Designing Virtual Worlds
By R. Bartle. 2025
609 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Designing Virtual Worlds is the most comprehensive treatment of virtual world design to-date from one of the true pioneers and most sought-after design consultants. It's a tour de force of VW design, stunning in intellectual scope, spanning the literary, economic, sociological, psychological, physical, technological, and ethical underpinnings of design, while providing the reader with a deep, well-grounded understanding of VW design principles. It covers everything from MUDs to MOOs to MMORPGs, from text-based to graphical VWs.Designing Virtual Worlds brings a rich, well-developed approach to the design concepts behind virtual worlds. It is grounded in the earliest approaches to such designs, but the examples discussed in the book run the gamut from the earliest MUDs to the present-day MMORPG games mentioned above. It teaches the reader the actual, underlying design principles that many designers do not understand when they borrow or build from previous games. There is no other design book on the market in the area of online games and virtual worlds that provides the rich detail, historical context, and conceptual depth of Designing Virtual Worlds.
Subfields: Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/088aed09181504c85d2090e510b628f257497e43
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In Sociology and Political Science
- Nicolas Ducheneaut
- Zsolt Demetrovics
- Róbert Urbán
- K. Duffy
- Mingfong Jan
- Eric Nickell
- Kurt Squire
- Robert J. Moore
Citations in the corpus
- Why do you play? The development of the motives for online gaming questionnaire (MOGQ) (2011, background): “Furthermore, in contrast with former studies (Bartle, 2003; Frostling-Henningsson, 2009; Yee, 2006), the identified seven dimensions are applicable to all types of online games, since we did not limit our sample to any particular game types.”
- "Alone together?": exploring the social dynamics of massively multiplayer online games (2006, positive): “The ability to construct an identity as an “uber” or “elite” gamer is where MMORPGs are truly social worlds – grouping with others can be just a means to an end, which can be sidestepped depending on playing style [1, 26].”
- We ARe at home: How augmented reality reshapes mobile marketing and consumer-brand relationships (2018, background): “Especially in immersive virtual realities such as massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs), it is often observed that the player becomes the avatar, eradicating any separate distinction between the physical self and the re-embodied self (Bartle, 2004; Belk, 2013).”
- Mad City Mystery: Developing Scientific Argumentation Skills with a Place-based Augmented Reality Game on Handheld Computers (2007, background): “In the context of multiplayer games, game structures such as roles are created to promote collaboration, competition, and community among players (Bartle, 1996, 2003; Steinkuehler, 2006b).”