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Raph Koster's personal website: MMOs, gaming, writing, art, music, books
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 Blog — Recommended posts 1998-2012— Recommended posts 2012-2017— Popular
Posts Game Design — A Theory of Fun— Presentations— Essays— Interviews and
panels— Snippets— Laws of Online World Design— The Online World Timeline—
Links Books — Postmortems— Theory of Fun— Sunday Poems—  Other writing — —
Fiction— — Poetry— — Lit Crit Music —  After the Flood — — CDBaby— — Amazon— —
iTunes— Listen— Instruments and tunings Art — Pencils— Pen and Ink— Cartoons—
Digital Art— Doodles About Raph — CV— Contact Raph— Press kit—  Hobbies — —
Emulation— — Fish tanksUpcoming Events


OWNERSHIP: HOW VIRTUAL WORLDS WORK, PART 5

 Posted by Raph Koster(Visited 2740 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with:
copyright, game business, metaverse, vw design
Oct 212021
 

Let’s get one thing out of the way first. Ownership of anything digital is
illusory, and always will be.

How Virtual Worlds Work
1: Clients, servers, and art
2: Maps
3: Object templates and instances
4: Object behaviors
5: Ownership

Then again, it’s illusory in the real world, too. Ownership is a convention, not
physical reality. This is why we have sayings like “Possession is nine-tenths of
the law,” which basically means “you can claim you own something all you want,
but if you don’t physically have the object, it’s pretty hard to enforce.”

In digital settings, of course, you never physically have anything. At best, you
have a physical container of data.

Continue reading »
 No Responses »


OBJECT BEHAVIORS: HOW VIRTUAL WORLDS WORK PART 4

 Posted by Raph Koster(Visited 8035 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with:
metaverse, playable worlds, virtual worlds, vw design, vw tech
Oct 142021
 

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


ITEMS AS PURE DATA

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 »
 1 Response »


DIGITAL OBJECTS: HOW VIRTUAL WORLDS WORK PART 3

 Posted by Raph Koster(Visited 3218 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: game design,
metaverse, playable worlds, virtual worlds, vw tech, vw tech metaverse
Oct 072021
 

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 »
 Comments Off on Digital Objects: How Virtual Worlds Work part 3


BUILDING THE METAVERSE SESSION

 Posted by Raph Koster(Visited 2304 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: community,
interview, metaverse, social worlds, video, vw history, vw tech
Oct 062021
 

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 »

 Comments Off on Building the Metaverse session


HOW VIRTUAL WORLDS WORK, PART TWO

 Posted by Raph Koster(Visited 6621 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with:
metaverse, virtual world, vw, vw design, vw tech
Sep 302021
 

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.


CHASING THE WRONG DREAMS

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 »
 1 Response »
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