How to make a website feel more like a world

[Corrupted Unicorn]

Of course, your definition of a "world" may vary, but that's why we write forum topics for, right? To get different insights and perspectives. 

Do you know the Bartle taxonomy of players? It's a classification of people who play games depending of what they are looking for in them. There's:

• Killers: Not necessarily only griefers and people who like to ruin others fun (but they are included here  ), this is mostly about people who like to compete against other opponents (people, not NPCs or AIs)
• Achievers: People focused on 100% the game, getting all the achievments and secrets and easter eggs and endings, and planning strategies to make the most out of the game and get the highest stats.
• Socializers: People whose main focus while playing is socializing with other people, making friends and teamwork.
• Explorers: People to play for the appeal of discovering and/or getting lost in the game world

Well, out of them, I am definitely an explorer - I like walking, around, talking to every single NPC, discovering secrets (tho I wish I wouldn't spoil myself so often  ) and appreciating details of the game itself or its scenery. My favourite genres include open worlds, platformers, RPGs, point-and-clicks and roguelikes - all of them genres that involve Going Places and Looking at Things. And guess what - you can do something like that with a website!  Of course, a website doesn't have a "goal" and "rules" in the same way a game does, but we're looking for the Feeling of Exploration here.

The most basic tools to do this is with a place to host your webpages, the aforementioned webpages, hyperlinks and extra interesting Things to Look At (text, pictures, videos, music, etc) I know some people like to make their websites literally look like a place in the physical world - an idea that has lots of appeal to me! But I also kinda want to play with the format of the website itself.

My "ideal" of an explorable world in website format is Neopia from Neopets. I remember going through all those thematic worlds and clicking on every single thing to discover a shop, a game, or maybe something entirely different that could boon a goodie or two. Not everything was wrapped around the "idea" of a location - for example, the main Games page was just a directory of all playable games in the website, and wasn't adscribed to any particular place in Neopia - I've seen people interpret it as an arcade or, depending on the particular game, as something happening "for real" inside one of Neopia's lands. I love ambiguous things that are open to interpretation like that.

With that said, what can we do to make our websites closer to worlds? This is a topic to share thoughts and ideas. Here's a few of mine so far!

• As mentioned before, framing webpages and their content as a real life location
• I think hyperlinking things to eachother makes things more connected, even those that don't follow a structural way. What I'm trying to say, if I have pages about Subject A and B, and they aren't related but B is mentioned in A's page, B is linked from A. If I do this enough, soon there'll be plenty of rabbit holes to jump into!
• Secrets! We've got some interesting tools at our disposal like showing bonus text when mousing over, which I think makes websites a little more interactive and fun to browse through!

Share yours!

[minttea]

Oh, this is right up my alley! Yeah, I've actually been designing my site along these lines, to a certain extent.

The homepage is the 'town center' (or the aetheryte plaza, in FFXIV terms. Its a fansite!), with a list of local spots on the sidebar! (Library, Housing, and so on)

That said, I'd like to up my game a bit! The coding intimidates me, but I'd like to do a 'world map' in the style of Neopets! Meloon's town map is also pretty inspirational there. I've also been trying to hide some secrets lately throughout the pages! Those are a WIP, but definitely there.

As for hyperlinking.... Hmmm. I'd like to have more of that, but I'm not sure I have enough pages yet or not where it'd be fun to. Something to think about!

[debleb]

at the moment i’m planning a new web site which is going to be my worldbuilding site where i keep all my world lore and stuff but with the twist that it’s going to be styled as an in-universe library with all the lore entries being like little books

i think it’s a pretty clever way to make my site a little more immersive 

[Mcbuzzerr]

This is going in a less "website" and more "game" directions, but this topic just sparked an idea in my head.

The Idea:
A website where you have a little avatar!
The avatar doesn't really move, but if you click somewhere it walks to your mouse position.
Now make it so that the only way to navigate pages is to get your avatar to walk over to whatever you want to link you to the next page!
It could be doors, the edge of the screen, regular text that would usually just be a hyperlink!

I think the main way to make a website feel more like a world in a more website kinda way probably involves having less stuff on each page, but having more pages. Then start linking those pages together however you can/makes sense.