Another story from sister site Gamasutra worth pointing at (promise we won't do it _every_ day), former EverQuest designer Kevin Carter (not the Manic Street Preachers one) has written 'Living Worlds: The Ecology Of Game Design', promising "...three simple guidelines you can use to make your game worlds that much more believable, and therefore that much more exciting to play through."

He explains in the intro: "I’ve compiled notes on the conditions that enhance, or at least encourage, the feeling that a game’s environment is a real place, that it may theoretically exist somewhere out there and is not just a collection of levels built solely for my amusement. Surprisingly, this kind of immersion has little to do with graphics (though good graphics never hurt, they are not the focus of this article). It has more to do with subtle elements borrowed from the real world."

A particularly interesting point is that creatures are shaped by their environment, something not always well communicated in games: "The easiest of the tools that can be used to tie creatures into their world come from environmental associations between the creature and the surrounding game geometry. In other words, wherever a creature appears in game, it should be nearby an object (or objects) typically associated with that creature type." Can anyone think of good/awful examples of this?