The Elder Game on Designing Virtual Worlds

Who Plays the Elder Game?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Player Interest and the Elder Game

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I mentioned in Chapter 3, while deriving a third dimension for the player interest graph, that MUD2’ s wizzes are griefers, politicians, networkers, or friends: They are not the world-oriented types of planners, opportunists, hackers, and scientists. Why is this? Shouldn’t they be hacker-type explorers or friends-type socializers?

MUD2 has rules about what wizzes can and cannot do. To prevent abuses of their (considerable) powers, they are not allowed to use them to play “normally” as a non-wiz (that is, a mortal). In other words, if a wiz wants to play in the mortal world as a mortal, they can’t use their special wiz abilities; they have to use a different, non-wiz character. In the discussion from which the original player types graph was derived, wizzes therefore considered what they did as a wiz to be separate from what they did as a mortal. Some of them spent most of their time as a wiz; some spent most of it as a mortal. The rules forbade them from doing achiever or explorer things as wizzes, which is why they didn’t show up in the analysis of what wizzes did. In fact, these players did all these activities, just not using their wiz personae ¹.

Player-Created Content

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Most content in virtual worlds is created by the development team (to the specifications of the designers). Some is created by the live team ¹. Some is created as a community statement because the players will it ². Some is created by the players themselves.

Players “add content” whenever they play by their in-context actions. Anything they do that affects the virtual world or its inhabitants is adding content. There’s always a positive effect to this, even if the action as a whole is detrimental to the virtual world: In the same way that any publicity is good publicity, it can be said that any content is good content (because it’s better than no content).

Power to the Player

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Chapter 1 stated that players can create content in a number of ways, which can usefully be categorized as being either in-context (you put a minotaur on retainer and hire a bunch of NPC peasants to construct your labyrinth) or out-of-context (you manifest a minotaur and a labyrinth from nothing). People with the ability to make out-of-context changes are “builders.” An analysis of who can build and how long their creations last determines who “owns” a virtual world.

The Content Conundrum

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Player-generated content is popular with those who design it, aspirational for those who see it being designed, inexpensive for developers, and it satisfies a perceived need (that is, a constant flow on new content to prevent a virtual world from becoming stale). Arrayed against it are concerns about quality, which, although legitimate, can to some extent be alleviated by the provision of design tools, documentation, testing facilities, and a person to act as content editor. Given the advantages, why aren’t more virtual worlds looking at this as an option?