Purposeful or Decorative?

You look at a wall. Hanging on the wall is a picture. You go up to the picture to remove it and find it’s actually part of the wall. In a textual world, it would be embedded in a room description; in a graphical one, it would be part of the texture for the wall. It’s purely decorative.

Some objects are in virtual worlds for tangible reasons; others are there for intangible ones. Should you give even the intangible ones some tangible purpose, or keep them as the props they are?

It might seem a little premature to decide at the very beginning of a virtual world’s design whether to assign meaning to everything. Surely you can figure all that out later, once the really important things have been done? Well yes, you can, but by that time you may discover that the decision has been made for you: It would be simply too much work to give everything meaning. This is why so many virtual worlds have windows that don’t break, chairs you can’t sit on, grass you can’t pull up, trees you can’t chop down….

If you know from the beginning that objects will all have tangible functionality, it means you can design for this from the beginning. If you know they won’t, you immediately increase the range of what you can design. You’ll have longer to do it, too: Depth eats into design time, but if it’s there from the start, it won’t eat anywhere near as much as it would if you added it later.

An example: Are clothes just costume or are they fashion? It’s possible to analyze what characters are wearing statistically and determine what is and isn’t in fashion. If you wear fashionable clothes, your status goes up; if your status is high, what you wear is fashionable until everyone is wearing it. Non-player characters will treat high-status characters in a tangibly different way than low-status characters. Should this gameplay element be added to push players into making choices about how their character looks? Or should they be free of such tyranny and be able to wear whatever clothes they like? Even those of the opposite sex?

Another example: Should coats of arms be regimented or freeform? Real coats of arms are steeped in symbolism. Should players send their characters to a college of heralds to compose their device from templates? Or can they scan a photo of themselves and use that? In the former case, NPCs could be expected to “read” the meaning and react appropriately (farriers may give a discount to a knight whose shield features a horseshoe; bandit rebels may decline to attack a character whose shield bears a holy symbol ¹). Uploaded images are meaningful to players, but meaningless to NPCs.

In general, designers do want a gameplay meaning for everything in their virtual world, because it makes the world more immersive. If they don’t determine this from the outset, though, they may be unable to have it when they’re at the point they need it (fleshing out the details after the framework has been implemented).

There’s a second issue here, though, which is more contentious. What we’ve been asking so far is whether things that are needed for out-of-context reasons should be given some contextual meaning. However, what about things that are needed for contextual reasons that have out-of-context meaning we don’t want? “I was lying across the tracks when the train ran over me: Why am I still alive?” “Because we thought you might stop playing if you died.”

This tension between what is good for tangible reasons but bad for intangible ones has claimed many victims in the past; it’s sure to claim more in the future. It isn’t only manifested by permanent character death (the virtual economy is the other big loser, and there are many smaller ones), but that’s where the battle lines are drawn ². The problem is that some things are really, really desirable for tangible, gameplay reasons and really, really undesirable for intangible, business reasons. If gameplay wins, business suffers; if business wins, gameplay suffers (and then business suffers).

The general policy with regard to whether gameplay or business imperatives have priority should have been decided when the parameters of the design were set out. For a well-known issue such as permanent character death, this will almost certainly be the case. However, there will undoubtedly be other instances where friction will occur. Be sure that the procedures for dealing with the resulting disputes are in place; you’ll need them.