# Maintenance

LLMS index: [llms.txt](/dvw/en/llms.txt)

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You wake up, you visit the bathroom, you wash, you brush your teeth, you have breakfast.

You wake up because you went to sleep. You have to go to sleep because human (and most other animal) brains won’t work if you don’t.

You visit the bathroom because your body is powered by chemical reactions that generate waste products.

You wash and brush your teeth for cultural reasons. You don’t have to, although the chances are it’ll prolong your life considerably if you do. People used to die if they got an abscess on a tooth.

You have breakfast because you need fuel. You noticed you were breathing too?

This is an example of a maintenance schedule. It varies from person to person. Some people might include a bit of exercise, others might count their morning prayers as “maintenance for the soul.” The point is, it’s a routine. Except in special circumstances (for example, illness or vacation), it’s something you do daily; it’s not for fun, nor for gain, but to avoid the consequences of not doing it.

Should virtual bodies have maintenance routines like real ones? Characters have no need to sleep or eat or anything else unless designers say so. Why lock them into the same tyranny of routine that players must observe?

The only strong argument in favor is that of realism (that is, it helps immersion). Unfortunately, in this particular case it’s very powerful. Players don’t actually want to undertake a routine for their character, but they do need to know that their character has a routine, and that it’s being followed. It’s a general principle of virtual world design that if every player has to do exactly the same boring thing, none of them should have to do it. Thus, the solution suggested in Chapter 4, “World Design,” of abstracting the maintenance routine is a good one; furthermore, the fact that characters are charged for it means that players will notice, thereby reassuring them that these strongly ingrained but wholly irrelevant activities are taking place [^41].

There is a difference between abstracting and removing, though. A character who puts on make-up might want to wash it off right there and then; in this case, it’s not an act of general maintenance, but a normal action to achieve a specific purpose. Similarly, just because characters by default empty their bladders when their player is logged off, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be able to do it at other times: Urinating on a small campfire is as easy a way of putting it out as any other (at least for men) [^42]. If characters want to eat, drink, and sleep explicitly rather than behind the scenes, they shouldn’t necessarily be prohibited from doing so.

To summarize, then: Routine maintenance should always be abstracted, but the actions that it abstracts should also be available independently (cultural circumstances permitting).


[^41]: It can be removed at higher levels of experience; we can assume that demi- gods don’t need to bother with this kind of thing, for example.
[^42]: For fairly obvious reasons, this particular action is more acceptable to textual worlds than to graphical ones.