Theory and Practice on Designing Virtual Worlds

Modes

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

When you start up your web browser, what page does it point at? Surprisingly, for most people the answer is “whatever my ISP set it to when I installed its software.” Their first view of the World Wide Web every morning is what their ISP shows them.

Virtual worlds have many ways to let players customize their experiences. In a textual world, for example, some people want full room descriptions the whole time, and some want short ones the whole time. There are commands that let players choose for themselves which of these to go with. However, one option will be the default, and that’s the one that newbies will use. In MUD1, the first time you entered a room you saw its full description, and on later visits you saw the short version. This helped stop newbies from getting lost. Later, they would use exclusively verbose descriptions when making accurate maps and exclusively brief descriptions at all other times, but later is later. When they started, they got the default, and the default said, “Explore!”

Virtual Reality

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Read a selection of Science Fiction stories about virtual worlds, and you’ll soon discover that the following are inevitabilities:

True intelligence will emerge from the hideously complex machinations performed by the virtual world engine, with unnerving consequences for human morality.
Unscrupulous people will transfer their consciousnesses into hardware in order to live forever, muahahaha.
Virtual worlds will be experienced through virtual reality interfaces so good that the virtual will be indistinguishable from the real.

Extensibility

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Virtual worlds are designed such that they can be extended over time.

Why? To add content, to correct imbalances, to allow for more simultaneous players—there are lots of reasons.

Who extends the world? The live team.

Who created the world? The dev team.

Is the dev team a subset of the live team? At some point, the answer has to be “no.”

For large-scale, graphical virtual worlds, the answer is usually “no” immediately, because the live team is a separate entity from the dev team. Even for small-scale worlds, or those for which the live team is built from the dev team, the original designers aren’t going to be around indefinitely. Students who create virtual worlds eventually leave college; professional designers who create successful worlds are offered new opportunities ¹; people move, their circumstances change: Ultimately, no one lives forever.