After the craziness of Cabo, Kristin invites Stephen to a Blink concert with the hope of getting back together. Graduation day is here and the seniors spend time with their families getting ready for the big event. Through a Senior Video Project, the seniors reveal their personal thoughts on graduation, senior year, and life after Laguna.
In the final days before leaving Laguna, Stephen must tie up loose ends, first saying goodbye to Trey, then the surf shop and finally Kristin. Laguna Beach. SD SD selected. Buy series. Can't play on this device. Check system requirements. Other series. Available on HoloLens. Mobile device. Xbox Description Like other California teens, the lives of these Laguna Beach teens are filled with sandy beaches, beautiful friends and love triangles.
Episodes 1. The Bonfire. Fast Cars and Fast Women. What Happens in Cabo. The Best Part of Breaking Up. The Last Dance. Graduation Day. The content of virtual game worlds is often inspired by literature — especially the science fiction and medieval fantasy genres are of great importance. Virtual worlds in this tradition are games in the sense that the user takes over a character, strives to achieve certain game objectives, and collects valuable items and experience points on the way.
These worlds mark an important offspring in the game world development since they were the first social virtual worlds Bartle , p. As opposed to game worlds, there are no game objectives in these worlds; the communication aspect come to the fore and the content is designed to a significant part by the users.
Because of the multitude of different worlds already in use, it is quite difficult to give a common definition that fits all of them. Castronova , p. The mental experience of being within the world is called immersion and usually leads to the player having a strong identification to his or her avatar.
Basically the architecture of a virtual world consists of a more or less function-rich client and a server grid which is usually maintained by a service provider company. Footnote 1 The responsibilities of the client are to provide a user interface for a specific device e. PC, mobile phone, gaming console , to send certain user interactions to the server; to receive the current state of the relevant world sector, and to graphically or textually render it.
This implies certain requirements to the specific communication protocol e. As proposed by Bartle , p. The so-called driver which implements the basic data structures and hardware abstraction is on the lowest level. Above this layer is the physics engine which is responsible for all of the physical behavior of the virtual world such as time, gravity, distance, movement, and material properties. The world model defines all the world specific object classes e.
Related to the control of non-player characters, algorithms of artificial intelligence can also be found in this layer.
The top level implements the simulation of the virtual world: that means calculating all the state transitions for each object instance within the virtual world. Architectural layers of virtual worlds according to Bartle , p.
Similar to other domains in software development, standard interfaces and frameworks for certain functional blocks of virtual worlds and computer games have evolved in order to increase the reusability of software components. For example, Second Life uses the Havoc software component as its physics engine.
There are efforts to provide integrated development environments e. Besides the levels and building blocks of the architecture, there are other important design decisions that need to be made.
One of them is the question of changing and extending the content during the lifetime of the virtual world.
That means determining who should be able to change the world to which extent. The more the world is supposed to be variable, the more descriptive and dynamic programming techniques e. A further consequence of a dynamic appearance of the world is the use of fine-grained persistence objects in order to properly recreate the state after a server reset. There is always a trade-off between flexibility of the world and its performance, and thus its enjoyment. A growing world needs to have an architecture which can be extended, for example by connecting new servers to its grid.
However, there are other concepts conceivable; most of the virtual worlds organize their server capacity along geography because this approach minimizes the coordination effort between servers. There are two variants for assigning virtual areas to servers. In the first one, this assignment is static. This has the advantage that the operations concerning a specific part of the world can be processed locally; however, this variant typically leads to certain restrictions of user interaction, e.
Beyond this, such implementations have not been able to make the area frontiers fully undetectable to the users. The second variant is a dynamic assignment of virtual areas to servers which leads to a seamless world experience, but is much more demanding from an algorithmic perspective. The advantage of the dynamic approach is that higher workload for some servers caused by higher activity in a certain area of the world can be compensated by less engaged servers Bartle , p.
Since virtual worlds are about users who communicate with each other, the design of the communication infrastructure plays a central role. Appropriate features e. If players are consumers, content is what they consume. In a game world, we typically have a storyboard which is the basis for the content production and the design of gameplay. The background story comes either from other media, e. Based on this story, there is a multistage iterative process to create characters, textures, artifacts, audio and video sequences, animations, and other types of content.
Technically this process is supported by diverse content creation tools, e. The level design puts it all together by defining the room architecture, the landscape of the virtual environment, the illumination and sound, and it determines the path finding for AI-controlled characters. Beyond this, the frame story defines a more or less detailed social context which gives the creatures, artifacts and places their meanings and opens up further interaction possibilities, e.
Based on this, the user is offered world specific configuration mechanisms in order to set up a character and to choose a role. There are often specific development paths and behavioral expectations of other players and non-player characters linked to a role. In some of the worlds, the social structure is differentiated on the level of class, race, or even whole societies.
The world designers address this problem in different ways. Many worlds predetermine a learning and experience process for each role that is reinforced by certain incentives, e. During the process, the player is challenged by tasks with an increasing degree of difficulty. For this purpose certain parts of the content are often provided in separated sub-areas with limited entry.
Complementary to this content reuse strategy, the virtual world can be extended, e. As opposed to game worlds, generally there are no frame stories and no prescribed goals in social virtual worlds. For the content production in Second Life, an in-world graphical development environment is provided. This includes a scripting language, interfaces to import textures, and the integration of web services. The users build the content, trade goods and services with each other, implement in-world games, produce works of art, and build communities around manifold interests Malaby Of course, the openness and the intended minimum of control in this approach are not without problems: there are many security and legal issues e.
The formal rules of a virtual world refer to the rights and responsibilities of the user and the provider. Typically, it specifies how access to the world is provided, which intellectual properties are claimed, which kind of behavior within the virtual world is prohibited, what kind of sanctions are imposed for violating these prohibitions, and which kind of claims for damage are excluded.
This imbalance is criticized by some researchers; they argue that as virtual worlds are being used by more and more people, they are taking on the characteristics of public places. Of course, the power of the providers is limited since the overall customer satisfaction will have an effect on the economic position of the virtual world.
Thus, the providers will have to decide in which ways the users can be involved in the rule making processes Castronova , p. The value chain of the virtual world business can be divided into the roles of hardware developer, software developer, publisher, distributor and operator Fig.
Especially in worlds with a high degree of user involvement in the design and extension processes, it makes sense to add the users and their communities to the value chain. Within the virtual worlds and in secondary markets, e.
Some game world providers try to restrict this kind of trading because it is feared that it will damage the game characteristics Castronova , p. The design of a virtual economy is a very complex task and has to address similar issues to real economies e.
So far, these related problems have not been resolved in a fully satisfying way and mark a field for further research Bartle , p. Value chain of virtual worlds according to Wirtz , p. The manifold aspects in the development of virtual worlds make it a highly complex task. Often an interdisciplinary team consisting of designers, content developers, artists, programmers, sound engineers, and other specialists is deployed to tackle the related challenges.
The management-related tasks of virtual worlds producer mainly include the coordination of the development process and the definition of the overall marketing strategy. Important decisions in this context relate to the choice of technologies and development tools, the licensing of content e.
Concerning the business model, the revenue model needs special attention Wirtz , p.
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