Levels

In the development of virtual worlds, levels came first (as they also did in table-top gaming). Levels are the classic advancement system—easy to implement and to manage—and are based on the concept of goals and rewards. Characters undertake actions, for which they receive a payment in experience points; because the notion of experience is general enough to apply to pretty well any activity, this approach has wide applicability. When a character’s experience points reach a certain threshold, the player rises in (ability) level. This will typically involve things such as attribute boosts, skill boosts, resistance boosts, greater choices, and higher status (among NPCs and, often, PCs).

Looking at this analytically, boosting is implemented at times dictated by a step function. Why not use a more continuous approach? Instead of levels, raw experience points could be used. By using a finer grain for things such as attributes and NPC attitudes, a character who is one experience point below the threshold for level X wouldn’t have exactly the same stats as a character exactly on the threshold for level X-1. In pencil-and-paper games, where humans do (or used to do) the bookkeeping, this is reasonable—keeping separate track of these things is just too tedious. Computers, though, excel at tedious, so why the need for levels?

The answer is that levels provide goals. They give players something to shoot for, so that their actions have more purpose. They give players a sense that their achievements do have effects. Levels use a step function because players like to feel they have taken a step.

The time taken to reach a new goal ¹ must be appropriate, of course. If characters advance too quickly, levels effectively merge into a stream and offer no more bang than experience points. If levels are too far apart, players become disenchanted that their efforts rarely seem to get them anywhere. Note that although the experience points separating two fixed levels are invariant (at least within character classes), the time taken to acquire the necessary points will depend on two things—what the character does, and luck. Thus, characters do not level ² with monotonous regularity, but with some unpredictability. This leads to what is known as a variable ratio reinforcement schedule, which behavioral psychologists have shown to be the most effective there is for maintaining a high, constant rate of play ³—Las Vegas slot machines are designed this way to keep people pumping them full of money. The morality of using such an addictive system for virtual worlds is discussed in Chapter 8, “Coda: Ethical Considerations.”

Another reason for grouping together several rewards is that this enhances the overall experience; the bulk adds value. Damming a stream and then releasing it has more of an impact than would letting it run freely, whether the stream is of water or of presents.

The relationship between levels and experience points varies, depending on the virtual world. However, it’s almost always exponential rather than linear. MUD1 used a doubling scheme, whereby the points needed to rise from level X to level X +1 totaled the same as the points needed to get from level zero to level X ⁴. Most modern virtual worlds start off approximating a doubling regime, but gradually tend toward a more linear scale. Compare the examples ⁵ from Asheron’s Call shown in Table 5.1.

Table 5.1 Asheron’s Call Level System

A slowing curve enables more levels to be packed into the same range of points, which increases the rate of reinforcement for players of experienced characters. Even so, some virtual worlds allow characters to have so many points that they record scores using a floating-point representation. This kind of level inflation can get out of hand (in worlds without permanent character death, anyway), so there’s often a maximum level beyond which characters cannot proceed. Some virtual worlds allow remorting at this level, which means a character gets to keep its abilities but must start back at level zero as a different (sometimes more powerful) class ⁶. Other approaches are relative levels and ranking systems (“you are 386 th out of 4,034 characters”).

One of the problems with levels (for VWs which make use of them) is that content has to be available for characters of whatever experience. If one character needs a million points to go up a level, they’ll be doing different things to the other character who only needs a thousand ⁷. This means that characters which are of markedly different levels can rarely play together—the lower character will find high-end content too difficult and the higher character will find low-end content insignificant.

Another issue concerns where points come from. Some of the most intense experiences of players result in low overall gains—or even losses—of their characters’ points. If some monster beats you up, but you get healed then go back again and again until you beat the sucker, your character may be worse for it but you, as a player, may be better. Likewise, running around mindlessly collecting easy quest points is going to make your character improve, but it’ll do nothing but bore you as a person. Ideally, points should be awarded for things you find exciting, rather than as some kind of compensation for being fed up.

I’ve been describing levels here as a single-advancement abstraction of other progression measures. It’s possible to formalize this, with level changes being determined using a formula that accounts for a range of multiple-advancement schemes. Thus, a player may suspect from experience that they’re close to going up a level, but don’t know how much they need to improve their swimming skill or their dart-throwing skill to do so. This uncertainty makes a variable ratio reinforcement schedule even more powerful, and the morality of using it consequently even less clear.

Hybrid schemes are also being developed. Neocron ⁸ for example, has typed experience points: When your character is awarded experience points for doing something, the points go to a pool associated with one of five stats. When the pool fills, you go up a level in that stat only, and gain skill points that can be spent on skills related to that stat only. It’s a cross between a level system and a class system.

Designers are thus increasingly becoming aware that the benefits of levels can be used in non-traditional areas. In particular, applying a level system to individual skills can be very fruitful, assuming some provision is made for achiever-type characters to compare themselves against others (and even that may prove unnecessary). Skill systems are present even in many single-advancement, experience-based virtual worlds, and could eventually take over from them as the predominant measure of a character.

However, skill systems are not without their problems.