FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION

World Models

If you plan to offer more than just a chat room, you must give players something to do. The types of things that you give them to do and the rewards they earn for doing those things constitute the world model. Raph Koster identified five classic world models, although you can undoubtedly devise more. Yours may include ele­ments from more than one of Koster's original five, listed here:

■ Scavenger model. Players collect things and return them to places of safety.

The game is primarily a large treasure hunt, and players don't risk losing anything they've collected.

■ Social model. The world exists primarily to provide an expressive space. The fun comes from role-playing in character; most goals represent social achievement (political power, adulation, notoriety, and so on). Players use their characters' attri­butes as a basis for role-playing rather than computer-managed combat.

■ Dungeons & Dragons model. In games based on this, the best-known model, the player is primarily in conflict with the environment, fighting NPCs for ad­vancement and doing some scavenging along the way. Such games rely heavily

on the functional attributes of the avatar for gameplay and include feedback mecha­nisms: Defeating enemies advances the character, which requires the game to offer tougher enemies next time. Such worlds tend to include quests as a form of narra­tive and a way of offering challenges to the players.

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Player-versus-Player (PvP) model. In this sort of world, players advance by defeating one another at contests, often characterized as combat. Players advance through a combination of their natural skill and rewards from winning battles. For this to work successfully, they need to be reasonably evenly matched; you can't have the old-timers beating up the newcomers all the time. EVE Online is perhaps

the most cutthroat of the successful PvP games, with very little in the rules to prevent players from abusing newcomers.

■ Builder model. This somewhat rare sort of world enables players to construct things and actually modify the world in which they play. It's a highly expressive form of entertainment. People get kudos not for their fighting skills, but for their aesthetic and architectural ones, both intangible qualities.