f13.net

AGC Rivebrog: The Future of Virtual Worlds

Rive Brog on "Future of Virtual Worlds"

Brief Summary:
The general consensus among the panelees is that "virtual worlds" (which for the purposes of this discussion primarily refers to 3D virtual environments consisting largely of user-created content) will very soon be much more widespread than they are now, becoming as widespread as the Web is now, and perhaps becoming in essence the new Web.


» Read More

Where's the beef?

Distinct lack of discussion about gaming and fun in all that. As ever.

The stuff they were talking about was (deliberately) tangential to gaming.  What it boiled down to was Second Life (or something like it) as the next incarnation of the Web, not as the next incarnation of WoW.

But the web isn't just MySpace. Oh well, I'm sure they'll all attend WWW6 in Santa Clara next year and rattle sabres with the W3C folks then.

There was an interesting bit in Popular Science recently about Second Life being used for commercial purposes, like banks setting up bank structures in Second Life to handle online banking, with a virtual teller as an alternative to the automated and text chat interfaces currently on their web sites.  So it's not just MySpace-type stuff, although that's certainly going to be a very popular use for it, just like on the Web (I think MySpace gets more traffic than Google now?).  That and porn.

MySpace gets more porn than Google now? Time to brush up on my MySpace-Fu.

You might want to give the scoping-fu a quick polish too while you're in there.  Although I do believe that would be true if MySpace didn't have such strict ToS.

I'm not hooked on this whole "virtual world" thing. At All. What happened to progressing beyond glorified chatrooms? Because that's how I essentially see "virtual worlds" such Second Life.

Devs have a hard enough time making a fun and engaging game, so making a compelling "world" may be beyond the industry's abilities at this time.


Note: I also do not do the whole Myspace/Facebook/Whatever thing. At all...so my prespective is probably skewed. Somewhat.

Sounds like this panel had Gibson on the brain.

Because camping the Froglok Sage is a lot more fun than talking to girls on MySpace.

MMOs are a damned expensive way to deliver games that can be made better other ways.  So what is the differentiator for gamey MMOs vs other games?  Other people.  So if MySpace delivers people better, and Flash delivers better Games cheaper, what is left for MMOs?  We deliver shitty games with ninja-looting assholes?  This is a selling point?  This is a future?

What was the most profitable game ever?  Hangman, as done by Wheel of Fortune. (Well, ignore poker, too many legal issues, and I still own my old roommate's speakers)  If you can deliver a simple, flashy game for focus, and find a way to allow the typical fragmented family to gather in their scattered living rooms and nursing home beds (yeah, I went to visit grandma last weekend) on a nightly basis, where you can associate with friends and family regularly, 6 million plus will be a small number for concurrent users, never mind total subs.

There are a lot of other options for this multi-user stuff than whacking foozles, and most of them will have a larger audience.

Rather than personally putting this thread in the Den myself, I'll simply say that Myspace and the drama queens therein: Not my bag, baby.

Anyway, yes, I'll agree with your sarcastic remark that camping mobs sucks, or pointlessly slaughtering foozles is not fun. What I don't agree with is the notion that Myspace somehow "delivers people better." They might deliver More people than an MMO, but I would insist the general population to be just as shitty, but for different reasons.

And quite frankly, I'm not even sure what I want from MMOGs anymore. One thing I am sure about is that I don't care about the other random people who might be playing the same game as me. I either play games with groups of people from this site, or RL. I simply don't care anymore.

Hell, I can hardly form my thoughts into something coherent at this point. I just want a deep game. Fuck the player population. I can't imagine how I got by with PUGs back in the day. Maybe I'm getting too crotchety, but the average player in a MMO annoys me. The average Myspace user annoys me too, so I don't see expanding the playerbase as a solution for me either.

Just give me my fun games, dammit.

I'd say that MySpace delivers people better based on the democracy of the headcount.  That doesn't mean you have to like it; I generally don't like most democratic choices, but quantity does have a quality, and so forth.  I guess I'm mostly responding to the first point, about where is the fun, and part of what I'm driving at is that fun isn't always going to be defined in ways folks around here would agree with.  But that doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of people who find that fun.  Heck, even foozle whacking can be fun; I think the biggest problem with foozle whacking is the pacing of the process.  (Note, this is a stolen idea from the Writing track keynote, where the speaker addressed the importance of pacing for story;  it seems to me that not only is pacing a problem with game stories in general [eg part of why cutscenes usually suck], it is also a problem with MMO activities in general.  I get some sleep, I'll try to decifer my notes and post something.)

And I think the dismissive note I thought I heard in talking about Gibsonian thinking was a factor in my response; I think that thicker interfaces to this intraweb thing are one way some people will find more interest here.  Sort of like Dolby Surround for the mind.

And the discussion pretty well gelled a feeling I have for the whole 'Worlds Suck, Games Win' meta-thread I've been seeing over time.  Sure, there are plenty of knocks on the Virtual Worlds people have constructed, but have the gamey worlds really been all that much better?  Schild told me that he has given up on MMOs because they suck so badly; I think our criticism isn't doing much better.  Pardo's keynote sounded a lot like things that were being said clear back on LTM, that somebody finally heard some of, but the critical comments I've seen the last few years haven't broken much new ground either.  Maybe there should be a panel on MMO criticism.  Have the critics progressed any faster than the developers?

And I'm sure that some of my response was based on sitting at the gate at O'Hare, waiting for somebody to get the ramp up to the door, so we could get off the damn plane, already.  For that part of the mix, I'm sorry.

It's a possibility...but then again, another possibility is that WoW costs $15/m and the other two are (technically) free to play.
Where's William of Ockham when you need him?

Only person I've ever known who played Runescape was a 10 year old kid and his 13 year old sister, who played it because they liked online games but weren't allowed to play one with a monthly fee.

My opinion is that if virtual worlds want to succeed, there needs to be a feature superset of SecondLife. Means basic things like combat, vehicles and whatever else needs to be available at the core of the engine already, bigger terrains with selfadjusting cell sizes (think BigWorld propaganda, none of that 256x256m shit) and more basic stuff like this.

The poster child is currently nothing more than a terrain shader with a scripted object spawn, all with shit performance. Virtually every functionality has to be supplied by the users. That includes basic mechanics like vehicles and combat, which usually work like shit, since an overloaded script processor and a crappy API isn't exactly the best ground to complement a game.

And for the love of god, the next SL should introduce import of 3D meshes. Modelling with primitives is annoying as hell, UV mapping impossible, and more taxing on the graphics hardware.

Puzzle Pirates and Guild Wars are also both free to play, no?  How are their numbers compared to WoW's?

Guild Wars has hit over 2 million box sales (this very well may include the original game and the Factions box. I don't know). How many of those two million are actually playing is anybody's guess.

According to SirBruce, Puzzle Pirates, as of April, has around 36,000 subscribers and subscriber "equivalents" (those who purchased Doubloons).

So respectable, but still not at the same level as WoW, numbers-wise, much less Habbo or Runescape.  Despite being free to play.

Guild Wars is more than respectable, I'd think (not WoW numbers....but what the hell).

You could slice 2 million in half, and it would have the kind of numbers we once thought were amazing (before WoW). You could cut 3/4 off, and 500k would still be better than many others. If you cut 90 percent off of it, then it'd be respectable.....And still better than what most are doing.

[edit]

I'm derailing, I think. Sorry about that :).

That's the thing, though... it's impressive by the standards of games that are marketed to gamers, and much better than most games in that space, but still nothing compared to games/services marketed to everyone else.  At least in terms of number of users.  Habbo isn't quite profitable yet, although that's changing rapidly now that they're solidly established.  I expect that it'll change even more rapidly in a few more years when their user base gets old enough to get summer jobs and blow some of that money on furniture micropayments.

The free to play and the unpolished go hand in hand, of course. It's the total package you need to look at.

I think there is another important angle here - how many developers *want* to work on a game like Habbo Hotel?

Saying that "MySpace delivers people better" is missing the ENTIRE point of MySpace.

Yeah, it connects you to people, but it's all about You and Your Ego and how fantastic (or crappy depending on your Emo level) the world centered around You (you special snowflake) is.  It even says it in the name, "MY" not "Everyone".

MySpace is popular because Attention whores are abundant, not because it's some fantastic content / connection site.  It actually sucks balls for that purpose.

MySpace is all about whoring around. Sure, some people use it to contact old friends, and Hollywood uses it as a viral marketing tool, but most people are on there to get laid.

The audio of this panel was just posted at 3pointd.com.

This whole "3D web" thing is to today what virtual reality was to ten years ago.  Lots of buzz that gets a certain breed of tech-worshipper whipped into a frenzy, while other people wonder how this is supposed to be any quicker/easier/better than just pointing and clicking.

When I first heard about Gametap, I imagined everything it could be. I envisioned players making an avatar and walking through virtual arcades, and playing minigames to get their quarters, and playing other minigames to go from arcade to arcade.

Then I started actually playing Gametap, and realized that would suck. When I boot up Gametap, I want to play my games, not bash mobs for virtual quarters and then drag-race down the virtual street to get from one set of games to another.

Likewise, if a 3D world is attached to MySpace, I won't use it. It would get in the way. However, I heard that we were getting MySpace-style pages for our Second Life characters. That would be awesome.

Seems to me that's kinda like trying to make a gamey-world into a worldy-world. It's okay to add a non-intrusive system to something; just don't make your users play something they didn't sign up for. What qualifies as intrusive versus non-intrusive? We're starting to find out real quick....

You that like it is a bad thing.

And how exactly are those two things different? If Myspace added Second Life and Second Life added Myspace they would be the same...

Not quite.

One is a 3D virtual space being inserted into a web community. To make it fit, it'd have to be browser-based, most likely. It's pretty much an accessory, since it doesn't fit into the original user interaction paradigm for MySpace.

The other is a 3D virtual space getting an web-like thingamajig added to it that should improve the social sphere of the application; I'm not sure whether you can already browse the web from within SL, or if this is an external, web-facing addon. If it's within SL, then it sort of fits within the existing SL UI paradigm. (I know Eve has an in-game browser, but it's not so hot.)

The problem with the 3D web is that 99.9% of the information in this world is in text or image form.

How does 3D make an AP story on Derek Jeter any better? 3D certainly has a place on the web. But a "3D web" doesn't make a whole lot of sense. 3D is good for object visualization, which is not what the web is about at all. Now a car-buying site where you can rotate the cars around in full 3D? Sure I'm on board with that.

Because when you go to a website, you want to get to the fucking content.  Not dick around with some horseshit game-wannabe Lawnmower Man interface shoehorned in there by some numbnuts who thinks everything has to have an avatar because the unflashy convenience of point-and-click doesn't look cyberspacey enough.

Oh, and you know what else?  Second Life is not the fucking future.  Second Life is a sex-club for furries with about as many (paying) customers as goddamned Tibia.  I know the crazy avatars and shit give everyone who owns a pile of Gibson novels the giggles, but really, who gives a fuck?

The point is that Second Life reached out to people who aren't hardcore gamers. Furry or not, it's a seperate market of people.  As for MySpace + Second Life. The result would be something new. It wouldn't just be MySpace + Second Life. It would be a virtual fucking proxy of the real world of people who want to live together. Just less laws.

I don't (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p16frKJLVi0) agree (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f5NuHzGXJA).


Unless Myspace literally bought Linden Labs and merged them so you'd have Second Life characters with Myspace profiles and Myspace  profiles with embedded SL viewers.

 :-o

Unspeakably awesome. That technology, particularly the part that interpolates between two photos and generates a scene mesh, could do wonders for tourism. Virtual tourism. Awesome.

And damnit, I knew there were topics I kept forgetting to bring up at the interview. Augmented reality (and how it's beginning to be employed for games) was one of those. :|

Youtubes new interface isn't so hot. Not minimalistic enough.

Edit: Also, agree with Yoru. Neat Shit.

Are we agreeing or disagreeing?

I said that most information was 2d images and text and that 3D was good for object visualization, and you countered with an elaborate niche application that is visualization and requires an involved setup.

I'm not saying "KEEP YOUR DAMN 3D OFF MY WEB!" 3D has a valuable place. I love 3D. (I have a Masters in 3D graphics) My point is that if you go to a typical website very little of that content makes sense to be in 3D.

3D message boards? What's the point? A 3D espn.com? msnbc.com? slashdot? Few sites would benefit from sort of mass conversion to 3D because most data we have is 2D.

The fact that you can composite a bunch of photos into a 3d scene is cool, but how many websites prominently feature a large number of photos of the same scene from different angles, or would want to?

3D is good for looking at stuff, not for reading stuff. And most information is in written form. The written form does not benefit from 3D presentation.

I fully expect that over time 3D will be more integrated into places it makes sense - 3D models in online stores for examples. What I don't see is what 3D has to offer a site like CNN.com, other than in small-scoped niche applications.

That kind of question is as incomprehensible to me as 'Why would anyone need more than 640k?' or 'What does anyone need more than 3ghz for?'.


Which is fine but right now there is no good integration option to do that. I'd rather have the 3D option available and see what people do with it than NOT have it available because 'what's the point?'.

When you add more memory, proc, whatever to your computer, you make it faster. If you added a 3D client to most of the web, you make it slower.

Personally, I use MySpace as an e-mail client. I click on the mail, I click on the bulletins, I click on comments...etc. If you make that 3D, then I have to wait for the java to load, then wait for the graphics to load, then walk painfully slow up a spiral staircase then say the magic word to open the rusty iron double-doors to read my mail. Comments? Oh boy, I have to close the door, then walk back down the stairs, then down the hall, and open each door to read each comment.

And holy crap, god have mercy on me if I want to reply to someone.

That's an exageration of course. You could make it as quick as you wanted. But any amount of 3D environment is going to be slower than the click-and-read we have now.


To be sure. I'd love to see people experiment with 3D web sites. Virtual shopping might be kind of fun. I wouldn't use it, because when I want to buy a book, I go to Amazon and click "Quick Buy!" I don't want to try to find it on a virtual shelf. I want my damn book and I want it NOW dagnabit! If I wanted to browse through the aisles, I would get off my lazy butt and go to the bookstore. (But the outside world scares me, which is why I shop online.)

And actually...when you put it that way, I would like to see an optional 3D client for MySpace, if only to see how many people use it, and for how long.

Oh look, an application for object visualization, which would be screamingly irrelevant to 99.9% of all the content on the web.  :roll:

That was unexpected.  Also, asking why SL + Myspace might be cool, but Myspace + SL probably wouldn't be?  "You thought it was neat when we put a TV set in your car!  Why are you crying now that I want to come into your living room and build a car around your TV set?  It's the same thing!"

I know you can watch movies and videos inside Second Life as if your avatar is sitting in a theater. There are tons of virtual theters in SL you can pay some Linden to and watch your movies(pr0n) at your leisure, I think even downloading it to your computer.

I don't agree. Theoretically a hardware rendered browser engine would be faster than current software API rendered browser engines.


The point of an integrated 3D solution is that you wouldn't have to wait for java/activex/whatever to load. And again you're stuck in gamer mentality. Does EVE make you do that to read/write mail? No, so why even throw that out there as an exaggeration when current MMOs don't even do that. 'Walking' around in a 3D environment is a bullshit artifically constraint (as most MMO rules are).

I'm not exaggerating (well, not in the way you say). When people say they want to do a 3D MySpace, that's what it sounds like to me. Everybody would have their MySpace profile, but it would be an apartment that you walk around in, and open doors, and hang shit on the walls, and walk down the street to other peoples' profiles if you want to leave them messages. So yeah, I'm totally stuck in the gamer mentality here. I see nothing else that 3D can do besides adding those "bullshit artificial constraints." You could tone those constraints down to quickly flying from one profile to another, but it would still be slower than just clicking on a link.

Well, there's also that neato photo selection tool. Everybody would have to post their photos with that in mind, and that would take a while to catch on. I'm sure it would. I see very few practical applications for it, though. A few weeks ago, I wondered if the interior of the Sistine Chapel was really as awesome as people say it is. I Googled for images of it, and verily I was humbled and whatnot. If I could Google for a 3D environment of it, I would be totally blown away. That would rock. But that's the only application I can see for that.

What else can 3D do for us?

(Edit: clarified "exaggerating")

Anyone else find the conversation this AGC has instigated across several threads rather... underwhelming?  Okay, so everyone posts their photographs and this thing makes a virtual world out of it.  Then like, maybe some teenagers post whiny blogs with shitty background music into it.  And maybe some people make furry avatars and use it to cyber.  Hooray.  And you thought 50,000 identical Dikus was bad.

I'll quit living in the past (playing UO) when the future quits sucking so much.

I do.  The only game I've bought this whole year was World of Warcraft, and I didn't even make it through my first month.  That was bad enough.

If the stuff talked about here is the only future of gaming beyond that, it may drive me out of gaming entirely.

Part of being an educated consumer is being able to have realistic expectations.  I think we all recognize that there will never be "one game to rule them all" so being able to recognize the titles that can still provide you fun despite their flaws has become more critical, especially as the market continue to grow.

So, what is it that you consider most important in a future MMORPG? And don't say, "something that doesn't suck".  That's not helpful.  Sure, you know what you don't like, but what would actually appeal to you enough to shell out 15 a month?

Gaming is far too broad a genre to be driven out of.    Now matter how I slice it, when it comes to personal entertainment I still prefer gaming over tv, movies and reading (though with the NFL in season again TV has moved up :) .   To wit,  I've gotten less sleep then I wanted for about a week due to playing through HoMM V campaigns; bitten by the "just one more turn" bug.  There are good games out there.

Xilren

The trouble with the phrase 'realistic expectations' is how far you're going to take it.  You can take any idea which doesn't yet exist in the real world and tell me 'It's not realistic to expect that.'  Nevertheless, I'll try to provide a short list of what sort of game would get my 15 dollars (or more) a month.

Must - have:

1.  A business and world model not dependent on out-of-game monetary exchanges, micropayments, ads, or RMT.  This is the part that's at least partly related to the original thread topic.   Pay $5 a month... or $10 for your Sword+1!  I know it's a money maker, but it's a deal breaker for me if the company sells items and characters.  That way lies Magic the Gathering - when it was brand new I thought the concept was great, but I quickly saw that game devolves into who spends the most money on cards.  You can be really good at deck construction and planning, but if the other guy spends 1000 bucks to get ridiculously powerful cards, there's not a lot you can do if you don't have equally uber shit.

2.  All items are commodities, and all items are destroyable.  There should be no usuable item that doesn't wear out, and no usuable item should be rare or dictate the power curve between players.  I would like it if a sword is just a sword.  There's no Sword+1, Sword+2, or Purple Sword of you-can't-touch-me-unless-you-also-have-a-Purple-Sword.  When I look at World of Warcraft, I looked back on the previous Blizzard games (the Diablos)  and realized that it really came down to whether you were blessed by the Gods of Random() giving you that uber drop.  I'd really like to do away with that entirely, and just let equipment be equipment.  In Counter Strike there's no special gun you get for playing for 200 hours that always gets headshots - your reward for playing more is (maybe) better tactical awareness and experience.  That's it.  You get the same equipment loadouts with their associated tradeoffs and fixed levels of power forever.  Taking that notion a bit further to the characters themselves, in early UO when you were a newb, you had about 40 HP (depending on Strength).  When you were maxed out, you had 100.  The power differential was much less than the thousand-fold difference in stats in Diku-style games.  This crosses over the realm of realistic expectations, I guess, but I think that a day-old newb should have a small chance at defeating a 10-year veteran, if the newb is very smart and the vet is very stupid.  Time invested, in and of itself, entitles you to jack shit.

I used to want a PvP paradise like '98-'99 UO had, but I left all that out, realizing that I stuck around (with grumbling) after Trammel, but I left promptly when Age of Shadows came around.  I do not want to play an item-based collector's game.  I want success in the game to be determined by tactical sophistication, situational awareness, and (optional) reaction time, and not levels and equipment.

I like the AFK clause. If someone with an experienced character walks away from his computer for z minute, a new character should be able to kill him in that amount of time.

Very true, but MtG has drafts and sealed which counter that argument.  Perhaps a game with similar optional play styles that dont emphasize the loot aquisition but still have it for the people who want it...


Which means you are going to be seeking something other than a computer RPG for the forseeable future.  Like it or not, the time investment to skill up and/or get uber loot is a BIG part of customer retention in these games.  In many ways that IS the baseline expectation for a mmorpg among consumers and developers alike.  RPG have a foundation that a character/avatar/ship changes over time, and by far the most common change is improvement in something.

To a developer, what you just said is "give me a persistant quake with swords".  Is that really what you want?  And more importantly, what the hook to keep you playing (and paying) for a recurring monthly fee?

Xilren

Heh. Sounds like a question Megyn of Corpnews was asked in an interview. "What do you like about games?"

Personally, I want Firaxis' Alpha Centauri Online, or something insanely similar to it. I want SWG and ATITD scale resources and crafting, with seven PvP factions, on an alien planet, and we have to colonize it all. No NPCs. Emergent content, even on the scale of SWG would be fine; I don't need quests. No preference if PvP combat is character-skill or player-skill. I like both.

So I don't want a men in tights DIKU, which means I'm in the minority. How sad. When Multiverse comes out, I shall make that game and make no money off it because everybody else wants men in tights DIKU, but dammit I'll be able to say my ideal game is out there! YAY!

Just give it an end state where once a certain colonization level/ % world settle is reached, that planet is considerd a home world and the game end... to start right back up on a brand new world with different maps and factors (and even rules).  Sounds good to me.

Xilren

I've thought about that. Or...players could find a way off their rock, by inventing interplanetary flight, and thus start over on a new world. And keep adding more and more worlds, and more and more servers, and more and more development expenses!!! (Or scale things down so 100 worlds could fit on one server, but that's not defeatist enough.)

Yes, that is what I want.  In fact, when sitting around at a friend's house talking about this issue, we have certainly used that exact phrase "persistent Quake, with swords" at least once.  Whether that's viable or realistic is up to some development house.  For what it's worth, I'm glad that Counterstrike is free but if I had to, I would definitely be willing to pay a monthly fee to play it.

As for the hook, you can have other things besides your level and gear if you have a single persistent world.  Player-owned housing (and wealth in general) would be good.  Territorial control, status/rank, kill ratio, fame, and reputation are other ways to keep people. 

 

Have you looked at the Dark Messiah Beta (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=8120.0)?

Might be right up your alley.

Xilren

No I haven't seen it before.  I'm going to check that out.  Thanks.

Or Sherwood (http://www.maidmarian.com/Sherwood.htm).