Population on Designing Virtual Worlds

Non-Player Characters

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

What are non-player characters for? They

Buy, sell, and make stuff.
Provide services.
Guard places.
Get killed for loot.
Dispense quests (or clues for other NPCs’ quests).
Supply background information (history, lore, cultural attitudes).
Do stuff for players.
Make the place look busy.

In buying, selling, and making stuff, they’re normally just fictional conveniences; they may as well be vending machines. Similarly, in providing services (training, repairs, healing spells, and so on), they are interface conceits: Designers want the players to be able to obtain the services in question, and NPCs are the mechanism that has evolved to dress up what’s happening so it fits in context. Their being player-friendly helps; they don’t look like vending machines.

Player Characters

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

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.

Economics

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

Economics is a huge subject of immense importance. In the real world, it touches on absolutely everything that people do. Daily it occupies some of the finest minds on the planet, and yet still the mechanisms by which it functions aren’t completely understood. Even top economists can’t agree on everything.

Is it any wonder that it scares the willies out of virtual world designers?

As part of their trade, the designers of virtual worlds must accumulate a wide range of knowledge covering many specialist subjects; some of these they’d perhaps rather avoid, but none of them are truly avoidable. Economics is one such specialist subject. Unless it’s your own specialist subject, you’re in bother.

Interference in Economies

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

How much should you interfere with how an economy “should” work to facilitate its smooth operation?

Let’s start with something relatively mundane. Players don’t like being ripped off; if they want to trade, should there be a secure trading system whereby goods can be exchanged with no danger that anyone will take the money and run? It’s not very immersive, but players are accustomed to the idea and will accept it without thinking (in the same way that they accept slow scene dissolves in movies as a signal for the passage of time). The easier it is to trade, the more likely players are to engage in trade.

Tips for a Successful Virtual Economy

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

I’ll wrap up this discussion of the economies of virtual worlds with a few tips to help you design one that works. Rather than merely repeat what I’ve already said (“Don’t use fixed prices, you idiot!”), I’ll concentrate on ideas that might not be immediately obvious. Not all of them apply to all virtual world economies, but hopefully they’ll spark a few ideas.

Have Stuff Wear Out

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

The normal problem in virtual worlds is inflation. The effects of this are alleviated somewhat if players have many ways to be separated from their cash. The easiest way to do this is to have stuff wear out so that replacements have to be bought. This hands money to NPC vendors or (if goods are bought from PCs) to NPC miners/farmers. If PCs do all the mining and farming too, it’s still of some use because it encourages trade; it’s best as a money sink, though. It helps keep scarce items scarce.

Charge for Services

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

Players don’t like it when you take money from them, but they don’t mind so much if they think they’re spending it. They are quite happy to pay for things that reduce the amount of work they have to do.

For example, consider teleportation. When a player wants to go from A to B, the cost of teleporting compared to the time cost of walking should really be an issue. Players ought to have to think about whether they need a service enough to pay through the nose for it. Naturally, they’ll complain that teleporting is “too expensive,” and they could well be right. With a pricing structure that rises and falls depending on how many people use a teleporter, though, a balance should be achieved.

Have Multiple Currencies

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

In the real world, there are many currencies. If a price is quoted in one currency and you want to pay in some other, you have to sell some of the latter currency to get some of the former. I can’t give a taxi driver in Paris dollars and I can’t give a taxi driver in New York euros ¹.

Exchange rates between currencies fluctuate. In theory, this happens because of trade: If a country manufactures goods that lots of other countries want, those countries will have to acquire the currency of the first country in order to pay for the goods, which will lead to a rise in the exchange rate in the first country’s favor. If a country needs more capital to invest in its industry and infrastructure, it can raise interest rates, thereby attracting investors who want a guaranteed return; this will also lead to an increase in the exchange rate.

Give Money Weight

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

This is a great tip for virtual worlds with a pre-Victorian era setting.

If you have 100,000 gold pieces, that’s a lot of gold. Post-1982 U.S. 1 cent coins (pennies) weigh 2.5g; 100,000 of them would weigh 250kg, or about 550lbs. Coin quality gold is about 2.5 times denser than electroplated zinc. Moving that kind of mass is not easy without cheating physics.

When coin has weight, the act of transporting it is non-trivial. Someone who is rich in one city is not so rich in another. A local economy can therefore flourish because players can’t easily transport enough coin there to undermine it. It leads to a more stable overall economy. Objects genuinely do have different values in different places, and a career as a merchant suddenly becomes a possibility. Although giving coin weight gets in the way of trade, it also makes trade more interesting; it gives it gameplay elements that it didn’t have before.

Multiple Uses

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

Elves draw magical power from the number of trees that exist within a certain range. Humans in the nearby town want wood for housing. This is conflict. Economies can drive conflicts. Conflicts can also drive economies. Dwarfs need elf skins to enchant their forges.

Conflict like this is good for gameplay (if not overdone), and having multiple uses for resources is a neat way to introduce it. The same technique can be used to enhance trade (by driving up volumes) and challenge monopolies (because the opposition to them will be greater).

Charge for Advancement

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

Players are so pleased when their character has gained enough experience for them to advance a level or skill that they are quite happy to pay virtual coin to seal it. Whether this is through “training” (which for some reason only NPCs seem able to provide) or the acquisition of some expensive item (mithril cross, ebony staff, engraved armor) is not the point: The point is to provide a money sink.

Charge for Abstraction

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

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.

Non-Player Players

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

I did mention when I began this section that although the main virtual worlds were populated by characters, NPCs, and monsters, there was a fourth possibility: nonplayer players. These are the customer service representatives, techies, designers, and other members of the live team who need access to the virtual world but don’t want to play it as regular players. They generally need supra-world powers in order to help people, to test the world, to fix problems, and so on. How should the game fiction account for this?