Player Characters

Players are the best things and the worst things about virtual worlds. They’re contradictions.

Players want an immersive experience. They want a virtual world that looks and feels like how they expect it should look and feel. They want to share it with thousands of other people. They want fully integrated, working systems that support a rich, eclectic mix of activities in a balanced way. Only when they have it do they change their minds.

Players’ desires completely overwhelm a virtual world. You could have a smooth-running, functionally luxuriant virtual world of 50,000 NPCs that would collapse if 50 players entered it (think Aztecs and Conquistadors here). There’s a conflict between what players want and what has to be true for them to have it.

For example, they like a huge playing field. The early textual worlds often advertised themselves in terms of the number of rooms they had, the bigger being implicitly the better ¹. However, when it comes to moving around in such a virtual world, suddenly distance becomes an inconvenience. Players want to be able to get where they want to go quickly. Why should the first half an hour of a session involve moving through uninteresting territory to where the action is? They want teleportation, portals, high-tech transporters—anything, so long as it bypasses the points between start and destination.

So they want a big world, then they want to shrink it.

A common outcome of players’ insistence on such luxuries is that only player characters get to use them. Mobiles don’t. There may be a public-transport teleport gate in the middle of town, convenient for all amenities, but NPCs saunter right past. Those NPCs who want to go anywhere have to walk. The same applies to many other situations: player characters might get better after they’ve been killed, but monsters certainly don’t—they’re well and truly gone ².

This special treatment for players is not in itself necessarily bad. It only becomes bad when it subverts systems, such as the ecology or (especially) the economy. Here’s an example of what I mean.

In medieval times, wine was a drink for the peasants in France but for the nobility in Scotland. Why? Because grapes grow in France and they don’t grow in Scotland. French peasants harvested the grapes and made it into wine. They kept some for themselves and handed the rest over to the local feudal lord, who would retain some and sell the excess to merchants. Those merchants would transport the wine to the coast, put it on a ship, and dispatch it to (among other places) Scotland. There, it would be unloaded and sold to another merchant, who would trade it to the nobility because no one else could afford it. The cost of transporting the wine from France to Scotland is what made it so expensive there (well, that and the import duty levied by the Scottish monarch).

Now assume that the people in Scotland could have materialized in France, undertaken some transactions, and then rematerialized back in Scotland. What effect would this have had on the price of wine in Scotland?

It would have fallen, obviously. Scots could have bought the wine at source. In fact, they could have done better: They could have bought the grapes at source and then made their own wine. If everywhere is local to everywhere else, this is exactly what happens. Nowadays, transport is much less expensive (although taxes are just as high), so the price of wine in Scotland is comparable with that of the local product, whisky. If transport were free and immediate, the only reason to make wine in France would be because that’s where the winemakers wanted to make it.

Now imagine you’re back in medieval times and you have access to a teleporter. You can buy wine in France and instantly sell it in Scotland at a far lower price than regular merchants can while making a far greater profit. At a stroke, you have completely wrecked the economy as it stood.

This leaves designers with a problem. NPCs have to use the same economy that players do. With instantaneous travel, there’s no such thing as a local market: Prices for goods are the same everywhere. Therefore, the virtual economy should at least simulate the ability of NPCs to use teleporters. Yet, defiantly, players don’t want this. They want tin to be cheap near tin mines and expensive elsewhere, just like in the real world. They want silk to come from China, wood to come from Scandinavia, spices to come from India, gold to come from Central America: That’s what they learned at school and that’s how it should be. If diamonds the size of tennis balls can only be mined on the planet Eebagum, then they should cost less in the gem markets of Eebagum than back on Earth. It stands to reason. Thus, when a player teleports from Eebagum to Earth with a sack full of diamonds and sells the lot, the price shouldn’t drop. Then, a month or so later, they can wonder why their immense wealth won’t buy them anything from other players.

The subject of player perversion of virtual economies is a big one. However, it’s something designers really need to know about, so let’s make a start.