"Computer, Let's have a beach scene, some pina coladas, and a couple of blondes in bikinis please. Oh, and a beach umbrella - I don't want to get a sunburn like I did last time."
This is how virtual reality is always portrayed on TV - beautiful, lifelike locales where participants sort of sit around and watch the scenery - kind of like a picture book in 3D. Hmm, while I have often been pretty impressed with a computer game's artwork, I can't say that I've ever wanted to spend all day just looking at it. However, there are other traits of reality besides how it impacts the senses. In particular, reality is:
When you think about it, virtual reality as portrayed on TV doesn't seem to have too many of these traits. The fictional VR shown on Star Trek is immersive, certainly - but no one ever seems to go back to the same world twice - and always you see new VR worlds being ordered up for only one or two people at a time to share - there are no real societies in VR. In fact, this portrayal of virtual reality doesn't have much in common with regular reality at all - it seems a lot more like a high tech version of watching TV (big surprise, huh?).
Everquest, on the other hand, shares many of these traits of reality in spades.
It's hard to understand how involving a computer game can be until you've played one for a while. To first time observers, it can be challenging to even figure out how the images all fit together into a cohesive whole! For instance, I had a friend who enjoyed trying out the game Quake, but after a few minutes it made him feel motion sick. All of the movement on the screen without the additional cues to his inner ear confused his sense of motion. He was immersed enough into the game to feel motion sick, but not enough so his senses had adjusted to it.
This leads to an interesting observation: Computer games like Everquest become more immersive as the brain adjusts to the abstraction of a 3 dimensional reality mapped onto a 2 dimensional computer screen. Where an observer may just see the view of a hallway racing past the screen, the long time player actually experiences running down, and being surrounded by, a 3 dimensional hallway. It is a difference of perspective which comes over time.
Also, experienced players quickly lose awareness of the fact that they are using buttons to control their actions. At some point, the brain stops saying "I must push the up arrow so I can go forward", and simply says "go forward," and the action of pushing the right button becomes a subconcious act. This adjustment is much like the adjustment of learning to drive a car.. When was the last time you thought - "the light's green, now I have to release the brake pedal and step on the gas pedal." Yet when you first started learning to drive you really did have to think about these things.
So, are games like Everquest as immersive as the Star Trek holodeck? Well, no - but over time it can get closer than the inexperienced might think. Just ask my wife how well I can listen to her when I'm trying to play. Believe me, I'm in there baby!
When people hear that Everquest is a role playing game, they think that everyone chats in olde english and pretend to be valorous knights or ancient wizards. Well, some people get into that kind of role playing, but really most players don't - or they do it only on a part time basis. In reality (umm, Everquest reality anyway), role playing has simply come to mean that you create your own characters, and that these characters evolve over time.
For instance, a couple of years ago I created a character which is a cleric (a particular type of healer - clerics in EQ participate in battle primarily by healing other characters as they fight). Initially I gave this character a class, a face, and picked out which things it would be especially good at. Over time, this character has become more powerful and gained more advanced healing spells. Places which used to be very dangerous for my character have, over time, become boringly safe - while other more dangerous places have become accessible in turn.
Aside from better healing spells, my cleric has acquired better armor, weapons and certain amount of virtual money (which, like in real life, I never have enough of). Sometimes, playing Everquest even begins to feel a bit like a job - constantly improving my character and trying to get more stuff can be a lot of work. This may make some people wonder why anyone would play. Herein lies the secret of Everquest's success at keeping an army of nerds playing late at night for years at a time: games like EQ are really a simulated form of self actualization. Your character starts out afraid of everything - wimpy and helpless. But over time, your character becomes more powerful - and by association you feel more powerful. Would that real life allowed such a clearly defined path to self-improvement!
In real life self-actualization is difficult and unpredictable. Who knows if all that weekend bike riding will ever enable you to do that 100 mile ride as quickly as some of your bike enthusiast friends? You could get hurt during training and be set back by a year or more, or much more likely, you could just lack the natural ability to easily progress past a certain point. In Everquest, the road to simulated self actualization is time consuming, but not really dependent on any kind of talent - and to the most part it occurs in a regular, predictable manner. This is the aspect of EQ which gets people so hooked into the game (more on that in another section). That is also part of why playing Everquest is like being in a Virtual Reality, and watching TV (with it's much more "realistic" images) is not.
As I mentioned, I generally play a cleric in Everquest, and clerics are healers. As you can imagine, my character does not really do that well fighting on his own - but he can be a great asset to a group of other more offensively oriented characters. In this manner the design of EQ encourages people to play together, and not just venture through Virtual Reality sharing the same world but rarely interacting.
If I do my healing job well and keep all of my companions alive through a series of battles, I will make a positive impression on them and they are likely to want to play with me again. On the other hand, if I ignore them during a fight ("oops, I noticed you guys all died - sorry, I was getting some Pop-Tarts"), then they are likely to ignore me next time I'm looking for a group.
People are also likely to be swayed by incidental behavior - like the conversation that you make during slow spots in the game. A little humorous commentary on the proceedings is likely to make people enjoy playing with you. Also, if you are into role playing and somewhat good at it, players can be very entertained by your valorous Paladin or your stupid but well intentioned Ogre. On the other hand, being mean or childish (like saying "boy, you suck at this game, you know?") is likely to give you a bad reputation in no time. So is hogging all the loot or skipping out on the group when the going gets tough.
There are other ways of interacting with other
players besides fighting together. You can buy and sell to other
players - either stuff that was picked off of corpses of
vanquished foes or even things you make yourself. Again, doing
this well can earn you a reputation, just like fighting well can.
There are more ways in which players can interact, but I think you get the idea. My point is, as state of the art VR progresses, shared virtual worlds will almost certainly come to predominate over individual virtual worlds. Having real, honest to goodness people to play with adds an element of conversation and complex interaction that computers by themselves are unlikely to match for decades to come - if ever. Without being shared, virtual realities lack a human dimension.
The complexity of games such as Everquest can be fairly overwhelming to new players. I recently bought a 500 page book about the game and I feel that it mainly just scratches the service. There a huge number of sites on the web devoted to different aspects of EQ. There are web pages focusing on game geography, how to make different stuff, what the different spells do, and what the different quests are that you can perform (mainly to get weapons and armor and such).
This complexity is part of what makes it impossible to explore every aspect of the game - even if playing EQ was the only thing you did for every waking hour. However, the real trick behind the apparent endlessness of Everquest is how the game is only revealed to a player through many hours of playing. For instance, to be able to safely pass through certain zones requires a character of a certain level. Attaining that level can take many hundreds of hours of play in lower level zones. So even though Everquest is a tiny fraction as large or varied as real life is, it's complexity is, effectively, more than can be grasped by a single player without putting in enormous amounts of time.
This isn't necessarily so different from real life in a way. The experiences of seeing the Great Pyramids, winning an election, or seeing your child's first steps, may all be things that take place within a single day - but months or years may be involved in building up to that day. In real life, meaningful experiences can't just be ordered up at the press of a button. Designers of virtual reality smartly mimic reality in that respect by keeping much of their best stuff hard to get to.