High Windows

 Posted by (Visited 5479 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
Jan 172015
 

Almost exactly seven years ago, I gave a keynote at the virtual worlds-themed Worlds in Motion Summit at GDC. I was supposed to talk about why games people should care about virtual worlds. But I just couldn’t warm to the topic.

I was in the midst of wrestling with Metaplace, which was the culmination of ten years of dreaming about the potential of virtual spaces. We were trying to put into practice the ideals embodied in things like the Declaration of the Rights of Avatars, the loftiness of hopes for general empowerment thanks to the newly interactive Web. But at the same time, I was watching tens of millions of venture capital dollars flow into kids’ worlds, virtual worlds about McDonalds and by teddy bear companies and tied in to bad reality TV shows and more.

So I took my qualms to the stage.

After, I felt like it didn’t go over all that well. There were a fair amount of blog posts about how I was engaging in “spasms of liberal guilt.” One picture of the event was of an attendee holding a piece of paper up for the camera that simply said “Ugh.” I ended up torn about putting it up on the blog, and it wasn’t recorded at the time (or the recording is lost — one has never surfaced, at any rate).

That idealistic Metaplace project ended up as a financially worthwhile grab at social gaming money on Facebook, but didn’t set the world on fire nor fulfill even a fraction of what I had dreamed for it. Club Penguin sold for hundreds of millions and still touches the hearts of millions of children, but most of those commercial tie-in projects made back their money and were quietly forgotten. And virtual worlds and MMOs sputtered and stopped grabbing for big dreams.

As you read the talk, you might want to mentally replace every mention of “virtual world” with “social media” or “online communities” or whatever — I think that it’s hard to recall, now, the degree to which it was online worlds that sat at the vanguard of so much of what we take for granted today in our daily virtual lives. In the wake of the last year’s worth of online controversies, the talk feels more relevant than ever to me.

I’ve combed through four or five liveblogs done at the time, and cobbled together a semblance of what I said. Hover over the slides for the captions. So here’s the long-lost talk “High Windows.” Warning: it features some extremely graphic imagery that may be upsetting.

  • (Before I started, Leigh Alexander, who was the advisor to the summit, cracked a joke that since virtual worlds were originally described as the metaverse in Snow Crash, that they have a lot in common with Scientology -- they both sprang from science fiction, right?)

(Also archived for posterity in the revamped Presentations section of the site).

  13 Responses to “High Windows”

  1. Mark says:
    January 21, 2015 at 12:01 pm

    I was at that talk at the time, and I remember liking it, though it was a bit over my head as a lowly college student. However, looking back, I think that the least justified assumption underlying your predictions/plans was the assumption that virtual worlds should resemble games. Specifically, they contain elaborate (and elaborately simulated) metaphors for the type of interaction taking place – representing user presence and profile through the means of avatars in rooms, and so forth. All interaction with the virtual world was filtered through these metaphors, which turned out to be unnecessary: users, even “non-technical” lay users, are perfectly capable of understanding the semantics of virtual presence without connecting the concepts to a meat-based fantasy.

    Understandably, the pursuit of those metaphors was crucial in identifying the more mature and direct concepts necessary, from technical, economic, and logistical perspectives; we stopped needing the metaphors because we had become familiar with the thing itself. (And the whole point of games is that such metaphors, and the concrete simulations thereof, can have artistic and entertainment value even or especially when they’re not necessary for understanding.) Perhaps the ultimate unnecessary metaphor in virtual words is that of the virtual “world” itself.

  2. Raph Koster says:
    January 21, 2015 at 12:33 pm

    You may want to read https://www.raphkoster.com/2010/02/26/are-virtual-worlds-over/ Sounds like a very similar conclusion!

  3. Katalin Benko says:
    February 2, 2015 at 12:41 am

    @raphkoster Wasn’t *exactly* what I thought/almost hoped it would be, but instead was more sophisticated. So, a good thing!

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