Settlements

Many virtual worlds contain virtual buildings. Although some of these may be isolated (farmhouses, cottages, wizards’ towers), worlds created to a bigger scale will want settlements.

Settlements in this context are collections of buildings (or one huge building with lots of rooms—a castle, say, or a space station). Most of the time they will be occupied, but ruined settlements are also possible.

It should go without saying that settlements are positioned where they are for a reason. Virtual worlds are more believable if their settlements are built in locations that make sense. A town with no access to fresh water or no trade routes to other settlements will cause anyone who gives them a moment’s thought to raise an eyebrow. Unfortunately, many designers are oblivious to such formalities. They’re quite happy to put a ruined city on the side of a mountain and say it’s the site of a massacre of humans by dwarfs, but they’re less concerned about what the humans who lived there would have eaten.

There are many reasons why large-population cities in the real world are built where they are. Most grow from smaller settlements, although some are founded by rulers (for example, Baghdad, Munich, St. Petersburg, Washington D.C.). To prosper, all of them need

• Plenty of level ground

• Access to food and water

• Nearby building materials

• A non-threatening climate/geology/geography

• Communication links

• A population

If they are close to natural resources and are in an easily defensible position, so much the better.

Note that for many virtual worlds, some of these criteria are not necessary from a strictly gameplay point of view. Food and water are only needed if characters need to eat and drink; characters are generally impervious to the effects of climate; communication is often instantaneous. Indeed, people may only want to have a house at all so they have somewhere to store their stuff. That’s not how real-world settlements form.

For virtual worlds designed under license, settlements have to appear where the map says they do. Even so, it doesn’t necessarily hurt to put roads, springs, forests, and cornfields in the vicinity. Designers of other virtual worlds have more freedom to put cities where they want, but more responsibility to put them somewhere non-idiotic. As with many aspects of virtual world design, the key is to do your research: A few hours spent skimming through a textbook for first-year Town Planning undergraduates will give you the rudiments of settlement organization (which are all you need). With a virtual world, you don’t only get to place a settlement where you want it in relation to other settlements, but you can change the geography to accommodate it. There really is no excuse for carelessness. The usual rule of rule-breaking applies: If a settlement is in a place you wouldn’t normally find a settlement, there’s some in-context reason it’s in such a place (for example, the religious inhabitants don’t want contact with outsiders).

Note that smaller virtual worlds, especially ones that don’t have a high degree of persistence, may use social places, such as inns, as hubs (rather than resort to full-blown settlements). The placement rules for these will differ, but they’ll nevertheless still exist; don’t just plunk them down anywhere.

Given these basic laws for positioning settlements (or whatever), the next issue is applying them to derive the configuration that designers want. Settlements invariably serve some gameplay purpose; they’re not there merely to provide yet more background color. Although some locations are so natural that a settlement just has to occupy them (the estuaries of major rivers, the heads of deltas, the desert oasis on a major caravan route), the positioning of the rest depends on what designers want out of them—in particular, whether or not they want players to visit them. Often, settlements will be centers of trade, where players can go to sell their stuff and buy better stuff. They’re also frequently places where players get quests. Thus, they act as focal points and can foster a sense of community; in worlds that allow for property ownership, they can become the physical embodiment of communities.

If there are too few settlements, players will crowd out the ones that do exist. It’s less of a problem if there are too many, as players will gravitate to just a few and leave the others as testimonies to designers’ wasted time.

Ideally, settlements should fail or flourish by a process of survival of the fittest. At a superficial level, this looks easy: The ones that players frequent should expand to offer new opportunities and services; the ones that are forgotten should atrophy away to become ghost towns. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done: The majority population of most settlements consists of non-player characters, who won’t necessarily be easy to move (even from a purely implementational point of view). More worryingly, they could look useless but perform an important function indirectly. For example, players may never visit the mining town but if it produces all the iron that the artisans in the big city use to make armor, closing it down would be a mistake. In a sophisticated virtual world with interlinked economies, ecologies, and communities, measuring the success of a settlement merely by the number of player-occupied houses is not enough.

Should players be able to build their own settlements? This would allow for them to appear spontaneously where designers (deliberately or otherwise) left a hole. Ultima Online allowed it from the beginning, but other virtual worlds can have technical reasons for not permitting it: Asheron’s Call only lets players buy prebuilt housing, for example, because its long-term story arc could suddenly call for a volcano to appear beneath a shanty town otherwise. On the whole, though, player-built settlements are simply too powerful a retention tool to dismiss; for long-term persistent virtual worlds, if player-created settlements make any kind of sense at all then designers should aim to facilitate their creation.

This isn’t actually as easy as it sounds. Virtual worlds need virtual inhabitants as well as real ones. Settlements that don’t have NPCs in them won’t be as functional as those that do. From where do they acquire their denizens?

There are three main ways to do it:

• Sleight of hand. When the settlement reaches a certain size, NPCs appear. Other than in defining the boundaries (and therefore size) of a settlement, the only disadvantages of this to speak of are that it isn’t exactly convincing and it can lead to NPC inflation (that is, the more NPCs there are, the less the value of each one).

• Bought in. With these, buildings that operate services come with their own staff. If your community clubs together and funds the construction of a cobbler’s shop, it comes automatically with a cobbler. This is marginally more realistic and allows for a greater variety of towns, but can still lead to NPC inflation. If every town builds a cobbler’s shop, how does this affect the price of shoes?

• Economics. NPCs periodically look at how their business is going, and if it’s poor, they move to somewhere else where it won’t be poor. This is the most realistic solution of all, but it needs a good economic model to underpin it—one that can be used predictively so NPCs can speculate where a good market may be ¹.

Construction time is another issue. If major buildings can spring up overnight, then it doesn’t bode well for a sense of realism. Unfortunately, if it takes a realistic time, then it doesn’t bode well for community management: Impatient players will complain if it takes a whole week to build an entire castle, let alone a modest dwelling (although this can be alleviated if you make them build in stages). Let them build in stages. There’s a case for having some delay, even if the fiction can support instant houses (“Just plant the house seed where you want it to grow, then water it and stand back”). A wait can heighten the anticipation, especially if progress is visible. Too long, though, and it becomes frustrating ². It’s up to you where you draw the line.

Perhaps the most noticeable thing about the settlements in virtual worlds is that they aren’t actually all that large. EverQuest’s towns have perhaps 50 buildings in them—they’re mere hamlets. Big textual worlds can have many more, but they suffer from not “looking” big. If graphical worlds had 5,000 buildings, that would be more like it! Unfortunately, this would depend on their having a capability to support significant numbers of NPCs that most of them severely lack (because of the degree of AI needed to control the little dears). Also, many designers see little point in having large numbers of pretend people in a virtual world that can boast several thousand real ones ³.

Nevertheless, I look forward to the day when I can visit a virtual city populated by tens of thousands of virtual players, each of whom has their own life to live and their own place in their virtual society. That would really be quite something.