Metaverse Grudge Match
In the wake of the Metaverse Roadmap (are you tired of hearing about this event yet?) a really interesting distributed conversation has developed that has as its main interlocutors massively multiplayer game designer Raph Koster, chief technology officer Cory Ondrejka of Linden Lab (makers of Second Life), and SL resident Prokofy Neva, one of the most outspoken activists in the metaverse for the cause of avatar rights. The main issues here seem to come down to how the metaverse will emerge and whether 3D is the right thing to emphasize. Raph presents a skeptical argument on the value of “social” virtual worlds, while Prok waxes eloquent on the “momentous occasion” that is the emergence of places like Second Life. As usual, I come down somewhere in the middle, though I do think both Raph and Prok are missing the point somewhat, while Cory is probably closer to the mark: Second Life is less a social virtual world than it is a tool or development platform. As such, its adoption curve will have less to do with games or traditional VWs and more to do with things like the Internet and World Wide Web. My vision of the metaverse horizon has SL — or something like it — moving out of the VW space altogether and becoming something we’ll think of more as an interface that will be useful for some things and not for others. Raph does get it right when he says “some of the best indicators of coming metaverses are Habbo Hotel, Cyworld, MySpace, Amazon, and eBay.” But I’d argue that some of these apps will naturally evolve at least partially toward 3D spaces, and will come to include geospatial hooks from flat Web pages to real places.
Raph originally posted his thoughts on the metaverse summit about a week ago. There, he sounds a skeptical note as to how quickly 3D apps will be adopted and how useful they’ll ultimately be. He mentions that 3D is “more than twice as hard to adopt” and that there will continue to be “a large and aging population that won’t be gone by 2016 who will stick to the old methods.” That may be true, but I think that learning curve flattens out significantly as people are born into the technology. The teenagers who are most of MySpace’s exploding population, for instance, will have a much easier time adopting 3D apps than almost anyone who was at the Metaverse Roadmap. I’ve written about this in the past and firmly believe it to be true: the next generations of users will have a facility with these things that far surpasses our own, and will dream up uses for the technology that we haven’t even begun to envision.
Prok’s inimitably verbose responses in the comments thread (and in his blog, where he offers the really interesting thought that “perhaps cyberspace began back with the Whole Earth Catalogue“) focus partly on keeping the conversation open to all, but also seem to give Second Lifee perhaps too much importance in the grander scheme of things. Cory moderates at his own blog, and tries to place things in a broader context. As he points out, it’s not structured gameworlds versus social gameworlds; it’s gameworlds of any sort versus technology platforms like the World Wide Web.
In a follow-up post, Raph credits game worlds with being what have historically “driven adoption in virtual spaces” and what have “driven lasting innovation,” and points out that “most people find game worlds to be more fun than freeform social worlds.” That’s true, depending on your definition of “virtual spaces.” But Raph also says the future of the metaverse is going to come from gameworlds, not freeform social worlds.” This, I think, is just slightly off in timing and in fact.
The fact is, gameworlds have already done their part for the metaverse. Second Life would probably not exist were it not for its predecessors in text and graphical virtual worlds. But what SL is trying to do (albeit somewhat clumsily) is create a kind of grand mashup between a social world and a technology platform like the Web. In fact, it’s explicitly mashing a 3D space into the Web with the coming integration of Web services into SL. Combine this with graphics capabilities, the Western world’s Web-connectedness and a younger generation that’s primed to use 3D online spaces, and you get something fundamentally different from a place like LambdaMOO, which Raph calls “EXACTLY LIKE SECOND LIFE” (his caps).
Well, no, it’s not. LambdaMOO as a technology may have very closely resembled SL, but you can’t divorce the technology from its context. In the broader view, LambdaMOO is very different. We’ve moved very far beyond text as a sufficient way to represent information, especially on a platform as graphics-capable as the Web. Population numbers matter as well. Our lives have moved onto the Web in far greater measure than was the case when LambdaMOO was at its peak (sometime in the mid-1990s), and there is a growing stream of developers looking for new ways to push interactions and interfaces. This makes a real difference to what technologies are adopted and how that comes to pass. (Take Flickr as a case in point: such an app could have been written almost ten years ago, but it took a certain maturation and diversification of the Web’s population before it could actually happen.) Technologies don’t stand or fall on their own, they do so in relation to their users. Previous virtual worlds have educated people in what it’s like to navigate a 3D online space; the emerging set of technologies coming to be known as the metaverse will be where those people start to do their best work.
I don’t find Raph to be a skeptic of virtual worlds in general or Second Life in the specific, necessarily, but it seems like his emphasis on entertainment is too strong here (just as Prok’s emphasis on good governance is important but perhaps too narrowly focused). My best guess is that virtual worlds, 3D technologies and whatever it is the “metaverse” turns out to be will develop as any other new technology; it will fly only if productive uses for it can be found that add value to individuals’ lives. It will crash if nothing useful develops. It’s just beginning to take off at the moment, but I see a lot of room for wind beneath the metaverse’s wings.
Feeds
I find Cory’s argument that perhaps everyone will migrate to making games within SL to be pretty far from a middle ground! :)
As far as 3d exceptionalism, I’ll offer this up: http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/03/31/are-muds-and-mmorpgs-the-same-thing/
And as far as entertainment/content, I’ll point out that what mnakes the web work is content — often USER content, but content nonetheless.
That’s true, I don’t actually agree with Cory on that one.
On content: Totally agree. But “content” subsumes both “entertainment” and other content. Games are, by definition, entertainment first and communication platforms second, and they are tools for productivity as only a distant third. While content is certainly what makes the Web work, I think it’s productivity and communications content more than it is entertainment content that has that effect.
On MODs/MMORPGs: I don’t agree with you on the dumbness of the client. It’s pretty commonly accepted that you can convey more information more quickly by including graphics capabilities (and I mean to include pen on paper drawings, etc., with that, not just computer graphics). I think that’s one fundamental difference you and Richard seem to be missing here. Yes, the underlying simulation is the same, but the medium through which that simulation is conveyed does have an impact on the message. Take a line graph of sales revenue against net profit. You can see at a glance — in less than a second — whether your profit margin is growing or shrinking. It takes much longer, relatively speaking, to tease that information out of two columns of numbers placed side by side. I think that (or the extension of that) is a significant difference between text and graphical worlds.
Of course it has an effect on the message! Your graph example is perfect.
On the other hand, drawing a picture of the first paragraph of “A Tale of Two Cities” does not convey what the text does.
At core, my position is that “different media have different strengths.” What I am arguing against is the notion that “this medium is better than all the others.”
ChibaMOO had web integration in 1994, 250,000 people logged in, and is forgotten today. AlphaWorld is *still running* and allowed user construction in 3d. And yes, I actually tried these out — I don’t at all have distaste for social worlds, or “don’t get it” as I seem to get painted here. I like them quite a lot. The last world to hook me was actually There.
There’s no doubt in my mind that progress is being made; I am simply trying to present context here. I recommend reading Mike Sellers’ reply over at Cory’s blog: http://www.typepad.com/t/comments?__mode=red&id=17334365
As far as content — I do believe that if we look at the top websites, we’ll find that it’s entertainment of one sort or another that is driving most traffic.
My apologies, Raph, I definitely didn’t mean to imply that you don’t get it. In my opinion, you get it more than almost anyone else around.
Totally agree that different media have different strengths. While there are people who argue that 3D virtual worlds are better for *everything*, I’m not one of them. I’d always rather read A Tale of Two Cities by flipping the pages of a book in my hands than I would by looking at a picture of it on a prim. If I was conflating your argument with another one, again, my apologies.
That said, I still don’t think it’s fair to compare SL in 2006 to something like ChibaMOO in 1994. The technologies may be very similar, but the context in which they appeared and in which they operate is very different. I guess my position is that game worlds have done their job of ushering 3D interfaces into the broader world of connectivity. But I don’t think of SL as a social world, I think of it as more of a development platform. There.com I do think of as a social world, and MySpace as a similar kind of social space. I think what will be important will be people coming out of these places to build tools in places like SL (it may not be SL itself) that will connect to everyone’s real life in a useful way.
Sorry, Mark, I wasn’t directing the “don’t get it” remark at you; rather, it was more a general expression of frustration (go read the thread on my blog on this if you want to see where some of the frustration comes from!).
SL certainly is a platform as well as being a social world. And it’s becoming more platform-like every day. But we have had platforms before. Right now, the only platform I see as being open in the ways that will really matter longterm is OpenCroquet.
Heck, has the social world community looked at the burgeoning world of “gray shard” MMORPG operators? Last I heard, there were 40,000 active players on UO gray shards alone: all with control of their worlds, able to code and build. That’s a platform, with a lot less hype (and legality). I have been told that in 1998-1999 there were 400,000 players in China on UO gray shards (!).
I think Cory is going way too far out on a limb saying that all kinds of games are going to be migrating to SL to do their thing inside SL, like a kind of WWW of worlds — I partly believe in that but I’m willing to have it take a far longer timetable and meandering. Cory makes it sound like its around the corner, “if we do our jobs right,” he says — but since that job then will include everything from making HTML-on-a-prim work, to getting Havoc 2 in, to getting in voice or Team Speak sort of support to more complex issues like reform of group tools, governance, dispute resolution, etc. etc. I think he’s setting himself up for failure! I can’t imagine he can do this job *right* in even 5 years. Or course SL’s acceleration continually surprises me.
Re: “Cory is probably closer to the mark: Second Life is less a social virtual world than it is a tool or development platform.” I think it’s in Cory’s and other Lindens’ interest to keep emphasizing the “platform/tool versus world” stuff to position themselves away from games that are “everything good that is bad for you,” and make it more acceptable to mainstream audiences, whether Google, the major media, the U.S. Congress, whatever. To the extent they can position SL as part of the new bandwidth- bandwagon of new medias and new technology, they can get in the door on lots of foundation and government grants and reviews and leveraging of influence.
But they must never forget what their main product is, the one they almost seem to reluctantly sell these days, the one they treat almost as an embarassing by-product of their platform work: a *world*, and a world of worlds. They show a real disaste for world management someetimes that they workaround by creating a very exclusivist world of their own of game-devs/FIC/etc to cope.
The worldy-ness of SL is what brings most people there. SL as the interesting platform to use for prototyping other games, or solving problems like how to train emergency response, are still nonce items, one-offs that don’t seem to replicate yet with any speed.
The world is their biggest product, and they need to pay more attention to it, and if they’re tired of it, outsource the world management or even create a real, authentic handing off to resident groups, so that people can work toward self-governance and get support for their own communities to become freer of this game company in preparation for the day when they might either host their own servers or have their own licenses, or at least live in a mature, adult, modern, urban environment free of the kind of net-nannies and politically-correct supervisors they have now on the forums and on the grid.
It’s easy for Cory Linden to talk about SL as a tool and a platform, because all the concommitant world that springs up around that he gets to control, and fashion to his whim. But we want worlds, too. He and the other Lindens must step back from their creation, on the one hand, and allow authentic self-governance (and not hokey state-created resmod systems of their pets like on the forums) AND provide more technological support for things like small businesses and start-ups through better tools. This is a terrible balance — less intervention in some places/more in others. Actually, they do an amazing job of that Cat-in-the-Hat balancing act every day. But we can only want more and better.
Technology platforms like the World Wide Web sound boring, Walker. Who wants to go a damn technology platform and socialize and party? People want worlds. If all Cory does is make SL too much like a boring technological exercise, doing things like helping his friend FlipperPA Peregrine and the ESC make a bigger and better shopping site for avatars to clothe themselves through endlessly shopping, that’s not progress, that’s just more of the same. I’d be more interested if Cory created inworld features *and policy* voting mechanisms.
Walker, how can you not think of SL as a social world? Geez. You just haven’t met the right girl avatar yet! You should come to my yard sales. Oh, you’re over there plotting fraud and digging ore in Eve, bleh.
I agre that text games and game worlds have done their job of ushering in 3-D interfaces, and they are the grandparents of the revolution to whom we all pay tribute, but we don’t endlessly go back and keep celebrating them when so many people have emptied out of them. As for the newer game worlds with more technological flash, like WoW, their “wow” moments seem to come when they can become more personalized. Like right now my son is thrilled with WoW merely because he met an NPC with his RL name. If he had the power to script the NPC and give it his name, he wouldn’t be on WoW. If SL didn’t have so many frustrations and brokenness of things like the group and land tools, he’d be on there.
Raph has said it all with this “what makes the web work is content — often USER content, but content nonetheless.” Add to that “news” and add to that “niche and locale content and news” and yes, you have what works.
A couple of semi-random thoughts:
1. Why are 3D worlds seen as such an advance? A browser interface is essentially N-dimensional (where N is the number of links). By constraining motion through the world to “3D” users are doomed to waste time being bored - hence “teleporting” “ruining” the geography of SL and other MMOs - to minimize boredom (though making the games more expensive to develop since the “boring between stuff” still needs to be created). Also, we are still looking at these 3D worlds through a 2D screen. The information inefficiency combined with increased cost of creation (and storage and bandwidth) poses an ongoing burden on these businesses. Also, the tiny window on a 3D world is completely inconsistent with actual 3D - no peripheral vision, depth of field limited by inherently unsatisfactory first person or third person perspectives (am I a gun? or a hunchback?).
2. Geography is probably the least interesting thing to portray in a “3D” online world. We don’t even do a good job with 2D information. Read Tufte’s books including “The Visual Display of Quantitative Infomration” (and for fun, “The Cognitive Power of Powerpoint”) to get a sense of how cheated we are in terms of visualization via a computer. Not to mention the general artistic, and blandly realistic poverty of most existing 3D spaces - where is the visual creativity to take advantage of these tools - it is almost all depressingly soulless and sterile to my eyes. 3D art seems to limit imagination more than it frees it.
3. Entertainment is the mass market opportunity of these worlds - this should not be surprising as the largest portion of the US (and Japanese) export economy is their culture. Good old Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs puts “self-actualization” at the top - for most people, that means Entertainment. Online spaces may be used for business (and will be increasingly), but 3D is expensive and inefficient (as noted above) and can only justify its expense for entertainment.
secureplay, I find your skepticism and approach interesting.
1. What made a link suddenly a dimension? There are 3, and time is the 4th. A link is merely one of the Ds. I agree that p2p ruined some geographical issues for SL, and chief among these is the “grey squares” trade-off problem of each location taking so long to rez, but geographical contiguity remains a big value in SL, and when they took out the telehubs that forced transit and commercial hubs on traditional RL-type arteries, some of the hubs simply remained intact without any telehub when it was gone; curiously, the private islands, where telehubs weren’t removed, make even more use of the red-vector fly-over function of their own controlled hubs for commerce; and the new places for vending still tend to be right next to what already gets traffic, i.e. clubs and events venues. I totally agree about the lack of peripherality in SL and the hunchback problem, amen. However, like many people on SL, I want my peripheral world while online to be still my ears and eyes cocked to be my RL world of jobs, kids, cats, etc. and refuse to give that capacity for constant RL-tune-in to virtual goggling. Don’t make me do that.
2. This is a fantasy entertained by a tiny minority of tekkies and artists, that geography is boring, and that crystallized crenellations like points and daggers of light and geometric shapes are going to be fun to live on, layered up into the sky. Guess what, as in RL, people don’t like living and moving on sculpture, as much as they might view sculpture and appreciate it. Let me suggest that the geography generated by the body of Earth is perfectly suited by our Creator to the body of the human being, and virtual worlds cannot jump too far above those bodies even when reaching the heavenly bodies — bodies and geography go together. We are ensouled bodies, not pinpoints of light. Also, the rant about SL looking like suburbia is getting old. It doesn’t. It looks like suburbia, the middle ages, Transylvania, the Jetsons, the forest, whatever, mashed together. Make what you want. Other people did the same thing, respect that. Go to the Society of Virtual Architecture and pick up some cards and read Virtual Suburbia and fly around a bit more before you render that judgement.
3. The expense of the 3-d world is not only met by entertainment companies, who get credit for starting it, but by government, multilateral institutions, universities, big corporations, philanthropists and foundations. If it works for them they’ll pay for it.
Ah, we meet again, Prokofy, and not at Tony’s site for a change.
1. As to dimension, there are arbitrary dimensions (sayth my ancient math major), Search engines view the Internet as a metric space defined by search terms… web browsing defines a metric space on the Internet by links (the way I move through the Internet).
The important thing is that the richness of the way I can move - not just up, down, left, right, but based on “links” created by the local author, search terms & models from various engines…. The Internet is beyond 3D - and much more interesting and useful for it.
The REALLY important thing is that the definition of this metric space defines real estate “value”. You and I took the same view when Linden Lab changed the metric space of SL by adding teleporting. Google is a different metric space that defines value (visits and ad revenue).
3D is unnecessary and limiting… except for RL.
2. I am not advocating wacky fractal spaces and architecure… what about some style? Impressionism or Expressionism - a 3D world that shows some vision or passion (Ooo, look, another medival castle, yet another medival castle…how about a big box… blah!). People seem to barely do this well in 2D. The limitation on authorial control in 3D has really challenged artists - they don’t get to control the “camera”, which makes good art extra hard.
Just as with many forms of art, creativity comes out of constraints, not freedom - this is why Sonnets are so beautiful vs. most free verse (or is it blank verse).
3. WOO HOO… you are right, training will also be a major 3D application… but mainly because it is cheaper than actual RL simulations. RL money wins again.
1. Re: “Search engines view the Internet as a metric space defined by search terms… web browsing defines a metric space on the Internet by links (the way I move through the Internet).” Well, those are search engines, not people. I don’t care what the abstractions envision like or are called, how people see these things are going to render in 2-D, full stop. Links are links. How many of them can you fan out in front of you at a time? There’s a limit.
2. Bah, links are just page-turning of the National Geographic. We haven’t gone anywhere but back to Life and Look magazine, turning pages only just turning them REAL FAST. link, press, zoom. Who is this even different than my old Viewmaster from Disney? Click view, click view. So there’s a search term to search to go with my click view, click view. Ok, nice. But not special, not some “dimension”.
I’m not sure the Lindens actually changed the metric space, they just changed the fly-over and time to get around space — there aren’t portals as such (there are those touch-portal things I’ve blogged about and now I’ve inspired three scripters to make 3 thingies that do this that I started around the Memory Bazaar:
o Touch-portal script to go to one place, touch, brings up map, teleport to place — this was taken from the Linden’s map api page and put in a prim
o Random Compass — each person who comes along loads in a landmark. Anybody else can touch and go to any randomly selected landmark loaded in — touch, brings up map, go. Thanks to Yumi Murakami
o Bus/Magic Carpet — load in the landmarks, and they serially load and you also get buttons to name them stuff. Thanks to Static Sprocket.
(Lewis Nerd’s bus shelter and bus ride, which I also messed with, wouldn’t load right for me and could only take 12 but has more space to write terms and other features)
(These were somehow easier and simpler for me to use and understand than the Roamspace and Cubey Terra’s taxi, but they probably are the same things almost.
With all these things I was trying to get the world to be more connected, at least the patches I work with, and have people have tradeable kiosks of adventures and travels and such. I’m finding p2p is used pretty much only for shopping. People still insist you send them a tp as you may know. People don’t fly that much.
2. I’m awfully glad you’re not advocating wacky fractals. Wacky fractals will now become my bound-phrase, with credit to you, for this nonsense that somebody inevitably starts in every single meeting or discussion about SL in any kind of meta voice — “why is it all suburbia, let’s make wacky fractals”. I think there is PLENTY OF STYLE. Fly around more, and get all my links and everybody’s who is searching. So there’s a castle, here’s a castle, so what? Let them.
I really think the avatar gets in the way and the camera is indeed too sucky. They shouldh ave “build mode” like the Sims more where the avatar is put away during the session.
3. I never get what people are talking about when they get all dewy-eyed about “training”. I guess because most things called “training” in RL are fake and bogus too, and more about just maintaining full employment in America for a lot of college grads, a kind of warehousing and forced idling. Training *for what*. What do you *train for* in an SL training session. Be honest.
The first time I heard of the Whole Earth Catalog related to the Internet is when Steve Jobs mentioned it in his ‘05 commencement speech @ Stanford–comparing it to Google, fascinatingly enough. I noticed the citation is also linked to from that Wikipedia article.
Altho, for my referential purposes, I relate more to Serafini’s Codex:
http://www.archimedes-lab.org/Serafi/C_serafini.html
OK, this has to be the most distributed discussion ever, thus I must post here as well . . .
The odd thing about Raph not buying into the “games will move into SL”-argument is that he’s made one of the better articulated arguments in favor of it, namely his “Moore’s Wall” talk. Content creation is already crazy expensive and will only get worse, so if it becomes cheaper to make fun games in SL — and people are able to profit from that either monetarially, socially, or however — do you really not think that people won’t make them? What if we decided to embed the JavaVM? Suddenly you could write Puzzle Pirates inside SL, immediately gaining access to a very active micropayment system, an audience, etc etc.
Of course content is king and nobody has spent more time talking about that than I have. The most compelling aspects of SL revolve around creation as much as community — hence the fact that labeling it a social world is naive. 66% of residents who log in make something from scratch every month, 15% write script code, and 3 million lines of script code are written *per week*. I think that SL residents recognize the important of content. They just define content more broadly than “game created by professional game designer.” I agree that the web demonstrates this beautifully.
Raph, re the link to your piece about MMORPGs versus MUDs: leaving aside the 3D aspects — I’m so titling my next TN post “Playing The Horde is Morally Bankrupt and They’re in 3D Which Makes Them More Bankrupt than Text Would” — if one accepts your arguments then we’re back to my wondering why you’d bet against SL’s approach. If it all comes down to the complexity of the world you simulate — however you display it — then single shard + physical simulation + user scripting + user creation is going to generate the maximum possible complexity. It may not be cohesive but it certainly will explore the available design space. More importantly, everytime we manage to improve any of those pieces, the design space gets bigger and more valuable. Of course you can’t make Doom 3 or WoW quality games in SL right now, but are you that sure we won’t get there?