Icarus Studios News

(Continued from Part 1) 

Going down the list and taking a brief look at environmental interactivity, as meant in the introduction of part 1:

In this particular reference, “environment” is not equated with “experience” and instead refers to setting (the city, the mountainside, that tree over there, your ability to open or smash boxes)—an important distinction that often gets muddied in conversations about game features. “Interactivity with the environment” doesn't have to mean the ability to plant trees or break rocks. Since we're talking about virtual worlds, we aren't dealing with real objects in the everyday sense of “reality,” so the subject of interactivity with your environment can be referring to interactivity on an intangible level.

However, the definition of environmental interactivity as “something beyond broken boxes or thrown rocks” seems to not often be used. I'd like to think then, that a better way to keep these issues straight is by assuming “player-to-environment” means player-to-setting, and “player-to-concept” refers to a generally available state of interactivity within the dynamics of the playspace itself.

Having your world edit its appearance with scripted events to perpetuate a feeling of interactivity won't gather enough momentum on its own. Any change rendered this way is still passive in effect; at least until the changes affect a player's overall experience in more ways than simply changing what he or she sees. Once a game object becomes part of a principled structure, some of the various options provided to the player by his or her own ingrained curiosity are taken away. This is the difficulty in offering “more:” finding a balance between creating a system (not object) that players can play with (not at).

To illustrate: say two players were put in a room with an orange. That sounds pretty boring and the orange is just an orange, but a player could walk around it, pick it up, eat it, kick it, show it to another player, stow it away, kick it at another player, share it, etc. Conversely, when in a maze, you have a very direct goal, and yes, there are limited choices available and success might induce some sort of reward response when the maze is first traversed, but the subject in question can only “get through the maze” no matter how often they try to do anything else. All other options are closed by the system.

The bottom line is: the maze may be longer and have a clear point, but the player is still required to go out and act alone, only now, he or she is alone and trapped in a cycle. Put this way, the room with the orange seems like a much more interesting prospect, not only because you could alter the orange and not only because there was another person in the room, but because the situation could change with every entry depending on how you and the other person decided to approach the room. To be progressive, a game system and its players should share and exchange continual and changing interaction. It's not a huge change. It's subtle, and more about being opened to change than presenting it yourself. Players who have entered a group environment should come away feeling assured that they are the game, and, to an extent, are the ones in control of the world, whether or not this is actually true.

(Continued in Part 3)

-Miri Funderburk, Virtual Worlds Team