Really

Last week I attended the State of Play 09 conference, organized by the NY Law School. There were several excellent speakers and panels, and I met lots of great people, and had many interesting discussions about virtual worlds and their applications. In the next couple of posts I’ll try to summarize some of the ideas and discussions that arose during the conference. For more details, and better reporting on what was actually said, see the list of blog post collected by keynote speaker Raph Koster, or go back and look at the discussion that took place via twitter during the event.

Raph Koster opened with a keynote addressing the conference theme of “Have virtual worlds reached a plateau?” Comparing Second Life to services like Twitter which are being used by demonstrators in Iran and their supporters, Koster stated that virtual world have failed to achieve main-stream relevance. He pointed out that the MMOs and virtual worlds of today are direct descendants of text-based MUDs, and enable the same type of interactions that were available to users in the 1970’s. In order to make virtual worlds more relevant, or at least reach a wider audience, virtual world and MMO designer need to start thinking about different user experiences and ways of interaction. As an example, Koster suggested a more web-browser-like experience, using open standards, and allowing users to have multiple tabs open in different virtual worlds.

I definitely agree that by looking at how users are currently working with and consuming information on the web can give us important insights on how to evolve virtual world design. I like the idea of using tabs to allow users to be present in, and easily switch between multiple virtual locations and think it would enable new techniques for managing communication and collaboration. Looking at other ways we work with information and translating (not merely importing) them into virtual worlds is definitely a rich area to explore.

However, Koster seemed to be advocating for ways to get more people to play games in virtual worlds. “The killer app for virtual worlds is ‘having fun’,” he said (according to my notes – maybe not an exact quote). The fact that the activities in text-based MUDs survive in modern 3D MMOs was presented as stagnation, and a barrier to wide-spread adoption. My view is that rather than stagnation, this persistance of a certain set of activities simply means that there is a large group of people who enjoy playing those types of games (quests, role-playing, world-building, socializing, etc.) and they have used the evolving technology to make those games more enjoyable. What is needed now is to look at other types of activities that other people enjoy and see how to apply virtual world technologies to them. We’re already seeing virtual worlds being applied to domains like concerts, training, and collaboration. Perhaps there is similar benefits to using virtual worlds, or certain features of virtual worlds, to other domains as well (accounting, basket weaving, exercise…).