The Sims 3 released some time ago a Create a World builder tool for their game. It’s a fun enough game, but I’ve actually been using the world builder as an outlining tool. While plenty of things that come up in a story are based on real location and some are just flat made up, I’ve managed to find a certain utility to plotting everything in my mind. Sure, I can have the restaurant in my mind, but where is it in relation to the main character’s house? How is the antagonist supposed to drive by dramatically if the road is a dead end? I’ve had a lot of fun actually plotting these things out.
The Sims franchise has taken digital story telling into a new world. It’s built around the idea of telling stories and sharing them. The video recordings and album photo arrangements were created with story-telling in mind. So far the product has not always been especially high quality, but there are some genuinely stirring examples out there, like the blog Alice and Kev that I posted about a few months ago.
At current, full made games are still more common and profitable, but the price and difficulty of designing worlds is increasingly by the year. Already, multiple games are produced using the same platform, and games like Neverwinter Nights were almosted released primarily as tool sets that happened to include a story. I suspect this trend will continue. A company will produce a framework (such as Second Life), and periodically update the overall capability of the universe, but the user base, which may include secondary companies, will be responsible for content generation. Again, Second Life is basically an example of this already, but it’s yet to take any sort of real Mainstream acceptance.
I envision a sort of hierarchy of virtual creations with an overall base partitioned by various content providers, either persons or companies, to which individuals join. Think a cross between Steam, Second Life, and World of Warcraft. One can navigate throughout a larger virtual multi-verse to ‘log in’ to World of Warcraft like experiences. Once the overall technical capability is at this level, one suspects it’ll be substantially easier to create meaningful content thus opening the userbase even more. The economic and information sharing potential of this sort of creation, would seem to propel the world to greater levels of interactivity in an organic fashion.
I suppose this is all very ‘Snowcrash’ like, but, as small a step as it is, I’ve found a lot of utility from using one, limited tool to create a world and I’m only using it to plot out a written world. Surely, this niche has room to grow. If our internet access ever stops being terrible some of the ideas might actually take off…but that’s enough from me for one day.
