Unending or Circular?
In a single-player computer game, when a player makes a mistake it means a restart from their last save. In virtual worlds, this is impossible—a restart for one player means a restart for all of them. How, then, can a player learn from their mistakes? Do similar situations arise regularly? How about the same situation? Does everything repeat in time, or does the world evolve?
This is basically a change and persistence issue.
Players consume content. There is certain content that they like, and which they are not averse to consuming several times.
Other content they can only really consume once. On the other hand, just because one player has consumed something, that doesn’t mean someone else wouldn’t like to try it. How can these differences be reconciled?
Well, that’s what you have to decide. In practice, you can’t have them all at once: It’s a sliding scale from low change/persistence (circular) to high change/persistence (unending). A fully circular approach reuses content but has nothing new; a fully unending approach abandons used content but offers fresh experiences.
Virtual worlds that don’t change much and don’t persist much have to be sufficiently broad and deep that players take an age to explore them; otherwise, only the activities of other players will provide novel experiences. Virtual worlds that do change or persist will retain players’ interest 1, but be costly (because new content has to be created 2) and wasteful (because old content isn’t reused). Furthermore, virtual worlds need checks and balances to ensure that all new content is in keeping with the virtual world as a whole.
Virtual worlds that don’t introduce content are called fixed. Whether virtual worlds that do introduce content are fixed depends on whether the content is fixed. A predetermined storyline is not new content; it’s old content that hasn’t been added yet 3. Players have no more ability to change the future than they do in a virtual world that resets every two hours. If storylines are reactive or emerge from player actions, that means the virtual world is not fixed.
Note that by “virtual world” here I don’t mean just its physical geography; anything from its social structures and mobiles to its economy and combat systems can be changed. Asheron’s Call and Anarchy Online both have basically fixed storylines, but the former’s can involve the leveling of entire cities whereas the latter’s (because of how it’s implemented) can’t.
Does the virtual world have a future? If so, who decides it? You get to choose.
Unless there is so much change that it renders large chunks of players’ knowledge unusable. ↩︎
It’s a never-ending commitment, too. Once you begin adding content regularly, players will come to expect it regularly, irrespective of whether the virtual world actually needs it. ↩︎
Players may perceive this as new content, because they haven’t seen it before. From a designer’s point of view, though, it isn’t new. What constitutes “new content” varies from virtual world to virtual world: It usually means new monsters and areas, but it could also include additional skills, spells, classes, or even races. Basically, if “content” is stuff that holds the interest of players then “new content” is stuff that does this which wasn’t there before. ↩︎