[MUD-Dev2] [Design] Personal virtual worlds

[Mike Rozak]

I just wrote up a short article about "Personal virtual worlds". It's an idea that I've been thinking about for some time, and which I'm currently basing my VW toolkit on, at http://www.mxac.com.au/mif .

The article can be found at: http://www.mxac.com.au/drt/PersonalVirtualWorlds.htm

I'd like to hear what you think.

I've pasted the article below, but the bullets didn't come out well:

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Personal virtual worlds
(Back to TOC)
26 January 2007
by Mike Rozak
Discuss on www.mXac.net/forums
A few years ago, I had an E-mail discussion about 
personal virtual worlds (PVWs). The general idea is 
that if virtual worlds were easy (low-skilled) to 
create, and cheap to host, then millions of people 
would create their own virtual worlds, just like 
millions of people have their own blogs, MySpace pages, 
web sites, etc. PVWs would be a form of self-
expression, just like blogs.



Personal virtual worlds "won't work"

I wasn't too keen on PVWs for the following reasons: 

1. Inevitably, all "development kits", including 
virtual world development kits, encounter a 
tradeoff between ease-of-authoring and 
flexibility. In order to make virtual world 
creation so easy that millions of people could 
create their own worlds, the toolkit would have 
to limit the variety of worlds that could be 
created.

In less abstract terms, a virtual world creation 
toolkit that's easy enough for millions of people 
to use will end up being a virtual dollhouse; 
players will be able to position stock objects 
around their world, and that's about it. No 
custom 3D objects, other than colours selected 
from a palette. And the stuff that really brings 
a world alive, scripting, will be non-existent 
because scripting is an uncommon skill.

2. Virtual dollhouses might be fun for the authors 
to create, but they're not very entertaining for 
players, other than a quick look around to see 
what garish colour combination the author managed 
to invent. By the tenth such dollhouse, players 
will give up and never visit a virtual world 
created by "Easy-to-use virtual world creator" 
again.

3. Chatting with other players might be fun. 
Unfortunately, with millions of worlds, players 
would be so thinly scattered that they wouldn't 
produce a critical mass. A player would log onto 
a world, see that it's empty, and immediately log 
out. One minute later, a different player would 
do the same. As far as the players are concerned, 
the millions of worlds might as well be single-
player "games", but they're not even games; 
they're just empty chat rooms.

4. With a slightly more complex toolkit, and fewer 
authors who could drive it, authors could create 
games instead of chat rooms. However, since the 
easy-to-use toolkit wouldn't require scripting, 
all the games would end up being exactly the 
same.

With only a hundred professionally-created 
MMORPGs in the world, an obvious and now-cliche 
Diku-game has already emerged. A million Diku 
PVWs would only be worse because they'd be 
exactly the same game, not just strikingly 
similar games. After the 10th Diku PVW, players 
would get bored and swear off playing in worlds 
created by "Easy-to-use Diku creator".

5. Of course, the toolkit could allow for more 
complex gameplay and authoring choices via 
scripting, resulting in something like 
Neverwinter Nights (I or II). Instead of millions 
of dollhouse PVWs, however, the toolkit's 
complexity would limit the target market to only 
a few thousand authors. Unfortunately, NWN 
authors can't alter the fundamental game 
logic/programming, so the thousand worlds would 
still be very similar. NWN worlds do attract 
players though, even if the majority remain 
empty.

6. Text MUDs go a step beyond NWN worlds; authors 
have access to the MUD source code (even more 
complicated than scripting) and can change 
everything about the game. Over the last fifteen 
years, www.mudconnect.com has amassed a list of 
1700 MUDs, many of them defunct, and most of them 
player-less. And they're almost all clones based 
on Diku-MUD!

MUD clones exist because customising a MUD is too 
much work. Authors download the source code with 
accompanying "default" content of 2000+ rooms. 
They quickly realise that any change they can 
make to the MUD's 10 man-years of code and 
content is minimal, unless they're able to commit 
10 man-years themselves. So, with no other 
choice, the defeated authors rename "Orcs" to 
"Sporks" and "Elves" to "Ethereal Beings", add a 
few hundred rooms to the 2000 stock rooms, and 
mis-label their MUD as "completely original" 
(since no one will try a MUD that's clearly 
marked as a "clone"). 

Some fundamental reasons why PVWs don't work
Let me rephrase some of what I stated above: 
1. It can be fun for an author to create a personal 
virtual world, even if all the author does is 
move virtual furniture around.

2. Creating a virtual world that is interesting to 
players, however, requires 3D modelling skills, 
audio skills, and most importantly, programming 
skills. (Not to mention creativity, storytelling, 
and whatnot.) If an author doesn't have such 
skills then they can still have fun creating the 
world, but it's unlikely that players will stick 
around.

To play devil's advocate, I'll point out blogs, 
which as easy to write, attract readers: Millions 
of people write blogs, and at least 10,000 blogs 
are actually read. Blogs aren't difficult to 
write. They don't require any ultra-complex 
modellers or programming languages, but they 
still manage attract readers/players. Why 
shouldn't the same hold for PVW toolkits? Why 
can't a PVW toolkit be as easy to use as a word 
processor?

Blogs actually require enormous skill to write. 
The reason blogs are so easy to create (relative 
to PVWs) is that much of your education was 
devoted to learning how to write, not to mention 
all the conversations you have every day of your 
life. Very little, if any, of your education 
included 3D modelling, programming, and creating 
audio files. If you were lucky, you took a few 
art and music classes in elementary school. If 
your education emphasised 3D modelling and 
programming as much as it did writing, creating 
amateur virtual worlds would be a piece of cake.

Continuing the blog analogy: A virtual world 
development toolkit that doesn't require 
modelling and programming is like a blog server 
that only lets bloggers choose paragraphs out of 
a standard library; actually choosing individual 
sentences, or (God forbid!) individual words and 
forming unique sentences, is too complicated for 
illiterate people. (Notice that bloggers aren't 
forced to create their own fonts, though!)

3. The more PVWs that exist, the lower the player 
density in the worlds. Low player densities turn 
the worlds into single-player games... that 
occasionally contain other players. If a PVW's 
design assumes that other players create most of 
the fun, then an empty PVW won't be much fun, 
which creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop 
when players log on, see no one around, and then 
immediately log out.

4. Text MUDs, in particular, try to be enormous, 
some claiming to be as large as 20,000 rooms. I 
suppose that larger worlds attract more players 
to try the world. However, huge worlds are 
problematic:

? They reduce the player density still 
further.

? They take more time for players to 
complete, so they're not accessible to the 
75% of the population that works, and/or 
has children, and/or has a life.

? An emphasis on "huge" causes authors to 
reduce quality in favour of quantity... but 
quantity isn't needed by PVWs because there 
will hypothetically be thousands (or 
millions) of them, most of dubious quality 
merely because their authors aren't skilled 
enough. Inducing a further decline in 
quality by encouraging quantity is merely 
another nail in PVWs' coffin.

5. Players' expectations are high. After having 
played in a world that took 300 man-years to 
create, a text MUD that took 10 man-years is, for 
the most part, unappealing.

Beginning with a 10 man-year text MUD as a base, 
an amateur author could hypothetically devote one 
man-year to changing and customising the code and 
content, and numerically create an experience 
that is 10% different from the original 
code/content. Users would perceive the difference 
between the new MUD and its ancestor to be 
greater than 10%, though. I guesstimate that a 
10% real change will be perceived as a 20% 
difference. 20% is on the threshold of being 
different-enough that players who played the 
original MUD will want to try the modified one. 
(The exact number isn't important here; You can 
come up whatever scaling and threshold makes 
sense to you.)

However, only 50,000 - 200,000 people play text 
MUDs; There isn't enough eye candy to attract a 
larger audience. 20 million (to use a round 
number) play 300 man-year eye-candy-laden 
MMORPGs.

If a player suddenly got a hold of WoW's source 
code and models, and devoted a man-year to 
customising it, the game would still be 99.7% 
WoW! Even doubling this value to simulate how the 
changes are perceived, after one year's work, the 
game would be perceived as 99.4% WoW... which 
means that the experience would be almost exactly 
the same. To create a "new" experience from a WoW 
base, a team would require 30 man-years (10% of 
300) of customisation... hardly an amateur 
endeavour. 

The solution lies in stating the problem
If I invert the problems, a possible solution reveals 
itself: 

1. Create a virtual world toolkit that encourages 
quality over quantity. If the world takes more 
than six hours to play through, it's probably too 
long.

Side note: The more years I spend thinking about 
amateur virtual worlds, the shorter I think they 
should be. A few years ago I anticipated a 50-
hour MMORPG, like GuidWars, in my anti-MMORPG 
writeup. I now think that even 50 hours is too 
long.

2. The toolkit should encourage authors to create a 
fun single-player game (or experience), such as 
an interactive fiction, CRPG, or FPS. If other 
players happen to show up, they're an added bonus 
to the fun, but their presence can't be required.

3. The toolkit must emphasise customisation. For the 
most part, the game code and graphics should all 
be replaceable, including fundamental assumptions 
such as gravity.

4. Here's a tricky (and contentious) solution: The 
toolkit should only be a few man-years of work, 
or rather, the parts important to a player's 
perception of what makes a world different should 
only be a few man-years. If not, any attempt that 
authors make to customise the experience will be 
overwhelmed by the mass of pre-existing 
code/content, as in Diku-MUD clones that are all 
similar because authors don't have the manpower 
to significantly change them.

I suspect that there are ways to circumvent this 
limitation, to an extent, such as allowing third 
party models and code to be bolted in by authors. 
However, for this to work, authors must have a 
large selection of models and code, and the 
models and code must themselves be customizable.

5. Include all of the necessary tools in the 
toolkit, and perhaps even offer hosting. 
Requiring the author to download the toolkit, 
then also install a separate 3D package, 
database, scripting language, audio editor, etc. 
isn't good enough. There's no reason to make 
things more difficult than they need to be. 
This is only one solution. There are others: 
1. Create a dollhouse PVW toolkit that's designed to 
be fun and easy for everyone to use, but where no 
one seriously expects players (other than the 
author's friends) to show up.

2. Create an amateur PVW toolkit, like I described 
above.

3. Create a professional virtual-world toolkit that 
is used to create worlds in the top-100 list. 
Attracting players to amateur PVWs
What attracts players to an amateur PVWs? 
? They're all different. Or at the very least, 
different ones are easy enough to find that 
players won't come to the conclusion that all 
PVW's from a specific toolkit are all the same.

Corollary: A web site that recommends suitable 
PVWs based on the player's preferences should 
exist. Something like Amazon's book 
recommendation feature would be nice.

? They're fun as single-player games, because 
players may be alone in the world for significant 
periods of time.

? If other players happen to be in the world, the 
game (or activity) is more fun.

? Players can arrange to meet friends in the world 
and play through it together.

? Entering a new world is frictionless; there can't 
be any large downloads or lengthy registration 
procedures. Content should be downloaded on 
demand, not in one 100 MB block at the beginning.

? The worlds are free, or close to it. They 
probably won't have enough content and eye candy 
for players to pay money. (Advertising might 
work.)

? The worlds serve a niche audience, just like 
blogs. Mass-market audiences will play in 
professional virtual worlds.

? The worlds shouldn't take long to for players 
complete. A group of friends should be able play 
through a world in a night. An exceptionally long 
world might require two or three nights.

To beat a dead horse: Attempting to make a large 
world on a minuscule budget results in a lot of 
uninteresting content that is only attractive to 
a small segment of the population... which would 
be a fine niche, except that niche is already 
owned by MMORPGs with gigantic eye-candy budgets. 


Postscript

I thought of an alterative name for PVW's... "Mini-
MMORPGs" or "Micro-MMORPGs"... which would be 
abbreviated as "MMMORPG"! I decided that PVWs sounded 
better. :-)