I always wished they could do that so to see Raph say that it had been considered was nice.

Yes, there must be space… or we don’t have a world in our VW. But the way in which we interpret and “virtualize” the geometry of the world really determines if space = space in our RL sense, or *how* space = space in terms of that interpretation. So before we set ourselves the task of developing space-based systems/features for a world, don’t we need to determine some basics about how we are going to understand space to exist in it?

For example, I was struck, last year, upon re-reading, “Snow Crash,” at how… well… dumb it seemed that there wasn’t a simple “think/teleport” system in place. There’s that race from the other side of the world, and it’s a big deal for the plot, and… well… in SL, you’d just click on your bookmark. Yawn. Racing in a world with hyperlinks isn’t possible. In which case, “space” is, essentially, there to serve as visible “scenery” backdrop and, possibly, a part of tactical level issues. As opposed to some MMOs where, with no teleportation, portions of the game become a “running simulator,” which is boring as hell. Well… if you eliminate the “boring running,” but still want to have space/distance be meaningful for other issues — racing, boundaries, borders, etc. — you have some thinkin’ to do. Also… vertical space vs. horizontal space is insanely important in our real world, but less so in some virtual worlds. Can I go underground? Can I fly? Hover? Easily jump over a one-foot tall curb? How much of the 3D-ness is bounded by vertical restrictions. Again… I’m not really disagreeing with you, Raph, but suggesting that there’s some thinking to do about the characteristic, even before we get into desiging with it.

Persistence has the same issues, I think. The real world has levels of persistence. Are we to model them accurately? Or interestingly, but differently? Is the persistence to be predictable and based on classes of behavior and types? Or is it… chaotic?

For example, if I can do “X” and it is persistent, and you can do “Y,” and it is, too, should those things be able to interact in both our absences? IE, can my persistent dog eat your persistent cat. And when we come back… how would we know that that’s what happened? Should we? Unless one of us set up a persistent security camera or a mindful talking parrot?

As to multiple users in the space… I agree that they (we) need to be there. But questions about when and in what numbers and for what reasons go back to the root of what “multiplayer” even means. Is golf, for example, a solo game or multiplayer? I have a friend who says that golf is the loneliest game in the world, and even more so when played with friends.

These cranky musings aside, I’ll try to come back later and provide more helpful thoughts on the topic…

> I don’t suppose you know anywhere where the musician’s
> music is available?

You can extract it from the game assets if you still have them. You’d need some kind of TRE extractor program to do it. There was one called InsideSWG which you might look for. I don’t know if it deals with the new TOC files that they added later on but it handles the original assets.

Anyway the samples are stored under player_music/sample and there are some in data_sample_00.tre and data_sample_01.tre as well as any later patches.

Each song is split into song intro and outro, loop and 8 flourishes. There’s one WAV file per instrument for each of the above categories.

Once you have those files you can stick them into your favourite audio application and turn the nostalgia knob up to 11.

The list of things Raph noted are the things that antropologists (sp) or archeologist (sp) look for.

The idea of legends, urban myths, and other psychological (non-system based) beliefs that pops up just indicate that players are looking for things that leverage the medium, the “virtual” aspect to make it a bit more tangible, a bit more immersive.

Frank

[...] Koster’s comments about exploiting space w/ Reactable music prototype (and link to video demo of device) [...]

[...] I’m of the latter school, and as such I present the following article he wrote yesterday: http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/03/27/exploiting-the-space/ This presents some really interesting possibilities, and certainly has inspired several additions [...]

[...] persist space persist users Posted March 28, 2007 Raph Koster threw down a pretty good post today. In the light of developing this RP mush (if you don’t know a RP (roleplay) mush is a [...]

Except for the risk aversion problem which prevent the idea from actually being built.

In fact, I’d love to see someone take a look at MMOs in general as examples of living things. James Grier Miller’s Living Systems suggested a list of features that all living systems have — I wonder how closely a MMO might fit that classification, and what if anything it might reveal about the results of poking a MMO in various ways to see how it responds.

One addition I’d suggest to the space, persistence, and numbers list of core features of MMOs would be “communication.” We assume it, but maybe we shouldn’t — maybe there’s something special about giving a lot of people in the same space multiple ways to share information. LinkedIn is one example of this in the general Web space — is this something else that’s still very much open for exploitation in MMOs?

Finally, Brask, I actually once suggested that very idea about “emergent roads” in the offical SWG forum. I think it was about 0.3 microseconds before some Black Hat pointed out that players would just use this feature to run around to spell out dirty words.

I still can’t decide whether that was a valid objection or not.

–Bart