The other extreme, where you can go inside everywhere, turns out to be boring. Second Life has that in some well-built areas. If you visit New Babbage, the steampunk city, there's almost a square kilometer of city. Almost every building has a functional interior. There are hundreds of shops, and dozens of bars. You can buy things in the shops, and maybe have a simulated beer in a pub. If anyone was around, you could talk to them. You can open doors and walk up stairs. You might find a furnished apartment, an office, or just empty rooms.
Other parts of Second Life have roadside motels. Each room has a bed, TV, bathroom, and maybe a coffee maker, all of which do something. One, with a 1950s theme, has a vibrating bed, which will make a buzzing sound if you pay it a tiny fee. Nobody uses those much.
No plot goes with all this. Unlike a game, the density of interesting events is low, closer to real life. This is the fundamental problem of virtual worlds. Realistic ones are boring.
Amusingly, Linden Lab has found a way to capitalize on this. They built a suburban housing subdivision, and people who buy a paid membership get an unfurnished house.
This was so successful that there are now over 60,000 houses. There are themed areas and about a dozen house designs in each area. It's kind of banal, but seems to appeal to people for whom American suburbia is an unreachable aspiration. The American Dream, for about $10 a month.
People furnish their houses, have BBQs, and even mow their lawn. (You can buy simulated grass that needs regular mowing.)
> The other extreme, where you can go inside everywhere, turns out to be boring
But that's the point! Daggerfall is like this too: huge areas (both cities and landscapes) with nothing interesting in them. That's what makes them feel so lived in. They're not worlds designed for the player to conquer, they're worlds that exist independent of the player, and the player is just one of a million characters in it.
The fact that I pass by 150 boring buildings in a city before I get to the one I care about both mirrors reality and makes the reward for finding the correct building all the greater!
>Unlike a game, the density of interesting events is low, closer to real life. This is the fundamental problem of virtual worlds. Realistic ones are boring.
Reminded me of this clip of Gabe Newell talking about fun, realism and reinforcement (behaviorism):
You must live in a different reality. The one I live in has fractal complexity and pretty much anywhere I look is filled with interesting ({cute..beautiful},{mildly surprising..WTF?!},{ah, that's an example of X..conundrum}) details. In fact, so far as I can tell, it's interesting details all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in any direction I probe.
No, the fundamental problem isn’t the recreation of real life. Rather it’s that real life isn’t mirrored in ways that are important like having agency to pull of systemic changes something I’m having a hard time articulating. What I can say is that Eve online pulls off certain aspects of this pretty well.
Corporations pouring millions into flashy, pointless projects using a bunch of Excel seems pretty realistic to me, the lasers and starships aren't, sure.
It’s not but there is an aspect of complete freedom to do things outside the bounds of prescribed interactions is what I’m getting at.
For instance second life might be a lot more interesting if you could kill someone, assume their identity and pull off other such shenanigans. At the same time there should be real user “law enforcement” continually tracking down criminals of this nature. Being arrested should mean real jail time/account suspension for a fixed amount of time etc. Criminals should get a real user driven trial where they can argue their case, real user lawyers you can hire etc.
Other parts of Second Life have roadside motels. Each room has a bed, TV, bathroom, and maybe a coffee maker, all of which do something. One, with a 1950s theme, has a vibrating bed, which will make a buzzing sound if you pay it a tiny fee. Nobody uses those much.
No plot goes with all this. Unlike a game, the density of interesting events is low, closer to real life. This is the fundamental problem of virtual worlds. Realistic ones are boring.
Amusingly, Linden Lab has found a way to capitalize on this. They built a suburban housing subdivision, and people who buy a paid membership get an unfurnished house. This was so successful that there are now over 60,000 houses. There are themed areas and about a dozen house designs in each area. It's kind of banal, but seems to appeal to people for whom American suburbia is an unreachable aspiration. The American Dream, for about $10 a month.
People furnish their houses, have BBQs, and even mow their lawn. (You can buy simulated grass that needs regular mowing.)
So we have a good idea of the appeal of this.