Defining Everquestness

What are the defining qualities of virtual worlds? What defines their worldliness: the there of There, the everquestness of Everquest?

These questions are central to Lisbeth Klastrup’s recently published phd thesis: Towards a Poetics of Virtual Worlds: Multi-User Textuality and the Emergence of Story.

Diving straight to page 322 ‘Defining Everquestness’ Klastrup suggests that the experience of a virtual world can be split into three levels:

- The lived experience of individual characters “those which turn into stories"

- The experience of the game ”of mastering it and discussing it as “a tool”"

- The total experience of the world incorporating “the knowledge of the world “gathered” by all my characters on their travels”

She goes on to say that the experience of the world also includes becoming part of a social network, the malfunctioning of EQ as a capricious technological artefact, the “playful oscillation” of acts that have one meaning within the world and another to those outside it etc. Finally she concludes that the worldliness of EQ is made up of the sum of all these experiences.

Having not read the preceding 321 pages yet I’m unsure of the detail. But thinking about what makes the experience of VW distinct from others I tend to think in terms of Bartle’s take on the Hero’s Journey. Yes it’s our experiences of the worlds what they are - but specifically for me it is the breadth of the arc of those experiences, the actuality of being one of the heroes of a saga, the intensity of relationships that are forged and lost, this to me is the particular if not peculiar worldliness of VWs.

Thanks to Mirjam Eladhari’s Blog for pointing out that Lisbeth’s thesis is now out.

Comments

[David Surman]

1.

Hey,

I recently gave a paper at the Hypermedia Lab creative gamers seminar on gameworld characteristics: "Style, Consistency and Plausibility in the 'Fable' Gameworld."

It will be appearing in our forthcoming anthology 'Animated Worlds' published by John Libbey and coming out later this year.

Hopefully more gameworld analyses will appear in the next few years -- I think it is a key area of study for the field

Dave Surman