Major Decisions on Designing Virtual Worlds

Ethos

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

What kind of a virtual world do you want?

To a large extent, it depends on the players. Where will they come from? What will their background be? What player types will dominate? Why will people eventually leave?

Players bring aspects of their real-world community—their culture—into the virtual world with them. Part of the point of virtual worlds lies in being able to pick and choose what you leave behind. Culture is that which is passed from generation to generation without being inherited; virtual worlds let you rethink what you’ve been taught at every level.

Unending or Circular?

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

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.

Hands On or Hands Off?

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

Intangible content in virtual worlds will arise naturally through the interactions of players. Designers can and should assist these interactions, by providing tangible means of support and encouragement. How far should they go, though? In particular, should they be proactive to the extent that they provide for live team “leader” players to catalyze these interactions?

In traditional tabletop role-playing games, the referee not only designs the game world but can lead the players through it. Players perceive a highly detailed world because the referee can resolve everything they do, to whatever depth. Referees don’t have to think up everything in advance; they can create some of it in response to the actions that players take.

Intimate or Grand Scale?

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

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.

Purposeful or Decorative?

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

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?

Closed or Open Economic Model?

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

The first question you should really ask is whether your virtual world needs an economy at all. They don’t have to have one. If, for example, characters can take nothing with them between playing sessions, not only is an economy unnecessary, but you can’t have one anyway. The more persistent a virtual world, the greater its need for a means to facilitate the efficient transfer of goods between players, but even then this doesn’t imply the worlds need a formal currency. That said, the real world has money and therefore virtual worlds that want to seem real will have money too.

Information Versus Immersion

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

Which is better: to tell a player they hit a troll really hard, or to tell them they did 25 points of damage? The former is what the character would see; the latter is what many players want to see. If they do see it, though, it works against immersion: In the real world, you don’t see numbers appearing every time you hit something with a hammer, so why should you in the virtual world?

Major Decisions on Designing Virtual Worlds

Ethos

Unending or Circular?

Hands On or Hands Off?

Categories

Intimate or Grand Scale?

Purposeful or Decorative?

Closed or Open Economic Model?

Information Versus Immersion