Player Base

The other way to look at the success or otherwise of a virtual world is by examining its player base. In theory, the better worlds will attract more players, and therefore those that have the largest player bases are the best. In theory….

Actually, there are many reasons why a virtual world may have a large user base (or a small one), with marketing and pricing not insignificant factors. From a designer’s point of view, these have to be taken into account so the essential reasons for a design’s success can be gauged.

The first thing to note, therefore, is that there are different measures of “size” here. If someone visits the same virtual world for three hours every night, should they carry the same weight as someone who plays for two hours every Saturday morning, or someone who only plays for two hours once every three months? Sure, there’s a different business case for each usage pattern (hard-core players are more important for per-hour charging, whereas casual players are more important for per-month charging). However, that doesn’t help when you’re trying to figure out why a particular virtual world is popular so that you can adjust your own designs accordingly. Some of the best virtual worlds are free: Is being free one of the reasons they have a large player base, or would they have even more players if they charged a fee and could afford to advertise themselves?

For commercial games using the same business model, absolute subscriber numbers are an acceptable means of comparison. If game X has 300,000 subscribers and game Y has 100,000, and they both charge around $12 a month primarily to North Americans, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that game X is “better” in some sense than game Y.

For virtual worlds that don’t conform to these parameters, user base size comparisons are much harder. There are basically five approaches:

• Count the number of registered players. This assumes the world registers its players, of course, but not all do. Why is this? Well, when people want to try out a virtual world, filling out forms puts them off. Even asking for an email address can be annoying—who wants to end up on some mailing list when they’re only looking to see whether they like the world? In other words, forcing players to register can be seen as a barrier to entry. You get more newbies into the game if you don’t take down their particulars first.

• Count the number of characters. Every game keeps records of the characters belonging to players. Yes, there will almost certainly be people who have several characters, either attached to the same player account or ones belonging to false identities they’ve set up. The same applies to all virtual worlds, though, so the argument is that it ought to even itself out. The first flaw here is that actually, no, it doesn’t even itself out. Some virtual worlds have entrance qualifications that make owning multiple characters or accounts very difficult—there are role-playing MUSHes ¹, for example, that interview prospective players and have waiting lists for entry. The second flaw (which also applies to the “count the number of registered players” approach) is that some virtual worlds purge player records that remain dormant for a period, but others don’t. A world which has been running for two years that doesn’t clear out unused player records will be able to boast a larger user base than one that has been running for ten years which deletes records that haven’t been accessed for 90 days.

• Count the number of players who access the world per day. This can actually be quite a good measure, although a bad game with marketing will get more suck-it-and-see players per day than a good game with bad marketing. Also, it depends on the day—weekends tend to be busier than weekdays.

• Count the number of simultaneous players. This measure posits that snapshots of usage throughout the day can give a good comparison of user base sizes across virtual worlds. Suppose two worlds each have 80 players in them at 7 p.m. and 120 players at 8 p.m. It seems fair to suggest that they have roughly the same degree of popularity. It doesn’t matter that for one world half the players at 8 p.m. may still be playing from when they were counted at 7 p.m., and for the other some people have played for half an hour and missed being counted at all; indeed, this is entirely the point. Newbies who enter a game and see a lot of players in a world would think that world was popular, irrespective of how long those players spent per session. The main problem with using a count of simultaneous player numbers is that it varies so much depending on the time and the time zones where their players live. Worlds that have 700 players at 10 p.m. might have only 20 at 5 a.m. The figures are so skewed that the mean, median, or mode average is not of any use. Thus, when people do refer to the number of simultaneous players in a world, they tend to give the daily peak (which is better, but not much better).

• Count the number of player-hours. This is perhaps the best measure of the popularity of virtual worlds, but it suffers precisely because of this. Few administrators are going to publish details of how many player-hours are spent in their virtual world per day if this would make them look bad against the bigger games (and it would!). Incidentally, this and the previous measure are both susceptible to the inflationary effects of people who are logged into a virtual world but not actually playing it. Some textual worlds, for example, regularly have over half their players away from the keyboard while their characters remain unattended in full public view.

However it’s measured, the size of a player base has big implications on the design of a virtual world. For example, the main differences between graphical and textual worlds from a designer’s point of view are to do with the huge numbers of players that the former attract, rather than the fact they have pictures.

Size, as they say, isn’t everything, though. Also important are the demographics of the player base—and not just so marketing people can sell to advertisers and sponsors. Those are actual demographics; when a game is being designed, the target demographics are important. The more designers know about the kind of players that are required, the better they can account for this in their design. A virtual world aimed at wealthy professionals would be different to one aimed at impoverished students. A virtual world aimed at children would be different to one aimed at bored homemakers. A virtual world aimed at everybody would be different to one aimed at just the design team (although many design teams don’t yet seem to have figured this one out).

That said, demographics are only statistics, and they don’t always tell the designers of virtual worlds what they need to know. It’s clear that virtual worlds which are perceived as computer games—and most of them are—seem to attract different groups of people than their regular-game cousins; there is, however, wide disagreement among analysts over the actual figures ². The same overall trends are nevertheless present within individual surveys (which compare like with like), and it’s probably fairly safe to say that in general:

• Virtual world players are older than console gamers, and cover a wider age range than PC gamers.

• Virtual worlds attract proportionately more female players than do console or PC games.

This information is normally interpreted in one of two ways: Designers should make their games more inclusive, so as to further appeal to the mass market; designers should make their games less inclusive, so as not to alienate their core audience.

Actually, though, it’s possible to appeal to both groups of players. Whereas marketing people want to know who is playing, designers are more interested in why they are playing. Players’ expectations and desires are more important to designers than their ages, incomes, and geographic locations; if designers can model how the different player types interact, and design their virtual world such that these interactions are both stable and intrinsically interesting for participants and observers, then demographic information becomes purely a marketing tool. If you want more female players, advertise to women; if you want more older players, advertise to senior citizens; if you want more teenagers, advertise to teenagers. It shouldn’t matter who plays, so long as there are checks and balances within the virtual world itself to ensure that no one playing style can come to overwhelm the others.

Fortunately, models for representing playing habits independently of demographics do exist; they are discussed in Chapter 3, “Players.”