WORLDS
Like novels, narrative films, and television shows, many video games can be said to have a diegetic world, that is, an imaginary or fictional world in which game events take place, and where the game’s characters live and exist (“world” is used here in an experiential sense). Usually such worlds are made in support of a narrative, though worlds do not necessarily have to contain stories, and not all of them do. Video games such as those of the Sim series (Maxis Software/The Sims Studio, 1989–present) and other sandbox games allow players to build imaginary worlds, within certain limitations and restrictions, but there is no predetermined narrative that occurs there, though the player’s experiences and interaction within the world may constitute something like a narrative. The world and its design often is closely connected with the design of the game, since exploring the world (navigation) and learning how the world works (including everything from its machinery to its ontological rules and its physics, which can differ from the actual world) are both often a substantial part of what occurs during gameplay, and part of a game’s objectives and goals.
Space, Time, and Causality
As the action of most video games takes place in a virtual space over time and features some sort of causality, the settings in which games take place are often referred to as “game worlds,” and as such, they have a place in the history of imaginary worlds. Video game worlds are necessarily composed of several things: some kind of geography, inhabitants, action, and logical consequences that are the outcome of actions. Every game world has some kind of space in which the game’s action takes place, from simple blank playing fields that are a single screen in size (as in many early arcade games), or a verbal description (in the case of text adventures), to vast, elaborately detailed worlds with hundreds of thousands of players (as in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs)). These areas are displayed on-screen, and many games, especially adventure games, require exploration of the game world, where other characters are encountered, objects are found, and quests are completed. Sometimes the revelation of game world space is the game’s main objective, though it is more likely to be a sub-goal required by other game goals. In many games, especially those with three-dimensional graphics, there is usually some sense of what lies beyond the game world space that the player’s avatar can actually visit, conveyed by backdrop imagery (which depicts an extension of the game world out to a distant horizon) that is placed around the edges of the active game area. The indication that a world exists beyond what is seen on-screen is conveyed through such things as maps, as well as through methods borrowed from cinema, such as off-screen sounds, off-screen light sources, and events that occur offscreen and are discovered by the player later in the game.
The inhabitants of a game world include the player’s avatar (or avatars), the avatars of other human players, and the non-player characters (NPCs) controlled by the game programming. All characters, whether avatars or NPCs, usually have some sort of purpose, motivation, and goal-orientated behavior, which may help or hinder that of the player’s avatar (or the player’s intervention, as in the case of sandbox games where the player does not control an avatar directly). Characters initiate action within the game world, although action can also be initiated by the game program’s direct control of the game world itself; for example, changing weather conditions, a diurnal or seasonal cycle, or events such as earthquakes or tornadoes (as in SimCity (Maxis Software, 1989)). Quite often the action of the game world’s characters directly affects the state of the game world itself, and a particular game world state may even be the game’s objective (for example, the destruction of an evil empire, or restoration of a ruler or magical object).
Finally, a game world will operate according to some logic that it uses to assign consequences to actions taken by the game world’s characters. These consequences usually are consistent and can be expected in advance once the player learns how the world works. Through knowledge of these consequences, players can make gameplay choices that move the game world’s state in a desired direction. The game world’s logic determines much of the gameplay experience, and may also shape the look and feel of the game world itself, suggesting guidelines for design aesthetics. Other aspects of the game world controlled by the game engine include the physics of game events, the automatic positioning of the implied camera that controls the player’s point of view, artificial intelligence (AI) controlling NPCs, and the player’s interaction with the world. Learning how these things work is often important to gameplay, and knowing how events and decisions are generated may help the player predict some games events in advance or at least be ready for them when they occur.
Video Game Worlds and the Imaginary World Tradition
Video game worlds are also part of the imaginary world tradition, which reaches back at least three millennia, to the first imaginary worlds found in literature (Wolf, 2012). Specifically, video games are an extension of the subcategory of interactive imaginary worlds, the history of which can be traced back to such things ranging from dollhouses and model railroading to table-top war games, and which extends through the twentieth century including building sets, playsets, and table-top role-playing games such as Braunstein (David Wesley, 1967) and Dungeons & Dragons (TSR, 1974). Text adventure games began as computerized versions of role-playing games, with the computer taking on the role of the “Dungeon Master” who controlled the game. Graphical adventure games began soon after, replacing verbal descriptions with images, and borrowing conventions from other visual media in which worlds had been depicted, including film and comic books.
Besides sharing many things with imaginary worlds of the past, video games also bring new innovations to the imaginary world tradition, since they are also virtual worlds. Virtual worlds are collections of world data like the worlds of novels and films, but the way that those data are automated and manipulated to construct an experience is something new to the imaginary world tradition (though some science fiction authors wrote about the possibility of virtual worlds before any actually existed). Unlike the imaginary worlds of novels, film, television, and other non-interactive media, virtual worlds enjoy a different ontological status. Instead of existing as a set of recorded words, images, and sounds, video games exist in the present tense, as mathematical models within a computer’s memory, ready to be incarnated as interactive imagery.
The player’s control of the main character in a video game can also be seen as an extension of the main character’s role in the imaginary world tradition. Often in traditional narratives involving imaginary worlds, the main character, or protagonist, is a traveler to a new world, through whom the audience experiences the world vicariously. While in earlier worlds the protagonist tended to be a traveler and observer, as time went on, and especially into the twentieth century, main characters became more actively involved in the imaginary worlds they visited, even becoming agents of change in those worlds. Video game worlds can be seen as extending that interactivity to the audience members, and thus, can be seen as another advancement of the imaginary world tradition begun thousands of years ago.
Thus the video game’s role within the imaginary world tradition has impacted that tradition as well, as video games join the long line of other media windows offering us glimpses of imaginary worlds, and in some cases, letting us reach through those windows and become active participants in them. In addition to presenting new types of imaginary worlds such as the social, shared virtual worlds of MMORPGs (or non-game worlds such as Second Life (Linden Labs, 2003)), game designers are also finding new ways for games to fit into transmedial worlds, where they can range from being merely a playground themed with interpretations of the imagery and iconography of a world, to a central, canonical part of the backbone of a world.
Video Games and Their Role in Transmedial Worlds
Transmedial imaginary worlds must adapt themselves to each medium they appear in, and likewise, the nature of a world may change along with the type of media in which it appears. Video games may be an extension of an imaginary world that originated in another medium, or an imaginary world originating in a video game may spread to other media. Either way, the combination of media, and particularly interactive and non-interactive media, can raise questions regarding the onotological status of a world and the canonicity of events in that world (which is to say, the events that “officially” happen in that world).
Worlds are defined by the objects and events that compose them, and these in turn are defined by what is considered canonical for a given world. Video game worlds clearly have canonical objects and characters, but due to their interactive nature, can they be said to have canonical events? In virtual worlds such as those of MMORPGs, which are usually not restarted or reset, one could argue that all events are canonical, since they occur diegetically within the world in question. Or one could argue that by a stricter, narrower definition, such worlds do not have canonical events apart from those “official” ones produced by the author of the world, such as those found in “expansions” and large-scale events that affect an entire world.
Canonicity can depend on the level of interactivity present. A non-interactive world almost always has a set of specific canonical events, which defines the world and the audience’s experience of it: in Middle-earth, Frodo always takes the Ring to Mordor; in the Star Wars galaxy, Luke always becomes a Jedi; in the world of The Matrix, Neo always defeats Agent Smith, and so on; these events are fixed parts of their worlds’ histories. An interactive world can have specific canonical events as well; for example, in video games, the events taking place during cut-scenes that are the same every time and not altered by gameplay. Likewise, an interactive world can also have what we could think of as general canonical events: Inky, Pinky, Blinky, and Clyde always chase Pac-Man; the Qotile always shoots swirls of energy at enemy Yars; and the Space Invaders always advance downward and eventually crush the player’s avatar. While the specific details of these events vary with each game, they are still inevitable and always a part of the world. General canonical events often involve the main conflicts of interactive worlds, and thus are a constitutive part of the audience’s experience of the world.
Interactive worlds with alternate storylines can also treat some endings as canonical and others as non-canonical. For example, in Riven (Cyan, 1997), out of ten possible endings, only the ending in which the player frees Catherine, allowing her to rejoin Atrus before Riven is destroyed, is canonical, since Catherine appears later in Myst III: Exile (Presto Studios, 2001). In such games, the player’s challenge is to see to it that canonical events play out as they should; all interactivity amounts to merely exploring a world and keeping events going the way the author has predestined them to go. By keeping to a set storyline, however, such games can be more fully joined to their non-interactive counterparts in a world’s history; thus the events of Riven can occupy a central place in the franchise’s overarching story.
In contrast, interactive branches of a transmedial world may only play with characters, locations, and situations, without adding any new events to a world’s canon. The LEGO Star Wars video games (Traveller’s Tales, 2005–2010), for example, feature LEGO versions of the franchise’s characters and locations, and the game’s cut-scenes are parodic versions of scenes from the films. The players’ avatars engage in activities seen in the films, such as lightsaber fights and the piloting of vehicles and spaceships, but often in very different contexts and locations that mimic but do not reproduce those in the films; the games are essentially three-dimensional platform games dressed up in Star Wars attire. In these kinds of games, canonical events from other media incarnations of a world are alluded to or even replayed, but no new canonical material is added to the world. Interactive branches of a transmedial world, then, vary greatly in their relationships with their non-interactive counterparts, yet in all cases they provide the audience a new experience related to the world, and one that potentially can strengthen the audience’s engagement and involvement with a world.
A Very Brief History of Video Game World Development
While works set in other media could build more complex worlds, due to the use of literary description (in the case of books), photography and video (in film and television), or hand-drawn imagery (in comics and animation), the limitations of early computer graphics kept the worlds of video games simple and relatively abstract at their beginning, and sometimes also reliant on text.
The earliest games often had a single screen of graphics depicting their worlds visually, or text descriptions describing them verbally, or some combination of text and graphics. World information required memory, and in the early 1970s, only mainframe computers were able to accommodate games with more developed worlds, including text adventure games such as Adventure (Will Crowther and Don Woods, 1976) or the first two games with three-dimensional graphics, Maze War (Steve Colley, 1974) and Spasim (Jim Bowery, 1974), short for “space simulator.” When video games became a commercial industry, arcade video games had to be simple and based on fast action (in order to bring in more quarters per hour), which worked against more complex games with more elaborate worlds. In the end, only a few arcade video games would have relatively detailed worlds; some were original, such as those of Gravitar (Atari, 1982) and Major Havoc (Atari, 1983), while some were extensions of worlds seen in other media (such as Star Wars (Atari, 1983) or imitations of them (Stellar Track (Atari, 1981) was loosely based on Star Trek, just different enough to keep from infringing copyright). Additionally, arcade games had to be fairly intuitive in their design to be immediately usable, whereas home video games could be described and explained in a manual, allowing them to be more complex (for example, Space Shuttle (Activision, 1983) for the Atari VCS 2600 had a 32-page game manual that described and explained all the features of the controls and the actions the player could (and had to) accomplish).
Home video games, which were purchased by the consumer and expected to provide long hours of gameplay, could better accommodate games with a slower pace that were oriented more for puzzle-solving and exploration than for fast action. The adventure game genre flourished on home systems, and perhaps more than any other genre, it placed an importance on a game’s world, its exploration, and the illusion of an open-ended adventure in which the player character could move about freely and encounter a world’s locations and inhabitants. Games such as Zork (Infocom, 1979), Adventure (Atari, 1979), and Ultima (Origin Systems, 1980) had large game worlds that were experienced respectively through text descriptions, graphics with screen-to-screen cutting, or graphics with four-directional scrolling, and all three encouraged the production of sequels and imitators.
As the amount of available computer memory grew, so did the size and complexity of video game worlds. Online worlds, such as those of Scepter of Goth (Alan E. Klietz, 1983) allowed multiple players to pay simultaneously within the same text-based world, while other online worlds such as Islands of Kesmai (Kesmai, 1985) and Habitat (Lucasfilm, 1986) had graphical worlds in which online players’ avatars could gather. The use of disks and diskettes increased storage capacity, and later CD-ROMs greatly increased the amount of storage to hundreds of megabytes, allowing for larger and more detailed worlds, such as The Manhole (Cyan, 1987) and Myst (Cyan, 1993), as well as games requiring multiple CD-ROMs to hold their worlds (such as Riven). While Cyan’s games were series of pre-rendered images linked together into a navigable three-dimensional world, other games of the time, such as DOOM (id Software, 1993), Descent (Parallax Software, 1995), and Tomb Raider (Eidos, 1996) had three-dimensional worlds that players moved in with a real-time rendered first-person perspective that increased the feeling of immersion in the world. More detailed worlds meant more complicated storylines (whether pre-determined, embedded, or emergent), and more involvement and engagement of players, who could spend hours at a time vicariously inhabiting a world (such as those of the games of the Halo, Grand Theft Auto, and Elder Scrolls series of games).
The latter half of the 1990s also saw the rise in popularity of MMORPGs starting with Meridian 59 (Archetype Interactive, 1995). Like the worlds of earlier networked and online games, players could play against other human-controlled players rather than merely algorithm-driven NPCs (although game AI did improve them considerably). The size and scope of MMORPGs, as well as their continuous and ongoing existence, quantitatively and qualitatively changed the nature of the game worlds, leading to video game worlds more like the actual world, with guilds, groups, and communities arising and long-term narratives playing out as players developed their own properties, cooperating and competing with others, and developing world infrastructures. Such worlds have become the subject of much scholarship and even experimentation in the social sciences. Discussing the study of common-resource pool problems and macrolevel behavioral trends using virtual worlds, telecommunications researcher Edward Castronova and his team write:
By their nature, synthetic worlds are ideal tools for this research method. In order to allow for vast, persistent worlds, the servers on which such environments are stored must keep track of an innumerable amount of data. Among many other variables this includes player ability statistics and assets, auction inventory and market prices, resource depletion, and the randomized appearances of rare goods. Additionally, besides tracking information on the state of the world and players, databases may also be used to monitor nearly all of the social interactive content of the synthetic world. This includes components such as chat logs and player emotes (commands for the visual display of emotive avatar animations). All of this information can be stored, and later, mined for aggregate trends in player behavior.…
In addition to tracking and storing vast amounts of behavioral data, synthetic worlds also permit the experimenter a great deal of control. All manner of methods by which players interact with the environment and each other (including exchange rates, rates of resource renewal, communication channels, and market locations) may be manipulated, allowing for a wide range of potential experimental variables. In controlling for world conditions, experimenters may then observe the dependent effect on participant behavior. We argue that these observations are significant because of the inherent complexity of the social environments in which they occur.
(Castronova et al., 2008, pp. 284–285)
The ongoing existence of these worlds, as well as the necessity of choosing what is seen or experienced from a myriad of simultaneous events, creates an experience quite unlike that of the worlds experienced through traditional media such as books, films, and television shows, and even other video games. Events are unrepeatable, and most will go unseen by any particular player, yet players can remain online several hours every day without exhausting all the world has to offer.
Finally, there are video game worlds that are overlaid over the actual world, using augmented reality technology, which may include mobile computing technology, global positioning satellite tracking systems, cameras, projectors, and other recognition technology. These games map their game worlds onto actual physical spaces, so that players must move around physically while the game tracks the player’s location and reacts automatically in real time, mapping virtual spaces onto physical spaces and visualizing the results. Augmented reality games for mobile gaming devices (such as an iPhone, iPod, or iPad), include Ghostwire (A Different Game, 2008) and Sky Siege (Simbiotic, 2009), which position game elements virtually in the space around the player, who must turn around and use the mobile device as a window to see what is occurring in the game. Another game, Pandemica (XMG, 2009) allows four players to play together, shooting at virtual aliens positioned around them. Ogmento, a company started in 2009, is devoted exclusively to the production of augmented reality games.
A video game’s world can be easy to overlook as it provides the background to the game’s action and events, which are often the focus of both players and critics, along with characters and their capabilities. But video games worlds are vicariously inhabited by players, and this alone is reason enough to consider them. Video game worlds can link games to transmedial franchises or even the actual world, providing models of immersive spaces that designers can use in other areas such as web design, educational media, informational media, and scientific visualizations and experiments. As virtual worlds incarnating the dream of imaginary worlds that can be entered and experienced by an audience, video game worlds have advanced the imaginary world tradition, and have a potential limited only by computing power and human imagination.
References
Castronova, Edward, Mark W. Bell, Robert Cornell, James J. Cummings, Matthew Falk, Travis Ross, Sarah B. Robbins, and Alida Field (2008). Synthetic worlds as experimental instruments. In Bernard Perron and Mark J. P. Wolf (Eds.), The video game theory reader 2 (pp. 273–294). New York and London: Routledge.
Wolf, Mark J. P. (2012). Building imaginary worlds: The theory and history of subcreation. New York and London: Routledge.