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."

Comments

Games too?

[MacDork]

So gaming worlds are going to coalesce just like instant messenger serviced did years ag... oh, nevermind ;-)

Re:Games too?

[IAmTheDave]

Too true. Proprietary information is too important. Heck, Blizzard sues the shit out of anyone even trying to interop. Thinking that they would allow their servers to host other game metadata, allow interoperability, or anything of this degree is pretty stupid.

Although, "who needs more than 64k of RAM?" was uttered several times, so I could be completely wrong. I just don't see for-profit companies, who use and abuse every law on the books to protect their systems and intellectual property allowing this to come to pass.

Re:Games too?

[ADRA]

You're looking at the wrong companys to 'lead' a united approach. You will see The Microsoft and Sony (PS divison) leading the charge to 'join sonys metaverse! Be an orc today, tomorrow a jedi!' Its all a very slight variation on what Sony already has today with its universal pay scheme. The hook is that It'll also look a lot like MS live arcade.

Basically, you'll pay for the service and be given unlimited access to all realms (verses) that the service hosts. MS will come up with some nifty lauch titles to make people go ooh and ahhh all over. They'll start building a player base. When 3rd party XYZ, a young budding startup wants to get into the MMO space, instead of building a market from scratch, they could opt into a contract with Microsft to host their service on the MS live-type service. Once hosted, MS will pay XYZ for the time and use that the players waste on that particular game. Thats just what I think the pay scheme'll look like. It seems pretty plausible to me. It benefits everyone pretty equally. Obviously MS gets the advantage cause their holding the player base. But, the little guys can scrape by and get some money for their development costs without worrying about 'where's our audience?'.

Now how the in-game behaviour works is another question. Assuming the above example of the 'business of multi-versic games', we can assume MS would have a lobby-type area that you have some kind of common ground that all player base will reside in. It'll have crub like IM/Top score boards/Rankings/Game-entry areas/Mini-games/diverging visual themes depending on what genre we're going to log into.. portals, oh gods. There's so much that can get put into whats effectively the 'openning screen' that its too pointless to talk about all the cool things that could come from this.

The drawback of course is that it takes away from the immersion of 'that' game so that you don't really relate to the in-game avitars in the same way you would in a stand-alone game. Also, having a multi-versic system will mean universal sign-ons and trying to come up with an original name in a virtual world of millions and millions of people will be an issue first and foremost. Maybe passport signon anyone?? *shudder*

Re:Yawn...

[everphilski]

... and yet you post on /.

no it won't

[Joseph_V]

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.

"There is reason to believe..."

[raehl]

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.

hmm

[engagebot]

"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.

The Open Source Virtual World Platform

[Peter Amstutz]

Project Interreality - Virtual Object System (VOS)

http://interreality.org

Where do they get these writers?

[brucifer]

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.

Step away from the crack pipe.

[Shivetya]

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.

wishful thinking

[kisrael]

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"

It won't happen for a number of reasons.

[WidescreenFreak]

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.

I'm having serious difficulty imagining this.

[tukkayoot]

I've read people make similar claims before, but I am having a difficult time grasping this idea. I read this article thinking it might provide some sort of satisfactory explanation of how any architecture could do an adequate job of resolving the serious differences (and contradictions) between different types of virtual worlds and the avatars, environments and challenges that populate them.

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).

Yeah. No.

[jaybill]

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.

Economic Incentive

[NitsujTPU]

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.

Tools converge. Entertainment is not a tool.

[Runesabre]

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.

How Today's Pop Culture Is Making Us Smarter

[Laserwulf]

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...