Reading the a post about upcoming enhancements to Xbox Live, my first thought was that the avatar has finally come of age. I remember talking about avatars at Yahoo! in 2000, but not much came of it.
Users loved them but didn’t use them much as they lacked functionality - they weren’t 3D nor portable. Well they still aren’t all that portable but many things have changed since those early years.
Then I began to think more about what the Xbox Live service was doing. It wasn’t just the avatar that Xbox Live and other services were adopting, they’re adopting a host of other virtual worlds features. Ability to customize your avatar, earn points, leveling, socialize, etc. None of these are new and they’re all taken from someplace else - mostly from games. But I would still say that virtual worlds represent a unique combination of features and place different emphasis on them. Which got me thinking, if games have game dynamics (some may call them game mechanics) why can’t we have virtual world dynamics? Game dynamics is not just the set of features but how they interplay with one another, the same can be said for virtual world features.
So I think I’m just going to start using the term “virtual world dynamics”. My last question, should it be plural - virtual worlds dynamics? Maybe not.
