Player Housing in the Video Game World: What does it mean to dwell?

One of the subjects that often come up around the subject of MMOs is that of the potential for player housing to enhance the experience of being immersed in a world different to our own.  There are those who have implemented such a system in the past (Star Wars Galaxies being a prominent one) alongside more recent results of Rift, Wildstar and WoW to the point where games like Everquest Next is making it a pillar of its design through Landmark.  These examples present a mixture of in-world structures and instanced-off dwellings, but they all present a ‘this is my mark in the world’ feeling that players get a lot of enjoyment out of. 

So we come to me, a person who likes to read into the subject of housing and what does it mean to dwell to which you would think I’m very much for the creation of player housing as much as possible.  My experiences of this are mixed, but generally I feel that they have a certain something missing from them that a static location can’t create which I hope to discuss in these paragraphs. 

Many of the examples I’ve presented above create a player housing situation through the use of an instanced area where the owner can invite people into to share their digital home from home.  These houses may have a colour scheme reflected of the player’s aesthetic choice, unique items showcasing their participation in the game or various NPCs that they’ve interacted with in a related storyline.  Other examples like WoW’s Garrison or the current GW2 home instance (pre-expansion as of today) have resources that can be obtained on a timed basis, giving players the potential to open up their instance for a trade-like experience with others.  For me, these examples create a vernacular feeling to their implementation, where the dwellings only have superficial changes while the personal stamp of housing isn’t truly presented. 

The other option of in-world creation seems a bit more true to life, in that various empty spaces in the world are set aside to create player housing naturally so that over time these spaces can grow like traditional towns and cities.  Although I didn’t play it personally, friends of mine who did always talk of a living town in SWG where craftsmen set up shops and people hung out together.  Creating something out of nothing in this sense has popularise older titles like Sim-City and more modern examples like Minecraft; where the player (whether alone or with friends) start with an ever-expansive horizon and form a vast city out of it creating stories as they go.  That being said, one could argue that the goal of player housing (in that to create a sense of location and togetherness in the world with others) is attained not through the bricks and mortar of their walls, but of the act of coming together to create an event where a group of similarly minded people work to achieve a goal. 

 

To put this viewpoint into perspective, I would like to present the concept of a field.  A field can be as basic as a piece of lawn in a non-descript place, or it can be a lush patch of land in amongst a landscape of forests and such other natural occurrences.  By its own accord, it doesn’t constitute a dwelling, but it has the potential to become something through people interacting with the space.  So, by a group of people coming together to have a picnic on the field, they are now creating a temporary dwelling to settle at so that they can enjoy a picnic.  Towels are placed onto the grass and hampers are produce bearing a selection of sandwiches, cake and drink while others have brought chairs to sit on.  While the adults do this, a group of children play around the edge of the field, maybe climbing up the nearby trees until their parents call them to the towel and enjoy some food and drink.  This field, for the people having a picnic, is now architecture as a place in which people have created an event from for the couple of hours they stay at the field. 

It’s by this view I feel that the concept of player housing can be represented in a way that keeps the spirit of the notion while exploring the physical manifestations of it in game.  Guilds meeting to participate in a raid against a mutual foe, friends exploring the environment and finding some hidden area together or players meeting in an area at a specific time to morph into bunny’s and confuse the regular player-base; these all potentially create architecture through a place being given narrative.  Player housing naturally has the potential to also do these sorts of things while also giving the player a means to put themselves on the digital map so-to-speak, but I feel there’s much to discuss about what we enjoy about the housing and how much of it is built around its bricks and mortar.