General Observations
I noted in Chapter 1 that many players of virtual worlds don’t consider themselves to be gamers, even if the virtual world is billed as a game. What’s more, they’re correct—they aren’t gamers.
People sign up to large-scale commercial virtual worlds because these are advertised as games, but once there they don’t necessarily want to play them as games; ironically, games have become the new “noble content.” Players have different ways of amusing themselves. Applying the player types categorizations:
Achievers see virtual worlds as games. Their aim is to improve, advance, and ultimately win (for some common, easily stated, world-supported definition of “win”).
Explorers see them more as pastimes, such as reading, gardening, or messing about in the kitchen. Reward comes from discovery and furthering understanding.
Socializers see virtual worlds as entertainment, such as TV, clubs, or concerts. Discussion of the performance and behavior of themselves and others is their main draw.
Killers see virtual worlds as sport. This is of the huntin’, shootin’, and fishin’ kind, rather than the running the 100-meter or the marathon kind 1. If the user base is large enough, some killers may treat virtual worlds as team sports—with themselves as captain or head coach.
It’s interesting to postulate how pitching a virtual world as something other than a game might work. To attract socializers, for example, a world could be portrayed as a sophisticated chat room with built-in toys that players can do things with; in this context, achievement is a mere by-product that arises when people choose to use the toys to play games of their own devising. This approach would apply well to something like The Sims Online.
Of course, by focusing on only one notion of what a particular virtual world “is,” there’s a danger that people will believe it is not for them and will stay away. Would achievers bother with The Sims Online if it didn’t at least nod in the direction of being a game? It’s only because of the growing opinion that computer games don’t have to be games (which was pioneered in part by The Sims itself) that non-gamers have come round to accepting them as noble content. However, if they entered a virtual world and found that it really was all game, they wouldn’t hang around for long. Part of a designer’s work is therefore to ensure that the philosophy governing what their virtual world is “about” is not too exclusive. If the design sends the wrong messages to players, it can alienate them.
On the other hand, there’s a risk of going too far: That by trying to please everybody, a designer can end up pleasing nobody. It can be fine to tailor advertisements to particular audiences: The movie Pearl Harbor 2 was successfully sold as a war story in America and a love story in Japan, for example. However, there can be problems when groups with different expectations meet: Japanese moviegoers would not necessarily have enjoyed Pearl Harbor had they been sharing a theater with Americans cheering the U.S. counter-attack. In describing a virtual world, it’s okay to tell all players the same thing; it’s okay to tell them the same thing in different ways; what isn’t recommended is telling them different things. There’s a distinction between saying “this is a game for everyone” and “this is a game for you.”
What designers tell players shapes the way a virtual world is perceived. “Tell” in this situation means through deeds rather than words: A world may be promoted as a place where basket-weavers are as respected as much as warriors, but when there are 25 different kinds of weapons and two different kinds of baskets, that’s not what it’s saying. This topic of how a design can (for better or worse) send messages to players is discussed in more detail in Chapter 5.