[...] and the Jira among other things. She's the ultimate anti-everything, and even dares to believe she knows better than professional game designers like Raph Koster. Maybe the most epic encounter of all (replete with truckloads of popcorn) occurred over on [...]

[...] HTML and, thus, was the sole province of techies. Now she's pissed off everyone from the Lindens to Raph Koster. She can't help herself. I think it's some form of intellectual tourettes, [...]

[...] Raph’s Website » Thoughts on the Metaverse Summit Share and Enjoy: [...]

[...] is a great discussion happening on Raph Koster’s blog about the Metaverse and Metaverse Roadmap Summit between [...]

[...] of a 3D-web or ‘metaverse’? (I’m thinking about Prokofy Neva’s comments in this comments thread): HJ: I have long felt that the term, game, is both enabling and crippling. We have a tendency [...]

[...] Suddenly, all that time Raph has been labouring talking to gamers and Infamous Antagonists on his blog seems to make sense — if a new and different thing and better thing will come out of it. An interesting discussion on whether games or worlds are better is going on here. [...]

[...] I realize that I have sung the praises of adding that extra dimension over the past pages. I do not want to convey the message that 3D is some magic pixie dust. I think that Raph Koster nails the tradeoff well: “3d is pretty, significantly more immersive, and it’s more than twice as hard to adopt. “ (http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/05/08/thoughts-on-the-metaverse-summit/) I would agree that navigating in 2D on a 2D screen is currently easier. Both SL and many MMORPGs are well known for having UIs with hard learning curve. Maybe the attention arrow will swing back towards hardware interfaces at some point. Mouse and keyboard does not feel like an optimal way to navigate 3D space. I do agree with Beth Noveck that “information objects convey meaning on many levels and with more layers of complexity than text.” (A Democracy of Groups http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_11/noveck/) With a more inclusive concept of literacy we will be able to communication with greater bandwidth. I think the work at the Space Flight Museum more than hints at a possible evolution towards more social, interactive and visual communication. I think that this will be very beneficial towards making sense of abstract information and letting us tackle larger problems together. It is important to bear in mind that the SL ecosystem is very much 2D and 3D. The 3D environment might be at the heart of it, but nearly every resident I talked to visited websites as a part of their SL experience. In Play Between Worlds T. L. Taylor comments on how it hard to imagine a game like EQ without the web resources. (Play Between worlds, M. Jakobsson in Chapter 3, p. 84) I feel the same way about SL. Resident creativity has spilled onto the 2D web in a big way. There are many examples and I’ll list but a few here: Think of how the Space Flight augmented their collaborative building with a wiki. SL Boutique (http://www.slboutique.com/) that recently surpasses 100000 listed items (http://www.3pointd.com/20060803/100000-items-listed-on-slboutique/) offers shopping via a 2D web interface. Payments are integrated with SL accounts. Using the SL history wiki the residents collaboratively write their own history (http://history.secondserver.net) Snapzilla has become the Flickr of SL (http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/) The New World Notes blog is many residents’ primary source of SL news (http://nwn.blogs.com/) [...]

[...] You should also check out conversation about the 3D web at Metaverse (http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/index.html) and then read this:http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/05/08/thoughts-on-the-metaverse-summit/ it’s fascinating to read how people are thinking about blurring the Web and real life. [...]

[...] Someone held a summit on the Metaverse and didn’t invite me Oh well, but at least there are plenty of thoughts around from blogs of the attendees.Lets start by pointing out the website of the organizers of the conference:http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/�Basically, the point of the conference was to layout a possible roadmap that will get us to a "Metaverse" by 2016. On the roadmap overview page, they list imminent technological and societal changes to get us there. In the true spirit of the internet, information about the goings on at the summit can be found in podcasts�and blogs�and some scattered media outlets. The latter reporting that the conference was not without controversy:The trickiest salvos in this conflict were delivered just after the conference in the comments accompanying the Metaverse Roadmap blog thread of theoretician of fun, Raph Koster. The leading massively multiplayer games thinker came under fire from Second Life’s most outspoken critic and advocate, Prokofy Neva, in a voluminous and hotly argued exchange that has spread across multiple threads and forums across the blogosphere.Prokofy attacked numerous aspects of what Koster said, but also much of what the Second Lifer perceived he stood for. The Metaverse Roadmap came under fire for not being diverse enough, and featuring a familiar set of ‘panel-dwellers’, such as Koster:"You don’t get diversity just from ‘multiple generations of technology’ – for something as big and far-reaching and impactful as ‘the Metaverse’ it seems to me that you need to have people from all walks of life, including non-technological – not just users, but thinkers and doers from a wide variety of fields. I don’t see the different viewpoints appearing in the blogs – not yet, anyway. It’s a lot of enthusiastic cheerleadering. The ‘non-profit’ types were like Randy Moss of American Cancer Society which is already in SL and promoting it – but not people who had never heard of SL. That would be the real test – take people who are smart and involved and doing great things but never heard of any of this and see – does it work for them?"Prokofy was making some valid points amid the contention, arguing that the real innovators on this new frontier might not the developers and gamers, but the people who were using the likes of Second Life for business or education:"I find there’s a horrible, horrible, hangover from this MMORPG culture you’ve all imbined for decades that is hugely destructive and is near to strangling the infant of the Metaverse in its cradle. You conceive of worlds as if they all involve skilling, leveling up, killing orcs, and getting advice from NPS and Wizards. YOUR goal is to be the ultimate Wizard (like a resident becoming a Linden). But there’s no objective need to force these memes and cultural institutions of MMORPGs, with their rigid, stratified, tekkie-serving forms of governance on virtual worlds just because they’re virtual, and you can fly in them. None whatsoever. Indeed, to the extent that we can shatter this horrid MMORPG culture with its fanboyz and resmods and alt-outings and rare-hoarding, we’re be that much farther ahead."More info on the exchange can be found here http://www.3pointd.com/20060516/metaverse-grudge-match/I'm still reading all this info, so I may come up with some thoughts about it all soon. Posted by Ariane Barnes at 08:26 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) Trackbacks Trackback specific URI for this entry No Trackbacks Comments Display comments as (Linear | Threaded) No comments Add Comment [...]

[...] Thoughts on the Metaverse Summit — see, more Prokofy means more readers! [...]