3pointD.com

It was in Austin last spring, after the South by Southwest Interactive conference, that the ideas behind this blog finally gelled in my head (even though I’d staked my claim to the 3pointD territory months earlier, for no good reason). Now, not even six months after SXSW, 3pointD is headed back to Texas to chat about some of the stuff we write about here, on a panel filled with much heavier weights than mine, at the Austin Game Conference on September 6. Jerry Paffendorf of the Electric Sheep Company sponsors of this blog) has convened a panel on The Future of Virtual Worlds (at 1:30pm on the Online Multiplayer Tech/Art track) that will see me sitting beside legendary MMO developer Raph Koster, Linden Lab chief technology officer Cory Ondrejka and Multiverse’s Corey Bridges. Can anything I have to say possibly be of value?

Well, of course I like to think so. In any case, it should be a fascinating discussion, if only because Jerry has assembled a panel of people who have overlapping but very different views of how the metaverse may evolve.

Cory O., of course, is looking at Second Life as the future of the metaverse. He’s talked in the past about the day when most of SL’s architecture would be open-sourced, if only because Linden Lab wouldn’t be able to maintain all the servers necessary for it to gain truly wide adoption. But LL’s strategy — at least as far as I can divine from recent extispicy sessions — seems to lie in holding onto whatever piece of the software it is that will allow them to continue to collect revenue once the open-source moment hits. They seem to want the broadest possible penetration for their product (and who can blame them, really?), in hopes of a Microsoft-like domination of the market.

Corey B., on the other hand, has a more browser-like feel for things. His virtual-world platform, Multiverse, lets users build a variety of virtual worlds that are all accessible via a single client. It’s a great concept, but it relies on the underlying technology being adopted as the standard for virtual worlds. If his world-building tools are easy enough to use and stand out from the rest of the pack (and let users create worlds that stand out in a similar way), things could well go his way.

Raph is perhaps a bit of an outlier here, as he’s something of a social-world skeptic (though not a game-world skeptic), but word is that since leaving Sony Online Entertainment he has a virtual world of some sort in the works that may be closer to a social world than what he’s worked on in the past. While it’s probably still too early for him to talk about it in Austin, it will be interesting to see whether his views have changed at all since the Metaverse Roadmap summit back in May.

And then there’s me. I kind of come down at the intersection of a lot of the ideas I’m describing above (and those named here should please forgive me if I’ve misrepresented them; these are merely my impressions of the dialogue that’s out there). I’m a big believer in the power and potential of virtual worlds, but I think that if they’re ever to truly realize that potential, developers may have to start looking at them in a more bottom-up light.

Linden Lab founder and CEO Philip Rosedale talks about Second Life as a kind of next generation of the World Wide Web. Corey Bridges’s Multiverse model explicitly uses the same model. But the Web only works because it’s built atop a standards-based transport layer that takes the form of the Internet. It’s worth remembering that the standards came first, and the Web only afterward.

Does that mean we have to tear it all down and start over from scratch, banging out a VWP/IP for use in streaming virtual-world objects and interactions across existing networks? Not necessarily. Most standards are formed from a synthesis of existing technologies; the process of hashing them out is often less than gentle, but it doesn’t require going back to the dark ages. It’s also possible for one among competing standards to become dominant. But not before the technology itself is stable enough to be converted from a platform into what can properly be called a standard.

Standards, of course, imply interoperability, which will be another important question: How much interoperability do we want among our virtual worlds? Here I’d argue that the Web is a fine example: you (as administrator of a Web page) can have more or less as much or as little interoperability with other pages as you like. The question is whether interoperability will be desirable enough to drive broad adoption of the kind of standard discussed above. This isn’t the only thing that would drive adoption of such a standard, of course, but it could play an important role.

All these things feel like they’re quite far off, and well they may be. But it’s not too soon to start thinking about them, I’d say. Hopefully we’ll get to chat about them a bit in Austin. Stay tuned for further reports.