Does a virtual world need to have evolved?

Ok, a bit of random thoughtfulness that occured to me over the new year.

If you use the Wayback Machine, you'll see that when SL started up, it was totally different to how it is now. It was unabashadly a game where the objective was to build things, get attention paid to them, gain L$ as a result (and back then, with rating bonuses and dwell, that was pretty much automatic) and use it to buy more land to build more things. There was no cashing out, and no tier, but it cost L$ to rez objects. It was essentially a competitive game to see who got to define most of the world.

Now we have the new VW's coming along, like Metaplace and Blue Mars, who are all trying to "learn from SL's mistakes". Don't take that competitive approach, because it's unsustainable. Regular users will ultimately be building from prefabs, so make that as easy as possible; but for building from scratch, competitiveness will mean that everything is ultimately pushed to the limits so that only the most dedicated, artistic and technical can make anything interesting, so focus on making those limits as far away as possible and don't worry about user friendliness.

Neighbour disputes suck, so have no concept of neighbours. Adult publicity scares the public, so ban adult content. And so on.

But the interesting issue is this - it's looking fast as if "learning from SL's mistakes" is actually, in itself, a huge mistake. Because SL _needed_ those "mistakes", to evolve into what it is now.

Look at Metaplace, for example - closing down because of "insufficient traction". Or Blue Mars, where many SL's are going there and saying there's "nothing to do". Actually, technically there's probably as much to do in BM v0.5 as there was in SL v1.0 (SL didn't have custom animations at that time, so yes, all you could do was sit), and the building is MORE flexible. But BM is blunt about its structure based on the lessons from SL - you'll buy your city or block, you'll edit it, maybe you'll be able to run it as a business and maybe not, but if you want more you'll have to pay more.

At that time in its development, SL was selling itself as a game where building was the whole point, and where defining the world was the reward. Ultimately that was impossible, but nobody knew that it was at the time, and the chances people took on that basis drove SL towards becoming what it is. The dream of earning free land and (later) even RL income just by having a popular build and cashing out your dwell and DI (remember _that_!?) was unsustainable and unrealistic, but it had to exist _for a while_ to create what we have now, and some of the businesses and places that still stand today, or that are gone now but inspired those that do remain.

But can any other virtual world do that now? Now that the lessons of SL _are_ learned by the VW community, can any other VW make us forget them to benefit from the same rush of creativity?

Did SL, and SL's community, _have_ to evolve from the unknown? If so, how can we - or anyone - do it again, when those unknowns are no longer unknown?

The evolution of technical features, the GUI, and so forth, are all important, but I think that the most important element is the "culture" of any VW: it is this that drives the technical stuff, because running a VW is ultimately "about" retaining and attracting new users. And yes, communities do have to "evolve" over time. The continued survival of SL depends on maintaining a dynamic community that continues to evolve: if it doesn't SL will become a dinosaur. And the success of BM depends, I really believe, upon the creation of a new community, with a culture that is distinct from SL's.

When I started SL late in 2003, I had options to fly, walk, run, jump, do the Function key dances, chat locally, chat in groups, create textures, upload sounds, transfer items with other users, build, and script, and see and participate in what the users had produced. There was considerably more to do than sit.

From an end user's point of view, Blue Mars is not as far along as SL was at the end of 2003. It's not at the "have a fun time in the Beta" stage for end users. It's at the "have a interesting learning experience time for developers" part of the process. You can't go there and get any idea of what it might be like to be an end user after it's developed further. I expect there will have to be games provided by developers to keep the end user's interest up.

Metaplace seemed to have a nice infrastructure but the client used isometric projection, allowed only one camera viewpoint, had dumpy childish cartoon style avatars, and a primitive movement system . I think those might all be rather superficial with respect to what the underlying "Metaplace system" really is, but one has to use the interface that actually exists, not the potential one that might exist someday . Also it used a Flash client, which works poorly on my system. I don't find any of the Flash systems where right clicking produces the Flash context menu instead of a "current program option menus" to be any good. They feel like quick hacks to me, something you might use for a demo, a proof of concept. Had Metaplace had a 3D world with avatars more to my suiting and either a non-Flash display system or a Flash system crafted such that I couldn't tell it was Flash I'd have definitely have spent a lot more time in it.

If LL added the "Leader Board" and other competitive game aspects back in it might cause an increase in concurrency and investment.

(For the record, I'm not feeling real well today and I think my posts will likely reflect that quality wise. )

I would say yes, they need to evolve.

And have their own history, and sacred places, and peoples; good times and bad times.

Was this really clear? That building was the "whole point?" Is that really how they advertised it and promoted it? They didn't promote the social aspects? Just asking....was curious as to what the mission was from Day One.

ETA: (since some of us aren't really clear on what the mission is, some days

Except it isn't. Competitive, or unsustainable.

It certainly was competitive. I mean, you were around in 2005 as well - when Second Life had a _high score table_! Or the offer of "DI goes to the creators of the top 25 most popular areas.."

And yes, creation was emphasized a lot more. The standard response to "How do I get money?" was "Make something and sell it"; not "Buy it". In fact, "they're all supposed to buy L$ now" was _protested_ about by even established successful users.

The original model - L$ for land, and no tier - was unsustainable. Residents could earn more and more land, but no new real money to pay for the server hosting came in unless new users joined; and those new users would eventually earn their own land, and so on..

And, yes, the original model that advertised the ability to "become a world-famous designer or architect" or "amass a fortune" was also unsustainable in a genuine market economy - without "crutches" (as people call them), the majority of the population will be by definition excluded from these simply due to varying natural ability.

Yeh, and I had a blast while ignoring all that stuff. That wasn't what SL was about, that was just the 2005 fumbling around trying to figure what they had, like the corporate BS today is.

Just because Linden Lab is pointing at something, that doesn't mean that's what's really going on. It's like the Zen koan about the finger and the moon, except the finger isn't even pointing at anything.

I think this is a very astute observation.

I might elaborate (read: complicate) the Culture => Technology idea. Those two constructs are mutually influencing: Culture <=> Technology; which users are attracted to a platform is a function of the technical capabilities on offer, and the priorities for technical development are determined by the existing and desired user base.

As I read Yumi's post, I recognize another construct, something like "Business Policy", that's also mutually interactive with Culture and Technology. The VW business can choose to extract rents from expression of Technology (models, geography, uploads) and from Culture (subscription fees, VW commerce and advertising, a venue's capacity for avatars), and those fees determine who is attracted and what technologies they use--and vice versa, determining the viability of the business model.

The current Business Policies of Blue Mars, still in their infancy, and its Technology, appear to be especially attractive to a Culture that, in SL, we might call the "Pretty Prim People" tribe: followers of the faith that making better art brings more folks to admire it.

I have no idea if that's who they want to attract, nor how that will influence the evolution of their culture, nor the future evolution of SL's culture.

Right now it seems SL and BM are gearing up their Technologies to compete nearly head-to-head, but ultimately they will evolve to speciation--or extinction for one.

Sort of that. I mean, my argument was that SL's current culture _needed_ those earlier mistakes to be made in order for it to take off. I believe that if SL had taken the sterile "it's a platform" approach from Day 1, I doubt it would ever have become as popular is it is now, and would never have gotten into the position where it could "change into" a platform in the way that it did.

If residents are to inhabit a VW for more than a few months, then yes, not only the platform but also the culture(s) using it need to evolve over time.

I'm not sure that BM aims to be a Virtual World in that sense; that it intends to host a grid where people live for years. It *might* only aspire to be a place where developers build games and environments that people visit for a while, then move on to others.

I think it is quite possible that SL turns out to be unique in providing a true Second Life. Or, rather, that SL up to now is unique; we may be at a tipping point. It seems to me that new members are not building as much as they used to. It also seems to me that they aren't joining into the existing cultures within SL in large numbers, so that as RL, other VWs, and miscellaneous distractions take their toll on these cultures, their active numbers are dwindling. Perhaps that's only true of the groups I know of ... but I know of a lot of groups!

Also, the number of people who are interested in building VW cultures *does* have a limit. It may be that Virtual Culture evolution is a zero-sum game -- that most of the leaders in this already looked into SL, and that other worlds must be populated from an SL diaspora. If so, that would be sad; I doubt any new VW will pull together the mass of wide-eyed volunteers that SL attracted, and thus I am dubious that we will see another world with the diversity and wonder of SL.

And I don't think it mattered whether LL promoted a competitive atmosphere or not, the people who were going after the DI weren't the people creating most of the cool stuff in SL. The best places were in the middle, the ones making enough dwell to keep operating but not getting involved in the "game" side of things.

"Your world, your imagination" *means* "it's a platform". The "game" side of things was damnfoolishness from the start.

A virtual world that doesn't evolve quickly becomes extinct.

Nice analysis. My model was certainly simplistic. These three constructs create a complicated model that is going to be much more difficult to predict.

My very very tentative view is that SL is not so much evolving as being pushed toward a more "corporate" model -- in a cultural, rather than necessarily "business" sense. And that BM has seen this happening, and has decided to "get the jump" on SL by starting from the point that is LL's current target.

The problem is that this ISN'T an evolution: it's an orchestrated plan. And I have feeling that it's not going to work very well . . . for either platform.

I see Linden Lab *trying* to push things to a more corporate model, but evolution is something that happens in response to pressure, and not necessarily in the way anticipated.

Changes in the character of SL have been happening *despite* Linden Labs efforts to guide its evolution, not *because* of them.

It would be smart for anyone coming along to try to compete with SL to study it and learn from not only from mistakes that have been made, but also what's been done right. On the other hand, I don't know anything about Metaverse, but since they're gone, apparently they didn't learn enough, and as far as BM is concerned, it looks like they looked at what LL "did wrong" and sat around, brainstormed, traded ideas, and in the end, did it.... They came up with ways of making BIGGER mistakes than LL did (hard to believe, I know, but true).

They set the system requirement bar so high that only a niche market will be able to use it.

They thumbed their nose at the biggest biz in SL, the sex trade.

They thumbed thier nose at furries, tinies, robots, etc, anyone who's non human.

If that wasn't bad enough, to go somewhere, you have to download gigs and gigs of data before you can go there, and if they place sux, then you wasted all that time/bandwidth downloading for nothing.

At every turn, they seem to be thinking "how can we limit ourselves yet even more?"

So, yeah, other virtual world up and comers should study LL since they're at least profitable and still going after 10 years of development, and 7 years with the doors open, but they goal is to fix any mistakes you found in SL, not make bigger ones, and, at the same time, do all the RIGHT things that SL has done too.

Meanwhile... LL is (albeit slowly) correcting some of the 'mistakes', and I use that term loosely, because it's difficult to say when the company is making probably around 40-50 million a year in profit, yet, they're in the process of fixing the things that time has shown need to be changed. So considering Metaverse is shut down, and BM is a huge joke that will never amount to anything (quote me if you like), and LL is moving towards fixing it's problems, then at least one company out there is improving itself based on 'mistakes' made in the past.

It's Metaplace that's closing in in a few hours, not Metaverse.

Yeah.

There is always an unknown, at least to living memory.

(1) I looked up an "average retail selling price" PC from Best Buy (Gateway - Desktop with AMD Phenom™ II X4 Quad-Core Processor Model: DX4300-11 | SKU: 9535416) @ $600. With the addition of a $100 graphics card, it would be decent for Blue Mars.

(2) My experience with Avatar Reality (the company developing Blue Mars) is most of them are tech heads, and don't really have a clue about the social side of virtual worlds yet, and they are aiming at a somewhat younger market than SL (13 and up). They will either learn fast how to deal with adults being adults, or it will bite them in the ass.

(3) They are encouraging non-human avatars. The reason they don't have any yet is they licensed the graphics engine from Crytek, but that did not come with the Crysis game content, so they have had to create their own avatars from scratch. They made your basic male and female avies and some animations for test purposes, but it's up to content creators to make the rest. I know at least one developer is working on dragons.

(4) The average Blue Mars city download is about the same as a one hour TV episode in avi format (~200MB). I have video flyby's online of my cities in development, and a photo album and blog. While the places browser in the client only gives a photo and a short description and how large the download is, other city owners can do what I am doing to give people a preview before they download. I would expect in later versions of the client, they can include a link right there to visit whatever info the city has to offer prior to download.

(5) I'm glad you can predict the future of a product that's still a year away from completion. But on the subject of the thread, since Second Life already exists, any other virtual world that comes along cannot repeat what happened here. They need to *start* with a significant amount of content and places to visit, and have most of the user functions we are used to. Otherwise people will look at it and say it sucks. People are saying that now, but they are reviewing an unfinished product.

SL opened with 12 sims. I was not around here that early, so I don't know what was in those sims at launch, but I do know that's smaller than the smallest city I am working on, or any of the ones that are live. My personal benchmark is Blue Mars needs to open with around 1000 SL regions worth of city area, and have that reasonably populated with places to go and things to do. If it's too small, or too empty, or too boring, people will not hang around.

I totally agree with Johann's post #16. I've taken a good look at BM and my impression is that it might be a handy place for games studios to run a little R&D on enclosed simulators. Otherwise if new accounts are already bemused by the SL learning curve, BM will be a non-starter.

If SL has a problem it is that the learning curve works both ways and the Lindens are having technical trouble meeting what the collective imagination of SL requires. They need another visionary at the helm: someone who has sufficient faith in the concept to forget about the finances and just go with implementing as many good ideas as they can manage.

I think you may have unreasonable expectations of how much people should be expected to spend on something like this.

I am not expecting people to plop down 700 for a new computer. I was pointing out that the average computer being sold right now (which is about $600) only lacks a decent graphics card to use Blue Mars. That was to reply to Johan about the requirements being so high as to be a niche market. It is true that only a small percentage of all PCs right now can run it (I estimate 2-5%), but over the next couple of years that will change as people upgrade in the normal course of things. Among gamers, they are at 70% that can run it, which is far from being a niche.

@ Ephraim - A game studio can license the full CryEngine 2 graphics engine and go build their own games, though that's fairly expensive. Of course if you can afford to pay game designers you can afford the license. By allowing secondhand use of the license via Avatar Reality, that lowers the entry cost for small developers.

What AR is doing with Blue Mars is splitting the client software. In SL all the build tools are in the user client, so that has lots of menus and windows. With BM, the user functions are in one download, and the build tools are in another kit. Whether that ends up being a good plan we don't know yet.

If it really was like that, it must have sucked enormously. Glad I missed it.

Of course they would ultimately license their own version of the graphics engine. I specifically mentioned R&D because it would be convenient for a small company to test player reactions/opinions/whatever from around the world in a limited online environment. Not everyone with a good idea for a game can afford to employ a stable of designers and programmers but BM could easily stand in as a virtual studio for a small but financially and geographically challenged design group to work on their ideas.

I think this is what AR are aiming for - kind of like the Linden's corporate client aspirations but with a sharper, more practical vision of their market.

I don't know about 2003, but in 2005 they still had the "leader board" and all the game stuff, and it wasn't competitive the way Muri's describing it at all. Oh there were a few people who were into the whole game side of things, but just like now most people were doing their own things. The biggest difference from now was that a lot of people who were just making pretty builds could support them from dwell alone, so there were a lot more nice looking builds with no stores or begging bowls. Good places to hang out.

The thing that really made SL work was that "your world" part. It was directed to ALL of us, not just the professional artists.