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12:33pm on Tuesday, 28th June, 2022:

Mike Sellers

Anecdote

Along with pretty well everyone else involved in virtual world design, I was saddened to hear today of the death of Mike Sellers.

The universal consensus is that Mike was smart, kind, helpful, insightful, witty, charming, generous, ... I concur with this absolutely. However, rather than repeat what the rest of the virtual world industry is saying, I thought instead I'd give a short glimpse of what we've lost with him.

My last emails with Mike concerned a book he was writing: Pillars of Virtual World Design. I was really looking forward to reading that book.

For Mike, virtual worlds were imaginary places where real people form real relationships through the vehicle of imaginary people. In other words, players use their avatars in virtual worlds as conduits to form relationships with other players. The "pillars" of the book's title were:
- Persistent Identity
- Engaging
- Complementary Roles
- Persistent World
- Persistent Relationships
- Systemic
- Monetisation

As a player journey, this equates to:
- A real person (the player) enters virtual world and establishes an avatar identity. [Persistent Identity]
- The player is acclimatised to the virtual world. [Engaging]
- The player is acclimatised to other players' avatars (characters). [Complementary Roles]
- Through play, the player's avatar exposes part of the real person behind it. [Persistent World]
- The player's avatar groups with avatars of other, compatible players. [Persistent Relationships]
- The player gains enjoyment interacting with the players and the systems of the virtual world. [Systemic]
- The player supports the existence of the virtual world from the real world. [Monetisation]

What's basically going on in this analysis is that a player enters a world as an imaginary person who is steered towards other imaginary people. Through play, players start to see other players, not other imaginary people. As a result, the real people behind these imaginary people form relationships. This enhances their enjoyment of the virtual world. Because they wish to sustain these relationships, occasionally they drop the developer some money.

What a great narrative spine! What self-respecting virtual world designer wouldn't want to read that book the moment it came out (if not before!)?

I did have a couple of questions about it. The approach emphasises social interaction, but for some people the social side of virtual worlds is more about validation than interaction. Also, there are players who find observing the social interactions to be important, not participating in them. I wanted to know how Mike fitted those into his theory, but sadly it was shortly after asking him that he became unwell, so I'll never know the answers.

Mike had so much experience, yet still so much potential.

What a sad loss.




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