Horizons: David Bowman on Online Worlds

Over at RPG Vault [site] David Bowman had a little comment on what were building with virtual worlds.

[i]Are online worlds fun? I've personally had many hours of fun in an online world, so I'd say yes. But I believe I understand what Damion is getting at with his statement. Can they become fun for a broader audience; can they become fun in ways that they are not currently?

I have a question of my own. Are we making theme parks, playgrounds, sandboxes, vacations, simulations or games? (Or something else entirely?)

Each of these differs from the others in the way that fun occurs, and I believe massively multiplayer spaces can choose to model themselves after any of these traditional fun spaces and succeed, but that they appeal to differing audiences.

A theme park provides diverse, static experiences in a single location through which a "player" moves.

A playground provides specific static equipment upon which social players interact with each other and with the equipment.

A sandbox provides a dynamic player-controllable environment where players can interact in player-negotiated ways.

A vacation is an alternative to "real life" where players can interact with each other and live a social life different from their own.

A simulation provides a detailed recreation of an environment and rule set that players experience as an alternative to their "real life" experience.

A game provides an approximation of a real environment and trades verisimilitude for ease of understanding and direct access to the rule set.

These are my own definitions and your opinion may vary, but in order to provide the widest possible fun for players, elements and lessons can be taken from each of these. Budgets don't currently allow us to create all of these in one product, but by creating each of these as a portion of multiple products, it should be possible to increase the number of people playing these games and the amount of enjoyment that any one person derives from experiencing these spaces. It is also possible to create more and more varied experiences in a single space if you can update that experience. Even the earliest of existing products were able to update through new boxed content and patches, thus growing the variety of fun to be had. Next generation products are even better prepared to expand their experiences and as technology and infrastructure improve, the scope of that experience can dramatically increase as well.

This was included as part of the "Online Worlds Roundtable issue #4"