I jumped from Second Life to There the other day and got thinking about the way that space /feels/ in virtual worlds.
I started wondering what it was that gave space a feeling. I think it comes down to two key elements: camera movement and in-world physics.
To deal with the latter, and I think least important, animations such as running embody a representation of in-world physics. This provides, as it were, a diagetic sense of the feeling of space; that experienced by the character that you control. This is maybe why, to me, it feels secondary.
The primary thing that I think provides this sense of the world (for which I’m not sure there is a name) is camera control. Spaces such as WoW and Second Life give the user pretty rigid camera control, with some mouse of button combination it can seem like one has hold of the camera and is moving it in hard space. Whereas in EvE and There, while each have quite different degrees of control over camera position, the view-point seems to have its own momentum and damping.
I don’t think that one of these is any more realistic than the other. After all the notion of a camera is one of those interface elements that we conveniently internalize in the experience of a virtual world. So in one case we could think of things simulating a phone-cam, in the other a full movie camera. However as the notion of camera also seems to be a mass-less singularity in the virtual space, to me, it seems like we are ascribing these properties to the space itself.
It gets me to wondering (a) how intentional the relationship between the feel of space in a world and the more semiotic sense of a world is (b) what other elements of a virtual space are there that I’m overlooking that make up my senses of it and thus add texture to the experience. (c) Am I write about this feeling of space thing at all, is it just me, is it different things that are in fact creating the effect.
See Previously: Memories of virtual children
