Many people see virtual worlds like Second Life as a place to live out alternative lives. Others, such as Edward Castronova, see it as a new world built around game dynamics. New technologies tend to inspire unrealistic hopes for universal understanding and world peace as the book, The Victorian Internet, pointed out. In hindsight, how things eventually play out seems almost too obvious. The same will be true for virtual worlds, where as today many predictions are bordering on that of world peace. Ultimately what becomes of it will be less lofty and probably more practical. I of course have my own predictions, one that seems obvious to me is that virtual worlds will emerge as entertainment an platform.
In the post, The wrong type of Integration, Sibley Verbeck the CEO of The Electric Sheep Company, lays out his belief on how the metaverse will evolve. Rick van der Wal addresses the evolution of browser based virtual worlds over client based ones in his post, Is Second Life being replaced. Both posts mirror the state of the industry, focusing heavily on the technology and trying to find a business model. Such a focus I’m afraid leads the industry to look to the 2D web for inspiration and not see what is truly unique to virtual worlds. By focusing on what is truly unique to virtual worlds I see a platform for entertainment above almost all else.
Virtual Worlds
First I should clarify a little in what I mean when I say virtual worlds. I see them as a subset of the metaverse. The metaverse encompasses MMOs, 3D chat, small worlds (virtual rooms), mirror worlds, enterprise virtual work spaces, maybe even Miis – anything that has an avatar and a sense of presence. Virtual worlds share these characteristics but their most defining feature is that they are not games.
Second life is a place, its like Luton, you can play games in Luton but Luton is not a game.
- Richard Bartle
- Virtual Policy 08 Conference – Car boot sales and micropayments
But I don’t want to get caught up in the details, this is just how I currently split things up.
Second Life Gives Way to Open Standards and an Open Architecture
We already know that walled gardens eventually give way to open standards.
No privately held virtual world is going to end up in sole possession of the 3D Internet, just as no early 2D “walled garden” network provider like Prodigy, Compuserve or AOL owns the 2D Web today. A number of industry groups are working on open 3D standards. As soon as one of these gains widespread acceptance, anyone will be able to build a virtual world that is connected to any other similarly coded virtual world – just like HTML now allows anyone to create a 2D Web page that is connected to any other 2D Web page.
Industry groups are great, but as Tim O’Reilly pointed out in his post, Open Source and Cloud Computing, it was the open source browser Apache that ensured open standards on the web. It’s a combination of industry groups powered by open source that yield open standards. Open source virtual world platforms like OpenSim, Croquet, Sun’s Project Wonderland, and others will be the driver for interoperability. Perhaps interoperability will be home grown, come from the open interoperability project, or adopt others such as Google’s OpenSocial. But we’ll probably see the first widely used standard for interoperability between two open source virtual world platforms.
It’s also important to understand that as open source platforms mature it will be easier for individuals to run their own worlds – not unlike how we can host our own sites today. If you’re tech savy you can run and host your own web server, or you could off load much of the support by using a hosting service. If you don’t want to deal with any of the back-end you could use a free or premium service like GeoCities or Blogger. The same options will eventually be available for running your own virtual world, or piece of a larger virtual world.
However for this structure to work for web sites you need the domain name system, and virtual worlds will need a similar system. For the lack of a better word at the moment, I’ll call this a ‘connector’ system. This system will likely include some interoperability support and be based on open standards, allowing others to freely connect or not.
As a network effect takes root other internet services will join – MMOs, web utilities, web sites, etc.
Virtual Worlds are not Worlds Onto Themselves
A running debate on virtual worlds and the metaverse as a whole is the benefits of 3D vs 2D (predominately text based interfaces). Is 3D chat like IMVU and Google Lively necessarily better than 2D chat? More importantly, what will prove sticky? 3D chat may let you be more expressive but is that enough for it to replace the light weight nature of 2D chat? Only time will tell.
Many of these new 3D services will end up augmenting their 2D brothers, never becoming their own thing. Will a social networking virtual world ever replace MySpace or Facebook? Probably not, but maybe aspects such as avatars and virtual rooms may prove sticky enough to be adopted by social networks. Of course these aspects were already present in the social network Cyworld long before Second Life existed. The key is to not think of virtual worlds as separate to the internet and web, but as services to it.
The question then becomes what unique features do virtual worlds bring to the table that 2D or text based services do not? Mirror worlds certainly are interesting and go far beyond the traditional online mapping services. One obvious one think a lot of people overlook is real time, interactive, entertainment. Sure some can see games, but there is potential for so much more.
Storytelling
One area the internet has failed is storytelling as Reuben Steiger pointed out in his post - Has the Internet Failed as a Storytelling Medium? Virtual worlds will change all this. The tool-set, visual medium, and distribution is too great to pass up.
AI can already power intelligent virtual agents, or embodied agents, that can understand natural language. It isn’t too difficult to see these being turned into characters – intelligent virtual characters. From there it isn’t much to build a scene around them. Combine scenes to make a narrative. And it isn’t just playing out in front of us, the audience can interact with the characters, interact with the setting of the story, etc. This is what I call immersive story.
- Immersive Story
- Dramatic narrative that happens in real time as a player interacts with computer controlled characters and environments in virtual worlds.
If you’re familiar with interactve story, the difference between the two is whether or not a players actions affect the storyline – does the player have agency? Interactive story makes this a requirement, immersive story makes it a nice to have.
Imagine the scenario:
- You log onto one of the metaverse platforms
- Lead your avatar into a virtual theater building and select a theater.
- Upon entering your avatar is transported to a totally different environment, or scene, and has even taken on a different appearance.
- Characters in the scene approach and speak with you through text chat, or voice.
- You converse with them through text chat, amazed they respond as if they were real people.
- Slowly they draw you into the story.
- The story continues to unfold with you its protagonist.
This type of story is certainly different than traditional forms and will require new methods/techniques of storytelling.
In order to process stories in real time, traditional storytelling needs to be formalized into computable models, by drawing from narratological studies, and by taking into account the characteristics of programming. Consequently, due to its technological complexity, it is currently hardly accessible for creators and end-users.
- From the 1st Joint International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling
Equally this type of storytelling will call for it’s own feature set – requirements. As a game engine controls the elements of a game, an immersive story engine will control the camera, jump scenes, natural language processing, management of multiple players, management of story elements and characters, etc.
Finding the right techniques and corresponding technology will take a lot of innovation. Innovation that could be spurred by a company but is more likely to come from the community and a sprout from an open platform.
Companies have adapted to user-centered innovation in different ways. Several authors have described how companies have innovated by providing platforms from which externally generated innovations can result, and where users–as well as ecosystems of affiliates, third-party developers, and service providers–can form innovative communities.
Amy Shuen – Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide
Possible Architecture for the Platform
My guess is that the immersive story engine will be part of the virtual world platform, a module of a sort.
The immersive story engine may ping outside resources if it gets into trouble. Say the built in AI natural language processing piece comes across a slang term it has never seen before. It can ping the Google search engine for the latest meaning.
Mass Amateurization
This entertainment platform will bring the same thing the web and blogging software has brought to the news industry – mass amateurization.
The freedom driving mass amateurization removes the technological obstacles to participation.
- Clay Shirky
Of course as we know, a lot of this amateurization is also powered by the hope of making money. The same will be true of immersive story, however what form that takes is a bit of a mystery. There is always the hope of micropayments, but what seems more interesting to me is immersive product placement. Imagine AdSense for your immersive story but instead of text ads or putting a billboard up, intelligent virtual characters can be programmed to give a product spiel. The more they deliver the spiel the more an artist earns. Imagine an immersive story that involves a bar and the artist has elected to use immersive product placement where the bartender pushes Coors beer to the point of annoyance. Maybe that annoyance ads reality to the bar, that is up to the artist to decide. If the annoyance pushes too many players away the artist can switch it up. In a way this is user generated ads.
Conclusion
Virtual worlds enable many new and interesting technologies, but most of them will simply augment ones already found in 2D. However virtual worlds offer unique features over that of 2D. Two features, rich graphical environments and integration of AI technology can be used to create immersive story. Where as the internet has failed at storytelling, virtual worlds will not. In fact I believe virtual worlds will eventually come to be seen as platforms for entertainment more than anything else.
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