Maybe this source has been mentioned already, but I've found Bartle's
definition in Designing Virtual Worlds, 2003 New Riders, to be very
useful because it's precise and to the point (and that's what I've
used in my diss.work (blatant self-promotion)).
In brief, Bartle's essential points which I find useful are:
- a virtual world is a simulated place ("virtual")
- it has accepted conventions and supporting infrastructures ("world")
- its inhabitants regard it as being self-contained ("world")
- it does not exist in reality ("virtual")
- it's implemented as simulation supported by computing hardware
("virtual")
- in it, people interact with simulated places and other residents
("world")
- all simultaneously affect the same environment in a shared fashion
("world")
- persistency: simulation carrying on even when nobody interacts with
it ("world")
So for example ActiveWorlds, by the above definitions, isn't quite
100% a virtual world, because it's a collection of separated
environments with different rules and inhabitants. And vice versa some
text-only social environments ought to count as virtual worlds, since
the visual/graphic aspect should not be an indispensable part of the
concept.
-Mitja (RL: Hmeljak, SL: Omlet)
www.cs.indiana.edu/~mitja
> From: Pavig Lok <
[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [SLED] citations requested for 'what defines a virtual
> world'?
>
> On 21/10/2009, at 8:44 AM, Greg Wadley wrote:
>
> >> - WAN
> >> - Multi-User
> >> - Persistent
> >> - Avatar
> >
> >
> > I agree with these, but think a definition of VWs has to include
> > their representation of space. Avatars move and act within a
> > simulated space. (The space is often Euclidean and 3d, eg Second
> > Life, but not always, eg MUDs.)
>
> I've always argued (and I'm probably in the minority here) that a
> "virtual world" must have a predominantly normal approach to physical
> space - that is a persistent world with a single geography. Sharding
> or rooms based environments I don't think qualify - I'd call them
> simulated environments. If like in WoW you need to understand what
> server you're on, that there are multiple copies of the same space
> running concurrently, or like Lively effectively you're in a room and
> the world stops existing 50m from your location then I think it's a
> stretch to call it a "world".
>
> The term "virtual world" has by convention come to mean anything that
> looks like a world from a screenshot, but many of these "world" are
> clearly simulated environments which only act like a world in a very
> local sense. In that way I think EVE online and second life are worlds
> (in the case of eve perhaps universe is a better description). Most of
> the things however classified as virtual worlds don't qualify via my
> criteria.
>
> Second life of course does have a sense of purely local space - due to
> the way land is divided up into sims. Such technical constraints are
> inevitable on some level. I think the cutoff though depends on how
> seamlessly they adhere to our natural sense of how the world is
> structured. In second life (though it may not be strictly true) we
> feel like we are in a world rather than a room when we stand on the
> edge of a sim and look across at the content on next server.
>
> Such things as sharding (where parallel timelines and alternate
> universes play out in the same space concurrently immediately
> disqualify an environment from the "world" label as it's just too
> radical a departure from our intuitive understanding of the world.
> Sony home as well, where, though we can see the horizon beyond the
> mall, we intuitively know that the mall is an enclosed entity and that
> we'll never be able to climb those mountains - everything outside that
> building is an illusion. Such spaces confound our natural sense of
> being, and though we can understand them we also understand that these
> arbitrary constraints mark the environment as entirely artificial and
> unreliable. There are different rules of existence for that which is
> near and that which is far.
>
> Well that's my two cents.
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