Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
World Models
If you plan to offer more than just a chat room, you must give players something
to do. The types of things that you give them to do and the rewards they earn for
doing those things constitute the
world model
. Raph Koster identified five classic
world models, although you can undoubtedly devise more. Yours may include ele-
ments from more than one of Koster's original five, listed here:
Scavenger model.
Players collect things and return them to places of safety.
The game is primarily a large treasure hunt, and players don't risk losing anything
they've collected.
Social model.
The world exists primarily to provide an expressive space. The
fun comes from role-playing in character; most goals represent social achievement
(political power, adulation, notoriety, and so on). Players use their characters' attri-
butes as a basis for role-playing rather than computer-managed combat.
Dungeons & Dragons
model
.
In games based on this, the best-known model,
the player is primarily in conflict with the environment, fighting NPCs for ad-
vancement and doing some scavenging along the way. Such games rely heavily
on the functional attributes of the avatar for gameplay and include feedback mecha-
nisms: Defeating enemies advances the character, which requires the game to offer
tougher enemies next time. Such worlds tend to include quests as a form of narra-
tive and a way of offering challenges to the players.
Player-versus-Player (PvP) model.
In this sort of world, players advance by
defeating one another at contests, often characterized as combat. Players advance
through a combination of their natural skill and rewards from winning battles. For
this to work successfully, they need to be reasonably evenly matched; you can't
have the old-timers beating up the newcomers all the time.
EVE Online
is perhaps
SPORE:
A MASSIVELY SINGLE-PLAYER ONLINE GAME
Spore
broke new ground in a number of ways, and one was its use of the Internet.
Spore
is not a multiplayer online game in the usual sense. It does not maintain a single, central
game world and players cannot interact with one another directly. However, when a
player creates a creature or a building in the later levels of
Spore
, the game uploads the
player's creation to a database stored on a server maintained by Electronic Arts, the pub-
lisher. These data are available to all other players, which means that one player's creature
may appear in another player's world. This makes the player's experience of the game
extremely rich, as creations from thousands of players may turn up in his game world.
However, there is still no direct interaction with other players. A player can download a
copy of another player's creature from the server (in fact, this happens automatically),
but he cannot intentionally influence another player's experience. Will Wright, the
designer, jokingly called
Spore
a massively single-player online game.
