BigWorld: Part 2

This is the second part of the story of BigWorld, a virtual world-game development project that took place between 2020 and 2021.

To read the first part, click here.

Avatars

We anticipated that the body that would give people connecting to BigWorld the agency to move, see, hear and interact with the world, would evolve over time. Much as the BigWorld itself was designed to begin as a coarse, rudimentary environment and see successive epochs where resolution and complexity would increase; we expected that avatars too would begin as single-celled blobs but could over time accumulate more complex organs, limbs, and features.

Also, an important distinction was that avatars would always be made of the same stuff as the world, so their creation and destruction would appropriately debit and credit the energy and mass of the world. They could add to their corpus the energy and material they found, and when they die, their remains would decompose back into the environment.

In the first epoch though, we sought the simplest form of an avatar, capable of rudimentary but still interesting ways of expression, movement, and interaction.

Concept drawing: “Clay world” epoch

Concept drawing: “Clay world” epoch

Mating and Reproduction

Concept: a gestating ovum

(aka: Inviting New Users)

The architecture of the world was conceived such that it could be large enough to accommodate millions of simultaneous users, because as new people joined, the shared computational power and storage would also increase. But it was also central to the concept that people who are already in the world would need to take an action and expend some nominal resources to create a new person’s avatar. This action would be analogous to real world reproduction, and would hopefully evolve its own rituals of courtship and mating.

As an abstraction of real-world reproduction, our initial concept was that one party could create a circular imprint glyph in the ground by moving their avatar in a small circle, and then a second avatar could place a unit of energy on the ground in the middle of the circle.

This combined act would generate a reaction which over a duration of time would gestate into an blank invitation code, which either parent could claim and share externally. If the gestation was interrupted by marring the glyph or removing the energy, the ovum would cease to develop.

Avatar Energy

The economics of accumulating and spending energy, courtesy of Philip Rosedale:

In order to lay the foundations for a minimally-viable energy economy, we had to make initial guesses about how energy could be accumulated and spent in a way that would be roughly stable over time. This meant that we had to conceive of a system where the equilibrium would tend to a diffuse distribution of energy, or conversely one where it would be very difficult and very unstable for a great deal of energy to be in the possession of a small number of users.