How Open Big virtual worlds grow
Over at WoW Insider, an article asks “Why are people leaving WoW?” They offer up this graph of concurrency from Warcraftrealms as evidence.
Well, here I am to explain. 🙂
Game talk
This is the catch-all category for stuff about games and game design. It easily makes up the vast majority of the site’s content. If you are looking for something specific, I highly recommend looking into the tags used on the site instead. They can narrow down the hunt immensely.
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What is a virtual world?
In response to Lum and Cuppy and Moorgard:
Online games and virtual worlds are not the same thing. If you’re building an MMO, you better be sure which one you intend to make.
Online game: a game played using network connectivity.
Virtual world: a simulation of space. cf long usage in the VR community, 3d viz community, etc. Somewhat deprecated since these days, everyone wants connectivity.
Online virtual world: a simulation of persistent space connected to via a network, wherein users are represented by proxies often terms avatars. Note thatboth “online” and “virtual” are often elided from the term.
Synthetic world: see online virtual world.MUD: old term for online virtual world.
Avatar: the proxy by which a user is represented in an online virtual world.
Toon: see avatar.
MMOG: an online virtual world wherein embedded systems layered atop the spatial simulation present game rules.
MMORPG: an MMOG where the game presented is an RPG.
“Worldy”: an adjective applied to MMORPGs to describe RPGs with certain rather specific game characteristics, such as freedom of character construction, diverse rule systems including non-combat roles, etc.
“Social”: an adective applied to online virtual worlds to indicate that their primary emphasis is not on games.
Metaverse: the hypothetical idea that online virtual worlds would be linked together to form a single network.
Mirror world: an online virtual world that mirrors data from the real world.
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IBM/MIT Virtual Worlds conference notes
Virtual Worlds News is liveblogging IBM and MIT’s conference.
- Opening remarks.
- Colin Parris: “Virtual Worlds and Business Value”
- “Digital Convergence and Identity” panel
I am sure more will be posted.
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GigaOM’s Top 10 Most Popular MMOs
You may join the debate already in progress.
FWIW, I think some of these numbers are wrong. But the overall point the list is trying to make is right.
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Virtual Goods Summit, Supernova
I’ll be speaking at the Virtual Goods Summit 2007, which takes place June 22 at Stanford University. This is one of those fortuitous coincidence things — I was going to be in town speaking at Supernova, which I’ve mentioned before as being one of my favorite tech conferences, and the chance to show up at the summit luckily slotted in right before I have to catch a plane back home. 🙂In both cases it’ll be panels — the Supernova one will be more general, about virtual worlds overall, and folks like Reuben Steiger of Millions of Us and Clay Shirky will be on it. The one at the Virtual Goods Summit will be about brass tacks — the issues you run into when diving into the whole microtransaction world — and oh boy, it’s an interesting mix of folks on it. Details:
