[MUD-Dev] NEWS: Why Virtual Worlds are Designed By Newbies -No, Really! (By R. Bartle)

[ceo]

Koster, Raph wrote:
> Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

>> Two systems can share qualities > without being essentially the
>> same thing. So, a system can both be a > multi-user game and a
>> virtual world, and a multi-user game may be on > the borderline
>> of being a virtual world.

> Definitely; however, I am looking for the term that encompasses
> Second Life AND City of Heroes, EverQuest AND LambdaMOO.These are
> all flavors of the same thing in a way that Diablo is not (but
> that Diablo II or Guild Wars arguably are).

I'm still wondering why no-one's ever taken me to task for
repeatedly implying that D2 is. I always expected *someone* to take
umbrage, and spark a discussion, since it was a knowingly
contentious claim...Under my personal definitions, the range from
"yahoo games" to "everquest" is not a large empty space with a
bright dividing line but in fact a smooth scale with lots of things
sliding around on it, for instance the Blizzard pre-WoW games. I
suspect a similar false pigeonholing by US companies led to them
missing the boat on mobile games, thinking they weren't capable of
earning much revenue, whilst they were already earning millions in
profit just for individual studios in europe.

I have met with considerable useless bias from mainstream dev
studios towards pigeonholing things as "traditional high-budget game
online-only with subscriptions" or "stupid little web-games that any
idiot could make in half an hour", and it's never been helpful to
anyone involved, and always been symptomatic of people who've no
idea what a typical MMOG actually comprises beyond "thing which
makes big money!" (and so have horribly naive ideas about
implenmentation effort, maintenance, etc). I suspect that that bias
derives in part because of people like us who've had these "bright
dividing lines" in our heads and have leaked our sure categorization
to the mainstream - where they've been adopted as gospel without
understanding that they were fluid and just handy rules-of-thumb in
the first place. And then, of course, that probably feeds back and
cements the definitions on e.g. this list because of majority
pressure :(.

Personally, I think perhaps it's time you got rid of your "bright
dividing line". It sounds (to me) like an old habit you've had so
long you're loathe to get rid of it - like something that even when
you're re-visiting all your old assumptions, you turn a blind eye to
the problems of this one.

In particular, what *precise* definition are you trying to encircle
with a Name? For instance, I consider SL to be diametrically opposed
to CoH/EQ in that it's so obviously not a "game". And yet clearly
related to MOO for the same reason. That, of course, is *my*
personal bias: I'm largely uninterested in anything non-game, except
as a "related discipline".

I wonder if you have to create a set of definitions, parameterized
on the perspective you're using to view the things. For instance,
from a technical/implementation POV, SL and EQ are closely
related. From a game-design POV, they're completely separate. And
from a user-experience POV, all text things are closely related -
but strongly dissimilar from the graphics ones.

Looking at how threads move and evolve on this list, it has often
struck me that each POV is a separate dimension, and the threads are
free to make small steps in any dimension. They often move start
moving in one dimension, then step sideways a small distance in
another, only to continue in the original dimension - but now a very
long distance from where they were the last time they were moving in
this dimension.

>> It is rather pointless to refer to all multi-user systems as
>> virtual worlds, although most multi-user systems can be viewed as
>> virtual worlds.

> MOST multi-user systems do not employ a spatial metaphor. A text
> mud is basically a hypertext system wherein the links are labeled
> with directions and presumed to be movement, and where other
> browsers of the same text block are displayed to you. You could
> change the links to be thematic or something else, and remove the
> sense of place, end up at something akin to the web or IRC, and it
> would have lost its "worldness" to me, and fallen out of the field
> this list covers (though obviously it would remain a close
> cousin).

Interestingly, this is part of why I lost interest in text MUDs long
ago: the complete lack of spatiality stressed me out too much. I got
fed up with the arbitrary unflagged changes of scale and direction
and the forced weak metaphor that felt like a square peg in a round
hole. I now tend to view MUD's as if each location were a website,
and mentally ignore the faux "compass direction" labelling, since
this worked out a lot less stressful. Oh, and the auto-mapping MUD
clients were a godsend to me, any of the ones that generate graphs
that you can use as a map to navigate by double-clicking.

Adam M
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