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| Early virtual worlds were not games. The first virtual worlds presented on the internet were communities and chat rooms. They attempted to create sets of avatars for virtual interaction. Community virtual worlds allowed access to the environment and encouraged creating buildings, art, and structures (and many did not include avatars). | Early virtual worlds were not games. The first virtual worlds presented on the internet were communities and chat rooms. They attempted to create sets of avatars for virtual interaction. Community virtual worlds allowed access to the environment and encouraged creating buildings, art, and structures (and many did not include avatars). | ||
| The virtual worlds found in ]s are often split into discrete ]s. | |||
| ]s are discrete sections of virtual worlds. | |||
| ==Early interactive communities== | ==Early interactive communities== | ||
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A virtual world is a place for users to inhabit inside computer memory. This habitation usually is represented in the form of two or three-dimensional graphical representations of humanoids (or other virtual avatars) in a computer simulated environment.
This type of virtual world is now most common in massively multiplayer online games and massively multiplayer online role playing games, such as Everquest, Star Wars Galaxies, Ultima Online or Lineage. The computer simulation appears to be a real world, with real world rules such as gravity, topography, locomotion, real-time, and communication. Communication has been in the form of text in current examples of an online world.
One perception of virtual worlds requires a persistent 24-hour, 7-days a week world to qualify as a true virtual world. However, no MMOG runs all day, every day. All the online games listed above include downtime for maintenance that is not included as time passing in the virtual world. While the interactions with other players is real-time, time consistency is not always maintained in online virtual worlds. For example, Everquest time passes faster than real-time despite using the same calendar and time units to present game time.
Many single player games also exist in a virtual world where the same rules and perception of a graphical reality exist. Many of these allow you to save the current state of this world instance to allow stopping and restarting the virtual world at a later date. (This can be done with some multiplayer environments as well.)
Early virtual worlds were not games. The first virtual worlds presented on the internet were communities and chat rooms. They attempted to create sets of avatars for virtual interaction. Community virtual worlds allowed access to the environment and encouraged creating buildings, art, and structures (and many did not include avatars).
The virtual worlds found in video games are often split into discrete levels.
Early interactive communities
One of the early prototyptes was WorldsAway, a prototype interactive community featuring a virtual world by CompuServe called Dreamscape and avatars representing the participants.
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