Players as People on Designing Virtual Worlds

Persona Issues

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

When people sign up to virtual worlds, they will have a number of preconceptions as to what they can expect to happen to their characters and what they can expect not to happen to them. This may come from publicity, from what friends have told them, or from a general sense of what “this kind” of product is like. If they know the virtual world is “about” combat, they can expect their character to kill things in it. If they don’t know initially, but in the character creation system discover that there is a wide range of combat options available, then they should read this as a warning that nevertheless there is combat in this world. If they don’t like the idea, they don’t have to play ¹.

Privacy

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

Anything you do in a virtual world can be logged or snooped. In commercial textual worlds, it probably will be; in graphical worlds, cover is rarely 100% at the moment but will become so eventually.

So, is this an invasion of privacy? No more than is a closed-circuit television system (CCTV) monitoring a shopping mall. Indeed, it’s probably less so, given that log files are only usually looked at when there’s been a complaint whereas CCTV cameras are watched the whole time (in theory, at least).

Addiction

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

Virtual world designers are creating something that they know is addictive. Addiction is a bad thing, because of its personal and social costs. At a moral level, are designers of virtual worlds little better than drug pushers?

The first person to question me on the ethics of making an intensely addictive experience available to unsuspecting members of the public was computer journalist Guy Kewney in the mid-1980s. His point was that even if I didn’t know MUD1 would be addictive when I started on it, I knew now and should therefore give some thought as to whether I should continue running it. This I did, and I concluded that although players might at times exhibit behaviors that could be considered symptomatic of addiction, it wasn’t that simple. Virtual worlds are places: You can’t be addicted to a virtual world any more

Mental Illness

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

This is more of a game management thing, but I thought I should mention it here because it does impact on designers.

Some players really are crazy. If you accept that the word “crazy” can be applied to an individual, then statistically some crazy people will play virtual worlds. A user base the size of EverQuest’s will include several bona fide psychopaths. That’s assuming that virtual worlds mirror the general population: It could be, for example, that the nature of these worlds is such that fewer crazy people play them. Alternatively, they could act as magnets. I suspect the latter

Religion

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

As I mentioned in Chapter 6, I’m an atheist. All religion looks like an aspect of anthropology to me. I see where religions come from, I see why they succeed and fail, I see why people follow them, and I see how they propagate. I also see why my making

any observations about religions is likely to be highly contentious no matter how impartial I aim to be, therefore I shall keep this short.