Virtual world in the context of Computer simulation

Special effects (often abbreviated as F/X or simply FX) are illusions or visual tricks used in the theater, film, television, video game, amusement park and simulator industries to simulate the fictional events in a story or virtual world. It is sometimes abbreviated as SFX, but this may also refer to sound effects.

Special effects are traditionally divided into the categories of mechanical effects and optical effects. With the emergence of digital filmmaking a distinction between special effects and visual effects has grown, with the latter referring to digital post-production and optical effects, while "special effects" refers to mechanical effects.

An online game is a video game that is either partially or primarily played through the Internet or any other computer network available. Online games are ubiquitous on modern gaming platforms, including PCs, consoles and mobile devices, and span many genres, including first-person shooters, strategy games, and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG). In 2019, revenue in the online games segment reached $16.9 billion, with $4.2 billion generated by China and $3.5 billion in the United States. Unlike purchased retail games, online games have the problem of not being permanently playable, as they require special servers in order to function.

The design of online games can range from simple text-based environments to the incorporation of complex graphics and virtual worlds. The existence of online components within a game can range from being minor features, such as an online leaderboard, to being part of core gameplay, such as directly playing against other players. Many online games create their own online communities, while other games, especially social games, integrate the players' existing real-life communities. Some online games can receive a massive influx of popularity due to many well-known Twitch streamers and YouTubers playing them.

Computer-generated imagery (CGI) is a specific-technology or application of computer graphics for creating or improving images in art, printed media, simulators, videos and video games. These images are either static (i.e. still images) or dynamic (i.e. moving images). CGI both refers to 2D computer graphics and (more frequently) 3D computer graphics with the purpose of designing characters, virtual worlds, or scenes and special effects (in films, television programs, commercials, etc.). The application of CGI for creating/improving animations is called computer animation (or CGI animation).

The sociology of the Internet, also known as the social psychology of the Internet, studies how sociological and social psychological theories and methods apply to the Internet as a source of information and communication. It examines the social implications of technology, including new social networks, virtual communities, online interactions, and issues such as cybercrime. A related field, digital sociology, focuses on understanding digital media as a part of everyday life and its influence on social relationships, behavior, and identity.

The Internet, as a major information breakthrough, is of interest to sociologists both as a research tool and as a subject of study. It enables online surveys, discussion platforms, and other methods of data collection. The sociology of the Internet focuses on online communities, virtual worlds, and organizational changes driven by digital media, as well as broader social transformations from industrial to information societies. Researchers examine online communities using statistical methods, such as network analysis, and qualitative approaches, including virtual ethnography. Social change is studied through demographic data or the interpretation of evolving messages and symbols in digital media.

Cyberspace is an interconnected digital environment. It is a type of virtual world popularized with the rise of the Internet. The term entered popular culture from science fiction and the arts but is now used by technology strategists, security professionals, governments, military and industry leaders and entrepreneurs to describe the domain of the global technology environment, commonly defined as standing for the global network of interdependent information technology infrastructures, telecommunications networks and computer processing systems. Others consider cyberspace to be just a notional environment in which communication over computer networks occurs. The word became popular in the 1990s when the use of the Internet, networking, and digital communication were all growing dramatically; the term cyberspace was able to represent the many new ideas and phenomena that were emerging.As a social experience, individuals can interact, exchange ideas, share information, provide social support, conduct business, direct actions, create artistic media, play games, engage in political discussion, and so on, using this global network. Cyberspace users are sometimes referred to as "cybernauts".

The term cyberspace has become a conventional means to describe anything associated with general computing, the Internet and the diverse Internet culture. The U.S. government recognizes the interdependent network of information technology infrastructures and cyber-physical systems operating across this medium as part of the US national critical infrastructure. Amongst individuals on cyberspace, there is believed to be a code of shared rules and ethics mutually beneficial for all to follow, referred to as cyberethics. Many view the right to privacy as most important to a functional code of cyberethics. Such moral responsibilities go hand in hand when working online with global networks, specifically when opinions are involved with online social experiences.

A chat room, chatroom, or group chat (GC), is an online technology of synchronous conferencing, and occasionally even asynchronous conferencing. Chat rooms comprise technology ranging from real-time online chat and online interaction with strangers (e.g., online forums) to fully immersive graphical social environments. The ability to converse with multiple people in the same conversation differentiates chat rooms from instant messaging programs.

The first chat system was developed by Murray Turoff and for its first by the US government in 1971. Talkomatic, the first public online chat system, was created in 1973 on the PLATO System. Chat rooms gained mainstream popularity with AOL, and many peer-to-peer clients were created to host chat rooms. Further innovations include visual chat rooms, which add graphics to the chat experience.

A multi-user dungeon (MUD, /mʌd/), also known as a multi-user dimension or multi-user domain, is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, usually text-based or storyboarded. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat. Players can read or view descriptions of rooms, objects, other players, and non-player characters, and perform actions in the virtual world that are typically also described. Players typically interact with each other and the world by typing commands that resemble a natural language, as well as using a character typically called an avatar.

Traditional MUDs implement a role-playing video game set in a fantasy world populated by fictional races and monsters, with players choosing classes in order to gain specific skills or powers. The objective of this sort of game is to slay monsters, explore a fantasy world, complete quests, go on adventures, create a story by roleplaying, and advance the created character. Many MUDs were fashioned around the dice-rolling rules of the Dungeons & Dragons series of games.

A virtual economy (or sometimes synthetic economy) is an emergent economy existing in a virtual world, usually exchanging virtual goods in the context of an online game, particularly in massively multiplayer online games (MMOs). People enter these virtual economies for recreation and entertainment rather than necessity, which means that virtual economies lack the aspects of a real economy that are not considered to be "fun" (for instance, avatars in a virtual economy often do not need to buy food in order to survive, and usually do not have any biological needs at all). However, some people do interact with virtual economies for "real" economic benefit.

Despite primarily dealing with in-game currencies, this term also encompasses the selling of virtual currency for real money, in what is sometimes called "open centralised marketplaces".

A stuffed toy is a toy with an outer fabric sewn from a textile and stuffed with flexible material. They are known by many names, such as stuffed animals, plush toys, plushies and stuffies; in Britain and Australia, they may also be called soft toys or cuddly toys. Stuffed toys are made in many different forms, but most resemble real animals (sometimes with exaggerated proportions or features), mythological creatures, cartoon characters, or inanimate objects. They can be commercially or home-produced from numerous materials, most commonly pile textiles like plush for the outer material and synthetic fiber for the stuffing. Often designed for children, some stuffed toys have become fads and collector's items.

In the late 19th century, Margarete Steiff and the Steiff company of Germany created the first stuffed animals. In 1902 a political cartoon of Theodore Roosevelt inspired the idea for "Teddy's bear". In 1903, Peter Rabbit was the first fictional character to be made into a patented stuffed toy. In 1921, A. A. Milne gave a stuffed bear to his son Christopher which would inspire the creation of Winnie-the-Pooh. In the 1970s, London-based Hamleys toy store bought the rights to Paddington Bear stuffed toys. In the 1990s, Ty Warner created Beanie Babies, a series of animals stuffed with plastic pellets that were popular as collector's items. Beginning in the 1990s electronic plush toys like Tickle Me Elmo and Furby became fads. Since 2005 beginning with Webkinz, toys-to-life stuffed toys have been sold where the toy is used to access digital content in video games and online worlds. In the 2020s, plush toys like Squishmallows, Jellycat and Labubu became fads after going viral on social media.

A metaverse is a virtual world in which users interact while represented by avatars, typically in a 3D display, with the experience focused on social and economic connection.

The term metaverse originated in the 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash as a portmanteau of "meta" and "universe". In Snow Crash, the metaverse is envisioned as a version of the Internet that is a single, universal, and immersive virtual world, facilitated by the use of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets.

A talker is a chat system that people use to talk to each other over the Internet. Dating back to the 1980s, they were a predecessor of instant messaging.A talker is a communication system precursor to MMORPGs and other virtual worlds such as Second Life. Talkers are a form of online virtual worlds in which multiple users are connected at the same time to chat in real-time. People log in to the talkers remotely (usually via Telnet), and have a basic text interface with which to communicate with each other.

The early talkers were similar to MUDs with most of the complex game machinery stripped away, leaving just the communication level commands – hence the name "talker". ew-too was, in fact, a MUD server with the game elements removed.

Second Life is a multiplayer virtual world that allows people to create an avatar for themselves and then interact with other users and user-created content within a multi-user online environment. Developed for personal computers by the San Francisco-based firm Linden Lab, it launched on June 23, 2003, and saw rapid growth for some years; in 2013 it had approximately one million regular users. Growth eventually stabilized, and by the end of 2017, the active user count had fallen to "between 800,000 and 900,000". In many ways, Second Life is similar to massively multiplayer online role-playing video games; nevertheless, Linden Lab is emphatic that their creation is not a game: "There is no manufactured conflict, no set objective."

The virtual world can be accessed freely via Linden Lab's own client software or via alternative third-party viewers. Second Life users, also called 'residents', create virtual representations of themselves, called avatars, and are able to interact with places, objects and other avatars. They can explore the world (known as the grid), meet other residents, socialize, participate in both individual and group activities, build, create, shop, and trade virtual property and services with one another.

In video games, an open world is a virtual world in which the player can approach objectives freely, as opposed to a world with more linear and structured gameplay. Notable games in this category include The Legend of Zelda (1986), Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004), Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), and Minecraft (2011).

Games with open or free-roaming worlds typically lack level structures like walls and locked doors, or the invisible walls in more open areas that prevent the player from venturing beyond them; only at the bounds of an open-world game will players be limited by geographic features like vast oceans or impassable mountains. Players typically do not encounter loading screens common in linear level designs when moving about the game world, with the open-world game using strategic storage and memory techniques to load the game world dynamically and seamlessly. Open-world games still enforce many restrictions in the game environment, either because of absolute technical limitations or in-game limitations imposed by a game's linearity.

A persistent world or persistent state world (PSW) is a virtual world which, by the definition given by Richard Bartle, "continues to exist and develop internally even when there are no people interacting with it". The first virtual worlds were text-based and often called MUDs, but the term is frequently used in relation to massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) and pervasive games. Examples of persistent worlds that exist in video games include Battle Dawn, EVE Online, and Realms of Trinity.

A persistent world can be achieved by developing and maintaining a single or dynamic instance state of the game world that is shared and viewed by all players around the clock. The persistence of a world can be subdivided into "game persistence", "world persistence" and "data persistence". Data persistence ensures that any world data is not lost in the event of computer system failure. World persistence means the world continues to exist and is available to players when they want to access it. Game persistence refers to the persistence of game events within the world (a Groundhog Day MUD is a virtual world where the entire (game) world is reset periodically). When referring to a "persistent world", world and game persistence are sometimes used interchangeably. The persistence criterion is the trait that separates virtual worlds from other types of video games.

The Battle of B-R5RB or the Bloodbath of B-R5RB (/ˈbiː tæk ɑːr faɪv ɑːr ˈbiː/ ) was a massive-scale virtual battle fought in the MMORPG space game Eve Online in January 2014 (YC 116 in-game), possibly the largest player-versus-player battle in gaming history at the time. The 21-hour-long conflict pitted the Clusterfuck Coalition and Russian alliances (CFC/Rus) against the N3 Coalition and Pandemic Legion alliance (N3/PL), and involved over 7,548 player characters with a maximum of 2,670 players in the B-R5RB system at one time. The in-game cost of the losses totaled over 11 trillion Interstellar Kredit (ISK), an estimated theoretical real-world value of US$300,000 to $330,000 (equivalent to between US$393,053 and $432,359 in 2024), as derived from the contemporaneous market value of PLEX, an item purchasable with real currency that can be redeemed either for subscription time or traded for in-game currency.

Part of a larger conflict known as the Halloween War, the fight started after a single player controlling a space station in the N3/PL-controlled star system B-R5RB accidentally failed to make a scheduled in-game routine maintenance payment, which made the star system open to capture. Being a key staging area used by N3/PL in the war, the CFC and Russian coalitions began pouring players into the system in a swift offensive, and N3/PL moved in a large fleet of players as a response. A massive battle erupted in the system, and numerous smaller engagements occurred throughout the game universe as players attempted to block reinforcements from joining the battle. CFC/Rus gained a clear win by inflicting heavy losses on N3/PL and successfully capturing B-R5RB. The losses totaled 576 capital ships, including 75 Titans (the largest ships available to players), along with thousands of smaller vessels.