The Whole Picture on Designing Virtual Worlds

Under- and Over-Design

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

Under-design is a frequent problem with virtual worlds that have been written from scratch. Developers spend so long creating and building the world that they forget to add any gameplay. There’s not a lot for players to do, but lots of things for them not to do it to. Alternatively, there is a lot to do but only to the same things, over and over again. Either way, there simply isn’t enough. The virtual world may be immense, beautiful, and finely crafted, but just a shell. What players want, there’s no way they can have: It’s like going on a shopping expedition and finding that all the shops are closed ¹.

Participatory Design

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

When a bunch of musicians get together and start jamming, they’re engaging in a form of participatory design. Everyone has ideas, which they offer up for approval to everyone else. Some ideas work, some don’t work, and others suggest better ideas. Computer programmers hacking together work the same way: Someone types, other people make suggestions, changes are made in the light of these suggestions, new suggestions are made. It’s an editing process undertaken (ideally) by members of a spiritual community ¹.

Testing a Design

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

Large-scale virtual worlds are designed before they are implemented ¹. After implementation, play-testing can be used to pick up the many design bugs (as well as programming bugs) that will have crept in. However, fixing them at this stage is expensive as it involves code changes (potentially quite large ones). The more flaws in a design that can be fixed before implementation, the better.

How, though, do you test a design when there’s no world to test it in?