Influence Through Design on Designing Virtual Worlds

Churn, Sink, and Drift

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

Churn is the rate at which people leave a virtual community. The greater the level of community, the lower the churn, because the stronger the bonds that hold the community together. Most churn occurs in a newbie’s early days: They play, decide they don’t like the virtual world, and leave. This cause of churn is called sink: Newbies show up, play a little, don’t like it, and sink without trace. They may flit into a few communities, but none of these gain enough of a hold. (Indeed, they may loosen them: The virtual world itself might be compelling but have thoroughly obnoxious players.)

Influencing Community Development

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

The first decision that designers must make in looking at their virtual world in terms of community is how large they want their community to be. The rule of thumb here is that beyond 250 members, a community of interest is going to fragment into sub-communities of sub-interests no matter what you do (and most fragment much sooner ¹). Most communities will be communities of interest and/or practice, with overlapping subcommunities of commitment. Very few spiritual communities will exist, and when they do they’ll be very small (just a handful of players).

Ways to Promote Community

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

Having ways to shape communities is all well and good, but you need to have communities in the first place. Communities will form whether or not you want them to, of course, but except in very particular cases (for example, psychological or anthropological studies) you should do everything you can to promote them. Note that’s “promote,” not “force.”

Here are some suggestions.

Communication

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

The more that people communicate, the more they will develop relationships. The more relationships that develop, the stronger the community becomes. Remember that it’s individual friendships that are important: Community is just an emergent consequence of these friendships.

Provide channels. Let people receive messages by their names, their locations, their character’s properties, the groups they’re members of, by topic—the more the merrier. Let them do it using real-time typing, through message boards, through email—however you can. Let them opt out of channels that don’t interest them so they can focus on the ones that do. If none of this fits with the virtual world fiction, change the fiction. It’s that important.

Filtered Communication

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

This isn’t as important as communication itself, but by allowing communication itself to be a topic of communication, further communication can be stimulated. Communication filters are fine if they don’t remove too much meaning from the message and don’t become the default. If your virtual world has a “say” command, add “lisp,” “stammer,” “stutter,” and anything else you can think of. If characters drink 10 bottles of ale, replace all occurrences of the letter “s” in their speech with “sh.” It’s only a diversion, but if it prompts only one conversation in 10,000 it’s worth it.

Mutual Dependencies (Characters)

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

If characters are dependent on other characters to succeed, then players will come to trust those characters who don’t let them down. Bonds will be formed, and (if these are reinforced often enough) communities will arise. All members of an adventuring party should depend on one another to some degree, but there are plenty of other ways to promote mutual dependencies. Simple economic need is a favorite: Miners need blacksmiths to buy their iron, and blacksmiths need miners to provide the raw materials they need. This can be extended in different directions, for example temples may need worshippers to cause deities to give their priests powers, and worshippers may need those priests to cure diseases, purify water, and vaporize undead.

Mutual Dependencies (Communities)

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

As well as dependencies between individuals, create dependencies between communities. Again, the simplest way to do this is economically: The elves make the bows and arrows that the humans use to hunt boar so they can sell the meat to the elves. It doesn’t have to be this clear cut, though: The sorcerers and the necromancers keep apart so as not to contaminate each other’s magic wells.

Dependencies that are threatened can give cause for conflict. If humans cut down trees to make fires on which to roast their boars, this may impact the elves. If there are so many sorcerers that a single magic well is not enough, they may need to set up a second well nearer the necromancers.

Reconnection

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

If you miss a session in the virtual world because your cat was ill, the rest of your party may have moved elsewhere. How are you going to find them? Even if you know exactly where they are, it’s not really pleasant to spend half an hour trekking through swampland to hook up with them.

If people are members of a community of interest, they need to be able to communicate with one another; if it’s a community of practice, they need to be able to access one another’s data; if it’s a community of commitment, they need to be able to act in concert with one another; if it’s a spiritual community, they just need each other. The domain in which these proceedings take place is the community space for that community. For mages passing spell sequences between each other telepathically, all action and interactions takes place through the telepathic network, therefore that would be the community space. In most cases, though, the virtual world itself is the community space. In order to participate in a community, members need to be proximate to the rest of the community in its community space; for virtual worlds, therefore, this means that characters must be able to reach the same (virtual) physical location as other members with relative ease. In other words, they have to be able to teleport to them.

Jargon

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

Jargon consists of new (or specialized meanings for old) words, terms, and phrases; it comes with communities of practice. Although often seen as a barrier (if you don’t speak the language, you’re not ready to join), jargon can be a very effective way of making players feel they really are part of something. It serves to draw in people: You hear someone say “rotate aggro” and you want to know what it means ¹. Acquiring the vocabulary gives you a badge that says, “Hey, I’m one of you.”

Communal Activities

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

Sadly, players can’t gather round a camp fire and have a good sing-song; lag, if nothing else, prevents players from acting in concert to this degree. Nevertheless, there are things that players can do together as (virtual) leisure activities, and designers should support them.

For example, players like to tell stories. This doesn’t mean that there should be a bard class and everyone should be obliged to listen politely to their excruciating poetry. It does mean that there should be venues and situations conducive to storytelling and suggestions as to how to go about it. A somewhat overt approach would be to have a Storyteller’s Hall, for example, containing a variety of atmospheric rooms, each with a Storyteller Stone that bears the legend “tell your part of the story, then pass me on.” It’s crude, but it works.

Stake-Holding

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

Members of communities act and interact in community space. If they own some of that community space, it can help them feel like they’re a permanent part of that community. For virtual worlds, that generally means they should own some virtual place of residence. It shows they care for the community space, and therefore (by extension) for the community.

Textual worlds introduced the idea of owning property; indeed, building their own house was a major preoccupation of players of TinyMUDs from the very beginning. Many MUDs using codebases that didn’t let players access content-generation tools also allowed characters to own houses, although the practice was not widespread. Its importance was only really highlighted by its inclusion in Ultima Online, where it proved a galloping success ¹.

Things to Demote

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

Some things are generally good for communities, and some things are generally bad. There are any number of real-world reasons you wouldn’t want these anyway, but players being players they’ll sometimes occur. Designers should make every effort to prevent this from happening unless explicitly trying to make some kind of point or working with precisely controlled gameplay mechanics.

The main ones to watch out for are:

Xenophobia
Prejudice
Oppression

Xenophobia can cause an individual community to become stronger within itself, but it will be isolated from the rest of the virtual world in a way that other communities aren’t. In some virtual worlds, modular communities often have no motive to interact with other communities, but that’s quite different from having a motive not to interact with them. A party of EverQuest adventurers might keep itself to itself, but if some other party asked to team up for a while to tackle a particularly tough monster, they’d generally give the suggestion a fair hearing. A system that made it easy for the second party to slaughter members of the first party once they’d gained their trust would cause these communities to become more tightly woven (which sounds good) while treating every other community as a threat (which may also sound good, but is most certainly not). People don’t like having to be on their guard the whole time. Under this kind of pressure, modular communities will emigrate to some other virtual world where they’re not going to have to watch their back.

Influencing Immersion

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

People want to be immersed. Designers want them to be immersed. Therefore, designers and players can collude to make immersion happen. In this sense, immersion is easier to design for than community, because it mainly involves telling players what they want to hear. You don’t have to worry about how much immersion you want, or how quickly to deliver it—just give them as much as you can as quickly as you can, and they’ll do the rest.

Ways to Promote Immersion

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

Immersion will happen almost by default in a virtual world eventually. Nevertheless, designers shouldn’t take this for granted. Here are some ways by which to promote immersion. Again, note that’s “promote,” not “force.”

Control

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

The more immersed a player is, the less the virtual world can dictate to them. In particular, it can’t treat their characters as if they weren’t people.

If my character waves and the feedback is, “You wave enthusiastically,” that takes control away from me. I didn’t “wave enthusiastically;” what I did was “wave.” Virtual worlds should not presume to control my character for me.

The only exception is if I give my consent. If my character consumes alcohol, I’m explicitly relinquishing some degree of control. Loss of control is a well-understood property of alcohol. Therefore, if my character suddenly staggers off involuntarily in some direction after consuming a bottle of port, I’ve consented.

Detail

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

More detail makes for more persuasiveness. There are two caveats: Detail should be non-contradictory, and it should be at a consistent level. Contradictions usually only arise when two different designers working on disjoint parts of the virtual world independently specify content that clashes; this problem is almost always easy to fix. Inconsistent levels of detail are another matter, though. They arise because designers focus on one feature without following through the implications. For example, it may be possible to fell a tree to expose a hollow core that you can climb down through, but not be possible to fell any other trees, even saplings. Players would accept the same level of depth throughout (that is, no fellable trees) but if one tree can be chopped down and others can’t, they’re reminded that they’re in a virtual world. Furthermore, it’s an incomplete one (from their point of view) because felling trees isn’t fully implemented. Better you can fell no trees than just one.

Freedom of Choice

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

Designers decide what options to provide to players and the manner in which to provide them. This is how design influences players.

For promoting immersion, it’s slightly different. The whole point of identity play is that you’re free to make choices. Designers may suggest directions that you hadn’t considered, but they have to stop short of actually recommending any of them. It’s for you to make up your own mind.

Self-Expression

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

Self-expression is another way to promote immersion. By giving players freeform ways to communicate themselves, designers can draw them more deeply into the world—they feel more of a part of it. Communication and stake-holding help players to exhibit self-expression in addition to being ways to promote community; the decision to have them therefore looks trivially easy.

Self-expression allows players to discover more about themselves, which is almost a definition of the goal of immersion. It also, to a lesser extent, lets them find out more about the virtual world; this, too promotes immersion.

Things to Demote

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

The twin enemies of immersion are Reality and sterility.

If players are continually reminded that they’re in Reality, it will disrupt their sense of immersion. You can’t stop someone’s significant other from bringing them a mug of coffee, but you can stop your virtual world’s interface from being intrusive and you can prevent references to Reality from sneaking in. Keeping Reality out is why commercials are unacceptable in virtual worlds, but product placement is comparatively okay.