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Are We Headed for a Virtual Winter?
Elixir creator and digital avatar evangelist, Bruce Damer, believes that a downturn in Virtual Worlds may be leading to a "winter" in the near future. "Is the coming of several new VW platforms going to balkanize a limited usership or grow the user base? In looking at broader scope of user interactivity demographics, will the move of more people to do their primary computing on mobile platforms reduce the number of people using VWs on big screens or put a cap on the growth of the VW market? Is the fact that there are now so many options for real-time representation of people online (Skype, Twitter, etc) means that VWs are always going to struggle for visibility? Is interaction in a VW that much more enriching and valuable than the simpler modalities available in other platforms? Will VWs ever really go mainstream? I continuously hear complaints about VWs not being worth the trouble, especially from people much younger and hipper than me (I am 46) who prefer much lighter weight forms of interaction. What does this portend?"
Why shouldn't WoW or SL be able to integrate directly with Skype, AIM, email, Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter?
It's probably the next step of increasing MMO/VW usage.
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I think we just have reached a saturation point, just like how first person shooters became saturated. Fantasy-wise, there is a ton of stuff... EQ1, EQ2, WoW, WAR, DAoC, Vanguard, AoC, etc.
Even general purpose virtual worlds are covered -- Second Life pretty much grabs that market.
Blah blah yammer bafflegab.
Rich virtual worlds are one of those things that sound good in theory, but don't work out so well in real life. I spend a lot of time on IRC, and I just don't see the need for anything more than a nickname and a topic to have meaningful interactions with others online. And even the topic is optional.
Is there really a point to having a 3d avatar?
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To reiterate: What?
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Why are you asking all those questions about Volkswagens?
Is it really that difficult to avoid overloading common acronyms?
Volkswagen
Virtual Worlds
Virtual Winter
Profit!
air or water cooled VW's here?
To reiterate: People seem to like AIM better than Second Life
I continuously hear complaints about VWs not being worth the trouble, especially from people much younger and hipper than me.
Well, yeah. If you're near San Francisco, go to Burning Man, went to Thunderdome last weekend, and have friends in Vau de Vire, real life has about as much drame, and as much bare skin, as Second Life. If you're stuck in Outer Nowhere, Second Life looks like a good option.
I was thinking (oh god no) the same thing. I've seen some of the virtual worlds out there and they are very resource intensive. I wonder if there was some lighter weight protocol we could use? I wouldn't need an avatar image.. maybe just a label to differentiate speakers. Of course, avatars allow you do express other emotions that sometimes don't come across well with pure messaging.. Maybe we could devise a system of text-based shortcuts to show when the "speaker" is joking or smiling, etc..
The VWs do have features that can't be replicated well, however. For example, I can set my avatar to "Away" and in some VWs it will save messages for me to read later. It would be interesting if there was a way to have a sort of "INBOX" where these messages could be easily retrieved. Maybe allow subject and date fields, and some method of sorting the messages would be useful...
Probably won't happen though...
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There aren't multiple World Wide Webs. There's just one.
There aren't multiple "Email Networks" -- again, just one.
Why are all the exciting, new, "Web 2.0" technologies all such walled gardens? I understand why I can't take my World of Warcraft character to Age of Conan. I don't understand why I need one login for Slashdot, another for Myspace, yet another for Flickr, and so on -- OpenID, people, please!
I've seen a few attempts to make this happen, but it seems that the most open virtual world we have now is Second Life, which is entirely controlled by the whim of one company (Linden Labs). Where's my general-purpose, open source Virtual World Browser? Why can't I simply walk from one "virtual site" to another -- each controlled, run, and maintained by different people?
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I've never seen SecondLife etc. as just somewhere to go to chat (although you certainly can). If I wanted to chat, I *WOULD* use AIM, etc. There is no point to going into SecondLife or whatever, sitting in a virtual conference room, and talking to a room of avatars -- just use IRC or whatever. I've also not seen the point in sitting in a virtual cafe and chatting people up, although some do.
My point personally in playing around in SecondLife etc. are to see the sights, and interact (play around with stuff in-game and play around with people.) You're not going to have a car race, laser tag, show off the stuff you've created, etc. etc. in IRC.
Well, the thing is, most people don't play a MMO for ever. A lot approach them with the idea that they'll live the rest of their life there, but eventually they finish the game, do the end grind 100 times, get bored, move on.
And a lot seem to have trouble grasping the idea that, basically, "it's ok. I played it for so long, I got bored, time to move on." They feel somehow betrayed and cheated, and throw tantrums that everything that kept them there for a year, now suddenly sucks. And please someone make a game without that WoW crap. And before WoW, it was EQ. But I digress.
Back when I heard a number, it was back in EQ times. (First one, not EQ2.) Sony figured out that the average player stays in the game for an average of 6 months. Some stayed a lot longer, of course, and some quit before the first month was over, but the average was 6 months.
I wouldn't know if it's longer or shorter for WoW, but most people don't stay for ever. They get bored, and they go looking for another MMO to play. And end up playing offline stuff for a while, and/or back to WoW.
What I'm saying is that WoW didn't just enlarge the market for itself. It also enlarged the pool of players who genuinely want to move to another MMO by now. It gets new players and sheds all players all the time. And sometimes gets them back.
Or to put it otherwise, just look at all those people in your guild who were swearing that when D&D Online comes live, that's it, they're outta here and generally it's going to bury WoW. Then it was LOTRO. And Vanguard. And God knows what else.
So to get to the point: to enlarge the market, someone would just need to catch those falling off it. Sure, maybe integrating with Skype could work too, nothing against that. But you could double the market over night without that too. You'd just need to make a game that's good enough for all those getting off WoW.
Then there are the untapped niches.
E.g., the chaos gods know there are a ton of us starving for a good _SF_ MMO. If you look at TV vs MMOs, something is amiss. There are more SF fans than high fantasy fans for TV, but on MMOs some 99% of the market is high fantasy. Can it be that there are a _lot_ of people just waiting for a _good_ SF MMO for a change? (No offense to the couple of AO and SWG fans left, but, eh, you get my drift.) There is the potential to do for the SF segment the same that WoW did for fantasy games.
E.g., there are a lot more kinds of games than RPGs, that have their followers. Business sims are quite big at least in Germany. And The Sims has sold more copies than some whole other genres. Or how about tactical/strategy games? Why can't I lead a squad or run a city-state on a huge map, instead of running around as one character? Etc. Now probably it's not as straightforward to convert most of them to a MMO, but if someone figures out how to do a good one, I'm sure they can enlarge the pie a bit.
So to sum a it up: there's a lot of room for growth by just, well, not making a half arsed job of it. And even more room if it's not yet another EQ clone.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
There aren't multiple World Wide Webs. There's just one.
And it took years of work to make that happen, to bring together TCP/IP, UUCP, BITNET, BBSes, FIDO, the various online services like Compuserve and Delphi, and later AOL and MSN, and have it all fall together into the World Wide Web.
There aren't multiple "Email Networks" -- again, just one.
In the '80s your email address could be "USER AT MIT-AI", "c.user%ucbcory@UCBVAX", "cn=Random User, ou=Staff, o=Your Company, c=us", "...!ihnp4!mhuxa!user", and so on. They all developed separately and grew together.
3d is a pretty complex problem and the technology to make arbitrary constructs and avatars from different sources work well with any kind of realism is still under active and rapid development. It's hard enough getting it to work at all, let alone limiting it to some sort of common subset of all the possible ways people are making it happen.
There are a number of standards being developed, but we're in early years yet.
I had dinner with Bruce about a week and a half ago, shortly before his article was posted. I mentioned to him that "Virtual Worlds appear to be more for entertainment; if I want to communicate with someone, I use Skype or the real world. I see Virtual Worlds eventually becoming mainstream when we get augmented reality."
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