Translation of Richard Bartle's book Designing Virtual Worlds. Chapter 1. Basics

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Richard A. Bartle (Richard Allan Bartle)
Certified specialist in artificial intelligence. One of the creators of the very first MUD (1978), which gave rise to the entire industry of massively-multiplayer games, the boom of which we are now seeing. In the future, Richard firmly engaged in research of virtual worlds and their inhabitants. As an independent consultant, he has participated in almost every such project over the past 20 years.

(Who wants to help with the translation of the fundamental book on game development, write in a personal or mail magisterludi2016 <dog> yandex.ru)
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The basics

(many thanks for the translation to Vladislav Zadumov (zadumov.v <dog> gmail.com), who professionally translates from English and Japanese)

As a rule, people want to break up various virtual worlds into categories, to make it easier for them to discuss what interests them specifically, or to find the world that best suits their needs. Potential players, for example, will want to know what the world looks like, and what the setting is in it: If they want to play the space pirate, the Fantasy World setting is unlikely to help them with this. Marketers and investors are more concerned with the longevity of the product and the demographic statistics of its users: They may not be interested in spending time in the virtual world themselves, but they will be very interested in those who are immersed in this world. Designers also have their own, theoretical problems that they need to solve, in addition to the need to understand the desires of players and marketers.

If you look at the virtual worlds from the point of view of their historical development, the categories used most often stand out quite easily:

• Appearance
• Genre
• Code base
• Lifetime
• Player Base
• Degree of variability
• Degree of immutability

Let's look at them in order.

Appearance

Beginners tend to believe that the appearance of the virtual world is very important; old players are more concerned with other features.
Virtual worlds are usually divided into text-based (text) or graphic-based (graphic). The former describe locations, objects, and other players with words, while the latter use images.

However, between the two extremes there are many options. To access the textual virtual world, the player needs some kind of program to connect. This can be a direct connection — for example, starting the game server in the console and entering commands upon its requests — or indirectly, using the client. If a client is used, then it can be “stupid,” “smart,” or individually customized.

Strictly speaking, a “stupid” client does nothing but accept input (the results of which he sends to the server) and output answers (which is all that the server sends back). However, few clients are so “stupid” - even telnet is capable of some editing functions, such as backspacing. The simplicity of "stupid" customers is not accidental, it allows you to use them to achieve more goals.

Even when we are dealing with a “stupid” client - or we do without a client at all - the virtual world does not have to consist solely of a lifeless text. Individual letters, words, sentences and paragraphs can be colored by the server (usually using ANSI encoding, which most PCs can recognize), so that the resulting text is more attractive and meaningful.

Smart clients are designed for use with certain types of applications; in this case, the text virtual worlds. Such clients provide additional input options (such as macros or triggers) and output management tools (for example, local saving logs and line breaks). Although these features could be installed from the server side and transferred to the “stupid” clients as results, most of the authors of modern servers are not tied to this, as they know that there are now so many [52] good clients freely available, that players are almost guaranteed to use one of them.

[52] http://www.mudconnect.com/resources/Mud_Resources:Mud_Clients.html contains a list of resources with customers.

An individually configured client only works with a small subgroup of virtual worlds that has a common protocol with it (usually there is only one such world). The client sends packets with information describing the input to the server. The server responds with packets telling the client what to output. Although the input protocol is usually not very complicated, the output may contain embedded codes that will cause the client to execute commands, such as switching fonts, playing sound effects and music, or displaying images. In the case of the textual virtual world, pictures will by definition be static, resulting in something like an illustrated book rather than a film. However, this is an excellent example of how far the text world can be developed before it is classified as a graphic one.

As a rule, the virtual worlds of the first and second generation were used by “stupid” clients, the third generation - by “smart” ones, and the fourth generation - individually configured.

The fifth-generation virtual worlds (graphics) also use customized clients, but they display information differently. Packages received by the client contain information that can be used by the client to render the scene. It will be either in 2½D (tessellated), or in 3D (first-person view), although there is no doubt that “real” 3D (using some kind of stereoscopic device for imparting depth to the scene) on the way to full BP is not far off.

Therefore, for a beginner who does not know and is not interested in the mechanisms of work, the difference between the virtual world with moving pictures and the world without them is obvious; most likely this fact led to the choice of one world instead of another. However, for the old player who understands the mechanisms of creation and operation of the virtual world (server side), the graphic and text worlds are essentially the same, whatever the client is - the difference, albeit rather significant, is only in the interface

Genre

Another category, important both for beginners and, to a much lesser extent, for designers, is a genre [53].

[53] I use this word to refer to both the topic / setting and the category of content (usually expressed as being acceptable to children).

A newbie will look at a set of virtual worlds and say: “This is medieval fantasy, this is Cyberpunk — science fiction, this is a horror about vampires, this is about Greek mythology, this is asexual Japanese Anime, this is about stylized Gangsters”, and so on.

Again, from the point of view of design, the virtual world for the most part is built regardless of the genre. Of course, you do not need to prescribe magic in a world based on Venice of the 16th century, and you do not need firearms in a world where players will be fishes. However, most of the basic functionality will not greatly change from genre to genre.

But it also happens that the genre has important features. For example, why there are so few virtual worlds about the Wild West? Because it is very difficult to justify the reason why the character of Vasya Novyky cannot enter the store, buy a revolver and put the entire drum in the back of a character that Petya has been playing for five years already. No wonder that revolvers are called “levelers” [54]!

[54] There is also a problem (noticed by Damion Schubert) that enemies do not become “bigger”. Except for the problems in real life, which will appear because of the killing of virtual Indians and Mexicans, what will happen when a character gains experience and moves up the level? Will he kill the "big" Indians and Mexicans?

In Fantasy, science fiction and even horror, there are ways to do this in such a way, without breaking the narrative, there are similar ways in worlds based on a hundred or more years ago. And this is not the only problem - there are many more. For example:

• Detectives do not work very well as a genre, because players do not want to reveal clues to each other. This means that the game seems to counteract their communication, while most designers, on the contrary, would prefer that they communicate.
• The same type of comedy as a genre. The player laughs when something funny happens the first time, but by the tenth time similar jokes are already annoying.
• Novels do not work in virtual worlds. But sex works. Even if you start from the first, everything quickly comes down to the last.
• Heroes or loners are not well transported into virtual worlds. It’s stupid when 5,000 people run, playing Indiana Jones, Lara Croft, James Bond or Doctor Who. In the real world, there would not be enough room for them, let alone a virtual one.

These problems may be obvious to you, but there are those who do not see them [55]. And even if this is not the case, why would any businessman want to sponsor the development of an unverified (as part of the possibility of creating a virtual world) genre? Is it not more likely that he would prefer to choose the genre that is already known to be created?

[55] The only genre that I haven’t met in all the years of my work as a consultant for the design of virtual worlds is comedy. Everything else I have seen how people try, some more than once.

In general, the most important thing in genres is the ability to attract players. From this point of view, the choice of a genre becomes a problem of marketing, rather than design (although designers really need to understand their markets). Someone from the “effective managers” may think that millions of people have seen films about Batman, and this will be reason enough for them to insist on this choice - regardless of whether Gotham City is a good setting for the virtual world or not.

Fortunately, most designers can avoid the dangers of a bad genre. Of course, there are a lot of dangers in good genres too, and their examples will become obvious later in the book. One of them is the licensing problem. Licensing is generally a sore subject in the gaming industry as a whole. The following arguments are usually given:

Behind:

• People know and trust the brand, so more players will come.
• You attract the attention of the media and competitors.
• You get free advertising from other products under a related license.
• The design of the general idea has already been made.

Vs:

• You will have to pay large sums for the license, so the costs inevitably increase.
• Free advertising can be bad or just not help.
• Some license assumptions may be necessary for the sake of gameplay. This can annoy both fans (and this is worse) and license holders.
• The general idea of ​​the world is what designers love to do the most.

Within the framework of virtual worlds, the decision to “license or not” is usually made by someone other than the future designers of the world. This imposes a framework on the creative process, because designers must fit the franchise. Although many license holders are quite liberal, there are those who shake their worlds and will not allow anything uncanonical, despite the problems caused by the new media. This can pose big problems for the designer. Sometimes, even those things that are part of the world of the setting can go beyond the scope, for example, the license for Lord of the Rings will not always include the material mentioned in the Hobbit, although they occur in the same fantasy world.

However, strange as it may be, licenses can also facilitate the work of a designer — at least where it concerns virtual worlds [56]. A guaranteed hit such as Star Wars Galaxies or The Sims Online can risk things like unlicensed games, simply because if they screw up, it won’t kill the game. An innovation with a 75% chance of success can be easily tested in a licensed graphic virtual world, while in an unlicensed one it will not be touched, based on the fact that “Chance is 1 to 4, what does this produce 15 million dollars of investment? You are crazy?".

[56] As for ordinary computer games, the license is often a big sign of “Caution: Secondary Product!”

For a competent design team, a world with a sufficiently large license cannot fail, except if they have conceived that it will fail (at least for this moment).

To be continued



Bartle 's article "Worms, clubs, diamonds, spades: players of virtual worlds"