Printed Works

The single most important influence on virtual worlds from fiction is J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings ¹ trilogy. Although it would be of huge significance merely for having established the genre of High Fantasy, its ultimate worth lies in its depiction of an imagined world. It’s not the particular world it describes that is momentous (although Middle Earth is indeed classic source material for people writing new text-based games); rather, it’s that creating a fully realized, make-believe world was shown to be actually possible. Prior to The Lord of the Rings, worlds of such depth were practically unknown.

The word “practically” is used because there were immensely detailed imaginary worlds before, but they evolved over centuries and had many authors. Folk tales, while perhaps originally having some basis in fact, nevertheless changed over the telling, drifting toward some popular shared setting that gave listeners a context. Individual stories had a place and time, so no background had to be given, and they in turn made a contribution to enriching the overall canon. These collections of tales set in what were to become shared fictional worlds gave rise to such well-loved anthologies as Britain’s Arthurian Legends, the Middle East’s 1001 Arabian Nights, and China’s The Water Margin.

The other great source of imaginary worlds is religion. This is a little trickier to discuss, because whereas few people today would disagree that the worlds of Greek, Roman, Norse, and Celtic gods were completely imaginary, the suggestion that there might be fictional elements in the Jewish Torah, Roman Catholic Apocrypha, or Hindu Ramayana—to name but a few—is just asking for trouble. The issue of real-world religion in virtual worlds is debated in Chapter 8, “Coda: Ethical Considerations;” for the moment, it’s sufficient to note that religion can be a source of imaginary worlds comparable in breadth and depth to those that are accepted myth, but you’d have to be brave or stupid to use a living one.

What J. R. R. Tolkien showed was that imaginary worlds did not have to emerge from amalgamations of the ideas of many people; it was possible for an individual to construct a believable world from first principles (although he did draw on many tropes from existing myth as part of Middle Earth’s architecture). The sheer amount of vision he produced, maintained over six books in three volumes, is breathtaking. It’s small wonder that the imaginative possibilities raised by The Lord of the Rings are as much an inspiration for designers of virtual worlds today as they were for the authors of MUD1.

That said, the actual content of MUD1 wasn’t drawn from Middle Earth. The game’s terrain was English and the inhabitants were pure fairytale—it had “dwarfs” rather than “dwarves,” for example, and no elves, orcs, nor hobbits whatsoever. There was a fictional influence, but it was due to the sword and sorcery of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian ² series rather than The Hobbit ³. Long novels aren’t as good as action-oriented short stories for evoking the heart-in-your-mouth style adventure that MUD1’s world was intended (among other things) to deliver.

Beyond The Lord of the Rings, the influence of fiction on virtual worlds is three types:

• Direct. The virtual world is an implementation of a familiar fictional world such as Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time ⁴ or Terry Pratchett’s Discworld ⁵.

• Partial. The virtual world is inspired by a particular work of fiction or a genre that is derived from one. It might have the same “mutant academy” idea of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s X-Men ⁶, but let you create your own superheroes.

• Indirect. The virtual world implements or is inspired by some other work which itself is an adaptation of a book or comic series. A virtual world design team might decide to adopt the Dungeons & Dragons magic system without necessarily knowing that E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson (authors of Dungeons & Dragons) themselves adopted the idea from the novels of Jack Vance ⁷.

Given the choice, most professional virtual world designers would prefer to design their own, original virtual world. They have good enough imaginations that they don’t need to steal from fiction (yet are regularly asked “where do you get your ideas from?” as if they couldn’t just think them up unaided). Like a scriptwriter adapting a book for the big screen, designers working to a license might genuinely enjoy what they’re doing but, deep down, they’d rather be exploring their own imagination than someone else’s. For this reason, designers tend to approach novels analytically, deconstructing them for their form rather than their content.

There is, however, a fourth category of fiction that has subject matter in itself of use to designers. These are the books that are about virtual worlds; not in the pedagogical way that this book is, but far more speculatively. Books of this kind are of great interest to the designers of virtual worlds because they actually involve consideration of design issues. Suppose that all implementational and commercial problems have been solved, and people can physically visit invented worlds from reality: What might they find there?

In early examples of the genre, such as Larry Niven and Steven Barnes’ Dream Park ⁸ and Vernor Vinge’s True Names ⁹, the authors had not encountered virtual worlds ¹⁰ and were therefore writing from a position of pure conjecture. Nevertheless, they raised several issues about the design of virtual worlds that have proven to be quite prescient. Dream Park, for example, asks questions about narrative and ownership that were to be raised again some 20 years later when the debate about ongoing content provision for fifth-age graphical virtual worlds began in earnest. True Names made the distinction between player and persona (the real-world identity of an individual being a persona’s “true name”) and explored some of the consequences of identity masking that this enables.

When Cyberpunk brought new meaning to the term “cutting edge” in the Science Fiction literary scene of the mid-1980s, the future of virtual worlds immediately seemed laid out with neon clarity. In Dream Park, virtual worlds were glorified real-world theme parks; in True Names, they were stored in computers that people reached through electrode “portals” suckered to the head; by William Gibson’s tour de force novel Neuromancer ¹¹, access was through neural jacks making direct electronic connections to the brain. Surely this was to be the ultimate in imaginary experience made real? The notion of cyberspace—data represented as imagery within a shared virtual environment—burst into public consciousness. Virtual worlds were merely a manifestation of virtual reality; the interface not only brought the message, it determined it. The syntax shaped the semantics.

It was easy to forget that Cyberpunk fiction was just that: fiction. It was predictive in the cautionary sense, showing how things might become, not how they would become. Part of Cyberpunk’s agenda was to show that although technology offers a way forward, people could corrupt it for their own ends. That which has the potential to bestow liberty can be twisted to the cause of oppression or anarchy. Thus, it was in the interests of Cyberpunk authors to show cyberspace as a slick, high-tech victory of form over substance, hip and happening yet shallow and soulless but for its dark, in-shadow periphery. The cold, objective way that virtual space was depicted (as a network of freeform, three-dimensional statistical symbols) conveyed the impression that getting to cyberspace was more important than what was there when you arrived.

Many people find the neurotechnology envisaged in Neuromancer exciting, because (were it ever available) it would provide a means of entering a virtual world totally and completely ¹². It is unlikely, however, that any virtual world they did visit would look like a classic Cyberpunk vision unless the designers deliberately took such as their model ¹³. This was acknowledged in William Gibson’s later cyberpunk novel, Idoru ¹⁴, which distinguished between network-as-medium and network-as-place by explicitly referring to virtual worlds as MUDs.

Cyberpunk teaches designers a number of valuable lessons about the sociology and psychology of players and the responsibilities of developers. Virtual worlds are not insulated from the real world; they can’t be regarded as solely the purview of their designers, publishers, or even players. Their influence extends into the real world, and therefore the real world extends into them. Ultimately, though, the relationship is one-sided: The real world always wins in the end.

Cyberpunk was the evangelizing prophet of virtual reality, but, once the hype died down, other authors were able to look at the new reality and use that as their starting point for speculative work. Media darling LambdaMOO was an obvious first point of contact for people considering writing speculatively about virtual worlds, although in itself it was hardly representative of what was already out there.

Perhaps the most impressive of those novels first to be informed by extant virtual worlds is Tad Williams’ Otherland ¹⁵ series. This monumental ¹⁶ work traces the fortunes of a number of disparate individuals accessing the “Otherland” virtual world of its title. Among the many things the series gets right that Cyberpunk got wrong are

• Client/server model dynamics. The gradual shift in importance from how powerful the client hardware is to how powerful the server hardware is.

• Multi-faceted worlds within worlds. This is typical of MOOs and other builder-centric codebases (such as the book’s “Otherland”).

• Inter-world object mapping, so that taking an object from one sub-world to another replaces it with a functional equivalent (an analogue). This is indeed how designers intend to handle transfers of objects and characters between virtual worlds.

• Player attitudes to gender-presentation betrayal. When people say they’re something they aren’t and get in too deep.

• Understanding of immersion (the sense of being “in” a virtual world). Cyberpunk mistook visualization for immersion: The two are not the same.

• Virtual worlds modeled on the real world. If what you see looks and behaves like reality, you feel you’re “there” more than if it looks and behaves like a gridwork of platonic solids.

• Recognizing that people have expectations of degrees of reality within the virtual world. Fulfilling these expectations leads to increased immersion and denying it leads to decreased immersion. People don’t want worlds to have anthropomorphic content merely because they feel more comfortable in them that way.

• The difficulty of distinguishing between computer-generated characters in the virtual world and ones under the control of human beings, and (more importantly) the consequences of not being able to tell. People have already been fooled into believing that virtual players are real ones for extended periods; many more will undoubtedly follow.

Of course, the series also gets some things wrong of its own account. The attitude that characters (in the first book) have to persona death, for example, is at odds with how people in the real world tend feel on the subject (real people are far less stoic). On the whole, though, it offers much for virtual world designers to ponder. Besides, no designer could possibly criticize a book that names a virtual mall after LambdaMOO and has the opening line: It started in mud, as many things do ¹⁷.