Citations:world state

Noun: "(video games) the state of a gameworld at a given time, e.g. all player locations, object states, narrative variables, etc."

 * 2009, João Cunha, Nuno Lau, João Rodrigues, Bernardo Cunha, & José Luis Azevedo, "Predictive Control for Behavior Generation of Omni-directional Robots", in Progress in Artificial Intelligence: 14th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence, EPIA 2009, Aveiro, Portugal, October 12-15, 2009 Proceedings (eds. Luís Seabra Lopes, Nuno Lau, Pedro Mariano, Luís M. Rocha), page 280:
 * Considering the highly dynamic nature of a robotic soccer game, the worldstates will most likely not be the same.
 * 2011, Niels Jeppesen & Rune A. Juel Mønnike, "Peer-to-Peer Architecture for Massively Multiplayer Online Games", thesis submitted to the Technical University of Denmark, page 13:
 * Therefore it is necessary to verify each single action the game client wishes to apply to the worldstate.
 * 2012, Cian Kearney, "Character Based Interactive Storytelling for Role-Playing Games", dissertation submitted to the University of Dublin, page 34:
 * Each decision in the game world is made based on the NPCs [sic] personality and current world state.
 * 2012, Nathaniel Thorn & Mark Troutt, "Broken World: A Massively Multiplayer Online Game", paper submitted to Worcester Polytechnic Institute, page 28:
 * When players do make changes to the world state that can be seen by other players—moving from one tile to another, placing a building, and so on—the state server notifies all players within one tile of the affected area about the change.
 * 2013, Sam Smith, "Dragon Age: Inqusition", Play, December 2013, page 43:
 * The game will come up with a default world state and give you a description about what’s been going on.
 * 2014, José Teixeira, quoted in Paul Taylor, "Into The Wild", XBox: Official XBox Magazine, November 2014, page 41:
 * "We're not doing 'endings,'" explains Teixeira. "We have three epilogues with twelve variations, and 36 'world states ' that can come from those. There are so many branching decisions that, when you reach the climax of the story, there's a particular state you leave the world in."
 * 2015, Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition, page 37:
 * Via the DragonAgeKeep.com website, gamers can export and customize the outcome of 300 narrative choices from previous Dragon Age games into 2014's Dragon Age: Inqusition – effectively enabling them to tailor "world states" they had created.
 * 2016, Lane Thomas Holloway, "Modeling and Formal Verification of Gaming Storylines", dissertation submitted to The University of Texas at Austin, page 95:
 * This included all in-game scripts and variables used to track the quests completion status and world state.
 * 2017, Tyler Paulley, "The Official Rulebook for Choice in Video Games: An Examination of Choice in Modern Narrative Games", thesis submitted to Bellarmine University, page 12:
 * Players can edit their decisions from previous games they have played to affect the world state in the newest game in the series: Dragon Age: Inquisition.
 * 2018, John Drake, "Planning For Non-Player Characters By Learning From Demonstration", dissertation submitted to the University of Pennsylvania, page 10:
 * Skyrim presents players with a variety of actions that they can perform to change the game’s world state.
 * 2018, Angelica Fuchs, "The Player's Journey: Ludology and Narratology in Modern Gaming", thesis submitted to Virginia Commonwealth University, page 34:
 * In Dragon Age: Inquisition, the third game in the Dragon Age series, if the player decides to import their previous world states from the first two games, they will have different NPCs that they can interact with based on things such as political choices made by previous protagonists or whether a NPC (or even PC) died in a previous game.
 * 2018, Ari Polgar, "Plot, Participation, and Playing Pretend: Narrative Pleasure in Single-Player Video Games", thesis submitted to Wesleyan University, page 24:
 * Because none of the changes enacted by the players are large-scale, smaller variations in worldstate and unique quest outcomes create greater individuality in each playthrough of a game.