I’m interested in that as well. What precisely must be present for it to be considered a virtual environment? How much of a world is required? Some level of abstraction must be allowed, since no game perfectly mimics a world, but how much? There are games that intend to evoke a world, as the old Avalon Hill games did with their hex-grid maps. What about a game such as Monopoly? It alludes to physical spaces, but does so very abstractly.

I find it easier to think of board games that have this sense of a virtual world, but there are card games that seem to fit the bill. Once Upon a Time establishes a fairy-tale world through the story the players weave.

As to whether or not a game is more interesting based on whether or not it has a virtual environment or it tries to simulate a world, well, I’m not entirely convinced that this is the primary measure of a game’s interest, or even necessarily a major one.

Once play begins, players are enclosed within the artificial context of a game – its “magic circle” – and must adhere to the rules in order to participate.

I recently heard the term magic circle come up in Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s talk at GDC about play, based on their upcoming book.

I have been grappling with this as well. Here’s a suggestion:

A game has a virtual world when it can be described in its own terms (independent of board pieces and servers) and when it’s possible to reconstruct “what happened” and what time it took for something to happen.

EverQuest, Counter-Strike etc… have virtual worlds since we can recount the events effortlessly: “The elf climbed to the top of the mountain and was attacked by a spider”.

Chess does not have a virtual world in this sense because we can’t recount what really happened: The queen was attacked by a pawn? What? And how long time does it take for a bishop to move anyway? So chess is rather an allegory of war, and Monopoly is an allegory of the real estate market.

There are some weird overlaps between rules and fiction. Roger Caillois is all up on it:

Despite the assertion’s paradoxical character, I will state that in this instance the fiction, the sentiment of as if replaces and performs the same function as do rules. Rules themselves create fictions. The one who plays chess, prisoner’s base, polo, or baccara, by the very fact of complying with their respective rules, is separated from real life where there is no activity that literally corresponds to any of these games. That is why chess, prisoner’s base, polo, and baccara are played for real. As if is not necessary.

(Man, Play, and Games p.9)

As to whether or not a game is more interesting based on whether or not it has a virtual environment or it tries to simulate a world, well, I’m not entirely convinced that this is the primary measure of a game’s interest, or even necessarily a major one.

To focus on certain types of games, e.g. GIVEs, is not to say that those games are “more interesting” than others. Some of them might be quite interesting, while others probably are not.

I suspect there are GIVEs that are very interesting despite the presence of boring virtual environments used in tedious ways; the gameplay is nice but the virtual environment is pretty much incidental to the experience. Similarly, there will be some GIVEs that are not so hot as games but have a pretty compelling simulated world despite that. I wouldn’t expect that the study of GIVEs specifically will shed a lot of light on how these two sorts of games manage to be effective, although it might help us to understand them somewhat.

But I find the category interesting because it focuses on how “game” and “virtual environment” can work together effectively in (to get Aristotelian again for a moment) an excellent virtual-environment game, one that would not excel only as a game (without the environment) or only as a world (without the game). I suspect that, looking beyond gaming, it’s in intersections like these that we will find some of the most interesting 21st-century artistic and cultural endeavors, and that investigations of this sort will be particularly fruitful.

at what point do game pieces or displays cease to become representations of an environment, and become the environment themselves?

I think Jasper’s perspective on this can be a good one. Let’s look at different games in the gray areas and find out if a virtual environment perspective helps us learn something new. Perhaps the important boundary between virtual environment or no is found when there is too much overhead in trying to explain how pieces move and what the rules of the system are by only referring to the physical game board or display screen. If it simplifies the explanation to describe the virtual environment and refer to that, this is a good sign that you’re dealing with a GIVE. If it makes things more complex without providing any benefits (as would happen if we imagined chess as having a VE) then we shouldn’t bother.

(An automatic trackback didn’t occur from her post to grandtextauto, I think because she’s not using Movable Type.)

Although it relates to your use of the term, I was thinking of “overhead” as being what we want to avoid in explaining a game, as theorists and critics. For instance, we could talk about what goes in a game of Super Mario World without making reference to a virtual simulated space, but our description would either be very vague or hideously elaborate. A lot of descriptive overhead of this sort would be avoided if we introduced the concept of a virtual world. That would make our explanation simpler while being as powerful, or more powerful, than before. Yes, It’s likely that not only theorists but also players build these intermediate representations when they encounter a game that has a virtual environment.

And as for Torill – I read her post on the topic, but surprisingly I found that I was unable to comment upon it. I wonder if she knows that she has comments turned off? *

I think in her discussion of virtual environments that, once again, Torill is talking about what I call the context of play, and what Huizinga (and Katie and Eric) refer to as the magic circle. This (“the imagined common arena within which play happens” as Torill puts it) is an essential sphere to understand, but not the only sort of virtual environment one can have. People playing the board game risk sit in a “magic circle” in which discussions occur and in which they can make and break alliances by talking to one another. This is a context of play – if your friend breaks an alliance with you that does not mean that she won’t give you a ride home from the Risk game, as she agreed to do before the game. But this environment isn’t the same as the geography and topology of the Risk world that is represented on the board. On the other hand, it may not be best to understand this “Risk world” as a virtual environment; perhaps we can understand it just as easily if we simply think of it as a game board. If we are playing a purely verbal game such as Twenty Questions, there is no representation (physical or virtual) of a geography of this sort, but there is still a context of play – questions of a certain sort are going to be “in game” and others (“hey, do you smell something burning?”) are not.

I certainly don’t think that a computer is required for a GIVE, and I don’t think anyone has proposed that it is. Dungeons and Dragons is a clear example of a GIVE that doesn’t involve a computer. Also, I am in agreement with Torill’s take on why we find virtual environments interesting – the idea that they “are the way we think, theorize and explore abstractions.” I wouldn’t say that they are the only way, but certainly they represent an important one.

* [A reference to Torill's recent discussion of comments and blogging. Also, good-natured sarcasm.]

I love trackback, but I sure wish they appeared along with other comments rather than in their own separate section.