Virtual world equation

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6 April 2005

by Mike Rozak

As I stated in The authoring equation, computer graphics thinkers have come up with an all-encompassing mathematical equation that explains 3D rendering. Most of the computer graphics lighting techniques that you may have heard about, such as radiosity, global illumination, ray tracing, motion blur, etc., are just approximations to the full solution described by the rendering equation.

Since I like to examine the underlying principles of ideas, I keep wondering if there's a similar all-encompassing "equation" that explains virtual worlds...

Here's my latest attempt.

What a virtual world is...

A virtual world is...

1. A virtual place simulated on a computer.
   
   
2. The place is populated by various "players" visiting the world. The most common type of "player" is an ordinary player. Other types of players exist though, including the author, members of the live team, and trusted players. (See Player powers.)
   
   
3. Each player has the ability to control their avatar, affect the world, and affect other players, either directly or indirectly. The type of control depends upon the player type. Authors, for example, have much greater ability to change the world than ordinary players.
   
   
4. Players visit the world because they want something out of the experience.
   
   The most common "desire" is entertainment from the author's content, which the author created using their authorial player-powers. Most players also want to play with friends, or meet new people. Some want to run inns. Others wish to be kings. Many want to dominate others. The author and live team "play" (in part) because they wish to earn real-life money.
   
   The players' desires are conscious, sub-conscious, and maybe even something unknown or unwanted to the player when they first begin playing, but which is ultimately "good" for them (such as Richard Bartle's "Hero's journey"). Does the the author's choice of what is "good" for the player mimic the "theme" of a novel? (More on this in a future writeup.)
   
   To state the obvious: If the player's desires didn't somehow involve other players, the players would probably be playing a single-player game instead of dealing with all the headaches of the Internet and other players.
   
   
5. When players try to fulfil their desires, they often annoy other players in the process. A player fulfilling his desire occasionally benefits other players.
   
   For example: A player who wants to role play is annoyed by non-roleplayers, and vice-versa. A player who wants to grief annoys just about every player he meets. A player who wishes to be an innkeeper and chat with his customers annoys those customers who just want to buy a beer and get back to adventuring.
   
   Of course, not all players cause each other grief, and some get along quite well; A player who wishes to play Florence Nightingale is appreciated by wounded fighters. A player that wishes to to sing bawdy songs at an inn is usually welcomed by the inn's visitors, although some customers may disagree.
   
   How much one player's desires affects another player depends upon the individuals and their particular moods and circumstances. Some people may not like being healed by Florence Nightingale, while a small minority of others might actually enjoy being griefed. Annoyance can be conscious and sub-conscious.
   
   See The player pyramid and Altruism.

The equation

Looking at virtual worlds in this light makes "the equation" to solve fairly obvious... The goal of a virtual world is to:

Sustainably maximise the fulfilment of the players' desires (aka: conscious and sub-conscious enjoyment of the VW), while minimising the amount that players get on each others' nerves. (To make matters more difficult, players getting on each other's nerves sometimes leads to fulfilment of the players' conscious or sub-conscious desires.)

Of course, this is easier said than done.

Some obvious solutions

Some solutions naturally follow:

1. The author and live team need to produce the "entertainment" that players consciously and sub-consciously expect from them. Such entertainment is usually in the form of hard-coded content, scripts, and AI... what most people would call the PvE game. Some virtual worlds (see below) rely on the live participation of the author and live team, while others have no PvE content whatsoever. (See Player powers.)
   
   
2. The world should be designed to attract "complimentary" player desires. These could be self-attracting desires, A <-> A, such as players looking to meet people wanting to meet other players wanting to meet people. They could be mutually beneficial relationships, A <-> B; Players who wish to be leaders must be in worlds with players who wish to be led, and vice-versa. Or, there can be more complex relationships of A -> B -> C -> A. See Intertwined relationships.
   
   The player pyramid discusses one possible relationship, where some players pay the real-life bills in order to have the other players around.
   
   
3. The virtual world's advertising should do its best not to attract players that won't fulfil their desires in the world. Attracting the right players is also important, but is (in many ways) secondary to not attracting the wrong players. If the wrong player visits a virtual world they will not enjoy their experience and will tell ten friends how lousy the world is, just like people who see a movie they didn't like. Unlike movies, players who aren't enjoying themselves will also make life miserable for the virtual world players who are playing and enjoying the world. (Note: Similar behaviour does happen in movie theatres... Occasionally, a disgruntled movie viewer will provide a running criticism of the movie to everyone sitting in neighbouring seats.)
   
   
4. The virtual world's advertising should attract a "balanced" distribution of players. If more players wish to be innkeepers than there are inns, some of them will be unhappy. Damion Schubert pointed this out in his response to the player pyramid.
   
   
5. The world should attract and empower altruistic players. Some people are naturally friendly and altruistic, and are a net benefit to a virtual world. The virtual world should attract these players and give them powers to maximise their beneficial effect. Other players (griefers) annoy virtually everyone else and should be kicked out. (See Damion Schubert's response to the player pyramid.)
   
   
6. The powers provided to various types of players should be designed so the players can attain their desires. If a world attracts players who wish to lead, the world should provide tools/abilities so the players can actually lead. A world that attracts players who want to be innkeepers should provide player-run inns. Alternatively, an option for "looking to group" ensures that players that wish to meet other players can easily do so.
   
   The powers might be dependent on other players, so that player A cannot fulfil his desires with his own powers, but must convince player B to use his powers.
   
   
7. Players should have a choice about what they want to do, and who they typically interact with. This allows players interact with people that help fulfil their desires, and avoid annoying ones.
   
   
8. The world should naturally funnel players to meet other compatible players. Guilds ensure that leaders and followers meet up. Likewise, PvP players are given their own PvP region of the world so they don't kill a PC that doesn't want to partake in PvP. In some worlds, fantasy races with strong personality associations attract people of like-personality into the same region of the world. (Giving players exactly what they want isn't always best though. See below.)
   
   
9. Players are rewarded for fulfilling the desires or other players, and penalised for being annoying to other players. Players naturally reward and punish one another through in-character actions, such as as insults, avoidance, and PvP combat.
   
   Role playing virtual worlds sometimes provide each player with role-playing points that he/she can award to another player that he/she thought did a good job role playing. The points could just as easily be handed out for "making my experience more enjoyable". Negative points could be awarded for "being a jerk"... so long as the true jerks aren't allowed to label other people as jerks and their friends as enjoyable, or the world will turn into a world of jerks, which is fine if that's what you're after.
   
   Rewards can be simpler than this; in the case of a virtual world with player inn-keepers, making goods less expensive at the player-run inn than the NPC-run inn acts as a reward for players who visit the player-run inn.
   
   
10. Role playing points and/or real-life cash payments can be accumulated and used to "purchase" potentially negative abilities. For example, if a player accumulated enough role playing points they could become king, which would allow them to impose their will (to an extent) on other players. Inevitably, such an imposition would be a minor annoyance to a large number of players. To become king, and thereby mildly annoy large numbers of players, the player had to do good deeds, either by getting lots of role-playing points or by paying real-life bills, so on the whole they make the world a better place to live in... This system acts like the inverse of Hindu theology, where the positive/negative actions of this life affect what you're reincarnated as. Instead, the positive actions of this life allow you to act negatively in your next life.
    
    Notice the semi-interchangeability of role-playing points and real-life money. Does this mean that virtual worlds which are expensive to run (ones with plenty of eye candy) will value wealthy contributors above those who earn role playing points, and vice versa?
    
    
11. Worlds with democratic player politics have a similar effect. A player who desires to be elected will only be elected if he makes enough other players' desires come true. Unfortunately, democracies inevitably lead to factions where 51% of the players are getting their desires met, and 49% are unhappy with the current administration. Role playing points used to purchase kingdoms could produce similar outcomes.

Notice that these solutions almost all require that the player makes a conscious choice, which means that the player will tend to fulfil their conscious desires and often fail to heed their sub-conscious or "good to have" desires.

Examples

Applying this model to contemporary virtual world genres (partially) explains why they succeed:

• Single-player worlds - Players are looking for canned entertainment from the author and live team, in the form of content. The author and live-team are looking for a real-life income, which the players pay in exchange for entertainment.
  
  
• Player-vs-environment worlds - The single-player world's player/author relationship of entertainment/money exists. Plus, the players wish to play with their friends (who in turn wish to play with the player), and to meet new players (who wish to meet the player). The author reorients the single-player content so it provides a vehicle for playing with friends or meeting new people.
  
  
• Player-vs-player worlds - As with PvE worlds, players who wish to play with friends, or who wish to meet new people, are attracted to the world. Furthermore, the world attracts players wishing to compete against other players (who in turn wish to compete). Leaders and organizers are attracted to the world, as well as people who wish to be led or organized. Many PvE worlds include PvP elements, but the PvP elements are usually in separate sections of the world or PvP is optional.
  
  
• World-like worlds - Players who wish to be innkeepers, mayors, or kings end up paying the real-life bills. In order to have clients or subjects to rule, they pay for the author and live team, who provide free content that attracts players who like single-player or PvE worlds. See The player pyramid.
  
  
• Creation worlds - Players that wish to create scenery or other works of digital art wish their creations to be seen. Players that wish to socialise visit these worlds because (a) the scenery and artworks provide something to socialise about, and (b) the artists often pay the real-life VW costs for the socialisers. Since creation can also be used as a status symbol, some socialisers partake in creation (and help pay the real-life bills) to increase their social standing.
  
  
• Role-player worlds - Players who wish to role play like to play with other players who role play, and without non-role-players. The role players need the author and live team to create the stage as well as to police the role playing in a non-political manner.
  
  
• Table-top RPGs - Since the players and author (the GM) are friends, all players participate to continue and strengthen their friendship. The GM is the player in the group who most likes creating and role-playing, while the other players enjoy the entertainment.

If this model is applied to single-player games, as shown at above, then you'll see that a single player game is a world with one player and an author in absentia. The absent author is limited to hard-coded elements, scripted elements, and artificial intelligence. The author "learns what the player desires and dislikes" by providing the player a choice of play styles in the guise of races and classes, as well as choices throughout the game.

A story is 0-player world in which the reader has no input. The author of a book or movie can only use hard-coded elements; scripts and AI are not possible in books.  Furthermore, the author cannot even ask the viewer what they're interested in, so instead, the author designs the content to satisfy a stereotypical reader/viewer. (Theoretically, a piece of linear fiction on a computer could ask the reader what type of experience they want, and use scripts and AI to tailor the fiction.)

A more complex solution

If you have a hammer, all the world's problems look like nails...

All of the "obvious" solutions are already used in contemporary virtual worlds. Let me propose a more complex (and robust) solution that may be a bit controversial:

Create an AI (or members of the live team) whose job it is to figure out what a player desires, and hook him/her up with other players (or content) that fulfils the player's desires, while also fulfilling the hooked-up players' desires.

In other words,

Create a god/director for the world whose purpose is to make the world fun based upon its knowledge of each individual. Much of what the god/director does is act as a "dating" service, arranging "chance" encounters between players (or content).

Basically, the AI's job is to maximise the fulfilment of desires while minimising the amount that players get on each others nerves. For example: It needs to get chatty players to visit the inn run by the chatty innkeeper, while steering rushed players to a vending machine.

This isn't any easy task, and isn't likely to be solved anytime soon.

The first problem is finding out what the player desires:

1. If you ask players what they want, they will be able to state their conscious desires. They won't be able to tell you their sub-conscious desires, and won't have clue about unknown desires that would be "good" for them.
   
   
2. Players may not be able to put their desires into words or settings that an AI can understand.
   
   
3. Players may lie about their desires.
   
   
4. Players' desires change from day to day, hour to hour, and minute to minute. A virtual world can't possibly ask players what they want every 10 minutes. Polling the player once every few weeks might work, since the player's desires probably fluctuate around a mean.
   
   
5. Some desires should not be fulfilled... Even though players may think they want to fulfil a desire, they will be unhappy if they actually do.
   
   It's the old saying, "Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it."
   
   Or, to paraphrase Frank Herbert in his Dune series: Most people will tell you they wish to know the future, but what they really want is to know which lottery number to pick and how to avoid accidents. They don't really want to know everything that will happen to them.

Somehow, the AI (or live team) needs to watch a player's actions and reactions, and guess what the player is trying to get out of the virtual world experience... I said it wasn't doable in the near term.

Furthermore, the AI (or live team) must determine what annoys the player so that content and encounters with potentially annoying players can be minimised. Attaining a list of "annoyance" factors comes with the same difficulties as determining the player's desires.

Once the AI (or live team) knows a player's desires and annoyances, it needs to steer the player to the content or players that will be most compatible. An even more complex solution would have the AI create content designed for the player, just like a table-top RPG GM does.

If this wasn't complex enough for an AI, the AI will probably need to be very subtle about its machinations. Many players will resent an AI playing matchmaker, even though they might appreciate the results. If the players know they are being manipulated, or in what specific ways, they might rebel and purposely try to subvert the AI. Griefers will find all sorts of ways to subvert the system. For example: If a griefer is given a quest that's obviously designed to benefit another player, this provides the griefer with information about what the other player wants, and can be used by the griefer as a weapon against the other player.

Table-top RPG's successfully implement this more complex solution because the GM (acting as the AI) only deals with four to six players, and knows them well enough personally that he can deduce their desires and dislikes. The players know such machinations occur, but accept it because the GM is their friend, and is trusted so long as he doesn't go too far.

Even though its a long way off, the idea is not that far fetched... Amazon.com uses data mining and analysis to produce reasonable (but imperfect) book recommendations based on what books you have already ordered. When I log onto Amazon.com, it recommends that I purchase a collection of books about 3D rendering and game design, along side a Thomas the Train electric train... I have ordered Christmas gifts for my nephews through Amazon.com, and the AI isn't intelligent enough to realise that the gifts weren't for myself.