[...] an excellent post on Raph Koster’s website where he considers just how close to becoming mainstream ‘virtual worlds’ really are [...]

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Hadn’t heard of Jewel of Indra before. I can’t get the site to load though.

I agree entertainment is the mainstream for the MU worlds. There are other expressions that use 3D worlds (eg, the virtual reality music album). But the point is that social worlds can also be about other forms of getting together. By far the most common social experience across all cultures is worship. Worlds Of Worship (TM) would do well. The problem is infrastructure and means to enforce norms. Unlike ‘let it all hang out’ worlds, worship worlds come with a long history of traditions, rituals, norms and affordances and so on.

So why hasn’t it happened yet? Possibly because of games. The game culture itself may be in the way because the technology is adequate for this form of social expression. In fact, it is possibly a perfect application for virtual worlds combined with facebooks.

[...] Koster — Are We Mainstreaming? Raph notes that these game, they are getting a bit noticeable amongst the average citizenry. (Bad [...]

[...] disdain for lists. Nonetheless, I want to highlight a superset definition which I’ve pulled from Raph’s post:A Social Virtual World has game-like immersion and social media functionality without narrative [...]

[...] Metaversed has a good article on Twinity, which appears to be a social virtual world with very firm ties to real world geography. It uses an “urban” metaphor, so you don’t freely build structures, and instead you rent apartments and the like. There’s clear potential here for the sort of geotagging/mirror world stuff I alluded to recently. [...]

What Makes an Online Platform a ‘Virtual World’?…

It is ‘definition time’ in the virtual worlds industry. As this industry is growing, it is becoming more and more important to define categories, to draw border lines – especially between ‘games’ (bleh) and ‘the other worlds’, the ‘serious stuff…

[...] an excellent post on Raph Koster’s website where he considers just how close to becoming mainstream ‘virtual worlds’ really are [...]

[...] — which generated a lot of buzz, but not so much quantifiable gains for Second Life, Raph Koster wonders if virtual worlds are becoming “mainstream.” Like Alice, he agrees there really aren’t that many “true” virtual worlds, though his definition [...]