What a World!
The term "virtual" is part of the topic of this
particular blogpost. The second word describing the topic is "world".
So let me start with a quote from an article by Pavel Curtis, entitled
quite long-windedly as "Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual
Realities":
Some of my colleagues have suggested that the term `text-based virtual real-
ity' is an oxymoron, that `virtual reality' refers only to the fancy graphical
and motion-sensing environments being worked on in many places. They go on to
predict that these more physically-involving systems will supplant the
text-based variety as soon as the special equipment becomes a bit more widely
and cheaply available. I do not believe that this is the case.
The
context of the paper is that of a text based multiplayer roleplaying
game. The reason I quote this section is to show that a virtual reality
or world does not mean a complex hardware structure. That something so
simple as text on a screen can create an immersive environment. So my
opinion is that a virtual world is something created by the mind.
Virtual worlds are everywhere because people are constantly dreaming up
situations and locations to inhabit that are not "real". So it comes as
no surprise that the simple text descriptions can provide the necessary
bandwidth to give players a virtual world. A further word from that
author "[w]hile I agree that the fancier systems are likely to become very popular for certain applications and among those who can afford them, I believe that MUDs
have certain enduring advantages that will save them from
obsolescence." Which I agree with also and is backed up by the trends
I've seen unfold over time. Something from my experience is that while
I play WoW as a 3D graphics game I recieve maybe half of the total
information I use playing that game as text. All of the damage numbers
and spell effects are described in the combat log which is a text based
description of everything that occurs in the game. I use an addon to
the game ui called "scrolling combat text" to dynamically display the
most important parts of that description on screen in a very visible
manner so I can have exact information. In fact in many cases when I
step back from playing and analyze my UI and my information retrieval
habits I put so much emphasis on the numbers from the text and the text
is so big that many other people can't pick out thegraphics behind them. In the same vein of thought but from the essay The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat by Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer:
The essential lesson that we have abstracted from our experiences with
Habitat
is that a cyberspace is defined more by the interactions among the
actors
within it than by the technology with which it is implemented.
While we find
much of the work presently being done on elaborate interface technologies --
DataGloves, head-mounted displays, special-purpose rendering engines,
and so on -both exciting and promising, the almost mystical
euphoria that currently
seems to surround all this hardware is, in our opinion, both
excessive and
somewhat misplaced.
I especially like the second sentence because I've noticed it more and
more as graphical displays in game get better and better what makes a
game good, worth playing, is the game not the platform its on. Gameplay
and the story and the environment can be translated to the platform no
matter what it is and still provide the player with the virtual space
for the player to create his or her part of the virtual world they
reside in while they play.
On a final note that doesn't specifically fall into creating a digital immersive world is the following:
Even in a more technically advanced network, however, bandwidth remains scarce
in the sense that economists use the term: available carrying capacity is not
unlimited. The law of supply and demand suggests that no matter how much
capacity is available, you always want more. When communications technology
advances to the point were we all have multi-gigabaud fiber optic connections
into our homes, computational technology will have advanced to match. Our
processors' expanding appetite for data will mean that the search for ever more
sophisticated data compression techniques will still be a hot research
area (though what we are compressing may at that point be high-resolution
volumetric time-series or something even more esoteric)
Which
seems to me to be an extremely accurate prediction and illustrates
nicely the trend I mentioned earlier. There is also another assertion
made by the paper that I thoroughly support "Detailed central planning
is impossible; don't even try." What I take from the combination of
these two statements is that any successful online environment is a
dynamic expanding endeavor that requires a lot of work and trail and
error and getting feedback from the players to help iterate the design
makes for a more immersive and entertaining game.
Jerald Parker
Comments