Theory and Practice

It should be clear by now that virtual worlds have a long and varied history—much longer and more varied than many of the people who play and design them realize. But so what?

It’s not entirely the case that only by understanding the past can people understand the future. Virtual worlds have been “invented” at least seven times (MUD1, Sceptre of Goth, Avatar, Island of Kesmai, Aradath, Monster, and Gemstone were all developed autonomously), and the designers of these games had no sense of any “past” in what they were doing. Originality is entirely possible without rehashing other people’s ideas.

However, to ignore completely what has gone before would be extremely foolish. Time and time again, designers have made the same mistakes their predecessors made, either because they were simply not aware of the earlier work or they were too arrogant to believe it could possibly be relevant to their greatly superior product.

Conversely, some designers look too hard at what has gone before. To use some admired virtual world as a prototype is fine if you fully understand that world, but very limiting if you don’t. A designer whose major experience of virtual worlds is EverQuest might, for example, think “what character classes should we have in our new game?” rather than “should we have character classes in our new game at all?” Some of the more basic assumptions go right back to MUD1, with few designers even realizing that they are assumptions, let alone that they can be questioned. That can’t be right!

Nobody wants to repeat the mistakes of the past, but people don’t always realize that what they’re repeating is a mistake. That’s because they’re learning the wrong lessons. The past delivers facts—the practice. History delivers the understanding of those facts—the theory. It provides the causal links.

This is especially true for the design of virtual worlds. Each must be conceived as a complete entity. Each one can’t really be modularized: Every component affects every other. Sometimes newspapers put together composite pictures made of the best features of famous faces—Bette Davis’ eyes, Julia Roberts’ mouth, Doris Day’s, nose and so on. The result is usually more like Frankenstein’s monster than “the world’s most beautiful woman.” So it is with virtual worlds: It doesn’t matter how perfect the parts, it’s by the whole that they are judged.

Thus, designers who know not only the choices available to them but also the wider effects of those choices are better able to create a virtual world that works than those designers who don’t.