State of Play impressions
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…).
I think the last paragraph is rather sending mixed messages.. is Koster trying to say MUD is a barrier to wide-spread adoption of 3D games and therefore we should move on from MUD? (that’s the first question.. more to come
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And also.. I think we should (or I should) dig deeper about the MUD vs. 3D situation.. my opionion is that 3D limits your imagination in a strange way.. when I type “kick xxxx” I might have a different image in my mind about that action. And for certain games (like kill aliens maybe?) that is actually better than 3D for some people.. they have their own idea about what aliens should look like..
Well this is not a question but just a comment :p
I have a hard time picturing how to do accounting or other business stuff in 3D virtual world… I am still used to using a GUI as an interface.. but I guess the 64 million dollars question is how do you make the HCI transition happen? when we were happy with DOS or vi a long time ago, windows just seem so nature and you don’t have to force people to get into using it. But for 3D virtual world, any use other than gaming seems hard to get used to?
A wild idea– if you can just get one news show, one show to try to use 3D virtual world to broadcast news.. then maybe the rest will follow..
Yu-an,
What I was trying to convey was that the things you can do in MUDs are pretty much the same thing you can do in 3D MMOs (though, as you point out, requiring more imagination). So, the barrier is that many people don’t want to do those things that you can do in MUDs, and the 3D games don’t add enough to lure more people in.
As for using 3D for accounting or other non-game uses, my view is that being in a fully 3D, immersive environment is the most natural UI of all, since it is what we experience everyday. We are a long way from achieving a completely natural experience however. Also we need to figure out how to use the environments appropriately – broadcasting news is probably not useful, just as it is not very effective to have people walking down the street shouting the news
That sounds more like gossiping :p
“it is not very effective to have people walking down the street shouting the news ”
Twitter and mobile phones are enabling just that – people wlaking down the street shouting the news……and it seems to be very effective…