Through the years of playing virtual games, whatever genre they fall in, we have gained quite a refined taste for their kind – their gameplay, mechanics, graphics, social features, and even the population of the playing community accounts for our selection. Let us all get to know the refined taste we have earned through the years of playing virtual games.

First, we have the "gameplay" that have evolved through years of playing different virtual games. Since the earlier days of virtual games up to this point, we have witnessed a handful of refinements with these games through the years. From the earlier games that generally hand you with individual tasks and primarily offer a basic chat feature, we can now enjoy games that allow us to express ourselves in terms of gestures, fashion choices, and many more complex manner.

In fact, previous virtual world players didn't get to enjoy plenty of the features that we currently grade as “mainstream”. For instance, playing a game that basically share a cookie-cutter format that features dressing up your avatar, along with basic socialization tools like private chat rooms, emoticons, and gestures. There is usually a huge game world that you can freely roam around and explore, either alone or in a group. You can also find fun activities to participate in and enjoy.

IMVU, for example, is an aged virtual world game that utilizes the cookie-cutter format that we've mentioned in the previous paragraph. It has the basic infrastructure of a virtual world, where it takes you through points of interests rather than allowing you to freely roam the world with your avatar. Only thanks to its abundant library of assets that it still have tons of participants up until present. Now if you’d set up a game world that utilizes every little aspect that the game have, and allow you freely roam the world as its key upgrade, suddenly, everyone would easily find the latter the better sounding game.

Secondly, we have the game mechanics. This is something that developers will be able to figure what calls for a change, and what works. With these trial and errors as well as improvements, we have the games that we truly enjoy nowadays. Imagine having to play something that asks you to do a very repetitive task, a lot alike to what you have experienced in some of the older time management games.

You can’t present the same old “do this list of task ten times and come back” type of quests to players of today. In this case, tedious gaming chores are often labeled as “grind” or “grinding”, which is a rather derogatory term among players of today that want variety in their games, and only a game that offers a diversified means of earning progress will win the hearts of gamers nowadays. Therefore, we now have games that justify the meaning of progress in a brand new way – having you to take on a series of tasks that keep the repetition to a bare minimum while allowing you to earn experience points and progress in the game.

Other than that, one of the most notable refinements in virtual world games that we all enjoy today falls on the graphics side of things. Yes, we do still have 2D virtual games today, but the level of details we get from these games makes the games seem aged and look obsolete. As we have grown thirsty for high resolution stuff, we get a fair share of graphics update in our virtual world games. And though some games do still preserve the nostalgic feel of "old-school" graphics (say for instance voxel-based games), you’d easily spot the upgraded crispness of detail in them as compared to actual older games. Detail means everything in today’s world of gaming – and this is true with most of the present virtual games.

Lastly, we have added social features and player population to our checklist of refinement for virtual world games. With games that have loads of active participants in any given room at any given time, we all now share open worlds that generally give you the freedom to meet everyone, anywhere, and anytime. Much more, virtual games of today easily provide you the option to create your own hang out space from where you could invite friends to visit, have a fun party, and chat with each other.

Features in a virtual world game are only stuff that won't be used if there are no people. In fact, it is actually relevant to take into account the population of a virtual world game before you would even consider playing it. After all, hanging out with just a few people just does not cut it anymore. But, if it has thousands of attendees, then it’s good to go – simple as that.

These are just some of the refined tastes of virtual world games that we have acquired over the years. It's not something that's unique to us though, as we've also observed player trends in the world of virtual games and have noticed that they tend to gravitate towards games that have at least half of the important features we've mentioned in this article. What do you think?