3pointD.com

I’m blogging this from the Austin Convention Center in Texas, where the Austin Game Conference is in full swing. The highlight for me so far has been (not surprisingly) the panel I spoke on yesterday with Corey Bridges of Multiverse; Raph Koster, formerly of Sony Online Entertainment and now of his own stealth virtual-world startup, which has just gotten a first round of funding, according to Raph; Cory Ondrejka, chief technology officer at Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world of Second Life; and moderated by Jerry Paffendorf, resident futurist for the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog). There’s an audio file of the panel that I’m going to post here as soon as I get hold of it, but for now I thought I’d share a few of the thoughts and opiniosn that I managed to remember throughout the thing.

If you can pardon my obviously biased opinion, it seemed to me that we rolled out a bunch of interesting thoughts and questions having to do with the future of virtual worlds (which was the topic of the panel), and, judging from the faces in the audience, managed to blow a few minds in the process.

Jerry did a great job prepping the panel. He tossed a first question at Raph, quoting something the legendary MMO designer had said at the Metaverse Roadmap Summit:

User-created and dynamic content will replace topdown content. We’ll see more scrappy, independent content. The rise of independence is clearly a story. In 1997 there was an apocolyptic event that killed all the existing MMO providers. It was the shift to a subscription-based business model paired with game level production values. The thing was the dinosaurs that got got killed off were the heirs of an earlier apocalypse in 1989 which was the shift in earlier business models to an hourly closed service model, heirs to a shift in 1982 from academic VWs with no business models. And in all those shifts, the existing companies pretty much all died. And we’re due for a shift. The last explosion was 1996, 1997 (Dark Sun, Ultima, Lineage, Asheron’s Call, Active Worlds, and others). There will be a production shift married to a business shift and the Blizzards of the world will face a new round of mammals. EA seems a particularly good Goliath candidate to my mind.

Raph talked a bit about some of the new trends in gaming he’s seeing lately to support his thesis. The games that most of the people are spending the most time playing, according to Raph, are not the big-ticket, cookie-cutter, formulaic games coming out of places like EA and others, but smaller, more innovative titles from independent developers you might never have heard of. Flash-based games and virtual worlds like Runescape and others also get far more use than is commonly acknowledged, Raph said. (He made a great presentation on these kinds of numbers this morning, actually, which I will transcribe shortly.)

Corey Bridges spoke about the potential to use Multiverse as a platform for more than gaming, but as a place to build social software, and to re-create bits of the real world with added functionality. One Multiverse user is creating a mirror-world version of the state of Oregon at the moment, and even bringing topographical maps of the planet Mars into Multiverse.

Cory Ondrejka was asked to talk about the quarter bet as to whether Second Life would have more subscribers than World of Warcraft in North America by 2008 or so. “The size of the bet should indicate how seriously we take it,” Cory said. Still, he expressed the usual confidence that Second Life would continue on its “gentle exponential growth curve,” and the panel largely agreed that it would be very difficult for WoW to grow its subscriber-base significantly, or even to maintain it for very long.

I gave my view on whether there is a kind of “3pointD moment” happening at the moment, and whether it seems sustainable. My answer to both parts of that question was yes. While 3D worlds aren’t good for every conceivable application under the sun, there are any number of factors pointing toward 3D spaces becoming a more and more common way to connect online. There will also be applications of the technology that we can’t even conceive of yet. But the fact is that if we have the technology to do things better in 3D, there’s no reason to think we won’t move in that direction. To make the moment sustainable we’ll have to work out a lot of kinks; a 3D platform like Second Life would have to become far more open than it is today, and we might have to settle on a kind of virtual worlds protocol for making everything interoperable. But given the fact that there’s a generation that’s already deeply comfortable with new modes of online interaction — in places like MySpace, massively multiplayer online games and virtual worlds — it seems only natural to me that a lot of this interaction will move into 3D to a greater extent than today.

Toward the end of the panel, everyone was asked to make one prediction, give one uncertainty they saw on the horizon, and come up with one hope or aspiration for virtual worlds. Jerry has posted them on his blog, but I wanted to add what I remembered of the panel here:

Multiverse’s Corey Bridges predicted that the era of independent virtual worlds is starting now. This is of course in keeping with his company’s mission: to make the creation of independent worlds easier. The uncertainty he saw was the extent to which government would try to regulate virtual worlds and their internal economies. His hope was for better artificial intelligence, to give games non-player characters that react more like humans, are able to emote and learn, and might even pass the Turing test.

Raph predicted that the era of category-killers like World of Warcraft would rapidly draw to a close, and that there would begin to be so many virtual worlds and so much content being created for them that we’ll see a series of smaller hits, as well as lots of worlds that blow up and die after a few months. Raph sees the game design industry changing quite a bit, in fact, to come more in line with the kind of long-tail model that many other media industries are moving toward, in which a series of small successes are what sustains the sector, rather than blockbusters. The uncertainty Raph saw was how much big media companies will step into the sector. To his eye, a company like Fox or Viacom was just as likely to create popular virtual worlds as a dedicated game company like Blizzard. His hope was that everyone in the room would one day come to make, run and share their own virtual worlds and 3D spaces.

Raph’s aspiration was my prediction, more or less. As I see it, 3D online spaces will one day become as easy to maintain as Web pages, for those who want them. The uncertainty I saw had to do with the nature of our online identities. How will our online selves connect to our offline selves? If everyone in the room (which was packed) had their own 3D space, whether an island or part of a contiguous grid, will I have to have a separate login and password for each one, and make a new avatar each time I go from space to space? Or will identity be managed more as it is in a Web browser, where I bring a single “self” from Web page to Web page. More likely, it will be something between those two possibilities. My hope was that we’d see a virtual world technology protocol emerge, in the same way open protocols are what makes the Internet and World Wide Web possible. At that point, the possibility space gets radically larger.

Linden Lab’s Cory Ondrejka predicted that the number of non-game virtual worlds would come to completely dwarf the game worlds out there. The uncertainty he saw (after noting that Corey and I had taken his first two choices) was how virtual worlds would operate on mobile computing platforms and cellular phones. If cell phones become the dominant mode of connectivity, how do virtual worlds and 3D online spaces fit into that model? Cory’s hope closed the panel to rousing applause. He urged the audience to dial up the Electronic Frontier Foundation and get in touch with their legislators on the issue of net neutrality. The issue should be of great importance to the game industry, Cory said, so that it isn’t only the big companies like EA that could afford to have their games connect at top-tier speeds, while smaller houses and individuals are relegated to a narrowband ghetto.

There were a couple of moments when it definitely seemed like the people in the room were hearing new things, but new things they could understand and even start to get excited about. Raph’s talk this morning on the future of the game industry also tried to inject some new ideas into the mix and shift somee paradigms about a bit. This is the kind of thing that’s going to have to happen, I’d say, if any of us want to keep abreast of how virtual worlds are going to evolve. Because it seems they will continue to evolve; the challenge is whether those of us involved in them now will be able to keep up.