Icarus Studios News

One of the coolest things about running a virtual world is the concept of emergent play: given enough world elements and enough users, very fun games emerge that the developers never would have thought of when they created the original items. In a lot of worlds, this is a design goal: toys, physics-objects, user-generated content, and placeable items are all added to the world to encourage the players to use them in interesting (but hopefully family friendly) ways.

However, not deliberately including opportunities for emergent play can just raise the bar for player creativity. World of Warcraft features powerful bosses that are meant to sit at the heart of their own territories, waiting for enterprising players to come fight them. They are far off the beaten path, so aren’t a danger to player just minding their own business. However, another mechanic in the world works to make NPC enemies chase their attackers as long as the attackers are still putting up a fight, and most will chase you for an unlimited distance and time if you keep attacking them and manage to survive.

This leads to some interesting opportunities for emergent play. The first link is a tactic later made impossible: luring Doom Lord Kazzak into a distant player city where he will continue killing until he’s destroyed everyone that attacked him or the server is reset. Since the monster grows more powerful the more targets he defeats, eventually he becomes unstoppable and the developers had to reset the server or he would have continued to make the city unusable for players. The second is similar to the first, but actually had a goal beyond just unleashing chaos: the backstory for the game world says that the bosses for two enemy factions are friends, but, in practice, they will fight one another just like any other pair of hostile NPCs. “Reuniting” them elevates the play from a challenge to a story.

Unfortunately, the exciting accomplishments of both emergent play experiences impact negatively on bystanders. There were probably quite a number of players for whom seeing something unique was not enough to justify killing their characters and delaying their use of the areas where enemy bosses were never supposed to be creating havoc. In Kazzak’s case, an entire city would have been mostly useless to uninvolved players long after the fun of his presence was used up, had the server not been reset. But that, itself, might have been emergent play: players with the power to permanently restructure the danger landscape of the world in ways unforeseen by the developers.

Ultimately, players will find ways to have fun using your tools in ways unintended and even antagonistic to the goals of the designers. It’s up to the world’s staff whether that means giving players enough power to make whatever art they want, even if it’s vulgar, or locking down the world and being completely surprised when systems are made to work together to generate chaos. And, as long as the emergent play made more people happy than it inconvenienced, it’s almost always best to reward it: a small number of players doing something legendary is likely to inspire greater interest from a large number of players that want to see something similarly unexpected.

-Stephen Cheney, Virtual Worlds Team