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!
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.
Read More “Ownership: How Virtual Worlds Work, part 5”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.
Read More “Object Behaviors: How Virtual Worlds Work part 4”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.
Read More “Digital Objects: How Virtual Worlds Work part 3”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: Read More “Building the Metaverse session”
