# Beyond the Virtual World

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

---

So, I want to bake a loaf of bread. I get the ingredients, I mix them up, I stick them in the oven, then—I wait? What if I’m not baking bread but am manufacturing swords? I get the metal together, heat it, beat it, rapidly cool it, heat it, beat it, rapidly cool it, heat it—for how long? Do I actually have to do this? My character has the skills, not me—why should I have to be present while it happens?

The sheer monotony of repeatedly clicking on the same icon (or, for really advanced systems, the same three icons) for long, long periods has led designers to look at ways to alleviate the boredom. The most promising one opens up other possibilities, too: offline action.

Although many players may find this hard to believe, they cannot spend 24 hours a day playing in their virtual world. There are real-world demands that have to be met, most notably sleep. Some of the time, players are disconnected from their characters. What do the characters do during this offline period?

Well, the answer is that they can do the stuff that the player didn’t want them to do while being played. Thus, the character can sleep, eat, visit the bathroom, and so on. For reasons of safety [^98] and confusion [^99], they will usually not be visibly present in the virtual world while they do this (that is, they’re not temporarily NPCs); however, they are there in the abstract [^100].

It seems obvious, therefore, that if players want their characters to do something mindlessly boring, this would be the time to do it. You set your character digging, you log off, go to school, come back half a day later, log back on and your character has deposited six truckloads of ore in your depot.

Virtual worlds always took some account of characters’ continued existence while their players are offline. MUD1, for example, would gradually heal characters’ wounds while no one was playing them. These weren’t actually offline activities, though; you didn’t really have a choice about what your character did while you weren’t there.

The first steps in that direction concerned trade. You hired an NPC to buy and sell stuff for you (usually the latter rather than the former) while you went away adventuring. The NPC remained in place when you finished your session, therefore when you next returned you might have found that someone had bought something from you or sold you the materials you wanted. There are some issues as to how price changes work in this situation, but in general it works well. Offline manufacture extends the same principle to the PC, rather than some NPC hireling, and simulates what the PC was doing rather than actually doing it (as it does with the NPC).

Skill learning fits this system well. Learning how to make a pot isn’t something that occurs the instant you hand over your training fee; to make sense, it ought to take time. By making it an offline occurrence, this passage of time can be suggested without drying the brains of the players. Furthermore, it makes them eager to come back next session to try out their new skills, and hey, it benefits adventurers, too!

There are other applications for offline action of which travel is perhaps the most interesting. Virtual worlds are large, but players don’t really get a feel for how large because of the (economy-wrecking) instant travel solutions that are available to them. No one wants to make players march their characters across a desert, but how can you convey a sense of remoteness if you let them press the magic button and materialize instantly? Well, offline action lets you do it. You set off walking, riding, flying, or whatever, then disconnect. When you reconnect the next day, there you are. If you were to reconnect prematurely, you would appear in the desert, your exact location interpolated from your starting position, destination, the elapsed time, and your mode of transport.

There are two ways to handle offline activities, whatever you use them for.

The first way is to give orders in advance. Just before you log off, you instruct the virtual world as to what your character will be doing while you’re away. Some of these tasks will take longer than others, but you can create a queue of orders so it doesn’t really matter. When you next log in, the character will have worked through some or all of the queue, and you can pick up from there. The advantages of this approach are that you can be informed (for example, by email or phone message) when a task is complete, and that you can set orders without using the virtual world’s client software (for example, via a standard web browser from work).

The second way is a more quantum mechanics approach. Your character accumulates activity time while you are offline, but you don’t have to decide how it’s spent until you log in and collapse the quantum wave. This means you can take into account events that have occurred while you were offline—for example, if gold has been discovered in them thar hills in the direction opposite to where you were intending to travel. This retroactive approach doesn’t allow for interrupts when actions are complete, but it’s handy for meeting up with friends who have wandered off since you last played.

There’s no reason why a virtual world couldn’t use both of these approaches, of course: When the action queue is empty, subsequent offline time is banked for when the player next logs in.

Offline actions aren’t a panacea for boring activities. In practice, there will usually be some limit to the amount of offline time that can be spent, if only to stop players from setting up programmed mules to act as craft factory cash cows. Some people object to it in principle, as it can break the bond between player and character (“How can I be in the virtual world and at work in the office at the same time?”). Nevertheless, this idea does have potential and the advantages seem to outweigh the disadvantages.


[^98]: In PvP or PD worlds.
[^99]: People trying to interact with them.
[^100]: How they reappear when the player starts a new session without shattering immersion is an issue that concerns all virtual worlds. For some genres, a fictional (but rarely convincing) explanation may be possible, but for most you just have to accept that it’s out of context. Characters blink into and out of existence and that’s all there is to it; tough luck if you weren’t expecting it.