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When Virtual Worlds Collide
Wired is running an interesting article on the realization of past predictions with regards to online gaming and where we are headed for the future. The author predicts that the separation between online worlds like Ultima Online and World of Warcraft may be headed out of style, making your in-game persona as pervasive as an email address. From the article: "Because the current metaverse evolved largely out of videogames, it makes sense that it should be composed of fiefdoms - after all, you wouldn't expect a Grand Theft Auto crack dealer to drop in for a barbecue with the Sims. But there is reason to believe that the divided metaverse is merely a transitional phase, and that its component worlds will coalesce."
And those of us with jobs and lives will STILL not be a part of it...
I call best swordsman.
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Perhaps we could all drop by the 'Black Sun' and discuss our differences. It all sounds very much like Neil Stephenson and William Gibsons ideas.
So gaming worlds are going to coalesce just like instant messenger serviced did years ag... oh, nevermind ;-)
I think the GTA crack dealer would be a hell of a lot more fun at my sims bbq than, say, headcrabs.
after all, you wouldn't expect a Grand Theft Auto crack dealer to drop in for a barbecue with the Sims
When I pictured this in my head, it was one of the funniest damn concepts I'd seen in awhile. I wonder if somebody could make such a similar game, where various groups work happily at creating little people and families and others play as the carjackers and dealers. Imagine that you log on onto to find that your car has been jacked by local online-gaming hoodlums, or perhaps your wife abducted, and you could persue a form of quest in which you have to hunt them down a-la hollywood style. This could be fun for both those playing the 'criminals' and those playing the 'citizens'.
Perhaps one could through legitimate playing work up to the level of mayor or congressman, making you a target of the darker elements but also allowing you to hire bodyguards and/or accept bribes. Interesting ide.
Analogy: I'm going to wear my DnD gear to work because of my persistant avatar. I'm going to be a professional lawyer even though I have a degree in medicine because of persistant avatars.
This is stupid, different people have different ways of escaping, and just because it COULD happen (which would require a level of industry cohesion that will likely never exist) doesn't mean it will.
1/10 for being a bad idea and not even being funny.
Translation:
I've made up a few reasons while ignoring all the reasons it won't happen. By not giving you a source of the reasons, you might buy this as being anything other than attention whoring.
paintball
I can't wait to fly my big ass freighter ship from Vendetta-Online into the World of Warcraft. Maybe I'll knock down a couple of those nasty spidery things with my afterburners. ;-)
I'd probably crash though as I doubt the Linux client would work anymore in that world.
The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.
The Open Source Croquet Project is the future. It's a platform that is will be very well suited for creating virtual worlds of all kinds when it's a bit more functional. It is very flexible and extendable. Objects can be coded in OpenGL and the graphics engine is very extendable and new features and support for vendor specific extensions can be added. The networking capabilities is still pretty early in development. Currently you have to use a VPN if you want to connect to other people over the internet, and the content servers are only in experimental betas.
Just how well will my futuristic soldiers from Star Wars Online or AO fit into some MMO like WoW or DAoC?
Well, I guess if we throw theme totally out the window, it's managable.
Besides, it might be fun to take laser weapons and force fields into the past and pwn those n00bs using pitiful swords and bows...
"making your in-game persona as pervasive as an email address"
I think the closest we'll get to this is the kind of thing MS does with the Xbox gamertag. Maybe you have the same gamer id for all games, but that doesn't mean the game universes will all intertwine.
Han shot first.
I'm going CT.
I thought this was about practicing to destroy planets
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
"When basement worlds collide".
Ah, that's better.
I do different things with my SWG char then my WOW char. As an example, I have been playing SWG since launch and have never joined ro were interested in joining a guil, in WOW I am going to join a guild and experience what that is like. Hopefully people will not have to think if I do something evil in this game I will end up paying for it in another.
in the future, all drugs will be the same drug!
You shall NOT wear Composition Armor while on company property, All Rifles including the T-21 are to be left in your Bank/Storage Compartments. You agree you shall not Sell / Trade or purchase additional armor componenets while on company time.
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
Project Interreality - Virtual Object System (VOS)
http://interreality.org
So games have become so unimaginative that you may aswell play the same character in each game, or at least the same two legged, two armed, mammal like creature.
It's like 50's sci-fi all over again, where every monster was a man in a rubber suit or a girl in a bikini.
Yet another person who needs to spend less time re-reading Snowcrash and more time in the real world.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Federation of Planets vs. Star Wars Empire.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What's amusing is the article cites examples of "convergence" like 80's PC platforms, and then uses that to say online games will "converge" so you can migrate from one to the other.
Anybody freely moving software from their Amiga or Commodore to their PC?
Yea, didn't think so. MMORPG's won't converge - at best many will simply die and one will "win".
This article is nothing but "Need to write something for this issue to keep my job. Hrm, how about baseless random future predictions?"
paintball
Its great to post speculative articles and all, but seriously, I'm not buying into using the word "metaverse" no matter HOW many times you use it in one paragraph.
But virtual reality has failed to conform to forward-looking visions in one crucial respect. We don't live in the Matrix, but in the matrices Hes Not ready to be unplugged... Looks like he took the blue pill.
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
It's called Real Life. Graphics and sound are EXCELLENT.
There's a lot of time spent mindlessly earning gold though, and the biggest problem with it is the lack of a save feature.
paintball
I seriously doubt it.
Apparently the author has no understanding of why these games appeal and why the differences between how they appeal to different segments of the gaming populace is what stands between what is now and what he is dreaming of.
First players would want to have some kind of convergence and I doubt only a few do. If people want to communicate between games its not hard to IRC/AIM now with other applications. Trading between games? As in skills, items, etc, - he is smoking way to much crack. First most game companies probably could not get their own products to talk to each other let alone find a viable means of exchanging persona or items between the two. Can't imagine the hell that would be there for communication between two different companies. Like they would really want their customers playing a competitors game.
Uh, this guy saw the Matrix and believed it. Some people just buy into the idea of Virtual Reality and then seek to apply it to anything that they don't understand or any group that is managed/organized via a computer. Throw the word internet in their for good measure too.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The author seriously misinterprets online gaming. While some people might think Azeroth as a representation of a virtual world and in fact will spend more time there than the real world reality is more mundane. These so called worlds are little more than a thin backstory to provide at least some minimal motivation to primary goal of entertaining ourselves by engaging in a particular type of escapism. MMOG are created first and foremost as a platform to entertain people sufficiently to encourage them to seperate themselves from at least some amount of their disposable income. In this respect there is hardly anything revolutionary about MMOG. Blizzard, SOE, NCSoft and Turbine may say they are creating a virtual world but in reality they are just creating a medium for entertainment designed to keep you playing and paying. Just like TV, movies and books MMOG allow you to escape your reality and entertain yourself for a few hours. Moreover I highly doubt that any of these companies have any interest in merging their respective intellectual property into one multi-verse simply to achieve some utopian ideal of a virtual universe.
The real mistake in this article is the writer mistakes MMOG for some sort of virtual world and not just the medium of enterntainment that it is.
My other issue with the article is that the author assumes that players create their one avatar and are that thing for the life of the game. The only reason I see people having one "main" character in MMOG is because creating more than one is either impossible (original swg) or simply too time consuming to maximize two virtual characters. Given the opportunity to create more than one character players will happily do so. For example in DDO.
I have to wonder if the writer of this article has even played an MMOG or if he just read a steven gibson novel and then did a google on virtual worlds and let his imagination get the better of him.
Yeah, when i saw this in the print version it struck me as a giant batch of wishful thinking, powered by a way overstrained metaphor (80s computer networks vs. the later internet)
The only way this works is by boiling everything down to the lowest common denominator, and taking out the unique worldmaking which makes each game spcial.
Like someone else said, this might be an XboxLive-ish "gamer tag" across games, or maybe even some kind of shared standard UI for First Person games, but beyond that, it's just too many nights spent reading "Snow Crash"
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Part of the fun for a lot of people is creating new characters. You can commit virtual-social-suicide and then come back a few minutes later a new man. Not to mention that people LIKE to play different roles.
Games are developed by different companies. What is the motivation for companies to work together on any sort of standard? Sony wouldn't particularly want Everquest players to pay for other online RPGs.
If it's going to happen, I think it will first happen between games made by the same company.
And landed in another.
More "realistically", the Game Designers could, at the boundaries of each of their virtual worlds, offer "portals", which are of course technomagical devices that you walk through, to enter some other virtual world of your choice.
Maybe now a platoon of elite marines and some tanks can help me down Nefarion in World of Warcraft. One 120mm APFSDS > WoW boss.
Spore is a good example of a game where players from other worlds would come into your game. The way the game works is it downloads 'creatures' that other players have created on their machine, and populates your galaxy with them. From there, the computer controls them.
No, this won't happen directly, but I can see game companies allowing you to use your "meta-data" and in-game appearance to be used as a cross-pollinating interface in the future.
Meta-tagged icons to be used in a shared 3D virtual interface.
Probably at least five years away if you can convince companies to do it.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
Trust me - you'll thank me later!
Obligitory Seinfeld reference:
You have to keep your worlds seperated. If worlds collide, you'll kill Independent George.
I don't see my undead priest flying my EVE ship more than I see myself using my /. karma to impress people on Fark.
Anyway, after RTFA, it seems more like someone had a pot induced idea than anything serious.
This is one of the silliest things I've heard in a long time for a multitude of reasons.
First, it assumes that companies are willing to share their gaming technology and infrastructure. That alone cancels it out. Do people really think that EA is going to make the server and game specifications, possibly the source code itself, for Battlefield 2020 available to be licensed by competing gaming companies so that Diablo VII can interact with it - and vice versa? After all, if you're going to cross into another games' realm, that realm would have to look as though you were playing it through the other game for it to be convincing.
Also, would all of the worlds in this "common architecture" and their graphical components (models, textures, and so forth) have to be loaded on my system or will I have to wait while several hundreds of GB are downloaded? I personally don't want to see "Now integrated with Common Architecture(TM)! Comes on seven BluRay discs with all of the components of other Common Architecture(TM) games right on your system!" This would of course require the necessary system requirements of 400 GB of hard drive space.
Then comes the corporate politics of who will be responsible for connectivity between the various games. "Well, it's not our problem that our game servers are not communicating. Contact the other company." "No, our network is running fine! It's a connectivity problem on their end."
Of course, the cost of development must come into play. Does it make sense to have to disparate games that communicate together and effectively end up looking and playing the game and risk the inter-corporate political BS that will undoubtedly ensue?
But on a more practical level, if I want to play a Star Wars game, I obviously want that kind of environment! To even suggest that I'd want to take a Star Wars character and interact with an EverQuest character is nonsense! If I want EverQuest, I'll load EverQuest.
And shall we guess how a bug in one developer's coding might disrupt the gameplay of the other developers' products?
I can understand perhaps bridging the gap between play systems, such as allowing players of the same game on the PS3, Xbox, and PC game together. In fact, EA is already exploring that possibility based on a few customer surveys I've received from them. I can even understand different games from different developers under the same publisher, but only as a fun, side benefit that does not encompass the entire game.
But bridging the gap between games and companies in order to form a "common architecture"? I'd rather just have a "common artchitecture" under one game company with the inherent benefits (and drawbacks) of only having to deal with that company instead of the massive potential for the blame game to kick in. Otherwise, how is this "common architecture" going to be nothing more than the same damned game from different publishers?
No, thanks. I'll pass. I don't know what the author of the article was smoking, but that must be some really good shit.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Aside from all the other reasons why this won't happen, which other posters have mentioned, it seems to me that one of the big ones is that we don't want this to happen. One of the biggest advantages of these individual virtual worlds is that they are isolated - that's what gives them their unique character. Part of the fantasy of playing in one of these games is that you get to be someone different in each one.
My level 60 mage does not want to steal cars in GTA!
That forsaken mage raise out of the dirt and reduce you (and you lazer gun) to a pile of cinder and melted metal with one of his fireball... But, it let me wonder, mage, priest and jedi... they all weave some 'magic'... it could lead to an point where you find out that jedi and sith are just the few last remnants of great schools of arcanists.
Colosse.
Hmmm, perhaps my son's goal of being a virtual cop in the online worlds could be a good career choice after all.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
As a kind of an online version of GURPS, but the problem is that it would be a complete rewrite of the existing MMORPG's we all know and love to fit a more universal playing system, and very unlikely to happen.
I think the closest we're going to get to a "pervasive avatar" is a unified website where everyone can see how Jim Bob is doing in WoW, Vendetta Online, and GTA, at least until quantum computing and AI creates a computer that is able to be the electronic equivalent of the Uber-GM - but maybe without the weight problem and slightly cheesy odour.
His name is Robert Paulsen...
I don't understand how you can mix together such differing genres as Star Wars, World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto and The Sims all together in such a way that does not completely wreck any sense of immersion the player might hope to achieve, for one thing.
Game mechanics and balance produce another problem. Unless all of the unified games utitlize an extremely similar set of game mechanics, interplay and competition between avatars from different "realms" would seem impossible, or at very least, potentially massively unbalanced.
Sorry, I'm just having a horrible time wrapping my head around this one. I'd like to think this is a cool idea, but I'm not really grasping what the advantage to doing this even is. Having an open standard for e-mail works because if there were not a standard, as communications tool it would be a lot less useful. Do games need to be part of a standard to be fun? Do standards make them more fun? Doesn't this present a danger of further homogenizing the already somewhat redundant MMO space?
I'd love to understand why people think this is so inevitable, and why it's a good thing. I think I want to be able to escape to discrete worlds, different worlds for different moods, experiences and challenges, and I don't see the big deal in not necessarily having to create a new avatar for each world (which I've always considered to be part of the fun in playing a new game).
Anyone who uses a word like "metaverse" is full of fucking shit, and should never be paid to write anything ever.
The idea of an avatar that goes from one game to another, taking with them all their skill and items, makes as much sense as allowing a football player onto the basketball court in full pads and say it's ok for him to tackle whoever has the ball.
Certainly a football player can remove his padding and play basketball with the same rules as everyone else, but at that point he's not taking his rules (which would equate to an avatar's skills) or equipment from one game into another.
The examples he gives to support his theory that the world is going to move this way are laughable. The software worlds of the Matrix and Snowcrash are fictional. Just because someone has envisioned them doesn't mean they will occur as soon as technology permits. People have also been envisioning and building amphibious cars for decades but the last time I drove my Honda into a lake it didn't do very well. What's more, even in their fiction they are really a communication method, not a game.
Combat occurs in the Matrix not because the computers wanted to make the virtual world fun and competitive but because they were trying to fool people into thinking it was real. Combat in Snowcrash on the other hand only existed because of the implausibility of the world. Imagine the chaos if I could go to any email or web post anywhere and click on a button and 'kill' the original poster, kicking them off the Internet for a period of time. It would cut down on flame wars drastically but you'd have kids abusing it just for fun all the time.
Of course there is some precedent on the author's side. Just look at table top RPGs. Originally they were all separate systems. When GURPS came out all those other systems went away since there was now a single system to handle everything. I'll tell you, it sure made it a lot easier for me to find RP groups since I know my fusion cannon wielding cyborg is compatible with what everyone else is playing, even if they were doing a medieval campaign.
One way or another, consolidation is all but inevitable.
Only in the virtual world he lives in.
Diverse and incompatible standards - CompuServe members could only email other CompuServe members - gave way to a common platform that allowed everyone to connect.
I fail see this as an example or an indication of how gaming worlds will or should interoperate in any way. There is no standard way for games to communicate or operate, and unlike other forms of communication, there is hardly a *need*.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
People play games as much for the rules as for the worlds or the characters they create. Games are not just stories, they are systems. For example, even though the d20 System in the pencil and paper game world has been successful, there are still many other game systems. In business computing, figuring out new rules (how does this damned app work? Why is this OS different?) present annoyances. In the world of games, these challenges are part of the exploration and fun.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
you wouldn't expect a Grand Theft Auto crack dealer to drop in for a barbecue with the Sims.
I don't know what kind of parties this guy throws but at my house the crack dealer is a manditory attendee.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
The writer seems to describe how he would like the situation to be as a cyberpunk fan, and then using this as a basis for some rather outlandish predictions. He is ignoring that there is an important distinction between "virtual worlds" as predicted in various science fiction works, and online games as we play them today - the latter are games, played largely for entertainment and/or escapism and designed and balanced to form a more-or-less coherent universe suitable for these purposes. (I am aware that "worlds" that can only peripherally be said to be games exist - such as, IIRC, Second Life, but these are hardly as mainstream as the numerous MMORPGs that "millions of us commute to".)
If convergence between worlds were to happen, the "game" aspect would have to be marginalized or entirely eliminated: either one would have to reduce the rules of the game to the rules that are common to all the merged games, essentially ending up with a glorified chat room, or one would have to merge sets of rules for games modelling entirely different things, resulting in the kind of chaos that might be fun to read about in science fiction novels, but would probably not be very playable. Thus, unless something happens to create a demand for massively multiplayer non-games which is not there today, convergence between games will not happen.
I'd argue that virtual worlds such as described in fiction have not actually caught on, because context is important here: "virtual worlds" are not actually worlds in the sense of having functions parallel to those of the actual world unless people actually look upon them as such, and for now, the people who do are by far outnumbered by the people who look upon them as games where they strive to improve their avatar's abilities.
This is never likely to happen beyond one sensational marketing ploy. Users play because they want to escape. Not everybody wants to escape to the same place - otherwise we're just in Real Life(tm) Mk II!
There I was with my druid, contemplating the ruins, when some WWII-style tank came blasting through. I didn't know what was going on, but suddenly the tank got sucked into a genie bottle, then sold to some gangster figure as drugs. They didn't seem to know what was happening either.
Things got too weird and out of control. I stopped playing in that multiverse.
What we need is a Spelljammer for the metaverse. That will make it better.
What the heck would I want to take my level 40 dwarf over to Counter Strike Source for?????
I find it an interesting idea, albeit a somewhat unrealistic one. It requires a bit of revisualizing the universes these games take place in. The Sims takes place in a neighbourhood. GTA takes place in a city. Warcraft takes place on a continent. Sci-fi worlds tend to take place over solar systems or galaxies... you COULD combine them. You have a Sim in your neighbourhood, and the car theif from Vegas comes through. Maybe he robs your house, maybe he hides in the shrubs. Meanwhile, in a different galaxy, intergalactic war is raging. Technically, if one of those ships pointed themselves at the Sim/GTA planet, they could eventually get there... but make it take YEARS, so it isn't a very appealing prospect (hence stopping one battalion of Stormtroopers from taking over Earth).
Yes, people play different games for different reasons, but there's no reason you couldn't have multiple characters sharing the same universe, but in different areas. If GTA and The Sims was combined, it would add a new dynamic to both games. If a player of the Sims' portion is driving to work, and gets carjacked by a GTA player, then there's now a real player behind that "crime". It opens up economies for neighbourhoods (why live in LA if your're going to get carjacked?), security businesses, etc... Too keep balance, then simply make the distances between unbalanced games unreasonable to travel.
Anyway, not going to happen, but an interesting thinkpiece.
What I'd be MORE interested in is a "Drawn Together" type of idea. A game containing all the stereotypical characters under one "roof". Alien soliders, crack addicts, film noir detectives with mad kung fu skills, scientists with guns, lone marines, and the lesbian couple that lives in a house where the pool has no ladder to get out with. Obviously with the proper safeguards in place to avoid any great inbalance in abilities.
Anyway... enough rambling for me.
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
Pretty much after reading my article,I began wondering if this guy even plays the games or hangs out with people online, and how the hell he's extrapolating this.
Games produce worlds. World's have certain rules and bounds. Different worlds have different systems. Converging these worlds kind of wrecks the individuality and specificity people want out of them. Starting over? That's part of the fun. Different personas? The same thing - we don't always want ot be the same person.
Sure, there will be convergence. It's going to happen. It'll be interesting (SL seems to be part of it in a way). But its not what everyone's going to want. Social elements and gaming elements can intersect, but the way he forsees it removes the uniqueness of worlds.
I of course suspect there will be some convergent systems. I can see, for instance, an OS MMORPG project with multiple divergent worlds. I can see expandable systems. I can see MMORPG tech used for social tech (hell, it is anyway). But shared worlds? I don't buy it.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Here's the theory according to George Costanza
Relationship George versus Independent George. Who will win?
Relationship George is George when he is with Susan.
Independent George is George when he is with his friends: liar George, for example.
If the two meet...Relationship George will destroy Independent George.
Live forever, or die trying.
One obvious objection is that each online "fiefdom"--let's just call it a "fief"-- currently has its own set of rules, and that these rules are incompatible--you can't mix a high fantasy RPG with Grand Theft Auto--or even Star Wars. That would make about as much sense as mixing chess with baseball. But why couldn't there be a neutral layer that connects all these now-closed universes? You could regard online games as a set of conventions that are adopted by a certain subset of those who inhabit the metaverse. Indeed, the metaverse could provide a meeting place where potential players gather to design and implement games. (I'm making the assumption that game engines and design components will be made accessible enough in the future so that it doesn't take years of heads-down coding to make a game.)
The metaverse could also provide a forum for the adherents of different fiefs to negotiate a common interface--which could involve agreements about what powers or artifacts can be transferred from one fief to another, how a certain level of achievement can be translated from one fief to another, and so forth. Games could become open-ended, with players moving on from one fief to another without losing everything they gained in the last one. Avatars might be allowed to play in more than one fief at a time, or might even gain status in the metaverse depending on their achievements in fiefs.
In time, the metaverse itself could become a very interesting place--a place where people meet to talk, plan expansions or vote on changes to the metaverse, or just hang out. Hey, can I call dibs on the lot across from the Black Sun?
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
When I think about persistant online worlds I always think about the way it worked in Reboot. They all lived in the local computer and then jumped into the game blocks in which they received unique attributes. I think in the future we'll have a similar setup, (much like croquet) where you will have a local 3D world, (probably of your own design), and be able to 'step' into the other worlds owned by other people. In this new world you will have whatever presence the owner of the world grants you. Currently these worlds are MMoRPGs, but who's to say in the future you won't simply step across into your friend's world on his local computer to say 'hi'.
I do security
Take a look at the Croquet Project run by Alan Kay.
/. users can think as to why Croquet is better long term than WoW or whatever? My guess is less than 1%.
I wonder how many
"There" had business model problems. At one point, the big thing was buying real-world designer brand clothing for your avatar. With real money. That wasn't a big success. The company has been resold twice. For a while, it was owned by Foreterra Systems, which used the technology to build military training sims.
I was briefly involved with There in its early days. I tried to convince them that it should be broadband only, but they were hypnotized by dreams of being "the next AOL", back when AOL was a leading dialup provider, and insisted that There work over dialup. As a result, it's a rather low-rez environment.
You obviously use the web. Eventually using virtual reality will be a lot like that. Instead of clicking links to move from one world to another you might have to trigger some special type of object but it'll still be mostly the same. It all might start out as a game system but eventually it'll be a powerful tool for getting work done and sharing information. Spatial representation can be useful in many types of problems.
It's all waiting for the client and server programs of significant power and ease of use to be made available for free and as an open standard. When that happens it'll be similar to when the web was introduced. The differences between gopher and the web were minor but enough to be the difference between something that was merely out there to something that changed the world.
Something like Second Life would seem prime for this to happen if they'd just see that they could profit more by becoming a standard than by sticking to being a game world. Imagine if eBay had a VR interface where people could buy and sell real, or virtual, items for Linden dollars. A built-in cash system is something the web has been missing since inception so the new system could already be a leap ahead. It'd be a chance for a whole new market to pop-up to make taking 3D images of objects as easy as taking a digital photo and uploading it. Lots of money to be made.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
MERGER 1) Company A makes a great game and $$$$ 2) Company B makes another great game and $$$$+$ 3) Company B buys Company A 4) Game Rewrite 5) Company A + B makes $$$$+$$$$+$$
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
I think the idea of MMORPGs coalescing is interesting, but not because of the conclusions a lot of people are jumping to. I agree it's ridiculous to expect a character from EverQuest to suddenly just show up in World of Warcraft, with migrated skills and whatnot. It's not something game developers would really want to do.
However, for those that play a lot of MMOs and regularly jump from game to game, there often is the notion of having "one on-line persona". Already there are guilds that span multiple games. A lot of people have friends that they've made in one MMO that they'd like to continue to hang out with in another.
Here are some ideas:
- Shared friends list across MMOs: I log into EQ2 and none of my friends are online. However, my friends list shows that they're all in EQ. I send a message why and they reply that they're feeling nostalgic and wanted to raid a few dungeons, so I jump over to EQ and join them.
- Shared achievements: I love crafting. No matter what MMO I jump into, I really enjoy going to the top its crafting professions. When I move from Star Wars Galaxies to EQ2, I want people to check my uber-profile (separate from the in-game one) and see that I'm a master crafter in several SWG professions. Maybe they'll trust me more in EQ2, after seeing my "MMO resume".
- Gameplay history: Similar to the above, I love PVP experiences in my MMO. Again, I'd like to show fellow gamers that no matter what game I'm in, I have a history of being good at PVP. You can do the same thing with many other gameplay mechanics too. For example, I love being a caster in whatever MMO I'm in, and I want people to see that as well.
Granted, some people DO want to keep their MMO personas distinct. Maybe I like being a PVP asshat ganker in WoW, but I want to be a pure goody-two-shoes crafter in SWG. In that case, I won't want to share my MMO resume to anyone else. There are definately folks like that, but as long as you make it optional what you want to share, then that should be fine.
I think it's a lot more likely that the features above will happen for companies that make multiple MMOs, which is why I focused on EQ, EQ2, and SWG (all developed by Sony Online). Granted, it's a huge leap to then getting Blizzard, Sony, Origin, etc. to all cooperate, but no one said it was going to happen any time soon.
And if you're still skeptical about this happening, then all I need to do is point to console gaming. Xbox Live already has a common platform with a unified friends list and achievements, across a number of developers. Sony and Nintendo are apparently planning the same thing. Now it'd be even cooler, if we could get Sony, Nintendo, and MS to agree on a common platform for this, but that's not going to happen anytime soon either.
-- jchenx
Of course UO and WOW will go out of style! Who wouldn't want the number of users of WOW with the famous stability of Ultima Online?
No, seriously. I think it would be neat to combine some genres. Sniper rifles make any game better -- especially golf.
And who wouldn't want to do Grand Turisimo Online while Turok Dinosaur Hunters are driving herds of wild brontosauruses across the I-5?
Could be very fun, but obviously if companies can't even keep their own games debugged (WOW has greatly declined in stablility, frame rate, and lag in the last year), I hold no hope they could keep an exponentially more complex game running at all.
I think this line of thinking is absurd. It makes no sense from a gameplay perspective. To use the aformentioned example, if the crack dealer from GTA shouldn't drop in on the Sims BBQ, why have that ability? Even in MMOs, one of the major points of the game, ostensibly, is to experience the world. If the worlds are all the same, or can be transversed easily, why bother? There has already been an attempt at this, it's called Second Life. You can, in fact, have a magic castle next to an urban wasteland. Gameplay suffers, and at it's best, SL is a giant chatroom with a pretty (if slow) interface.
This is a half-baked idea that falls apart in the face of even casual reasoning.
--Jaybill
making your in-game persona as pervasive as an email address
Hello sir,
I am interested in a position in your great organization. Attached is my resume. You can find my contact information at the bottom of this correspondance.
I hope to hear from you soon.
Sincerely,
Moochfish
Level 28 Night Elf, Hunter
Lothar Realm
World of Warcraft
There are a bunch of alternative universes, high-tech, high-magic, gothic-horror, techno-horror, pulp-fiction, each one is ruled by a bad guy and all of the bad guys have to listen to a master bad guy.
The rulers of these universes invade earth, and set up reality zones, which mostly conform to the rules of their reality. When someone from a high-tech reality goes to a high-fantasy zone, for instance, his powers are limited but not totally eliminated.
If they could implement these rules in an electronic MMRPG, the results might be fun...
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
I've always wondered how fun and chaotic it would be if every FPS and mmorpg were to merge in to one big world. I could login my quake 3 guy and blow away priests in World of Warcraft with a railgun from the top of a mountain and make hunters cry with the plasma riffle. Or be my WoW druid and sneak up behind the railgun camper and ravage him for 1500 damage. Only 100 health there slick. ;) Yeah its all kinda silly but fun to think about. Rogues with quad damage.. ouch.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
My Star Wars AT-AT vs your bedwetting lvl20 Elf Archer.
I can't wait to see drug dealers, drive bys, and ho's in WoW.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Nobody expects a Grand Theft Auto crack dealer to drop in for a barbecue with the Sims! His chief weapon is surprise.. surprise and fear.. fear and surprise.. and ruthless efficiency..
Am I the only one who thinks it would actually be cool?
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
What an ignorant concept.
That about sums it up for me. While this may be a neat experiment that will happen with a few similar games in the same genre now and then, I don't think I'll be playing my Animal Crossing character in a Star Wars universe anytime soon.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
They would need a protocol and standards comitteee to make this happen, joy....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Linden Labs, the creators of Second Life, have said that their hope is to eventually make the technology behind their virtual world more of an open standard, thus allowing the metaverse they've created to grow exponentially. Coupled with SL's basic premise of user created content, it's not inconceivable that in the future sophisticated MMOs could be built on top of Second Life by third party game companies.
"Sometimes futurists get the future right." Yes, and twice a day a broken clock shows the right time. Here are just a few hopefully perspective-inducing observations...
First, a mistake so common among Wired futurists and theorists: they confuse the relatively tiny group of well-off, young nerds who are in with the latest gadgets with humanity. "People" are by no means living in cyberspace. Humanity is in approximately the same place it was 30 years ago, i.e., a majority of people don't own a telephone. No one "predicted" that a tiny group of the wealthiest nerds would live in The Matrix, they "predicted" that humanity would, which means that they are way, WAY off.
Secondly, about the merging of online worlds. I see the point, sadly development is not driven by convenience but by economics (which to an ever increasing degree proves to _not_ converge very often). Differentiation is what drives innovation. Just look at Linux distributions. Why on Earth would MMORPG producers want to create a standard format for avatars, attributes, and inventories? It would be unbelievably cool to bring my BS/Invuln scrapper from CoH to WoW and take on an army, but really. It ain't gonna happen. Game characters are designed into the world as a whole. To create a standard you would have to standardize attributes (super powers, magic, etc), experience points, loot, and therefore also combat, mobs, missions... Not only it is a hell of a lot of work with little or no economic payoff, but it sounds pretty boring too.
Could solo up some uber stuff in say Adevnture Quest then take out an entier guild of brainwashed raid slaves who frequent EQ. Sounds great.
After all WOW is just like Grand Theft Auto, except the hookers are called "night elves." (Seriously. I've seen people create a female night elf, take off all her clothes, and pimp her out as a naked dancer for money.)
No reason why trust you build up in one game can't be carried with you to another. Not only trust, but other sociological and socio-economic metrics might be transferrable between persistent universes. If you've proven yourself a valuable team-player instead of solo artist in one game, say Battlefield, maybe that's useful to your persona in Eve. If you've racked up social credit as a good strategist in Drugrunners, maybe that can be taken to another game.
Heck, if you've never been banned for cursing in and mike spamming in CounterStrike, maybe that can go towards a $doesnotmikespam var in another FPS.
I think what should be transferred is gamesmanship metrics, not avatars themselves but what *you* bring to the game.
-- Religion is not an exact science
Here's the next million dollar idea: Give furries the ability to interject their 'fursona' (uhg) as the avatar for every popular video game series. It'd save them time while making LJ icons.
TFA is working with a sound premise, but the author just didn't spell it out very well. I have been saying the same thing, and I will offer odds that it will happen in the next decade or so.
Here is what I think he was trying to say: Given that MMORPG games have become an established genere onto themselves, and their basic design archetecture is very similar, when will the developers get together and design a basic MMORPG API to aleviate the need to reinvent the wheel for each game? While the game mechanics for each given world can vary, there isn't anything preventing publishers from comming up with a basic MMORPG 'standard' if you will, so that servers can be linked between games. Why would you want to do this?
1) Reuse of a code base. If you reduce your development to coding environment rules and creating models, there is one less element to worry about.
2) Support. If all your MMORPG games run the same system software, you can fix a single bug and deploy the fix to all your games. Each game doesn't need its own set of testers, devs, etc. Support is expensive.
3) Upgrades. Ok, DiabloWorld4 has been out for two years now. Pleople are getting bored with it. Since it uses your MMORPG API, it is simple to migrate them to Diabloworld5, or Ringquest2, or Dragonhunter7. You might have some sort of transform that has to be applied to their character, but it gives you a better chance to keep them as customers.
3) Upgrades. Ok, DiabloWorld4 has been out for two years now. Pleople are getting bored with it. Since it uses your MMORPG API, it is simple to migrate them to Diabloworld5, or Ringquest2, or Dragonhunter7. You might have some sort of transform that has to be applied to their character, but it gives you a better chance to keep them as customers.
4) Cross company efforts. If several companies decide that by pooling their resources they can build an even better persistent world than other companies individually, this will give them a common meidum to work in.
The MMORPG market is a rapidly growing market. Games are becomming huge in terms of development costs, and companies will spring up to start specializing in specific areas of development. A standardized framework will allow this sort of business to thrive.
The final side effect of all this would be that it would be trivial to allow such interactions as described by the author to occur. Would there be a point in having GTA characters wander around a WoW instance? I wouldn't think so, but I could see armies of WoW players fighting armies of D&D online players.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
We already commonly use the same nickname in different games. That's as far as it will go in pre-Matrix era.
Since the game worlds are totally different, obey different set of laws, have different physics, history, ideology... there is NO WAY there ever will be an "online avatar" that could carry traits from one game to another - only the way to REGISTER to those games would be the same - and that is already happening! Name, credit card number, address, etc.
To combine virtual worlds is like the "Electronic Battlefield" hype we heard from the makes of Falcon in mid-90's. Nothing real ever materialized. The first thing that was close to their original "electronic battlefield" vision was Operation Flashpoint.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
I agree that this may be far fetched and doubt it will be seen in the next 5 years.
However, I do not see any reason for it to not be feasible, even desirable, in the next 10 or 12. Ten years ago I never would have thought that I could use a computer to control my movie watching (Media Center). 8 years ago I did not expect that I would ever use my cell phone to take pictures & then email them to a friend. 5 years ago I did not expect that I would use a common framework to build a functioning Club website using only off-the-shelf components (DotNetNuke).
I am not so cynical. I think this may happen. I think some guy in his garage (or mom's basement) will develop a MMO gaming framework, release it open source, and then you would have a slew of games released, using a common underlying structure. Even possibly a peer-to-peer framework where no one would house the servers (excepting a smaller, log-in type server). I see this as the next step. Differing locations, differing plots, different visual engines perhaps, but the same characters. All one world. Open your minds. Its coming.
Maybe this author is a bit ahead of his time, but don't accuse his creative imagination as being fueled by crack.
I'm looking forward to the day when my Sims avatar can spend 2/3 of his life playing Sim World of Warcraft.
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
And when you run into the sociopath who has the time and inclination to follow you around and trash you to all your friends for a perceived transgression, they can now destroy your online reputation no matter where you go...
Just broken up with your girlfriend and she's busy spreading rumours about your supposed sexual inadequacy to anyone who will listen to preserve her pride? Guess what, you can't contain this to a single community now...
There are definite downsides!
The article was pretty vague, but to suggest that one day people will just be able to move their character from game world to game world is absurd.
Aside from obvious "What is a hobbit doing on the deathstar" problem, gamers would never go for it.
one of the best aspects of a new mmo is that it is new, not just new to me but new period. I'm starting out fresh just like the world is, just like everyone else.. The "level race" starts over, I have the option to be a pioneer in the game.
By simply moving a character from place to place this eliminates the fresh new feel of a new mmo.
Although this certainly seems like some stupid gimmick Sony would try, "Transfer your EQ1 character to EQ2 for only $59.99!!!"
"When basement worlds collide".
Being a virgin at 25 isn't a problem after all.
What exactly is the economic incentive for them to coalesce? Last time I checked, the whole point was to pump gamers for money on a monthly cycle, rather than just up front with each release.
So a group of 10 gamers who all play different MMOs are locked in a basement and have to deal with each other for 3 weeks without playing their game of choice. Don't try to immagine the smell after the 3 weeks is up. World of Warcraft anyone?
Can't wait to lay some totems and frostshock some punkass CT's in Counterstrike!
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
This reminds me of the folks who show up at a Renaissance faire in Star Trek outfits.
It would probably work out just as smoothly...
There is an old Piers Anthony book that explorers these issues. It's a VR type situation where there are hundreds of diffrent roles you can play in various VR lands. In any event you can then travel to a shared space at times. I don't remember the details but it was fun read back in 98 or so.
I think it's possible, just as an operating system can have 90% of the marketshare, I believe that a single company can come out with a "game" that incorporates different genres and experiences into a single world and take control of 90% of the marketshare for MMO games. Lot's of people seem to say this idea is an impossibility because companies won't reach a compromise and share their own technologies, which is true today. The way this would work though, is using the operating system analogy and having 1 company create the infrastructure and then having multiple companies creating programs and experiences for this world. It's happening already in Second Life, and would be very interesting when taken to new heights.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
I'll be able to put Railroad Tycoon into EQ2 and actually get to see interesting places in a short amount of time.
This strikes me as similar to Michael Moorcock's "Eternal Champion" concept.
---
Today's anonymous post was brought to you by the image-protected passphrase: "informed"
is entirely plausable, but I think I'd find your monthly newsletter a bit too scary.
You've got to love the tagging.
I'd love to see a "passport" app that reads one VR avatar's properties, then converts and registers it in a different VR, mapping properties across. Of course earned experience, wealth and status have to be earned anew. But one's "basic persona" could be available in the new game.
The major problem is probably the avatar's name. Each VR has its own namespace, and sometimes naming prohibitions. There's no guarantee that one's name will be registrable in the new VR. But an interesting case can be made for trademark, where "Kim WoW Lee" might be protected by the World of Warcraft trademark even in an Ultima game. Or maybe something like "Kim 632355239 Lee, call me Kim" is in store for most of us.
--
make install -not war
30,000,000 people in Ironforge. And you thought it was crowded now...
Email, operating systems; these are tools. People don't need or want 30 kinds of hammers to do basically the same job nor do they really want to have to expend a lot of effort deciding which hammer to use.
Virtual worlds are entertainment. People want their entertainment to be unique and diverse with many choices and options. Suggesting virtual worlds will converge based on what happened to tools is like saying eventually there will be one generic movie that everyone will watch and enjoy rather than the 100s of different movies that come out each year.
Most likely, some of the common tools and systems to build these virtual worlds will converge and standardize just like every movie generally uses the same video and sound equipment to produce them and sometimes even the same plot structure; but, they will still remain inherently unique.
Runesabre
Enspira Online
Somehow I actually feel more stupid after reading TFA. And why do I have the feeling that the author has never played a MMORPG, or any online game that isn't flash-based (I consider Yahoo!Games roughly equivalent to Minesweeper)? Way to research your subject, sir.
With the Matrix analogy, it only works because the Matrix is designed to give everyone the same type of experience. One reason why we have different genres of games is for completely different experiences. If I want to be a dwarven warrior, I'll play WoW. To be a superhero, I'll play CoH. I wouldn't want to be playing my Guild Wars necromancer & have my friend pull up in a HMMVW, fresh from Battlefield 2.
The only interconnectivity I could see for future games is for communication, like IMing. Microsoft has done this right with XBox Live, and The Matrix Online has AIM connectivity. I like Xfire, even if it is rather spartan.
What would really be useful is a standard set of protocols for IM programs. Then we could choose which program has the most features we want, rather than what the majority of our friends/family/whatever uses...
"Make cyberlove, not cyberwar!" -Khaed(544779)
Uh, yeah, that's, uh, what do you call it... oh yeah: bullshit.
My 15th level mage casts Enhanced Charm on Lara Croft.
It's called Leetster. We accept registrants from World of Warcraft, EQ 2, Asheron's Call, Matrix Online, City of Heroes etc.. eventually we'll cover all MMORPGs and other avatar-based systems, like GAIA online. The goal is to create a unifying identity for all your avatars. Check it out.
Philosophistry
making your in-game persona as pervasive as an email address.
So is he saying I'll have, like, fifty in-game persona's, most ruined by PK'ers and ID stealers, and only fraction of the working ones I can even remember, and an even smaller fraction of those whose passwords I can remember? Hmmm, cool... I think?
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
Uh-huh. Yeah. You know, Tinyfugue had support for "portals" that would bounce you from one MU* to another, and I never saw those used.
Different worlds, different characters. Maybe sometimes they're the same character dressed for the realm, maybe you're boring and play the same character everywhere you go with as little change for the world as possible... or maybe there're a few underlying themes, which you mix and match with a dose of whatever inspiration comes to mind? Reinvent yourself for a new world, and maybe learn something about who you are.
egypt urnash minimal art.
I had an idea a few years back before there really were any 3D MMORPGs. I still don't think that something like this has been implemented: My idea is to take a standard gaming graphics engine, maybe one of the quake ones, and add functionality that allows you to walk through portals. Once you walk through a portal, you will connect to another server. With enough servers you could have a pretty large world.
The portals could be made more seamless by automatically connecting the user to the other server once the portal is in view (the portal doesn't have to be a door - it could also be a plane in space), and then rendering data from both servers while both worlds are in view. Depending on bandwidth issues, you could make it perfectly seamless.
Now everyone can truly have their own dominion in a virtual space. It could get interesting when OSS developers start innovating. You could have secret underground worlds, and new types of artifacts or characters appearing; bots, sex worlds, all kinds of stuff...
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Well, I think we can short about that. Easiest is to make a paralel to other media.
All books and movies with the same lead character ? Of course not. Since the "attributes" and behaviour you need for each world are different. (and the story already mentions that a bit)
We need a way to talk on a headset and have those that are close to us in the 3d game be able to hear us as if they were standing next to us in real life.
Teamspeak is nice, but it is only for your friends. You can't just walk up to a troll and start talking to him without a lot of typing.
With 3d sound projection in game, the further away you stand the more distant the sound. You could even have a shout button to broadcast to a larger area, and of course a mute button to mute out the annoying prepubescent children.
The mute button could even be in the form of a gag that only you can see on the person. If they are gagged you can not hear them and must ungag them to hear them again.
Sure, game companies would have to spend a little more money to pay people to actually talk to the game players in certain key roles (forcing GMs to actually Gm), but they could still have monsters and robots armies running autonomously.
Then all we have to do is make VR glasses that work, and we would have the true virtual gaming we were promised 15 years ago.
Well, check out my avatar-unifying page: Pakhuda's profile on Leetster. It unifies communication for my GAIA online, Halo 2, and World of Warcraft characters.
Philosophistry
Using the avatar on the Web is a start. See the Jabber Virtual Presence Project and Webmobs.
From an old slashdot story: http://goodoldadventures.com/index.html. Not quite a game, but it's based on the old Sierra King's Quest games, sequels, and spinoffs. If you're old like me, it's kind of a kick to go there and look around. Walking around Daventry as Roger Wilco...
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
The article was a major stretch. The difference between the Matrix envisioned by William Gibson in his fiction and the MMORPGs, is that Gibson's matrix was a way of interacting with the internet itself and these are games. Gibson's Matrix had to have unified avatars and systems for everyone, it was all a metaphor for the what was going on in the underlying hardware and a way to interact with data. The games are just that, games. They have no underlying reality for which they are a metaphor.
The comparison the article makes between e-mail and the avatars in MMORPGs is a huge stretch for a similar reason. For e-mail to be valuable you needed to be able to send it to and receive it from virtually everyone, but the games are not like that. Some people genuinely play them as almost single player events or play them with a select group and ignore virtually everyone else. Others do come on for the social interaction, but they are hardly missing out on it because people from another game world are not there. E-mail is valuable because it is a way to communicate with specific people. The MMORPGs have value because they are entertaining.
"All virtual worlds require a communication protocol that lets you talk with other people, a software platform that lets you build things on top of it"
:)
this looks like the right aproach
http://uni-verse.org/