Friday, April 19, 2019

No Inherent Game or Movie Tropes

There are lots of tropes in games and in VR stories/movies that are designed to increase tension or add conflict to the story. 

  • Your character can be killed.   Most games after you die you can respawn, with varying levels of penalty.  An extreme version of this is in 'Ready Player One', once you die, your character is dead forever.
  • You lose your possessions when you die.  Sometimes they just get dumped there, or they might disappear.
  • You have limits on what you can carry.
  • You can only be in one game at a time.

It's possible to build games and have worlds where some of these things might happen within the confines of that world.  However, there are some basics which VRWorlds will enforce.

1.  There are two special types of certificates (special kudos), leases and deeds, which either give permanent or time-based access to Entities.   Avatars can only be deeded.   With deeds -- you own them.  Nothing that happens in any world will affect your ownership, or possession, of the object.   All this being said, your Avatar cannot die or be taken from you.   The only thing that can occur is that the original Entity or Avatar creator/provider can withdraw from the universe and take it's servers and your items with you.

2.  The rules about what you can lease or own are between you and the Entity server.  It may be that the Entity server allows you to own anything you pick up.  It may permit you to purchase/lease the item.   It also might be that the server won't let you take anything out of the world, but you will have it in your possession as long as you are in the world.  Items which you have deeds or leases for are yours and they cannot be taken from you, or even hidden from you.  They are in Active Inventory, even if you are not carrying them--you can call them back to you.

3.  There is no real limit on what you can carry of your own items.  A world might enforce carrying limits of world objects, but this cannot affect your objects.

4.  Worlds might not permit some of your objects to be used.  The Fluffy Bunny World might not permit you to use your 100 megaton nuclear hand-grenade, or they might.   Entities and Worlds have to cooperate on this.  There would have to be interlocked kudos to allow gameplay with interworld items.   I don't think third party worlds would want to trust self-declared attributes on a Entity from another service, but the world's physics engine would have to cooperate if an Entity wanted to explode, or shoot projectiles or otherwise be a weapon.  Your Avatar would have to agree to take damage, and there's no reason for it to even have a mechanism to do that, except for the purposes of gameplay.

5. There's no reason why your Avatar, at least notionally, can't be in multiple worlds at a time.  Now practically you can only function in one at time, but consider the analogy of having lots of tabs open in your web browser.   How you switch around, or get informed of interesting things happening in a given world are TBD, as is if your avatar will just stand there, or get ghosted out, or perform some activity via an AI.

6.  Kudo's are awards that are granted by worlds, or external groups (though I guess that can be a group of one Avatar).  They are a type of unreassignable crypto-coin.  Kudo's can be granted to avatars, worlds, entities (either the whole class of an entity, or individual instances), and so are owned by these objects.   Third parties cannot affect them, though the original grantor can revoke them.

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