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?