The Celebration of Identity on Designing Virtual Worlds

Polly’s Tale

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

So it’s a weekend in 1980. I’m in a computing laboratory with 15 students, all of whom are playing my game, MUD. This being 1980, and this being a computing laboratory, and this being a weekend, everyone here is male. The female computer science undergraduates have better ways to occupy themselves (mainly concerning male noncomputer science undergraduates).

I look around at my friends and realize that chances are not one of us has ever had a girlfriend ¹, nor have we any prospect of ever finding one. We regard all the female students on our course as people rather than as girls, and we’d no sooner hit on one of them than we would on each other. We’re desperately short of social skills. The non-computing girls on campus are split between those who shy away in horror and those who laugh in our faces. It’s pointless even trying: We’re inexperienced and out-gunned.

To Be, or What to Be?

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

The celebration of identity is the fundamental, critical, absolutely core point of virtual worlds.

Yes, that is quite some assertion.

Except for those worlds that people play for purely practical reasons (such as virtual classrooms), everything that players do ultimately concerns the development of their own identity: who they are. It’s why achievers achieve, explorers explore, socializers socialize, and killers creep up from nowhere and batter you with a stick.

Identity and Identification

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

Players play virtual worlds in order to be themselves.

Well, perhaps not quite all of them do, but it’s true of those who play for fun. Even in game worlds, some people will be there for specialist reasons (play-testing, customer service, spying from some competing game); none of these individuals would necessarily have any inclination to become immersed, and those that do would be professional about it. There will also be a few people who are in the process of “getting” what a virtual world is about; these will mainly be insufficiently immersed newbies, but occasionally there are individuals who never “get” what virtual worlds are about but play nevertheless (generally, to the irritation of everyone else). Most of the players will be there because of the freedom to be themselves that the virtual world offers, though.

Progression

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

I mentioned earlier the main sequence that charts player type drift. This gets its name from the main sequence of star development used in cosmology ¹. Players typically start off testing the immediate bounds on their behavior (killer) then begin to acquire knowledge of their environment (explorer); following this, they apply their knowledge (achiever), in the course of which they forge bonds with other players; finally, they retire from this and spend their time chatting with their friends (socializer).

Development Tracks

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

The thing is, those sequences overlap. People can switch paths, if they have some moment of epiphany. Someone could go griefer to scientist (main sequence) to planner to hacker (explorer sequence). They could go opportunist to networker (minor sequence) to politician to friend (socializer sequence). They’ll tend to keep to whatever path they began on, but sometimes they decide to go a different way when they meet a fork in the road ¹. Writing the sequences out linearly gives Figure 3.5.