Designing Virtual Worlds

(Continued) Polly’s Tale

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

Why won’t they role-play?

Everyone is in the same real-world room. Everyone can see each other in real life. They’re in MUD, but only shallowly; they’re still connected in Reality. Everything they do in the virtual world is subject to the same peer pressure as in the real one, because they still feel like they’re their real selves. They’re constrained.

Yet I’ve played D&D. I know that people can be connected in the real world and still role-play. MUD offers even more opportunity to experiment with identity—precisely what my friends seek. So, why won’t they step over the line?

Appearance

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Newbies tend to believe that the appearance of a virtual world is very important; oldbies are generally more concerned with other features.

Virtual worlds are typically characterized as being either text-based (textual) or graphics-based (graphical). The former use words to describe locations, objects, and other players, whereas the latter use pictures.

There is, however, quite a spectrum between the two extremes. To access a textual virtual world, a player needs some kind of software connection to it. This may be direct—for example, by running the game server from a console and typing at its prompts—or it may be indirect through use of a client. If a client is involved it may be dumb, intelligent, or custom.

Appearance

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

The first two questions that need to be answered for any virtual world are still character name and gender, but increasingly character appearance is becoming important.

In graphical virtual worlds, obviously it’s paramount (although even there it’s not mandatory—Lineage succeeds despite having thousands of characters that all look the same). In textual worlds, a character description is usually optional and can be added or changed at any time; a non-default description can often be thought of as a badge of non-newbiehood. Even some graphical virtual worlds allow players to create textual vignettes for their characters, to enhance role-playing.

Attributes

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

Attributes are the fundamental properties that define a character. Because they are tangible, they should properly only rate physical qualities, such as the character’s strength and manual dexterity. However, under the influence of table-top role-playing games they often include non-physical concepts, such as intelligence and wisdom. This just about makes sense to a hard role-player, who can work with “My character is stupid,” but it has its limits: “My character is a genius” would for most players entail pretending to be cleverer than they really are, which is not quite so simple. For most virtual worlds, though, these “mental attributes” are merely convenient labels: Intelligence is used primarily as a fiction to determine how much magic a character can use, and wisdom serves the same function for priestly types.

Beginnings

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

When the Internet hit the headlines in the mid-1990s, there was much talk about how important “community” was. Community meant retention: If you had community, people would keep coming back. I attended numerous conferences where “community” was hailed as if it were an amazing new discovery. Big name executives of games companies’ newly formed online divisions drummed in the idea that community was IMPORTANT. They didn’t know anything else about it, of course, but they knew it was IMPORTANT.

Churn, Sink, and Drift

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Churn is the rate at which people leave a virtual community. The greater the level of community, the lower the churn, because the stronger the bonds that hold the community together. Most churn occurs in a newbie’s early days: They play, decide they don’t like the virtual world, and leave. This cause of churn is called sink: Newbies show up, play a little, don’t like it, and sink without trace. They may flit into a few communities, but none of these gain enough of a hold. (Indeed, they may loosen them: The virtual world itself might be compelling but have thoroughly obnoxious players.)

Community Management

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Sooner or later, community management ¹ is going to become a social science in its own right if it isn’t one already. Virtual world designers create virtual worlds, but it’s the live team that keeps them going. Designers should therefore take this into account when they create worlds in the first place. Of course, as I’ve been mentioning throughout this book, designers do pay serious attention to the way that the virtual world will be run; unless they have live-team experience (which the best of them do, of course), their views may, however, be somewhat idealized. As a designer, ask yourself if you would know what to do if:

Computer Science

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

I re-read the previous paragraph immediately after having written four pages about computer science and virtual world design. I bit the bullet and cut them.

Many virtual world designers ¹ have a soft spot for computer science because their own backgrounds are in this area. However, the fact is that computer scientists in general are not tremendously interested in virtual worlds except when they’re working on them ², in which case they have a direct relationship with the designers anyway. Designers who are former programmers can call on their own experience, of course: Program design methodologies can certainly help in the process of virtual-world design, and systems analysis techniques are invaluable, too. The greatest benefit of computer science training to designers, however, is perhaps the understanding it gives of what can be programmed (and how long it will—or might—take).

Ethos

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What kind of a virtual world do you want?

To a large extent, it depends on the players. Where will they come from? What will their background be? What player types will dominate? Why will people eventually leave?

Players bring aspects of their real-world community—their culture—into the virtual world with them. Part of the point of virtual worlds lies in being able to pick and choose what you leave behind. Culture is that which is passed from generation to generation without being inherited; virtual worlds let you rethink what you’ve been taught at every level.

Formal or Informal?

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In small-population virtual worlds, everyone knows everyone else and there is no need for formal grouping commands. If you want to create a group for whatever purpose, you chat to prospective members and there you have it, a group.

This is an informal group. The main problem is finding someone willing to do the organizing, rather than the virtual world’s lack of support for it. Informal groups arise in all virtual worlds. In small-scale ones, they’re all you need; when more players are involved, some notion of a group as a tangible entity usually surfaces.

Geographical Consistency

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Throwing paint at a blank canvas does not create the geography of a virtual world. To be immersive, everything should be where it is for a reason. Much as a designer might relish the prospect of creating their planned Magic Shoppe that’s bigger inside than it is outside ¹, at this stage it’s only ever going to serve as a prototype to demonstrate the principles involved. Although not a bad thing in itself (actually, it’s quite a good thing—I usually recommend it to newbie developers), piecemeal development of individual structures is not the way to get a whole world. For that, you have to take a more top-down approach, through various levels of abstraction.

Geography

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It might surprise many designers to discover that geographers have an interest in virtual worlds. They do. They are interested in spaces, they regard cyberspace as a space, and virtual worlds are an exceptionally good example of the concept in use.

Note, there is a distinction ¹ between space and place. A space is an abstraction that groups objects of a particular type under a set of fixed rules; a place is a region (under adjacency rules) of some space. For example, matter operating under the laws of physics gives us the 3D space we call reality; Athens is a place in this space. Historical events operating under the laws of causality give us an “event space;” the French Revolution is a place in this space. Mathematicians are particularly fond of spaces, and will readily refer to name spaces, function spaces, and object spaces.

How Combat Works

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Taking a wide perspective, combat involves many activities: Magic-users cast spells, archers shoot arrows, clerics patch up the injured. Important and battle-winning that these may be, they are nevertheless mere adjuncts to the central conflict: Two individuals standing toe to toe, slugging it out with close-up weapons. The reason for this is simple: Hand-to-hand combat is more thrilling than ranged combat. The monsters are in your face. Yes, the wizard cranking up the spell that will nuke the bad guys is excited, but it’s an excitement borne by what’s going on at the front line: If the tanks aren’t excited by the fight, the wizard won’t be either.

Icons

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Many virtual worlds draw on iconic or mythical images to sustain their immersive depth. If a player comes across a “little old man” NPC, it’s a source of great disappointment if it turns out he really is just a little old man and isn’t veiling some immense power or wisdom. If they came across a unicorn, they would feel cheated if it wasn’t white (and if they came across a herd of them—say what?!). Although these iconic figures are stereotypical, therein lies their strength; they represent an idealized “knowledge” of a reality that when correctly applied to a virtual world can deliver immersion. So tokenized have these metaphors become that it can forcefully be argued they aren’t stereotypes at all, they’re shorthand for a parcel of meanings.

Laws of Nature

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The physics of virtual worlds is based on real-world physics. There is a reason for this.

If I push on a door, the door opens. If I push on a virtual door, the virtual door opens. I could just as easily make it that if I push on a virtual door, virtual birds fly out of a virtual mug. Unless the door was flagged as No Ordinary Door and the mug was flagged as No Ordinary Mug, this would confuse people. Why? Because human beings learn from an early age the cause-and-effect rules that govern the way reality works. In a virtual world, they are unable to stop themselves from applying these same rules except by an act of will. For virtual worlds therefore, anything that interferes with these rules acts as an out-of-context interrupt; anything that adheres to them implicitly supports the illusion that the virtual is real.

Life with a Backspace

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Starting a new character is like backspacing over your identity mistakes and retyping them a different way. It’s only possible in virtual worlds ¹.

Anonymity separates the real you from the virtual you. This has three effects:

People in the virtual world won’t prejudge you on superficialities.
Your real-world friends won’t judge you by your virtual-world actions.
Your virtual-world friends won’t judge you by your real-world actions.

Without anonymity, your virtual actions have real-world effects and vice versa. If no one knows you’re the U.S. president, you can be yourself; if they do, you’re back to being the U.S. president.

Literary Theory

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

Virtual worlds fall awkwardly between literary theory and dramatic theory, and are claimed by both.

Literature. Authors tell stories. Some stories have multiple authors. Some stories are made by the telling. Some stories are modified as they are told. Some stories are improvised as the author proceeds. Some stories are interactive with the reader. Some stories allow the reader to become the author.
Drama. Actors perform plays. Some plays have multiple dramatists. Some plays are scripted. Some plays are frameworks. Some plays are improvised by the actors. Some plays are interactive with the audience. Some plays allow the audience to become actors.

Maintenance

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

You wake up, you visit the bathroom, you wash, you brush your teeth, you have breakfast.

You wake up because you went to sleep. You have to go to sleep because human (and most other animal) brains won’t work if you don’t.

You visit the bathroom because your body is powered by chemical reactions that generate waste products.

You wash and brush your teeth for cultural reasons. You don’t have to, although the chances are it’ll prolong your life considerably if you do. People used to die if they got an abscess on a tooth.

Manufacture

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Here’s how a simple real-world manufacturing process works:

Raw materials are grown, dug from the ground, or captured. Examples: wheat, ore, cows.
The raw materials are refined to get rid of the useless bits. Examples: grain, copper, milk.
The refined materials are made into components or finished goods. Examples: bread, wire, cheese.
Components are combined with other components to make new components or finished goods. Examples: sandwiches, circuit boards, pizzas.

Missed Opportunities

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

OSI, which wrote Ultima Online, was part of Electronics Arts (EA). Given the positive effect of the Ultima name on sales, other brands from the EA stable were considered contenders for implementation as virtual worlds. Thus began the Privateer Online project. Raph Koster was installed as lead designer, with Rich Vogel as producer. Work was well advanced when the project was suddenly, bizarrely cancelled. Raph, Rich, and others were immediately snapped up by Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) to work on the Star Wars license they had recently acquired. SOE was the new name of Verant, a company spun off from 989 Studios to develop EverQuest. In other words, EA presented some of its best virtual world experts to one of its two major competitors. EA would shortly give most of its remaining experts to its other major competitor.

Modes

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

When you start up your web browser, what page does it point at? Surprisingly, for most people the answer is “whatever my ISP set it to when I installed its software.” Their first view of the World Wide Web every morning is what their ISP shows them.

Virtual worlds have many ways to let players customize their experiences. In a textual world, for example, some people want full room descriptions the whole time, and some want short ones the whole time. There are commands that let players choose for themselves which of these to go with. However, one option will be the default, and that’s the one that newbies will use. In MUD1, the first time you entered a room you saw its full description, and on later visits you saw the short version. This helped stop newbies from getting lost. Later, they would use exclusively verbose descriptions when making accurate maps and exclusively brief descriptions at all other times, but later is later. When they started, they got the default, and the default said, “Explore!”

Motivation

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A critical aesthetic is a system of ascribing meaning to individual examples of an art form. When formalized, it amounts to a theory for that art.

The “aesthetic” here isn’t in the general sense: It’s not a branch of philosophy concerned with matters such as “beauty” and “taste.” Rather, it’s to do with the rules and principles that underlie an art (in this case, virtual world creation). A virtual world may look beautiful and have a great visual aesthetic, yet suck as a world. The art director controls the look, but the designer controls the world. Designers who want a particular look hire art directors whose work exhibits that look. The look is part of the overall aesthetic. Introducing the notion of criticism allows for rationalization of the communicative aspects of this aesthetic.

Narrative

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The way that both film and computer games handle this is through narrative. Film is the more structured: The scenes in a screenplay link causally to tell a story (generally in a classic, three-act form). Syd Field’s famous analysis ¹ of script form puts act I at pages 1–30, act II at pages 30–90, and act III at pages 90–120. Around pages 10–15 will be an inciting incident that knocks the initially stable situation out of balance; around pages 25–27 will be a big event that gives the protagonist a goal; around page 60 will be a pinch point where the protagonist becomes fully committed; around pages 85–90 will be a crisis point where all seems lost; the resulting showdown lasts until about page 115, then the story wraps up with a realization section where the audience can see how events have grown the

Non-Player Characters

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

What are non-player characters for? They

Buy, sell, and make stuff.
Provide services.
Guard places.
Get killed for loot.
Dispense quests (or clues for other NPCs’ quests).
Supply background information (history, lore, cultural attitudes).
Do stuff for players.
Make the place look busy.

In buying, selling, and making stuff, they’re normally just fictional conveniences; they may as well be vending machines. Similarly, in providing services (training, repairs, healing spells, and so on), they are interface conceits: Designers want the players to be able to obtain the services in question, and NPCs are the mechanism that has evolved to dress up what’s happening so it fits in context. Their being player-friendly helps; they don’t look like vending machines.

Overall Architecture

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Actual architectures differ from developer to developer, but they can almost all be regarded as variations of a single generic approach that emphasizes reliability, scalability, and maintainability. Figure 2.1 illustrates this overall architecture.

Figure 2.1 Overall architecture.

Here’s how it works.

Central to the system is the user database. This is a powerful piece of software running on its own, fast machine with lots of storage. It contains records for all the players registered for the virtual world. Before anyone can access content, they must first log in; this means checking with the user database. Other parts of the complete system (not shown in Figure 2.1) for billing, customer service management, and patching also have access to the user database. It’s a very important, industrial-strength system, and is therefore usually bought in rather than programmed in-house.

Persona Issues

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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.

Player Rights

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Players do have rights. Players are real people, real people have rights ¹, therefore players have rights.

Characters, on the other hand, have no rights whatsoever.

For example, it makes sense to say that players have a right to exist, but no sense to say that characters share that right. Characters can—and do—get killed regularly in game-style virtual worlds. Characters don’t even have to have a human being controlling them.

When players become so immersed that they merge with their characters, they still have rights. Their characters (personae) now have rights too, but only in the sense that players do. Killing a persona does not kill a player; it might cause a player severe emotional distress, but any system embodying “the right not to be made very upset” would be wholly impractical (“You mean I can’t dump my girlfriend?”). Systematically persecuting a player through the vehicle of their persona, on the other hand, does border on oppression (if not exactly torture). It’s still the player that suffers, though, not the character. Just because someone puts your character on a rack, you can’t claim it’s “just like” you were put on the rack yourself. It isn’t.

Points of View

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Virtual worlds began as games. However, right from the beginning—MUD1—it was clear there was more to them than being mere games. Trying to convince people to take what they considered to be a “game” seriously was problematical, though. In academic circles, the only intellectually acceptable games were traditional ones, such as chess and checkers. A new game was not a worthwhile object of study. Playing games was a waste of computer resources.

Polly’s Tale

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

So it’s a weekend in 1980. I’m in a computing laboratory with 15 students, all of whom are playing my game, MUD. This being 1980, and this being a computing laboratory, and this being a weekend, everyone here is male. The female computer science undergraduates have better ways to occupy themselves (mainly concerning male noncomputer science undergraduates).

I look around at my friends and realize that chances are not one of us has ever had a girlfriend ¹, nor have we any prospect of ever finding one. We regard all the female students on our course as people rather than as girls, and we’d no sooner hit on one of them than we would on each other. We’re desperately short of social skills. The non-computing girls on campus are split between those who shy away in horror and those who laugh in our faces. It’s pointless even trying: We’re inexperienced and out-gunned.

Printed Works

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The single most important influence on virtual worlds from fiction is J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings ¹ trilogy. Although it would be of huge significance merely for having established the genre of High Fantasy, its ultimate worth lies in its depiction of an imagined world. It’s not the particular world it describes that is momentous (although Middle Earth is indeed classic source material for people writing new text-based games); rather, it’s that creating a fully realized, make-believe world was shown to be actually possible. Prior to The Lord of the Rings, worlds of such depth were practically unknown.

Scope

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The nature of a virtual world’s design is determined by three factors:

Business. What will it cost? How will it be sold?
Technical. What can be implemented? How long will it take?
Gameplay. What will people do? How will they have fun?

These are general terms. “Business,” for example, doesn’t necessarily mean commerce: Even a free, stock, textual world will need an investment of time, and its players still have to come from somewhere.

Social Dimensions

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

One of the earliest systems to use a primarily graphical interface was Habitat, which appeared in the mid-1980s. Although not strictly speaking a virtual world (it was essentially a graphical chat room), it nevertheless did have close similarities and is regarded as an important milestone in the development of graphical virtual worlds.

The system administrator ¹ of Habitat between 1986 and 1988 (during what would nowadays be called its beta-test phase) was F. Randall Farmer. In 1992, he wrote a paper describing some of his observations about the social dimensions of online communities ².

Some Definitions

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A computer implements virtual worlds (or network of computers) that simulate an environment. Some—but not all—the entities in this environment act under the direct control of individual people. Because several such people can affect the same environment simultaneously, the world is said to be shared or multi-user. The environment continues to exist and develop internally (at least to some degree) even when there are no people interacting with it; this means it is persistent.

The First Age: 1978–1985

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Virtual worlds are often called MUDs because MUD was the name of the first one to prosper. Although earlier games had been written that might today be described as virtual worlds, they were seeds that fell on stony ground. MUD, by contrast, grew to produce seeds of its own.

MUD was programmed in MACRO-10 assembler on a DecSystem-10 mainframe at Essex University, England, in the fall of 1978. Its author was a talented Computer Science undergraduate, Roy Trubshaw. Version I was a simple test program to establish the basic principles by which a shared world could be maintained. When it worked, Roy immediately started on version II, a text-based virtual world that would be instantly recognizable as such even today. It was also written in MACRO-10, a decision that led to its becoming increasingly unwieldy as more and more features were added. Because of this, in the fall of 1979 Roy made the decision to begin work on version III of the game. He split it in two: The game engine was written in BCPL (the fore-runner of C); the game world was written in a language of his own devising, MUDDL (Multi-User Dungeon Definition Language). The idea was that multiple worlds could be constructed in MUDDL but would run on the same, unmodified engine (which was effectively an interpreter).

The Job of the Critic

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

Films have critics, computer games have reviewers, but what do virtual worlds have? Virtual worlds have rant sites.

That’s not entirely fair; the main listings sites for textual worlds do carry player-written reviews that are often thoughtful and insightful (and not necessarily written by people with a vested interest in making prospective players either play or fail to play the world in question). For graphical worlds, though, with their much bigger player bases, rant sites rule.

The Nature of “Fun”

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Why do people play virtual worlds?

For non-entertainment worlds, the answer may be “because they were told to.” If participation is voluntary, though, the players must expect to get something out of their experience. This may be practical knowledge useful in the real world—playing a MOO to learn to program or to learn a foreign language. For worlds with no pedagogical imperative, though, why do people play?

Isn’t it obvious? To have fun!

The Team

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Design might be the most important cog in the machine that creates virtual worlds, but that isn’t to say the other components are unimportant. Some are absolutely critical: If a server crashes, for example, every minute it stays down will be paid for in cancelled accounts. Designers have to know about these things, so they can account for them in their virtual world design.

Designers should have not only a realistic idea of their own place in the system, but also a sound knowledge of the roles of the other people involved in the creation process. Composers don’t have to know how to play every instrument in an orchestra, but it’s essential that they know how all the instruments sound; designers can’t be expected to know how programmers or artists do what they do, but they must be aware of any limitations. If you want every wall of your virtual palace to have a stunning, original fresco on it, you can think again.

Under- and Over-Design

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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.

Unpleasantness

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Some things are found unpleasant by enough of the population that even though they accurately reflect reality it would cause dissent were they to be included. Slavery, for example, was a fact of human existence for millennia; even now, some countries allow bonded labor that is slavery in practice if not in law.

So, you’re designing a virtual world set in the swashbuckling Age of Piracy. Players take on the role of a buccaneer, sailing the Caribbean in search of treasure, glory, and infamy. Within a week of beginning your research, you (the designer) have come to the conclusion that slavery was such an important part of Caribbean trade and industry that were you to omit, it your economic model would be missing a third of its goods. Do you put it in, or leave it out?

Who Are These People and What Do They Want?

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

As mentioned in Chapter 1, “Introduction to Virtual Worlds,” the demographics of virtual worlds are important for two reasons:

If you know who likes your virtual world (the actual demographics), you can use this to decide where to look for newbies.
If you know who wants to like your virtual world (the target demographics), you can change the virtual world so as to appeal to those people.

Both of these are essentially marketing issues. In the former, the design group has the upper hand, delivering a product that the marketers have to sell; in the latter, the marketing group has the upper hand, selling a product that the designers have to deliver.

Who Plays the Elder Game?

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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.

) The Real as the Virtual (and Vice Versa

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Virtual worlds have their own communities and their own laws. Some things that are depicted in virtual worlds are legal in the context of that world, but would not be legal when practiced in the real world. For example, a virtual world set in the time of the British Raj may implement the Hindu custom of suttee, whereby widows threw themselves onto the funeral pyres of their recently deceased husbands. This would be allowed in the virtual world, but it’s been all but stamped out in the real world ¹.

A Story About a Tree

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A Story About a Tree ¹ is an eloquent rebuttal by Raph Koster of the suggestion that a virtual world is “just a game.” It concerns a player called Karyn.

In real life, Karyn was from Norway, but she found a virtual home in LegendMUD. She soon made friends, and would sometimes bring friends of her own along (although their English wasn’t always all that good, and she often had to translate). After a while, she set up a web site about LegendMUD, on which she posted a few pictures of herself (she was very photogenic; unsurprisingly, as she was a former Miss Norway).

Architecture

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

Architects think about spaces for reasons that differ from those of geographers. They are interested in the physical construction of objects within a space, yes, but also in the functional and aesthetic values they can project through such a construction.

In the real world, buildings are designed to fulfill some purpose. This purpose (and the proposed budget) provides the hard parameters within which architects operate. What about cyberspace, though? It’s clearly a space, but then so is the space of possible solutions to a crossword puzzle; architects would not be concerned with the latter, so why should they be concerned with the former?

Artificial Intelligence

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I also have a background in artificial intelligence (AI). I did my BSc in computer science but my Ph.D. was in AI. Why? Because AI is highly relevant to virtual worlds.

The reason AI is relevant is because of mobiles. Okay, well there are other reasons, too—object representation, pattern recognition, route-finding, parsing, and so on—but mobiles were why I went for it. Virtual worlds are places, but (except for heavy role-playing or educational worlds) they’re places that are better for having denizens. The virtual world designer has to create not only the environment, but also the occupants of that environment. This is where AI comes in.

Character Generation Methods

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It seems a simple task: Set the initial values for a fixed number of genders, races, classes, attributes, and skills. What is the best way to do it, though, so that it provides enough dilemmas to make players think about what they’re creating, yet can be completed quickly for those who just want to play?

There are many different ways to do it, a surprising number of which can be offered simultaneously. Let’s go through the main ones.

Circles

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Circles is the name given by then Ultima Online player Hedron to his 1998 ¹ description of how players advance through different states of maturity. Although it is not a particularly well-known approach, I shall describe it here because it makes some very insightful observations ².

Hedron’s vision is of virtual world players organized as concentric circles. They begin in the outer circles, and advance in their experience and attitudes through the inner circles; the analogy is (ultimately) the mandala of Buddhism, which adherents can use to symbolize conditions of spirituality that they desire to re-create through mental exercises.

Content Created by Players

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Back in Chapter 1, I described the two mechanisms by which players can add content: Within context and without context. In my discussion thus far, I’ve assumed that any content added by regular players within context, as with house building in Ultima Online. What are the implications of allowing them to add it

without context, as with arbitrary room construction in LambdaMOO?

A first observation is that allowing players to build out of context passes control of the critical aesthetic to those who consume it. This implies accessibility, removing the pretentiousness and snobbishness that comes from artistic elitism (which I’ve undoubtedly been guilty of demonstrating in this chapter). One player’s opinion is just as good as any other player’s opinion.

Enhanced Combat Systems

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

Actually, the MUD1-style approach does make some sense if, instead of stamina/health/ hit points, armor/shield is used. You bash at people until their armor comes to pieces, then the next blow hits their body and they’ve lost. Where characters’ injuries would heal with rest after a fight, “wounded” armor is repaired.

Of course, to be “realistic” some hits should possibly get through despite the armor, but even so they might not do fatal damage, yet fatigue can set in and…blah blah blah.

Film and Television

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

Most original fictional ideas appear in magazine, comic, or book form first, because these are far less expensive to produce than movies or TV series (or even stage plays). Many of the top-grossing movies, year after year, are based on stories or characters that first appeared in print.

Unsurprisingly, the influence of film and television on virtual worlds falls into the same categories as does that of books and comics:

Genre

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

Another categorization that is important to newbie players but less so to designers is genre ¹.

A newbie will look at a set of virtual worlds and say that this one is medieval Fantasy, this one is Cyberpunk Science Fiction, this one is dark vampire Horror, this one is Greek Mythology, this one is asexual Japanese Anime, this one is stylized Gangsters, and so on.

Again, though, from a design perspective most of the way a virtual world works is independent of genre. Sure, you’re not going to need magic in a world based on Venice in the 16 th century, and you’re not going to need firearms in a world where all the players take on the role of fishes. However, most of the basic functionality isn’t going to change a lot across genres.

Influencing Community Development

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

The first decision that designers must make in looking at their virtual world in terms of community is how large they want their community to be. The rule of thumb here is that beyond 250 members, a community of interest is going to fragment into sub-communities of sub-interests no matter what you do (and most fragment much sooner ¹). Most communities will be communities of interest and/or practice, with overlapping subcommunities of commitment. Very few spiritual communities will exist, and when they do they’ll be very small (just a handful of players).

Levels

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

In the development of virtual worlds, levels came first (as they also did in table-top gaming). Levels are the classic advancement system—easy to implement and to manage—and are based on the concept of goals and rewards. Characters undertake actions, for which they receive a payment in experience points; because the notion of experience is general enough to apply to pretty well any activity, this approach has wide applicability. When a character’s experience points reach a certain threshold, the player rises in (ability) level. This will typically involve things such as attribute boosts, skill boosts, resistance boosts, greater choices, and higher status (among NPCs and, often, PCs).

Levels of Community

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

Joe Newbie arrives at a virtual world. He’s not there alone—people are busy, they come and go, the whole place looks vibrant. He quickly picks up the basics of the user interface he’s using, and feels a little awkward. He’s new, he doesn’t know the ropes, he doesn’t want to make a fool of himself asking a dumb question. Yet he’s eager to participate, to let people know he’s there. What does he do?

Levels of Geographic Abstraction

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

Geographers have many different ways to look at this and other real worlds. They’re experts, after all. Most players of virtual worlds are not geographers, however, and they’re only going to notice more obvious errors. A degree of knowledge beyond that of the average player is always a good thing for a designer to have, of course, but as soon as players stop noticing what you’re doing you can stop. Immersion is about not busting players into reality; it isn’t about teaching them erosion patterns for sedimentary rocks ¹. From this point of view, the levels of abstraction listed in the previous section are sufficient to give a virtual world all the geographic consistency it needs. Let’s look at them in more detail.

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.

Player Characters

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

Players are the best things and the worst things about virtual worlds. They’re contradictions.

Players want an immersive experience. They want a virtual world that looks and feels like how they expect it should look and feel. They want to share it with thousands of other people. They want fully integrated, working systems that support a rich, eclectic mix of activities in a balanced way. Only when they have it do they change their minds.

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 Types

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

In 1989 and 1990, the senior players of MUD2 got into a debate lasting several months to answer the question, “What do people want out of a MUD?” At its conclusion, I undertook an analysis of their replies, and summarized their ideas of what constituted “fun” for them as falling into one of four categories:

Achievers. These people put the game-like aspect of the virtual world to the fore. They like doing things that achieve defined ¹ goals, thereby progressing their character through the world’s built-in ranking system.

Postscript

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

Did any of this help my friends?

To be honest, probably not—it was by then too late for most of them. It did help denerd those that followed, though.

It also set a lasting precedent: Virtual worlds are seen as acceptable shielding contexts. To this day, playing a character in a virtual world with a gender different from your own does not suggest anything about your sexuality—just your readiness to spread your wings and fly.

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).

Recipes

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

My house is within five miles of four large supermarkets. The bread in the first one is too doughy; the bread in the second is too crusty; the bread in the third is too soft; the bread in the fourth is perfect (a shame the rest of the stuff they sell is so rubbish). Bread has been manufactured for thousands of years, but even today bakers use different recipes.

To make crafting more palatable to non-socializers, some virtual worlds have introduced explorative or competitive elements to it. One favored technique is to have multiple recipes for the same basic object (or, commonly, spell—this can be applied to more than just manufacture), some of which will endow the resulting creation with different properties than others. A recipe typically consists of a set of ingredients; these will often have to be explicitly arranged in some (usually linear) sequence, but in some implementations the “use recipe” action will do it implicitly.

Role-Playing Game Theory

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

Role-playing gamers have theories of role-play. Actors have theories of role-play too, of course, but players of role-playing games (RPGs) do not consider these to be appropriate to their particular circumstances. Instead, they’ve developed their own theories, the origins of which lie in the discussions of role-playing that occur on the Usenet group rec.games.frp.advocacy. Most of this work was done in the context of human-moderated games, whether face-to-face or live action; nevertheless, much of it can be applied to virtual worlds (and to single-player computer role-playing games, come to that).

Server Architecture

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

Server clusters implement instances of the virtual world. There may be programmed differences between them (attacking other players might be allowed on one but not on another, for example), but these are generally minimal in form if not effect. The number of servers present in a cluster varies from implementation to implementation, but it’s usually around half a dozen or so. The number of clusters also varies, with more clusters being added as a product’s popularity increases (EverQuest hit 40 server clusters in 2000, averaging around 1,500 players simultaneously on each one at peak time).

Social Engineering

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

Are virtual worlds a force for good or for evil?

As I have already said, I strongly believe in the former. However, mere faith in my own (clearly biased) judgment is hardly justification. Computer games (along with television, film, and music) are routinely implicated when some disturbed teenager gets hold of a weapon and goes on a killing spree; virtual worlds are also starting to suffer from their perceived negative effects ¹. Do virtual worlds incite, reinforce, or train?

Some Questions

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

In developing a critical aesthetic for virtual worlds, we need to answer some difficult questions. I won’t pretend I answer any of them, but here they are anyway:

How is the “value” of the virtual world experience determined?
What do you need to understand when you have fun, and how do people with different understandings interact?
What rules apply to all virtual worlds, and what are their limitations?
What symbolism exists within the virtual world itself and within the way it is presented?

Survival

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

Don’t go to sleep on the ground if it’s covered in snow; if you do, you’ll get hypothermia and die. The same thing will happen if you swim in icy water. In a desert, if you don’t freeze to death at night you may bake to death during the day.

That’s in the real world. In virtual worlds, you will either suffer some minor, temporary skill or attribute degradation or you won’t notice any ill effects at all. Characters are generally immune to the environment.

Temporary or Permanent?

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

Sometimes, people want to group together for only a short period—a single session. A group of characters are hanging out at a bar, someone comes in and announces that there are wolves attacking the village, so everyone bands together to beat off the wolves. This would be a temporary group.

Groups that persist (in particular, that would continue to exist when all their members were logged off) are classified as being permanent. Even if the group has a definite aim and will cease to exist after a certain point (for example, a consortium to sell virtual pumpkins on Halloween), it counts as being permanent if it would survive as an entity were all its members to log off.

The Big Six

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

Surprisingly, there are only six categories of commands for virtual worlds, only half of which are in-context. Implement these and you have the makings of a basic virtual world. The big six are

Exit the virtual world (“quit”).
Get playing instructions (“help”).
Make a note (“bug”) ¹.
Communication (“tell,” “say,” “shout,” “pose,” and so on).
Create/destroy object (“chop wood”).
State change (movement, “get,” “drop,” everything else).

Of these, the last one is the most important from the point of view of the virtual world’s physics.

The Development Process

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

There are many steps to the development of a virtual world. For smaller worlds with fewer players and different functionality, some steps can be skipped or done in tandem with other steps. To highlight every aspect of the process, however, the description in this chapter is for a large, graphical world. Luckily, designers don’t need to know every detail of this—that’s the job of the producer—but they do need to have an idea of how it breaks down. Therefore, you’ll be relieved to learn that only an overview will be presented here, rather than a how-to guide. If you want to find out more (and to understand why it is that producers are paid twice as much as designers), consult Developing Online Games: An Insider’s Guide ¹ by Bridgette Patrovsky and Jessica Mulligan (for virtual worlds) or Game Architecture and Design ² by Andrew Rollings and Dave Morris (for games in general).

The Name Problem

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

In a virtual world, you are represented by, represent, or are an individual. The world fiction may pretend otherwise, for example, by allowing hive minds (for example, ant nests) or shared-mind couples (for example, Tweedledum and Tweedledee), but these are mere conceits. You are associated with a single, sentient game object: your character ¹. So that people can refer to your character in conversation and commands, that character must have a label; in other words, a name.

The Second Age: 1985–1989

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

The first such virtual worlds to appear were Neil Newell’s Shades, Ben Laurie’s Gods, and AMP ¹. They were followed shortly by Pip Cordrey, et al’s very active MirrorWorld. As these games were all derived from MUD, they became collectively referred to as “MUDs” or, occasionally, “MUGs” (Multi-User Games). The original MUD was dubbed MUD1 (even though it was in its third version) to disambiguate it from the class of MUDs. This marked the beginning of the second age of virtual worlds.

Theory and Practice

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

It should be clear by now that virtual worlds have a long and varied history—much longer and more varied than many of the people who play and design them realize. But so what?

It’s not entirely the case that only by understanding the past can people understand the future. Virtual worlds have been “invented” at least seven times (MUD1, Sceptre of Goth, Avatar, Island of Kesmai, Aradath, Monster, and Gemstone were all developed autonomously), and the designers of these games had no sense of any “past” in what they were doing. Originality is entirely possible without rehashing other people’s ideas.

To Be, or What to Be?

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

The celebration of identity is the fundamental, critical, absolutely core point of virtual worlds.

Yes, that is quite some assertion.

Except for those worlds that people play for purely practical reasons (such as virtual classrooms), everything that players do ultimately concerns the development of their own identity: who they are. It’s why achievers achieve, explorers explore, socializers socialize, and killers creep up from nowhere and batter you with a stick.

Unending or Circular?

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

In a single-player computer game, when a player makes a mistake it means a restart from their last save. In virtual worlds, this is impossible—a restart for one player means a restart for all of them. How, then, can a player learn from their mistakes? Do similar situations arise regularly? How about the same situation? Does everything repeat in time, or does the world evolve?

This is basically a change and persistence issue.

Virtual Reality

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

Read a selection of Science Fiction stories about virtual worlds, and you’ll soon discover that the following are inevitabilities:

True intelligence will emerge from the hideously complex machinations performed by the virtual world engine, with unnerving consequences for human morality.
Unscrupulous people will transfer their consciousnesses into hardware in order to live forever, muahahaha.
Virtual worlds will be experienced through virtual reality interfaces so good that the virtual will be indistinguishable from the real.

Why Story Arcs Don’t Work

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

Most narrative art forms are passive, in that the audience doesn’t participate directly in their creation. An author may be creating a novel to speak to a particular group of people, but can only estimate how they will respond, and thus how the novel should be changed as a result of this imagined response. In virtual worlds, the audience can in theory participate to the point of collaboration. Are they part of the work? Are they part of the production? Are they neither, or can they be both ¹?

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

An Analogy

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

The reason that virtual world designers find viewing the player base in terms of communities useful is four-fold.

Community ties rank among the most powerful reasons for players to stay with a virtual world. They generate intangible content, but can be aided in tangible ways.
The sheer number of players in some virtual worlds makes it impractical to consider players at a personal level. It’s easier to reach communities than individuals.

Anthropology

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

The discipline of science concerned with the study of other cultures is anthropology. With ever-dwindling numbers of unstudied cultures, it is unsurprising that anthropologists should take an interest whenever new cultures develop on their doorstep (as they have in virtual worlds). That virtual worlds have not been flooded with anthropologists, however, can perhaps be ascribed to three factors:

The traditional view that virtual worlds are games and therefore not worthy of serious study ¹.

Beyond Real-World Physics

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

Reality can cope with more detail than virtual worlds ever can because it has more resources. However, there are two cases where the scope of virtual world physics extends beyond what reality can offer.

The first of these is that the virtual world interacts physically with a meta-world (reality), whereas reality does not ¹. Players in the real world can become personae in the virtual world, therefore a virtual world can influence the real one through its players (and vice versa). The commands that best illustrate this are those concerned with communication. There are four types:

Beyond the Virtual World

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

So, I want to bake a loaf of bread. I get the ingredients, I mix them up, I stick them in the oven, then—I wait? What if I’m not baking bread but am manufacturing swords? I get the metal together, heat it, beat it, rapidly cool it, heat it, beat it, rapidly cool it, heat it—for how long? Do I actually have to do this? My character has the skills, not me—why should I have to be present while it happens?

Codebase

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

Related to the idea of genre is that of codebases. To explain how the two are connected requires a short introduction to some principles of virtual world server architecture.

Codebases came about because much of the work that needs to be done to create a virtual world can be re-used when creating other virtual worlds. How much, exactly, depends on the codebase. Codebases are mainly associated with the third age of virtual worlds, although the codebase principle was used as early as MUD1 and there are ongoing attempts to create similar solutions for graphical virtual worlds (Asheron’s Call was designed with this idea in mind ¹).

Confounding Expectations

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

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.

Drama Theory

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

There are two standard works that look at virtual worlds from the perspective of drama theory: Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre ¹ and Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck ².

Laurel’s big idea is that computers are a medium, rather than a tool. She sees drama as a conceptualizing theory that should be applied for designing engaging human/ computer activities, its advantages over narrative being its emphasis on enactment—people perform. She argues that by arranging the action (in any software engineering project) about the interface, the rest of the design falls into place. When the interface is the human imagination, the possibilities are limitless.

Dynamics

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

In the wild, what effect does increasing the number of wildebeests at a watering hole have on the number of lions in the vicinity? Lions eat wildebeests, so the more wildebeests there are, the greater the number of lions that will turn up looking for a meal. However, wildebeests flee en masse when they so much as sniff a lion. The more lions that show up, the fewer wildebeest will hang around waiting to be eaten. This will lead to a reduction in the number of lions, which will cause an increase in the number of wildebeests, and so on, until equilibrium is reached.

Economics

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

Economics is a huge subject of immense importance. In the real world, it touches on absolutely everything that people do. Daily it occupies some of the finest minds on the planet, and yet still the mechanisms by which it functions aren’t completely understood. Even top economists can’t agree on everything.

Is it any wonder that it scares the willies out of virtual world designers?

As part of their trade, the designers of virtual worlds must accumulate a wide range of knowledge covering many specialist subjects; some of these they’d perhaps rather avoid, but none of them are truly avoidable. Economics is one such specialist subject. Unless it’s your own specialist subject, you’re in bother.

Education

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

I had 26 AI papers I would, given a free rein, have liked to have discussed here. I have 37 such education papers. Yes, I have a background in teaching, too.

Computer games and education have an uneasy relationship. Computer games are fun, education isn’t. Educationalists figure that by marrying the two, education can be made fun; unfortunately, all too often computer games are made unfun instead. It is this precedent that puts off many game-style virtual world designers from looking at educationalist virtual worlds. This is something of a shame, because there is a lot of very interesting work going on in the area. Books could be written about virtual worlds in education; indeed, books have been written about them ¹.

Extensibility

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

Virtual worlds are designed such that they can be extended over time.

Why? To add content, to correct imbalances, to allow for more simultaneous players—there are lots of reasons.

Who extends the world? The live team.

Who created the world? The dev team.

Is the dev team a subset of the live team? At some point, the answer has to be “no.”

For large-scale, graphical virtual worlds, the answer is usually “no” immediately, because the live team is a separate entity from the dev team. Even for small-scale worlds, or those for which the live team is built from the dev team, the original designers aren’t going to be around indefinitely. Students who create virtual worlds eventually leave college; professional designers who create successful worlds are offered new opportunities ¹; people move, their circumstances change: Ultimately, no one lives forever.

Facets

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

The most extensive study of the player base for any individual virtual world is Nick Yee’s The Norrathian Scrolls ¹. This important survey is famed for both its extensiveness and its statistical rigor. It considers the real-world and in-game demographics for EverQuest, and correlates the two. For example, it provided concrete evidence that (on the whole) male players tend more toward achievement than female players and that (on the whole) female players tended more toward socializing. Its scope also considered other issues of use to academic researchers (for example virtual gender-bending).

Flat or Hierarchical?

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

When all members of a group have the same powers as one another, that group has a fiat organization; if some members have more powers than others, it is hierarchical.

Most formal groups are at least nominally hierarchical, as they usually have a designated leader who (minimally) can expel individual members but can’t be expelled by them. In practice, though, there is a big gulf between this shallow tree structure and a full-blooded hierarchy with multiple levels, promotion, and demotion between levels, and increased powers the higher up the hierarchy you go. This degree of structure is almost always only present in formal groups, and aspects of it may be supported by the underlying code. For example, if the group has money and can own things, there may be provision for “treasury powers,” allowing a designated individual to determine who is allowed to spend the money and within what limits (that is, give a budget).

Hands On or Hands Off?

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

Intangible content in virtual worlds will arise naturally through the interactions of players. Designers can and should assist these interactions, by providing tangible means of support and encouragement. How far should they go, though? In particular, should they be proactive to the extent that they provide for live team “leader” players to catalyze these interactions?

In traditional tabletop role-playing games, the referee not only designs the game world but can lead the players through it. Players perceive a highly detailed world because the referee can resolve everything they do, to whatever depth. Referees don’t have to think up everything in advance; they can create some of it in response to the actions that players take.

Identity and Identification

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

Players play virtual worlds in order to be themselves.

Well, perhaps not quite all of them do, but it’s true of those who play for fun. Even in game worlds, some people will be there for specialist reasons (play-testing, customer service, spying from some competing game); none of these individuals would necessarily have any inclination to become immersed, and those that do would be professional about it. There will also be a few people who are in the process of “getting” what a virtual world is about; these will mainly be insufficiently immersed newbies, but occasionally there are individuals who never “get” what virtual worlds are about but play nevertheless (generally, to the irritation of everyone else). Most of the players will be there because of the freedom to be themselves that the virtual world offers, though.

Image

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

Traditionally, virtual worlds make a distinction between stats (short for “statistics”) and knowledge. Stats are what characters have (strength, dexterity, magic points, and so on); knowledge is what players have (how to bring down a dragon, the route to the citadel, that player B is an idiot, and so on). The virtual world knows everything about stats and nothing about knowledge; for this reason, the terms tangibles and intangibles are used when referring to attributes of characters ¹ as opposed to attributes of players. A player’s knowledge of tangibles is itself intangible, of course.

Load Balancing

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

Fortunately, the arcane subject of load balancing is not something with which designers need concern themselves directly. However, they do need to be aware of the consequences of whatever solution is adopted by the technical experts, especially because they are likely to be consulted on the matter.

Ideally, a virtual world would run on a single, very powerful computer. For textual worlds, this is already the case ¹. Graphical worlds may go the same way ², but for the moment there are still plenty of things on which newly available computational resources could be spent at the server side:

My Take on All This

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

Ideally, designers should create their world in such a way that they never need to add new content. In practice, this can never be. Nevertheless, new content should only be added to rectify problems in the way that the world works—that is, bug-fixing, balancing, and functional enhancing. Designers should not look to add or change content—even for artistic reasons—if it is not necessary ¹. All other content should be emergent from player activities. This means you need a virtual world with enough depth and breadth that players can, through the effects of their own actions, create content for themselves, and for others. The real world does it, so why can’t we? Players should have no access to out-of-context content creation tools. Whether they

On Being Others

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

I told Polly’s tale for three reasons:

To illustrate the importance of identity exploration in virtual worlds, and the emptiness of a world without it.
To demonstrate how something that many designers take for granted as part and parcel of virtual worlds has a real-world beginning.
To counter the popular notion among some researchers that MUD1 was written by a couple of one-dimensional hackers whose only aim was to provide a medium for adolescent males to live out fantasies of bloodthirsty violence ¹.

Passive Censorship

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

Censorship is generally active: You have a design that includes an element that you want, but you decide to take it out. If you did nothing, there would be no censorship. However, on occasion it can be passive: Information comes to light that is not in the public domain, and by doing nothing you are keeping it there. This amounts to censorship by inaction.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

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).

Pre-Production

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

Pre-production can last as long as six months. The aim is to do all the concept evaluation and project planning necessary to reduce risk in the later stages of development. It’s undertaken by members of the core team, in close consultation with one another. In many ways, it’s the most exciting part of the project, but it’s usually done under time pressure with inadequate resources available, which rather dulls the edge. In particular, a number of important deliverables will have been prepared by the end, all of which will almost certainly have needed more work on them than they actually received.

Problems with Combat

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

There are many social problems with combat, which I shall come to shortly. First, though, I’ll briefly address some purely practical concerns.

Equalizer weapons. Anyone who can flip off a safety catch and pull a trigger can kill someone else. Highly trained individuals have a better chance of success, but even complete novices—children playing with daddy’s pistol—are in with a good chance. Equalizer weapons brook no defense except a physical barrier (a good shot is no better at avoiding bullets than is a poor shot) and the damage they do tends heavily towards the disabling and destructive levels. Unless a convincing fiction for why this isn’t so can be produced ¹, equalizer weapons take a lot of the fun out of (combat-oriented) virtual worlds.

Random

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

The easiest method to create a character is at random. The server ¹ rolls digital dice to determine all values.

This is fast, and it may produce interesting character ideas that the player had not considered, but some characters will be measurably better than others (depending on how the dice fell). A modified version uses a balancing scheme, whereby each attribute, skill, or whatever is allocated a points rating. Random values can then be adjusted upwards and downwards so that the sum total of points is the same for all new characters but their distribution won’t be. This modified system has the advantage that it can be done on the client, with the server merely sanity-checking the results.

Role-Playing Games

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Role-playing games (RPGs) have always had an important influence on virtual worlds.

Role-playing is basically acting, and therefore has its roots in ancient history. It has many uses beyond theatrical expression (for example in psychology, education, and training), but it wasn’t until the 1973 arrival of E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson’s Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) ¹ that the concept of role-playing games finally crystallized. Dungeons & Dragons was a fusion of traditional tabletop wargames and interactive storytelling, in which one player (the referee, later to be known as the Dungeon Master/Mistress (DM) or Games Master/Mistress (GM)) designed an imaginary world into which a number of players would go. The referee would describe what the players could see, hear, feel, and so on, and the players would explain what they (or, more correctly, their characters) would do. The referee would then roll a few dice to determine the consequences of these actions in the context of the imaginary world, which would in turn cause the players to try new actions, and so on. Virtual worlds are very close to tabletop RPGs except they have computerized referees.

Sensing the Virtual World

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Traditionally, human beings have five senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. These are the means by which individuals can detect the world about them. Virtual worlds that have human or humanoid characters will usually want to account for these senses, with perhaps some additional ones for special cases (bat-like sonar, insect-like infravision, and so on).

Most virtual worlds, whether graphical or textual, emphasize vision. When a character enters a location, the player experiences what the character can see. They may also experience what their character can hear. Textual worlds also will make occasional reference to smells and tactile sensations (for example, heat from a fire), but taste only really comes into it when something is eaten or drunk.

Skills

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

In virtual worlds, skills are tangible representations of the abilities that characters have (supposedly) learned.

In real life, a skill is a related series of actions that a person has internalized to the extent that they can apply it “without thinking;” skills are either innate or learned through practice. In virtual worlds, the notion of what a skill is remains the same, but skill acquisition is often only tenuously linked to “practice makes perfect.” In particular, some virtual worlds allow characters to improve skills when they go up a level, irrespective of whether the skills they choose to improve are ones they’ve actually used.

Template Theories

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It’s easier to create something new by beginning with something old than it is to start from nothing. In developing a critical aesthetic for virtual worlds, it makes sense to look at existing theories for related art forms and see what light they can shed. It’s unlikely that they’ll fit very closely, but nevertheless they could provide a framework on which to build. Perhaps the symbolism used in virtual worlds is gifted to us already through that of its nearest relatives?

Terrain

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Terrain is what geography is made of. It also has levels of abstraction, matching the needs of the thematic levels. Someone designing a region might decide to place a forest; someone designing an area might decide to place a wood; someone designing a wood might decide to place a tree. Terrain is the paint that depicts the image a designer wants to convey.

The different types of terrain that are available to a virtual world depend on that world, of course. Swampland isn’t necessary for a virtual world set entirely indoors, for example. Tempting though it is to go straight to an atlas and look at the symbols it uses, there are more scientific ways of determining terrain that allow for more realistic tangible effects. For a generic, outdoors, continent-scale kind of virtual world, the following dimensions are likely to be more useful:

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?

The Koster-Vogel Cube

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At the 2001 Game Developers Conference, Raph Koster and Rich Vogel introduced ¹ their well-received storytelling cube as a model for describing the various ways by which players can experience virtual world event sequences as narratives. The following year, they explored it in more detail ². Their model classifies the elements that make up narratives along three binary dimensions:

Control. Is the story told by the designer, or does it arise from player interactions?

The Third Age: 1989–1995

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AberMUD spread across university computer science departments like a virus. Identical copies (or incarnations) appeared on thousands of Unix machines. It went through four versions in rapid succession, spawning several imitators. The three most important of these were TinyMUD, LPMUD, and DikuMUD.

TinyMUD, by Jim Aspnes at Carnegie Mellon University, arrived in 1989. It had two main ancestors: AberMUD, and a VAX VMS game called Monster that had been released a year earlier. Monster (by Rich Skrenta at Northwestern University) was unusual in that it was written independently of the general MUD1 hierarchy. Its main innovation was the facility to create elements of the virtual world from within the world itself. This was something that had been removed from MUD1 in the switch from version II to version III.

Ways to Promote Community

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Having ways to shape communities is all well and good, but you need to have communities in the first place. Communities will form whether or not you want them to, of course, but except in very particular cases (for example, psychological or anthropological studies) you should do everything you can to promote them. Note that’s “promote,” not “force.”

Here are some suggestions.

Whither Innovation?

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

The design of virtual worlds proceeds by a process of evolution rather than revolution. New virtual worlds usually draw heavily from one or more “parent” worlds, even to the extent that it’s possible to map out an entire family tree for all the various codebases ¹. This being so, it is becoming increasingly important that designers of new virtual worlds become aware of innovations arising in other branches of the tree. Not only does this ensure that the best ideas spread, but there is less danger of standards problems arising from the same concept being implemented differently in different virtual worlds.

Age

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How long does a virtual world typically last? What stops it from lasting longer?

To give you some idea of the longevity involved here, Table 1.2 lists examples of the oldest incarnations in existence of free, text-based virtual worlds.

Textual worlds have the potential to last indefinitely. This isn’t simply because the graphics never date and the bandwidth requirements are low (although those are factors); rather, it’s that they can remain compelling for long enough that people want to stay. Those that fail to attract a critical mass of players tend to die after a few months, but beyond that a virtual world can last for years so long as there is someone around willing to host and administrate it ¹.

Body Composition

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When a character picks up something, strangely this does not mean that the object teleports into their backpack. To make sense, they need to use their hand. Similarly, when they walk, their legs and arms move, when they look to one side their head moves, and when they’re fleeing in mindless panic every part of their body moves. The issues involved here extend beyond mere animation: If characters can move their hands, that implies they have hands to move.

Communication

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The more that people communicate, the more they will develop relationships. The more relationships that develop, the stronger the community becomes. Remember that it’s individual friendships that are important: Community is just an emergent consequence of these friendships.

Provide channels. Let people receive messages by their names, their locations, their character’s properties, the groups they’re members of, by topic—the more the merrier. Let them do it using real-time typing, through message boards, through email—however you can. Let them opt out of channels that don’t interest them so they can focus on the ones that do. If none of this fits with the virtual world fiction, change the fiction. It’s that important.

Computer-Mediated Communication

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Communications studies is a broad field, concerning the ways by which human beings convey information and emotion to one another. Inter-disciplinary almost by definition, it attracts mainly sociologists, sociolinguists and psychologists. Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is a subfield that addresses human communication through the medium of the computer. It specializes in email, Instant Messenger, Usenet, IRC, and virtual worlds (particularly textual ones, and very particularly MOOs). To CMC specialists, virtual worlds are simply one of many forms of CMC: They are important because they are media, not because they are places.

General Observations

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

I noted in Chapter 1 that many players of virtual worlds don’t consider themselves to be gamers, even if the virtual world is billed as a game. What’s more, they’re correct—they aren’t gamers.

People sign up to large-scale commercial virtual worlds because these are advertised as games, but once there they don’t necessarily want to play them as games; ironically, games have become the new “noble content.” Players have different ways of amusing themselves. Applying the player types categorizations:

Hardwired or Softwired?

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

A hardwired group is one that is programmed directly into the virtual world. A s oftwired group is one that is created by the players. All hardwired groups are permanent, and therefore they can be thought of as a subset of permanent groups. Similarly, although it’s possible to conceive of hardwired informal groups (built around predefined, labeled communication channels in the style of CB radio), in most virtual worlds that have them all hardwired groups also are formal; they can therefore be thought of as a subset of formal groups, too.

Interference in Economies

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

How much should you interfere with how an economy “should” work to facilitate its smooth operation?

Let’s start with something relatively mundane. Players don’t like being ripped off; if they want to trade, should there be a secure trading system whereby goods can be exchanged with no danger that anyone will take the money and run? It’s not very immersive, but players are accustomed to the idea and will accept it without thinking (in the same way that they accept slow scene dissolves in movies as a signal for the passage of time). The easier it is to trade, the more likely players are to engage in trade.

Law

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

Lawyers are almost all concerned only with real-life laws as they apply to virtual worlds. They are overwhelmingly not interested in the design of in-context legal systems for virtual worlds. Even so, for this reason alone virtual world designers should listen to what they have to say; there are also other reasons, however, that we shall come to shortly.

Virtual worlds raise several issues for real-world law with which legislators have yet to get to grips. These include

Levels of Immersion

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

One of Nick Yee’s facets is immersion. This is a concept with a long and distinguished history in role-playing contexts ¹, and it has been mentioned a number of times already in this book. So what, exactly, is it?

Fundamentally, immersion is the sense that a player has of being in a virtual world. The more immersive a virtual world, the greater its ability to immerse its players. Some virtual worlds (particularly non-game ones) deliberately aim for low immersion, so as not to distract from their purpose; most, however, aim to be as immersive as possible.

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

Movement

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Movement in virtual worlds is, strictly speaking, merely a specific form of object state transition. Because it’s the tool that players use to construct their cognitive map of the environment, however, it has enhanced significance—at least in the minds of players (which is what designers are designing for). The geography of virtual worlds must account for how players will build it in their heads, which depends not only on what they see but also on how they see it. Because virtual world geographies are too big to experience in a single event, movement heavily influences both.

Objects

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

The rule with objects in virtual worlds is integrate everything.

When a virtual world is implemented, the entities of which it is constructed are its objects. The relationships between these entities are their properties. Together, objects and properties comprise the tangible part of the virtual world, which the physics brings to life. It doesn’t have to be this way—you could in theory devise a system where objects are mere consequences of interactions between fundamental equations in the same way that numbers are. If you try that, good luck.

Opposition

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Conflict concerns opposition. Combat is the most obvious manifestation of this, but it occurs throughout virtual worlds. Two people wanting to get through the same turnstile at once are in conflict; two people aiming for the same job are in conflict; two merchants pitching to the same potential customers are in conflict. Combat may be one way to resolve this conflict, but others tend to work better.

In virtual worlds, conflict is typically categorized in terms of opposition: Who is in conflict with whom? There are three main possibilities:

Other Influences

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The design of virtual worlds is influenced by printed works, film, television, and role-playing games. Individual worlds may draw from other fields, too; for example, there are text MUDs set in console game worlds like that of Hironobu Sakaguchi’s Final Fantasy series, and there are scripting languages based on those used for military simulations. Anything requiring imagination can potentially be of value: These genuinely are “imaginary” worlds.

However, external factors are not the only ones at work here.

Other Things Happen

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Although players are the main source of the load on virtual worlds’ supporting hardware, they are not the only one. Things can happen whether or not players are present. Some of it is mechanistic: The virtual world’s sun rises and sets, its weather comes and goes, all irrespective of whether there are players around. For a highly detailed world, this could amount to considerable work (a breeze rustles individual leaves on a tree, one of which falls off to land in a stream that carries it lazily to a river and thence to the sea). Virtual worlds of this complexity are some way off at the moment, though.

Pick Points

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Starting from the modified random position, pick points allow players to tinker with the results. This saves players from re-rolling continuously until they get the result they want. They can reduce some values to gain pick points (equivalent to their rating) and spend them on raising other values. Sometimes, not all the pick points initially available will have been spent by the randomizing process, leaving a pool for players to draw from. This is better, because players don’t feel as if they have to harm their character before they improve it; however, it does mean that a “randomly flesh out” option should be available for players who don’t want to waste time messing around.

Power to the Player

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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.

Production

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The production phase ¹, which lasts between two and three years ² for a large, commercial virtual world, is when the bulk of the programming and data creation takes place. Code must be produced for the client, the server, and for tools. It all has to be done in order, according to a production schedule ³ set by the producer. Tools are usually written first, because other activities are dependent on them and because some of the code can usually be re-used for the server or client. Tools are required for things such as world generation, artificial intelligence (AI) scripting, and customer service support. It’s also a good idea to build some analysis tools, too, so that once the world is running it will be possible to determine what the players, the software, and the hardware are doing without having to ask.

Progression

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I mentioned earlier the main sequence that charts player type drift. This gets its name from the main sequence of star development used in cosmology ¹. Players typically start off testing the immediate bounds on their behavior (killer) then begin to acquire knowledge of their environment (explorer); following this, they apply their knowledge (achiever), in the course of which they forge bonds with other players; finally, they retire from this and spend their time chatting with their friends (socializer).

Signs and Symbols

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

So, let’s start with symbols.

When movies were first made, directors had to develop a language and their audience had to learn it: Real life doesn’t have jump cuts. When something happens in the way information is presented on a movie screen, which runs counter

to the way that human senses accept information in the real world, this signals an interrupt that the mind needs to interpret consciously. By codifying the interrupts so they are always used under the same circumstances, the brain can learn what they “mean.” This done, subsequent occurrences of the interrupt don’t register unless they subvert the code in some way.

Skill Organizations

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

The “skill levels” approach is an example of a linear skill progression. To acquire a specialized skill, you have to learn its parent (or prerequisite) skill first. Thus, you can’t learn, say, “diving,” unless you already know “swimming.”

A skill hierarchy takes this idea one step further and allows several specialized skills to be learned following the acquisition of a general skill. For example, having learned a “single-handed weapon” skill, a character may then learn “sword,” “axe,” or “club,” and from there further specialize into particular weapons (longsword, shortsword, rapier, cutlass, and so on).

Sociology

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Sociology is the study of the organization, functioning, and development of human societies. It is very closely related to anthropology; basically, sociologists and anthropologists got to pretty well the same place but came from different starting points. Indeed, an excellent way to annoy a sociologist or anthropologist is to ask what the difference is between the two disciplines. It essentially boils down to three things:

Sociologists study only industrial societies, whereas anthropologists concentrate on (but don’t restrict themselves to) pre-industrial societies.

The Fourth Age: 1995–1997

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

MUDs might very well have been called SOGs had things turned out differently.

Around the same time that Roy Trubshaw began work on what was to become MUD1, Alan Klietz wrote Sceptre of Goth on the CDC Cyber run by MECC (the Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium). The game (also known as Empire and The Phoenix) was based on an earlier MECC game called Milieu. It was developed completely independently; its mechanics owed more to Dungeons & Dragons than did MUD1’s, particularly in its use of character classes.

The Place of Narrative

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Virtual worlds are places, not stories. You can have a story about New York, or a story set in New York, and New York can have a history, but New York is not itself a story unless you stretch the definition of “story” so far that it loses all meaning ¹. The same applies to virtual worlds: Trying to impose a story on the inhabitants of a virtual world is as sensible as trying to impose a story on the inhabitants of New York. You can impose events, but not stories; people make their own stories.

The Role-Playing Paradox

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Experienced players will sometimes speak of “wearing” a character, like they might wear a mask. The freedom of revealing less of their outer selves can lead them to reveal more of their inner selves. They can, therefore, learn more about their inner selves, and change their character so it fits more comfortably. Ultimately, their inner and outer selves line up, and character becomes persona.

This is often described as role-playing. It is not. Role-playing is about assuming a role and maintaining that role. The role doesn’t change; if the character changes, it’s only for reasons that make sense for that character, not for the role-player.

Yourself

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

When all’s said and done, the ethics of a virtual world reflect those of its designer. If you don’t think about how to behave, about what’s right and wrong, about responsibility, about rights, then why should your players? If you think ethics are other people’s responsibility, so will your players. Your beliefs, your attitudes, your personality—they’re all reflected in your virtual world. You have to take responsibility, because (at least initially) you are the world.

Common Configurations

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Although there are many different ways that softwired groups can be set up, some tend to be more useful than others. Designers may therefore want to have easy-to-use templates for these in place, so that players don’t have to worry about setting flags that don’t interest them. As long as the basic models are all configurable, this is fine.

Common configurations are:

Fellowships. Temporary groups of characters that get together for a single session then go their separate ways.

Common Problems with Objects

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Given that virtual objects are, on the whole, intended to exhibit behaviors at the physics level that are consistent with reality, it might be expected that there are common problems that recur whenever some particular aspect or other of reality is considered. This is indeed the case: Some facets of reality are easy to implement and others are downright impossible. Many of these issues arise because what human beings think of as an “object” is actually just a conceptual entity. It works for naïve physics, but naïve physics doesn’t have to implement it.

Consequences

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Different locations have different risks associated with them. A PvP arena, for example, has a greater risk associated with it than a marketplace; a dragon’s lair comes with a greater risk than, raccoon’s.

Players like to know their risks in advance. They like to be able to tell by looking whether or not they can beat a potential foe in combat. Some virtual worlds helpfully color-code PCs and mobiles to make it easier to check them out. Although in real life you might not be able to tell a martial arts expert from anyone else merely by looking, in virtual worlds you often can. If there’s no fiction explaining why you might be able to do so, well, you still probably can.

Development Tracks

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The thing is, those sequences overlap. People can switch paths, if they have some moment of epiphany. Someone could go griefer to scientist (main sequence) to planner to hacker (explorer sequence). They could go opportunist to networker (minor sequence) to politician to friend (socializer sequence). They’ll tend to keep to whatever path they began on, but sometimes they decide to go a different way when they meet a fork in the road ¹. Writing the sequences out linearly gives Figure 3.5.

Dimensions

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External symbolism in virtual worlds can be explicit. You can create a virtual world where everyone is a dolphin trying to save the ocean from the evil oil companies that pollute the water ¹. This is not the kind of symbolism that I mean here, however. Rather, I’m concerned with the implicit kind, which are manifestations of the different views that designers hold regarding what is important about virtual worlds.

Debate—both verbally and through the action of design—takes place along several dimensions at once. Formally, these are

Filtered Communication

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

This isn’t as important as communication itself, but by allowing communication itself to be a topic of communication, further communication can be stimulated. Communication filters are fine if they don’t remove too much meaning from the message and don’t become the default. If your virtual world has a “say” command, add “lisp,” “stammer,” “stutter,” and anything else you can think of. If characters drink 10 bottles of ale, replace all occurrences of the letter “s” in their speech with “sh.” It’s only a diversion, but if it prompts only one conversation in 10,000 it’s worth it.

Intimate or Grand Scale?

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Virtual worlds imbue a sense of size. Players have very definite views on how large the areas they cover are. Asheron’s Call feels bigger than EverQuest.

Size is affected by many factors. The most obvious is the number of discrete points that a character can occupy: A text world with 20,000 rooms will generally feel larger than one that has 500; a graphical world measuring 32K by 32K will feel smaller than one measuring 256K by 256K. Speed of travel affects size: If it takes you half an hour to traverse one virtual world and two hours to traverse another, the former may appear to be smaller than the latter even if it isn’t; if you can teleport anywhere, the world will feel smaller still.

Kits

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

Character kits are predefined pick point spends optimized by the designers for particular playing styles. For many newbies, going through extensive skills lists without having a clue as to what’s useful and what’s not is very daunting. It’s easier to look down a (shorter?) list of character kits and make just one major decision, and then maybe fine-tune the result.

Character kits have a special significance for classless virtual worlds, because they allow players to create a character that is a “sorcerer,” “ranger,” “merchant,” or whatever, but don’t lock them into it. You can start off as a mendicant priest and end up as chief of the assassins’ guild; the character kit you start with points you in a direction of your choosing, but you don’t have to follow it.

Player Base

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

The other way to look at the success or otherwise of a virtual world is by examining its player base. In theory, the better worlds will attract more players, and therefore those that have the largest player bases are the best. In theory….

Actually, there are many reasons why a virtual world may have a large user base (or a small one), with marketing and pricing not insignificant factors. From a designer’s point of view, these have to be taken into account so the essential reasons for a design’s success can be gauged.

Post-Modernism

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

Post-modernists view virtual worlds as examples of post-modernism in action. Then again, they view everything like that, so virtual worlds aren’t necessarily particularly special in this regard. What makes them interesting to post-modernists (in the sense that anything at all is interesting to them) is that they illustrate certain post-modernist concepts more clearly than usual, and thus make good examples when explaining postmodernism to people who don’t get it.

Post-modernism ¹ only really arrived in the mid-1980s. As an intellectual movement, it has things to say about a very wide range of topics. Fundamentally, though, it’s about the meaning of meaning (or, rather, the lack of meaning of meaning). Human beings are entirely subjective; all objectivity is therefore illusory. Meaning is constructed from individually meaningless signs and symbols; the truth is hidden behind the image, but the truth itself is an image. Ultimately, human beings are constructs created by themselves; deconstruct them, and at best all you find is another layer to deconstruct.

Psychology

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

Anyone with the remotest interest in the psychology of players of virtual worlds must—that’s must—look at John Suler’s hypertext book ¹, The Psychology of Cyberspace. Much of it is 100% relevant to virtual worlds (he talks about them directly), and some sections are classics in their own right. Others are merely short monographs, but almost no subfield of Internet-related psychology goes untouched. Suler has something to say about everything I mention in the remainder of this review, and more besides. There are other, more cohesive and directed introductions to the subject ², but none that I have encountered are as comprehensive as Suler’s.

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.

Roll Out

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

Roll out is the most critical phase of development, when all the technologies and assets created are brought together to form a virtual world experience. It formally begins with the open beta (test), but has its roots much earlier in the development process.

Testing takes place all the way through development, of course. Programmers will test individual pieces of code, animators will test animations, even designers will run data through models to ensure that what they think will happen has a good chance of being what will happen after players are let loose in their handsome creation.

Settlements

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

Many virtual worlds contain virtual buildings. Although some of these may be isolated (farmhouses, cottages, wizards’ towers), worlds created to a bigger scale will want settlements.

Settlements in this context are collections of buildings (or one huge building with lots of rooms—a castle, say, or a space station). Most of the time they will be occupied, but ruined settlements are also possible.

It should go without saying that settlements are positioned where they are for a reason. Virtual worlds are more believable if their settlements are built in locations that make sense. A town with no access to fresh water or no trade routes to other settlements will cause anyone who gives them a moment’s thought to raise an eyebrow. Unfortunately, many designers are oblivious to such formalities. They’re quite happy to put a ruined city on the side of a mountain and say it’s the site of a massacre of humans by dwarfs, but they’re less concerned about what the humans who lived there would have eaten.

Skill Sets

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

The biggest problem with skills lies in deciding which ones your virtual world should have. How many should there be in total? Is 100 skills too many? Too few? From whose point of view—newbies or oldbies?

We should begin by determining what is meant by a “skill.” Most virtual worlds would admit derivatives of crafting—making or repairing things in the virtual world—as qualifying as skills. Some would include weapon skills, and others would also add spells. The disparity is in part due to the different mechanisms by which acquisition works: If you get crafting skills by collecting “skill points” for going up levels but you get weapons skills by buying “training,” the two are distinct. It would be confusing to call them both “skills,” so commonly some other term is used instead (for example, “weapon specializations”).

Soft Role-Playing

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Role-playing in virtual worlds is one of those concepts that is inherited from “parent” virtual worlds without a great deal of thought as to its nature. Consequently, over the generations it has become less understood. There are honorable exceptions—particularly among TinyMUSHes—but for the most part virtual worlds have a fairly relaxed idea of what constitutes role-playing.

One of the tenets of role-playing is that role-players must have a role to play. It doesn’t matter per se whether these roles are created by individual players or they’re assigned by some referee. Players usually like to create their own characters, but in practice most settings have constraints on the roles people can play (no cowboys in the court of Louis XIV). A midway position is therefore usually adopted where a number of scenario-specific templates are provided (musicians, advisors, guards, courtiers) and players get to choose which one they want. They can customize their character further if they so wish, so long as they stay within the character’s (and scenario’s) stated parameters. There will be limits on specific roles (only one person gets to be Louis XIV) and balance issues between generic ones (guards are needed—not everyone can be a courtier). These are rarely hard to resolve, though.

The Client/Server Model

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The server embodies the virtual world; the client translates it into a form the player can comprehend. Because the client is the player’s window on the virtual world, designers have a lot to say about its look and feel. Much of this is a matter of taste and convention, though, and will therefore not be discussed here. Clearly, it does make a difference if your proposed spell-casting system is too complicated to be implemented for mouse and keyboard ¹, but if this kind of thing isn’t obvious to you, then you’ve no business being a designer anyway.

The Content Conundrum

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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?

The Fifth Age: 1997–Present

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There had been graphical virtual worlds before.

The seminal PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) system went live at the University of Illinois way back in 1961, and many games were written to take advantage of both its network connectivity and graphics-capable plasma display units. Some of these laid down principles that would greatly influence the development of later computer games; some came close to being virtual worlds; some actually were virtual worlds.

Tips for a Successful Virtual Economy

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I’ll wrap up this discussion of the economies of virtual worlds with a few tips to help you design one that works. Rather than merely repeat what I’ve already said (“Don’t use fixed prices, you idiot!”), I’ll concentrate on ideas that might not be immediately obvious. Not all of them apply to all virtual world economies, but hopefully they’ll spark a few ideas.

Using Player Types

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Why use the player types model for virtual world design?

One purely pragmatic reason is that because it was the first such model, everyone knows about it; it therefore provides common ground for communicating ideas with other designers. This is by no means the only reason, though.

The model’s main strength is its categorization of players into the four particular types: achievers, explorers, socializers, and killers. It has its roots in a consideration of what people find fun in virtual worlds, and is therefore attuned to situations that might impact on this: all big design decisions, in other words. If you’re creating a virtual world and don’t have an actual user base yet, categorizing it along the lines the model advocates will give you some idea of how the players might take to a feature (or not); if you’re running a live game, the model will suggest how proposed changes might be received by existing players.

Caps

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Levels and (in most implementations) skills operate on a linear scale. A character starts at 0 and improves incrementally. A level 22 necromancer isn’t as powerful as a level 55 necromancer, but would be roughly on a par with a level 22 monk or assassin or whatever and much better than a level 11 necromancer ¹. So what’s the highest value that a level or skill can have?

If you have no limit, characters will improve relentlessly, getting more and more powerful until newbies are little more than insects by comparison. Once-daunting content will appear trivial; players will demand more to satisfy their appetites.

Conclusion

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This has been a long and difficult chapter. It took me longer to write it than it did the rest of the book put together. However, I hope it has served its purpose, which is to show

Virtual worlds are a meaningful object of study.
Most of those research fields that look at virtual worlds do so with respect.
Virtual world designers can learn much from researchers in other fields and vice versa.

Dimensions: Change and Persistence

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So how do designers categorize virtual worlds? And why would they want to categorize virtual worlds anyway?

Categorizations make explicit some of the choices available to designers. It’s all too easy to begin designing a virtual world having already made key decisions without even being aware of the fact. By laying out the options available to them, not only can designers be aware of what options are available to them, they are also forced to look at their solutions more analytically. Categorizations are particularly useful for seeing what the various combinations of design decisions imply about any resulting virtual world.

Gender Studies

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I learned through experience as an undergraduate at Essex University that as a male I have been irredeemably socialized to hold oppressive, androcentric views about all things gender and that therefore my opinions on the subject are worth less than nothing. Even seemingly neutral actions on my part are inherently tainted by my early conditioning and testosterone-charged world-view, so can therefore only be regarded as manifestations of my poisoned, male psyche. Consequently, if you don’t want the purity of your beliefs about gender issues adulterated, you should skip this section.

Have Stuff Wear Out

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The normal problem in virtual worlds is inflation. The effects of this are alleviated somewhat if players have many ways to be separated from their cash. The easiest way to do this is to have stuff wear out so that replacements have to be bought. This hands money to NPC vendors or (if goods are bought from PCs) to NPC miners/farmers. If PCs do all the mining and farming too, it’s still of some use because it encourages trade; it’s best as a money sink, though. It helps keep scarce items scarce.

Mutual Dependencies (Characters)

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If characters are dependent on other characters to succeed, then players will come to trust those characters who don’t let them down. Bonds will be formed, and (if these are reinforced often enough) communities will arise. All members of an adventuring party should depend on one another to some degree, but there are plenty of other ways to promote mutual dependencies. Simple economic need is a favorite: Miners need blacksmiths to buy their iron, and blacksmiths need miners to provide the raw materials they need. This can be extended in different directions, for example temples may need worshippers to cause deities to give their priests powers, and worshippers may need those priests to cure diseases, purify water, and vaporize undead.

Operation

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The operation phase ¹ begins when people start paying to enter the virtual world. It ends when people stop paying, or when the resources needed to support them would be better employed (that is, make more money) elsewhere.

During the operation phase, the original design and development team (the dev team) typically hands over control to a new set of developers (the live team). The rationale is that the battle-hardened dev team can move on to other projects (say, creating the next expansion), leaving the less experienced live team responsible for the maintenance and long-term improvement of the virtual world. This is not always the case, however; Dark Age of Camelot, for example, retained its dev team for the operation phase, rather than putting the very people who knew the project best to work elsewhere.

Permanent Death

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PD is not the same as PvP. PvP means that one PC can do things to another PC that the latter didn’t agree to; PD means that if a PC suffers death, it is consigned to oblivion. When PvP and PD are combined the result is player killing (PKing): One PC can directly cause the PD of another PC ¹. Players often use PD and PvP as euphemisms for PKing, but the distinction is there and is very important. Many of the benefits that advocates of PKing cite are primarily due to PD; some of the strongest objections to PKing are due to its PvP element, rather than to PD.

Purposeful or Decorative?

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You look at a wall. Hanging on the wall is a picture. You go up to the picture to remove it and find it’s actually part of the wall. In a textual world, it would be embedded in a room description; in a graphical one, it would be part of the texture for the wall. It’s purely decorative.

Some objects are in virtual worlds for tangible reasons; others are there for intangible ones. Should you give even the intangible ones some tangible purpose, or keep them as the props they are?

Questionnaires

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Questionnaires offer a different approach to character creation. Players answer a series of (usually) multiple-choice questions, from which a piece of software constructs a customized character. Questions may or may not be focused—that is, later questions may or may not depend on your answers to earlier questions. This can be done independently or tied into a kit system; it’s easy to see how a player-written web-based tool could construct characters from forms even if the developers decided against doing it officially.

Reset Strategy

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Players consume content quicker than it can be produced ¹. To prevent a virtual world from becoming “played out,” therefore, some mechanism for reintroducing content must be installed—the reset strategy of the virtual world. There are two basic approaches: sudden and rolling.

In a sudden reset, the region to be reset (usually the entire virtual world) is closed down and its content reinitialized. This is a fairly quick procedure, but it can be very inconvenient for players who enter the virtual world at the wrong time or for players who are in the middle of doing something when the reset occurs. The sudden reset strategy is sometimes referred to as the Groundhog Day approach, because players relive the same day repeatedly, as in the movie Groundhog Day ².

Solids: Assemblies

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Assemblies are objects that are made of other objects. Is an iron key magnetic? Yes. Is a hatchet? Well, the head is. What about a pair of jeans? Not really, unless you include the zip and the rivets (if they’re steel rather than copper).

People think of objects as unitary items most of the time, but they’re quite happy to consider them as being made up of other objects should the need arise. In virtual worlds, this poses something of a problem. If objects are made out of other objects, those objects must also be made out of other objects, and so on until you reach a point where you just have to stop. Where does that point lie? Conversely, if objects aren’t made of other objects, how do you refer to components of an object? Doors must have keyholes if they have keys, right?

Synchronization

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It takes time for information to travel between the client and the server. It takes time for the server to execute commands. During this time, the client has to maintain its display of the virtual world. What it shows may not, therefore, be a true representation of what the server defines to be the current world state: The two aren’t synchronized. In the real world, the sun might have spontaneously exploded 19 seconds ago, but you’re not going to find out for another eight minutes. In a virtual world, someone may have quit four seconds before you loosed an arrow at him.

The Designer

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The role of virtual world designer is fraught with paradoxes. You have to be imaginative yet realistic; deep-thinking yet practical; surprising yet dependable; an individual yet part of a team; a doer yet a listener. You have to know a lot about some things and at least a little about everything else.

This chapter has presented the context. If you didn’t already, you should now know where virtual worlds are, how they got to be that way, and where they seem to be headed. Whether they actually do go in that direction is another matter. It all depends on people like you.

The Newbie Flow

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Imagine that your virtual world is a bucket, and players are water. There are holes in the bucket through which the water escapes. If you don’t add water regularly, eventually it will all leak away. There may be a pool at the very bottom that isn’t high enough to reach the lowest hole—that’s you and your die-hard players. Eventually, even this will evaporate away, though.

All virtual worlds need a flow of newbies if they are to survive. It doesn’t matter how wonderful your world is or how dedicated your players are: If you don’t have newbies, you’re in big trouble.

Whence the Symbols Come

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An analysis of internal symbolism is justifiable here. Virtual world designers have many options available to them about what they put into a virtual world, what they leave out, how they put it in, and so on. In selecting between all the possibilities available to them, designers are employing their artistic faculties; furthermore, they are doing so deliberately. They want (for design/artistic reasons) to achieve an effect, therefore they arrange the virtual world to create it.

A Chemistry for Virtual Worlds

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In screenplays, every action and every piece of dialogue must have a purpose. Movies are so expensive to make that anything that doesn’t advance the plot or round out a character must be ruthlessly cut. This even applies to comedies: You may laugh at the joke, but if the joke weren’t there, then at a purely structural level there would be a minor plot hole.

Virtual worlds don’t have quite the same financial or narrative constraints. It’s not the case that everything must have a purpose, but everything ¹ ought to have a potential purpose ². The players may determine a different purpose entirely to the one intended, deliberately or otherwise, but so long as they find some purpose they’re happy. It’s very frustrating to look for an object’s use when it doesn’t actually have one, and even worse if your complaints bring only hoots of laughter from the live team.

Approaches to Permanent Death

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Let’s assume for the moment that a designer has decided they want permanent death to feature in their virtual world. The reasons why they might (or might not) make such a decision we’ll go into shortly, but for the moment we’ll suppose they’ve done it. What are the various ways it can be incorporated into a design?

It all depends on how you intend to ensure that a death is “fair.” Here are the classic ways to do it (most of which also can be applied to PvP):

Charge for Services

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Players don’t like it when you take money from them, but they don’t mind so much if they think they’re spending it. They are quite happy to pay for things that reduce the amount of work they have to do.

For example, consider teleportation. When a player wants to go from A to B, the cost of teleporting compared to the time cost of walking should really be an issue. Players ought to have to think about whether they need a service enough to pay through the nose for it. Naturally, they’ll complain that teleporting is “too expensive,” and they could well be right. With a pricing structure that rises and falls depending on how many people use a teleporter, though, a balance should be achieved.

Closed or Open Economic Model?

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The first question you should really ask is whether your virtual world needs an economy at all. They don’t have to have one. If, for example, characters can take nothing with them between playing sessions, not only is an economy unnecessary, but you can’t have one anyway. The more persistent a virtual world, the greater its need for a means to facilitate the efficient transfer of goods between players, but even then this doesn’t imply the worlds need a formal currency. That said, the real world has money and therefore virtual worlds that want to seem real will have money too.

Lexicography

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After so many pages of dense theorizing concerning nigh-inaccessible ideological positions using elitist vocabulary, I thought I’d go on to something a little less stressful next: lexicography—the compilation of dictionaries.

Lexicography is one small part of lexicology (the study of the structure and history of a particular language), which itself falls under the scientific umbrella of linguistics. We’ve already met sociolinguistics in the context of anthropology; other major subfields include phonetics, syntax, semantics, and translation, none of which touch on virtual worlds very much (which isn’t to say that they shouldn’t). Three other subfields of linguistics do have something to say about virtual worlds, however: cognitive science and computational linguistics (which I file with artificial intelligence), and language acquisition (which comes under education). This leaves lexicography, with a dash of lexicology as a context.

Mutual Dependencies (Communities)

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As well as dependencies between individuals, create dependencies between communities. Again, the simplest way to do this is economically: The elves make the bows and arrows that the humans use to hunt boar so they can sell the meat to the elves. It doesn’t have to be this clear cut, though: The sorcerers and the necromancers keep apart so as not to contaminate each other’s magic wells.

Dependencies that are threatened can give cause for conflict. If humans cut down trees to make fires on which to roast their boars, this may impact the elves. If there are so many sorcerers that a single magic well is not enough, they may need to set up a second well nearer the necromancers.

Security

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Your client software will be hacked. For some virtual worlds (such as those with no game aspect to them), this won’t necessarily matter. For the rest, it matters a great deal.

At the very least, it means that all packets sent from the client to the server have to be checked to see if they make sense. Error-correction at the hardware and transport layers should ensure that what arrives at the server is what was sent by the client, so why waste time checking for nonsense that isn’t going to come? Well, the fact is that the server may not be talking to a bona fide client. It could be talking to a piece of code a player has written to masquerade as a client or to insert data into the client’s packet stream. If the server receives nonsense but has no way of handling it, what happens then? Has someone acquired an ability to crash the server?

Skill Improvement

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How do characters improve their skills? To preserve the notion of what a skill is, there ought to be some relationship between what you do and how your skills improve; but what?

If skills are rated using a points system (as most are), the question becomes one of deciding when to increment a skill by a point. There are basically two ways to do it:

Random chance. Each time a skill-enhancement opportunity arises, there is a small chance of causing a skill point increment. This chance may increase over time.

Solids: Collections

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Some objects are sets or collections of other objects. You might have a bunch of flowers, a pack of cards, or a wad of notes. Using a principle of no-disassembly, these should be unitary items. They all have problems with this, though.

A bunch of flowers is fine as long as you have no individual flowers anywhere. Put in a single rose, and suddenly you’re accepting the concept of unbunched flowers. Players will therefore want to take flowers out of the bunch.

Tabula Rasa

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This method creates characters by constructing a backstory for them. Starting as a callow youth with no skills, no quirks, and no unusual attributes (that is, an empty slate, or tabula rasa ¹), the player chooses a profession from a list. This adds some skills and perhaps changes a few attributes. The player is then presented with a second list that omits many of the original choices but offers new ones instead (depending on what the character decided). The process iterates, with new opportunities and specializations presenting themselves. When it stops, not only can a character be created, but a short history, too.

The Bartle Test

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The final point to mention about player types is the Bartle Test.

I’m often asked about the Bartle Test, on the grounds that because it bears my name I must be responsible for it. Sadly, I’m not. The test is the brainchild of Erwin S. Andreasen and Brandon A. Downey, who wrote it in response to my player types paper so as to test the theory.

The Bartle Test is an online binary-choice questionnaire ¹ that players of virtual worlds can take to discover what player type they are. As such, it offers potentially very useful information for designers. Are players mainly achievers and socializers, as empirical observation would suggest? Just how numerous are killers? Are there large numbers of silent explorers out there that no one knows about? How do the different codebases compare? Answers to these questions could provide solid figures that would help designers visualize the make-up of the user base they have or they want.

Alternatives to Permanent Death

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Let’s assume now that a designer ¹ has decided they don’t want permanent death to feature in their virtual world. If there’s no NPC death either (because of world’s genre or application), that’s it, end of story, skip to the next section.

If there is NPC or (in most cases) monster death, the designer has to find some non-PD equivalent for PCs. If your character fights a monster and loses in the worst possible way, what happens to it?

Economics

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Virtual worlds (the more persistent ones, anyway) have economies. Economists study economies. Virtual-world economies are therefore legitimate objects of study for economists.

This doesn’t mean that many economists do study virtual worlds, however. Those who are involved in the area are more often than not players of virtual worlds who happen to be economists in real life, rather than economists coming to virtual worlds from the outside. That said, academic economists are becoming increasingly aware of virtual worlds, and we can expect more of them to become interested in the topic as time goes on.

Essay

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High-powered role-playing virtual worlds turn character creation into an art. Players of games such as EverQuest and Anarchy Online who regard themselves as “role-players” would do well to consider whether they could have written an essay on their character and its background before ever playing, to be submitted for approval to the world’s staff members. That’s what’s required of some MUSHers.

Role-playing virtual worlds work consensually. People who do not buy into the fiction or who are disruptive of it have no place. This makes all players simultaneously guardians and perpetuators of the fiction. To gain admittance, newbies must therefore demonstrate that they both honor the fiction and have an aptitude for role-playing. An essay forces a player to create a fully rounded character, in the process satisfying both these goals. As mentioned in Chapter 1, “Introduction to Virtual Worlds,” some virtual worlds will conduct interviews, too.

Have Multiple Currencies

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In the real world, there are many currencies. If a price is quoted in one currency and you want to pay in some other, you have to sell some of the latter currency to get some of the former. I can’t give a taxi driver in Paris dollars and I can’t give a taxi driver in New York euros ¹.

Exchange rates between currencies fluctuate. In theory, this happens because of trade: If a country manufactures goods that lots of other countries want, those countries will have to acquire the currency of the first country in order to pay for the goods, which will lead to a rise in the exchange rate in the first country’s favor. If a country needs more capital to invest in its industry and infrastructure, it can raise interest rates, thereby attracting investors who want a guaranteed return; this will also lead to an increase in the exchange rate.

Information Versus Immersion

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Which is better: to tell a player they hit a troll really hard, or to tell them they did 25 points of damage? The former is what the character would see; the latter is what many players want to see. If they do see it, though, it works against immersion: In the real world, you don’t see numbers appearing every time you hit something with a hammer, so why should you in the virtual world?

Reconnection

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If you miss a session in the virtual world because your cat was ill, the rest of your party may have moved elsewhere. How are you going to find them? Even if you know exactly where they are, it’s not really pleasant to spend half an hour trekking through swampland to hook up with them.

If people are members of a community of interest, they need to be able to communicate with one another; if it’s a community of practice, they need to be able to access one another’s data; if it’s a community of commitment, they need to be able to act in concert with one another; if it’s a spiritual community, they just need each other. The domain in which these proceedings take place is the community space for that community. For mages passing spell sequences between each other telepathically, all action and interactions takes place through the telepathic network, therefore that would be the community space. In most cases, though, the virtual world itself is the community space. In order to participate in a community, members need to be proximate to the rest of the community in its community space; for virtual worlds, therefore, this means that characters must be able to reach the same (virtual) physical location as other members with relative ease. In other words, they have to be able to teleport to them.

Solids: Containers

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Objects in virtual worlds can be in various hierarchies. The main one is the class hierarchy (X is a kind of Y), but other possibilities include an assembly hierarchy (X is a component of Y), a spatial hierarchy (X is on top of Y), and a container hierarchy (X is contained by Y). The latter two are related, as we’re about to see.

Container hierarchies are useful because they give players physical means by which to move around groups of objects in a virtual world. They’re not essential: In the same way that early computer operating systems didn’t have the equivalent of subdirectories or folders, so some early virtual worlds (most notably Shades) didn’t have containers. However, they’re very useful. In a nodal implementation of a virtual world, the work is already done anyway: Rooms can contain characters, characters can carry (that is, “contain”) objects, therefore, it’s not a huge leap of the imagination to allow objects to contain other objects too.

Fluids: Divisibility

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Most objects in virtual worlds are solids, and that’s how they’re implemented. However, when modeling the real world it’s a little hard to avoid the presence of fluids, especially water ¹. I use the term “fluids” rather than “liquids” in order not to exclude those solids that (in naïve physics) act like liquids, such as sand, ash, and flour; I also mean it to discount substances like glass that are formally liquids but on human timescales act mainly like solids.

Give Money Weight

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This is a great tip for virtual worlds with a pre-Victorian era setting.

If you have 100,000 gold pieces, that’s a lot of gold. Post-1982 U.S. 1 cent coins (pennies) weigh 2.5g; 100,000 of them would weigh 250kg, or about 550lbs. Coin quality gold is about 2.5 times denser than electroplated zinc. Moving that kind of mass is not easy without cheating physics.

When coin has weight, the act of transporting it is non-trivial. Someone who is rich in one city is not so rich in another. A local economy can therefore flourish because players can’t easily transport enough coin there to undermine it. It leads to a more stable overall economy. Objects genuinely do have different values in different places, and a career as a merchant suddenly becomes a possibility. Although giving coin weight gets in the way of trade, it also makes trade more interesting; it gives it gameplay elements that it didn’t have before.

Jargon

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Jargon consists of new (or specialized meanings for old) words, terms, and phrases; it comes with communities of practice. Although often seen as a barrier (if you don’t speak the language, you’re not ready to join), jargon can be a very effective way of making players feel they really are part of something. It serves to draw in people: You hear someone say “rotate aggro” and you want to know what it means ¹. Acquiring the vocabulary gives you a badge that says, “Hey, I’m one of you.”

Physical Differences

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Elves are taller than dwarfs, but not at tall as humans. Dwarfs are stronger than elves, but elves are more dexterous. Elves and dwarfs can see in the dark, but humans can’t. There are physical differences between character races, which are reflected in their default attribute settings.

Okay, so what about character gender?

Ah. In virtual worlds, the differences are usually purely cosmetic. Male and female characters look different, but apart from that gender X is every bit as good as gender Y and vice versa. There are three main reasons for this:

Politics

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When players of virtual worlds refer to “politics,” they’re really talking about systems of government. Politics will be involved in any process by which people gain office, whether that office is head of a country or head of the local chapter of Hell’s Angels. It can happen in any virtual world where players have the ability to gain power through the support of others. On the whole, though, players use the term in the context of offices that grant tangible, law-making powers to their holder, enforced by the virtual world itself. There are other forms of politics that are important for virtual worlds, especially so-called “issue” politics such as feminism; these, I cover where the particular issue is discussed. Thus, with one exception that I’ll give at the end, this section examines the research that people have undertaken concerning the government of and in virtual worlds.

The Unfortunate Consequences of

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Autobiography

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Virtual worlds have such an effect on people that often they want to write about their experiences. Although most of this takes the form of what might be called “fan fiction,” a little is more personal. Some players keep logs, some keep diaries; some write essays, some write poetry. A very small few write full-blown autobiographies that cover the period of their life that they spent in (and out) of virtual worlds. As the ethnography of an individual, these are remarkable resources; as a recounting of their author’s own, private hero’s journey, they’re invaluable.

Communal Activities

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Sadly, players can’t gather round a camp fire and have a good sing-song; lag, if nothing else, prevents players from acting in concert to this degree. Nevertheless, there are things that players can do together as (virtual) leisure activities, and designers should support them.

For example, players like to tell stories. This doesn’t mean that there should be a bard class and everyone should be obliged to listen politely to their excruciating poetry. It does mean that there should be venues and situations conducive to storytelling and suggestions as to how to go about it. A somewhat overt approach would be to have a Storyteller’s Hall, for example, containing a variety of atmospheric rooms, each with a Storyteller Stone that bears the legend “tell your part of the story, then pass me on.” It’s crude, but it works.

Long-Term Characters

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Should player characters age? There are some characters in text MUDs that have been played for so long that, were they alive in the real world, they’d be entitled to vote.

For virtual worlds with moderately low persistence, it’s perhaps not an issue. If the world periodically resets, it never ages; it’s not inconsistent to suppose that the characters entering such a timeless world shouldn’t change either.

For greatly persistent worlds, it’s not this easy. EverQuest’s night/day cycle is 90 real minutes in length. That means 3 years of real time is nearly 50 years of virtual time. As the virtual world never formally resets, shouldn’t 3-year-old characters be in late middle age by now? Everyone must sup regularly from a fountain of youth.

Miscibility

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Immiscible fluids pose few problems. If you have a pint jug containing half a pint of sand, you can top it up with water. Although in real life you’d be able to get more than half a pint of water in (because sand is a fluid, but not a liquid), in practice you’re not going to upset many players if you keep it to exactly half a pint. The same applies to adding fluids to containers that already hold solids: You may as well compute volumes assuming that none of the solid objects float, because even if you account for partial displacement you’ll never get it sufficiently accurate to satisfy anyone pedantic enough to check anyway. Immiscible fluids are implementation-friendly. Miscible fluids are implementation-unfriendly.

Multiple Uses

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Elves draw magical power from the number of trees that exist within a certain range. Humans in the nearby town want wood for housing. This is conflict. Economies can drive conflicts. Conflicts can also drive economies. Dwarfs need elf skins to enchant their forges.

Conflict like this is good for gameplay (if not overdone), and having multiple uses for resources is a neat way to introduce it. The same technique can be used to enhance trade (by driving up volumes) and challenge monopolies (because the opposition to them will be greater).

Permanent Death

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

People really do not like it when their character dies. That’s really do not like it. Not only will they say they’ll leave if it happens, some of them actually will leave. There’s ample evidence of this from virtual worlds that launched with PD but toned it down in the face of player opposition. You can take steps to minimize this—keep the incidence of PD low but the awareness of its possibility high—but it’ll still happen. Even non-PD PvP was softened in early flagship graphical worlds. People don’t like to lose, they don’t like to suffer, and they especially don’t like other people making them suffer.

Charge for Advancement

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Players are so pleased when their character has gained enough experience for them to advance a level or skill that they are quite happy to pay virtual coin to seal it. Whether this is through “training” (which for some reason only NPCs seem able to provide) or the acquisition of some expensive item (mithril cross, ebony staff, engraved armor) is not the point: The point is to provide a money sink.

Gases

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Virtual worlds rarely implement gases, and when they do it’s often as consequent properties of a location or some other object, rather than as objects in their own right.

The reasons for this are to do with the physical properties of gases (and of gas-borne particles, such as pollen and smoke). Gases are everywhere, they have miscibility and divisibility issues even worse than those of liquids, and they’re hard to contain.

Stake-Holding

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Members of communities act and interact in community space. If they own some of that community space, it can help them feel like they’re a permanent part of that community. For virtual worlds, that generally means they should own some virtual place of residence. It shows they care for the community space, and therefore (by extension) for the community.

Textual worlds introduced the idea of owning property; indeed, building their own house was a major preoccupation of players of TinyMUDs from the very beginning. Many MUDs using codebases that didn’t let players access content-generation tools also allowed characters to own houses, although the practice was not widespread. Its importance was only really highlighted by its inclusion in Ultima Online, where it proved a galloping success ¹.

The Unfortunate Consequences of Non- Permanent Death

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Let’s imagine what the real world would be like if the philosophers of ancient Greece had discovered the secret of eternal life. If you take your daily dose of elixir, you won’t age and will live forever. How would today’s society be different?

Well, it’s almost impossible to say, but one thing is for sure: Alexander the Great would still be in charge.

In virtual worlds, this is called sandboxing—the people who are first to positions of power get to keep them. There is no opportunity for change. Ensigns on the Star Trek spaceship Voyager (which was transported millions of light years from home) did not have a great career path no matter how able they were.

Theology

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Theology? Why would a theologist…?

Then it hits you: As the real is to the virtual, so the spiritual is to the real. Theologists should be more interested in virtual worlds than perhaps anyone else except the designers of such worlds themselves.

I have two points to make before I begin this discussion.

Firstly, I’m an atheist. I’m going to be talking about religions here, and try as I might to be objective it’s inevitable that my views are going to show through in places. If this is likely to offend you, please skip the remainder of this section.

Charge for Abstraction

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Should player characters have to eat? If they do, should the food work its way through their digestive system or be beamed out of them at the last moment as seems to happen in Star Trek? If nature proceeds like it does in real life, are there consequences for not washing your hands afterward? Or is this all a level of detail too far?

Some textual virtual worlds have eating. Every so often, characters will feel hungry. If they eat, the hunger goes away; if they don’t, their attributes degrade increasingly until they do. Some foods are better at restoring attributes than others, but basically, eating remains a background maintenance task that adds authenticity but little gameplay.

Plasmas

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In most virtual worlds, the only significant plasma is fire. Fires are usually treated as individual objects, but not always entirely realistically. It’s easy enough to model them to emit virtual heat and light, but the problem is that in real life fires spread. In virtual worlds, they don’t. You can set fire to combustible materials and they’ll burn; they may even ignite nearby objects. However, they won’t usually spread to the environment.

Things to Demote

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Some things are generally good for communities, and some things are generally bad. There are any number of real-world reasons you wouldn’t want these anyway, but players being players they’ll sometimes occur. Designers should make every effort to prevent this from happening unless explicitly trying to make some kind of point or working with precisely controlled gameplay mechanics.

The main ones to watch out for are:

Xenophobia
Prejudice
Oppression

Xenophobia can cause an individual community to become stronger within itself, but it will be isolated from the rest of the virtual world in a way that other communities aren’t. In some virtual worlds, modular communities often have no motive to interact with other communities, but that’s quite different from having a motive not to interact with them. A party of EverQuest adventurers might keep itself to itself, but if some other party asked to team up for a while to tackle a particularly tough monster, they’d generally give the suggestion a fair hearing. A system that made it easy for the second party to slaughter members of the first party once they’d gained their trust would cause these communities to become more tightly woven (which sounds good) while treating every other community as a threat (which may also sound good, but is most certainly not). People don’t like having to be on their guard the whole time. Under this kind of pressure, modular communities will emigrate to some other virtual world where they’re not going to have to watch their back.

Why Permanent Death?

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Players are against PD because they don’t want to die. Although some socializers wishing to flaunt their loving and caring credentials might disagree, players in general don’t care if someone else dies—they just don’t want it to happen to them. Because no one wants it to happen to them, it doesn’t happen to anyone. So everyone is happy, right?

For a time, yes. Then, the fact that the whole experience is vacuous begins to nag at them.

Influencing Immersion

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People want to be immersed. Designers want them to be immersed. Therefore, designers and players can collude to make immersion happen. In this sense, immersion is easier to design for than community, because it mainly involves telling players what they want to hear. You don’t have to worry about how much immersion you want, or how quickly to deliver it—just give them as much as you can as quickly as you can, and they’ll do the rest.

Non-Player Players

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I did mention when I began this section that although the main virtual worlds were populated by characters, NPCs, and monsters, there was a fourth possibility: nonplayer players. These are the customer service representatives, techies, designers, and other members of the live team who need access to the virtual world but don’t want to play it as regular players. They generally need supra-world powers in order to help people, to test the world, to fix problems, and so on. How should the game fiction account for this?

State Changes

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When you heat up water, it turns into a gas (steam); when you freeze it, it turns into a solid (ice). Similarly, gases can condense and solids can melt. These are state changes. Do you want them in your virtual world?

A virtual world can be satisfyingly convincing without state changes. If you don’t have any way to heat up things or cool them down, explorers might figure out why and get uppity but most of the population will take it in their stride.

The Hero’s Journey

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In his influential book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces ¹, academic Joseph Campbell asserted that the various heroic myths of all cultures follow the same, basic storyline. His theory was that myths are tied to the human psyche; they are cultural expressions of the universal need to explain the same, fundamental concepts of social, worldly, and other-worldly realities. Not all narratives follow the basic pattern (which is called the hero’s journey ²), but all myths and epics do. Famously, the movie Star Wars follows the hero’s journey almost to the letter.

Departure

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The call to adventure. The hero is given an indication that everything is going to change. The call may be symbolic, and the hero doesn’t have to realize what it means.
Refusal of the call. The hero is required to act, but initially refuses. This can be through fear, duty, or a whole bunch of other things. If the hero holds out, they may be subjected to assault until they take the hint.

Properties

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Properties are abstractions of objects’ physical characteristics. In virtual worlds, this regularly extends to non-physical properties as we shall shortly see, but it’s the physical ones (mass, density, shape, color, and so on) that dominate.

Properties are often implemented as functions, so that rarely used ones can be computed on a when-needed basis. However, although properties don’t change any values when they are called, functions in general do: Checking the “diameter” property of a balloon won’t change its diameter ¹, yet calling the “inflate” function on the balloon might. In terms of implementation, though, they can look the same.

Ways to Promote Immersion

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Immersion will happen almost by default in a virtual world eventually. Nevertheless, designers shouldn’t take this for granted. Here are some ways by which to promote immersion. Again, note that’s “promote,” not “force.”

Control

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The more immersed a player is, the less the virtual world can dictate to them. In particular, it can’t treat their characters as if they weren’t people.

If my character waves and the feedback is, “You wave enthusiastically,” that takes control away from me. I didn’t “wave enthusiastically;” what I did was “wave.” Virtual worlds should not presume to control my character for me.

The only exception is if I give my consent. If my character consumes alcohol, I’m explicitly relinquishing some degree of control. Loss of control is a well-understood property of alcohol. Therefore, if my character suddenly staggers off involuntarily in some direction after consuming a bottle of port, I’ve consented.

Initiation

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The road of trials. These are a series of (often three) ordeals that the hero must undergo to begin their metamorphosis. They could well fail at least one.
The meeting with the goddess. This is another highly symbolic step. The goddess represents the totality of knowledge; if the hero is not consumed by exposure to it, they are liberated by it. This is usually described in terms of the hero’s experiencing absolute, unconditional love. The understanding the hero gains leads to a “union of opposites;” the hero’s self-image begins coalesce as the hero gains awareness of the forces of life and death, of mortal and spiritual.

Ownership

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It may seem odd to include a subsection on ownership when discussing physics, but (as pointed out in Chapter 3) ownership can be considered a physical quality for virtual worlds. Note that this is virtual ownership—that is, ownership within the context of the virtual world; real-world ownership of virtual objects is all about data and intellectual property (as is much else about virtual worlds).

There are two ways to implement ownership. The first is to give all objects an “owned by” property, which can be either empty (for example, no one owns characters) or point to some ownership-capable object (for example, a character, a guild). The second is to make it implicit: You own whatever you carry. The latter works for virtual worlds with low degrees of persistence.

Detail

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More detail makes for more persuasiveness. There are two caveats: Detail should be non-contradictory, and it should be at a consistent level. Contradictions usually only arise when two different designers working on disjoint parts of the virtual world independently specify content that clashes; this problem is almost always easy to fix. Inconsistent levels of detail are another matter, though. They arise because designers focus on one feature without following through the implications. For example, it may be possible to fell a tree to expose a hollow core that you can climb down through, but not be possible to fell any other trees, even saplings. Players would accept the same level of depth throughout (that is, no fellable trees) but if one tree can be chopped down and others can’t, they’re reminded that they’re in a virtual world. Furthermore, it’s an incomplete one (from their point of view) because felling trees isn’t fully implemented. Better you can fell no trees than just one.

Return

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Refusal of the return. Life in the new world is so pleasant and carefree that the hero doesn’t see any reason to go home.
The magic flight. The hero can’t stay and have the boon. This is the exciting escape with it.
Rescue from without. The hero still doesn’t want to return, is prevented from returning, or is too weak to return. Powerful friends or allies help it happen.
The crossing of the return threshold. The hero returns to their old world and old life. How will they reconcile the old and the new? How will they apply their newfound wisdom?

Time

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Time is the one dimension that players and characters both share, and therefore it is completely beholden to reality. This does not mean that it has to be identical to real time, but it does mean that it must directly map to it.

Most actions that take place in virtual worlds are pretty well instant (lag permitting). Because of the way that people often routinely regard complex series of actions as unitary commands, there may occasionally be commands that take time to execute (cooking a meal, for example). Also, naïve physics can sometimes call for the effects of a command to take place after the action has been executed (such as the explosion that follows from lighting a fuse). As we saw with fire, some commands can have potentially chaotic effects that last potentially indefinitely. Most commands, though, give an immediate response and do not propagate except in strictly prescribed ways (typically, by giving feedback to characters who can detect the effects of the command).

Departure

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In this discussion, the “old world” is the real world and the “new world” is the virtual world. The departure action therefore takes place in real world.

The call to adventure. Something triggers the would-be player’s attention. It may be a specific advertisement, testimonial, shelf unit, cover disk, magazine article, or pushy friend—it doesn’t really matter. The point is that the player now finds the idea of virtual worlds appealing when previously either they didn’t or they hadn’t thought about it.

Freedom of Choice

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Designers decide what options to provide to players and the manner in which to provide them. This is how design influences players.

For promoting immersion, it’s slightly different. The whole point of identity play is that you’re free to make choices. Designers may suggest directions that you hadn’t considered, but they have to stop short of actually recommending any of them. It’s for you to make up your own mind.

Proactive Physics

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People who play in a virtual world are bound by that world’s physics, as implemented in computer code. Whatever tangible action they undertake in the virtual world, the consequences of that action are defined by the program. Players must accept this as part of the world, just as they must accept real-world physics in the real world. They may object to certain aspects of it, and they may even be able to persuade the live team to make changes, but they can’t opt out of particular rules they don’t like. If they get annoyed by the fact that their magic sword will eventually wear out, they can either continue under protest or quit.

Initiation

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This stage takes place in the virtual world, and is therefore the one that is most important to virtual world designers (more important than they may realize!). You may want to look back at the player development tracks shown in Figure 3.5 before you read this. You also might like to refer to the review of Hedron’s Six Circles, because this (at last!) is why I mentioned it ¹.

The road of trials. The player finds their feet. This is the opportunist/griefer step, where players meet and respond to small challenges to determine the extent of their abilities. Their success or failure at these will establish their course of future action.

Self-Expression

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Self-expression is another way to promote immersion. By giving players freeform ways to communicate themselves, designers can draw them more deeply into the world—they feel more of a part of it. Communication and stake-holding help players to exhibit self-expression in addition to being ways to promote community; the decision to have them therefore looks trivially easy.

Self-expression allows players to discover more about themselves, which is almost a definition of the goal of immersion. It also, to a lesser extent, lets them find out more about the virtual world; this, too promotes immersion.

Return

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This final stage accounts for players’ return from the virtual world to reality (or, perhaps more tellingly, the acceptance of players that the virtual world is part of reality).

Refusal of the return. The player has power, respect, friends, and peace. Why would they want to return to the real world?
The magic flight. The live team will usually not want a player to leave, and may provide a compelling elder game to try to ensnare them. They don’t, however, want their boon back (or wouldn’t, if they had one in the first place) and the barriers they erect are of the temptation variety rather than the physical or emotional of common myth.

Things to Demote

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The twin enemies of immersion are Reality and sterility.

If players are continually reminded that they’re in Reality, it will disrupt their sense of immersion. You can’t stop someone’s significant other from bringing them a mug of coffee, but you can stop your virtual world’s interface from being intrusive and you can prevent references to Reality from sneaking in. Keeping Reality out is why commercials are unacceptable in virtual worlds, but product placement is comparatively okay.

Analysis

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Conjecture: Playing virtual worlds is a kind of hill-climbing activity through identity space; the hero’s journey is an algorithm for finding a very good local maximum, if not necessarily a global one.

I believe that the hero’s journey does directly apply to player development in virtual worlds. However, the fit is not exact. Given that the hero’s journey has evolved independently in all cultures through the millennia, should some effort be made to try and make the fit better? Or is the fit not exact because in truth it isn’t a fit at all?

Attitudes to Permanent Death

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Will attitudes to permanent death change?

If some way could be found to retain the desirable consequences of PD while losing the undesirable ones, attitudes wouldn’t need to change. With our current knowledge of PD, however, this seems unlikely.

Change will have to occur, however, if virtual worlds are to remain faithful to their essence, at least in combat-oriented worlds. Dilution of the virtual world “product” will leave people unsatisfied. Will they stop playing all virtual worlds, or continually drift from one to the next, forever unable to find something that satisfies their long-term aims without violating their short-term criteria?