A Piece of Place

As I mentioned previously, I'm going to be presenting at the DCC04 workshop on Virtual Worlds. This audience provided an opportunity to move away from the legal and economic discussions and to focus on the role of place in Second Life. The paper is here.

In earlier papers I've talked about the use of economic motivations to provide context within a general, user-created world. This paper explores a different set of ideas, namely that factors that lead to a sense of place -- such as modeling on the real world, travel, land ownership and a constant influx of new land -- also provide a crucial context and motivator to creation and community formation.

Comments

[Nathan Combs]

1.

In the 1997-98 time frame, I played a tiny and doomed persistent world MMOG (Terra: Battle for the Outland). Fascinating game in many respects; one interesting aspect was that it was embued with this tremendous sense of place. Largely due to a huge (and under-populated) landscape upon which players would build forts and construction in tremendous isolation (20 km separation was defensive norm).

I can recall treks taking upwards close to an hour, across a god-forsaken, wind-howling red landscape.

Question: do you need space to have place? Or is this new-fangled trend towards streamlined travel in MMOGs undermining all this? Is teleport in CoH a place-killer, in the name of casual play?

[Tobold]

2.

I think that travel by conventional means (on foot, horse, vehicle) has to be carefully balanced with teleportation in virtual worlds. If you make teleportation too easy, you lose the impression of "place". But if you make it too difficult, you prevent people from playing together. They are able to hear their friends on some chat channel, but it would take them too much time to actually reach them and hunt together or do any other common activity.

Place is only of value if there is actually a reason to visit it. Too many games have huge, computer-created landscapes, with very little content in them. Littering the random landscape with random monsters doesn't help. Traveling from Freeport to Crushbone in EQ to go orc hunting is an adventure. Going from Mos Eisley in a random direction to go Bantha hunting in SWG is not.

I have often wondered if the game principle of "Pirates!" could somehow be implemented in a MMORPG. Buy goods in one city, have an adventurous journey to another city, and sell goods there at a profit. Would make a change from the usual leave city, hunt and loot monsters, come back to same city model. The game could still have teleports between cities, but you would be unable to transport goods by that way.

[Flatfingers]

3.

Tobold> "... Too many games have huge, computer-created landscapes, with very little content in them."

Before it launched, SWG planned to offer "dynamic" content. You'd be walking through the woods when (for example) a Twi'lek slave girl would suddenly appear, begging you to save her from the slavers who were chasing her. You'd have to choose whether to risk getting involved or not.

This idea of dynamically spawning content was appealing not only because it would make for emotionally engaging gameplay in a way that discouraged camping, but also because it was consistent with the Star Wars ethos in which moral decision-making is required. But it never wound up being fully implemented.

Raph can describe better than I can why this was the case. But from my perspective as a SWG player, not having this kind of dynamic content left SWG's places feeling random. They were pretty, but nothing you did seemed to matter.

There were some randomly spawning quests, but because they weren't connected to each other through story, players never felt they were a part of larger and thus more meaningful events. Not enough designed content existed to make the SWG world feel like a real place in which larger events were moving.

In this sense, "place" is a more abstract concept than terrain. It's not about one's relationship with physical locations, but about one's relationship to the lives of the other characters in the game world.

Physical place matters, but so does "knowing one's place."

Tobold> "Littering the random landscape with random monsters doesn't help. Traveling from Freeport to Crushbone in EQ to go orc hunting is an adventure. Going from Mos Eisley in a random direction to go Bantha hunting in SWG is not."

I wonder if the main way in which SWG differs from EQ with respect to "interesting travel" is this: EQ has paths that are less dangerous than other parts of a zone; SWG does not.

The concept of the Safe Path may be one of those universally shared human concepts that goes back to the days in the cave. Or maybe it's just a notion from relatively modern fairytales. Whatever its origin, people today get it: If you just want to get from A to B, take the path; if you're looking for adventure, stray off of the path.

The lesson may be: evenly randomized adventure doesn't offer enough stable external landmarks to let players create an internal map of physical place, but having safe paths through dangerous areas does.

Tobold> "I have often wondered if the game principle of 'Pirates!' could somehow be implemented in a MMORPG. Buy goods in one city, have an adventurous journey to another city, and sell goods there at a profit. ..."

"Buy low, travel excitingly, sell high" is a great summary of the Merchant features in Mark W. Miller's superb Traveller RPG. I've been nagging the current developers of SWG to add something like this feature to their game so that players could write their own Merchant Prince storyline, but no luck so far....