How to create a new world

You’re creating a virtual world. What’s your job, and what isn’t?

You’re god here. You’re laying down the rules of the universe. And you need to be a benevolent god because malevolent gods don’t have many customers. So you won’t populate the world with lots of dangerous critters – or anyhow you’ll provide safe havens from such critters. You’ll start people off with the rudiments of an economy. Maybe some tools to get them started.

But only to get them started. It isn’t god’s job to design buildings and cities. You might want to make a city – gods, like everybody else, gotta follow their bliss. But the laws of the world and the basic tools will mean that pioneers will take one look at your city and go, “Nah, I’m going over here to build a place of my own.”

That’s a good thing. Gods have to let go. For starters, if the people in your world are designing stuff then that’s less work for you. Also it gives them ownership. It means they get the virtual world to be what they want it to be.

Think of it like making the Garden of Eden. You come back a few days later to find Adam and Eve growing trees and herding sheep. A bit later they’re tapping for rubber, carving wood, using sheep intestines to make string. Next time you see them they’ve invented tennis. And all you had to do was the physics and the biology.

So virtual worlds can and should grow to reflect the wishes of the users. Except…

Seen The Deuce? You probably wouldn’t want to live near Times Square in the 1970s. What if your early adopters turn the world into Damnation Alley but you’d really like to attract the vuppies (sic) who’ll bring in the money and numbers? They get turned off by all that dark sleaze and might not come back for a second look. If your world is big enough there’s room for both groups of players, but that’s kind of a cop-out. It’s really two different worlds.

Around the time Second Life was making a big noise, a finance guy asked me to design a virtual world. Actually, he didn’t so much want a designer as somebody to take notes, as he already had a lot of ideas about what the world should be like.

“It’ll look like a modern Western city,” he said. “People will use money and they’ll be able to have sex.”

“So there’ll be prostitution.”

“No, I don’t want prostitution. Also, you can mug other players’ avatars and steal from them but you can’t kill them.”

“So there’ll be rape.”

“No! No rape! What are you saying?”

“What’s to stop somebody from stealing another user’s money and then only giving it back if they agree to sex? Or threatening them for sex? What’s to stop somebody demanding money for sex? If you put those elements in, prostitution and rape are emergent.”

“I don’t want those things in my game.”

He couldn’t see how his design decisions (mugging, theft, sex) had consequences. Tutoring a money guy on how game design works isn’t on my list of enticing jobs. I turned him down. But it did get me thinking about how you police the behaviour of people in a virtual world.

The ideal answer is that god doesn’t need to be a lawyer or a policeman any more than he or she needs to be an architect or a city planner. If people want a civilized society, they can organize it for themselves. Your job is to give them the tools to do that. You might, for example, place a constitution monolith in the centre of the world. Users can vote to add, remove or modify rules. Those could become laws of nature. Swear words, say, might be auto-censored. Or they could be behavioural guidelines that users are expected to abide by, and policing that social contract becomes a community matter.

There’s no hard and fast rule, but my working principle would be to give the users the tools and let them decide how to use them, whether it’s to make towns or to make laws. If there’s a demand for something – cars or buildings or whatever – then somebody will supply it. There will be businesses springing up with car designers and architects. The world developers are free to focus on the important stuff, like gravity and sparrows.

I’m talking about the big virtual worlds here. The ones with their own economies, where famous rock stars come to give concerts and studios hold movie premieres. But there are also what we might call boutique worlds, effectively cosplay theme parks. They will appeal to smaller groups of players with more specialized preferences, who come to play and typically won’t fuel much of an internal economy. The difference is that they will pay you more than the casual everyday user of a big world, and in return they expect you to do the heavy lifting. You’ll have to be an immanent, hands-on deity.

A fictional example is Westworld. Everybody who comes there wants to cosplay in a wild west setting of the late 19th century. Think of the real world (our world, that is; the one the guests come from) as a typical big virtual world – it has an economy, assets are user-created and traded, laws are user-designed and agreed on. If you want to play a game in such a world, you design it. You might make or buy a ball or a set of pieces, explain the rules to others, and you can play whatever you want. It’s real life. Westworld is a boutique world. In effect it’s a game, a traditional one, whereas the larger virtual worlds are exactly that: worlds.

People who come to Westworld aren’t there to redesign the town, they’re there to play the game. (Admittedly, like roleplaying, it’s actually a set of overlapping games with personally defined goals.) There won’t be any Travis Scott concerts, although some boutique worlds might be designed specifically as music venues. With a boutique world, you have to dress the world as well as create the fundamentals. Why would you do that, given that you’ll get fewer users? Because most of the people who frequent the big, tabula rasa worlds are not going to be giving you a lot of money. Most of them, the ones not directly driving the internal economy, are casual visitors – tourists in your world, really – who can and will migrate to other virtual worlds whenever they like. But the aficionados of a themed world will pay a lot, and they’re likely to stay.

I haven't even touched on the ethics of enslaving intelligent AIs to play the NPCs in a theme park (real or virtual), a topic examined in Westworld and discussed here by Dr Richard Bartle.

Between the themed and the tabula rasa world there’s another option: the world specifically designed for tourists. Literally tourists, in fact, as these would be recreations of real-world locations that either no longer exist or that some pesky pandemic or travel restriction or lack of time stops people from visiting. Imagine you could walk through the ruins of Pompeii – and at any point you could dial back to 79 AD and see what it looked like before the lava rolled in. Or London before the Great Fire. Or Tenochtitlan before the Conquistadores razed it. Or Angkor Wat without the blooming jungle. You could climb Everest. You could explore the Mariana Trench. You could stroll around the Forbidden City or Jurassic Park.

Who pays for that? Many developers already have models of such locations. Museums too. You might do a deal with the Great Courses to feature some of their content in the audioguide. Hilton hotels might provide visitors with their only 50th-floor view of Lake Texcoco. Tickets for real-world tour trips might be hidden, Willy Wonka style, for visitors to find. Reuse the content as AR so that tourists in real Pompeii can still look into your reconstructed version through their phones.

Virtual worlds are going to be sprouting up alongside the real one in ever-greater numbers. People will spend more time in them. They will have real economies. Events will take place in them: concerts, political rallies, parades, riots. Some people will make their living there. What happens there is going to matter. The gods of those places had better be ready.