Design of Virtual Worlds

Zhenzhen Qi

“Design of Virtual Worlds.” In Digital Transformation in Design: Processes and Practices

Editor: Laura S. Scherling, Ed.D.

Publisher: transcript Verlag (Bielefeld, Germany)

Publication Year: 2024

ISBN: 978-3-8376-7142-1

https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839471425-010

Design of Virtual Worlds

Digital interactive narratives are rapidly entering spaces of interactive and experiential design. An increasing number of general audiences are experiencing works of art through interactive installation, internet art, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality-(AR) based software applications. An increasing amount of academic curriculums are being redesigned into networked narrative environments, where students are expressing themselves, and being entertained, while learning new knowledge at the same time. Meanwhile, designers and media theorists are also entering heated debates about what it means to make a story digitally interactive. Central to this debate is an agent-world entanglement that emerges from the audience being able to enact the part of the original narrative through real-time software and hardware interfaces. When a narrative initially shaped by the author is rearranged by the audience through a series of button clicks and subsequently subject to system-level rules automated by computer algorithms, whose story does it become? In this chapter, the researcher investigates the central conflict of digital interactive media through historical events and contemporary case studies and inquires about conditions for collective authenticity against the backdrop of digital mediation, collective agency, and decentralization.

The Paradox of Immersion

As video game graphical technologies improve every year, video games grow closer to immersing players inside highly realistic virtual worlds. Starting from the 1970s, videogame as an industry has evolved from the primordial elements of Pong into the culture-defining medium demonstrated by early cinematic games such as Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto. From there on, cinematic games continued to achieve staggering commercial success, accumulating billions of dollars in the decades that followed. In various online video game forums such as Reddit and discord, players frequently share their excitement from iconic big-budget cinematic games such as Red Dead Redemption, Metal Gear Solid, and Tomb Raider. In particular, the Uncharted series is one of the most commercially successful 3D adventure game franchises of all time.1 The game features emotive, lifelike characters in believable three-dimensional worlds that rival Hollywood action-adventure films and intricate gameplay mechanics closely modeled after real-life outdoor recreational experiences such as rock-climbing, speed racing, and more. Major video game publications have widely credited the series for significantly raising the standards of single-player games.2 However, in an online Reddit forum where players exchange experiences of playing the game, opinions seem to be divided. On the one hand, some players consider cinematic “the currency” in the virtual world. In-game characters with high-definition freckles make it difficult for players to move their eyes away. Players feel convinced to invest their time and attention in the virtual world because they instinctively feel that Nathan Drake, the main player character, is alive. The players are standing next to them, breathing the same air and marveling at the same mountains below their feet. However, increasingly, more seasoned players are starting to question the idea of using powerful computational engines to simulate an alternative world - one that looks and functions just like the one we already inhabit. They feel like they are inside an immersive virtual world that evolves with mundanely simple clicks. If the goal is for players to feel realistic, why ask them to click buttons and remind them that they are players who sit outside the screen with a plastic joystick and controller in hand?

How A Virtual World Operates

Leading game scholars and practitioners have argued that the real power of videogame lies above and beyond realness or immersion. American game developer Anna Anthropy thinks that audiences of print literature and cinema cannot fail a book or movie the way a player fails a videogame. She refers to videogame as “the medium of failure”.3 Similarly, Danish game designer Jasper Juuls claims that “A video game is half-real: we play by real rules while imagining a fictional world. We win or lose the game in the real world, but we slay a dragon (for example) only in the world of the game.”4 He believes that videogame as a medium can simultaneously embody two modes of expression - telling a story, and interacting with a set of procedural rules. To play a video game is, therefore, to be immersed in the backstory of a fictional world while embracing the real consequences of our actions as exactly how we would in the real world. Espen J. Aarseth, a Norwegian scholar, specializing in the game study and electronic literature, also referred to hypertext literature, a form of nonlinear storytelling which requires significant audience effort to actuate the narrative outcome, as an example of a text that is impossible to be read, but must be actively “played”.5

For example, ELIZA was one of the first chatterbots developed against the historical backdrop of personal computing. It is one of the earliest natural language processing programs created by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the mid-1960s. It also served as an early test case for the Turing Test, a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. ELIZA fails very quickly by today’s standards if you ask it a few complex questions. But when it was ported to a PC, people found it very attractive. This program uses “pattern matching” and replacement methods to provide a stereotyped response that makes it feel like an early user is talking to someone who understands their input. ELIZA’s most famous iteration was called DOCTOR. This was done to respond like a Rogerian psychotherapist. The therapist “reflects” the question by returning it to the patient in this case.

Screencapture of a conversation with the ELIZA chatbot (Unknown Author / Wikimedia Commons)

Eliza is one of the examples that demonstrates the difference between the linearity and nonlinearity in digital interactive experiences mediated by a computer algorithm. Aarseth clarified the difference between linear medium (print, digital image, audio, and video, etc.), versus nonlinear medium(videogame, interactive fiction, among others). More specifically, he defines nonlinearity through a list of variables, Topology, Dynamics, Determinability, Trasiency, Maneuverability, and User-functionality.6 Topology states that nonlinearity does not present an experience from a singular, stable, sequential vantage point. Instead, through player-text reciprocity enabled by cybernetic agency, a random sequence of text emerge with each new appointment. Dynamics refers to if the content of the text is constant( reading a print newspaper), or changes(as chatting with Eliza). Determinability refers to relations between the adjacent content. In natural language processing, there are higher probability of certain words appearing next to each other, such as “I” and “am”, but it is not absolute, or deterministic. The conversation outcome from chatting with Eliza is also unpredictable, or deterministic. Transiency refers to if the passage of time alone causes the digital experience to shift. Maneuverability concerns how easy it is for users to access the technical infrastructure that’s sustaining the visual and interactive effects. Finally, user-functionality refers to the user’s ability to provide real-time input and alter the digital experience at hand through exploring the fictional worldspace, engage in virtual role-playing by selecting avatar’s action in the world, or engage with the world poetically through appreciating the virtual scenes, or introspecting on one’s existence within the virtual world. Enabled by the nonlinearity framework described above, Eliza invites players to develop an authentic way of making sense of the world through reflecting on experiences and knowledge one has already possessed. According to philosopher Nelson Goodman, the method of worldmaking is not about faithfully recreating the experience of the analog world in the simulated world, but “remaking a world from others”,7 similar to the process of building a constructional map. A map does not grasp what is already there. A good map systematizes a field and contributes to its disclosure. It delivers a perspective that allows players to make meaning from experiences through world disclosure and world orientation - it aims not at understanding the world for what it is, but at understanding our own ways of making sense and meaning of the world.

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