Advancement

Players advance in intangible ways, through the knowledge they gain and the friends they make. Characters also can develop intangibly to some degree, in that they exist partially in the minds of the players who encounter them. However, characters are primarily a tangible phenomenon: They are defined by code and data. The virtual world determines what they can and cannot do and how mobiles react to them. When a character “improves,” the improvement is measured in terms of tangible factors rather than intangible ones.

Characters don’t have to advance, of course; for non-game worlds, the aim is often for players to gain or hone skills, therefore the success or otherwise of a character is entirely dependent on what players learn and how they apply this knowledge. Still, though, it’s often the case that players will respond better if there is a reward in the form of some tangible improvement to their character, even if it’s of only metaphorical significance.

For those that do offer advancement, there are basically two approaches: single or multiple. In a single advancement system, one process completely dominates; in a multiple advancement system, characters can improve along several dimensions. At first glance, it looks like no contest: Why would you want single advancement when multiple advancement offers so much choice?

There are two reasons why. Firstly, single advancement is focused and unambiguous. Players know what they have to do, and can therefore set about doing it. In a multiple advancement system, players might have to make choices before being fully informed; they may therefore make mistakes. The second reason is that multiple advancement suggests multiple content, which is more expensive to produce and harder to balance.

As an example, consider a hypothetical virtual world set in Three Musketeers ¹ France. In a multiple advancement system, characters can acquire “military points,” “romance points,” “politics points,” and “fame points.” Thus, they can concentrate on acquiring points of a particular kind to advance their careers.

If more people want to pursue one career than there is content to support, new content must be added for it (and the content that already exists for other careers will be relatively underused). Players who start their characters off collecting military points only to find that the romance approach suits them better will feel that their time has been wasted. A single advancement system, where characters collect “social points” that are an abstraction of the other four, would allow characters to switch focus without suffering, and if content of one type was running low they could overflow into another until the first recovered.

Multiple advancement wins out when advancement involves different mechanisms. If military rank depended on campaign experience and political rank depended on electoral influence, the two could not be reconciled so easily.

Virtual worlds measure advancement in terms of advantageous changes to tangible data. In considering advancement, it therefore makes sense to begin by looking at what can be advanced.