Chapter 17. Online Games

Over the last seven years , online gaming has gone from a tiny fraction of the interactive entertainment business to a major market in its own right. It has many unique qualities, both good and bad, as well as unique design challenges. Because it's a technology rather than a genre, we don't look for design patterns in this chapter the way we did in the earlier ones. Instead, we address some of the design considerations that are peculiar to all kinds of online games, no matter what genre they belong to. It's a huge topic, how-ever; we could probably write an entire book about it. Unfortunately, we can cover only the highlights here.

The second half of the chapter is devoted to persistent worlds , also known as massively multi-player online role-playing games, or MMORPGs (although persistent worlds need not necessarily be about role playing). We're particularly indebted to Raph Koster, lead designer of both Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies , and Tess Snider, a long-time online role player and member of the WorldForge Project, for their help with this material. In his many years of working with online games, Koster has assembled a valuable collection of "laws" or observations about this particular form of interactive entertainment, and with his permission, we're going reprint many of them here. Some of these laws are originally his; others are credited to his colleagues. You'll see them scattered throughout this chapter like this:

Ola's Law About Laws: Any general law about virtual worlds should be read as a challenge rather than as a guideline. You'll learn more from attacking it than from accepting it.

You can read the complete set of laws at Koster's web site at www.legendmud.org/raph.