Raph’s Website » Thoughts on the Metaverse Summit

Thoughts on the Metaverse Summit

May 8th, 2006 (Visited 38135 times) Tags: 3d web, cyworld, habbo hotel, metaverse, randy farmer

So, I’ve already linked to a ton of other people’s commentary on the Metaverse Summit, but I haven’t given any of my own thoughts yet. If you’re used to thinking of me as the pie in the sky idealist, prepare for some grounding…!

Annotated versus virtual reality
There was a definite tug of war between two competing versions of what the metaverse means. One of them is the virtual world thing that most readers of this blog will be familiar with. The other is the annotated world augmented reality thing, which is the idea of pulling web data into the real world by overlaying it on our physical existence via heads-up specs and the like. In between is the “mirrorworld” which is a compromise, replicating the real world into virtual space and then annotating it there.

I have little doubt that all of these are dreams that are under development. But they don’t all seem to me to be the same thing at all, and I think they serve different purposes because of their usage patterns. Virtual worlds are primarily, and will continue to be primarily, for leisure time activities. Augmented reality serves a primarily practical purpose, and will continue to be best-suited for that. The killer apps for augmented reality lie in local economy applications: real estate, comparative shopping, navigation, interpersonal interaction annotation (heads-up tickler files over people’s heads, etc). The killer apps for virtual worlds have been, and will remain, chatting, hanging out with friends, and entertainment.

We’re seeing the first steps towards the annotated world stuff right now. World Heritage sites are being ddigitized, and services like Zillow are causing upheaval in their markets. These are all starting with mirrorworld applications, of course, but mirrorworld data will eventually migrate towards the two extremes. A digital Machu Picchu is much more compelling when it’s either serving as tour guide or hosting mutant dinosaurs you can kill; an inert 3d version would be one you visit once, think is cool, and then never visit again, much like most people fall in love with Google Earth (and its predecessor Keyhole) for about a week, then stop using it.

This divide stuck out for me perhaps because I am reading the latest Vernor Vinge book, Rainbows End, which is set here in San Diego, and features lots of augmented reality overlays on top of a landscape I know fairly well. Among the postulates is that kids will choose to run around in parks that are built with VR overlays for gaming — but there’s no mention of more traditional, screen-bound games. Which brings me to my next thought…

The poorly distributed future
One of my recurrent comments to other attendees was that many of the folks there needed to get out of Silicon Valley from time to time and go visit Cleveland, or Iowa, or rural Florida. You know, the real world. Some of the more enthusiastic folks were proposing brainports by 2016, and I felt obliged to stand up and point out that even if a fully functional and debugged brainport were announced by a stealth startup tomorrow, it would not have made it through the FDA by 2016.

Afterwards, chatting with Esther Dyson and Ethan Zuckerman, Ethan and I compared notes on the progress towards the “artificial pancreas” for diabetes management, something for which he has literally been waiting for 21 years despite the fact that “all the pieces are there.” (Minimed has recently deployed the first pre-alpha gen of something like this, and it’s a long way from being a real solution for all diabetes sufferers).

There’s a “last mile” problem in a lot of technologies, and metaverses are no exception. There’s this tendency to assume that just because a new technology comes into play, the old ones are replaced. But they aren’t — they are still in use even in the most trendsetting of communities. At the Summit, there were a lot of folks taking notes on paper right alongside those with laptops, and I think I was the sole tablet user. The only person I saw putting virtual worlds to real use during the summit was Robert Scoble, who seemed unable to pry himself away from Second Life. And lastly and most telling, there was an uncomfortable moment when some of the more pie-in-sky folks rhapsodized about how a virtual Darfur in Second Life could raise consciousness worldwide and Ethan slammed them for it. There’s a level of arrogance inherent in thinking that some geeks in Silicon Valley building a virtual Darfur can even begin to convey what actually happens in the Third World when many of those on the ground cannot grasp it.

Just as the screen-bound games are not going to go away (check out the resurgence in retro games!), Zillow isn’t going to kill off all the real estate agents either. There’s a large and aging population that won’t be gone by 2016 who will stick to the old methods; a large proportion of the younger folks will still prefer the handholding another person can offer; and the affluent will do the math and conclude that the cost of paying an agent may well be a better deal than the lost value of their hourly earnings if they did it themselves. Technologies accrete. Many of the loftier visions of social impact were centered around the incorrect notion that technologies replace, and that’s just not how the world works.

The metaverse is flat
The subtitle of the summit was “Pathways to the 3d web.” Some folks, like Daniel James, spent much time crossing out the word “3d” everywhere they saw it. As Randy Farmer noted in “3d is like blue.” It’s an attribute. What’s more, it’s a fairly useless attribute in many cases.

I have become persuaded that a huge part of why Korea boasts such a burgeoning MMO player population is because they didn’t go 3d as quickly as the West did. Yes, I blame EverQuest. 3d is pretty, significantly more immersive, and it’s more than twice as hard to adopt. The average person does not know how to navigate a virtual 3d space, the control complexity is significantly higher than any 2d environment demands, and most of our applications of virtual spaces haven’t actually needed 3d interaction anyway. The idea embodied in one of the OpenCroquet demos, of playing chess in a 2d window whilst in a 3d space, just underlines how superfluous the 3d space is to that particular application. It’s wonderful that you can collaboratively build 3d objects, but why do you want to?

Technology should follow needs. Some of the best indicators of coming metaverses are Habbo Hotel, Cyworld, mySpace, Amazon, and eBay. That’s where the volume is.

Similarly, there was a curious infatuation with space, closely tied to the love of 3d. Replicating New York down to every single apartment is neat and mostly useless. Space is an obstacle separating locations of interest. Empty space should exist only for the sake of it being filled with things of interest, or for the purpose of keeping locations of interest from overlapping.

We’ve known since the earliest virtual worlds that the topology of virtual spaces has more in common with subway maps than with Cartesian grid maps. Almost every world has involved forms of teleportation, and the “lumpy” distribution of population means that the world is seen from the point of view of major stops, not as a location-equivalent grid. For me, right now in the real world, San Francisco is closer than Big Bear, because I can hop a plane there and skip the boring bits. Skipping the boring bits is one of the big advantages of virtuality.

Ah, cycles
It seems like every ten years there’s a boomlet, and everyone who was doing virtual worlds the “old way” goes down, and a bunch of new mammal companies and organizations come up. Both the design assumptions and the business models tend to change at the same time. The last big boom was ten years ago, and marked by a serious swath of names that all started at just about the same time (though they didn’t all finish together):

Lineage
The Realm
Meridian 59
Kingdom of the Winds
Ultima Online
Everquest
Asheron’s Call
Dark Sun Online

What these brought to the table was a certain level of production values and a new, flat fee subscription model. They killed off a ten-year-old generation of games that had focused on time-based fees and didn’t have the same budgets. But those, in their turn, killed off an earlier generation, and so on.

Only around 3-4 significant virtual world releases happen in a given year in the whole world. Right now, we’re seeing that generational shift happen, and WoW isn’t the first of the new: it’s among the last of the old. The Summit asked us to forecast ten years out, and I think the safest prediction is that whatever we think is the next big thing will be dying off in ten years as a new disruptive approach is born.

That doesn’t minimize the importance of the disruptive stuff happening right now. The buzzwords that are making money circle the metaverse people once again: open platforms, networking multiple worlds, web integration, social networks, ancillary businesses, free play, microtransactions. A huge portion of this is going to be dotcom hype all over again. But some of it won’t be.

Because of that, as curmudgeony as this post might have seemed, I’m still very much an optimist and idealist about all this. I just think that tempering the dreams a little and focusing on the strengths of virtual worlds is what makes sense.

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Faith wrote on May 8th, 2006 at 2:37 pm:

[...] Comments [...]

alecaustin: Raph Koster on Metaverses/Technology Adoption wrote on May 8th, 2006 at 5:22 pm:

[...] one another, and the probable future direction of metaverses and reality annotation. Worth reading.(Post a new comment) Log in now.(Create account, or useOpenID) [...]

Mining For Fish » Blog Archive » The Metaverse might be upon us, but do we care? wrote on May 8th, 2006 at 6:02 pm:

[...] Sounds pretty crazy doesn’t it. Well, there are some problems. And although there’s some really cool stuff being done right now, The Metaverse isn’t going to take over quite yet, if at all. For a few good write-ups about just why not, go ahead and read Raph and M3mnoch’s thoughts. [...]

Clickable Culture wrote on May 9th, 2006 at 7:58 am:

The Metaversal Echo Chamber

A pair of conferences exploring virtual worlds have come and gone. I was able to attend several SDForum panels in avatar form, thanks to a streaming video window made available in Second Life by The Electric Sheep Company. But I missed out on the elite…

Slashdot | Mapping a Path For the 3D Web wrote on May 9th, 2006 at 8:18 am:

[...] Related Stories Offsite: Raph Koster’s Roadmap Roundup Offsite: Raph Koster’s Thoughts On The Metaverse Summit Mapping a Path For the 3D Web | Log in/Create an Account | Top | Search Discussion Display Options Threshold: -1: 0 comments 0: 0 comments 1: 0 comments 2: 0 comments 3: 0 comments 4: 0 comments 5: 0 comments Flat Nested No Comments Threaded Oldest First Newest First Highest Scores First Oldest First (Ignore Threads) Newest First (Ignore Threads) [...]

3pointD.com » Blog Archive » Webtakes on the Metaverse Roadmap wrote on May 9th, 2006 at 11:31 pm:

[...] Raph Koster’s Roadmap roundup and his further thoughts, in which he highlights one of my favorite ideas when thinking about things like this: technology should follow needs. (Which is not to say that it’s my ideas, just one I like.) [...]

Ambasel wrote on May 10th, 2006 at 7:02 am:

Raph’s Website � Thoughts on the Metaverse Summit

Werblog: Follow the Volume wrote on May 10th, 2006 at 8:07 am:

[...] Raph Kostera>: “Some of the best indicators of coming metaverses are Habbo Hotel, Cyworld, mySpace, Amazon, and eBay. That’s where the volume is.” [...]

…My heart’s in Accra » links for 2006-05-10 wrote on May 10th, 2006 at 8:38 am:

[...] Raph’s Website � Thoughts on the Metaverse Summit Raph Koster’s thoughts on the Metaverse summit… including my…ahem…explosion… (tags: immweb secondlife blogs) [...]

reBang weblog » Blog Archive » Metaverse Roadmap Rest Areas wrote on May 10th, 2006 at 10:52 am:

[...] Thoughts on the Metaverse Summit - Raph Koster’s thoughts after the event. [...]

Werblog wrote on May 10th, 2006 at 8:47 pm:

Raph Koster

Vs. online player in chess free wrote on May 12th, 2006 at 4:00 am:

Original post:Thoughts on the Metaverse Summit by at Google Blog Search: vs. online player in chess free

The Daily Graze » Virtual Worlds Collide wrote on May 12th, 2006 at 4:03 pm:

[...] There is a great discussion happening on Raph Koster’s blog about the Metaverse and Metaverse Roadmap Summit between Prokofy Neva and Raph. Worth checking out. [...]

The Daily Graze » The Metaverse for Change wrote on May 14th, 2006 at 7:49 am:

[...] As noted on Clickable Culture, the blogoshphere is buzzing about Second Life. Everyone from Robert Scobble to Adam Curry to Raph Koster is discussing Second Life and the Metaverse. The best part about it is that serious discussion about Virtual Worlds has hit a broader discourse. [...]

Prompt Criticality: Koster v. Neva wrote on May 15th, 2006 at 12:04 am:

[...] Given how often the amateur versus expert issue raises itself in relation to Second Life — whether in terms of content creation, medical research, game creation, etc — it seems somehow appropriate to watch Raph and Perkofy slug it out over on Raph’s blog. In the blue corner we have Raph Koster, till recently SOE’s Chief Creative Office and Big Thinker ™ on Virtual Worlds. In the red corner, Perkofy Neva, undisputed heavywieght champion of extended posts, big thoughts on Second Life, and continuous challenges to authority. Go read it — it’s interesting. [...]

Grimwell Online :: View topic - Metaverse stuff wrote on May 15th, 2006 at 1:30 am:

[...] There’s a terrorist on Raph’s blog commenting on Thoughts on the Metaverse Summit. He’s not really a terrorist; he’s a Second Life brand champion, but he scares me still. Anyone else want to leap into the fray? Raph’s blog is a virtual world experiment. You can either rush to his defense, join the opposition, or post saucy remarks like me. Sadly, there is no "phat lewt" to be gained. There’s only the satisfaction of participation._________________Morgan Ramsay [...]

Terra Nova: Public Media, Public Diplomacy, Games, and Place wrote on May 15th, 2006 at 8:27 am:

[...] I therefore assume (perhaps mistakenly) that the impetus for this post actually comes from the extended discussion with Prokofy Neva over on my blog, and most specifically the comments that you referenced in your own blog post yesterday. [...]

The Creation Engine wrote on May 15th, 2006 at 12:58 pm:

Second Life Kitchen, Real Life Cooking

The kitchen I designed in Second Life last summer now exists in real life. I did most of the work before I went to the Austin Game Conference, but we had to move our 500 plus CDs out of the

Second Life Blog wrote on May 15th, 2006 at 9:57 pm:

fabrication and delivery. All of the technology to do this exists in Second Life today. I think the project also serves as a useful concrete example which sheds some light on some of the ephemeral issues surrounding Web 3.D, the Metaverse Roadmap and Overlay Worlds versus Mirror Worlds versus virtual worlds. First, this project was fundamentally 3D. Although virtual world veterans quite rightly point out that a lot of what we do gains nothing from 3D, there are things that people do, like designing and building kitchens, that really are 3D and would

3pointD.com wrote on May 16th, 2006 at 7:44 am:

Metaverse Grudge Match

In the wake of the Metaverse Roadmap (are you tired of hearing about this event yet?) a really interesting distributed conversation has developed that has as its main interlocutors massively multiplayer game designer Raph Koster, chief technology offic…

Friends wrote on May 16th, 2006 at 1:02 pm:

[...] [Recent Entries][Archive][Friends][User Info] Below are 25 friends entries, after skipping 75 most recent ones:[<< Previous 25 entries -- Next 25 entries >>] May 8th, 2006 08:43 pmalecaustin[Link] Raph Koster on Metaverses/Technology AdoptionRaph Koster has an excellent post up about how technologies tend to accrete, not simply replace one another, and the probable future direction of metaverses and reality annotation. Worth reading. [...]

socialstudygames.com wrote on May 22nd, 2006 at 6:06 am:

[...] Raph’s Website » Thoughts on the Metaverse Summit [...]

Raph’s Website » Horses and the user-governed world wrote on May 24th, 2006 at 10:08 am:

[...] Prokofy Neva said, in the Metaverse roadmap discussion thread, What’s so tangled and complex about “who governs” (or as I put it often, “who develops?”) The game devs develop, and the game devs govern. Their junior partners, in the form of mods or wizards or junior devs or whatever are merely replications. [...]

planet squeak misc wrote on May 25th, 2006 at 6:30 pm:

del.icio.us croquet bookmarks del.icio.us warning: non-utf8 string! (sorry)

Gamasutra - Blogged Out: Snow Crash Mountain wrote on May 26th, 2006 at 11:22 am:

[...] May 26, 2006Blogged Out: Snow Crash MountainWelcome to ‘Blogged Out’, the news report that looks at the world of developer blogging and the conversations being had with the community at large. This week we look at the metaverse. Clockwork Pistols At Virtual Dawn Science fiction author Neal Stephenson’s fictional concept of the ‘metaverse’ has been adopted as updated concept for the new articulations of cyberspace - for the 3D realm which encompasses everything the web is now, and where everyone could potentially be represented by their personalised avatars in a virtual information space. The Metaverse Roadmap conference was intended to take a look at what this 3D web might entail, asking questions about the relationship between game worlds, business, 3D web apps and the general flow of online information, while at the same time collecting the usual suspect of luminaries up to enable them to articulate their thoughts on what this metaverse thing might actually be. Stephenson’s fictional construct has been used to articulate numerous ideas about where the web is going (including an interesting question from Ed Castronova about why there isn’t an academic virtual world in which regulated, non-commercial research can be conducted), but it has also become a unique field of battle. 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.” Blogger Mark Wallace sums this idea up rather differently on 3pointD: “The fact is, gameworlds have already done their part for the metaverse. Second Life would probably not exist were it not for its predecessors in text and graphical virtual worlds. But what SL is trying to do (albeit somewhat clumsily) is create a kind of grand mashup between a social world and a technology platform like the Web. In fact, it’s explicitly mashing a 3D space into the Web with the coming integration of Web services into SL. Combine this with graphics capabilities, the Western world’s Web-connectedness and a younger generation that’s primed to use 3D online spaces, and you get something fundamentally different from a place like LambdaMOO, which Raph calls ‘EXACTLY LIKE SECOND LIFE’ (his caps).” What it all comes down to, of course, is whether people actually want to do all of this in 3D, or whether, as Randy Farmer points out, “3-D isn’t an inherently better representation for every purpose. 3-D is an attribute, like the color blue.” Are any of the things that Second Life claims to want to do actually better done in 3D? Or is what is really better done in 3D simply the act of play? Sure, some people are making a buck now, and creating some interesting tools… but do the 60,000 people in Second Life make as much of a difference to the world as the millions logging on with the sole intention of playing games and having fun? [Jim Rossignol is a freelance journalist based in the UK � his game journalism has appeared in PC Gamer UK, Edge and The London Times.]POSTED: 10.39am PST, 05/26/06 - Jim Rossignol - LINK[05.25.06] [Next Column] [View All...] [View Other Blogged Out Columns] [...]

Emergic: Rajesh Jain's Weblog on Emerging Technologies, Enterprises and Markets wrote on May 30th, 2006 at 5:56 am:

[via Kevin Werbach]Raph Koster writes: There was a definite tug of war between two competing versions of what the metaverse means. One of them is the virtual world thing that most readers of this blog will be familiar with. The other is the annotated world augmented reality

Timbre of Tempests wrote on May 30th, 2006 at 7:35 am:

is/are wrong, and less frequently, that their opinion is right. This was the exchange (about a week or two old, now):Me: Granted, it must be nice to know who you’re speaking to and why they’re wrong from the outset. I’ve always envied that. Prokofy

Raph’s Website » Monthly Report, May-June 2006 wrote on June 1st, 2006 at 5:09 pm:

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

BIZertainment wrote on June 2nd, 2006 at 1:46 pm:

Raph Koster has a very interesting discussion going on about online worlds and the march toward a Metaverse. There is also a related discussion about “exceptionalism” in regards to the Metaverse discussion. I really don’t want to say much about it here, other than to point you to the discussion. This is for a couple of reasons:

bizertainment wrote on June 2nd, 2006 at 1:46 pm:

Whistle Through Your Comb wrote on June 16th, 2006 at 4:11 pm:

this film is extraordinary, not just for it’s use of technology but for it’s fantastic perception looking forward.” Here is the 2014 version. Here is the 2015 version. I can’t decide if this is cool or creepy. To Listen to Session interviews: To Hear Raph Koster’s take on the two competing views of the Metaverse A great CNET article on the summit Keynote Speech from Mike Liebhold (it’s the second to last link) All are definitely worth a look. For those of you who are fascinated by human interactions, technology

Noticias en jynus.com wrote on June 17th, 2006 at 11:16 am:

[IMG web] (Noticia no disponible en castellano) It seems Slashdot is getting a new design. As we could be no less, Jynus.com is currently doing the same. Hope you like the new style! Problems, suggestions and comments about the new style, here.

The Metaverse Summit - Virtual Underworld wrote on July 18th, 2006 at 8:49 am:

[...] 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 [...]

Talent imitates, genius steals: Interlife wrote on August 23rd, 2006 at 1:04 am:

[...] 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. [...]

3D vs. 2D - SL Creativity wrote on August 31st, 2006 at 11:13 pm:

[...] 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/) [...]

Second Life Herald: More Worlds! wrote on December 17th, 2006 at 2:47 am:

[...] 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. [...]

Rock, Paper, Shotgun - the PC gaming site wrote on September 9th, 2007 at 1:51 am:

[...] 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 [...]

Virtual Worlds Collide « The Electric Sheep Company wrote on January 7th, 2009 at 11:45 am:

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

pantomimeHorse said on May 8th, 2006 at 1:20 pm:

Yeah, GoogleMaps has that new toy quality, but it seems to be progressing into something honestly useful. Just give Google a bit more time to bring it up to par with mapquest for getting directions. I’ve noticed improvement since the launch. Having an overhead image overlayed with your map is actually helpful when navigating, though it does require some good spatial reasoning skills.

Scott Moore said on May 8th, 2006 at 5:29 pm:

Raph, thanks for the summary. As someone who saw a lot of the metaverse (3D) technology hype 10 years ago first hand, hearing about a Metaverse Roadmap gave me more than a little pause. Are people working on the next steps forward aware of the pervious generation’s successes and (more importantly) mistakes? I’m glad the organizers were willing to bring together a diverse and vocal group.

I’m disheartened just a little that when these types of discussions crop up, there tends to be a lot of talk about the technology, but not about people. Regardless if it’s a virtual world or an annotated overlay, the purpose is to provide a shared context in which people can interact. This is why I agree with you that MySpace, eBay, Cyworld and such represent steps toward large metaverses - the technology they employ is intended to further a particular set of human interactions. I hope that in addition to the virtual Darfur example, people were being considered during these discussions.

Psychochild said on May 8th, 2006 at 6:11 pm:

I think you’ve mostly hit the nail on the head here, Raph.

The only thing I’d have a slight quibble with is the fact that things will always get disrupted. One of the things were facing this time around is that we have some huge players with a lot of money invested in the old way. Something disruptive might come along, but if all the big players like SOE, NCSoft, et al. decide that “things shall not change!” then change will come much slower. Sure, as you point out each previous disruption pretty much made the old systems go away. But, in each case the newcomers were so much bigger and more dominant, or external conditions changed. M59 was the stepping stone to the current era of gaming, but UO and EQ simply had so many more players than the games on the old online systems that they made the previous games seem irrelevant. It also didn’t help that the flat-rate pricing model came along to AOL and disrupted how the old games made money, either.

All that said, I think it is very likely that we will see a major upheaval soon. The disruption in business model is coming. The big question for me is: Will something come along that will dwarf WoW in terms of players and profits? I’m sure one of the reasons why people are seeing WoW as a big transition is because its size has dwarfed previous games, just like the current era of games were big enough to make the old AOL, etc, games look tiny and insignificant. But, that’s only part of the equation.

The bigger issue here is how the business side of things will work. I think we’re going to have too many people trying to compete over the same space, and it will segment the market too much. I also fear that some developers and investors are going to want to cash in too quickly, and this will hurt some of the adoption of a new business model. The uproar over the Oblivion mods shows a bit of this, and people are distrustful because of it. The “free to play, pay with microtransactions” system takes a while to get into gear if you don’t already have a willing audience. Neopets took years to build their site up to the point it is now, and investors aren’t always keen on the “Yeah, we should be turning a profit in 5 years, hopefully” type of business plan. Unless you’re right that…

A huge portion of this is going to be dotcom hype all over again.

At least this time I have the skill set, the experience, and the contacts to exploit it properly. Maybe I can get myself a really expensive chair on someone else’s dime!

Slyfeind said on May 8th, 2006 at 9:01 pm:

It’s interesting seeing that list of games as the first line-up of MMOs. Out of them all, Lineage and EverQuest remain in the vernacular, while all the others have marginalized to one degree or another. UO is about as obscure as M59. Lineage is strong because of its huge playerbase…but EverQuest is available to anyone playing any other Station game. All the rest just have themselves. There is no “UO2″ to inform newcomers of “UO.”

MaxS said on May 8th, 2006 at 9:27 pm:

(Ralf is so right it takes no further comments) Brian, that the nature of disruptive technology: it does not make older stuff look “worse” by virtue of being “better”. It makes old stuff look completely irrelevant. So SOE, NCSoft, et al saying “thing shall not change” will have same effect as buggy whip producers marching around Henry T. Ford factory. Or recent “rich client will not die!” stand by certain old software company next to whole Google/Yahoo web 2.0 thing.

The big question for me is: Will something come along that will dwarf WoW in terms of players and profits?

question is 2 years late. Answer is out there in plain view for loooong time. Neopets.com was 25M members at time of acquisition. HabboHotel in 10s of millions. Everybody knows MySpace numbers - which is fundamentally async online world.

If you recall our chat last year about WoW / cannibalization? Let’s count the chickens. After 10y of various semi-lame attempts to build various “beat rats with the club” 3D worlds, the ultimately super-high quality jewel of this genre was created, stolen everybody users, and jury has reached the verdict: 5M. That’s it, end of story, done! 5M demographics for these 3D “rats” worlds. Ok let say 10M including various not-yet fully wow-erized survivors. Fine, that’s SOE/NC sandbox, have fun guys.

Real question today is: what “online” “world” 1B of web 2.0 users going to “play”? everything is in quotes since even definitions are fuzzy at the moment. After all MySpace+Pets+Habo+etc is still less then 10% of this market.

Psychochild said on May 9th, 2006 at 1:55 am:

Heya, Max. Unfortunately, my last attempt at a comment crashed and I need to sleep before the drive to E3, so here’s a slightly shorter version:

The difference between buggy whip makers and Sony/NCSoft is marketing dollars. The poor, abused-in-analogy whip makers didn’t have millions upon millions to spend in defense of their system. Consider how much money Sony spent on marketing for consoles. I think it’s silly to think these companies will become obsolete without a fight. For all the abuse they take, these companies still have highly profitable businesses and interests to protect.

I think you’re falling prey to one of the things Raph points out: techno-optimism. You think that change has to happen, but it doesn’t. To go back to the tired car vs. buggy whip maker debate, it was entirely possible for people to reject cars and continue using horse-drawn carriages. It didn’t work out that way, but we can’t assume it absolutely had to work out the way it did without external influences.

Also, notice I said “players and profits“. Having lots of users is nice, but if you aren’t making lots of money from them then it’s pointless in a business case. What’s MySpace’s business model, besides taking investment money? How are they making money off of 65 million (or whatever number this week) people? (And, we shouldn’t assume all of those are people.) Likewise, are NeoPets and HabboHotel (to name the two examples you gave) making more money than WoW is? How long did the first two sites have to stay online before making money? What was the initial investment? Can the successes be duplicated? Will the success last as long or longer?

Lots of questions, with answers required before we can even make educated guesses about what the future will hold. I still say there’s no guarantees here. It could be that MySpace.com is the future, or it could be a passing fad that crushes itself under its own weight. Time will tell if our guesses are correct.

I will say that I’m betting along the same lines of the future we’re discussing in some of my current work, but I have taken a long, hard look at the situation and the risks and know nothing is set in stone where the future is concerned. Hope for the best, but plan for the worst as they say.

My further thoughts,

Jerry Paffendorf said on May 9th, 2006 at 7:55 am:

Raph, great to see you again this weekend. More later, but on 2D vs. 3D:

Totally randomly my girlfriend bought me Microserfs by Douglas Coupland right before I left for the summit. Besides just getting to the part where one of the characters starts to build 3D “Lego” software that sounds a lot like a Second Life, which is funny enough, the same character earlier went on a 2D diet after locking himself in his office and only eating food that could be slid under the door. I think this passage nails the 2D vs. 3D thing we’re talking about here. A Web with common 3D interfaces and environments doesn’t banish 2D from the Web, but the ability to do 3D is the superset of 2D and the superset always wins (so how? how soon? driven by what forces? to what limit?).

From page 31 of Microserfs:

“I told [Bill Gates] about my Flatlander flat-foods-only concept, and we then got into a discussion of beverages, which, as you know, tend to be consumed with a straw in a linear, one-dimensional (and hence not two-dimensional) mode. Beverages are a real problem to my new Flatlander dining lifestyle…let me tell you.

“But then Bill…pointed out that one-dimensionality is perfectly allowable within a two-dimensional universe. So obvious, yet I hadn’t seen it! Good thing he’s in charge.”

Funny, but very true here too :). Wanted to be sure to add that in this discussion: it’s not 2D vs. 3D, 2D fits inside 3D. It’s too easy to see “3D Web” and say “meh, no way will it all be 3D” and walk away. That only takes away from the discussion of how the 3D gamespace stuff will get here and how. Needless to say the gamut of views will be repped in the Roadmap doc and extras.

Anyone interested in updates on the project and ways to get involved please drop a line to roadmap@accelerating.org . This is a different kind of foresight project and we want to hear from **everybody**.

Raph said on May 9th, 2006 at 8:47 am:

Jerry, the issue is that jumping straight to 3d limits the adoption path. I agree that it has to happen eventually, but systems like Second Life and to a lesser degree OpenCroquet limit who can use them by being 3d, and thus make difficult a lot of the more obvious possible metaversal applications.

Prokofy Neva said on May 9th, 2006 at 3:51 pm:

Dear Raph, I read on Clickable Culture that you said people weren’t critical enough at this conference. I think that’s because the Metaverse (or as I like to call it, SecondVerseSameastheFirst) is in a really narrow groove of Panelverse types who just migrate from one panel to another on somebody *else’s* dime. You need to get both more RL people who don’t do this panel stuff for a living AND you need to bring in people who actually do business exclusively inside these worlds (like Anshe Chung), not those both in and around them and sponsoring all the conferences(like ESC).

On the uses of VWs, I’m just not getting your segregation of these different metaversal strands. Seems to me that if you want 3-D thingies to go shopping for RL clothes and real estate, you’d like to do that while chatting with friends and family, and maybe prototype some of that out in 3-D virtual worlds and sample the versimilitude of the Google Earthed thing in SL. If they could get easier to use, people will use them. But they peak fast. Already my 11-year-old daughter explains with a world-weary sigh to me that ‘MySpace is a Parody’ and my 13-year-old son has committed SLuicide because returning mall prims just got too wearisome — they’re bored with WoW, too, and are actually lying around now *reading books* (!).

I agree that most people don’t really want to collaborate on 3-D building. This is a geeky myth. Yes, a few do, but the tools in SL are buggy and flawed for this (they’re revising this). I get the impressions most geeks talk a good game about 3-D build collaboration, but secretly, they’d actually rather build the stuff in their basement, and then upload it to the world to chat about with peers or sell OR have the entire thing in their basement on their own server. A “Worlds for Windows” sort of future application that can enable people to make little 3-d buildings and av bling and stuff and exchange it with their friends on Yahoo Messenger could be neat. At the end of the day, you still gotta eat tho - who’s going to pay for all this stuff?

Randy Farmer said on May 9th, 2006 at 9:19 pm:

[Crossposted from Habitat Chronicles]

Jerry,

The difference is emphasis and framing.

No one holding conferences and making 10-year plans for the All Audio Web, or the All-encompasing Video Web (which could be cast in your all-inclusive/subsuming reasoning.) Most folks seem to acknowledge that data formats and display technologies are tools that are fit for specific purposes.

“3D Web” puts one technology in the forefront, and without any particulary compelling rationale.

BTW - I never mentioned the 2D Web, nor framed the debate in that context.

Randy

pantomimeHorse said on May 9th, 2006 at 10:29 pm:

This discussion reminds me of:

http://damienkatz.net/2006/04/error_code_vs_e.html

It’s a discussion of error handling in OOP, but here’s the relevant bit:

I remember a crummy movie with Michael Douglas and Demi Moore where Demi was the bad guy. I don’t remember much about it except that for some reason the movie — with no relevance to the plot other than they worked in a tech company — included a virtual reality sequence that was suppose to showcase a brilliant advance in data retrieval UI.

The system worked by immersing you into a virtual reality representation of a library. Then, you could walk around the library to find the information you need. You’d navigate by following categorized signs, and then further narrowed categories until you found the virtual bookshelf with the virtual book of information you’re looking for. That’s supposed to be a huge advance in data retrieval, it made finding information as simple as going to the library.

Here’s the problem: What’s the very first thing you do when you want to find a book in a real library? You walk over to a computer and use the digital card catalog system.

Rik said on May 9th, 2006 at 11:47 pm:

Does anyone have any numbers on Neopets.com cash flow? Do we even know what it would cost to advertise there, like puzzle Pirates does?

Raph said on May 10th, 2006 at 12:24 pm:

I think that’s because the Metaverse (or as I like to call it, SecondVerseSameastheFirst) is in a really narrow groove of Panelverse types who just migrate from one panel to another on somebody *else’s* dime. You need to get both more RL people who don’t do this panel stuff for a living AND you need to bring in people who actually do business exclusively inside these worlds (like Anshe Chung), not those both in and around them and sponsoring all the conferences(like ESC).

Actually, I must say that the mix was a good one. The spread in virtual world designers covered 20 years, after all, enough to encompass representatives from multiple generations of technology. Unsurprisingly, there were different points of view across all of these eras. There were nonprofit reps looking for solutions to their problems, there were sales people and folks from other businesses, and pie in the sky tech people who don’t care abot an audience, and grounded biz folks who want to know where the profit is. It was a healthy mix, I thought. It wasn’t all the usual suspects.

Prokofy Neva said on May 10th, 2006 at 12:46 pm:

Actually, I’d have to disagree. 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?

The “grounded biz folks” who want to know where the profit is are *not inworld*. They are not DOING the Metaverse but just studying about it or exploring it or talking about it. That’s my point, Raph, sorry but, as I said, you didn’t have Anshe Chung — who reportedly makes $150,000 a year from her world-creation business and who was featured on the cover of Business Week. You could all talk *about* that BW article but not include the people who *really do it* (except of course for ESC which is a sponsor).

I imagine they seem like the “usual suspects” to me because I just keep seeing the same names everywhere — but then I’m just tuning in the last 2 years or so. You’re obviously far more traveled in this field, I’m just describing how it looks in my neck of the woods mainly around SL. The panelists at this conference, SOP III, SXSW — all the same from SL. But SL is a much bigger world, and beyond SL is even more of a big world.

Raph said on May 10th, 2006 at 12:57 pm:

Hmm, I guess I see Anshe as both an outlier and, in terms of the broad progress of virtual worlds, a footnote. And it seems to me there’s a contradiction inherent in your post in asking for people to both be in-world making something and also be from all walks of life. Second Life is populated almost exclusively by early adopter geeks of one sort of another. All the talk of Anshe Chung is exactly “enthusiastic cheerleadering” as you put it. There was more value in having someone like Esther Dyson there, who isn’t in virtual worlds at all, but is very plugged into the broader technological landscape.

I agree that multiple generations of virtual world developers doesn’t necessarily bring a diversity of viewpoints. But what struck me was that the longer that the developer in question had been in virtual worlds, the less likely they were to see the metaverse popping up. How much of this was rigidness wedded to old ways of thinking, and how much was the voice of experience talking to the novices, I don’t know.

I also very much agree that a wider array of people needed to be involved in the discussions — I commented as such while there, too.

chabuhi said on May 11th, 2006 at 11:49 am:

You know, I always find it a bit amusing that names like Anshe Chung always come up when naming SL’s successes (or at least such names seem to be mentioned with the purpose illustrating success within SL), and yet during my (albeit short) time in SL, I recall Anshe Chung and the other “land barons” being reviled by the masses in the VW.

I mean, it’s obvious why these characters are celebritized, since other people will see sparkly dollar bills before their eyes and look at SL as their next “get rich quick” opportunity. But, while I was around SL, such folks were widely regarded as experience-killers.

Prokofy Neva said on May 11th, 2006 at 7:41 pm:

Raph, excuse me, but you’re out of date and out of touch on Second Life. Those early adapter geeks are in a very distinct minority now — actually some of them got bored and went off to play WoW because they are sandboxers and not world-builders. There’s 260,000 odd people signed up now, some 60,000 of them active log-ons in the last 60 days, and the overwhelming majority of them aren’t early adapter geeks but people from all those walks of life I’m talking about coming in the door for all kinds of reasons ranging from entertainment to socializing to education to art.

I have to Laugh Out Loud that you’d call Anshe Chung an “outlier”. YOU are the outlier, Raph Koster, when it comes to this virtual world the size of Boston. You don’t live in the world that is at the cutting edge of the Metaverse. We *do*. We live and breathe it many many hours a week — you appear to be just parachuting into it. We’re adapting to how norms and codes and experiences are going to be working in this world. You’re at a conference, I’m sorry, I don’t care how many Internet guru geek credentials you have, you can’t capture something as big as the Metaverse by yourself.

Anshe isn’t a footnote — you and your conferees are the footnotes. Anshe has 125 private islands with hundreds of people. I have hundreds of customers too. *We live here, you cannot dismiss us so easily.*

For a project as gigantic and universe-shattering and changing as the Metaverse, there indeed have to be early adapters, middle adapters, late adapters. I totally reject any term like “outlier” for someone who is IN THE WORLD. I find it the worst kind of arrogance to be trying to marginalize them and their practical and intellectual contribution merely because they don’t have geek-world credentials. Baloney. This is going to be all different than your Internet. The kinds of people who start and maintain and change this giant thing should indeed come from all walks. Any enterprise of this momentous occasion demands the kind of panels and conferences you see on subjects like world peace or AIDS, like everyone from Vaclav Havel to George Soros to Jimmy Carter to Bishop Tutu and Nelson Mandala and many many other kinds of leaders– thinkers, poets, entrepreneurs, statesmen. If not leaders of these stature, at least people in those categories of human endeavour who can do some thinking about this beyond the box of the little geeky inliers and their preoccupations.

Just because the *talk* about Anshe was enthusiastic cheerleading doesn’t mean what she and other community developers do in Second Life is brainless or intellectually unimportant and uninteresting. This notion that these land barons are “reviled by the masses” is one of the cherished myth of the feted inner core, of course; the reality is the masses are all living on the land barons estates quite happily. This is all something to ponder.

I’m sorry, Raph Koster, but all of this is too important to just let YOU decide and interpret the virtuality. You’re going to have to *share*.

Raph said on May 11th, 2006 at 9:42 pm:

Whoa, there! TO start with, I meant outlier as in “almost nobody else is making that kind of money.” In that sense, Anshe is a statistical anomaly, correct? That’s the usual meaning of the term “outlier” — a point in the distribution that is way off the normal. There’s definitely things to learn from statistical anomalies, but something like the metaverse is not going to be built from statistical anomalies.

If anything, the conference was heavily populated by Second Life fans… it certainly came up a disproportionate number of times. Enough times, in fact, that I was certainly not the only one thinking to myself, “cut it out with the Second Life examples, your bias is showing too clearly.” I freely confess to being out of touch with Second Life myself. But perhaps that also gives me a bit of perspective on it. And one piece of perspective that is important is that it is not as big nor as diverse as you seem to think.

Let’s start with the stats you cite. 60,000 active logins in 60 days means 60,000 active players, period. The other 200,000 are people who quit. In fact, most worlds use active in 30 days as the metric of active players. UO is 9 years old and boasts larger figures.

I’ve heard (though have not verified) that SL gets around 6000 peak concurrent. Guild Wars just hit 100,000 concurrent players. Do you really think that it is statistically likely that Second Life is more diverse and representative of the general population? Second Life isn’t even available in other languages and territories to my knowledge.

By any measure of popular penetration, SL is small. I agree that it has an importance disproportionate to its size; I also think it has a fantastic hype machine. As a comparison, the ChibaMOO Web World had comparable figures of registered users — in 1994. Cybertown had 40,000 active users the last time I logged into it, which was last century.

Oh, come on. I have been in that situation, and seen that situation, dozens of times. And today, yes, those leaders, those communities are footnotes. Anshe isn’t the first person to make over $100,000 doing commerce in and around a virtual world, not by a long shot. Even leaving out the IGEs of the world, many the “gaming networks” we see today are the descendants of people who struck it rich by building UO fansites. Pople have been making profits off of virtual worlds for decades.

Now, you need to balance this comment with the knowledge that I have been a booster of Second Life for a LONG time. I’ve evangelized it, I’ve tried to help cut business deals for it, and I’ve spent hours with Philip and Cory and Robin. Hell, Robin came to Austin to give me a private demo back when it was in early testing. I think that what has been accomplished there is wonderful.

Nowhere did I say that Anshe’s contributions would have been “valueless.” Nowhere did I say that the work players do in world is “brainless or intellectually unimportant and uninteresting.” I said that in terms of the broad progress of the metaverse, the fact that yet another person has managed to make a lot of money is going to go down as a footnote in history, because it’s merely another data point on a trend. Having Anshe there would have been great. But using Anshe as proof that everything is somehow different now — that I don’t buy.

I would have LOVED to have as diverse a group as you cite at that conference. But most of those people would rightfully not deign to come. We’ve got a while yet before virtual worlds have the sort of audiences that merit that sort of attendance.

Lastly, I don’t know what to make of your final comments, to be honest. I didn’t set up the conference; I argued that it needed a more diverse attendance. I wouldn’t pick Anshe Chung, though — having Wagner James Au serves just as well. We could have used, instead, a top guild leader from FFXI or WoW to talk about difficult coordination in virtual spaces, and not asynch businesses; a few Korean players who could tell us what life is like when virtual worlds are mainstream; the developer of Coke Music, which has 2.5 million users; someone from Habbo Hotel (which has seven million active users in a month), someone from Cyworld (which has reached 98% of the population of Korea)… even just getting the spread of virtual world populations right would have been a help. The fact that at least ten people in the room were Second Life players was part of the problem, not part of the solution.

So I say to you, you think I’m the one who is not sharing?

MaxS said on May 12th, 2006 at 12:03 am:

Brian, great questions. Apologies for somewhat fuzzy data, recalling ~two year old pitch (yes, I have been peddling it that long).
Myspace: insanely profitable before aquistion. We speaking multi-M$ per month here. Ads, selling branded band apparel, probably other services.
Habbo: ~$20M/y something, Newpets: ~$50M/y
Surprising? Not at all. If you got multi-million audiences, monetizing is a no-brainer.

Marketing budgets. Just change the industry to see perspective. Does all these silly MSFT dinosaur Office ads make you use google less? Any plans to buy Office 10? Heh, you crashed writing comment, so one day you will discovery Writely which saves everything you type on server the moment you type it, and no amount of marketing $$ will make you go back. Now translate same perspective to Sony/NCSoft budgets you mentioned. They will defend old model trying to over-market EQ over WoW and vice versa, while web 2.0 startups will fly right under their guns offering new models. buggy whip makers do have huge budgets – its just they spending them to prove this whip is better then the other guy whip or making a bigger, better, HDTV-compatible whip. “Only our MMO will have realistic modeling of Trolls armpit hairs!” These huge war chests would have been much better spent building “new model” products, yet given average talent / innovation ratio in BigCo Inc. that’s next to impossible. Or they could be buying out startups early like Google does. however given how retarded gamedev is comparing to rest of software industry I doubt that will happen (although you never know. the cool touch of cold air from descending axe is known to trigger untypical relapses of rationality even in worse cases of BigCo mind-melt. From time to time)

you are right on survival potential. They are profitable, successful businesses, which may go on for decades. Just like IBM still makes good chunk of cash selling replacement mainfraimes and consulting to Kraft. instead of publishers implosion Ralf talks about, perhaps we will see gradual decline into senility. Less and less worlds built, less user interest and press, more attention shifting to “web 2.0”-like blends between games and social networks and that’s where people will spent ever increasing amounts of their online-time. At some point we will just remember last ditch hardcore holdouts of WoW and 2L players like we react to ThePalace folk today “omg, its so cute you still playing that!”

Prokofy Neva said on May 12th, 2006 at 7:45 am:

It’s very curious to me that you conceive of Anshe as an “outlier,” and that “outliers” are merely people who boringly make money off a platform, as if doing that is some kind of skill-grind and gold-farm that doesn’t involve having a stake in its development — as if the development of platforms and technology and such are just your area, and the rest of the activity in and on and around the platform is just for the fans.

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.

It’s an outrage to think that Hamlet nee Linden Au could speak for any of us inworld, when he is merely a former house organ writer, or government public relations officer, paid for and hosted on the Linden servers, who covered what was important for LL’s own sales and profit, but not necessarily what was important for the development of the world itself, or the Metaverse as a project larger than LL, whatever it’s control of the servers. To say that it’s “just as good to have Hamlet” because he can presumably speak in a savvy and coherent way at a sophisticated university or industry panel and people who “just make money” are chumps is to miss a lot of what is important and different about the world.

Anshe or any of us inside of Second Life aren’t just fans, and we aren’t just making money and we aren’t just a big server load test of feebs and choads and blingtards. We’re the pioneers in this new country really trying to live in it as if you could really live in it. Anshe has a lot to tell you about not just merely the flipping of land and the making of money, but the really intensive and numerous issues of how you create virtual communities, how they get along, how to do dispute resolution, how to devise and implement rules and devise them, how to deal with arbitrary and unfair state policies, how to compensate for world exigencies on servers and the limitation of tools, and a hundred other useful ideas, issues, and realities of virtuality that you seem unwilling to concede as a field of expertise or knowledge.

Your part in it is never a game, eh? It’s always us playing the game. But you get to play the meta-game of talking about the game at a panel in Panelverse, so you are better? No.

The outlier status of Anshe even in your defined notion is debatable. The story is about Chinese immigrant coming to first one RL country and then coming to the virtual country of SL and striking gold through perseverance and hard work. That experience is one that Philip Linden consciously celebrates — his favourite story is to imagine the young man in the third-world country who will make an invention in SL that will feed his family and lift him from poverty. The rags-to-riches dream story of the kind that animated the settlement of America is an important story, regardless of whether there are only a tiny percentage of actually wealthy people. The animating factor for people coming will be that dream. That’s something to take seriously; calling it a “footnote” would be like saying that your ancestors or mine coming to America and their aspirations are merely a “footnote” in American history, when they are not. Whether they fled pogroms or forced famines, whether they merely survived or struck it rich, the push and pull factors of the project called America doesn’t make “footnotes” out of things like that but makes statesmen, poets, culture.

A country with 60,000 people in it logging on regularly from the Americas, Europe, and Asia (not much from Africa or Eurasia) isn’t a country that is going to be terribly diverse. But it’s actually rather more diverse than you are prepared to give it credit for.

I’m sure you have vastly more experience in virtual worlds, obviously you’re the famous guru and I’m only the infamous antagonist. But I do think you have to think outside the MMORPG gaming box here. This isn’t gold-farming in UO or WoW. This is cashing out to RL money to pay RL bills using skills that aren’t grinding and skilling and questing but are more complex and sophisticated having to do with market determination, problem-solving, community building, legal interpretation, etc. that in my view, require a variety of disciplines and bodies of human knowledge to be brought to bear on it as it develops.

You make a very interesting comment about what it would be like to collect leaders, or even randomly selected inhabitants of everything from Habbo Hotel to Cyworld. I love that idea. I hope this Star Wars Bar kind of Metaverse Meet-Up happens even without all these game companies and the industry hangers-on in the supposedly independent world of academe. I hope that in fact the collective social pressure of all those people and their needs and wants and ideas will constitute a force for change that will be part of what goes beyond (overthrows) the game companies. Right now, we don’t really have a resident community independent of Lindens for all kind of factors, having to do with the smallness of the world, and the fact that 1/3 of the Linden staff comes from former residents. But this day will come.

I quite take your point about these latest conferences all being filled with SL cheerleaders. I think you have only click around on their sites to see what sponsors there are to understand why that is happening. If Linden Lab or Electric Sheep Company or Future Salon/Accelerating Change Foundation etc are the sponsors, then their networks will necessarily all be of a type, and all around the SL Kool-Aid nexus. But…The rest of us can’t complain if we didn’t raise the venture capital not only to make a world, but to then conference about it endlessly at funded prestigious academic venues.

Virtual worlds may not yet merit the attention of these world-class leaders of the Nobel Peace Prize caliber, let’s say. But I imagine it will happen sooner than you think. I wouldn’t have thought Harvard would show up as fast as it did in SL.

The Metaverse Roadmap isn’t likely to have significant genuine public input. It appears to be a geeky and wonky privileged and even clunky process that focuses too literally on hardware and technical advancement now for most people to be able to make meaningful input. What’s scary about it to me is that the people holding the cards close to their chests about the technological development and discussing it only among their own verhy select and vetted and apprenticed peers are indeed the ones not willing to share with others — they’re setting the bar very high by making it seem that without technical knowledge of how servers and streaming technology work, you can’t make any contribution. They’re replicating the Snowcrash memes.

That just seem wacky to me. Scientists made the nuclear bomb, too, and the rest of society and its thinkers have been catching up ever since and making sure that things like this aren’t done in a vacuum. The people of your world seem to have gone from the concerns of C.P. Snow that scientists weren’t included in high policy discussions of society and were left out by statesmen and writers, to completely overthrowing those political and literary people and saying that unless they can become conversant in technical jargon and notions they can’t play. It’s skewed again.

As for your “hours with Philip and Cory and Robin” I can only say: 30 points for you in Strategic SL, Raph, you’re coming close to beating the bosses, just a little bit more skilling and leveling and finding rares! But…Your hours are spent server-side, dude. I’ve probably spent *more* hours with them, come to think of it, but client-side, inworld, where the short end of the stick can be more painful, sitting in crashing town-meetings and struggling to communicate in half sentences typed out about things like the ridiculous hippie dope-smoking group tools and their flaws.

Really, you’re continuing to imply that what an Anshe does or anybody with business in these worlds isn’t intellectually exciting because you can only describe it as money making in the next sentence where you claim you didn’t mean to imply it wasn’t brainless.

I really have to say, Raph, that if I were going to have a really serious discussion about how to make groups work, and what groups can and can’t leverage in a virtual society, and what tools are needed for them to work, and their dangers and advantages, if I had a choice of having that discussion with Beth Noveck of NYLS who created Democracy Island, and wrote a fascinating but hugely troubling essay on groups and democracy, and who has logged on probably about 3 times since giving the initial project demonstration, or having that discussion with Anshe Chung, who probably spends 16 or even 20 hours a day in SL, I’d pick Anshe Chung. She doesn’t have 6 Phds. But she has incredibly valuable field experience. I can’t emphasize enough how you need to get out more, and find a way for people with this actual field experience to participate.

Most of these millions of people in these games don’t yet have the self-consciousness about their participation in a thing called the Metaverse to take their fate in their own hands.

Yet we need to burn it in now for elites and their advisors who think they will run this thing properly without widespread, democratic participation:

“Nothing about us/without us!”

Prokofy Neva said on May 12th, 2006 at 7:54 am:

Regarding the log-ons and concurrency of SL, I could add that what surprises me is the velocity at which these are increasing. Last year there were 40,000 sign-ups - now there are 260,000. I wouldn’t say that people all quit, however. I have dealt with thousands of these people as my own customers in the last year. Many people get frustrated or bored, but they understand SL is something special and they save their accounts, sometimes even saving a store with content still for sale in it. They check back in, they try it when it is less crashy or when they get a better computer or it adds features they’re interested in, like the recent support for machinima or HUD attachments.

Gosh, I’m the last one to overhype the Borg. I criticize it in my blog daily. But having been in TSO for 2 years intensively, and also having been briefly in some of these other worlds or watched my kids play in them, like Runescape or Neopets or WoW, I’d have to say there is something very different about SL, not only because of the way it hooks up to real life and cashes out money to real dollars legally, but because of the kinds of communities that form and function in it. The story of Second Life is probably going to be about the revolution of groups, and not groups just going in a WoW instance and killing monsters and looting the corpses, but groups accomplishing more complex and interesting things in the field of education, health, politics, civic organizing, art, culture, etc. I actually think that in 10 years time, people will talk about “secondlifing” something, putting some enterprise they are doing into the virtual space to manage and manipulate and do it in virtual ways connected to their real ways, and they will also create private and defined worlds-within-worlds that will be places that many people will live in, during a good chunk of their disposable time. More and more people will get paid to do this.

Raph said on May 12th, 2006 at 10:13 am:

First, let me say that I am not attacking anything here, and I get this aggrieved tone from you that I don’t quite understand. You have a mix of frustration with, and passion for, Second Life which is the hallmark of a true believer. I’m not trying to attack the things you believe in, so there’s no need to get defensive.

Let me clarify the outlier thing. Yes, Anshe’s story is amazing. It is even part of a trend, and I don’t just mean the “earning real world money” trend. But Anshe’s story is so amazing and Anshe has made so much money that it’s just not representative of what most people are like or what they are actually accomplishing. It’s a statistical outlier. It’s AVERAGE person who matters more, not the occasional shooting star, it’s the way in which the world is TYPICALLY used that matters more. I am far more interested in the people who rent fom the land barons, than in the land barons themselves. Those individuals will not have stories nearly as compelling, but they are more representative of the whole.

I don’t think that my comments were coming from tekkie/MMORPG culture. Indeed, I was attacking the infatuation with cool tech, in my original post. And the examples I have been referencing are far more mass market and not very gamey at all. They ARE very “entertainy” though.

As far as the techie governance thing — I note that Second Life has not adopted the Declaration yet either. I’ve been arguing on your side of the fence on that one for a very long time. The whole dispute resolution and group coordination thing is very very far from being a new issue. I am sure that Anshe can bring huge amounts of information to the table on it, but I am also positive that it isn’t going to show as a massive break in tradition from earlier worlds. I also think that it shows a little bit of a lack of awareness of what I’ve done in the past to say that I am not interested in communicating with players or in allowing them participation in the discussion or even administration of these worlds.

What I am arguing for, really, is some perspective. In the larger scope of virtual worlds, yes, I’ll say it again, Hamlet Linden and Anshe are offering much the same point of view. It’s a very idealistic, empowering point of view, and that’s not a bad thing to have around, but it can also be a bit naive. Hamlet’s group was the one that came up with the whole Darfur thing, for example. The political battles over who represents the Lindens’ viewpoint or not is below the radar of the sort of discussions we were having. Those battles are writ small over and over and over again in every world.

I didn’t put together the conference. I would have liked to have had more world users there, and from more worlds. I quite agree with you on the points about broader participation. I also completely concede that any given citizen of SL is going to know far more about SL than I will. I reject the notion that in order to talk about it, I have to be in it 20 hours a week. I think there’s a forest-for-the-trees category error going on there. It’s simply a different viewpoint.

On your other post; I agree there are some good points to be made in favor of SL exceptionalism. The velocity of acquisition is indeed very strong, and the integration of real world commerce is fresh and exciting. We should not lose sight of the tradition from which is sprang, however; you can probably find a LambdaMOO analogue to everything else in SL, such as the forms of social construction, etc. Again, just a perspective thing. All the details will be different; many of the headlines will be the same.

Prokofy Neva said on May 12th, 2006 at 1:27 pm:

>First, let me say that I am not attacking anything here, and I get this aggrieved tone from you that I don’t quite understand. You have a mix of frustration with, and passion for, Second Life which is the hallmark of a true believer. I’m not trying to attack the things you believe in, so there’s no need to get defensive.

Great way to minimize my contribution, there, Raph, make me seem like a raving fan LOL. A “true believer”, blecth. Did you not know I’m permabanned from the SL forums lol? The aggrieved tone is one not peculiar only to me, but is felt by others who are locked out of the process of development by exclusivist claims by “developers” who never ask themselves: who develops? Why do THEY get to develop and be the developers and not somebody else? Of course they can’t ask that of themselves — we’ll have to get them to do it.

You seem to imply there’s this Tinkerbell called Second Life that I “believe in”. Do I clap my little avatar hands with the clap gesture and maybe she’ll come? It’s not about “belief,” it just is. John Lester is standing up in Berkman Center right now and we’re watching him in world (He’s Pathfinder Linden) and calling SL the “shared dream”. I guess that’s their new meme for “evangelism” this week, and I think some might describe more the “shared nightmare.” Don’t mistake passion for something terribly important because it will shape our world awesomely in some fearsome ways, for mere religious-like “belief”.

LL made the Metaverse you could really go and live and move and have your being in. It’s utterly flawed and maybe they should just scrap it and let someone else make a new one, there are many paths to the truth, but I tend to think about SL like I think about democracy: the worst virtual world, except for all the others LOL.

>Let me clarify the outlier thing. Yes, Anshe’s story is amazing. It is even part of a trend, and I don’t just mean the “earning real world money” trend. But Anshe’s story is so amazing and Anshe has made so much money that it’s just not representative of what most people are like or what they are actually accomplishing.

You keep hammering on the Anshe-makes-money story. We got that. But you’re totally missing the Anshe-makes-virtual-communities story and Anshe-fights-powerful-authoritarian-government-to-create-civil-society story. This story is not about a quick buck selling pet rocks in the sky.
You keep describing Anshe as “money maker” and seemingly refuse to take seriously her world-making capacity. Surely you don’t think that only those making FPS toys-for-boys worlds are the only world-makers? Surely the girl stuff can count too like houses and relationships and villages and continents?

>It’s a statistical outlier. It’s AVERAGE person who matters more, not the occasional shooting star, it’s the way in which the world is TYPICALLY used that matters more. I am far more interested in the people who rent fom the land barons, than in the land barons themselves. Those individuals will not have stories nearly as compelling, but they are more representative of the whole.

Yeah, I got that. The point is, the thing driving the land barons is the same thing driving the land barons’ tenants. I’m only a medium-sized land baron, and there are now so many of them that many new people coming in will easily overtake me because the world has gotten so big. I do have to say I know a lot about the people who rent from the land barons as I spend lots of time listening to what they want, seeing what they do in SL, what SL means to them, how they cope with SL, what it gives and what it takes. And I’m trying to convey to you that if you are truly interested in what those people think, you should come in SL and do a business or some other kind of activity rather than just perching at conferences. Seriously.

If nothing else, Just Being Raph Koster, as I gather, would be a little mini-SL-business itself, and a shop on a 512 where all you did was just be would get loads of traffic. Probably the t-shirt sales alone would pay your tier bill.

>I don’t think that my comments were coming from tekkie/MMORPG culture. Indeed, I was attacking the infatuation with cool tech, in my original post. And the examples I have been referencing are far more mass market and not very gamey at all. They ARE very “entertainy” though.

OK, granted, I’m glad you see that.

>As far as the techie governance thing — I note that Second Life has not adopted the Declaration yet either. I’ve been arguing on your side of the fence on that one for a very long time.

I read your Avatar Rights and I found them very insufficient. We’re not just avatars in MMORPGs anymore. We’re people who have become “as angels”.
I would dare you to spend even one hour a week trying to push your Avatar Bill of Rights *inworld* and seriously correcting them with more RL rule of law considerations needed there, protection of consumer rights and not just creator rights being just one of many topics. Start by putting

Thoughts on the Metaverse Summit

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