I’ve posted up the slides for my Games Learning + Society keynote that I gave at UC Irvine on Wednesday morning. It’s more talk about metaverses, with some cautionary notes. Those of you who have read recent blog posts will find a decent amount of it familiar. Click here to take a look!
Making objects in a virtual world actually do something is way harder than just drawing them – and as we have seen, drawing them is already fraught with challenges.
How Virtual Worlds Work
1: Clients, servers, and art
2: Maps
3: Object templates and instances
4: Object behaviors
5: Ownership
Once upon a time, in the old days of DikuMUDs, every object in the game was of a type – ITEM_WEAPON, ITEM_CONTAINER and so on. These were akin to what I referred to as templates in the last article. But they were hard-coded into the game server.
If you added new content to the game, you were limited by the data fields that were provided. You couldn’t add new behaviors to a vanilla DikuMUD at all. That item type defined everything the item could do, and a worldbuilder couldn’t change the code to add new item types.
To extend the behaviors a little bit, there was a small set of “special procedures” also hardcoded into the game – things like “magic_missile” or “energy_drain.” The slang term for these was “procs,” and to this day players speak of weapons that “proc” monsters. You could basically fill in a field on a weapon and specify that it had a “spec proc,” choosing from that limited menu.
If we look back at the previous article, and think about what this means for portability of object ownership, one fact jumps out at us: the functionality of a given object in a DikuMUD is inextricably bound up with the context in which it lives: the DikuMUD game server. There wasn’t any code attached to the item that could come with it as it moved between worlds. Instead, it really was just a database entry. The meaning of the fields was entirely dependent on the game server.
Continue reading »How Virtual Worlds Work
1: Clients, servers, and art
2: Maps
3: Object templates and instances
4: Object behaviors
5: Ownership
First we talked about clients and servers; then we talked about maps. Now we are finally at the hardest part of virtual worlds to wrap your head around – not coincidentally, also the aspect that gets people the most excited.
Things. Stuff. Bits and bobs. Widgets. You know: objects.
A lot of folks think a digital object is something like this:
Objects might seem simple, but they are actually very complicated. The subtleties lead to confusion about what is possible in online worlds or metaverses – and the answer is both more and less than people tend to think.
Continue reading »The redoubtable Jon Radoff from Beamable has been doing a great series of videos called Building the Metaverse on a wide array of topics related to, well, the Metaverse. Today he’s posted up a video where the two of us riff on interoperability, governance, digital ownership, and much much more.
It’s got lots of real talk. Some key bits to whet your appetite: Continue reading »
Last week I wrote about the challenges of moving art between virtual worlds – especially the long-standing dream of moving avatars across wildly different worlds and experiences.
How Virtual Worlds Work
1: Clients, servers, and art
2: Maps
3: Object templates and instances
4: Object behaviors
5: Ownership
Something I didn’t touch on is whether this is a dream you actually want.
There are a lot of things people assume they want out of a metaverse which don’t really hold up under close scrutiny.
Do you really want to move your avatar between a fantasy world and a gritty noir world set in the Prohibition era? Even if it shatters all immersion when you head into a speakeasy and someone casts a fireball spell at you?
Do you really want to be in a ten thousand person battle with the latest weapons technology if it means you get headshot by a sniper a mile away that you never got to see, dodge, or avoid in any way?
Continue reading »