Charge for Abstraction

Should player characters have to eat? If they do, should the food work its way through their digestive system or be beamed out of them at the last moment as seems to happen in Star Trek? If nature proceeds like it does in real life, are there consequences for not washing your hands afterward? Or is this all a level of detail too far?

Some textual virtual worlds have eating. Every so often, characters will feel hungry. If they eat, the hunger goes away; if they don’t, their attributes degrade increasingly until they do. Some foods are better at restoring attributes than others, but basically, eating remains a background maintenance task that adds authenticity but little gameplay.

Players deal with this by using clients that trigger on key phrases. When the “you are hungry” line arrives, the client automatically issues commands to remove a food item from the character’s backpack and eat it. The original message, the commands to address it and the messages confirming those commands are all stripped out. The player doesn’t know the maintenance has taken place, except that the backpack needs restocking with food occasionally.

If players routinely automate responses, why bother having the events that trigger the responses at all? They’re just hoops that players are being made to jump through. It may add realism, but the use of trigger code to make them transparent shows that it’s realism players would rather do without.

So players shouldn’t have to eat, then? In that case, what are all those NPCs doing working on the land? Only NPCs have to eat?

One solution is to make eating improve your character on a temporary basis. If you don’t eat, your stats stay low. This is actually pretty much the same as using eating to maintain your (higher) stats, with failure to eat incurring a penalty. However, when phrased so it sounds like it’s giving players something for performing an action (rather than taking something away for not performing it), it’s more acceptable. This is the Star Wars Galaxies approach.

Another solution is to abstract such activities out. Characters eat, perform their ablutions, and so on, only when the player is offline, in the same way that characters in movies go to the bathroom only when the camera is not on them (or when they’re about to be murdered). This allows players to get on with the serious business of having fun, without having to concern themselves with minutiae yet while remaining within the virtual world’s fiction.

If this abstraction is performed, the player can pay for it. In general, players are against their characters’ being taxed, but they can be persuaded to put up with something equivalent if it fits the fiction; a support fee to cover the incidentals that they run up while the player is offline is one such pseudo-tax. Incentives to increase payments—for example, by granting characters more status if they do—will often work. Characters without the means to pay could either suffer attribute/skill penalties or be allowed to subsist by explicit foraging, depending on the fiction of the virtual world.

The abstraction must be strictly adhered to, though: If characters eat while the player is logged in (perhaps when visiting a restaurant or taking part in a banquet), then their support fee for that period must drop accordingly. Characters who do buy their own food should ideally get a better deal than ones who rely on the abstraction, but this may be hard to organize in a free market economy.

This technique of charging for abstractions can be used for similar tiresome activities such as reloading ammunition and recharging batteries. In general, any unnecessary detail ¹ can be removed this way and its cost bundled into a support fee.