Intimate or Grand Scale?
Virtual worlds imbue a sense of size. Players have very definite views on how large the areas they cover are. Asheron’s Call feels bigger than EverQuest.
Size is affected by many factors. The most obvious is the number of discrete points that a character can occupy: A text world with 20,000 rooms will generally feel larger than one that has 500; a graphical world measuring 32K by 32K will feel smaller than one measuring 256K by 256K. Speed of travel affects size: If it takes you half an hour to traverse one virtual world and two hours to traverse another, the former may appear to be smaller than the latter even if it isn’t; if you can teleport anywhere, the world will feel smaller still.
The abstract size of the world being modeled is significant, too, especially in textual worlds. One room may only be 50 moves away from another, but if the locations in between are written to convey an impression of vastness and fraught with dangers and dead ends, players can be left with the feeling of having undertaken an epic journey.
As well as the physical size of the world, there are other features that can indicate its scale—the number of independent organizational substructures (dukedoms, countries, planets, and so on), for example. The reach of these can help convince players how big the virtual world is: If the non-player characters (NPCs) change language or religion, or the currency no longer works, or the buildings have onion domes instead of towers, it reinforces the notion that a place is remote.
Virtual world designers like the idea of creation on the grand scale. The more there is to design, the more designing they can do, and therefore the more fun they’ll have. Big worlds have interesting interactions that small ones don’t; a big canvas makes for more detail.
Unfortunately, virtual worlds can be too big. Scatter 100 people around a regular house and it will seem crowded; scatter them in the Sahara desert and they’ll never find each other; put them next to each other in the Sahara desert and they won’t see more than a fraction of the rest of it.
Virtual worlds have to be of a size appropriate to the number of players they attract. In textual worlds, a rule of thumb is to aim for a rooms per player ratio of about 40; 20 rooms per player is crowded but bearable; 60 rooms per player is sparse but you can still bump into people by accident. It’s possible through design to influence how crowded a virtual world feels—for example, by introducing honeypot rooms or thoroughfares to attract players to the same location, or by starting players near to one another or far apart when they enter the virtual world. In MUD2, I have self-contained flood-control areas that only open up when a certain threshold of players has been reached. On the whole, though, it’s better if you just get the size right to begin with.
Another problem with having a large virtual world is that it needs content. More content means either more designers or more time for them to design in, both of which are expensive. Players would rather play in a world that is small yet packed with interesting things than a world that is large but empty.
As I remarked, actual size does not have to coincide with apparent size. A small world can seem large, and a large world can seem small. A seemingly expansive world will impress relative newbies and give them the urge to explore new vistas; a seemingly cozy one will feel more secure to them and make conversation easier. Designers will therefore use a hybrid approach sometimes, whereby newbies are initially presented with an intimate 1 environment, then see things on the grand scale when they emerge from it.
The apparent size of a virtual world helps contribute to its atmosphere. The actual size is important to ensure that players meet each other serendipitously often enough to form relationships yet not so often that these turn sour. Ideally, a designer can find such a balance. Sometimes, though, their hand is forced. In particular, if they are writing to a license, they could have problems. The licensed world may be impractically large (for example, Middle Earth) or impractically small (for example, Hogwarts School) for the numbers of players expected 2. Designers then have to decide how faithfully to honor their virtual world’s sources. “Inspired by” can work: Dark Age of Camelot isn’t an authentic retelling of Arthurian myth, but is close enough in spirit not to disappoint newbies. However, DAoC didn’t pay money to use its sources; if designers had done so, the pressure to use the entirety of what they had bought would have been great (not least from the license holders wishing to protect the integrity of their universe).
Size doesn’t just pop out of a design. You have to think about it from the beginning.