Sensing the Virtual World
Traditionally, human beings have five senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. These are the means by which individuals can detect the world about them. Virtual worlds that have human or humanoid characters will usually want to account for these senses, with perhaps some additional ones for special cases (bat-like sonar, insect-like infravision, and so on).
Most virtual worlds, whether graphical or textual, emphasize vision. When a character enters a location, the player experiences what the character can see. They may also experience what their character can hear. Textual worlds also will make occasional reference to smells and tactile sensations (for example, heat from a fire), but taste only really comes into it when something is eaten or drunk.
In graphical worlds, the players’ senses double up as the characters’: Players actually see what their characters see 1 and actually hear what their characters hear (plus the annoying soundtrack). In textual worlds, players are told what their characters see, hear, smell, and feel (through the skin—not emotionally). The scene is constructed in the imagination of the players, which paradoxically can lead to a more vivid experience. Although most players of textual worlds will of course use their own sight to read what is sent to them, this does not have to be the case: There are numerous examples of blind players using speech synthesizers or non-blind friends to read the text aloud; graphical worlds are not conducive to this.
Although textual worlds can utilize more senses and deliver a more compelling experience, graphical worlds have three main advantages over them:
The graphical experience is more immediate: You don’t have to interpret what you see, you just see it.
Graphical images can display more information of a certain kind than can textual images. Scanning 50 faces for a friend is easier (for most people) than scanning a list of names 2.
Graphical worlds use multiple channels. You can hear while you see. Textual worlds are essentially linear: You’re told what you see before or after you’re told what you hear.
For newbies in particular, text is unappealing. The fact that you can take photographs of smells in textual worlds is less relevant than the fact that you can see where you’re going in graphical ones.
Sometimes, senses are impaired or ineffective. In real life, for example, you can’t see in total darkness. What happens in virtual worlds?
Well, there are a number of solutions. Here are the most common:
Suggest the impairment, but don’t enforce it. A graphical world may darken the screen, but not actually black it out.
Provide a trivially easy remedy. Give everyone a portable light source.
Make it temporary. If you enter a dark room from a light one, your eyes need to adjust to the dark before you can see; when you return, your eyes need to adjust to the light first. The process only takes a few seconds, but the wait can be scary. Popular in textual worlds.
Play it straight. Actually black out the screen. Don’t send update packets, either, so players can’t hack the client to make it think it’s full daylight. Only relent if they’re under attack.
Impairment is one thing, but what happens when one or more of your character’s senses isn’t working at all? What if, as a result of accident or magic, your character loses the ability to see or hear?
In graphical worlds, the answer is simply “It Does Not Happen.” It would be possible to continue playing without sound, but without vision there simply isn’t enough other sensory information available to compensate.
In textual worlds, it’s a different story. You can try things and get feedback. If you walk into a wall, you can be told there’s a wall in the way (rather than a tree or a door or a dragon). Things that make noises or have smells or give off heat can still be described. You can pick up things and know what they are by their shape. Losing a sense could even be essential for solving a puzzle—for example, if you’re blind, then the snake-hair ugly woman can’t turn you to stone.
The way to do this is to use dynamic descriptions. Most textural virtual worlds, it should be noted, use static descriptions and therefore also have problems implementing lost senses (generally they take out too much information—blind characters can’t hear either). Here’s an example to illustrate what I mean.
A description of an object might be “Ticking in a corner is an antique grandfather clock.” If a deaf character (or one wearing ear defenders) came into the room, they wouldn’t know it was ticking. Should they see the description of the clock or not? Well, strictly speaking, not. If it were a static description, though, either the whole description stays or the whole description goes, neither of which is satisfactory. Dynamic descriptions individualize the text depending on the character’s sensory abilities. Thus, a deaf character would see “Standing in a corner is an antique grandfather clock;” a blind character (or one wearing a blindfold) would hear “Ticking nearby is a grandfather clock.” If the designer doesn’t consider ticking to be enough to identify an object, it might just be “Something ticks nearby.”
Dynamic descriptions allow for changes due to a character’s skills or knowledge, too. In the preceding example, the use of the adjective “antique” may depend on whether a character is an historian or not, for example. If a character is running, they may notice less than if they’re walking; if they’re concentrating or searching, they may notice more. A virtual world can incorporate this information into a dynamic description appropriate to each character.
Although senses can work below their normal levels, they also can be implemented to work beyond them. Characters can be given the ability to see like they were looking through a telescope, or to hear heartbeats at a hundred paces, or to taste the recipe that was used to create a dish. Superhuman senses in a world that contains superhumans do make, er, sense. Although there is no problem with this for active senses (ones you have to decide to invoke—for example, touching something to discover how it feels), passive senses can be more problematic. If you can hear heartbeats at a hundred paces and there are fifty people within a hundred paces, that’s a lot of heartbeats. For this reason, even passive senses will usually be considered active beyond a certain threshold. Switch on your bionic ear when you want to hear how many guards there are at the other side of the door, then switch it off afterward.