FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
It’s Harder to Suspend Disbelief
For some players, gaming is a form of escapism that takes them away to a magical place, and they want it to stay magical while they're there. To them, it's particularly important that nothing occur in the game to break their suspension of disbelief, but in online games there will always be players who won't stay in character or who will talk about real-world issues and events while they're in the game. Unless there's a strong (and enforced) ethos of in-character role-playing, people who play in an online game have to accept that their imaginary world includes a lot of entirely real people.
The persistent world World of Warcraft offers players multiple versions of its game world with different versions imposing different rules on the player. In some versions, in-character role-playing is expected—although there is no real mechanism to enforce it.
Unfortunately, playing with strangers—particularly anonymous strangers—creates opportunities for a variety of types of misbehavior that can ruin the game for others. These range from simple rudeness to harassment, cheating in various forms, and outright fraud. Rudeness might not sound very serious, but it drives away other customers. Furthermore, if you want children to play your game, it is particularly important to make sure you offer a safe environment—you may even have a legal obligation to make sure adults don't use your game environment to abuse chil- dren—and that means hiring customer service people to monitor the players. Self-contained networks such as America Online have some tools at their disposal to manage these problems, but on open networks such as the Internet, it's much harder. The section "Design Issues for Online Gaming" later in this chapter addresses some of these issues.
