World-Building: Just What Is Content, Anyway?

World-Building: Just What Is "Content," Anyway?

For most designers and development teams , "content" is the world they create and whatever they put into it. Content comprises the size and shape of the environment, monsters, houses , trees, rivers, weapons, and transportation (as opposed to "gameplay," which is the game's mechanics and interface).

While a good argument can be made that this is all just environment and that the players are the real content, for purposes of easing through this section, we'll go with the basic preceding definition, with a few changes.

Tools

What tools do you need to build a world? The necessary software capabilities are well known, even if development teams are not in universal agreement about how to use them, as you'll read about later. For now, we need a description of the basic tools and their general capabilities:

• Natural terrain editor ” If you're going to have a PW, you need some form of persistent terrain for the players to interact in. This tool creates and places or modifies natural terrain features such as mountains , rivers, grassland, forests, boulders, caves, and the like, or the equivalents for other genres, such as planets and asteroids for a space-based game.

• Man-made terrain editor ” This builds or modifies things such as houses, roads , shops , castles , space stations , and the like.

• Item/object editors ” Build or modify anything that a player can hold, such as a weapon or jewel, or interact with, such as a door that opens and closes , animals, or vehicles that can be mounted and ridden.

• NPC editor ” This will make non-player characters , give them an inventory, and ideally allow you to assign behavior patterns to them. NPCs and their behaviors can range from vendors that players can use to buy and sell from to monsters and guards to which you have assigned particular attack and patrol zones. This will probably end up being a sub- or super-set of your player/character editor.

• Script editor ” This allows the creation or modification of game mechanics that aren't hard-coded into the source code. If done right, most game mechanics, be they associated with magic/psionics, combat, or trade skills, can be created, modified, modeled , and tested using the script editor.

• Sound editor ” This allows the insertion of sounds that play out on action triggers or as ambient background noise. These sounds will include everything from animal noises, wind and other weather sound effects, weapons sounds, footsteps, and so on; if it makes a noise, there will be a trigger and sound associated with it.

• Quest editor ” For the term "quest," you can also substitute "mission" or "adventure." Most PWs have either built-in or dynamic quests; some have both. These usually involve the player or a team requesting a mission, being told what has to be accomplished to get credit for the quest, and usually, being told where to go to perform it. Most of these, especially dynamic quests, are relatively simple and usually involve fetching some object or animal, talking to an NPC, giving an object to an NPC, or going someplace, getting a bit of information from one NPC, and delivering it to another. Static quests are usually much larger in scope and complexity, normally require more than one player, take more time to complete successfully, and not surprisingly, eat up plenty of designer and world-builder resources.

  Thus, the capabilities of a quest editor generally need to be complex and extensive , including the ability to assign quest reward conditions, assign trap and NPC triggers that go off as the players attempt to complete the quest, and keep track of time for any quests that have a time limit.

With these tools and general capabilities, pretty much anyone can be taught how to technically construct a PW. What they should actually do with the tools has more to do with the game design document and design philosophy.

"Space" Doesn't Equal "Content"

Just because you have good tools and can lay down terrain, NPCs, and objects at a pace unmatched by mere humans doesn't mean you actually should. More important than "Do I have absolutely every tool ever conceived?" is "What am I using the tools to do?" More is not necessarily better; in fact, in persistent games , the opposite is often true.

For example, consider a comparison of pure size and space in the "more is better" frame of reference. In some ways, Turbine's AC is an innovative game, especially the allegiance system, which has the effect of causing established players to court new players (sometimes to utterly ridiculous lengths, but that's another story). One of AC 's features is the huge world players can explore, usually juxtaposed against EQ 's smaller and more quickly traversed "zones."

If all that players wanted was a huge space to travel around in, it would be game, set, and match for AC . So why is it that AC 's massive expanse of territory is generally considered more boring than the smaller, zoned EQ ? It's simple: Space is not equivalent to content. AC may be a huge world that takes hours of real time to walk across, but there is little to do in much of that space except walk and look at the same scenery and terrain for long periods of time. We appreciate beauty. AC 's scenery is beautiful . We have played in AC 's world and enjoyed it. But, AC 's world-space is larger than it is beautiful. There are vast expanses that have no creatures , towns, buildings of any sort , and more importantly, no other players out there wasting hours of their time walking around in an empty space.

EQ 's zones, on the other hand, may be relatively smaller, but they are packed with content. Each one is significantly different from the others, from terrain to building and artifact types to the creatures that inhabit them. And because the zones are smaller and more interesting, there are generally other players hanging about, which makes for a more interesting game session.

This general rule has been well known in the industry for years , going back to the early experiments on GEnie in the late 1980s, but somehow it continues to be violated by developers with new entries. If there is nothing interesting to do or experience, or the "happening" places are widely scattered and hard to reach except through many minutes of boring travel, you're just wasting server space and the player's time.

"Mass" Doesn't Equal "Content"

Conversely, you can go overboard by creating an unnecessarily high density of world stuff (known colloquially in many areas of endeavor as "just shoving too much crap into too small a space"). Some games tout thousands of weapons or armor pieces, but achieve these numbers simply by assigning a large number of levels to each basic weapon type. Most don't even bother to turn out original art for each piece, but just assign a text descriptor and change the capabilities on the server side. Another device designers use is to overpopulate the space with so many NPCs, monsters, buildings, roads, vendors, shops, outhouses, what have you, that a player can hardly move without having a collision with something.

Among developers, this kind of "piling on the density" is regarded as a reaction to the lack of an interesting or cohesive design concept from the very start of the process. If your world is based on the American West and you notice that you have 5-, 6-, 8-, 10-, and 12-shot revolvers but have omitted Derringers on the low end of the spectrum and Gattling guns on the high end of the spectrum, you have a problem.

Okay, What Is "Content," Then?

Speaking in generalities can get us into trouble. So, look both ways, here it comes: In general, if something in the game doesn't serve a planned, useful purpose as either an advantage or disadvantage to the player, it isn't content. One boss troll guarding a cave entrance is content; hundreds of trolls running around the countryside for the sole purpose of being killed by players is not content; it's a badly planned, useless riot. One or two vendor shops at a crossroads are content; having dozens of buildings there is a waste of your server's space and the player's time if only a few of them serve any use.

Someone will automatically point out that the cities in UO are large and filled with buildings. The difference is that almost every building in each of UO 's cities serves a purpose. It is almost impossible to walk into a building in Britain, for example, and not be able to conduct some sort of business. Contrast this with Omni-1 in AO , which is far larger than Britain and has several times more buildings, the overwhelming majority of which are window-dressing that perform no function beyond creating client-side latency with the time it takes to load them all and using up player minutes to pass them by and get to the useful content. Content is a balancing act that needs to be carefully thought out, based on how many players you expect to be in the area at any one time, what they are expected or allowed to do there, and whether the game is flexible enough to allow the players to create their own "content" there.

This balancing process doesn't stop at the design and execution of the design. You have to monitor the actions of players over time and modify the content to suit. If so many players are using the shops in one location that it is tough to get in and out in a timely manner, you need to open more shops nearby. If crucial NPCs are in scarce supply and this is causing boredom, you need to add more of them, or create new NPCs, or add some other activity that can occupy players' gameplay.

There is plenty of room for interpretation of these general rules; there is no perfect solution to balancing content versus usefulness . On the whole, however, less is more, if it is well designed. If you are careful not to waste the player's time with meaningless yet required travel or actions, you'll have a much better chance of turning out a flexible, interesting content set.

It all boils down to this: You can't have just depth or just breadth. You need a balanced helping of each to maintain equilibrium between excitement and involvement and to avoid boredom. A shallow game with no depth will get stale quickly; a narrow game with no breadth will see players maxing out characters and possessions almost before you're rested up from launch day.

Player-Created Content

If you have depth and breadth in the design that allow players to have an impact on the world, you'll find players will be more than happy to create their own content. Player-created content does not mean giving them tools to build anything they want. That way presents a nightmare of possible copyright and trademark violations. Imagine a precocious adolescent male building Porno-Disney for him and his friends to romp around in. If the parents don't sue your pants off, rest assured that Disney will do so, or worse . For a commercial enterprise, the chance of a violation and resulting lawsuit is just too great. What player-created content does mean, however, is giving the players access to tools that can be used to enhance their own gameplay and socializing online:

• Change the physical landscape within certain rules ” That is, build houses, space stations, stores, whole cities, or whatever makes sense for your game.

• Change the political landscape ” That is, run for mayor, create a faction of teams or guilds , influence tax rates, or start or end faction wars.

• Change the economic landscape ” That is, own and run a store, affect the economy by creating shortages, and so forth.

• Change the social landscape ” That is, perform diplomatic functions and activities from a micro to a macro level (think tribe to empire), create and run guilds or teams, or explore and claim new lands for the team, faction, or empire.

These capabilities allow the player/character to become involved in the larger game world, beyond the strictly personal activities of combat, trade, exploration, and so on. These kinds of functions are not that difficult to plan, execute, and test, but many current games are missing them. These are the tools that allow the players to have a "game within the game." Be prepared to see players playing the game in ways you never expected or intended. They will create their own content with whatever is available.

One example of this happened in the medieval fantasy UO in 1999. One group of enterprising players put together a theater company and rewrote and performed plays. Their online presentation of The Wizard of Oz featured numerous costume changes, special effects via in-game magic powers, and even a spell to make one player into a dog to play Toto. They were so successful that the support team for UO helped create and reserve characters for them on various server clusters so the troupe could "tour" UO with their shows.

Another example would be the bridge-diving contests in Air Warrior , a World War II air combat simulator. Kesmai's game featured rivers that separated the three main factions and bridges across them to allow tanks and jeeps to cross. One night, while pilots were bragging in-game about their skill, they decided to test it. The challenge was to fly at top speed under the bridge, as close to the water as possible. When that became pass , they added the difficulty of diving from great height. And when they had mastered that, they added the difficulty of diving from great height, attaining top speed, and flying under the bridge upside-down .

These are only two examples, among many we could have chosen from, of player-generated content. Neither required GM intervention; the rules were by the players themselves within the context of the game's capabilities, and they were managed by the players. Again, after you launch your game, be prepared to see players playing their game. Recall the advice of Raph Koster to a writer trying to ensure the integrity of his/her story in a PW; in a significant way, this applies to designers, too.