I was asked recently, what’s the difference between a game and a virtual world.
My answer was, basically, that a game has objectives, scoring, and winning, and a virtual world doesn’t.
But the distinction is blurry.
In an interesting article in The Wall Street Journal Junot Díaz described ’sandbox games,’ where you can stop playing the game and just do stuff.
Díaz noted that, despite the recent publicity about Grand Theft Auto IV, GTA III was the game-changer because it put the player in charge:
“GTA III brought a level of immersion, a depth of play never before seen in videogames. Other games allow you to play God or a hero but GTA III came the closest to letting you play something far more basic and far more strange. It let you, in a way, play a person…”
So, is GTA a game where you stop playing and just do virtual things? Or a virtual world where you can choose to play a game?
These immersive environments are going to become so flexible that they’ll be able to support whatever we want them to be: a game, a simulation, a 3D demonstration, a role play, a collaborative workspace.
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I am an elearning developer and passionate about Second Life. So much so that I own 13 sims and am a speaker at the eLearning Guild’s DevLearn08.
That being said, I often face the same issue: is Second Life a game? I think of it as a 3D web presence. Basically the same as normal websites, just a 3D version. In that you rent server space and put your content up. All content is user generated, just like the web. Content is arranged by region name and thus able to be bookmarked (landmarks).
In that light, I don’t see it as a game, just a sharable 3D application of user sites.
However, like on the web, you can also generate income from your presence in Second Life. Then all of a sudden, it does have objectives and goal: to make money. That aspect is gamelike in my opinion.
And as you wrapped up in your post, it is both and more. The collaborative nature is perhaps the most enjoyable one for me.
Hi David. I think as trainers develop more and more ‘asynchronous’ learning activities in Second Life, the blurry distinction between games and virtual worlds will become even blurrier.
If in a Second Life healthcare sim I can try to diagnose and treat the illness of a robot-avatar patient, and I get feedback (and maybe a score) on how accurate my diagnosis is, that may really feel like a game, a game-within-a-virtual-world.
Interesting stuff going on…