ABSTRACT

But Linden Labs, the company behind Second Life, had the brilliantly insightful idea to put out into the world what amounts to a multiplayer video game platform with no game!

Mike Azzara [1]

Virtual environments, like real-world environments, tend to be designed in accordance with the meaning and message of group goals. If you are designing a virtual environment to train people, or teach people, or engage people in a group activity, then you have probably been introduced to the idea of making these activities more gamelike to enhance the overall efcacy of your efforts [2]. This is the conceptual heart of a game-based virtual environment, it is a virtual environment designed to deliver the meaning and message of your group goals through gamelike activities. What is a game anyway? Is it an environment or scenario that gives us an opportunity to compete or collaborate within a set of boundaries or rules? Does that denition sound like life in the 9-to-5 ofce? What about the element of “play” or play-based activity? How does that factor in? Most of you instinctively know what a game is, although your taste for what kind of games you enjoy may vary. The overall goal of this book is to deepen your understanding of what goes into designing a game-based virtual environment, and the specic aim of this chapter is to understand game structure, game types, and game players and how this information can be incorporated into your designs. First things rst, let us get to a working description of what a game contains and how those components work together. Most, but not all, games tend to have these ve things in common: (1) they have rules, (2) they have a goal or goals, (3) they have obstacles that can temporarily block the goal, (4) they have a ranking or scoring system, and (5) during the process of a game you are engaged in a play-based activity. The rst 4 of these components t together like a machine; they help the game function while you play it. These four components also allow gameplay to emerge from the underlying mechanics of the game [3]. Gameplay is the interaction you experience while playing the game; it is the tactics you employ and the strategies you devise. It is separate from the visual or aural components involved in the game. Game mechanics provide for gameplay by organizing how the game is played. They work by dening the rules and structure, such as when challenges, goals, and rewards appear. In Figure 4.1 there is an overview of the interrelationships between these ve major game components and the kinds of behavior that emerges from these interactions.