If we start accepting MUDS and text adventure games as being virtual
worlds then we are making our task more difficult. Are we basically
saying then, that anything that allows 1st person interaction (even
system controlled interaction?) is a virtual world?
> This begs the question of whether a virtual world exists because of
> the way the user views it, or because of the way that the world data
> is laid out. Why isn't the sum of all game boards and states in Super
> Mario Bros a virtual world, or Mortal Kombat for that matter, or
> Tetris, even if such universes are rather limited? Every video game
> ever made would be a virtual world, right back to Pong, which is an
> electronic simulation of tennis.
>
> If you had a gigantic 3d maze of Tetris blocks, and many users spent
> their time viewing this world and manipulating the blocks, wouldn't
> this still be a virtual world? And the world continues to exist even
> if only 1 user is present....
Whilst I can see the point you are trying to make, I fail to see how
this helps anything. Generalising will only make a problem harder to
define and the solution too immense to implement.
> It seems like one must build the taxonomy anew. How about starting
> from the phrase "A virtual world contains puppets controlled by the
> user?"
I can't buy that. An abstract "virtual world" doesn't need to contain
anything other than the user. For a virtual world to exist there must
be someone "using" that world, for once the user has left, the world
ceases to be.
So if we are going to go off into a generalisation, I would suggest
that a virtual world is any "place" in which the user has a
controlling influence in the representation of that world. In this
context you could insert MUDS or even to a limited extent text adventure
games where I quoted "place."
But as I said, I fail to see any benefit in getting into a long
discussion about general terms?
Lee.