First Principles

Because we haven't had a crazy, abstract, whacked-out design thread for a while...

One of the things that bugs me about virtual worlds (game-like ones in particular) is how the paradigm doesn't really change much. We still get designers discussing what classes and races their world will have, without having considered whether they need classes or races at all.

So here's a question: given the absolute minimum that you need to have a virtual world, how can you extend that in ways that don't take us back to Second Life or World of Warcraft?

I guess I'd better define what I mean by "absolute minimum" first, huh?

OK, well for a virtual world you need a world (obviously) and players. The players need to be able to do things to or with each other; they also need to be able to do things to the world, which in turn should be able to do things to them.

That's about it.

Yes, I know, there are a bunch of assumptions embedded in there. Here are the main ones I think I make:
i) To count as a world, its existence has to be independent of that of the players: it continues to run when you're not there. In other words, it has persistence.
ii) There are absolute limitations on the actions that can be undertaken in the world: it has a physics. Because the world is virtual, the physics is implemented via computers.
iii) Players operate within the physics: each represents an individual within the virtual world. They have a character (or avatar if you prefer).
iv) Because players exist in the real world but their characters exist in the virtual world, there must be synchronisation. Virtual worlds therefore have to operate at speeds close to real time.

That really is it.

So, given this starting point (or your own), where can we go that we haven't been to before?

Richard

Comments

[David Cheney]

Is this playful curiosity, or are you suggesting that there are clear motives to *avoid* going "back to Second Life or World of Warcraft"?

Can anyone provide links to some notable posts offering critiques of thse games ... the things we'd like to avoid?

Dave

[Thomas]

What about single-player Virtual Worlds?

I had this recurring idea of a virtual "Robinson Crusoe" island, where the physics of the game-world dictated everything -

say for example that you want to build a fence around your base, you wouldn't click "build->Fence" and then "place" the finished fence somewhere, but instead you would build it by collecting sticks and ramming them into the ground.

Eventually the sticks would become a de facto fence, even though it would still just be a lot of individual sticks in the sand.

[Chad O'Neil]

This reminds me of a robot vacuum example from a computer science (CS) class I took. I am not a CS person so if I mess this up pardon me. We have the robot, the undetermined area to be vacuumed, and the program. Make it vacuum without covering any spot twice.

So we have our undetermined area (the ‘virtual world’) and the point of “absolute minimum.” I will skip the program for now and go right to the robot. What about customized avatars or class/race combinations are compelling? What makes my presence in a virtual world different from yours? I need difference for one.

[mike]

I think there's some wiggle room in iii)--just why does each player need to control a single piece?

I can imagine VWs evolving from game genres other than dungeon crawling rpgs: train games, sims, and civs all have the investment of long hours into steadily building up a thing, that thing's just not a person. Even there you could still have avatars; one of the striking things about playing Japanese console versions of these kinds of games is how often they put in characters to do the job of mouse pointers and menus.

Or, oo! How about space tradin'! :P

It's a neat exercize: it's hard to not wind up in the same place as WoW or SL; a lot of the things they do, they do for a reason.

[Verilazic]

Well, players will want some way to distinguish themselves from each other, preferably on more than a visual level.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

Drop: euclidean space and predictability.

[Andy Havens]

1. Well, you could use scale as a major force in leveling. I've been thinking about "Spore" since... well... they started hyping it in 1979, right? And Katamary Damacy, too. Could you have a VW where you start as something very small and leveling makes you bigger. But where certain skills stopped working at larger levels. I mean, little faeries can go places where trolls cannot. So maybe you might *want* to "level sideways" as a smaller thing as opposed to growing bigger.

1.b. Worlds/characters within worlds. Start as a warrior but discover an ant-farm and dive in as an ant-lord. Tunnel into the earth and find the Horde of the Dead and inhabit a ghost and haunt your old buddies.

2. Other than strategy that is based on folks working well together in groups (which isn't based on the world, but on basic ideas of strategy), I haven't seen much work done on the idea that groups of players can actually do *different* things than individuals. IE, skills that require 5+ people or chaotic things that happen if you get Type A and Type B players in the same room.

3. Time-flow. A couple great single-player games have allowed for the player to rewind time, usually for short bursts, or to slow it down. Don't know how possible that would be in an MMO. But how much would it suck if you just beat-down a PvP rival gang and they pulled a "do-over" spell on you?

4. No equipment (or identical, communal equipment for everyone). All in-game actions based on skills.

5. XP awarded (and or stolen) by (from) players from a personal pool.

5.b. User created quests.

6. Characters that can join together to make a mega-character (boss-like).

7. All in-game "stuff" built from a few key elements; water, air, fire, earth? Kind of a "Black and White" meme, but where you learn to control elements more precisely as you spend time doing it. Start a fire enough times, you get to start it at a distance. Put rocks around the fire to contain it enough times, you get to create heated rocks. You don't know what the skills will be until they pop up.

8. Not knowing if a character you approach is a PC or an NPC. Ever.

9. No in-game communication beyond the initial physics of the world.

10. No in-game visibility of avatar beyond the effects of what you do.

10b. The shepherd/programmer type game, where you can't do anything yourself, but must rely on your minions to do it all.

11. A game where leveling gives you more environment/land to control, to do with as you will. Farming gives you food, mining gives resources, etc. Which then levels you differently. Larger land = ability to build stuff. Merging land with neighbors allows for bigger stuff immediately... but all neighbors must agree on the builds, etc. Or elect a leader? Anyway... built around land as the value. When one player/guild owns the whole shard, they can make war on other shards ;-)

12. Classes based on "doing" vs. "judging." If you are a "do-er," you get to kill stuff, complete quests, etc. The usual MMO things. If you are a judger, you get to assign quests, give out XP, award trophies, etc. Yeah, I know. Shut up.

Time to stop for now.

[Mike Rozak]

I'm tempted to answer with a lengthy post, but I don't think I'll bother. I've tried in the past.

Whenever I try, people either (a) say it's impossible, (b) assume that I'm talking about classes/XP in disguise, or (c) nod politely because either they don't get it, or they think I've lost the plot. In all cases, they go on making Diku/EQ/WoW clones or Moo/SL clones.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink... out of a water fountain. A horse will recognize a stream or trough as a source of water because it's had experience with those, but it couldn't possibly imagine that the water-like substance coming out of the fountain is actually water.

[ErikC]

why does there have to be one to one scale in size, time, or avatar representation?
Even if one of your conditions is realistic simulation (or have I misread here) couldn't I be a quark, or something moving near the speed of light, or be an ant colony?

Also: not sure players have to operate within physics as understood by us, or literary worlds could not be simulated as virtual worlds.

I'd add another requirement: what people do leaves some form of possibly decipherable trace for others, player actions should also have ongoing environmental presence and persistence.

[Hellinar]

Picking up on some of the stuff Andy mentions, there is a lot of unexplored territory in all the possible Virtual Worlds. I like the idea of communicating with other players by the effects of what you do. I’ve had some sense of that in the world of WURM, where players can do a lot to shape the landscape.

I’d like to see a world in which your avatar carried on a life when you were offline. Or even break the one to one correspondence between player and avatar. Make the player a spirit god, able to possess NPCs and push them to outstanding feats when under the influence. But the player may choose to posses a different NPC next play session. Such a “game” would become one of creating the story of your Demi-god, and their interventions in the world.

I’m fascinated by the idea of time travel in virtual worlds. I’ve been messing about for years with idea of a gardening based VW that would have such a feature. I’ve concluded that, to be practical, players would have to be very limited in their actions in the world. But planting seeds, tending gardens, following different weather histories might all be things amenable to the “what if?” impulse. Now, how would you hold a conversation in such a world?

Maybe some of the territory has been explored, and found wanting. I don’t know. Certainly, if you want to do something different, its hard to see how you would connect with the people who might like it. Game sites are frequented by people who like current games. As people have noted, game betas tend to eliminate novelty, because people complain about stuff that doesn’t suit their playstyle. People who might like that novelty don’t hear of the betas. Katamary Damacy and Spore suggest that novelty is possible though.

[Thomas]

Stop talking about Spore until it's actually out.

[Mikyo]

"To count as a world, its existence has to be independent of that of the players: it continues to run when you're not there. In other words, it has persistence."

I think we need a better definition of persistance. A world can never be independent of the players, who would pay for it? Continues to 'run' when you're not there? Continues to exist perhaps, but essentially does nothing except wait for input. I love the theory that a persistent world can continue to evolve even without players. But the truth is that most 'virtual worlds' do not evolve even with players present. Azeroth will be exactly the same from now until the next patch. The only thing that actually 'persists' IS the players themselves.

[Dave Rickey]

I'd like to explore the implications of geometry. Worlds laid out in toroids, mobius strips, klein bottles, other hyperdimensional contructs. How does this effect the territorial impulse (which evolved for the essentially 2D surface of a globe)?

Since it's impractical to try to reduce the means by which the players communicate (because they just fall back on out of game means), what if we could *enhance* them, in terms of legitimate intercepts of hostile communications and movements?

AI is still a grossly under-explored area of great potential. Not by neccessarily making the NPC's tougher, but making their actions more coordinated, with goals of their own.

I'm currently focusing on games that don't have combat (it's not that popular with the 13-35 year old female market). I think these games have a lot to teach us, not just about how to make games for that market, but for non-combat conflict and cooperation in all games.

This is all just kind of stream of consciousness, maybe I'll have something more structured tomorrow.

--Dave

[Mikyo]

Geometry has a huge impact on Second Life. Magnified because of private spaces, and multiple kinds of spaces, and because most locations are 'owned' by someone. Most plots are much taller than their ground level footprint, so there are many high-rise structures, and even gravity-defying 'skyhouses.' Much controversy also about the right to fly over private areas, peek or teleport thru walls, dump primmy 'garbage' on the neighbors lawn, and suchlike.

[Mikyo]

I love the idea of surveillance and 'interecepts' spoofing, jamming and such. All of these are already being done in (you guessed it) Second Life. Almost all also violate the Terms of Service. But in a more 'gamey' world, privacy laws might not apply.

[Mikyo]

I don't see much need for making smarter combat AI. Nor even more realistic behavior. What I would like to see is 'artificial characters' with more personality. Imagine NPCs with 'mood' and 'tone' that change depending on how you treat them.

[Richard Bartle]

DaveCheney>Is this playful curiosity, or are you suggesting that there are clear motives to *avoid* going "back to Second Life or World of Warcraft"?

The motive to avoid it is that we don't know that we might be missing something better. Thinking, unlike developing, is free.

Richard

[Richard Bartle]

mike>I think there's some wiggle room in iii)--just why does each player need to control a single piece?

They don't need to control just one piece, but they do need to feel that one of the pieces they control is "them" (ie. the player in the virtual world).

>it's hard to not wind up in the same place as WoW or SL; a lot of the things they do, they do for a reason.

In that case, what are those reasons, and are there other ways to address what they address?

Richard

[virida]

Some ideas ive had:

1. small and big characters. Like, in a disney mmo, you could make both small chipmunk, squirrel, bee or mouse characters, or big human sized ones. And both interacts (shrink rays, giant robots to crew, etc). same is possible wit Transformers, and humans and robots as playable in same world.

This is a assumption most make: you cannot make a game with so wastly different characters. It should BE possible.

2. Differing physics laws. A playfield of flying coins, cogweels, or something, and the ability to wanter on all surfaces, and face other players going on an other plane. Ability to jump and "swim" to an other gravity field. Or, say, areas of playfields who is 2D "flatland", and places with 4 dimentions who players can move in (up/down, side/side, forward/back, and two new directions, i call them inside/outside here).

3. dimentions and time. Like, 2 planes beside each other, who is mirror worlds, and players can "shift" between them.

I think this isnt any good ideas even, just ramblings, but its possible, imho, and most devs who atm love WOW as the best game in universe would say its impossible.

A longtime mmo player
Virida, from EVE online.

[Richard Bartle]

Ola Fosheim Grøstad>Drop: euclidean space and predictability.

We did have this for textual worlds, of course. Nevertheless, we found that a world with physics too distant from reality's meant that players struggled to immerse themselves - they had to think about things they don't have to think about much in reality, such as which way is down. A world that operates on the whole in a fashion similar to the way that players internalise how reality works will be easier for them to accept (they can do it automatically), and therefore easier for them to become immersed in.

Do we want players to become immersed in virtual worlds? If so, we should go for a physics not too distant from reality's; if we don't care, we can try other physics.

Richard

[Alex]

To drop in a few thoughts:
- as it stands right now, weather is purely decorative (in WoW for example), except for perhaps the odd visibility drop; snow should be slippery and heavy wind could have an effect on your speed. Then, there's the bigger stuff: tornadoes that fling trees/skinnier party members in your direction? Earthquakes? Volcanoes that don't just sit there looking pretty? Bottomline, an environment that isn't so damn static.

- on the subject of classes: I liked the way old UO handled this. You had some templates, but there was nothing set in stone. You could combine skills however you wanted and, if you got bored with them, you could just get other skills (granted, it was a tad more complicated than I make it sound). You reached the level cap and realized you'd rather be that bloke with the sword and breastplate rather than the healing bot you currently are? There's no reason you should have to waste another few hundred hours grinding up a new character, when you could respecialize. Granted, this should also take some effort but not to the extend where you want to gauge your eyes out.

- a world that players can actually influence. As it stands right now, most MMOs have a story that advances by itself, in its own rhythm. It's a tad ironic that the ads usually call for you to be the 'hero of the land' and as you do step into the land, you find yourself in the shoes of a FedEx employee, while the big script advances more or less the same way, regardless of your actions. Granted, when you have 1M+ players, it's rather hard for every one of them to have a strong impact on the story but then again, attempts are being made (ie: Vanguard's diplomacy system?).

I should probably stop rambling for now.

[Richard Bartle]

Andy Havens>1. Well, you could use scale as a major force in leveling.

You could use it without linking to levelling at all. We don't need levelling for scale.

Different scale is, though, an appealing idea. So long as the player has a sense of their continued identity, then whether they operate at the level of the atom or the universe is immaterial. The interesting thing is that different players can be at different sizes in the universe and have different effects on each other as a result.

>I haven't seen much work done on the idea that groups of players can actually do *different* things than individuals.

It would still have to be the individuals who acted (or one individual who controlled the group). That said, there hasn't been a lot done that I'm aware of in terms of persistent group properties except in terms of collective ownership and reputation. If, for example, I refused to accept a few meagre coins from some poor peasants on the grounds that "the members of my order work for good, not for money", then that would enhance the reputation of my order (guild); if I said "I work for good, not for money" then it would enhance my reputation.

There seem to be different kinds of groups in virtual worlds: persistent, transient; formal, informal. Each has different needs and different benefits. For the virtual world itself to support a group, it would have to be formal (ie. recognised as an object by the virtual world), but could be transient (party) or persistent (guild).

What would be interesting here is if an informal group gained some extra ability as an emergent consequence of playing together. There should be some nice gameplay possibilities there.

>3. Time-flow.

A virtual world's time is necessarily linked to real time, at least in the sense that it has to map to it continuously for all the players for significant (real) periods. You can break it with resets/restarts or system-wide database revisions, but you can't wind it back for an individual unless you wind it back for all the other individuals.

>4. No equipment (or identical, communal equipment for everyone). All in-game actions based on skills.

Are skills the only alternative to equipment?

>5. XP awarded (and or stolen) by (from) players from a personal pool.

This breaks the usual fiction of what XP represents. If you want this system, you have to present a fiction to explain why I can steal experience from you.

>5.b. User created quests.

This means that players must be able to propose actions for other players to take, and offer rewards for those actions. Again, there are two ways to go about this: formal (supported by the virtual world) or informal. An example of a formal one would be where I put up a contract for one dragon's head for which I will pay twenty cows, and the moment you present me with the head then the virtual world honours the contract itself in code. An informal one would be where I ask you to go talk to a NPC while I raid his house, and we split the booty. The only thing that enforces that contract is trust or threat.

>6. Characters that can join together to make a mega-character (boss-like).

And what would each player do? Just sit and watch while the commander wreaked havoc?

This kind of thing does work for vehicle control. If five people are in control of a starship, then one could be captain, another the navigator, another on comms, another on weapons, another on engineering. What happens here is that you take the attributes of a super-character and separate them off into individual subsystems, each of which you put under the control of one player.

>7. All in-game "stuff" built from a few key elements; water, air, fire, earth?

This has been tried in textual worlds. It's a lot of effort and the rewards aren't great. The major benefit is that you get the ability to take objects apart and rebuild them (easier in text than today's graphics). However, it has a heavy reliance on physics to succeed. If, for example, I hammer a nail into my club, does it do extra damage? What if I added 2 nails? Or 20? Or 200? Some poor designer has had to write a formula to cover that...

>Start a fire enough times, you get to start it at a distance.

When new designers ask me to look at their projects, well over half of the Fantasy ones have an elemental magic system as part of it. A good half of the remainder are of the "magic returns after nuclear apocalypse" variety.

>8. Not knowing if a character you approach is a PC or an NPC. Ever.

Better AI - yes!

>9. No in-game communication beyond the initial physics of the world.

Now this is interesting. Players would resort to using external means of communication, of course, such as Teamspeak or Ventrilo, but they'd have to know each other to do that. If the world's physics matched that of reality, you couldn't tell a complete stranger in-world at a distance that you want them to come and buy 1000 gold from you at only $90.18 .

>10. No in-game visibility of avatar beyond the effects of what you do.

Or contingent visibility? And of the world, as well as the player? If everyone in my group has done the "burn down the village" quest then when we arrive at the village it's burned down, but people who haven't burned it down see it still intact (and don't see us).

>10b. The shepherd/programmer type game, where you can't do anything yourself, but must rely on your minions to do it all.

If there's no representation of you within the world, or if there is but it can't act on the world, do we still have a virtual world or do we have something else?

>Yeah, I know. Shut up.

I get told that, too!

Richard

[Richard Bartle]

ErikC>Even if one of your conditions is realistic simulation (or have I misread here) couldn't I be a quark, or something moving near the speed of light, or be an ant colony?

Yes you could. Realistic simulation isn't a criterion, but there are consequences of straying from it too far. The more the players have to force themselves to accept the world, the fewer players you'll get.

>Also: not sure players have to operate within physics as understood by us, or literary worlds could not be simulated as virtual worlds.

The physics don't have to be understood by us, but they do have to exist. The virtual world must constrain what players can do to the environment at some level; those constraints constitute the physics.

Some things which are physical in virtual worlds aren't in the real world. In the real world, for example, setting up a company is a legal thing; in a virtual world, setting up a guild is a physical thing, because it happens in the game's code.

Richard

[Michael Chui]

Richard responded to Andy, Now this is interesting. Players would resort to using external means of communication, of course, such as Teamspeak or Ventrilo, but they'd have to know each other to do that. If the world's physics matched that of reality, you couldn't tell a complete stranger in-world at a distance that you want them to come and buy 1000 gold from you at only $90.18 .

You're assuming a bit much about the physics of the world, aren't you? Then again, I was thinking about soundwave modulation for hearing, marking paper with ink, etc., so...

[Mikyo]

Why not adjustable difficulty levels like in single player games? Cheating? Maybe not, not everything we do must be a competition. Who cares if I play on easy mode? "It's not enough for me to succeed, everyone else must fail?" Or it breaks the fiction? But let's face it folks, the respawning monsters and corpse runs don't make sense either. Impossible to implement? Not in instances.

[Richard Bartle]

Hellinar>I like the idea of communicating with other players by the effects of what you do.

Strictly speaking, this is how the real world works, of course. I communicate by changing the environment in a way that you can detect, whether this be by vibrating air in my larynx, or moving body parts you can see, or causing electronic pulses to be stored in a database that you can display graphically.

>I’d like to see a world in which your avatar carried on a life when you were offline.

This is easy to finesse, eg. by giving players points to spend on movement and crafting, with more points accruing the longer they were logged off. You seem to want the player's character to have a physical presence in the virtual world, though, out of the player's control; that does indeed have implications outside of the existing paradigm.

>Or even break the one to one correspondence between player and avatar.

It's already broken, in that players can have more than one avatar. If an avatar can have more than one player, though, that's a different matter. If you can't tell that the same character in the virtual world is played by the same player in the real world, there's a conflict between persistence and character, ie. of points i) and iii) of the introduction.

Would a world in which you never knew who was whom really qualify as what we call a virtual world? Or would it be something else?

>if you want to do something different, its hard to see how you would connect with the people who might like it.

Although there may well be practical problems in attracting players, but we can't be certain of it. It could be that a novel idea is so obviously a good thing that people who grew up on WoW and EQ will still see its merit.

Richard

[Richard Bartle]

Mikyo>I think we need a better definition of persistance. A world can never be independent of the players, who would pay for it?

The players would?

Although with most large-scale virtual worlds there is little chance that a particular instantiation will be empty, it happens with smaller ones. It could even happen with, say, WoW. Imagine there were some major international event of incredible significance - aliens land in Mexico, for example. Everyone who can get to a TV is watching it. Virtual worlds will be just as empty as the shopping malls.

The definition of persistence is more a theoretical than a practical one. IF the players all left to go to bed THEN the virtual world would continue to run without them. This is in contrast to FPSs, which stop running when the players leave.

>Continues to 'run' when you're not there? Continues to exist perhaps, but essentially does nothing except wait for input.

Well that depends on the virtual world. I suspect that the majority of them do continue to move NPCs and monsters around and do continue to count time until darkness, irrespective of how many players are in them. I know my own MUDs did (and sometimes with interesting results).

>the truth is that most 'virtual worlds' do not evolve even with players present.

Correct. However, you can't use the fact that most don't evolve as an argument that the definition of persistence is wrong. The purpose of this thread is to extrapolate from the minimum requirements to find new paradigms, not use existing paradigms to specify the requirements.

Richard

[Richard Bartle]

Dave Rickey>How does this effect the territorial impulse (which evolved for the essentially 2D surface of a globe)?

We saw a bit of this in the heyday of textual worlds, but today's graphical worlds are pretty well based on a flat plane with no wrap-around. Nevertheless, connecting edges east and west would at least give a cylinder; connecting north and south too would give a torus. Putting in twists would give more still, and that's still while having basically a 2D map. I agree, there's a lot more that could be done here, and there could be fun gameplay consequences as a result of it, too.

>Since it's impractical to try to reduce the means by which the players communicate (because they just fall back on out of game means), what if we could *enhance* them, in terms of legitimate intercepts of hostile communications and movements?

Players can't communicate with NPCs or (probably) complete strangers out of game, and this is where playing with the communications channel could be fruitful.

>AI is still a grossly under-explored area of great potential.

I agree.

Richard

[Mikyo]

Maybe we are only trying to square the circle. There are endless games that have features very unlike SL or WoW. Those games are not MMORPGs, and probably wouldn't appeal to players who like MMORPGS. Why not automated henchmen and servants? Oh wait, thats guildwars.
The greatest potential for change is in abandoning the static, menu driven type of 'world.' Given a finite state machine, that may not be possible, or perhaps possible only by giving players some authority to change it.

[ErikC]

I like this thread, and Richard's replies.Which leads me to the suggestion that in a virtual world there is either the sense that my understanding of the world can be made manifest to others and/or others seem to understand each other in this 'world.'
I also like the idea of indirect communication, I believe if potential communication is suggested and possibly varied, that in itself will attract players to attempt to unravel and institutionalize and deinstitutionalize the means of communication.

[Mikyo]

Could you do more with situational awareness? I keep seeing the same radar style minimap everywhere. Rogues need not be silent, or use terrain, they only click a button. Monsters never seem to actually use their hearing or vision, but behave more like land mines waiting to be pulled or stepped on.

[Hellinar]

@Thomas: Spore is already “out” for the purposes of this discussion. Its novel, and heavily funded by a major game corporation. Which shows new paradigms can be developed, if only in particular circumstances. How well the marketplace accepts the new paradigm is yet to be determined.

@Richard: “A Tale in the Desert” does let you spend accumulated offline time on travel and production. I always felt Teppy was missing a trick there though. A frequent complaint about ATiTD was that the world seemed empty. If your neighbors character could be seen working on his offline straw gathering, or even walking along the road to a new destination, it would have added a lot of life to the place.

When it comes to breaking the link between the player and the current avatar, I’d argue that this is an sense would be more “immersive” than the current paradigm. Representing the Player as a powerful being from another plane of space and time is actually closer to the underlying reality than saying the player “is” the possessed character. So there would be less fictions to swallow in such an environment. You might need to toss in an “Olympus” where player Demi-gods could socialize as themselves though.

@Dave and Ola: I’m very interested in worlds that don’t entirely mimic our familiar concepts of space and time. Richard has a good point though, that most people don’t want the work involved in jumping the gap. As I see it, most people are looking for fairly mindless entertainment in these worlds. Messing about with the physics and such requires an attitude of “mindful play”, where the objective is more to learn surprising new things about yourself and the realm of the possible. Not “fun” for most people.

[Mikyo]

Wow. Why not a "Quantum Leap" type game. The player might temporarily take control of a new avatar to solve each particular quest?

[Mikyo]

Each quest could require the player to temporarily take control of a new and different avatar. One might be King the first day, but slave the next. Roleplaying, for once, held higher than combat skill. Instead of the typical struggle for (illusionary) power, players would be tasked with making the best use of whatever skills their "host" had available.

[Mike Sellers]

Mike Rozak: I'm tempted to answer with a lengthy post, but I don't think I'll bother. I've tried in the past.

Remember, "well done is better than well said." People aren't going to get new concepts until they see them. They're impossible until, well, they're not.

In another post here I quoted Henry Ford saying how if he'd listened to customers, they would have wanted a faster horse. He gave them something different, something that they would have thought impossible, right up until they experienced it for themselves.

And anyway, I believe it's better to not talk about things until they're actually real: too many games or game features get announced with much fanfare, and then turn out to be complete vapor. This isn't a change to virtual world design itself, but we could sure do with fewer way-too-early big announcements of upcoming worlds that then fizzle out (not pointing at you, Mike!).

Dave Rickey: AI is still a grossly under-explored area of great potential. Not by neccessarily making the NPC's tougher, but making their actions more coordinated, with goals of their own.

Agreed, completely.

Mikyo: What I would like to see is 'artificial characters' with more personality. Imagine NPCs with 'mood' and 'tone' that change depending on how you treat them.

This goes right along with what Dave Rickey said, and with what Mike Rozak is trying, I believe, as are we, among others. To me "artificial psychology" (to differentiate it from the path-finding dead-end that "artificial intelligence" has become in games) is a key component of the Next Big Thing.

Richard: They don't need to control just one piece, but they do need to feel that one of the pieces they control is "them" (ie. the player in the virtual world). And later: If there's no representation of you within the world, or if there is but it can't act on the world, do we still have a virtual world or do we have something else? ... Would a world in which you never knew who was whom really qualify as what we call a virtual world?

You already don't know "who is whom" -- who is behind any given avatar, and the 'worldiness' is not broken. The virtual world does not depend in any way on a singular representation of the player within the world. There's no a priori reason why a player has to have one avatar that represents "them." But for our collective RPG roots, you could as easily have "this army is 'me'" as in RTS games.

Limiting the online world to a one-to-one relationship between player and avatar is a sacred cow from old RPG days. Why not multiple players driving one character, one player driving multiple avatars, or a combination of both? There are very interesting forms of gameplay, identity, and community to be mined once we break out of "I am my avatar" limitations.

Alex: - a world that players can actually influence. As it stands right now, most MMOs have a story that advances by itself, in its own rhythm.

Actually I think that's far too generous. Most MMOs have no story at all: their worlds are frozen in time, or at most have occasional, lurching changes that proceed on the schedule of a new "expansion" rather than on the basis of the flow of the story.

IMO 'world-story' or 'multi-viewpoint story' (no one actor's view is any more valid or preferred than any other, a radical departure from millennia of story form) are another key aspect of the next generation of game-based online worlds.

[Mikyo]

Yes, thats it. Not so much artificial intelligence, more artificial psychology. NPC combat skill, ninety percent of the time, is already good enough. "Realistic" behavior in a world of elves, dragons and vampires doesn't seem likely or necessary. I would like characters that have more, uhm, character.

[Mike Sellers]

I would like characters that have more, uhm, character.

Workin' on it. :)

[magicback (Frank)]

Given the current model of repeatable and instanced quests, which essentially references time travel and multiple realities, why not just make this the basis of the world.

It can be a game based on Daybreak, the failed TV show. Daybreak is a kind of a groundshog day situation where the characters repeat a "raid" not to get loot, but to get a particular result; not by killing bosses, but by influencing their decisions and actions.

Frank

[Andy Havens]

@Richard: "A virtual world's time is necessarily linked to real time... You can break it with resets/restarts or system-wide database revisions, but you can't wind it back for an individual unless you wind it back for all the other individuals."

Well... I'm gonna disagree.

What the heck is "time" in a world that is recorded in a database? What if everybody else's character (or every other guilds' characters) was "reset" to their stats for yesterday, or "before the raid," but my guy (team) stayed the same. Obviously, you can't erase the memory of the players. But you could undo quest-points, take stuff out of inventories, remove links from friends' lists, etc. etc. Time, in games, is recorded not in real-life seconds but in time-spent in the game. Which is recorded, really, in "stuff what I've done."

Not saying it'd be easy. Or really fun. Just that you could do it. Everybody else wakes up having lost whatever they did in the last 10 days of game time... you, me and our crew... we get the girl, the Stone of Chronos and keep our XP.

[genericdefect]

I would say that in terms of what participants are doing in a shared virtual space has little to do with the objects that populate it. Objects only facillitate to serve as a focal point for shared attention and dialog.

If the emphasis is on the shared aspect of that space, and namely the sharing itself, then the focus must be on the interactions of the innumerable protagonists. We can divide that further in thinking that individual protagonists will have tools which affect their relationship to each individual antagonist they come across, but also a set of tools that can be utilized to affect the relations -between- other antagonists.

By intensively focusing on the metaxical aspects, it should be possible to develop a real sense for the "we" in virtual worlds.

There is infinite range for exposition, qualification, quantification and concretization of the mode of tools that focus on such things, but since it's just a virtual experience anyhow, it can be reduced to an elemental form. The blanks can always be filled in with details and particulars.

[Mikyo]

Many virtual worlds dont even have time. What's time anyway? What makes a year last a year? It ends when the planet finishes one revolution around the sun. Time is a measurement. A 'year' describes the amount of change in the location of the planet. So what is time in a world that cannot change, where every day is exactly the same as every other day?

[Mike Rozak]

Mike Sellers wrote: People aren't going to get new concepts until they see them. They're impossible until, well, they're not.

And at the same time, if the idea/meme doesn't begin propogating long before the technology is ready, people won't get the technology when it arrives. Science Fiction writing/movies have done a great job of propogating the ideas of spaceflight, robots, aliens, and whatnot, softening the intellectual barriers when, for example, spaceflight actually took place. (And we still have people that don't believe men landed on the moon.)

In another post here I quoted Henry Ford saying how if he'd listened to customers, they would have wanted a faster horse.

Or in other words, a horse with more polygons. :-) Which is exactly what Richard Bartle is talking about.

This isn't a change to virtual world design itself, but we could sure do with fewer way-too-early big announcements of upcoming worlds that then fizzle out (not pointing at you, Mike!).

I have no intention of making a big announcement. My product is niche market, one (out of many) reasons being that the meme hasn't had time to propogate so most people wouldn't get it, even if I had $50M of eye candy behind it.

Besides, no one would believe/understand a big announcement. (Which is all part of the mental block that Richard Bartle is talking about.)

[Michael Chui]

Andy Havens said, Time, in games, is recorded not in real-life seconds but in time-spent in the game. Which is recorded, really, in "stuff what I've done."

I disagree. That's not time at all. If it is, then doesn't WoW already allow you to remove skills to regain skill points? But that's beside the point:

Stuff you've done is represented in the database, sure, but in the database, you've also got that funny little thing called a timestamp which plods onward by the millisecond. You can't assign different players different timestamps. (If you can, I want to see it.)

Let me draw an analogy. In a couple months, I'm going to be handed a diploma. Yay me. If RL were a virtual world, that would be recorded in the database. Level up, ding. Now, your idea of time reversal is to go and remove that record from the database.

Did I actually go back in time? No. My experience of time is completely independent of my accomplishments. One second I had it, and the next second, it poofed. But time nevertheless marches inexorably on.

What you're actually describing is being ripped off. I pay 10 hours for one apple. Ten hours later, I get an apple. The next day, the apple is involuntarily removed from me. But I didn't get those ten hours back: no time travel here.

[Hellinar]

@Michael: Sounds like you are making no distinction between character and player there. Your in-world character has certainly been time traveling. Which could make for an interesting world I think. I can imagine being a time traveler, without any computer assistance. But the computer generated “reality” of VWs could amplify the effect far beyond my unaided imagination. I’d like to try it.

[Prokofy Neva]

>there must be synchronisation.

You must have thought of this but...why? One of the things that was great about the Sims offline is that you could speed up or slow down or freeze (using the hacks) the characters.

And even if a "real-time" game you could have part of the game be somebody stuck/frozen in time instead of dead.

I always thought it would be great if there were a world were "time doesn't pass/even though time goes by" like in the Frogg Marlowe song. Narnia, by contrast with RL England, was such a world, and SL sometimes seems like that, given the long hours people are willing to put into it.

[Michael Chui]

Hellinar said, @Michael: Sounds like you are making no distinction between character and player there.

I'm not. Richard has been going on and on about immersion in this thread; I saw no reason to make a world that is not.

And I have yet to visit a world where time travel that's out-of-step with the rest of the population existed. That was Andy's initial proposition, if I understood it correctly.

Now, granted, it's possible to change the number of actions performable within the same interval of time. That was immortalized in the Haste/Slow spells of D&D, and works just fine. But that's not time travel: it's a change in your capabilities, not a change in time.

But now I'm suspecting that I don't understand your meaning. Elaborate?

[Hellinar]

@Michael: The context I am looking at time travel is in a gardening based game (or perhaps pastime). The back story is that you are on an alien world of tiny energy beings who have little material interaction with the world, but can plant and tend flowers. These beings are natural time travelers.

One frustrating feature of real world gardening is that you never know what would have happened if you had done things a bit differently. Answering that “what if?” will be possible in my world, if it works as intended. The downside is that the Player interactions with the world have to be kept pretty limited, if the engine is to recompute the state of the world from changed initial conditions. Plants fortunately sit still and don’t interact much. Time travel in a world of mobs would be vastly more complicated.

In a world of time travelers, nobody ever has the frustration of losing their apple as you describe it. Each traveler always has their own history, which steadily accumulates, if not always going forward in time. Their personal story goes ever forward, though not with respect to world time.

Which world history you see becomes a player choice. Will Player A choose a world line in which Player B planted a garden at such a time and place, or not? Which makes the game multi-player, but strong choice on who you play with. Of course, I haven’t got this complex feature working yet, so it remains just a theoretical possibility. I have hopes its somewhere on my future time line though.

[illovich]

I think there's much to gain from looking at genre mashups - for example, a persistent world RTS mixed with a persistent world city builder, or either being done well alone.

I don't think that a really radical game design (e.g. non-euclidian geometry) would have a great chance of succeeding (I could be wrong) - it's better in my opinion to start with a goal of getting away from the 3d MUD concept and towards new ideas, but be willing also to accept small steps, like elimination of classes and/or combat (although doing this, you also have to accept you're going after a different audience than the WOW/EQ crowd, I think).

I've been goofing in Gaia Online -- which seems to be the bare-bones-est virtual world you can make that is more than text written on loose-leaf, and that has no classes or combat, and yet they seem to have 50k users on at peak times every night. It makes instant sense to people who try it, and the casual games they offer are fun enough (although they could use more).

But I think the really brilliant thing they did was making community participation a way to make money. Post in the forums? You get money. Vote in a poll? Make money. Make a journal and write an entry? You make money.

I think what they should do is add something similar to Doctorow's Whuffie currency, because I see a lot of low-level gaming of the system (bumping posts for money, etc). If money gained was based on how interesting people found the content you created, that would be even more interesting.

It can be a game based on Daybreak, the failed TV show. Daybreak is a kind of a groundshog day situation where the characters repeat a "raid" not to get loot, but to get a particular result; not by killing bosses, but by influencing their decisions and actions.

When I got bored with Everquest I made a barbarian and tried role playing a lunatic who was convinced that Norrath had become unstuck in time. I would tell anyone who would listen "Haven't you noticed? Nothing changes permanently. The dead reappear, objects that were taken reappear. Nothing can be done to change the world now. It is forever frozen. FOREVER FROZEN!!!"

Nobody seemed to like the joke though, so I didn't do it for long.

[magicback (Frank)]

Come on, anyone thought about Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy?

First, you got a virtual world with deep background.

Second, you have Psychohistory, the science of the actions of very large groups of people.

How would this be applied to MMOs?

Hellinar said:
"The downside is that the Player interactions with the world have to be kept pretty limited, if the engine is to recompute the state of the world from changed initial conditions."

Is this a real limitation? On possible solution is to recalc state change say once a month. The recalc applies statistical analysis of the actions of large groups of people to determine what the state change will be. It's a basic application of Psychohistory, Wisdom of the Crowd, the Long Tail, the Blue Ocean strategy and all that internet hype called Web 3.0 :)

illovich said:
"When I got bored with Everquest I made a barbarian and tried role playing a lunatic who was convinced that Norrath had become unstuck in time...Nobody seemed to like the joke though, so I didn't do it for long."

What if someone did liked the joke and you built a group of supporters? Could the world change because of it or would it still stay the same? That's the interesting question to ask.

Now, compare and contrast the results when you attempt in an instanced location and in a common location. What if you can change the state of the instance, such that player can choose to go into your instance location rather than some other location?

These are all interesting questions that I would like to get comments from the readers of TN.

Frank

[Richard Bartle]

Mikyo>Could you do more with situational awareness? I keep seeing the same radar style minimap everywhere.

Part of the reason for that is practical, in that your client software has to know the people are nearby or it can't instantly display them if you suddenly decide to turn around. If the client knows, then a program sitting between the client and the server sniffing packets knows, and then when it's released everyone knows. This is what happened to EverQuest with ShowEQ.

There are software solutions, though. The server can send the client all the information it needs, encrypted. When the player turns around, then all the server needs to send is the decryption key. This may still result in a half-second delay, but that could be acceptable.

>Rogues need not be silent, or use terrain, they only click a button. Monsters never seem to actually use their hearing or vision, but behave more like land mines waiting to be pulled or stepped on.

I agree that it's ridiculous to have monsters that stand around oblivious to the battle that's going on just down the hall in full view. Then again, it's ridiculous to have them standing aimlessly where they are anyway. Better to have smaller numbers of monsters with better AI, perhaps...

Richard