Putting the World in WWW

This talk was presented as a joint keynote for both the Sandbox and Web3d group sat SIGGRAPH.

Video

This video includes all the slides plus some annotations covering errata, as I spoke off the cuff.

Slides

PDF

Transcript

Seven Stories About Web 3D, Sandbox Games, and the Postage-Stamp Screen

Cleaned transcript from a YouTube auto-caption transcript. Lightly edited for readability: timestamps, repeated filler, and obvious captioning errors have been removed; paragraphing and headings have been added. The source transcript appears to cut off during the Q&A, so the ending is marked as incomplete.

Introduction

Host: I really love Raph Koster’s game design book, and I’d like to introduce Chris Swain, who’s part of the committee and will actually introduce Raph. Thanks, everybody, and I’ll be seeing you throughout the whole conference.

Chris Swain: Thank you. I was joking around with Raph and said, “You’re a game designer who doesn’t need an introduction.” He didn’t agree, so I’m going to give him an introduction.

Raph is a professional game designer and frequent writer on issues of virtual world design. He was a lead designer on the seminal online world Ultima Online, which first brought online worlds to the mass market. Until 2006, he was chief creative officer for Sony Online Entertainment, makers of EverQuest, where he was the lead designer on Star Wars Galaxies.

His essays and writings on online world design include widely reprinted and influential pieces such as “Declaring the Rights of Players,” “The Laws of Online World Design,” and “A Story About a Tree.” He’s in demand as a speaker and lecturer on issues of online world design, particularly in the area of community building. He’s a regular at the Game Developers Conference and is the maintainer of the canonical history of virtual worlds at his website, raphkoster.com. His book A Theory of Fun for Game Design was published in 2004 and is used in several university courses as study material.

Everyone, please welcome Raph Koster.

[Music and applause]

Seven Stories

Raph Koster: Those intros are so formal.
How many of you are Web 3D people? And how many of you are sandboxy game people?
When I realized I had to give one talk that somehow was interesting to both of you, I panicked. I was talking about it with my co-founder at my company, Metaplace, and he said, “Tell a story.”
So I decided that I would tell a story. I’m going to tell you seven stories, actually. I’m going to ask you to bear with me a little bit, because some of these stories may not seem particularly relevant to you. Maybe, for all I know, none of them will feel particularly relevant. But if that’s the case, then at the end of it we can all go have drinks over at the Fig, and it won’t matter. Hopefully, you’ll have been somewhat entertained for an hour or so.
But maybe they will be relevant. I don’t know. It’s stunt speaking. You get to put it back together in your head after I say it and see whether it still makes sense.
In that spirit, I want to start once upon a time, with the story of music.

The Story of Music

You’re all either Web 3D or game people. Are any of you actually from the music parts of games?
Stand proud. You’re always at the bottom of the totem pole for resources, aren’t you?
Here’s what I want you to do, and bear with me: close your eyes for a minute. I realize that at a graphics conference this is very hard to do, but do it for me anyhow.
Do we have audio back?
[Music plays]
Did you like that? Yes? No? You can open your eyes.
Music is kind of amazing, right? Did you see any pictures?
Audience: A meadow.
A meadow. Kind of like walking through?
Audience: Light playing through trees.
Light playing through trees. We’re all very New Age here.
Audience: It’s a road song. It’s a traveling song.
It’s a traveling song. As it happens, the name of that song is “Longitude.” Good call.
That was a solo guitar piece. I actually thought about bringing my guitar and starting by playing that, and then I decided I wasn’t schlepping it all the way up here and then not having anywhere to put it when we went for drinks at the Fig. What would I do with it then? So I figured I’d settle for a recording.
The thing about that is how much it can tell a story, and how much people can see pictures without seeing anything at all.
I’m going to ask you just for a minute — as you might have noticed, I’m very interactive with these talks — other than the piece of music you just heard, what was the last music you heard?
This morning, probably, because you’ve been trapped here all day. You all have heard music in the last twenty-four hours, yes?
When was the last time you listened to music?
That isn’t something we do very much anymore, is it? Active listening. Going out. Once upon a time, people would have played that guitar in your living room. The guitar was a parlor instrument; that’s what that means. So was the banjo, believe it or not.
Once upon a time, we had a very different kind of intimate relationship with music. Today, music is no longer a medium. It’s a utility, like tap water. It’s disposable — in a way, beyond disposable. We use it as wallpaper.
If you think about it, that’s a little bit sad.
The end of the first story.

The Story of Science Fiction

I’m a science fiction fan. Any of you science fiction fans?
This movie sucked, didn’t it? It was really, really, really bad. This is the movie, of course — Michael Crichton regularly creates science fiction that sucks, but I’ll try not to be too snobbish about it.
This is the movie that gave us the quintessentially Web 3D-ish moment of him rifling through a virtual filing cabinet at the end of a virtual hallway in order to find an incriminating virtual piece of paper. Exciting. Well, there was some kind of “he had to hack it in under five minutes” thing. It sucked; I don’t remember it very well.
Oh my God, has science fiction gotten this wrong.
I didn’t even see this one. The first one got it wrong. Actually, it isn’t just movies that have gotten it wrong. Books have, too.
I don’t know about you, but when I go to Google I don’t get any swords made out of glowing code, and I can’t chop a hole in the floor to escape. Sometimes I want to, but I can’t.
It’s funny because a lot of what we do — and here I’m talking to both groups in the room — is driven by these people. That’s not always a bad thing. Honestly, if you’re reading Vernor Vinge and Charlie Stross right now, then you’re heading in the right direction. Whereas if you’re still reading this, because it’s no longer 1992, it means you’re heading in the wrong direction.
Science fiction has shaped quite a lot of our dreams about what the internet is, about what 3D web means, about metaverse, cyberspace, all of that stuff. For better or worse, it has also shaped our notion of what virtual environments and games should be, could be, and can do.
And they look kind of like this.
Flying cars. This is what the school of art terms “retrofuturism,” which is, in short, the school of art about how wrong we got it.
The thing about retrofuturism, science fiction, and the ways in which they’ve made us think about the future is that they have kind of permanently infected our brains. We can’t let go of some of these old dreams. There’s a guy commercializing a flying car right now. It actually works. A personal jetpack, too. One took off in a test flight just a week ago, I read it on Boing Boing.
It’s funny because it has circumscribed our dreams in an interesting way, which is a strange thing to accuse science fiction writers of. After all, they got us to the moon. No Robert Heinlein juvenile novels would have meant no people walking on the moon — not that we’ve gone back, but they opened up a lot of dreams. At the same time, they kind of closed them back down again.
This is a scene from Ratchet & Clank on the PS3. It looks awfully retrofuturistic to me.
There’s something going on that I want to talk about here: the ways in which we’ve looked at our past and decided to build our foundations on older ideas rather than new ideas.
If you go back and look at the earliest thoughts about what would eventually get called the internet, once the technology actually existed, you’d find that it was mostly about library science. You’d find it was about the Memex. You’d find it was Vannevar Bush in 1945 saying, “Use some gestural stuff on my touchscreen, and then it will give me the printout of the document I wanted that it retrieved via pneumatic tube.” It was so close and yet so far.
Right now — especially right now — we are caught looking at a world that isn’t actually there. When we go to develop what we develop, when we make our plans for graphic engines and virtual worlds and new forms of social media, we’re not doing it by looking at what the world is actually like. We’re doing it by reference to this, an awful lot of the time.
It’s interesting, because I think the kind of people we are in this room are close to the only people on the planet who do that. Of course, we’re the ones who get the jokes about Lawnmower Man 2, a movie nobody but us saw.
In many ways, we’re very insular and self-referential. That’s a good thing, because frankly, in many ways we’re all social outcasts and we need each other very badly. But in other ways it can be a little dangerous if we can’t stay in touch with the way ordinary people live.
It makes them look at us funny sometimes. It makes them look funny at what we make. And those of us here in this room are in the business of making things for people.
There’s a moral in that one, but I’ll come back to it.

The Story of Line Rider

Once upon a time, there was a TV commercial. It came on while I was watching, quite against my will, a show on Cartoon Network. It showed this little dude sliding across the face of a guy with a big nose, sailing past a Dasani water bottle, past some french fries, and landing on top of a McDonald’s logo, all to the tune of some cool music.
I sat up absolutely straight and said, “Oh my God, that’s Line Rider.”
How many of you have played Line Rider? How many of you haven’t played Line Rider?
Line Rider is a simple little Flash game where you draw lines on the screen, and at the top of wherever you first start there’s a little dude on a sled, and he slides on your lines. I strongly encourage you to go to YouTube and see the freaking giant palaces of Xanadu people have created for this guy to slide around on for ten or fifteen minutes worth of unbelievable animation.
Line Rider at this point has touched something like sixteen million people. An enviable figure.
When I mentioned the Line Rider commercial to the guys at work, they said, “That’s funny. Why did they pick Line Rider? I mean, it’s McDonald’s, for God’s sake. You’d think they could pick something popular, like Halo.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about that question. I sat down and did some back-of-the-envelope math calculations, and I realized it was quite likely that Line Rider had greater market penetration and mindshare than the Cartoon Network show the commercial was on.
It has more penetration than Gossip Girl, which I bet we’ve all heard about — unless we really are that insular a community. Who hasn’t heard about Gossip Girl?
Audience: We’re from Europe.
Secret Diary of a Call Girl?
Okay, I have this great new Hollywood pitch. It’s called The Secret Life Diary of an American Teenage Call Girl. It can air both on Showtime and ABC Family at once.
The interesting thing about that Line Rider moment was that it reminded me — and I realize this weekly because of what I do right now, but I still need reminding weekly because everybody around me is trying to play the latest and greatest BioShock or whatever — that the game business has changed a lot in the last couple of years.
Are any of you game-industry outsiders who do indie stuff?
The good news is: you guys are now the industry. The game industry proper hasn’t figured out that it isn’t the industry anymore. That doesn’t mean you get any more respect, but it is the case.
If you ask industry people, they’ll say, “Oh my God, PC SKUs are doing really terribly. PC gaming is dead.” And then you go: Line Rider. Sixteen million. PC gaming dead. Line Rider. Incompatible thought.
The hot platform today is the internet, not the consoles. In fact, I can now install printer drivers on my PlayStation 3. That, to me, means it is no longer a console. It is officially a PC. If I have to deal with driver incompatibility, it’s no longer a console.
The hot audience is no longer the gamer. The hot audience is ordinary people. That’s who everybody is trying to reach.
The hot feature is no longer single-player. It is multiplayer. Blizzard is adding achievements to all Blizzard games. The hot technology is connectivity. And the hottest games on the planet are games you can be done with in five minutes.
That’s creepy. It’s freaky. It’s disturbing, because I don’t know how any of those games make money. Quite a lot of them don’t. That must strike huge, enormous amounts of fear into the likes of EA, who respond by making more things like MySims and more things like Sims Carnival, or by acquiring Sims on Stage, which doesn’t even resemble a game at all, but they can put “Sims” on it, so maybe it will sell to the gamers — except it won’t, because it’s basically YouTube.
The game has changed completely. It’s almost like the game industry is turning into not-the-game-industry, while there’s this segment over here still spending the money.
I ran the numbers on that too. Since 1982, our spending on a triple-A game has risen by a factor of 125. Yes, that’s 125 times what we used to spend in 1982 budgets. We’ve gotten six times better at making the content, so we’ve gotten some efficiencies back, but not enough.
There’s an interesting inflection point hitting, because this isn’t where the audience is. Instead, the audience is on these little things. You don’t have to come to SIGGRAPH to learn how to make these graphics. What’s more, an artist didn’t make these graphics. A player did.
This is what a Line Rider level looks like. You can see some of the characteristics that these new games have. Some of them aren’t new. Fantasy football hits this list. You want mass-market gaming? Fantasy football is mass-market gaming.
This is also networked Bar Trivia. It’s LOLcats. It’s vampires on Facebook. That is where the mass-market game industry has gone while we weren’t looking. We were sitting there spending piles of money.
McDonald’s, of course, has caught onto this. McDonald’s is somewhat better at market research than the game industry. They’re launching Happy Meal 3.0. You can go there right now and log in. It is a virtual world. They’re letting kids name the world. It’s done entirely in Flash, and it’s nothing but minigames.
I predict that this will be bigger than World of Warcraft in twelve months. Anybody want to bet against me on this? They’re putting the codes on every Happy Meal bag.
Somehow, I don’t think that the lovely X3D-based competitor is going to do as well.
I don’t want to pick on these guys; they’re doing rather interesting work, actually. But I think there’s a little bit of a mismatch of expectations here. Does the person who was happy with Line Rider want everything that we do at SIGGRAPH?
The end of this story.

The Story of the Toaster

I want to tell you about a toaster.
When was the last time you saw a brilliant, innovative design for a toaster?
Yeah, me neither.
Toasters are curious. Today, they exist in two flavors: ones where you put toast in a slot, and ones where you put toast in an oven. That was a major innovation, and fairly recent, actually.
The thing about toasters is that they’re a symbol for us. We talk about toasters as something ubiquitous, trivially easy to use, something everybody has — although, honestly, everybody owns one and a hell of a lot of people don’t actually eat toast every day. Yet everybody persuades themselves that it’s just part of the standard kitchen. You get three in your wedding-gift pile. Inevitable. Everybody has toasters.
A long time ago — thirteen years ago — I said, and I’m going to commit the PowerPoint sin of reading my own words, so forgive me for the ancient terminology here… For “mother,” please read “virtual world user.”

No doubt the number of MUDders will increase as the number of internets does, but the big explosion will probably not happen until access can be made as simple as operating a toaster, preferably with a graphical interface.

Which kind of dates this. The primary mode most virtual-world users used back then, of course, was command-line text, which does have its benefits.
Here’s the interesting thing. We spend an awful lot of time making really, really pretty stuff on that graphical interface. But thirty percent of people on the planet access the internet only on a screen the size of a largish postage stamp. Exclusively on that screen.
Thirty percent and rising. Another thirty-three percent use that and a PC — which these days includes a PlayStation 3.
There’s something going on there. Which one is the toaster?
This is a recently released piggy bank. Tomy makes it. When your kid deposits money, it goes into their gold-coin stash, and they can use it to buy weapon upgrades. Then they can play with the piggy bank, and earn experience as they deposit, and level up. I expect this to go massively multiplayer.
Look, it has a screen the size of a postage stamp, black and white, looks about thirty-two by thirty-two.
Is this the toaster?
It’s interesting, because for however big Second Life may have gotten, the one everybody points to right now is World of Warcraft. But if you look at the number of users that World of Warcraft has in North America — in Europe and North America, the North America figure is about two and a half million right now — and you take estimated active users per month, World of Warcraft comes in third on our table of the most popular virtual worlds on the internet.
Show of hands: how many of you have heard of Habbo Hotel? The number one. Good.
How many of you have heard of Sherwood Dungeon? The last. Written in Shockwave by a team of two.
How many of you have heard of Millsberry? That would be Millsberry as in General Mills — as in, this is a virtual world based on breakfast cereal.
The weird thing is that the toasters and postage stamps are getting better. Anybody want to guess what cutting-edge renderer this is?
[Applause]
Flash. This is the Alternativa engine running in Flash. The headlights are in the rearview mirror. The postage stamps are catching up to us — to those of us in this room who are used to thinking instead about what amazing ray tracing we can do with a Larrabee architecture.
There’s something interesting about what other media have done when faced with this kind of thing, and it’s something we haven’t really successfully done.
I’m going to assume most of you have heard of this particular IP. Nobody said no, so I’m going to proceed.
As you may know, this is actually a transmedia IP, to use the latest buzzword. It began originally as a novel, during a time in history when novels were a declining feature of American life and no longer had the kind of mass-market penetration they once had. At one point, the novel was important enough that people lined up in mobs — literal mobs, hundreds deep — on the docks waiting for new Dickens chapters to show up.
So Gone with the Wind, as big as it may have been, was in the decline and fall of the novel. Nonetheless, it was moderately popular and achieved some cultural recognition. Then it was trans-modified into a different type and became a movie, which also achieved some moderate success — which, when adjusted for inflation and ticket prices, turns out to still be right here at the top of the heap.
The interesting thing about this is that it doesn’t really matter how much we think Clark Gable is Rhett Butler. He ain’t. Rhett Butler is actually still on the pages of the book. But he’s here, and he’s here, and he’s here.
This is what an IP contrary to graphics can do.
I bring this up because we’re here talking for a whole week about pictures, and I want to point out how little pictures can matter. Hark back to the guitar music you heard me play at the beginning. An awful lot of central things in our culture have managed to be incredibly relevant and important, and to get reinterpreted for new generations.
This is a novel retelling the story of the missing dad, in case you ever wondered where the hell he went. Why wasn’t he around while his daughter was dying of pneumonia? Now you can read this book and find out.
This has happened over and over again. Wicked, the novel, becomes Wicked, the musical; now Wicked, the movie, is coming. It happens in the other direction. Songs turn into pop hits, which become the stage musical, which now becomes a really dreadful movie with Meryl Streep.
It happens in all kinds of directions. But it doesn’t happen very well with what we do. We’re not very good at this whole transmedia thing — creating IP that exists in this vague, nebulous space that isn’t tied to representation.
If I flip back to Ratchet & Clank and take away the big ears, can you tell me what Ratchet & Clank is?
You wouldn’t have any problem with this, right? There’s something there. It doesn’t really matter what it looks like. In fact, it’s so malleable and flexible that we feel completely comfortable with people taking it and doing crazy stuff with it. It’s perfectly fine with us because we understand that, to some degree, we own this idea ourselves.
It became a design that has gone beyond what its creators intended and gone beyond the way that its creators represented it.
There are people out there right now in other segments of the entertainment industry who do this on purpose. We’re in L.A. Is anybody here from Hollywood?
No, they just don’t want to raise their hands.
When you look at the kinds of things happening in Hollywood today around TV shows like Lost and Heroes, they’re doing this on purpose. Lost is no longer what ends up on the film. Yet somehow our games, our notion of creativity, is still bound up in this.
I’ll leave that as a little moral, and maybe we’ll come back to it.

The Story of Congress and the Pink Rabbits

Once upon a time, there was an august body of mostly white males. They were a very self-important group. They formed committees. They used a gavel. They talked amongst themselves a lot, and they postured for others, and they really desperately wanted to be highly respected so people would give them money, so they could stay in their chambers and continue to pound gavels.
But they are very important and vital, in fact, to the functioning of our democracy.
Does anybody know who this is? If you squint, you can read it at the bottom. This is Representative Edward Markey of the United States House of Representatives, and this would be his Second Life avatar.
This year, we had the notable event — and it is a major notable event — of a congressional hearing on the subject of virtual worlds and virtual world law held simultaneously in Congress and in Second Life.
That’s really cool.
Of course, it also led to The Washington Post commenting, in unwitting observance of April Fool’s Day, that some of the people attending the hearing were large fluffy pink rabbits.
Yeah.
I want to hark back to that whole retrofuture thing: who do we talk to, who do we interact with, what are our references? Frankly, if there were giant pink rabbits sitting in this room, I for one would feel no qualms whatsoever. I’m kind of used to that. I bet a lot of you are too.
Is anybody here going to fess up to having something higher than a level 15 in WoW?
Yeah, see? And does it look like the giant bull, or like the nearly pornographic chick with the ears? Both? Yeah.
So fluffy pink rabbits are not out of the question, really.
But somehow the rest of the world doesn’t quite see it that way. “What the hell is this rabbit doing here when you should be worrying about the price of gas, or whether Russia is invading Georgia,” and all that kind of thing.
Yet to us, this feels important. It feels significant.
I think we don’t always understand how little what we do can matter to the ordinary person.
This guy, ironically, is a science fiction writer, just to tie it back a little bit: Robert J. Sawyer, multiple Hugo Award winner. He’s actually won many awards for his science fiction. Yet here is one of those guru types who set our entire path saying, “Virtual reality is air guitar writ large and meaningless.”
Now, clearly he hasn’t played Rock Band. But he has a point.
There is some element of what we do that is pink bunny rabbits in Congress and isn’t quite connecting. It takes something like Rock Band, which is a completely and thoroughly non-science-fictional fantasy — a completely mundane and ordinary fantasy for people, the fantasy I didn’t get to fulfill by bringing a guitar and opening the conference with — something we all wish.
Sure, for the guys it tends to be the Strat, and for the girls it’s more bouncing with the hairbrush on the bed in front of the mirror. But come on, everybody should fess up. We’ve all dreamed of it.
The fantasy that crossed over was not the retrofuture giant jetpack and flying-car one, was it? It wasn’t the one we all grew up dreaming about, the one that got us into this business.
The end of that tale.

The Story of Kenya

Once upon a time, there was a country called Kenya.
This is my telephone. It is obsolete, and yes, it runs Windows Mobile. I’m sorry.
There are one billion people on the planet who live on less in a year than I spent on this phone. A lot of them live in Kenya, as it happens.
This is a traditional Maasai warrior with a cell phone, with a screen the size of a postage stamp. I bet you could play Line Rider on that thing.
There’s a company in Kenya called Safaricom. Vodafone owns a chunk of them now. At first, nobody thought doing a cell-phone company in Kenya would make any sense at all. But today Safaricom has something like ten million users in Kenya.
Part of the reason is that they don’t charge by cell-phone minutes. They charge by the second. I kid you not: literally cell phone by the second.
They had a problem, because it can be dangerous in Kenya sometimes. You can get robbed. It’s a long way from town out to the villages. A lot of people wanted to keep in touch, but they couldn’t afford to call people to tell them where they were, and there were no land lines out there anyway. So instead they would dial the number and hang up while it was still ringing, which clogged up the network like crazy. But at least people could keep in touch.
So much so that Safaricom had to allow five free texts a day for everybody, because people needed it to keep in touch.
The result is that Safaricom is all over the place. If you look worldwide at the postage-stamp-sized screens, which don’t display the pretty graphics, don’t display all the wonderful pictures, and don’t display the giant Ratchet & Clank ears, they way, way outnumber the kinds of platforms we’re used to working on.
Because they fill particular needs — like not getting mugged on your way home in Kenya.
They call it “bob.” It’s the Kenyan shilling, technically, but it’s a lot better to use your phone to text the money home than it is to use a bank account, because in Kenya nobody can get to the bank, but everybody can get to the local cell-phone outlet.
So the virtual currency in Kenya in which people put their savings is M-Pesa, and it is run by Safaricom, the partially owned subsidiary of Vodafone.
This isn’t unique to Kenya. It’s spreading out. China has the QQ coin, which has occasioned Chinese legislation because China started to get a little worried that people were literally keeping their entire life savings in QQ coins. QQ coins are used in order to play The Jewel.
It’s interesting to see the ways in which what we do has touched people in ways we really, really, really didn’t think about.
I don’t think the guys who made Bejeweled at PopCap ever thought that a pirated Korean version would become the backbone of the rural Chinese economy. And yet it did.
Part of the moral of this particular piece of the story is: why didn’t we think of that?
What is it about our frame of reference that keeps us from realizing that playing a stupid toy plastic guitar isn’t a niche product that will never sell, as was said at great length before Guitar Hero came out? Why is it that we don’t realize that the ability to acquire virtual coins and currency is going to literally become a $1.2 billion industry around the Pacific Rim? Why is it we don’t understand that yes, scribbling lines in black and white is going to be a more resonant experience with today’s youth than Halo 3?
What is it about the blinders we as an industry have, when we don’t understand how people use our stuff?
Because this matters a lot. This is the real power of what we do, not running around in rocket-shaped monorail buildings on some virtual island fantasy.
How many of this year’s SIGGRAPH demos will run on this machine, which, if it succeeds, will become probably the single most important computing platform in a continent?
Why isn’t the industry making these games? Why is it that instead it has to be a bunch of crazy guys at various universities? Granted, it’s always been crazy guys at various universities who’ve accomplished great things — many of you are in the room — but we’re the ones who know how to do this. That’s what we tell ourselves.
Where’s the money? Well, ten million subscribers in Kenya ain’t chump change. QQ coins make a lot of money — more money than I care to think about.
It’s an interesting question. One of the things that’s happening, like the piece of music I played for you — which is not registered with ASCAP — is that a lot of this trend is for creative content to be donations to society. The entire music industry is currently a donation to society. We don’t know yet.
I think the question for us is how long until everything on the postage-stamp screens — because actually pretty much all Flash games are Line Riders — is a donation to society. The Line Rider guys clearly have been paid; McDonald’s paid them, so clearly they’re making some money.
It’s an excellent question. I’ll tell you bluntly: I don’t know where the money is.
I think one of the things starting to happen is the content’s value on the open market is approaching zero. That doesn’t mean people won’t make money.
You know what this is? Do any of you shop at Target?
Nobody fesses up to shopping at Target. There’s nothing wrong with shopping at Target.
This is a rack that lives next to the extraordinarily large PC games aisle at Target — which, by the way, is extraordinarily large. It does, in fact, dwarf the PlayStation 3 aisle at Target. It is full of, those of you in the game industry will know how shocking this is, adventure games. Really. Up to episode 12 of the Nancy Drew series. Nothing but adventure games as far as the eye can see.
One aisle over, right next to the top-selling pop albums, is this rack. This rack is the United States equivalent of QQ coins. This rack is prepaid virtual-currency cards for all the games you guys aren’t playing, the ones that were on that graph.
It’s funny because WoW is not on this rack.
This is where the kids are.
They work just like phone cards: prepaid minutes, prepaid currency. You spend them. In fact, it works a lot like the M-Pesa stuff people in Kenya use to send home their savings.
I don’t think that, when we were going “Oh yes, Web 3D,” one of the core business skills we would need for Web 3D was to be fiduciary institutions. I’m here to tell you today that that is a more central core competency to Web 3D and the metaverse than rendering.
It’s weird. I really didn’t go into this business thinking that would be the case.
You may notice I haven’t really mentioned consoles very much in this whole thing. That’s because they are this.

The Story of the Radio

Once upon a time in Australia, if you bought a radio you had to pick and choose: were you going to buy the radio for Station A, or the radio for Station B?
This lasted until the 1920s, when somebody hacked a radio.
I leave you to draw your own conclusions on that one.
The reason this can be a joint keynote is because there is no difference anymore between the games guys and the Web 3D guys. You are actually working in exactly the same industry, even if you don’t know it.
The danger, of course, is that both of you are working in this industry without realizing you’re also working in the same industry as Safaricom in Kenya.
Because you are.
That is the name of the game now. We’re not going to get to split up this pie into tiny little pieces anymore. Smart people have figured this out.
I don’t know how many of you are currently working on really cool ATI or Nvidia hardware, but if you want to know what my current best bet for the console of the future is, it’s Flash. They just signed a deal to make it an open standard put on all these televisions and phones. Look at the list of partners they have. Oh my God.
That’s kind of scary, actually, because if Flash wins, then we still have one View-Master to write for. We don’t want to have just one. We want to have many.
But what we’re seeing here is a convergence toward a very different kind of world.
This is a world where the average screen resolution on PCs has dropped in the last two years, not risen. The reason is that people want smaller laptops. This laptop here has a very nice screen. It’s a tablet PC, and I can draw on it: 1400 by 1050. I can’t upgrade, because the factory making that size screen has been closed permanently. The average size for laptop screens has shrunk.
We’re heading for postage-stamp land.
“Web 3D” is a bad name — sorry, conference organizers — because the web in 3D probably won’t be in three dimensions, and it isn’t going to be about visuals. If we really want to have an academic conference forecasting the future of the inter-network, metaverse, ultra-connected reality, we need to be asking: what is the client that runs on that toaster? The literal toaster. The one that makes bread.
Honestly, I’m going to see that toaster networked to my refrigerator before my kids go to their prom.
That is Web 3D.
“Sandbox” — sorry, organizers — is a really bad name, because it says, “Look, here’s a game we made. You can come past the wooden plank into the sand and play with the toys in there. Please don’t get any sand out of the box. You can do everything you want in there, but the sand stays in the box.”
That is already not our world.
Any of you who have a customized Yahoo page know it is not our world. Any of you who use Facebook and have plugin applications that are literally querying fifty websites just to pull up your picture of your puppy know that is not the real world today.
The sandbox has exploded. It is everywhere.
Every single one of the technologies on here — augmented-reality lenses that let you see holographic stuff floating in front of your eyes, foldable screens you could wear on your T-shirt — is currently on the path to commercialization and adoption. Right here, now. Just like the flying car.
We’re not in science fiction land anymore. And Snow Crash had it really wrong. Really, really wrong.
When we come to a conference about the future of game design, when we come to discuss the future of graphics, it isn’t about pixel filters. It’s about what people can do with the pixels they’ve got.
All technology exists to serve people. It isn’t about polygons. It’s about personalities. It’s about meeting needs. We have to broaden our notion of needs out of “getting to the boss at the last end of the level” and back onto the things that are actually breaking ground, like Wii Fit.
Why did none of us think of Wii Fit? Why does it take that Japanese genius to kick us in the ass over and over again?
What’s going on there? Why do we still dream of that crazy Jetsons world? That isn’t where we’re going. It isn’t where we are now.
I’ve told you seven stories. They’re all the same story.
Someday we’re going to walk over to Starbucks. We’re going to sit down. It’s going to be musical wallpaper, for sure — but Starbucks is a music label now. One of the Beatles works for Starbucks.
We’re going to sit down there, and when we sit down and blink our eyes, our contact lens will pop up the Starbucks virtual world right there. But it’s going to be rendered in such a way that we can reach right through it, so we can get our triple half-caf decaf triple-whatever latte.
It’s going to know to transparently log you into the appropriate virtual world for wherever you’re standing. It’s going to annotate the caloric intake of your latte. It’s going to tell you that your friend is actually still back at the office, and he’s got an order for this — because you know what Web 3D is going to be about? Staying in touch and delivering coffee back to your buddy at work.
It might even look like a game. You might have to jump over some logs and fireballs to get it back there, because by doing so you might earn some more cash for your Starbucks card, which is accepted when you make your mortgage payments.
That is Web 3D. That is the sandbox. That’s what’s almost here now.
Because the nasty secret is that you could almost build that right now with off-the-shelf open-source tech. Right now.
Given that, let’s listen to some more music.
[Music plays. Applause.]
There are millions of things like this on YouTube. They touch more people than the recorded music.
So Web 3D, the sandbox games, all of it — where we’re going is back to the party. Back to inviting people into our homes, into our lives.
Thank you.
[Music and applause]

Q&A

Moderator: We have time for a few questions. You have statistics to back up all the philosophies, also. If people would like to line up, I think that might be a little bit less crazy. Also, we have a gift for Raph
Any questions?
Raph Koster: Are there any questions? You thought I was definitive? Come on.
Audience question: [The question is inaudible in the source transcript, but appears to ask whether the future he is describing is primarily augmented reality.]
Raph Koster: It isn’t just AR, actually. There has been some really interesting research and roadmapping around it at Stanford recently. The Metaverse Roadmapping Project happened under the auspices of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, and it breaks into four parts.
Virtual worlds are going to continue to be a significant part of it. But one thing I didn’t show you is a video survey that’s floating around right now; it got a lot of blogosphere attention. Fully half of the major virtual worlds in development right now actually run in Flash and 2D and are embedded in a browser.
I think we’re within a year or two of seeing virtual worlds use standard ad-banner technology, rather than thinking in terms of the immersive space.
The other areas we really need to be looking at, in terms of what Web 3D is going to become: AR is a big part of it, particularly geotagging, geolocation, geo-annotation, that kind of thing. Mirror-worlding is also going to be a significant part of what goes on. That’s replicating real-world environments into virtual environments in order to do takeoffs, further exploration, virtual tourism, that sort of thing.
The third big part is lifelogging, which I really barely touched on. That’s essentially recording absolutely everything you do.
Web 3D is really going to exist at the intersection of those four things: virtual worlds, mirror worlds, AR, and lifelogging. That isn’t really a space that is — it’s a space that is representation-agnostic. That’s the key message, I guess. If anything, that’s the underlying moral to all seven stories: representation agnosticism.
The value behind things like transmedia IPs, behind things like the virtual currency on the phone, the toaster — all of those things — is that they are independent of display.
As Web 3D takes root, and we already see it taking root, it’s going to lose the 3D part. It’s just going to be web. We need to start thinking in terms of how our technologies adapt to that, because that kind of representation-agnostic, device-independent, display-independent existence is what’s really going to be at the heart of the metaverse, to go back to Neal Stephenson’s term.
So, aspects of AR — but we shouldn’t forget: how many of you are walking around with a phone right now and have ever used it for asking for directions, checking our—
[Source transcript cuts off here.]