Really

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.

One of the best part of hanging around in Second Life, is the number of smart and creative people you meet. For some reason, a completely pliable 3D environment where you can create almost anything you can imagine, seems to attract a lot of creative energy. But even in the crowd of geeks, artists, inventors, and thinkers, there are some people who stand out from the crowd. Grace McDunnough is one of them, and anybody who is trying to get a handle on the real meaning and impact of virtual worlds can get some valuable insight just by reading her (far-too-infrequently updated) blog.

In addition to being one of the few who really “get” Second Life, virtual worlds, and new media in general, Grace is also a terrific guitar player and singer. Combining both areas of expertise, she has created “MUSIMMERSION” – an event that is to SL concerts what Cirque de Soleil is to acrobatics. These are live concerts, but for each song, Grace transports the audience into a new environment. The settings sometimes complement the songs and other times extend the song into a new direction. Looking around the environments while listening to Grace voice and guitar, I felt partially like being in a music video, and partially like being inside Grace’s mind, seeing her vision of the songs she was performing.

The below screen-shots (click on them to get larger versions) give some idea of what MUSIMMERSION is like, but it is really something everyone needs to see and hear for themselves. There are still some performances left in the series, and seating is limited, so send Grace an IM and ask for an invitation.

Nights in White Satin

Vincent

As I came out of the concert, I was thinking about how while most of us are working on creating cool gadgets, useful tools, or beautiful and entertaining things, and wondering how this translates to business value, Grace has created an experience and answered all the questions.

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?

In an article for the Second Life Insider, Eloise Pasteur asks, “How should we talk to each other?” She describes the development of the ways Linden Lab communicates with the residents of Second Life. The progression goes from being able to IM CEO Phillip Linden on a regular basis, to the current blog, which limits the number of comments allowed per post. In other words, there has been a shift from dialogue to broadcast. Eloise does not mention the occasional town hall (admittedly plagued with technical issues) and regular in-world office hours held by some Linden employees, but it’s fair to say that many residents feel that their views are not listened to.

Ironically, one of the main reasons put forward for why corporations should move into Second Life is that they will be able to use the virtual world to interact with their customers, get immediate feedback, and create a more personal relationship with them. So… that makes the current situation with Linden Lab kind of inconvenient for us virtual world proponents.

Maybe there is a limit to how many customers you can dialogue with — once Linden Lab hit a couple of million residents, using IMs to communicate, or even having public forums became ineffective. Having sufficient resources to have interactive dialogues with all your users maybe is a problem that all business in SL will need to face. But what a lovely problem to have: “We’re getting too many visitors on our island — take down the camping chairs!”

The answer to Eloise’s question seems to be the advice one should give to any corporation wanting to communicate in the virtual world:

• Have staff available during business hours to talk with visitors to your location.
• Hold regular communication events to share your vision, ideas, and strategy.
• Foster the development of user communities around your products.
• Provide effective ways for people share their ideas about how to improve your product offerings.
• Expect and welcome criticism.

Businesses in SL are already applying these principles on a small scale. Perhaps the answer is as simple as ensuring that as your customer base grows, you also grow the number of opportunities for dialogue. If you find yourself forced to revert to broadcasting instead of interacting, you may have forgotten the reason for going into the virtual world in the first place.

A poem

Can be a virtual world,

Where we see new vistas,

Meet old friends, and

in whose beauty we

Immerse ourselves.

But not this one.

I went to visit the Collaborative Environments group at Sun Labs in Burlington to learn more about the MPK20 project. Nicole Yankelovich and her team gave us a nice demo and told us about their motivations and future plans. If I heard correctly, more than 50% of SUN’s workforce is ‘remote’, and one of the major complaints is the quality of remote collaboration tools.

MPK20 is an attempt to improve remote interactions, both to improve efficiency, but also to bring back some of the social aspects of working in the same location that remote workers currently miss. Built-in from the start is voice support and application sharing, and though the project is still at an early stage, the development team thinks they are very close to being able to use it in day-to-day meetings.

I tried downloading and running MPK20, which was remarkably easy – as long as you have ant and a recent jdk, you can check out the source yourself, build and run the system in 2 steps. The system downloads the environment from Sun’s servers, which didn’t work through our firewall, but on my home machine everything came up smoothly.

The virtual world you get by default is limited to one building (MPK20 refers to building 20 at the Sun’s Menlo Park campus. There are 19 physical buildings, and building 20 is the virtual one). When you enter the environment, you’re in the big hall shown above. There are a number of “non-player characters” standing around having conversations or doing demos. Unfortunately, the voice-bridge is not yet available for download, but what happens is that as you move closer to different groups of people, you start hearing their conversations (similar to Second Life’s voice support).

There is currently nothing indicating who is speaking, and though the NPCs in the environment are gesturing, there does not seem to be any way to animate your own avatar. The avatars themselves (and the whole building) are rather primitive looking, though I’m pretty sure that it’s because the development team is focusing on features rather than graphics (since everything is built on Java3D, better graphics should be possible).

This image shows my avatar (live avatars are labeled with their names, NPCs are not), in the “team room”. This area has information all along the walls, and the intent is to have automatic updates of various artifacts, and perhaps even have whiteboards that can be updated in both the real and the virtual world. All around the team area are smaller rooms, that could be specific to individuals, for example. As in a physical office, a closed or open door can be used to indicate whether it’s ok to disturb the occupant.

There certainly is a lot of demand for a business oriented virtual world platform. Second Life and other available platforms have many problems, either in terms of security or in cost of content creation. MPk20 is open source (the voice bridge will be released soon) , Java based, includes application sharing and claims to be scalable because of the underlying Project Darkstar architecture. It will be interesting to see the future development of this project, especially if an open-source development community forms around it. So, if you’re a Java hacker looking for something to do, helping out the MPK20 team could be an option. If you want to make me happy, start working on some of the below:

• Easy content creation. Right now you have to use Blender or something similar to create 3D objects. The ability to import from Sketchup is supposedly being developed, and in-world building tools are also being considered.
• Better avatars. Better looking, more customizable, and more controllable avatars are needed before it becomes possible to feel comfortable with interacting with others using this environment.
• Better camera controls. There are currently only a few camera angles possible. If I’m looking at an application window in-world, I’m going to need better ability to zoom-in and to quickly look at other information being displayed around the room.
• Windows Application sharing. Currently being able to display and interact with desktop apps in the environment is only possible if the applications are X11 based.

Perhaps we should start a list of the minimal feature-set needed for virtual worlds?

One of the wonders of Second Life is the new variety of ways businesses and individuals can spam you. Apart from posting billboards all over the mainland, spammers can offer you objects,notecards, and textures, as well as send you IMs and group invitations. The latest releases of the SL client have included some features to try and limit “object-spam”: muting an individual or an object lets you ignore any offers of items, not just chats and IMs. Spamming also seems to be against the Terms of Service, though in an article in the official Linden news letter Torley Linden implies that it is only repetitive spam that is a virtual world faux-pas.

In any case, abuse-reporting and muting spammers doesn’t prevent the spam from reaching you in the first place. I’m starting to get a fair amount of group invitations and IMs from people asking me to try their latest products, which is doubly annoying, since these messages get forwarded to my email. The only option available at this point is to turn off email forwarding, which is too blunt of an approach. Some more fine-grained tools would be helpful. For example,

• Only forward IMs from people on my “friends” list
• Allow IM forwarding on an individual basis
• Automatically reject group offers

Anybody have other ideas? I looked in the Second Life Issue Tracker, and could not find any request related to IM spam, so maybe there’s a possibility to fill the gap and influence the development.

The real problem is that Linden Lab has created a communication mechanism without considering the spam issue at all. Given the history of USENET, email, wiki vandalism, blog comment spam, as well as other examples (I’m even getting spam on Twitter), it seems that building in a filtering mechanism from the start of any new communication medium is an essential feature.

I finally re-read Neal Stephenson’s book The Diamond Age, something I’d been meaning to do since the Spring Virtual Worlds 07 conference. At the “Virtual Worlds Roadmap – Where is it all going” panel an audience member asked the panelists to expound on the future of the Metaverse, taking it beyond the vision laid out by Stephenson in Snow Crash, towards the world depicted in Diamond Age. Unfortunately, I don’t think the panel had read the book, so the answers tended be along the lines of “more virtual worlds blended with augmented reality” (as I recall).

Diamond Age is a lot less focused on virtual worlds than Snow Crash was, however. The book describes a future where nano-tech has been completely mastered, enabling the cheap and quick (or slow, if the story demands it…) manufacturing of goods, food, and new materials. Information is distributed via “smart paper”, which is interactive, connected, and embedded with sufficient compute power to allow for at least a limited form of AI. Those of us interested in the future of documents can definitely take some inspiration from descriptions of smart-paper workflows like:

“Cover sheet,” Hackworth said to the piece of paper, and then it had pictures and writing on it, and the pictures moved–a schematic of a machine-phase system cycling.

[...]

“Letter fold,” he said to the piece of paper, and it creased itself neatly into thirds.

Virtual worlds do appear in the form of “ractives”; interactive movies which seem to be the main form of entertainment, but are not used to socialize or do business. Ractives are one aspect of what to me is the major technological theme of the book (apart from the nano-tech): using humans as compute engines. Humans are used either for creating believable interactions, not achievable by AI, or as compute-engines linked together into a massively parallel supercomputer (Stephenson seems to believe that the human brain is not a Turing machine).

Using humans as compute engines is pretty standard today (see Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, or projects like Galaxy Zoo) , and in Second Life avatars are (mostly) backed by a human brain. Interestingly, there’s been a large number of employment services that have moved into SL recently: KellyServices, Manpower Inc. , Semper International, and Randstad (all claiming to be “first”). Will we see a future where “actors” will take on different roles depending on what currently is in demand (furry male bartender at night, female ninja for a machinima shoot during the day)?

On the nano-tech side of things, we’re seemingly much further away from a reality where we can construct products, buildings, and tools effortlessly (just a small matter of programming). Of course, in the virtual world we have that ability, so now is the time to experiment with and invent the new tools and devices that we want to be able to create as soon as the technology in the physical world catches up.