Definition: “World Persistence”
Bartle, in 2003, stated that a persistent virtual world “continues to exist and develop internally even when there are no people interacting with it” (Bartle 2003). Bartle’s criterion that the world “continues to exist” can be referred to as “world persistence” (Nevelsteen 2015), with the element of time, as a minimum, continually “developing internally” within the world, i.e., “a [persistent] virtual world cannot be paused” (Bell and Robbins-Bell 2008).
Introduction
In popular discourse, world “persistent” or “persistence” is often related to a feature to mean the continued existence of that feature, e.g., persistent storage meaning nonvolatile storage. This entry focuses on world persistence. Concepts such as world persistence and data persistence are often erroneously used interchangeably, and ambiguity creeps into the meaning of combined terms when using a particular word...
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Technologies
Blizzard Entertainment: Diablo (1996)
Blizzard Entertainment: World of Warcraft (2004)
id Software: DOOM (1993)
Lankoski, P., Heliö, S., Nummela, J., Lahti, J., Mäyrä, F., Ermi, L., Ekman, I.: The Songs of North (2004b)
Trubshaw, R., Bartle, R.: MUD (1978)
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Nevelsteen, K.J.L. (2024). Physical, Virtual, and Game World Persistence. In: Lee, N. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23161-2_72
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