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. :-)