Time

Time is the one dimension that players and characters both share, and therefore it is completely beholden to reality. This does not mean that it has to be identical to real time, but it does mean that it must directly map to it.

Most actions that take place in virtual worlds are pretty well instant (lag permitting). Because of the way that people often routinely regard complex series of actions as unitary commands, there may occasionally be commands that take time to execute (cooking a meal, for example). Also, naïve physics can sometimes call for the effects of a command to take place after the action has been executed (such as the explosion that follows from lighting a fuse). As we saw with fire, some commands can have potentially chaotic effects that last potentially indefinitely. Most commands, though, give an immediate response and do not propagate except in strictly prescribed ways (typically, by giving feedback to characters who can detect the effects of the command).

One consequence of this, which is felt particularly hard in nodal implementations of virtual worlds, is that travel is much faster than it “ought” to be. The time it takes to climb a staircase can be the time it takes to pass through a forest. Speed is measured in nodes per second, which, as nodes don’t necessarily conform to a fixed ground scale, makes a mockery of Newton’s laws of motion. Fortunately, players aren’t spooked by this; as long as travel between two locations that are conceptually “distant” takes longer than travel between two that are “near,” they’ll let it ride. It will be noticed, though.

In graphical virtual worlds, where speed can be measured using the traditional units of ground covered per second, travel isn’t so fast or it would look ridiculous. However, this degree of realism can brutally shrink a world. In the time it takes a character to jog across a “continent” in EverQuest, a real-world marathon runner could perhaps traverse Singapore. Think of the map of Norrath transposed onto the tip of Malaysia and suddenly it doesn’t seem all that huge.

Virtual worlds may be tied to real time, but they don’t have to use it. In some (particularly low-persistence ones), it’s always effectively the same time—the clocks may change, but there’s no night and day. Others take an accelerated, linear approach: DikuMUDs usually map 30 minutes of real time to 24 hours in the game world. A more player-friendly strategy is to do it non-linearly, so that time at night (when NPCs are asleep) passes quicker than time during the day (when there’s more content at large). The number of hours in a virtual day and the number of virtual days in a virtual week, month, or year may vary, but usually there’ll be 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute (if time divisions go that low). Whether or not years increment depends on the context: If a virtual world set in the 1920s ran at DikuMUD time, the whole decade wouldn’t last 11 real-world weeks. Seasons can have a gameplay use, but years rarely do (what, you want characters to get older?!). Virtual worlds with story arcs are a principled exception.

Some virtual worlds add seasonal content related to real-world time. MUD1 had a supply of festive mobiles and objects for Christmas, for example, and MUD2 added more for Easter, Halloween, April Fool’s Day, Bonfire Night (November 5 th—it’s a U.K. thing), and March (there’s a mad hare). Ultima Online introduced the idea into graphical worlds. Although in theory (and occasionally in practice) these are immersion-breaking, on the whole they’re popular with players as they give a sense of permanence; the very fact that a virtual world has seasonal content shows that it’s there for the long haul. Some meager fiction, such as having a “night of the dead” coinciding with real-world October 31 st, can provide any necessary cover. It only works for worlds that don’t have their own internal time, though. Celebrating Christmas in a world where it’s officially Spring is going to seem bizarre; similarly, if virtual Christmas trees appear fully decorated in real July there won’t be many players in the mood.

There are other issues of concern, to do with the religious nature of some of these ceremonies; these are discussed in Chapter 8.

Night and day: What’s the difference? High-permanence virtual worlds need to take a position on the subject; in any outdoor setting based on the real world, night and day are hard to ignore, but in general, one is going to be more fun for the players than the other. A strict implementation would have most NPCs asleep at night and a different set of monsters awake. This provides gameplay differences between the two that can make life more interesting for the players (but of course involves the creation of more content—expensive). As for the more physical differences, well the most obvious one is that it’s darker at night ¹. There are two ways to handle this: by plunging the virtual world into gameplay-changing darkness; by making the virtual world suggest darkness without actually being dark (for example, use a blue wash). Full darkness is probably going to be implemented anyway for expeditions underground, so there are no real practical incentives not to make night as dimly lit as in reality. The reason many virtual worlds go for a cosmetic night that looks more like dusk is because it’s less unfriendly for newbies that way (it’s either that or give them a soon-to-be-mislaid lantern). Graphical worlds also have issues concerning the ability of various video cards to display images with low light levels—what might easily be visible to some players could remain totally unseen by others.

The final point to make about time in virtual worlds concerns traveling through it. All characters do travel through it, of course, in the same direction and at a rate related to real time. They could, if content were available, all travel backward in time or forward at a faster rate (relative to real time). However, time travel for an individual character is not possible: One character can’t go back to yesterday because for the other characters it’s today ². Sealed time discontinuities are possible—you can put a character in a mock-up of yesterday and tell them it’s yesterday—but interaction is limited. If a character “goes back in time” and shuts a door, this can only have consequences for a player in “today” under exact, predefined conditions. Time travel on a global scale—that is, everyone in the virtual world together—is possible ³; on a local scale, though, it’s no more possible in the virtual world than it is the real one.