# Confounding Expectations

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

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There’s a gray area to this talk of what people learn from virtual worlds.

Immersion is driven by a virtual world’s similarity to Reality. It is founded on players’ implicit expectations. Some of those expectations concern virtual worlds themselves. Should these expectations be confirmed or frustrated? Do you, as a designer, give the players what they expect (for example, races) or what they don’t (for example, everyone’s human)? The issue is not the effect on immersion (it’s not all that great); rather, it’s the effects that confounding these expectations has on individuals.

If you give someone something that they are not expecting, but which is consistent with the way the virtual world operates, then they will either accept it or reject it. Either way, they’ll have to think about it; this is why challenging expectations is good. Obviously, if too many are challenged at the same time it could impact on immersion, but in general this isn’t going to happen.

Challenging expectations causes people to think about those expectations. Through such analyses, players can change as people. As I have explained, this is how things should be; the lessons that people learn come from abstractions of events, not from the events themselves. You don’t learn that killing is good, you learn how to trust your friends; you don’t learn that Zeus is all-powerful, you learn that being all-powerful means being all-responsible. This is how it should be.

Yet immersion subverts this mechanism. You accept the virtual world because of its similarity to the real one. Your implicit view of how the real world works informs your view of how the virtual world should work. Is it not possible that the reverse could at times be true? What you implicitly accept without thinking in the virtual world could transfer to what you implicitly accept in the real world? As I said earlier, obviously anything complicated would require conscious thought—I’m not suggesting that players are likely to be brainwashed like

this—but nevertheless there are smaller things that could have real-world consequences.

Example: In a virtual world, acceleration is instantaneous. You go from a standing start to running full speed without an intermediate period of speeding up. If someone who has been playing in a graphical virtual world for 10 hours gets into their car and drives off, could that be dangerous? This kind of low-level skill acquisition is easy to pick up—people who access text-based virtual worlds from a command-line interface will routinely find themselves typing the short forms of “look” or “inventory” at the command prompt.

When designers challenge player expectations at this kind of level (rather than at a more cerebral level), the players have to accept it or reject it. Rejection means stopping playing, so challenges aren’t ever going to be major; they do exist, though. For example, in a graphical world if you want to walk between characters who are physically blocking your way, the world may let you do it—even though in the real world you couldn’t. The reason this is so is because otherwise players could barricade an area with their own bodies; nevertheless, it challenges players’ notions of their own physicality in the virtual world. If they don’t like it, they’re not going to become immersed and will eventually leave; if they do like it, it becomes part of their implicit knowledge of the way the virtual world works. With deepening immersion, there is the risk that this world view could be taken back to Reality. It may not last there for long, but it could still be enough to cause an accident.

Whose fault is it when such lapses occur? The player, for putting themselves into such a situation in the first place, or the designer for challenging their expectations?

Above the level of immersion, there is still cause for concern. Designers can cause players to re-examine their attitudes, but

what happens if the players conclude that they should behave in a way that is bad either for themselves or for society? I argued earlier that players don’t learn from the facts of what they do but from abstractions of those facts, but what if what they learn is inappropriate for their real-world culture?

For example, a virtual world may have lax attitudes to sexuality. A player may, after many experimental encounters of virtual sex, decide that they are not attracted to members of the same sex and are therefore heterosexual. This is fair enough, but if as a result of their not enjoying their homosexual encounters they drew all kinds of false conclusions about homosexuals in general, this would not necessarily be regarded as a universally positive view to transfer into the real world. Is the virtual world’s designer in any way responsible for this unfortunate result? After all, if they had not promoted lax attitudes to sexuality, the player would not have experimented and would therefore not have drawn any conclusions at all (false or otherwise).

Here’s another example. Virtual world designers create an environment in which people can explore their own identity. They can find out who they “really are.” It could transpire that they “really are” someone deeply unpleasant, who has previously been subduing their urges behind some façade that they now feel comfortable about dropping. Are virtual worlds best left alone if they regularly produce individuals like this?

Designers can influence the ways in which people change in virtual worlds. When they do so, does this give them a responsibility for the outcome? Or are they merely providing trials that will allow players to find what was already there deep inside them anyway? If I challenge a player’s expectations, am I equipping them with the means by which to determine their own solution? Or am I guiding them in a direction that may be inappropriate.

I’d like to believe the former. I can lead a horse to water, but I can’t make it drink. Yet I can make it consider drinking. Is it my responsibility if it does drink? Or is it the horse’s?