Really

New virtual world platforms have been popping up almost daily for the last couple of weeks: Vivaty, Lively, JustLeapIn, ExitReality, WebFlock, and I’m sure I forgot a couple. This is a new generation of virtual worlds, eager to show that they’ve learned from the mistakes of Second Life: Browser based! Embeddable in your web page! More fun graphics! Integrated with FaceBook!

Right now (and I realize it is still early), they just seem like more 3D chat rooms, similar to what Meez and IMVU have been offering for a while. To me, this type of platform is not that interesting. I want to be able to create things with other people, and explore environments and tools that others have built. So, I tend to dismiss those environments that seem to focus on just chat - they obviously don’t get it! Of course, IMVU reports that they have more than twenty million users, so maybe I’m the one who doesn’t get it (or, perhaps, people are different and like different things. Looking at Richard Bartle’s classification of player types - Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, and Killers, might help us understand what type of person prefers what type of virtual world).

Some of the new-comers are showing glimmers of moving beyond the simple chat rooms: Lively will allow Google Gadgets to be integrated in the 3D space, ExitReality automatically converts a web page into a 3D environment, and JustLeapIn “premium” room templates are much larger than the rooms of of other platforms, allowing plenty of opportunity for exploration.

However, I want to point out a story that’s told about Second Life’s beginnings. Philip Rosedale, describes how at a meeting where an early version of Second Life had been demonstrated, the agenda moved from the demo to a discussion about finances. However, the screen stayed on as “background entertainment” (cutting and pasting Rosedale’s story below from 3PointD):

What happened was, we were watching the background, and we realized this city was emerging, very, very fast, it was this incredible thing. We all started getting drawn more and more back to the screen. We started talking about it, and a snowman showed up, Andrew built a snowman, and I don’t know if it was broken at the beginning, but then somebody else built a sort of burning man, with a bunch of small snowmen bowing down to the greater snowman, and so you could see this jazz thing happening in real time. There had never been a canvas in which two people could paint that way at the same time, much less three or four or five.

That was this moment of change in that board meeting where we said, you know, it’s not necessarily about the wind working really well. It’s actually about people making things together. What’s going to come out of this is cities and intention and collaboration and community, because the capability this thing provides is mysterious in the degree to which is allows people to do things together.

What enabled this “moment of change” was the in-world creation tools, that enabled co-creation and a new form of collaboration. Chatting in a 3D environment may be good, but extending that chat with 3D forms of expression gives us a whole new way of communicating.

Current virtual worlds take different approaches to user-generated content. The more controlled environments give the users almost no way to alter the world, while more open platforms give users almost complete control of their surroundings. Allowing user-generated content is attractive, because, hey, free content development! Of course, there are risks also, like copyright infringement, “mature” content, and teh ugly.

However, even when user-created content is allowed, many of the current and emerging virtual worlds require users to create 3D models in external applications, and then import the models into the world. A sensible approach, reusing existing tools, and not trying to reinvent the 3D modeling wheel.
The risk is that it leaves the users with little or no way to modify the environment directly. The problem is nicely illustrated in a post on Journeys with Jayce, describing how to be an effective raid leader in World of Warcraft:

For some reason, we could not manage to keep the mob in the middle. So I decided to use a player corpse, positioning it right smack in the middle of the pit, and using that as a marker for where to place the mob. The goal was to make that drake die and land right on top of the corpse. We never had a problem with positioning after that, and it worked so well, I ended up dragging along a dead gnome all the way up to the back of NToV, and using him as our mob marker for all the nameds.

Being able to change objects in the world and move them around, enables users to develop their own collaboration tools as they need them, when they need them. Activities like highlighting, voting, and brainstorming, can all be accomplished by moving and altering objects — No further application support is necessary. Of course, built-in support for those activities might be much better than what users can come up with on the spur-of-the-moment (”stack your dead gnome next to the proposal you want to vote for!”), but it will be difficult to come up with all possible tools that users might need.

Voting by manually stacking blocks (no gnomes were available)

If your virtual world only allows you to talk to other users and interact with the environment in pre-defined ways, you lose much of the benefit of collaborating in a 3D environment. By providing tools for changing the environment directly, even if it’s just dead gnomes, virtual worlds enable users to interact with each other in new ways.

Wednesday, I joined a bunch of other virtual world enthusiasts for the first VastPark multi-user stress-test. VastPark is one of several virtual worlds platforms that’s currently in development. VastPark seems similar to Multiverse, in that it offers tools to create virtual worlds, that can be accessed using a standard client.
The VastPark creator tool has been available (to beta participants) for a while, but Wednesday was the first time we got to try the VastPark browser to access a multi-user world. The model is that you create 3D environments called ‘parks’, which are then hosted as multi-user worlds using “VastServer“.
The stress-test nicely demonstrated the difficult position new virtual-world platforms are in: trying to make sure they get the fundamentals right while trying to catch up with established platforms like Second Life (SL has the opposite problem, trying to stay ahead in the features race while at the same time re-architecting their basic infrastructure).
The VastPark direction seems to be:

• Open source VastServer from the start (allowing users and corporations to host their own virtual worlds).
• Use a peer-to-peer network architecture for scalability. VastPark announced that they are licensing a “decentralized network engine” from NICTA, that will enable millions of concurrent users.
• I asked if anybody was working on interoperability with OpenSim, and Craig Presti, VastPark Lead Developer, said they were “thinking about it”. The question wasn’t that serious, and the answer may not have been either,but it certainly wasn’t a flat denial of the possibility.
• The VastPark worlds are described using a markup language called IMML, base on XML. Using IMML rather than some hidden internal structure could make interoperability simpler, as well as tasks like importing and exporting content.
• One of the stress-test participants discovered that clicking on the blue buttons floating in the room started a Skype chat. It would be easy to speculate about whether this feature indicates future in-world voice using Skype, or tight integration with other applications in general.

However, we’ll have to wait some time before we can see any of the VastPark ideas in a usable form. Though it was a lot of fun to see the platform in its current raw state, it was hard not to wonder how Second Life and Multiverse (and Qwaq and MPK20…) will evolve while VastPark is still implementing basic functionality. Hopefully the different virtual world platform developers are not in a race to reach a specific destination, but are instead using different approaches to explore different parts of the space.

Thanks to the VastPark team for letting us bash on their software - If you missed the fun, take a look at some of the screenshots from the event, and prepare to sign up for the Open Beta in April.

Ted Castronova’s new book Exodus to the Virtual World argues that the growth of 3D virtual game worlds is inevitable, simply because they are more fun than most other activities. As more people start to experience these types of games, they will try to translate different aspects of game design into policies in the physical world.

The argument rests on the premise that virtual worlds are fun. An enormous amount of effort has gone into game design, ensuring that there is the right balance of challenge and reward in order to keep players entertained for months and years. Castronova provides solid arguments, based on research in psychology and economics, to explain why these environments are fun and how this will lead to hundreds of millions of people using virtual worlds for entertainment as well as to earn their living.

The book then explores the impact of these users interacting in virtual worlds rather than engaging in other activities. Castronova does not go into the effects of attention shifting from one space to another. Instead, he explores what will happen once a large part of the world’s population experiences an environment that not only is fun, but has been carefully designed to be so by applying specific rules and constraints. People will want to experience the same type of fun outside of the game, in the “real” world, and will therefore want to implement policies that match game rules and conventions. For example, in World of Warcraft, everybody starts out with the same amount of minimal resources, has the same opportunities to advance and earn wealth and prestige, and by trying for a sufficiently long time, will eventually “level-up”. Breaking the rules is punished swiftly and harshly, and there is no charity, welfare, or taxation. Applying policies that try to impose the same conditions in the physical world, should therefore create a “fun” society, where everybody can gain wealth and advancement if they try.

Now would be a good time to read (or re-read) Linda Zimmer’s review of Exodus to the Virtual World, where she reminds us that Castronova states at the very beginning that this is a book of “speculative non-fiction.” As speculation, the book is bound to be wrong, given the difficulties of predicting the future. I disagree with Castronova’s conclusions on what would make society fun, but until the changes described in the first part of the book actually occur, my arguments are just as speculative as his. What is important is that we start thinking now about the impact of a shift towards the use of virtual worlds for entertainment, communication, and interaction. As Castronova points out in the end of the book the risk is that those who don’t understand virtual world technology will enact policies that hinders their continued use and growth. Those of use hyping, er, evangelizing virtual worlds, need to lead the discussions, in order to ensure that informed decisions are made.

But while I agree with the general argument of the book, there are some underlying assumptions and claims which I don’t think are fully explored. First of all, the book is really talking about games like World of Warcraft and Everquest, rather than open platforms like Second Life. Though Second Life does not have defined game elements, many users still consider it fun. Indeed, the notion of fun described in the book seems to assume that the steady stream of positive reinforcement seen in MMOs is the only or best type of fun. Yet people engage in games and other activities that can be full of negative reinforcement and be very difficult to master, and think of them as fun as well.

The larger question is how much of game design is influenced by the constraints in the underlying technology. The constant positive reinforcement of XP and gold, may only be necessary in games because the user interface does not allow other types of feedback. For example, the satisfaction of aiming an arrow and precisely hitting the mark, or the smells and sounds of preparing a real meal, are not available in games today, though players engage in both activities. Once we move away from keyboards and standard game controllers, the physical feedback , and advancing based on learning new skills, may eliminate the need for leveling and XP. We may already be seeing the beginning of this transition in games like Guitar Hero and the Wii console.

Castronova also does not examine in detail the negative aspects of games. If game policies are extended into other spheres, will we have griefers wreaking havoc in the real world, with no accountability? The notions of addiction, or physical violence caused by games are also dismissed as uninformed, with very little justification.

Overall, however, Exodus to the Virtual World expertly points out some of the fundamental issues we need to start to think about as virtual worlds become more prevalent. As the sub-title states, online fun is changing reality, and we need to make sure that it turns into a reality where we will want to live.

A few months ago, I got an email from a virtual world training company, that stated that prejudice is eliminated in virtual worlds, since “everybody can choose their own appearance.” Of course, prejudice and bias is as common in virtual worlds as in any other place where people interact: it runs rampant. Hamlet Au (nee Linden) described the negative comments one Second Life user received when she went from white and blonde to “a staggeringly attractive, astoundingly photo-realistic, young African-American woman”. Nick Yee has written about “The Transfer of Stereotypes and Prejudice” in games, including how male and female characters are treated differently by other players.

All of which leads to the question posed by Ren Reynolds at Terra Nova: Do virtual worlds liberate us from prejudices, or reinforce dominant stereotypes? Another claim that’s often heard is how virtual worlds lets people express their “real” self. Yet, it often seems that our real selves are tall, thin, muscular and/or voluptuous. I’ve heard SL business owners describe how they use female avatars in business meetings, since it seems to encourage “better behavior” in clients, or trying to match the appearance of potential customers, in order to put them at ease.

It seems that we are leaning more to the reinforcement of biases than liberation, but I wonder if people are going to get tired of having to appear in a certain way in order to be accepted? Is there a point where it gets disconcerting to realize that a large part of your social network has an image of you that is vastly different than your real physical appearance?

Another question is whether virtual worlds like Second Life even allow the easy creation of avatars that realistically depict different body types, ethnic backgrounds, and disabilities (the avatar described in Hamlet Au’s article was a custom creation by a skilled avatar designer). In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud describes how realistic depictions of women and minorities did not appear in comics until there were a substantial number of women and minority comic book creators. Are we going to have to wait for a similar type of evolution in virtual worlds (or do we get to look forward to more worlds based on dolls and ponies)?

Update: I just saw Fleep Tuque’s Open Letter to SL Skin Designers talking about the difficulty of trying to offer a diverse set of avatars to potentially hundreds of new SL users (in an educational setting). She says, “ There are virtually NO fully transferable skins for folks who wish to have an african, latino, asian, or other non-white skin type.” Clearly, the default avatars offered by Linden Lab are not sufficient, and it is interesting that while non-white avatars are available for sale, they are not as freely available as other types. Is the scarcity a result of the difficulty in creating them, or because of a (perceived) lack of interest?

In the discussions around standards for virtual world, the notion of “portable avatars” seems to be pretty popular. At the fall virtual worlds conference, Linden Lab and IBM announced that they were partnering to define standards around Universal Avatars, web integration, security and stability. A universal avatar standard would allow users to move their avatar from one world to the other, while maintaining appearance, “digital assets”, and identity. Given that the problem of identity and managing multiple accounts has not been solved for regular web sites (ok, it may have been solved, but there is no widespread adoption yet), I’m curious to see how successful the effort will be in the virtual world space.

It may be that the value of universal, portable avatars is not big enough to drive the quick adoption of a particular solution. However, all virtual worlds need content, and Second Life has shown that the easiest way to get content is to let the users create it. So, virtual world creators either have to make it really easy for the users to create content in their environment (like the built-in tools in the SL client), or enable easy import of content created elsewhere. Already, platforms like Multiverse and Scenecaster are starting to enable integration with Google’s Sketchup and 3D Warehouse, and import of COLLADA seems to crop up more and more.

However, 3D objects are not that interesting on their own — they need to do something. So, the next step may be figuring out how to enable the import of complete virtual world applications. It seems unlikely that other virtual worlds would enable the running of programs written in the Linden Scripting Language (LSL), but once Linden Lab completes the transition to Mono, maybe other virtual world platforms will start to see the value of an integrated Mono runtime also?

Another possibility would be some standard 3D interaction libraries built around the scripting language Lua. Like COLLADA, Lua seems to show up in several different new (and old) virtual worlds. Maybe we will see the development of a lua common library for interactions in 3D environments, making it easier for programs to work in multiple different platforms.

Being able to write an application for one virtual world, and have it run anywhere (hey, “Write once, run anywhere” — that’s catchy!) would be pretty nifty, and is the flip-side of the Universal avatar: If I can use my favorite application in any virtual world, then maybe I don’t need to move between platforms so much.

Yesterday, I had the chance to talk with Remy Malan of Qwaq Inc. about Qwaq Forums. Qwaq Forums is a business oriented virtual world platform (like MPK20, and ProtonMedia), that is based on OpenCroquet. However, if I understand correctly, the Croquet part is mostly the back-end of the system, and Qwaq have added their own interface, asset management, and other features geared towards the enterprise. Rather than being peer-to-peer (as Croquet), Qwaq Forums is a hosted service which provides a virtual world where users can create rooms for different purposes. The system comes with a set of built-in templates for different styles of meeting rooms and project areas, for example. There are some limited tools for creating 3D content in the environment, but the philosophy is to not replicate functionality that is available in other tools, so the expectation is that users will import 3D models created with tools like Maya and SketchUp(!).

Other neat features are application sharing, integrated voice, and communication via https on port 80. The network part of it was actually one of the things that impressed me most, given the trouble I have connecting with Second Life through our client. When I started up Qwaq, it tried a couple of protocols and ports, figured out my proxy settings, and then connected to the server, without any intervention on my part.

Avatar support was minimal in the demo I got. Remy and I were represented as block figures moving around the room. Fully articulated avatars are in the works however, as well as a way to stream webcam video on avatars. Again, any avatar customization will happen using external tools, like Poser.

Qwaq has tried to make everything as easy-to-use as possible, but if necessary you can add your own scripting via Python, some sort of XML RPC to connect to external apps, and if you’re really serious, you can get down to the Squeak Croquet layer.

Qwaq is probably the most usable business oriented virtual world I’ve looked at, both from the perspective of available features and their cost structure (flat rate monthly subscription fee). However, I found myself missing some things. The obvious one is the lack of avatar support and customization. I think that being able to express yourself through and identify with your avatar is crucial to achieve immersion. Without immersion, you no longer feel like you’re interacting with people in the virtual world. With too primitive avatars, I find myself feeling like I’m looking in on the world rather than being part of it. Also, while the reliance on outside tools for content creation makes sense, I think it will limit the amount of creation done by users to those who whose job it is, as opposed to something everyone can do.

The other missing piece I think is going to be a problem for all “business virtual worlds”: isolation. By setting up private environments that are not connected to a larger world, you are limiting users to the content and interactions that they bring in only. There is no way to cross-fertilize with ideas discovered during random explorations of the world. I can’t bring in new presentation tools or fun animations created by some random resident. I can’t hold a post-meeting networking/sky-diving session (unless I build it myself). In other words, while Qwaq Forums and the others may be good business collaboration tools, I worry that they may not be any fun. And if they’re not fun, how effective can they be?