There Inc. Stops Consumer 'Virtual World' Updates

Thanks to Terra Nova for its story discussing a major refocusing at PC 'virtual world' company There Inc., as an official statement mirrored on ThereUniverse.com explains the company is "changing its strategic direction to focus on our technology platform", and "we will no longer be making regular updates to the [There 'virtual world' consumer] software, and we will not be fixing bugs", some claim due to plateauing interest in the game. Terra Nova points out: "Presumably There will be continuing their work with organizations like the US Army. Though they make it clear that this isn't a shut-down of the consumer world, it can't be good news for the development of virtual worlds beyond the typical D&D-inspired MMOGs", a category which also includes PC 'virtual world' title Second Life.

Comments

Second post!

[DourSalmon]

w00t! oh wait, crap. This sucks about There. (dissect that, grammar teachers!) While I hadn't played it myself, I was struck by how great an idea it was. I like the whole socializing aspect of MMOGs, the annoying thing to me is the whole "timesink" mentality. It was nice to see something that was not dedicated to leveling up, but rather more of a social environment. R.I.P. There, 2004. You will be missed.

so where is the "game"??

[oooorainbow]

Their biggest problem is there isn't enough game to it, and people lose interest very quickly. Numerous companies like this have seen failures in the Asia part of the world, and no, a shift to technology focus will not change their fate. They are no idSoft.

Re:so where is the "game"??

[Neillparatzo]

I had an idea to make There into an Unreal Tournament mod once, but that unfortunately never panned out.

annoying forced interaction

[Anonymous Coward]

my problem is that i enjoy anonymity. but moments after entering the game some overweighted character girl came up to me and started pressuring me to join in the conversation with her groups of friends.

if they perhaps allowed you to completely disguise yourself like a complete character redesign with your global ID number hidden from other players (or how about a nice "anonymous" generic profile? what a concept!) - now that might have made the social aspect just a bit deeper - less rigidified, less clichy (which in my opinion is something that turns off a great deal of geeks) - and thus they would have garnered a great deal more attention.

Forced social interaction is not my idea of fun: Waste my time talking to some overwieghted character. what kind of person makes thier character less attractive? whatever, unfair judgement on my part(her bio had a picture of her and she was indeed below average, though i'm sure a nice person, really really pushy). gave me "the" shirt. "you have to come on tommorow night to talk with me and my friends and pass that shirt to the next guest!"

Nice idea, I don't want to play like that. Anonymity died at that moment.

I played once and never looked back.

Re:annoying forced interaction

[secolactico]

Nice idea, I don't want to play like that. Anonymity died at that moment.

I played once and never looked back.

Wise choice. From what I read, There was essentialy, a chat room with pretty graphics. Even the documentation said that if you didn't enjoy interacting with other people, then the game was not for you (or something to that effect, I haven't looked at it since they were in beta). So if that's not your thing, there were several other multiplayer worlds to cater to you.

Re:annoying forced interaction

[KDR_11k]

Because anonymity leads to idiocy allowing "anonymos cowards" in MMOs would be suicide. Really, there are already enough idiots, botters, griefers, etc. in MMOs with personally identifiable data, allowing for anonymity would encourage people to flame each other and so on. Slashdot has the MOD system, but ho would that work in a realtime MMO environment?

(Karma Whoring: The Game, or what?)

Re:annoying forced interaction

[justforaday]

Karma Whoring: The Game

In the real world, we call that "politics"

Not quite 'There'?

[E_elven]

The problem was that the game just wasn't There. Too much to do, but a lot of it was just the same as Here.

And, by the way, There are games out There that are not just your average D&D-ripoffs. They just don't have graphics.

Visit www.mudconnector.com, www.topmudsites.com or www.mudmagic.com.

Re:Not quite 'There'?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Visit www.mudconnector.com, www.topmudsites.com or www.mudmagic.com.

Muds, bah. What a waste. To this day, I cannot find a MUD that isn't characterized by one of these factors:

1) Single-digit non-idle connected players
2) Obnoxious kids who can't compose a coherent non-hostile thought.
3) Environment that's awesomely primitive and/or cumbersome.
4) Guilds, holds, weyrs, etc where people sit around and kvetch because there's actually nothing to do.

I've been nurturing this itch to write a better MUD, a programmable MUD, but with a game design based on the principles that make a game addictive: simplicity and repetition at low level, with complexity and variety as an emergent property. Think about how much of the same thing you do in nethack, but it's still never the same game twice. But I just can't find the culture that would possibly move to it, use it, develop it. I'm no longer a MUDder, so I wonder what I'm doing wasting my time thinking about MUDs.

Maybe I just need a new hobby (already got the GF, it doesn't help, so no suggestions there).

Not to be compared with Second Life

[MBraynard]

Second Life was a limitless environment - people living inside of a CAD programing environment. You could *create* your own RPG or FPS or whatever within it. Mostly I created odd architectual objects and star trek uniforms. But you could really create any kind of object and program scripts to make it do pretty much anything.

Most people just built houses and furniture, but some were exceptionally creative and ambitious.

Compare There to the Sims Online maybe. Not to Second Life.

Re:Not to be compared with Second Life

[eggstasy]

Was? It's still around and growing faster than ever.
Ig you were there in beta, give it another try. You can get basic lifetime access for a one-time payment of $10, but if you wish to buy land and build some content that will be permanently displayed, such as a home or a store, you will need to pay a monthly fee.

Re:Not to be compared with Second Life

[FRAGaLOT]

I disagree. I play both There and SL, and TSO is a different beast. So comparing There and SL is more adequate considering they are both full 3D worlds, and TSO merely fakes it's 3D.

There and SL don't force you to do anything repetitive as in TSO you have to constantly "green up" just to keep your avatar happy. Avatars in TSO have their own personality and don't always obey what you tell them to do.

Your avatars in SL and There are totally controlled by you, and have no needs of their own like eating, peeing, making friends etc. Or they will collapse and die if you don't tend to those needs.

If you seen There lately it's starting to look like SL in many ways... very cluttered. Homes with furnature, and crazy decorations.. not much diffrent than SL, except not as creative.

While you can't build directly in world, there has been THOUSANDS of new items being put into game, created by other users, not There it self.

There are port-a-zones everywhere that has all kinds of crazy stuff just like you see in SL. But we have no scripting language.

Re:Not to be compared with Second Life

[MBraynard]

Tried it. Dropped after 7 days. Conflicting interests of my own plus bugs destroying things plus the fact that I would have prefered to be able to create off line in a non-laggy environment and then move them into the world.

As somebody who beta'd There...

[Txiasaeia]

...nobody's missing much. It was basically a glorified chatroom with a few flash games. I was expecting something like the Metaverse from Stephenson's Snow Crash, but what I got was a bunch of people out in a forest, the desert, beach, and various other locales. What's the point of playing games just so you can customise your hair style or clothes?

Furthermore, what's the point of having a "game" with the same rules and goals of reality? It's more fun to get a few friends and go play frisbee than log on, run around a bit, and type in some stuff.

What about furcadia?

[apezaholic]

Furcadia has had a lot of success. It's been running for like 4 years or something like that. There are usually about 400+ people on at any given time. Plus it's free. www.furcadia.com

Re:What about furcadia?

[bersl2]

MUCKs are successful because they often are accompanied by a specific focus for creative efforts---in Furcadia's case, anthropomorphism---instead of being solely a free-form modeling environment.

Hah.

[Wtcher]

I have a There.come beta account. Or /had/ a beta account... I don't even know if they still are in that stage, I never bothered to pursue it after I captured the CD and discovered that IE had to be set as default browser. ;)

From what I read of There.com, the world seemed to be a marketer's utopia; the essential keystone of the world would be that you'd pay real money to buy virtual accessories so you could fit in with the rest of the population. Now, while I'm not going to rip on the flagrant shallowness of such an existence, I would like to note that I can already do that in real life and derive a more concrete sense of accomplishment doing so. Sort of.

I feel that purely social realities are profitable and sustainable (ignoring M* of old), but that they aren't approaching it from the right perspective. They should take on a more design-centric process for developing these things.

Someone posted about Furcadia earlier. The nice thing about Furcadia is that you have the freedom of doing many things there - just socializing with friends, roleplaying, even scripting and designing new areas for people to explore. The other really nice thing is that they don't make you pay out the nose to access the community.

Re:Hah.

[Carnildo]

Perhaps you should look into SecondLife.

Re:OT

[E_elven]

As much as I love Stephenson, the 'Metaverse' is one of the most ridiculous internet utopias I've encountered. It almost ruined the book for me, but not quite. And, you know, I don't know any people (and I know some geeky people) who can take binary input directly (especially since it'd be in NBO, presumably).

Futher OT

[Cecil]

What's wrong with the metaverse? A utopia, perhaps.

Regarding the taking of binary input directly, are you referring to the bitmap/binary scroll that infected people with Snow crash? Hiro never suspected that anyone could read it or understand it directly. It was supposed to be pseudo-magical, somehow tickling the pathways in your brain that had opened due to your understanding of binary. It's part of the fiction.

Besides, there certainly are people who can read binary directly, just as there are people who speak fluent Klingon. Never underestimate the obsessive nature of a geek. Seems popular enough.

Re:Futher OT

[E_elven]

The metaverse was unnecessarily complicated and embellished view of the internet. Realistically, it wouldn't go in such a direction. So it pissed me off because the book was otherwise good :)

I know people can read binary directly -I can- but they can't take it in directly. It's such a fundamental change from a natural language that the translation process can never be fully mitigated. It played on the idea that the true-false mode of operation was somehow inherent to the human brain, but it unfortunately isn't.

And the price of therebucks plummeted

[V_M_Smith]

as people madly tried to sell off their accumulated wealth.

The results are here. Keep in mind that the nominal prices of tbux are $1.12/2000 (from There.com) and $1/2000 (from tbux.com, another large reseller).

Re:And the price of therebucks plummeted

[mutewinter]

I know many online games prevent selling ingame items in their TOS. It would be interesting to see the ramifications if There actively tried to prevent this currency exchange.

Call me a nerd, but I find this extremely interesting. In some respects, the economics of the virtual world are the same as the real world, but in others they are dramatically different. For example, the game creators can pump an infinate supply of currency into the system (kind of like the fed to pay their deficits), and inflation can actually occur. On the other hand, they can create an infinate number of X items.

Here is the interesting twist -- to make players happy do you give them everything they want? The last virtual world I inhabited was managed (for a while) by people who thought appeasing the in-world citizins by making rare items infinately available again was a good idea.

Any slashdot reader knows this isn't a good idea. We play games so that we can get X sword in Diablo II, and when we are at level 99 whats next? Do we really play to win, or do we play to play? "Unwinnable" MMORPGs tell us we play to play. That being said -- do you think twice when you buy a lottery ticket?

I know in the real world we actually *need* to work to eat, but its just a thought.

Re:OT

[Txiasaeia]

I think you'll agree with me that Stephenson's Metaverse was much more interesting than There, at any rate. I'm still partial to Gibson's cyberspace myself, but that's just me... brilliant how the man came up with the concept in Neuromancer from an Apple advert.

As for the "snow crashing:" I had been led to believe that the code that caused it wasn't necessarily binary, but some sort of metalanguage/symbology that the brain understood at the lowest possible level, below the subconscious. Did I read this wrong?

Furcadia stats

[Doctor Cat]

Actually we've been up over 7 years now, and in the evenings we generally have somewhere from 2000 to 3000 people online. It does drop down below a thousand in the wee hours. We estimate that we currently have about 50,000 players who are active on a regular basis (logging in once a month or more). I hope we'll get a lot more after a few more updates, but we're making a comfortable living now. The scripting language is powerful enough now that we've had people cloning a variety of arcade games in Furcadia, along with the expected combat systems, quests, puzzles, rides, etc.

Even though several of my friends had jobs working on There, I have to say I always found Second Life to have a lot more potential and to be a lot more interesting. The Sims Online and There were both projects that I thought might come along and beat us to the punch with some of the things we wanted to accomplish with Furcadia - but then they failed to live up to their potential. Second Life, so far, looks like it's doing a pretty good job & is certainly ahead of Furcadia in a number of ways. My hats are off to 'em, I hope they manage to turn it into a profitable ongoing concern.

Re:OT

[E_elven]

The metalanguage was 'input' into the brain by means of displaying the hacker binary data. I don't find it plausible that anyone could understand binary at this level -it's not how the brain works.

Virtual world memories

[MilenCent]

I signed up for the beta, though I didn't get chosen, largely because I've interacted with one of the people working there, Jeremy Hunter, back when he worked on WorldsAway.

Actually, I'm not even sure of that name, back in WA his character name was Vaserius and I've never met the man in person.

WorldsAway (now called something different I haven't even bothered to keep track of) had some of the same problems as There. What was originally pitched to be something along the lines of Habitat/Club Caribe never evolved beyond the "gabbing on a street corner" model.

I remember the first wave of managers trying to steer the world away from that, but it never really happened. Now they've been through at least three sets since then, and things have gone way downhill.

These are all "social" virtual worlds, as opposed to "gaming" worlds like Everquest and Ultima Online. Social worlds seek to follow the Snow Crash virtual reality route, but like Sims Online, have so far proven to be spectacular failures in the market place.

I think the reasons largely boil down to this:

No social game world has yet presented a sufficently compelling environment.

I'm not talking about raw size of the world or the physics model or the quality of graphics or the existance of monsters to slay. But that the world, itself, largely boils down to just a lot of space to wander around.

From what I understand of There, it was just a big area you could roam. You could obtain vehicles with which to explore (which, to some degree, cost real-world cash -- I like to refer to that as strike one), and they had a physics engine, but even so... why explore when over There is just another flavor of right Here?

Another way to look at this is that social worlds don't have enough "game" in them. And to me, "game" worlds don't have enough "social" in them.

I hate to bring up Nethack again (it's been on my mind a lot lately), but really, for a social world to work it's going to have to present at least the complexity in its environment that Nethack, at its best, is capable of exhibiting. That, in a multiplayer setting, just might work. If they had the advertising budget and the huge amount of art resources to pull it off.

It's a shame, because while I love the idea of virtual worlds, I have very little interest in level-treadmilling.

Also, when I was in WorldsAway I found it to be an incredible time sink, even when there wasn't much to do. I racked my brain to try to come up with things to do in that limited environment, and even came up with some rather nifty concepts if I say so myself - a Halloween vampire event that spread in a "viral" manner, where people got to dress up and roleplay, but only if they had been "invited" to participate in a public RP scene by someone already participating, and another long-running structure where a bunch of us dressed spare characters up as "tribespeople," roleplaying an (admittedly simplistic) indiginous culture to the world, complete with a co-conspirator-written translator program to give us an obfuscated language. Those two were the standouts.

When I finally just stopped going, I was working on a magic system that also relied completely on roleplaying, along with a Slashdot-esque moderation system to balance out abuses between participants. You can do an awful lot with social engineering if you have a little client program sitting on participants' computers, but I haven't seen anyone else really moving in that direction.

Ah well, enough braggart old fogey stories for now. Just trying to show what's possible, even within a highly-limited reality, with enough effort. Unfortunately, all the effort it took from my end almost dropped me out of college....

Re:Virtual world memories

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been a member of the online community known as There since October of last year. We're definitely not dead yet but with all things that are living and breathing an amount of optimism for the future is a necessity. With the decision by There Inc. to take the staff down to a skeleton crew and discontinue patching the product we are obviously dismayed but I think most of that is because all of us had great optimsim that There wasn't just a game, but it was the logical evolution of chatrooms, IM clients, and sites such as Friendster. Built into this playground were all of the tools that people would need to create, relax, and experience a remarkably diverse spectrum of social interraction.

I think it was my second night in There and some guy had listed a party at his place. I showed up to his virtual house, with its virtual decorations and listened as this guy played music that he had selected of his his shoutcast server over his inworld stereo. I was in Tampa Florida and he was in Sweden.

I was part of a company that's principle mistake was being ahead of it's time. I think this was the case for There as well.

Re:OT

[drinkypoo]

Your brain builds physical structures to optimize tasks which you perform often; they "fade" over time if the pathways are not reinforced. Thus a hacker who dealt with binary a lot might be able to convert binary to decimal or hexadecimal in moments if they were in a trance or something.

However, unless they inherently understood this sumerian language, they wouldn't necessarily be able to turn their understanding of a string of numbers into whatever it's supposed to represent. The premise however was that everyone shared a deep connection to that language, and was inherently receptive to it.

Hence, if they really were, I could definitely believe that showing a bitmap to a deep hacker could transfer an informational virus to them. Haven't you ever seen a picture that seems indelibly stamped on your memory for months? You close your eyes, and there it is, as if seen from your peripheral vision? The brain is a funny thing.

Luckily for us, it is highly unlikely that any such perfect language exists, or ever existed :)

Re:OT

[Cruciform]

You close your eyes, and there it is, as if seen from your peripheral vision? The brain is a funny thing.

Sometimes the image is stamped there by trauma. And if it is, is there any way to replace that image with something else. For example, if you've seen the goatse.cx pic, any time someone alludes to it, there it is, filling your minds eye. It's unavoidable. How do we replace that with a mental image of cute, fuzzy kittens?

They're problem was availability and target market

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't even give themselves a fair chance at profitability: The "world" is CLOSED on one day of the week (Tuesdays?) and is only open the remaining days between very specific hours. You can't operate this kind of "service" like that. Much like everything else on the internet, people expect to be able to go "There" whenever it strikes them to. That right there really cuts down a person's inclination to want to come back. If the service isn't there WHEN they want it, then they will find something else to spend their time with, and there you go (pun intended) and lose a customer.

Second Life also available as Mac os X Beta

[gitana]

Second Life is also available as a Mac Beta. It has pretty steep hardware requirements but runs well.

One aspect of Second Life that seperates it from other virtual worlds such as There and the Sims Online, is the degree to which the "players" are in control of the contents of the world.

Also, items created in Second Life belong to their creators under the Creative Commons liscense.

Second Life Residents To Own Digital Creations

Shameless Self Promotion

[agentk]

Want to help create a free and open VR platform? After some major reworking of the system, we're about to start releasing new versions of VOS/Interreality. Rather than paying a company to use their world to chat, buy and sell virtual consumer goods, VOS enables a distributed network of interconnected worlds; host a piece of it on your cable modem and make it do something interesting! It's Free Software (open source) of course and extensible to more specialized games as well (two have already begun). Let us know if you're interested in helping!

Re:They're problem was availability and target mar

[Ponderoid]

It was closed on Tuesdays during late beta. We referred to them as "Black Tuesdays", but we remembered it being closed a lot more than that during the early beta. As There Inc. prepared for the general launch, the downtime shrank, and when it fully launched it was open seven days, with the downtime reduced to 1.5 hours per day, 5AM to 6:30AM Pacific (GMT-7). That particular time of day probably turned off some potential customers from the other side of the world.

Re:OT

[Anonymous Coward]

Ouch. Cute fuzzy kittens and goatse.cx do not mix well in my mind's eye.