpose. Movies are so expensive to make that anything that doesn’t advance the plot or round out a character must be ruthlessly cut. This even applies to comedies: You may laugh at the joke, but if the joke weren’t there, then at a purely structural level there would be a minor plot hole.

Virtual worlds don’t have quite the same financial or narrative constraints. It’s not the case that everything must have a purpose, but everything ¹ ought to have a potential purpose ². The players may determine a different purpose entirely to the one intended, deliberately or otherwise, but so long as they find some purpose they’re happy. It’s very frustrating to look for an object’s use when it doesn’t actually have one, and even worse if your complaints bring only hoots of laughter from the live team.

In screenplays, the dialogue, action, characters, and locations are the “atoms” that are built up into the “molecules” of scenes. Each atom has a purpose; using a different atom will change the chemistry of the resulting molecule, making it react differently with the other molecules that make up the screenplay as a whole. Sometimes an atom can work at multiple levels, as in the example of a one-liner in a comedy: It might make you smile, it might move the plot forward a notch, it may say something about the character who utters it (or the character who is its butt), it could influence the pacing, it might even make a point out of context for the screenplay itself altogether. And this applies to every line out of 110 pages of lines? Therein lies the art of the screenwriter.

Virtual world design documents have similar atoms: objects, commands, characters, and locations. What molecules are these atoms built into? Quests?

At a tangible level, yes. Players want things to do, and by arranging design atoms such that in combination they enable the solving of quests (whether generated by the world itself of by its players), the whole can behave differently from its parts. Quests are valid design molecules, but they’re not the ones I’m going to talk about here. This discussion concerns the symbols used in virtual worlds, and symbols need both a tangible and an intangible meaning ³. Quests do have intangible meaning, but it’s to the individual player at a hero’s journey level ⁴.

Designers use tangible objects to construct intangible meaning by combining them to influence breadth, depth, and atmosphere.

Breadth means player choice. The size of the world, the number of objects within it, the variety of commands: Breadth is form. Depth means understanding. The effects of commands, the complexity of the physics, the ability to use things in unintended ways: Depth is function. Where breadth reflects the range of opportunities that players have to change to the world, depth reflects the extent of change that each individual opportunity can effect.

When a newbie joins a virtual world, it’s the breadth that interests them. They want to know that there is depth but they don’t want to be exposed to it (otherwise it will seem too daunting ⁵). Depth is for more experienced players, for whom breadth is unsatisfying. The further along their development track a player is, the more they will favor depth over breadth.

In terms of symbolism, depth is easier to deal with than breadth. Breadth is by definition global to the virtual world, therefore any differences in breadth that might be picked up by players as symbolic have to be in global systems. If, for example, there were 50 different ways to combine fruit to make desserts but only five legal weapon/armor configurations, that would tell players that combat was not as important as cookery in this virtual world, or at least that cookery was more important than they might ordinarily think.

Depth effects can be more local. If the kobolds in one part of a virtual world have no names and are of indeterminate age and gender, yet the ones elsewhere have first names, surnames, families, and children, this says that the ones here are not as important as the ones elsewhere. If players notice this, they will act on the information (although whether they choose to emancipate or slay the unnamed kobolds is another matter, of course).

Unfortunately, too few players are attuned to virtual world design enough to realize that differences in breadth and depth may be deliberate. They’ll see them as careless inconsistencies or bugs. Actually, they may well be right a lot of the time and they are bugs; this merely compounds the problem of using breadth or depth to say anything beyond the basics of what players are able to do and how doing these things affects the virtual world. Breadth and depth, while something that designers do build from the design atoms available to them, don’t yet have the fidelity necessary to be used symbolically.

With atmosphere, at last, we have a way of using virtual world mechanisms and objects as symbols that players actually interpret as symbols.

Atmosphere is the means by which designers influence players’ moods. It can be active (for example, it tells the players they are in danger), passive (for example, it puts players at ease), or interactive (conducive to exploitation by players). Atmosphere is used to

• Signal the start or end of an action sequence.

• Signal a breathing space during an action sequence.

• Throw players off their guard, ready for a big surprise.

• Warn or encourage players.

• Reward or punish players.

• Hint at what is to come.

• Facilitate various social activities.

• Make a philosophical or ethical point. (This may or may not be in combination with any of the above.)

Some obvious ways to suggest atmosphere are

• Open versus closed form. Cramped areas restrict choice, wide areas open it up; dungeons are more oppressive than wilderness. When players enter a very narrow passage or descend underground stairs, they know their options are being limited; if they continue, it symbolizes their readiness to accept the danger. When players enter a vast plain, they know their options are maximized; if they continue, it symbolizes their readiness to accept responsibility.

• Lightness versus darkness. The less you know, the more easily you’re spooked. The same applies to other sensory information that the virtual world supplies: Sudden silence is also spooky. When players find that the light levels are falling, they can interpret this as a warning. If they keep on going, they are accepting the challenge of whatever awaits them. If they see light at the end of the tunnel, it tells them their ordeals are nearing their end.

• Vistas versus corners. Corners hide information. You know the information is there, but you don’t know what it is. The less you’re told, the more you want to learn—but the more you fear you won’t like what you discover. A passageway that has a number of short, sharp turns increases the sense of urgency; a long, straight passageway reduces it ⁶. On the other hand, a vista can

symbolize the distance of goals: You emerge from the trees to see a vast tract of open country, on the far horizon of which you can just make out the spires of the City of Bronze. The designer is showing you what you’ll have to go through to get there: By proceeding, you’re reaffirming your goal.

• Familiarity versus alienness. A sudden change of terrain or architecture can induce either relief or a sense of unease. The more sudden the change, the greater the impact. This may look like a regular Middle Eastern bazaar, but when it gives way to a snowfield there’s a jarring of expectations. This is not a normal bazaar. Do you investigate, or do you get out before anything dreadful happens? More gradual changes can serve to label areas: The more spiky the architecture, the more spiky the inhabitants ⁷. The same technique can be used on a smaller scale. Your blacksmith’s hammer breaks, you get a new one, it happens all the time; this time, though, the replacement hammer changes its appearance the first time you use it, and makes a noise different to that of regular hammers. It tokenizes the unknown: Do you explore it, or shy away?

• Ease versus difficulty. In the big city, you’re asked to deliver bread; in the frontier town, you’re asked to kill bandits. Can you stand the heat, or do you get out of the kitchen? By giving players harder quests in rougher areas, designers inform them that these are tougher areas. If some NPC asks you to wipe out a nest of vampires and you refuse, you’ve nevertheless been told that this is the kind of place where there are nests of

vampires. If you go wandering off on your own, you can’t say you weren’t warned. The quests act as notices that players should heed.

• Large versus small. Big monsters are strong monsters; tall NPCs are authoritative NPCs. Smaller monsters can be dominated; smaller NPCs are servile. Tiny monsters may be fast, poisonous, or otherwise awkward; tiny NPCs have some hidden power. An impression of size can send potent, primal messages to players. It’s why real-world animals such as cats will try to make themselves look bigger when facing off an opponent.

• Beauty versus ugliness. Breathtaking panoramas and glorious palaces can generate feelings of awe and wonder. Misshapen creatures and ruined buildings can make an otherwise normal situation seem unpleasant. Beauty represents success, ugliness failure; beauty goodness, ugliness evil. It operates at different levels (the superficially beautiful can be ugly deep down, and vice versa), but the symbolism remains the same. This is one area where the players call the shots: They’ll assume beauty to be indicative of goodness, safety, aspiration, and so on even if the designer just wants to make their world look better than competing virtual worlds.

There are many others, too. Intense colors mean warmth, vibrancy, and action, whereas washed-out colors mean coldness, placidity, and melancholy; changes over time can question the permanence of your knowledge and your willingness to adapt. Individual designers have their own styles of controlling the atmosphere of locations and situations; all are subtly different.

Symbols can be combined and contrasted to create new symbols: The alien can be beautiful; a corner can turn into the light; warmth and softness can make a cramped space seem secure. The priests of Gheen wear sumptuous gowns but disfigure their faces with hideous scars.

Designers place the symbols in context; players interpret them and divine the context. Thus, we have a basic chemistry for our critical aesthetic.

The Story of Story

Symbols of atmosphere react with “adjacent” symbols, but in a non-linear fashion. Linearity can be enforced (for example, by making characters “run a gauntlet”), but this is itself an expression of atmosphere. Non-linearity is good for making statements, but bad for advancing arguments. Is there some other way that symbolism can be introduced such that it can be structured in a linear (and therefore more contributory) fashion?

Narrative

The way that both film and computer games handle this is through narrative. Film is the more structured: The scenes in a screenplay link causally to tell a story (generally in a classic, three-act form). Syd Field’s famous analysis ¹ of script form puts act I at pages 1–30, act II at pages 30–90, and act III at pages 90–120. Around pages 10–15 will be an inciting incident that knocks the initially stable situation out of balance; around pages 25–27 will be a big event that gives the protagonist a goal; around page 60 will be a pinch point where the protagonist becomes fully committed; around pages 85–90 will be a crisis point where all seems lost; the resulting showdown lasts until about page 115, then the story wraps up with a realization section where the audience can see how events have grown the

protagonist as a person. The position of the later events can slip a little, but many professional screenplay readers really will look at pages 25–27 and reject a script if it doesn’t have a big event there.

Virtual worlds don’t—can’t—have this degree of narrative control, because players don’t follow scripts. However, some causality can be introduced, and it can be done in such a way as to stimulate emotional or other involvement in players. It is important to realize that virtual worlds do not have, nor ever can they have, narrative in the conventional sense. They’re places. Players can act out narratives of their own within them, but the virtual worlds can’t impose a three-act structure or anything like it. Nevertheless, they can do some things. Here’s their full narrative spectrum:

• Non-fiction. Changes are introduced without any explanation. One day a new area, spell, class, or weapon is available that wasn’t available yesterday. There’s no explanation, it just happens. This may be in response to player suggestions or complaints, or it may have been planned from the beginning but omitted so that the virtual world could meet its launch date—whatever. The change is made with no supporting context, therefore any meaning that players read into it can only be intrinsic to it. “Oh, there’s a new class of bards. They must want to give role-players more choice.”

• Backstory arcs. These are narrative tricks intended to explain a virtual world’s prehistory, and are the mainstay of regular computer games. The better worlds use them to add richness and depth, explaining why things are as they are; the worse ones retro-fit a backstory to make illogical gameplay features seem logical. If a virtual world’s initial configuration is constructed to echo events of a fictional past, this can be a great aid to immersion. When it’s to erect some façade to justify why

characters don’t die, or why magic-users can’t wield swords, or why artifacts exist that no one can make, that’s less satisfactory. The backstory should come first, not second. Unfortunately, so many virtual worlds now use the retro-fit approach that players are growing accustomed to it. This means that backstory is often merely a designer’s commentary on their creation, rather than an inherent part of it.

• Idea arcs. With these, events occur that give players things to do, but they are not related to any central theme. Individual mini-dramas may be played out by the eruption of a volcano, an invasion by teeming hordes of monsters, a failure of the grain harvest, or whatever, but the events that trigger them are not part of any central narrative. Designers can make statements through these—for example, about the transience of all things or about their own ambivalent feelings concerning their powers—but these would be inserted as part of the wider work, rather than as threads in a narrative.

• Story arcs. These consist of interlinked series of events. The volcano erupts because the dwarfs dug too deep in their search for gold. The disaster awakens the ancient, half-remembered demi-god who once ruled all, but who was defeated in a cataclysmic battle and sealed beneath the sacred mountain. Through the causality of the events, the designer is making a point about the consequences of unmitigated greed. Unfortunately, the players have no say whatsoever in it: The drama unfolds whether they like it or not; they must react to the change in circumstances that the unfolding events dictate, but they can’t affect even the timing of what follows: A monthly patch is a monthly patch.

• Responsive arcs. Here, the designer changes the narrative in response to players’ reactions, much as a table-top referee might. For large-scale virtual worlds with multiple shards, this is very expensive as individual

shards can have divergent narratives ². Nevertheless, it is the strongest narrative form available to virtual world designers: It allows them to enter into a dialog with the body of players, and if the trust is there, it allows for expression on both sides ³.

• 360 degree arcs. There is a narrative path, but it’s circular. Players are involved in a perpetual struggle, sometimes making gains and sometimes making losses, but never able to achieve final victory or defeat. They’re locked into a story that never changes. Whatever the designer may be trying to say with this technique, the players will eventually conclude that the struggle is meaningless. If that’s how newbies see it too, the virtual world could end up in trouble.

• Player arcs. The virtual world is richly featured enough that players themselves are empowered to create personal narratives through their own ongoing actions. Designers get to give them the tools and the space in which to do this, but they don’t affect the narrative itself directly. Thus, although they can make statements by what they give the players to work with, they can’t tie these into a story; that’s for the players to do.

From this we can see that it is possible for virtual world designers to construct a narrative, but there are a number of barriers. Players don’t like being treated like ants whose nest is being stirred up for the amusement of some kid with a long stick. If a volcano is set to erupt every once in a while pseudo-randomly, that’s one thing; if it’s set to erupt because the live team say so, that’s another thing altogether. The same event

begs different interpretations based on the perceived intent of its creator. It’s not enough for the designer to say that the event is what matters and it’s for players to construct their own meaning from it. Players (through their characters) are directly affected by the event, and their understanding of it is heavily moderated by the notion of deliberateness.

Say I walked into an art gallery containing a paint gun installation. I know the paint gun will shoot at random intervals, and I can construct some statement about the nature of risk from that. If I walk in front of it and get hit, well, that’s going to make me ponder on it some more. If, however, I walk in front of it and the artist presses a button that makes it shoot me, the conditions from which I construct my meaning are different. Yes, I get hit by the paint gun in both cases, and yes, the artist set up the paint gun the same way both times. However, being hit at random is not the same as being hit deliberately.

So it is with virtual worlds. Imposed storylines mean reduced freedom. Through narrative, designers can explore important issues; however, by forcing players to participate in those narratives the issues change.

Story elements can be added in reaction to what players do. For example, if a bunch of characters mine deep into a mountain they could encounter a colony of dwarfs or dark elves or crystalloids. It’s hard to predict in advance when (if ever) players would dig deep into a particular mountain, and harder to list all the other possible things they may do that could reasonably lead to new content; for these reasons, it’s therefore not usually worth hard-coding bespoke content into a virtual world. However, it may be worth building a pool of content that can be released when appropriate to advance players’ stories. These also can be used by the live team to spice up a waning incarnation of a virtual world, for example—when some überguild is enforcing a dreary

status quo.

The main difficulty with this form of interactive content provision is that many players resent the fact that there’s someone pulling the strings and will level accusations of favoritism or victimization. “Hey, I dug a hole in this mountain over here, how come you didn’t give me any dwarfs?” Players like to think that the world is fair; interference by the live team in response to the reactions of individual players is unfair. Basically, they trust the code to be impartial but they don’t trust the live team to be so (except in very refined worlds). The new content inevitably becomes symbolic of the management’s disregard for players, regardless of whether it has some other, greater interpretation.

I’ve discussed narrative thus far on the global scale. Where narrative most often occurs is on the local scale, primarily through quests. In these, players as individuals are targeted by the narrative, rather than players as an amorphous group. Thus, although the designer is talking to fewer people with each narrative, what is said can be more finely tuned to those people. The different degrees at which independent narrative episodes can be sustained are:

• Puzzles. These are fixed in their location and solution; a standard maze is the classic example. Puzzles provide a search-space framework for branching narratives. Their inflexible nature means they can cover predetermined narratives in greater depth, but at the expense of becoming uninteresting very rapidly. Once solved, they’re solved.

• Static quests. These have standard locations and goals, but allow some open-endedness in their solution. They’re generally mindless and repetitive because they’re targeted at newbies rather than at more experienced players. Because newbies undertake them, though, designers will use the opportunity to promote shared cultural contexts. Although

the narrative possibilities may therefore be reduced to making general statements about the nature of the virtual world, they nevertheless lay the groundwork for more sophisticated forms of expression that players may encounter later.

• Dynamic quests. These change every time in locations or goals or both. They serve gameplay purposes only, and rarely matter beyond their existence. Although the means by which they are generated may be symbolic, the quests themselves can’t be so as they have no direct human input in their construction.

• Chained quests. These are a series of interlinked quests, each one leading to a new, usually greater one. They may be plotted manually by a designer or dynamically by an AI, or in combination. There is greater scope for narrative here with the potential to make an impact on individuals; even AI-generated chained quests can conform to a predefined concept, such as whether it matters more to rescue a friend or save a village of strangers. Chained quests can be used as part of an overall story arc, or to introduce new spells, resources, or whatever that would otherwise appear without reason.

• Player quests. The virtual world is so broad and deep that players can find things to give each other to do. This is the emergent gameplay approach, which is good for the players (those with the desire to participate) but allows for no narrative content on the part of the designers other than in the form.

Narrative is seen as an important artistic feature that is often lacking in computer games; by extension, virtual worlds are also often criticized for their lack of story (except those who have it, which are criticized for the quality of the story). Implicit in this is the elitist notion that players aren’t all that good at storytelling, therefore anything that emerges from their actions is not going to be compelling; better to find the people who are

best at storytelling and have them write the stories for everyone.

I don’t dispute that some people are better at storytelling than others. The question is, what is storytelling’s place in virtual world design? Are people participating to be part of someone else’s story, or to be a part of their own? In the major part of this book, I have argued strongly in favor of the latter. Virtual world designers may use narrative as a way of joining related concepts into a coherent whole, but these can only ever be steps along the way of a player’s personal narrative, which is what they make of themselves. Virtual worlds that impose narrative—even narrative written by a famous author—are overlooking what virtual worlds are about.

Why Story Arcs Don’t Work

Most narrative art forms are passive, in that the audience doesn’t participate directly in their creation. An author may be creating a novel to speak to a particular group of people, but can only estimate how they will respond, and thus how the novel should be changed as a result of this imagined response. In virtual worlds, the audience can in theory participate to the point of collaboration. Are they part of the work? Are they part of the production? Are they neither, or can they be both ¹?

In most virtual worlds, the dialogue between designer and player is indirect. Players can influence production from the beta test onward, but as individuals only in very minor ways. Some virtual worlds do go as far as to give the player body control over the actual programming, but most don’t. The fact that LambdaMOO famously introduced this has created a false impression among researchers that the practice is widespread.

It is not. Commercial virtual worlds in particular would consider this degree of player involvement in production insane. Players may be part of production within the context of the virtual world, but not of the virtual world itself.

It is the question of whether players are part of the work that is more contentious. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t regard the objectification of players as by definition a bad thing; after all, I don’t expect road construction engineers to look on me as anything other than a driving statistic, so if a designer looks on me as a bandwidth statistic at some point, fair enough. The objection comes when this is done inappropriately; in particular, players do not like being thought of as components of someone else’s art installation. If a virtual world is advertised as being such, they can hardly complain, of course (any more than can an actor in a play); indeed, it may be that over time players gain a maturity and understanding that allows them to appreciate the skill of the storyteller more fully. They would then become more akin to an improvisational theater group rather than players of virtual worlds, though. Sure, there’s a place for this kind of art, but it’s not a place that appeals to the reasons players play.

Designers who want virtual worlds to have storylines usually cite from the following reasons:

• It keeps people playing, because they want to find out what happens next.

• The virtual world seems richer, more immersive, and more vibrant.

• New content can be introduced that would be fiction-breaking otherwise—for example, a new race of lizard people.

• Pre-planned, higher-level content can be released in a controlled manner.

• It provides cover for nerfs and bug-fixes.

• It lets players know they haven’t been forgotten.

• It demonstrates the design team’s creative credentials.

• It helps market the virtual world.

• There is increased opportunity for tie-in books and other merchandise, arising from having more intellectual properties.

• It’s de rigeur.

These look reasonable enough, but there are some serious flaws:

• Either the player is impotent or the arc is derailable.

• You can follow the story without playing. I know a former Asheron’s Call player who got wrapped up in the story but not the world; she now follows it from web sites.

• People don’t like coming in on a narrative after it has started.

• Players like to create stuff of their own more than they like to see what other people have created—whatever its artistic merits.

• Explorers don’t mind new content being added, but dislike having to check over changed old content. They much prefer to be told explicitly what changes have been made, rather than having to deduce them from some piece of story.

• Player actions are limited by future storyline considerations. You can’t build here because there’ll be a castle on this spot four months from now.

• The more story that designers add to a virtual world, the less world there is, because the world is constrained by the story ².

• What happens when the story arc ends? Everyone quits and plays some other game? Or does the arc never end?

• Players’ destinies are not under their control, nor can they ever be. A hero’s journey in such circumstances is nonsensical.

Even without these objections, there are practical difficulties concerned with writing a narrative for virtual worlds. Stories in most cultures of the world traditionally follow the classical three-act structure of beginning, middle, and end. As noted previously, if you try this for a virtual world it means there’s an end. This is fine if the story is one of many stories that make up a player’s experience, but it’s not good if the virtual world is itself the story. The three-act structure is replaced by a recursive structure instead:

• A single, beatable individual is identified as the enemy. It’s not the police state that’s trying to crush you, it’s one particular member of the secret police.

• You identify the enemy, collect the plot tokens, and defeat them. But they were just a pawn, controlled by the real enemy!

• Variant: They aren’t really dead! They come back bigger and stronger!

• Recurse.

This is the conspiracy theory approach: When in doubt, widen the conspiracy. Eventually, the whole world ends up as a conspiracy and then you have nowhere to go. It’s a narrative trap.

Oh well, you can cross that bridge when you come to it.

Designer-level narrative has a place in virtual worlds, as a method of delivering content, information, and/or meaning. It is very good for presenting and identifying symbols. It is hopeless for presenting and identifying choice. Sparks, yes; arcs, no.

The fact is, any virtual world that places designer-driven story above players’ personal stories is a prison. This is why story arcs don’t work.

The Koster-Vogel Cube

At the 2001 Game Developers Conference, Raph Koster and Rich Vogel introduced ¹ their well-received storytelling cube as a model for describing the various ways by which players can experience virtual world event sequences as narratives. The following year, they explored it in more detail ². Their model classifies the elements that make up narratives along three binary dimensions:

• Control. Is the story told by the designer, or does it arise from player interactions?

• Context. Does the story arise more from real-world events or from the virtual world itself?

• Impact. Are the story’s effects short-lived or lasting?

These dimensions give eight possible combinations:

• Designer/in context/static. All content exists at the beginning, and players uncover it. Example: Majestic.

• Designer/in context/dynamic. Designer-created content is delivered episodically, possibly making major changes. Example: Asheron’s Call.

• Designer/out of context/static. This recognizes real-world events as part of its fiction—for example, Christmas holidays. Example: Ultima Online.

• Designer/out of context/dynamic. Designers attempt to weave any new features they add into a consistent narrative. Example: Achaea.

• Players/in context/static. Players role-play in the designers’ world. Example: EverQuest.

• Players/in context/dynamic. Players role-play in the designers’ world, and through their actions can change that world in major ways. The designers adjust the context to take account of the events. Example: Castle Marrach.

• Players/out of context/static. Things the players do for their own reasons, irrespective of what the context says they should do. They tell each other stories that make myth of their adventures; they go on themed jungle crawls. This is the default player activity.

• Players/out of context/dynamic. Players act outside of any designer-driven plot, but through their own actions can cause important and permanent changes to the virtual world. Example: Lineage.

The idea behind the Koster-Vogel cube is that it helps virtual world designers conceptualize what kind of virtual world they want; it lays bare the narrative choices that are open to designers. The cube has certainly proven effective in this regard, but I have a few misgivings about it.

My main complaint is that the dimensions seem to change their meanings. Players can role-play in Asheron’s Call as much as they can in EverQuest, so why is EQ classified as having player-driven narrative when AC isn’t? The main difference between the two in storytelling terms is that AC gives (the designers’) stories more impact than does EQ’s static “vision,” so what’s the justification for having differences in two dimensions instead of just one? Similarly, Ultima Online’s players role-play more than

EQ’s and arguably have a stronger ability to determine their own destinies, so why is UO designer/out of context/ static and not player/out of context/static? Perhaps EQ should be in the designer/in context/static sub-cube instead (or perhaps it should be acknowledged that virtual worlds can be in more than one sub-cube at the same time).

The context axis is especially tricky: I’d have thought the way Achaea strives to weave real-world events (such as the appointment of a new administrator) into its fiction would make it a more in-context world than one like EQ that presents the events with no in-context explanation at all. But if the “out of context” flag means “giving in-context meaning to real-world events,” how does that agree with the default player activity sub-cube? There, players are not making any reference to real-world events, just to the in-context events that occur through their own determination of their story. Personally, I think the context axis is weaker than the other two; it’s a distraction, and the model makes better sense if reduced to two dimensions (impact and control).

To illustrate my point, where would MUD1 fit in this scheme? Well it had real-world events programmed in, so that means it’s out-of-context (even though most of the time those events were dormant). It was reset-based, so any story impact was static. Control of narrative events was in the hands of the players, operating in the space of events made possible by the design. This suggests that MUD1 should be placed in the default player activity cube. This may well be correct: MUD1 had no backstory. What difference would it have made if it had one, though? Bear in mind that if I hadn’t added the real-world holiday stuff to MUD1, it would appear in the same sub-cube as EQ (which does have a backstory of sorts—more than MUD1 does, anyway).

Back in Chapter 1, “Introduction to Virtual Worlds,” I discussed persistence versus change as a way to categorize virtual worlds.

The Koster-Vogel cube’s impact dimension is roughly the same as persistence, and its control dimension is roughly the same as change (or player impact ³). There is a difference between in-context building and out-of-context building, but it’s not orthogonal to the other two dimensions; in particular, the groups of players able to build in-context in a world may differ from those that can build out-of-context in the same world.

The Koster-Vogel cube looks at virtual worlds as a medium for storytelling, and as such succeeds. It is, however, neutral concerning the likely success or otherwise of a virtual world that follows any particular classification. Designers using the cube should bear this in mind; in particular, virtual worlds with overarching designed-in storylines (as opposed to opt-in, opt-out mini-narratives) face a long struggle.

The Place of Narrative

Virtual worlds are places, not stories. You can have a story about New York, or a story set in New York, and New York can have a history, but New York is not itself a story unless you stretch the definition of “story” so far that it loses all meaning ¹. The same applies to virtual worlds: Trying to impose a story on the inhabitants of a virtual world is as sensible as trying to impose a story on the inhabitants of New York. You can impose events, but not stories; people make their own stories.

The designers of virtual worlds write the history, either explicitly (as a piece of prose) or implicitly (in the design). This gives the initial context, at which point the designers cede narrative control to the players whether they want to or not. Through play, the players write their own stories, but only to the extent they do in real life; there’s nothing intrinsic to virtual worlds that makes player actions any more “storytelling” than real-life actions. You do things, things happen, you recount these happenings to other people: story.

Virtual world designers can’t add story, they only can add content. Content provides experiences that can be made by those who come through or observe them into story. If the content itself is story, players’ own stories become worthless incidentals.

Narrative is linear. Virtual worlds are not linear. You can’t control the order in which players do things without railroading them, removing significant freedoms. There is only one path into the past, and thence comes story; there are infinite paths into the future. Virtual world designers build a bagatelle board and release the ball, but have no way of knowing where it is going to land. If they did, where would the fun be?

Episodic release of content is guaranteed its place in narrative theory, but the real reason for its existence is purely practical: Developers want to stop players from getting bored. Dressing it up as story is merely a handy conceit. Any developers who believe otherwise are deceiving themselves (and their players).

Some content needs to be added for other reasons: Virtual worlds continually need fine-tuning; real-world occurrences can have an impact on the virtual world that requires an in-context explanation. In these cases, content can be slipped in such that it disrupts the world’s fiction less, but it does still disrupt it. It

adds another peg to the bagatelle board, and no amount of hand waving or appealing to artistic imperatives can disguise the fact.

The Critical Aesthetic in Use

Let’s return to the concept of a critical aesthetic. How is it used? How is it developed? Do different virtual world architectures give rise to different aesthetics? If so, is there any cross-fertilization between them or are they immiscible?

The Job of the Critic

Films have critics, computer games have reviewers, but what do virtual worlds have? Virtual worlds have rant sites.

That’s not entirely fair; the main listings sites for textual worlds do carry player-written reviews that are often thoughtful and insightful (and not necessarily written by people with a vested interest in making prospective players either play or fail to play the world in question). For graphical worlds, though, with their much bigger player bases, rant sites rule.

When it comes down to it, virtual worlds are places. In the real world, if you want to go on vacation somewhere you buy an up-to-date guidebook before you go. The guidebook tells you all you want to know, using language you can understand, in a reasonably unbiased manner. Virtual worlds do have guidebooks that you can buy, but as I mentioned earlier these are usually just extensions of the manual (and they’re not necessarily up-to-date). If you have a real-world guidebook for Egypt, you may on the strength of reading it want to go there even more; if you have a guidebook for a virtual world, it’s because you’ve already been there but couldn’t get to grips with

it. Unfortunately, if you scan through the articles on a rant site for either Egypt or for a virtual world, you’re only ever going to come away with misgivings.

Rant sites are almost non-stop interpretation and criticism. Sometimes the criticism is constructive ¹, often it is justified, but always it is biting. To paraphrase Mr. Burns in The Simpsons, rant sites “know what they hate.”

Much of the criticism that rant sites direct at virtual worlds is non-comparative. You have to decide which virtual world you want to try on the basis of whichever attracts the fewest complaints on subjects that matter to you. Occasionally, they do describe virtual worlds in terms of one another, but this is normally to petition for the inclusion or removal of a feature on the grounds that some other virtual world has or doesn’t have it. Normally, though, the comments are prescriptive and fairly self-centered: This is what the virtual world should be like so that people like me will enjoy it. Nevertheless, individual writers do have consistent opinions, and if you find one whose views agree with yours on something you know about, it makes eminent sense to consult them when it comes to something you don’t know about.

The problem that a critic/reviewer of virtual worlds has is that these take a lot of time to get to know. Food critics only have to eat in a restaurant once to be able to fill half a page of newsprint with colorful invective; film critics can watch five movies a day. Even computer game reviewers diligent enough to play something all the way through will rarely have to spend more

than a week at it ². Virtual world reviewers can only do a good job if they take months—and then, having invested so much of themselves in the world, they have the problem (common to ethnographers) of disconnecting from their subject matter enough to write about it objectively.

When reviewers manage to do this, they are capable of writing excellent critiques. It can be very difficult making these accessible to non-players, though. It’s like reading the blurb of book six in a Fantasy series that you haven’t read books one through five of: “After the fall of Khanex, Modorph’s future looks secure. But now the Jeek-riders of Xethen threaten the southern borders and Wachel roam the Dillith Marches. Can Luth and his Darok blade, Shaash, ever ….” So it is with virtual worlds: To explain what is truly wrong or right with one, it’s often only possible to do so with reference to things that people may only understand having experienced them.

There are exceptions, of course. Back in Chapter 1, I described the ways by which virtual worlds are readily categorized from a newbie-friendly historical perspective; such information is often sufficient to put off people trying one or cause them to look at it in more detail. This hardly amounts to criticism, though. Another technique, favored mainly by researchers rather than reviewers, is to play a virtual world for a few evenings to get a sense of its look and feel, then interview players to form a picture of what life is like after six months. This can be useful, and the critic’s ability to collate and summarize opinion comes to the fore. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy obtaining a representative sample of players: A higher proportion of the ones you bump into or who respond to interview requests seem

to have a chip on their shoulder than is statistically correct. Nevertheless, an experienced reviewer can account for this, knowing it will happen. This is one of many reasons why I am very excited by the (as I write this) impending re-launch of the print magazine Massive Online Gaming ³, the first issue of which (before it hit publisher problems) was hugely impressive.

The role of the rant-site critic in virtual worlds is large in terms of forming player opinion, but small in terms of relevance to prospective new players. If you’ve grown disenchanted with one world and want to try a different one, or if you’re a total newbie looking for somewhere to start out, a rant site won’t help ⁴. Intelligent reviewers can be invaluable guides, but ultimately you need a means to assess virtual worlds yourself. This must be both accessible and supportive of a Theory of Virtual Worlds to which you give allegiance. The theory gives the ideal; the experience gives the reality; the critical aesthetic connects the two.

Perhaps one day virtual worlds will have travel guides, written by independent correspondents whose job it is to report on them. Until then, however, players are essentially on their own.

Content Created by Players

Back in Chapter 1, I described the two mechanisms by which players can add content: Within context and without context. In my discussion thus far, I’ve assumed that any content added by regular players within context, as with house building in Ultima Online. What are the implications of allowing them to add it

without context, as with arbitrary room construction in LambdaMOO?

A first observation is that allowing players to build out of context passes control of the critical aesthetic to those who consume it. This implies accessibility, removing the pretentiousness and snobbishness that comes from artistic elitism (which I’ve undoubtedly been guilty of demonstrating in this chapter). One player’s opinion is just as good as any other player’s opinion.

A second observation is that this critical aesthetic is recursive. A player’s creation when considered as a work of art is legitimate purely because it was created, not because it was created in line with some theory. Thus, any theory that tried to explain players’ creations would contradict its own existence.

The existence of worlds where players can build has implications for virtual worlds where they can’t (and for which the existence of a Theory of Virtual Worlds is less problematical). It ensures that the theory can’t stray too distant from the player, because otherwise it would be exposed as distant. Players will create according to what they perceive as the critical norms, but if those norms become too esoteric, then they won’t. This gives designers of worlds where players can’t build a ground wire. Naïve art may be naïve, but it’s still art—and it’s art that informs designers’ own art. Virtual world designers may be better at creating their art than the average player, but it’s the average player who judges them. If the average player lacks the critical faculties to appreciate the work, it’s the designer who is asking too much, not the player who has learned too little.

On the final day of the 2002 Game Developers Conference, there was a panel discussion about the next generation of virtual worlds. On the panel were Raph Koster, Rich Lawrence, Jessica

Mulligan, Jake Song, and Gordon Walton. Raph’s opinion was that the next generation of virtual worlds would see much more player-generated content. A question from the floor asked how designers should deal with this, given that 99% of it would be crap ¹.

Gordon Walton summarized this as meaning that most people have the desire to be creative, but not the skill. Raph Koster turned it around, in a celebrated defense of the ability of players to create: Players don’t care that 99% of everything is crap because they see their own creations as being in the 1% that isn’t. Virtual worlds give the ability to create art to people who never had a platform for it before. People want to express themselves, and in virtual worlds they can. Film directors, writers, poets, and painters should get over themselves, because the rest of the world is coming.

This is a rousing sentiment. Raph’s suggested first step to achieving such a goal was to allow in-context creation in virtual worlds, which allows for authorship within authorship; whether in a large-scale virtual world this could ever be extended to designer-level authorship is less clear, however ².

Although I applaud the ideals involved here, I’m not convinced they’ll work in practice (at least not as described). Players may like to think their creations are in the 1% that is excellent, but when they are disabused of the notion they will rarely be happy. My elder daughter has a web site with cartoons on it that she

has created for her friends ³. She likes it, her friends like it, she’s happy. Someone else I know has a web site with cartoons on it that she hopes will attract the interest of animators ⁴. The cartoons are crap. Animators make polite noises, but no way are they ever going to give her any money. She is frustrated, she is unhappy, and every push she makes to convince anyone that her work is good is met with yet more evidence to the contrary.

So long as people don’t set their sights too high when they create things in virtual worlds, it’s fine. If they do—and this is perhaps the default—then it turns sour.

There is an interesting possibility that virtual worlds can be used as gateways to subworlds. This happens in some textual worlds already, where there is an overarching “context” world onto which players build their own public or private extensions; it’s not yet the case for 3D graphical worlds, but that will surely come ⁵. Consider, for example, allowing players major build powers within their own pocket zones in EverQuest 2: EQ2 would act as a gateway, providing plenty of content for newbies, but players could build their own games within the game. Some would be bad, some would be good, and some would be good enough that people might even consider paying their creators to enter them. In time, the host world need not have any gameplay elements at all; it would merely act as a portal to the worlds it supported. What would result would be a kind of World Wide Web for streamed content, with players creating places rather than pages, hyperspaces ⁶ rather than hypertext. Were such a system to evolve, the applicability of this book

would fall a level, because it assumes that virtual worlds are self-contained. If they could contain or can connect to other (arbitrary) virtual worlds, or if other worlds could connect uncontrollably to it, the artistic integrity of the world as a whole would be called into question (but not necessarily to its sub-worlds).

It’s also interesting to consider the impact on the hero’s journey metaphor of making creation the primary activity in a virtual world. People play virtual worlds to discover themselves. They can do this through a hero’s journey or through the self-expression that comes through art. Which of these does the inherent nature of virtual worlds best support? Can they exist side by side, or will one always dominate the other? Which is the more effective? Which would keep people playing for longer? Which can virtual worlds deliver in ways that other forums for artistic endeavor can’t?

My Take on All This

Ideally, designers should create their world in such a way that they never need to add new content. In practice, this can never be. Nevertheless, new content should only be added to rectify problems in the way that the world works—that is, bug-fixing, balancing, and functional enhancing. Designers should not look to add or change content—even for artistic reasons—if it is not necessary ¹. All other content should be emergent from player activities. This means you need a virtual world with enough depth and breadth that players can, through the effects of their own actions, create content for themselves, and for others. The real world does it, so why can’t we? Players should have no access to out-of-context content creation tools. Whether they

have access to nontrivial in-context tools is open. This kind of “hands off” world is what I was trying to create right at the beginning with MUD1. Hopefully, some day someone will get close to achieving it.

Narrative: You can only tell a story when it has ended. Designers can create the obstacles, but the players themselves must overcome them. Players may come across self-contained, narratively driven sequences of events, but story arcs are out of the question.

In the end, all that designers can do is load, take aim, and fire. What happens after they pull the trigger depends on how good a shot they are. They provide an environment, they seed a starting culture (or multiple cultures), and then they yield control to the players. Of course the virtual world needs managing thereafter, because the nature does need nurture. Artistic expression by the designer stops with the launch, though.

This is my world. I created it. It’s my gift to you. Take it. Live in it. Make of it what you will. It’s your world now.

The central theme of Arthurian myth is whether the king is for the kingdom or whether the kingdom is for the king ². This has a hugely important spiritual dimension, as Arthur is a metaphor for the human soul. Merlin teaches Arthur with a view to his becoming a king for the kingdom, but Mordred exploits the relationship between Guinevere and Lancelot to cause Arthur to use his kingdom for his own ends.

Are designers for their virtual worlds, or are virtual worlds for their designers?

The answer is both. The king is for the kingdom; the kingdom is for the king. They’re the same.

Locate, learn, apply, internalize: As characters reflect players, so virtual worlds reflect their designers; as players learn from their characters, so designers learn from their worlds. The more of yourself that you, as a designer, put into a virtual world, the more you become it and it becomes you. Your experiences will develop the world’s, and its will develop yours.

The virtual world is your (the designer’s) exploration of yourself. It’s your hero’s journey. The king is the kingdom. How could it be otherwise?