Who Plays the Elder Game?

The content that occupies players in advanced states of immersion is known as the elder game ¹. It deals with four types of player, each with differing needs. In hero’s journey terms, these are those who are in the following states:

• Pre-apotheosis. Players whose characters have advanced quicker than they themselves have. This may be because the players have had too much help on the way, or they didn’t recognize/understand the atonement (that is, final achievement) process. These players will want more of the content that they were consuming before they reached the elder game, but which they have now exhausted.

• Apotheosis. The players for whom the elder game is primarily intended. They have succeeded in their goal, and are enjoying resting on their laurels prior to returning to the real world.

• Refusal of return. They don’t want to stop playing, and the live team usually doesn’t want them to go either. However, they’ve either used all the elder game content or are self-generating it.

• Post-crossing of the return threshold. These players can return happily to the virtual world at any level. They have nothing to prove, and can therefore play how and when they want for the sheer joy of it.

Let’s take these in order.

Looking back to Figure 3.5’s player development tracks, the main types of player in a pre-apotheosis state will be politicians and planners. Politics has long been promoted as one of the two great elder games for large-scale virtual worlds ², because it self-generates content: Players do things that impact one another, which leads to new courses of action with different impacts, indefinitely. Self-generated content is inexpensive and long-lasting. Evidence from textual worlds suggests that politics ³ is indeed a good elder game for players with conveyor-belt characters that traveled at the wrong speed; it’s also a useful delaying pursuit for players at the refusal to return step. It doesn’t really help those in apotheosis, though.

The other pre-apotheosis player type likely to have characters in advance of their degree of immersion are planners. These are the achiever types who went at it too mechanistically and matured their characters before they matured themselves. They’re still looking to achieve. For these players, remorting is probably the best solution, as it at least holds out the prospect that they’ll reach a sense of fulfillment at some point; however, the existence of remorting as a possibility may lead other players not to feel they have “finished” when perhaps before they might, therefore they’ll head off on another dispiriting achievement ladder that will do them no favors at all.

For some virtual worlds, the reason that planner-type achievers reach the elder game is because the virtual world itself has no formal indication that they have reached “the end.” In this situation, the human thing to do would be to add a recognition that the player has undergone a rite of initiation. The inhuman thing to do would be to add more content to keep the players achieving. Sadly, the latter is not uncommon, particularly in commercial virtual worlds.

Players who are in a state of apotheosis will be either hacker-type explorers or friends-type socializers. The former can usually be catered for by allowing building privileges (assuming that they didn’t have them already; if they did, building is part of “the game” rather than “the elder game,” so won’t be of much use here). Building may be only a limited option in a commercial virtual world, where real-world copyright laws could be enforced to devastating effect. Legal solutions are likely to be found, however, which will remedy this situation.

Friends-type socializers will want to sit around chatting to one another, and are therefore easy to deal with as long as they have something in-context to chat about. Historically, chat content has been generated by the snoop command, which allows one player to see what another player sees without that player’s knowledge. Again, although this works for hobbyist virtual worlds, there may be legal problems if it were tried in commercial ones; people value their privacy, even if they’ve signed an end-user agreement that says they don’t.

As mentioned earlier, politics works well for players who are refusing to return. It gives them something vaguely meaningful to do, which they can practice almost indefinitely (even when, as a party leader, they lose an election and are rejected by their party—at least it gives them a goal to reclaim what they’ve lost). Unlike the situation for politician-type socializers, it is unlikely that post-apotheosis players will actually enjoy what they are doing, however, and resentment could well build up. The end, when it comes, could be acrimonious.

Players who have crossed the threshold are the easiest to deal with as they require no new content; their elder game, if it can be called that, is to do whatever they like doing the most. Responses vary. At one extreme, they may never feel the need to enter the virtual world ever again; at the other, they might take up residence and spend their whole time exploring or helping newbies or politicking or whatever (hopefully not slaughtering newbies). Some may become members of the live team.