Scope

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

The nature of a virtual world’s design is determined by three factors:

Business. What will it cost? How will it be sold?
Technical. What can be implemented? How long will it take?
Gameplay. What will people do? How will they have fun?

These are general terms. “Business,” for example, doesn’t necessarily mean commerce: Even a free, stock, textual world will need an investment of time, and its players still have to come from somewhere.

Reset Strategy

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

Players consume content quicker than it can be produced ¹. To prevent a virtual world from becoming “played out,” therefore, some mechanism for reintroducing content must be installed—the reset strategy of the virtual world. There are two basic approaches: sudden and rolling.

In a sudden reset, the region to be reset (usually the entire virtual world) is closed down and its content reinitialized. This is a fairly quick procedure, but it can be very inconvenient for players who enter the virtual world at the wrong time or for players who are in the middle of doing something when the reset occurs. The sudden reset strategy is sometimes referred to as the Groundhog Day approach, because players relive the same day repeatedly, as in the movie Groundhog Day ².

World Design on Designing Virtual Worlds

Scope

Reset Strategy