3pointD.com

• GRINDHOUSE on Yahoo! Movies
  um, when’s the videogame come out?
  (tags: film movie trailer grindhouse)

Matt Mihaly is blogging about a new experimental virtual world from the makers of Habbo Hotel. Called Mini Friday, it’s designed to work on Nokia mobile phones. The experiment is admirable in its simplicity: “We are trying to find out if real-time virtual worlds make sense on mobile devices.” I’d wager they do, although they may be better off when linked to a PC-based world as well. It seems to work for Neopets (insofar as Neopets actually constitutes a virtual world). I know of several other virtual world / MMO companies that are contemplating adding a mobile component, or already have one in the works. As processing power increases and storage and display become more efficient, it would seem to be inevitable. We like having the option of checking our email and even browsing the Web while we’re on the go, why wouldn’t we want to have the option to check into a virtual world?

Raph Koster flags an Escapist article in which Allen Varney covers “boutique MMOGs” and the fact that they can not only be profitable but can garner significant niche audiences in a similar manner to very narrowly focused Web sites. This kind of thing is along the lines of some of my thinking about virtual worlds. I’m pretty sure we’ll start to see a proliferation of 3D virtual spaces as time moves on and the tools for building such places get cheaper and easier to use. These will be not just individual islands (or collections of islands) floating in 3D cyberspace, built on a platform that resembles an open-source Second Life, but a metaverse of things like MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach (built on the technology behind There.com), and games and social worlds built on a free platform like Multiverse. Eventually, a large handful of these will come to capture audiences in the hundreds of thousands. The business model is totally viable. It’s working for the games mentioned in Varney’s article, as well as for a game like EVE Online. The Web has shown us that huge “category-killers” like World of Warcraft need not actually kill a category at all; you can successfully launch and run a Web site or a virtual world that aims at a narrower audience. Will the category-killers one day fall away altogether? I doubt it, but perhaps the rallying cry will be something like, “The category is dead! Long live the category!”

Reader Sterling Whitcroft tips us to the fact that the Washington Post has a good wrap of some of the legal issues that have been facing the virtual world of Second Life in the wake of the recent CopyBot uproar. What’s nice about the piece is that it comes at the situation mostly from the viewpoint of the law, and still manages to get the SL resident perspective as well. It’s good to see virtual worlds start to get the kind of coverage they deserve, coverage that treats them not as fantasy realms but as an extension of the “real” world around us. More and more legal scholars and legislators are beginning to realize that these places merit more serious consideration as well. It remains to be seen what the eventual disposition of legal and taxations questions will be, but it’s beginning to look like the law will not reflexively accept whatever strictures game and virtual world companies lay down, but will instead seek to bring some kind of more broadly just legal regime to bear on such places. Good news for all.