f13.net

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/collide.html

If this has been talked about before, then I apologize. This seemed like a pretty likely premise (even if it is from Wired), but then I'm not all that bright and am still impressed by digital watches. Thought it would be a good topic of conversation though.

I disagree with what he said. Vehemently.


No, it is NOT inevitable. The only single, pervasive environment will be a standard interface for launching the worlds, i.e. an X-Box Live sort of thing. But the makers of the games are NOT going to provide some form of standardized architecture whereby a character in EQ is equivalent to a character in WoW because it's not in their financial interests to do so.

I brand this man a thinktard.

As long as we have multiple companies that want to control such a market (MS, Sony, Nintendo, et. al.) and people that think there should be alternatives (Mac, Linux, and Open Source type enthusiasts), I doubt we will have even a single interface.  Were we to somehow get to that point, eventually something would come about to challenge it simply because no product can be universal and someone out there is arrogant enough (and maybe correct) to think they can do better.

I agree with what he said, because I've hawked the same wares (http://www.darniaq.com/phpNews/news.php?action=fullnews&showcomments=1&id=207) as well.

But, it doesn't apply to diku-inspired themes. Yes, that wouldn't be in financial interest for SOE nor Blizzard. At the same time though, it's iterations on a limited-appeal theme. Lots of money, but not a lot of people.

I don't necessarily think it'll be common architecture/Open Source type stuff. Sure there's Bigworld (nice tools they have, but much more for indies than people with series marketing bling to spent), but the current model still requires account retention in a singular experience that gets updated with iterative content.

Rather, I see the commonality between players lessening, allowing for broader/compartmentalized experiences as noted in that article. Stuff we're seeing now (SL, SWG) but which the current genre vets haven't embraced en masse (because most obviously like the Diku stuff instead). Worlds will get broader, probably based on scaling through success. Start as a diku, end as a World, that sorta thing. During te life of an MMO, adding housing and player vendors to WoW would be a lot more successful than retrofiting even the best combat and content system to SWG. You need a successful foundation to generate the cash for true integration of breadth though.

Wired Magazine is well known for publishing writers who are full of shit but would like to appear profound.

This guy doesn't even appear profound; he's just full of shit.

Any shmuck can point out the similarities between two things - the similarities between consolidation of BASIC programing languages and hypothetical 'consolidation' of MMORPG avatars, for instance.  But that's not real knowledge, and it's not actually saying anything.  Real knowledge, and real understanding, comes from examining differences, not similarities.

And that's where his case completely falls apart.

Why did BASIC consolidate?  Because there was a serious demand for it and the fragmented system was fundamentally untenable in the long term.

What's untenable about the fragmentation of virtual worlds?  Nothing.  No overwhelming demand has been produced for your level 60 in WoW to translate into a level 60 in EQ2 from the player side of the equation.

From the developer side of the equation?  It'd be hell.  MMOGs would essentially then form a highly imperfect marketplace, where player labor (time at keyboard) would be exchanged for items and XP.  Any podunk indie game that was included in the system but which made it easier to level would instantly become the grinder's game of choice, from which they'd transfer to another system.

Oh, and exploits?  Yeah, that'd be great.  Now a gold dupe in EQ2 isn't just a problem for EQ2, it inflates every game on the market.  Goodie.  That's exactly what we need.

Also, when you make a market permeable and fungible, guess what floods right in?  The most fungible good of all, real-world money.  Kiss any hopes of being able to regulate IGE-ish behavior goodbye.

One more point to think of - MMO Dev teams are suspiciously similar to the American government.  We 'vote' with our dollars in some sense on which game we'll play, but the games are relatively similar, and due to being wedded to a game in the virtual world (much like you're wedded to an incumbent, gerrymandered politician in RL), you'll be willing to put up with a lot without jumping to another game.

What does that create a big constituency for?  Lobbying.  The exact rate at which an EQ1 epic translates to an EQ2 epic would be the subject of immense forum ranting and whines.  In the real world, the amount of lobbying behavior correlates to how much power you put in the hands of governments; in virtual worlds, the ones with the least complaining to the devs tend to be relatively balanced full-PvP worlds where people feel their destiny is in their own hands - In AC1, for instance, Darktide complained considerably less to the devs about game mechanics, because beyond PvP class balance, we created our own content.

Any system like this exponentially increases the power of the devs over the player's day-to-day virtual world existence.  As a result, there's going to be that much more teeth-gnashing over dev decisions.  Imagine - they talk about making EQ2 more casual-friendly by adding easier-to-get epics, and all the WoW and Vanguard 200 man raid guilds flood the EQ2 forums to tell EQ2 players to learn2play and quit ruining other games by wanting to have fun in their own.

There's only one decent way you could pitch this - and that's a company shutting down a game and allowing the players some compensation if they move to another game that the same company owns.

Anything else is just more of Wired's usual sub-par HAY GUYS DOESNT TECHNOLOGY OPEN NEW FRONTIERS babbling to an uncritical audience.

I do hope that as systems get more and more complex, people will no longer be able to afford to create their game world, due to time constraints, nor will they need to - I'm hoping that in the future, there will be GPL'd virtual reality... all the 3d models of the real world, in some indescribably gigantic database that anyone can draw upon plus alll the APIs to act upon those objects through the fundemental forces. Once our computers get powerful enough to render the visible world (pieces of it anyway) in real time, that's when I think we'll start to see consolidation. It'll simply be too huge for any one company, there will have to be open standards. At first it'll be for-profit companies doing things for various commercial enterprises, but eventually free software will catch up and exceed any one company's database of items. It'll grow and grow, until (once again) the important part of a game (or entertainment, or virtual reality, wherever that line is) will be as it should have been in the first place - about the story and characters. The world will be free.

It's a nice dream, anyway.

You can do that today, essentially, with ASCII.  I'm not kidding.  Download Megazeux (or ZZT if you feel that working within limitations is what make art beautiful) and go to town.  Make any kind of world you want.  Extending it into MMOSpace would Not Be Hard.

Why don't you?  Because technology has advanced beyond ASCII, that's why.  What happens to your ever-growing database of models and textures as time goes on and technology continues to advance?  It languishes in the same way ASCII game-making does, that's what.

I'm afraid I simply don't get this man's points. If MMORPGs were chat programs -- or hell, a sort of metaversy thing like Second Life -- I could see them merging and allowing crossover, the same way MSN and Yahoo are merging their IM software to allow crosscommunication.

But people don't play WoW in order to go beat up on spaceships in EVE. This just sounds like a guy who really wants to see who'd win in a fight between the Enterprise and a Star Destroyer -- and had had a few puffs before work.

If he was talking engine standardization and licensing -- so that, for instance, companies might stop producing MMORPGs and just produce engines and toolkits for it -- like the Quake engine or the Unreal engine, I can absolutely see that happening. But just because Joe Bob's Space MMORPG and Tammy Sue's Elf MMMORPG are running on the same basic engine that anyone is actually going to want a Joe Bob cyberlord wandering over to duke it out with a Tammy Sue Elflord is pretty ridiculous.

Hell, only EVE has managed to pull of a 20k+ shard -- everyone else already divides their worlds up into 3k or so chunks. Why would you start letting them merge?

I'm sorry but you are full of shit. If you can't see a 3D web coming you must be living under a rock somewhere. The 2d web now but in 3d. How hard is that to understand? We're just waiting for someone to build a 3d procedural Mosaic client.

A 3D web is a hell of a lot different than some weird-ass merging of MMORPG gamespaces. Hell, add Wikipedia into second life, and you've got the net. Men pretending to be women, porn, arguments, information to be skeptical about, more porn....

Not that this is in any way related to what I wrote, and you're taking this thread in a silly direction, but I'll bite.  How would a '3D web' be seriously different from a glorified version of The Palace?  How would the vast majority of web-users see their experience improved by a move to 3D?  How will my friends who use their PC to watch silly videos, buy stuff off Amazon, and check their e-mail benefit?

If it's just a niche thing, then again, how would that be seriously different than a glorified version of The Palace?

No. The author of the article only mentioned MMOGs because that is currently the only sizable use of 3D metaverse like environments in use today. MMOGs are the BBSs of today.


These questions you're posing, they said the same thing about the web in 1994. I was there.


Use your imagination. There are thousands of ways which I won't even begin to list here.

See my previous statement about how intelligent thought generally stems from showing how things are different, not how they're alike.  For instance, one might argue that bulletin board systems like, y'know, THIS ONE, are the "BBSs of today", not MMOs, and that MMOs are if anything more akin to, say, Magic: The Gathering.  But that'd just be me.


That's cute, and good to know.  I actually got on the net in 1994 (I was 8 at the time, was the first in my school to have it), and was using it for all sorts of things - linking up with a huge network of likeminded 8 to 13 year old Sonic the Hedgehog fans, for instance, and writing a video game newsletter with 40 or 50 subscribers (I wrote at about a high school senior level, which was useful, though ironically I reviewed games I hadn't actually played).  A few years in, when I was in 11 and the awesome power of the 14.4kbps modem made image retrieval reliable, I got myself a 14 year old internet girlfriend with my l33t typing skills.  Not only was I, in fifth grade, The Mack for doing so, she sent me hawt pics.  The internet's uses revealed themselves very clearly.

In other words, the question was posed in 1994 and easily answered.  You seem to have a bit more trouble answering the question posed now for your half-baked idea.


Yes, because the best way to win an argument is to refuse to provide any points in favor of your position.

Sheer brilliance!

Next time I'm in a formal debate, rather than taking the affirmative or negative I'll just lambast my opponent for his failure to imagine what my arguments might be.  Why didn't I think of this sooner?

You didn't think of it because you appear to be closed minded and lack imagination. Afterall, who needs more than 640KB right? Likening MMOGs to M:TG is laughable. MMOGs, BBSs, and forums are all closed communities. M:TG is not a community.

He's got a point, though.  You're not going to win any arguments by saying "look, it's just obviously true" unless everyone already agrees with you, in which case arguing is kind of pointless. 

The author of the article does seem to be implying more than just "The web will be 3D someday" when he talks about the idea of separate game worlds becoming "a quaint artifact of the frontier days of virtual reality."  And that kind of thing is completely unfounded speculation.  You can't predict, with any kind of accuracy, a massive conceptual shift like that.  People spend fortunes trying (and failing) to do so.  Maybe it will happen, it's certainly physically possible.  Seems highly unlikely, but stranger things have happened.  Who knows.  I don't.  I'm fairly sure, though, that the author of that article doesn't, either.

My point is once you get to the point of being able to render the fundemental forces real time, there isn't anywhere else to go for all intents and purposes. Even if you can't render individual atoms (the quick answer being the computer itself would obviously have to be bigger than the atoms you render, all compression asside) if you can render their affects in a macro universe you're already there. There is no greater technology that you can get for day to day purposes. 'm saying that once people hit it (it's closer than you think, if you believe moore's law) there's really no where else to go in the techical arena... so the frenzied advance in graphic experience instead of play experience can finally stop.

This whole "I'm going to randomly bring in the quotes of people who wrongly predicted the flow of technology" thing is relatively stupid.  As is the argument that  "lack imagination" because I don't subscribe to the (often ignorantly made) argument that "eventually, everything cool will happen through the magic of science".

But let's get to the root point, which is that you know fuck all about the nature of MTG communities.

MTG had a larger, more dedicated community, centered around official certification (The DCI) and the pro tour circuit.  We could roughly analogize this to the uber-guilders, the people who are known all over by those who care to learn about such things.  There are also, inhabiting the MTG "world", a ton of smaller, semi-insular communities based around individual comics shops running their own local tournament - you might see an unfamiliar face from time to time, but most often you see a core group who form the "community" for you.  This sort of socialization could roughly be analogized to guild membership.  And then there are the people who play entirely outside that system; they could be analogized to soloers.

Also, let's not forget the acquisition aspect of MTG card collecting; it's basically DikuMUD behavior with a much cooler combat system.  Just as there are some people who love to craft in MMOs, there were some MTGers who just liked to talk about the cards and collect them without actually playing a single game.  (I did that for the Pokemon TCG:  Made roughly 800 dollars, a princely sum back at age 13ish, based on speculation and smart selling without ever actually playing the game.)

So you see, while you can bicker over the specifics, the analogy of MMOs to MTG is really quite apt.  Of course, I actually took the time to explain and elucidate my ideas to you, instead of simply castigating you for "not being able to see what's obvious".

Which one of us lacks imagination, again?

You're thinking in binary, where something is either "closed" or "open".  In reality, most people in MMOs (and in MTG) live and operate within subsystems of the larger system - how the overall system encourages the creation of subsystems (or doesn't) is directly relevant to making an analogy that speaks accurately to people's experiences.

In short, we're on a tangent, and you're wrong.

ArticleAuthor: "*I think* that at some point there will be a 3D metaverse ala Snow Crash connecting all this 3D shit togather".
Televangelist: "Bullshit because esoteric MMOGmumbojumbo."
Krakrok: "*I think* Televangelist is full of shit and the author is right."
Televangelist: "640KB! the palace!?!"
Krakrok: "MMOGs are isolated communities like BBSs were before the internet. Use your imagination."
Televangelist: "Bullshit. Mylifestory. MMOG=M:TG."
Krakrok: "No. Closed communities."
Televangelist: "M:TG is an MMOG because everyone goes to comic shops to play. 1 can equal 2 if I become esoteric enough. You are wrong."



The only tangent here is your narrow view that the universe revolves around gaming and your incapacity to accept differences of opinion. The (http://www.web3d.org/) technology (http://www.opencroquet.org/) is (http://www.imvu.com/) here (http://metaverse.sourceforge.net/) right (http://www.spore.com/) now (http://www.secondlife.com/) ( (http://www.sketchup.com/)all (http://www.multiverse.net/) over (http://desk3d.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php) the (http://www.oddcast.com/) place (http://www.3qme.com/)). (http://croppingtool.com/) All it takes is for someone with the right special sauce to bring all that shit togather into an open killer app. Second Life got pretty close but they wanted too much control.


Don't let me disturb your fixation on when to tap out or how many times your weapon can proc though.

While I agree that this Mr. Steven Johnson is a "thinktard" (and not even a good one given how poorly he supported his argument) and the ideas presented in the article are wholly unoriginal they are not without merit. There are two parts to his argument: the first is that development will move to a common platform rather than constantly being recreated from scratch and the second is that characters in these worlds can freely move between them.

For the first part, while I don't agree there will be a single "monopolistic" platform since that violates one of the three virtues of programming (i.e. "hubris"), I do see there being consolidation onto a handful of frameworks for major development though developers will still be creating specialized frameworks as well. You can see this trend happening in video game development already with the move to middleware to speed up console development and the emergence of licensed graphic engine frameworks like the Unreal Engine, Source Engine, the iD engines, Lithtech, Gamebryo, etc. Sure developers still love to roll their own engines (a la the "hubris" virtue) but as the complexity continues to increase more and more games will use licensed engines/middleware for game development.

In the MMOG space, while there have been a handful of frameworks developed none of them have attracted any serious interest so far though the Multiverse product got some attention given the possible connection to James Cameron's MMOG project. That will change as the genre continues to mature, though I expect the first successful framework will be "extracted" from a successful game (to borrow a Web application framework concept) rather than created in a vacuum like the current attempts have been.

For the second part of the argument that has already been done in MUSHes, MUCKs, and MOOs and LambdaMOO was my first exposure to this where there was a full-blown fantasy RPG built into the world which was a little jarring at first since the primary world is a recreation of a house the main developer lived in so you would be wandering by, say, the pool and run into somebody dressed in a suit armor and carrying weapons. This is exactly analogous to the Star Trek holodeck concept that has been discussed in other threads where in the shows the crewmembers would "dress up" and enter their holodeck world for fun and games. The game The Second Life is in many ways the spiritual successor to LambdaMOO since it gives players the same building/programming abilities to create their own little worlds within the main game world (the fantasy RPG within LambdaMOO was player built).

Now been able to play multiple RPGs within the same "parent" game world is more complicated than the LambdaMOO example above since the main game in LambdaMOO was not an RPG so there was no conflict with the fantasy RPG but it certainly is feasible. In the PnP world this is already well-explored territory with the GURPS and Hero systems (and D20 to a lesser extent) and something similar could be ported over to a MMORPG system allowing you to take your same character from, say, a western setting into a fantasy one. It's even less work if you skip the RPG trappings and just go with FPS-style gameplay.

Note that the two parts of the original argument are independent -- you can have a common MMOG framework(s) without having multiple worlds within the main world and vice versa.

We're still a long way off from this shared "multiverse" concept becoming reality on a large scale but I do think it's coming.

The author shows a basic lack of knowledge in how MMOGs retain customers.  My favorite line is,


The concept of a unique and consistent identity that follows you around shows a basic lack of understanding gamer behavior.  Many people like having anonymity for their games.  And many others like using trademarked names for their characters. 

People don't want persistent identities: people want perfect anonymity with one character and world-renoun with another.  People want multiple identities, or at least the option to do so. 


A better, and more realistic, concept in gaming convergence is an IM-style friends list that can monitor avatars in multiple games at the same time.  If my girlfriend is playing WoW and my brother is playing EVE and my buddies from work are playing Battlefield 2, it would kick ass if I had a client gathering all that information.  That's a much more realistic and achievable goal then some over-client acting as a single massive, persistant meta-world.

Xfire already does that.

Edit: People running Xfire spent 25 man years playing WoW today.

Xfire works as a client that both people have to run (right?).  I was referring/hoping to something that worked without clients needing to be installed on the PCs belonging in the friends list.   

Huh? With regular IM you have to install a client as well, how is that any different?

IM requires clients on both sides to share information.  So does XFire.

The software I'm thinking of just gathers information on whether a certain character is logged into a certain game/shard.   Why rely on a copy of that application on a remote side?

But how would a player check who was logged on where? Through a Web browser? And how would you setup who was on your friends list? Also through a Web application?

It could be something similar to RSS.  My understanding of RSS is a little sketchy, but the overall idea, in this case, works something like this:

Game worlds would write who is connected to them to a text file, and update the list every X minutes/seconds.  The application on the client side would sort through the list and determine if a certain name on a certain shard in a certain game was found.  If it is, that name would be displayed. 

This information is clearly easy for games to index and search now in game clients: moving that information outside of the game client to a public resource sounds like a good idea.

But you still need a client on your machine to "subscribe" to the player lists. That's what I was confused about -- you seemed to be advocating some sort of "clientless" system.

A more robust system would be for online games to use a common text communication protocol akin to something like IRC (e.g. IRC + buddy lists) and open access to the communcation channels to external applications/servers. That way you could chat with people in one game without being having to be in that particular game yourself. You can fake this with IM right now as long as the game you are playing doesn't mind external apps popping up windows but it's not seemless since you have to switch to a different app instead of using the chat tools already in the game.

Pretty much, yeah.  An application to view the information, while the game server collects it.  MMO gamers don't always like third-party apps, even if they are beneficial.  Otherwise, just about every person in WoW would be using Cosmos.

Regardless of whether it is a built in application or a downloadable program, it would be some sort of client.  Basically anything that connects to another machine is (even a web browser is).  The only way for there to not be a client of some fashion is if there was no separation of your machine and everyone else's machine, which we probably do not want.  So don't let the terminology get in the way of the ideas.

Lol, that is the most asinine "idea" I think I've ever heard.

See, as Lantyssa points out, there are ways that various MMOs could be interoperable to the benefit of the customers.  For instance, IMing between games.

(Can't you already do that between EQ and EQ2?)

The fact that between-games IM'ing is the first example pointed to, though, is somewhat ironic:  In any Intro to IR class, looking at how nations may choose to compete or cooperate, the international mail system is usually cited as the prime example of cooperation that will come with very little prodding, because nobody stands to lose anything by taking a cooperative stance.

In other words, something like Lantyssa imagines is actually very likely - even if it moves from client-side solutions such as XFire to something server-side.  But, as I'm sure the majority of readers here can recognize, that does not necessarily herald any greater interoperability, such as a free transfer of avatars between games.

MMO devs are going to be loath to give up their "sovereignty" over such affairs.  The most controllable situation is the current one - where, if I want to convert my WoW character into an EQ2 one, I can do so, with the one intermediary step of selling character A for cash on EBay and using that cash to buy character B.

The worst that can be said about the current system is that it's not 100% convenient.  However, most things those on the developer side could do to increase convenience would come at a severe cost to the autarkic nature of their worlds - all the EBay in the world doesn't allow you to transfer a level 60 in WoW to become an uber character in Game X at day one of release.

I'm all for the concept in the first post, it it means I can sit in geosynchrinous orbit above Teldrassil in my Navy Apocalypse and fry newbie night elves with heavy tachyon beams.

Just a thought:  How would CoH / CoV fit into his schematic?

The one difference is that it's very difficult for someone in country A to say "I just talked to my friend in country B and they are having fun so I am moving there." even going from say the US to Canada is a HUGE deal and certain types of economies actively prohibit this sort of thing, see the Berlin Wall, I can't imagine a societal construct less likely to enable easy movment of people between instances than MMOG's run by different corporations.

Communication between MMOG's is one thing, just look at this board, but enabling movement between ones held by different companies is something else all together.

The same way it works now. Except the interface between Game A and Game B would be in 3d. If Second Life had an open architecture server (ala apache) that anyone could run themselves instead of their stupid closed land system it would be pretty close to a 3d web client/server architecture. There isn't any reason that current games aren't meshed with existing protocols (irc/email/usenet/im/http) other than they don't want to be because they want to control their closed enviroment.

You've been trying to paint a 3d metaverse as some kind of socialist utopia where meaningless achievements in Game A would carry over into meaningless achievements in Game B, all companies would be lovie dovie with each other, and a unified set of rules would govern the whole place. NWN already is an example of server side characters vs. bringing local characters from your own client with you (and the individual servers control the config).

Whereas I see it as simply an open 3D interface over the existing internet architecture (re: usenet, email, irc, http, ftp, gopher). The only real difference being that people visiting a virtual location (like a website) would manifest as 3D avatars and would be able to interact and communicate with each other in 3D space in real time. Every server would govern it's own ruleset and handle it's own load just like web servers do now. AJAX is already moving the 2D web in this direction. Wizbang shit like text to speech, automatic avatar creation, and the actual 3D browser is all just gravy.

Actually, I was referring to the schematic of the original article, where characters can move between MMOs.  Since CoH / CoV is the closest anyone's come to ever actually doing this, I figured it was an example worth bringing up.

Or, uh, we can keep going around in circles about the 3D internets that are useful for thousands of secret reasons we lack the imagination to discover.  That'd be fun too.

Here's the big test for new technology adoption:  Porn.  The web's uses for porn were relatively obvious.  What does the 3D internet bring to the table?


In other words, your idea is somewhat possible currently, but nobody's doing it because it's not useful?  If even the Second Life kids, probably one of the more experimental bunches around, aren't doing this, you're telling me that my grandfather who plays Bridge on Yahoo is going to someday?

How is the 3D internet useful to him?


Does NWN have serious PvP, either directly or in terms of peen-waving?  Also, can you see why the NWN model might be accurately defined as "niche"?


There are places already for people who visit the same website and would like to communicate with one another.  Pro Tip: You're in one of them right now!  Also, given how AOL's IM service has tried to push 3D avatars on its members (as a replacement to the 2D ones) and they've been a spectacular failure because nobody gives a fuck about 3D avatars, I'm failing to see the point to the '3D manifestation' jive.

Just to be helpful: Bastions of War (http://www.bastionsofwar.com/).

BoW has an exclusive character vault, though, and special rules to ensure fair and balanced play. You can't bring your character over from other servers - which is generally true of all PW servers.

Yeah, no one gives a fuck about 3D avatars thats why ~5 million people play WoW right. No one cares about 3D avatars thats why none of the MMOGs have intricate visual character creation systems. And no one gives a fuck about 3D avatars thats why there aren't 3500 people online IMVU (http://www.imvu.com/) right now, they aren't a top 10k site on the internet either, they don't have user made 3D content, and people aren't buying and selling said user made 3D content. Yeah I guess all that shit doesn't exist because your grandpa plays Yahoo Bridge and you have no idea how to make the interface easier.


A mosaic video sphere with the user inside where the user mouse overs or clicks the various videos in the mosaic, it zooms into that video, and it begins playing the 30 second trial clip. You drag & drop your "credit card" object on the video, it fills out all the payment information automatically, and unlocks the full video. Better yet, you control the camera angle from a 360 degree sphere in a PPV cam girl show because 4-8 360 degree cameras are recording all the angles and meshing the video togather in real time. Oh wait, I forgot, scrolling up and down on a 2D web page is good enough! If you had your way we'd still be jerking off to the command line.


And thank goodness your unimaginative ass wasn't alive when there were punch cards because who needs a view screen right? Punch cards are good enough!

I think some of you are trying to skip ahead too far. Technology is one thing. Acceptance is another.

To stay on point, the sovereignty of MMO "countries" is more about the finances and resources of building them than any arrogance over who runs them. Governing an MMO is protecting one's IP, which one spent a few to scores of millions building. The result of this is people who apply for citizenship in new MMOs through what amounts to an Ellis Island and as if they were poor people who just managed to jump onto the boat before it left harbor. This fits within the Heroics mythos though. Start weak, progress strong, take vengeance on what once beat you. That sorta thing.

Since MMO companies are about finances and resources too, the core of business would need to change in order to get to the One World/Many Facets concept.

It could happen, but I imagine if it does it'll be more because of business reasons. If companies could band together to make separate MMOGs with a common suite of tools (Big World?), they could achieve, and somehow work out the financial sharing, for One World.

But we're a ways away from that. The tech is there, but the will is not.

You're making the same mistake the original author does, by assuming that this is why people play the game.


I've never heard of IMVU before.  Top 10k site doesn't mean shit.  Especially not when compared to the number of people using AIM, and MSN messenger.

Also, you're shooting yourself in the foot; if people who want 3D avatars can go to IMVU, that lessens their demand for the 3D internet you speak of.


Note: Any and all links that follow will be NSFW.

Drag and dropping your credit card is in no way different than the many 'wallet' tools offered by Google, Yahoo, et al. at the moment.  As for video trials, what you're proposing is already done, if anything done better, by websites such as shooshtime.com, kaktuz.com, and more importantly, VideoBox.com.  VideoBox actually gives you a filmstrip of the entire movie, and you can select whichever portion you'd like to download, and it'll start streaming instantly.

You're not offering anything that the 2D internet doesn't already do.  In fact, given how hyperlinks usually make for faster surfing than having an avatar, your way would be less efficient.  And when I'm surfing that sort of material, I do not want to be in contact with other avatars doing the same.


That's a very... um... detailed description.  That said, what you're talking about the kind of thing you'd program an app for on the webpage itself.  There's no reason to make the entire web 3D for this sort of thing; you'd program it in Java or Flash or ActiveX or whatever, and visitors to the website would use it just fine as-is.


Gee, I could have sworn I said that the reasons for adopting the web were readily apparent at the time to those who cared to think about it.  The issue here isn't that I'm "against advancement", it's that you've latched onto a really stupid idea and somehow convinced yourself that it'd be an advancement when it's probably not.  Straw man, ahoy!

Oh, and you've still failed to offer a single reasonable advantage that the 3D internets would provide over our current setup.

Exactly my point. Thanks for making it.


Online Bridge is over rated. Just play with your own card deck at home. There is no reason to have 3D MMOGs either. UO 2d was just fine.


There were plenty of naysayers just like you. "Any promising new invention will have its naysayers, and the bigger the promises, the louder the nays. It's not hard to find smart people saying stupid things about the Internet on the morning of its birth. In late 1994, Time magazine explained why the Internet would never go mainstream: "It was not designed for doing commerce, and it does not gracefully accommodate new arrivals." Newsweek put the doubts more bluntly in a February 1995 headline: "THE INTERNET? BAH!" The article was written by astrophysicist and Net maven Cliff Stoll, who captured the prevailing skepticism of virtual communities and online shopping with one word: "baloney."" - Wired (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html)


You're still pretending that a 3d web is some kind of socialist utopia. Do not pass go do not collect $200.

Your point was that you're not offering anything substantive?

Your point was that you have no point?

WTF?


This is silly.  Expanding MMOs (and games in general) into the 3rd dimension expanded the gameplay.  Just as expanding into true 'virtual reality' would do so as well.  The whole issue here is that you're not making any compelling arguments as to how expanding internet surfing into a 3D protocol (as opposed to localized applets for individual webpages that might use 3D, such as porn - i.e., the system we have right now) provides these benefits.


Using the label of "naysayer" as an epithet is generally a mark of someone who doesn't know much about technology but fancies themself a dreamer.

There are all sorts of tech issues where the naysayers were largely right:  On SDI (some caveats on that, but that's a side topic), on a space elevator, on Betamax, on cold fusion.

Try investing in the stock market without listening to anything said by "naysayers".  I'm sure you'll do great.

Simply calling someone a naysayer and then pointing to an example in history of naysayers having been wrong is not an actual, defensible, position.


Socialist utopia?  I'm going to make a genuine effort to translate your writing into actual thought...

...Are you saying that I'm pretending that a 3D web is some kind of pie-in-the-sky fantasy when I shouldn't be?  In other words, that I'm underestimating its feasibility?

This is an incredibly stupid analogy.  The issue with the whole "socialist utopia" thing was that they had something they perceived as being de-facto desirable, and the counterargument was that in the real world it was not feasible.

I'm not debating the feasibility of your 3D internet, though barriers to implementation would be significant.  I'm saying that there's no point to it once you get there, and so people won't be terribly interested in getting there.

If you really believe the shit coming out of your mouth, shouldn't you be making a list of every company working on 3D internet technology, and rushing to offer funding, or acquiring stock where applicable?  Surely, one of them will be the one to shift the paradigm, and you'll make a fat sack of cash off your prescient wisdom!


Question to any possible lurkers:  Is there anyone who agrees with Krakrok's position but actually makes sense, and can thus explain to me in English the great joys of the coming proletarian revolution3D internet?

There's a lot of stuff you could do with 3d. You're talking about the internet, though, so it's fairly tricky to know where to draw the line. Are we talking about software downloaded, or client media you stick in your computer? Maybe in the future it won't matter. What's the display device? Advantages to looking at 3d on a 2d monitor are limited, but what if we had a holo-cube type setup, or monitor-glasses that create 3d, or a holodeck, or the matrix style direct neural feed? Here are a few things I would find useful even on a current monitor or with some sort of 3d glasses setup:

Virtual home renovation. Imagine the home builders give you soft copy of the blueprints, or you are looking to build/buy a house. Try everything from colors to seeing what it would look like with that optional kitchen island, or how stainless steel fridge compares to white. Hardwood now Carpet now Tile. Add a room! Change the yard around!

CAD Desgin. Like the one above, but for real engineers. Coupled with the up-and-coming fabrication technology, this would be very useful.

Virtual Sightseeing. Yeah, OK, it's not the real thing as being there, but wouldn't it be cool to see a real 3d picture of a place? Virtually walk inside the pryamids or check out the forbidden city. This goes for news reports as well, it's just added depth that you'd get as opposed to 2d.

Layered Desktop. We're always looking at new ways to process images, a 3d desktop could theoretically give more performance. It's been tried before, with varying degrees of success.

TV. We sold the public on HDTV is better than regular TV; Just use 2 cameras for the 3d effect while filming. Maybe too expensive a display for home use, maybe movie theaters will be saved after all...

Video Games. Yeah, they're already in 3D. It'll just be better, faster, and higher definition.

The idea isn't to re-invent the wheel; Print is 2d and we're going to be reading it till the end of time; It doesn't get any real benefit out of 3d. The same goes for a lot of websites out there; 3d will likely be an auxiliary technology at first, but with the advent of new display devices, computers may be 3d by default and you will use 2d planes within.

I could definitely see the usefulness of this, but I'm not sure how it'd be dependent on the internet itself being 3D; it seems like the Home Depot would make this kind of thing a localized applet on their webpage.


That's actually my mom's field.  When I talk to her, I'll bring it up and ask how that sort of thing would impact her work.


This would be awesome - though again, I see it as a combo of genuine 3D technology (as opposed to 3D rendered on a 2D plane) and being a specialized app, as opposed to being 'part of the internet itself'.

To be fair, I think I noted a while back in this thread that true virtual reality (3D viewed in 3D) is something I'm a big proponent of, and clearly passes all the tests I laid out.  This is different, however, from the topic we've been debating, which is 3D viewed on a 2D plane a-la a MMO, or Second Life or whatnot.  To be fair, I think you recognize that distinction as well.


I, too, think that this is roughly how the technology will progress.

Instead of admitting your assertion that "no one thought the internet was bullshit" is wrong you move on and say "but naysayers are usually right so whatever". Your kind of "me me me" attitude is what is ruining America.

Thanks for trolling; check back soon for prizes.

"Nobody thought the internet was bullshit" wasn't a substantial assertion I was making; amend that to "Most smart people who thought about it saw the benefits" and you get the point.  You're dodging the main argument because you're clearly wrong.  Also, I didn't say "naysayers are usually right", I said "being a naysayer is not necessarily a good or bad thing", in response to your using 'naysayer' in a derogatory way.


Uh... WTF?   ROFL.

God. We haven't even gotten like _any_ of the potential performance out of the 2D web and people are already saying we should switch to 3D?

3D makes a nice metaphor for navigation, but, uh, has anybody built a 3D interface to some non-navigation task that hasn't beein _inferior_ to a 2D interface?

Even then, how are you going to map the Internet to make it useful to a 3D navigator? On one level I can see 3D being your own custom metaphor for the space of the Web, but, uh, to get any kind of actual "thereness" going we're going to have to rip out the entire HTTP underpinnings of the Internet and replace it with some non-idempotent protocol. The groundwork for doing this in a non-scorched-earth way is progressing with AJAX.

--GF

The biggest question I can ask, without really reading this topic because it seems to have gone off the rails, is...

What can a 3D interface offer to web users who can barely understand the current 2D interface? I'm thinking not much.

A 3D web sounds really cool, but in practice, it just adds "travel time" to what is a simple process. Click on the link, you get information. Why is that hard, or a bad thing? On a 2D output device (monitor) with a 2D input device (keyboard/mouse), what's the point of a 3D interface? Again, there isn't a point. It's not necessary.

Now if we are talking about a 3D output device, such as a surrounding holographic display, or better yet, a display that is in the mind as opposed to one projected out into real space, a 3D interface would probably make sense. But we are decades away from that kind of technology being affordable to the home user, and even then, I'm not sure it's necessary.

So...Microsoft Passport 2.0 will include avatars and a little chat thing and the entire internet will adopt it?  Basically what you're saying?

Navigation and spatial awareness are a lot easier in 3D. Even if it's only metaphoric navigation, if the metaphor's 3D rather than 2D there's a significant increase in efficiency and usability.

Erm, don't have the paper on me, but back when 3D tech was in its infancy these were the conclusions of a study of 3D vs. 2D trees for navigation and suchlike. Also telling was that where the 3D interface didn't perform as well people were kludging around with the 2D bit bolted on to the 3D, suggesting that if a metaphor could have been implemented for the task in 3D there would have been gains.

Is the metaphor the limiting factor? Maybe. Are there some tasks that can't be ported to 3D? According to the study's background information, yes, up to and including stuff like condition monitoring with 3D bar graphs.

--GF

Oh look, Jeff Bezos invests in the potential future of Amazon in 3D (http://www.siliconbeat.com/entries/2006/03/28/linden_lab_raises_11_million_to_go_more_mainstream.html).

Edit: And a second article about blurring the virtual/real currency line (http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/03/the_future_of_credit_cards_ear.html).

Second Life is hardly the same thing as a 3d spacial web.

I don't agree. List some reasons why. The only difference I see is there is no open standard SL server.

Terra Nova discussion on the same Wired article (http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2006/03/yeah_not_so_muc.html).

Because the benefits of 3D are highly dependent on what kind of content you're trying to deliver - and thus localized applets on individual webpages can provide the benefits of 3D without making the whole internet so?  I.e., you type amazon.com into your usual web-browser, Amazon.com pops up in 3D, and nothing else is affected?

For instance, CNet offers a multidimensional 'web' for seeing how its news stories link to one another.  It's useful, it's on the CNet webpage as an applet, and it doesn't require any change in the overall internet to implement.  You're totally dodging how much of what you're banking on as 3D's uses can be accomplished in a similar format.

For your argument to be correct, you'd have to make the case that it's not just better to have 3D on Amazon or 3D on CNet, but that we want a full 3D experience for going *from* Amazon *to* CNet.

A 3D web is not an exclusive endeavor. For 3D to be truly useful, we have to get out of the two dimensional interface of mouse, keyboard and monitor. Not really VR with GestureTek or one of these things (http://www.measurand.com) per se. But we do need something a lot better than poking holes at animated paper.

The metaphor of the 3D environment matters for the experiential quality of an immersive environment. But it doesn't make data fundamentally easier or harder to sift through unless the entirety of the interface is considered.

You demonstrate a fundamental incomprehension of the topic at hand.

Ah, finally.  Also: the original article was stupid.

Life involves a lot of interactions with people who don't comprehend all sorts of things.  If you have a grand idea and you're not able to guide people to comprehending it, all that speaks poorly of is your communication and persuasion skills, which is no skin off my back.

In the end, the sophists (And AC. Grayling, whose book, "The Art of Always Being Right", is essential - import it from Amazon UK if they're not publishing it in America anymore) were largely correct - oftentimes what matters isn't whether you're right or wrong, what matters is your ability to turn your opinions into actionable consensus.

In that respect, you failed.

Oh, and there's also the whole "Sophistry and the powers of persuasion aside, you're probably wrong" thing.  But don't trip on that too much, it's more fun to edit my quotes and pretend I'm debating you because I want attention.

Another article from January regarding SecondLife publishing an open standard at some point (http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/entry/second_life_to_go_open_source_eventually/).

We could comprehend it better if we were not limited to a 2D interface. :-D

And you disapprove of Televangelist trolling? The hypocrisy is so ripe I could pluck it from a tree.


Edit: Changed complaining to disapprove.

I never complained about his trolling.  I disagree with his views on in-game communities certainly, but not the act of posting itself.

Trolling and griefing are one and the same. You were being snarky.

Yes, I was being snarky here.  But I never complained about or claimed he was trolling.  I was honestly trying to figure out how he could feel that way.

Hay guys!  There's this really neat private messaging feature built into the board software.

With all the definitions of sociopathy being tossed about and the talk of a sociopath being someone who disregards "societal norms"... Isn't it a societal norm not to have a derogatory 3rd person conversation about someone when they can obviously hear you, while you act as if they're not there?

Obviously, I'm a big boy who will not break down into a blubbering mass at the thought of someone speaking ill of me, but the casual hypocrisy is pretty blatant.

Being online, this isn't a community after all.  There are no social mores for me to break, so no, I do not think taking this to PMs is necessary.

Were I talking about someone else it would be hypocritical, but I am respecting and supporting your stance.

[Edit - Not no double-negatives no more.]

Everyone knows social mores dont apply to people with sickeningly cute avatars...

Uh, but that's my reasoning.  You were just arguing the opposite.  Since when are you holding yourself to my codes of behavior, which you've stated you believe are incorrect?

So when you encounter someone who has a belief system you disagree with and think is immoral, whenever you're around them you toss off your own belief system?

In other words, you only stick to what you believe is right because there are other people around who also believe that it's right?

Isn't that tantamount to only being moral out of a fear of punishment?

By your own logic, isn't that sociopathic?



Sorry to drag the other thread over here, but Lantyssa and Krakrok started that up for reasons unknown.

Your thread fagger is showing.

You don't understand sarcasm very well, do you?

I did not consider you trolling prior to this, perhaps because I was trying to talk with you even if I did disagree strongly.  I was being upfront and honest about our exchange and trying to remain neutral about you.  When you start acting like it bothers you, which is hypocrisy itself, my inner bitch is going to run with it.

With you pushing it I don't feel much sympathy for you anymore.  If that makes me sociopathic so be it.  At least I am willing to accept the possibility.

[Sorry to everyone else.  I really wasn't trying to derail this.  I guess I need to work on that... I'll stop now.]

Still interested in why you don't think SecondLife constitutes a 3D web, HaemishM.

---

I would also point out that cell phones have shitty input devices and the three big graphics chip makers have all come out with 3D chips for cell phones.

I'm still trying to figure out what you think actually makes Second Life a 3d web.

It's a 3d chat room, with some other nice features (streaming audio/video) etc. thrown in. The two are greatly dissimilar. I'd compare a 3d web to an actual library before I'd compare it to a game-ish environment like Second Life.

And I'll repeat. I think a 3d interface to the web while still keeping the web on a 2d output device like a monitor is just adding an ill-fitting interface of obstruction.

My cell phone has a 3D chip.  It uses the 3D for localized applets, most notably games.  I have a snowboarding game on my phone that's in some ways akin to a stripped-down 1080 Snowboarding.

The technological back end is basically a web server. Dynamic content is streamed to the client in real time. It has hyperlinks. It has it's own internal DNS system. Everything above that is a facade.

Except that Second Life is not meant as a content delivery system, it's meant as a socializing mechanism. It's more like a message board than the entire web. The fact that its backend can stream content doesn't make it a 3d web. I don't jump on Second Life to browse pr0n, though I might browse pr0n while on Second Life.

If that were true you wouldn't be able to build (and 'sell') your own content and write your own scripts.


The web is a socializing mechanism. SL only appears that way because it is a closed system. If the client/server protocol was an open standard it would no longer be a closed system (which I've already stated).


I would agrue that hyperlink (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink) embedded content is the web. Everything else is a facade.

That is not it's primary function, that is a feature of the socializing mechanism which IS its primary feature.


Ok, so you can add your own content to Second Life, yet its a closed system just because the client/server protocol isn't an open standard? MEH? You still haven't told me why its the exact same as a 3D web.

A 3D web would add travel time to the otherwise easily traversed 2D web. What good would that do? About the only "benefit" I can see of a 3D web would be the illusion of "window shopping" or the return of browsing at random from 1995. That's not that interesting, based on the "99% of all creative is crap" rule. Frankly, the web works better with the current 2D input/output paradigm of the monitor/mouse with one click browsing than it would with walking around in some faux 3D world.

A 3D web would raise the profit margins for 3D card manufacturers. For everyone else, it'd just be a waste of time until we have actual 3D holographic displays.

It is a closed system because I can't run my own server and I can't create a hyperlink from my server to your server. I can't write my own server software and I can't write my own client based on an open 'SL' protocol. A single company owns the server side and there is no room for change or innovation in the ruleset or technology of said server and client. SecondLife is like the AOL or Prodigy or Compuserves of the 90s.


Travel time is an artificial construct of current MMOGs. There is no reason to force users to 'walk' from website to website. The same instantanious transfer that happens now when you click a hyperlink can continue to happen. SL allows direct teleports though they may have it artifically limited to give credence to their 'land' constructs. Additionally, if I am on website A which is being served by company A and I click over to website B which is being served by company B I am now accessing company B's server which can and does have an entirely different ruleset than company A. When you run the server you can make the rules be whatever you want in your own 3D space (as previously stated in regards to the NWN server vs client saved characters).


No one is advocating ditching the current 2D web interface. In software such as Croquet (see screenshot (http://www.opencroquet.org/About_Croquet/screenshots.html)) 2D content is co-oped into the 3D interface via 'portals' or whatever. SL is currently implimenting FireFox into SL as well. Why it takes them a year to do this I have no idea.


What I am saying is that at some point there is going to emerge a widely accepted/deployed 3D web architecture which will allow the use of 3D crap without the need of other proprietary hard to use third party crap in a 'web browser'. It very well could be that Microsoft will impliment some form of sandboxed DirectX into Internet Explorer, or Adobe will open the Macromedia Shockwave 3D protocol/server/client, or SecondLife, or someone entirely different (like Spore). Additionally, the mobile market is a prime target for such an application because of the lack of a usable interface.

If you can teleport directly from one content point to another, what exactly is the point of having a 3D interface on top of the web? Seriously, I cannot fathom why you think that's somehow important or even needed. Is it so you can browse two pieces of content in the same viewing port? Is there some grand idea that suddenly makes that idea make sense or am I just too dense to get it.

Unless the 3D functions around me (holographic display), I see nothing a 3D interface would add onto the web worthwhile.

I can't help you there then because I can't even count all the ways where it would be useful.

That's not a convincing argument. That doesn't even tell me you know any of them.

Come on, just one way.

I already listed two in regards to porn. But another example might be Google Earth in the browser instead of Google Maps. With real time traffic/weather. You know Google purchased Sketchup (http://www.sketchup.com/) right?

GoogleEarth has actual 3D data in it. 99.9% of websites content does not.

Websites are mostly information browsing - really online catalogs. Those don't benefit from being in 3D.

Are there some specific applications for 3D on the web? Sure. If you are shopping for something online how about a nice 3D view of the item that you can rotate, zoom, etc? Sounds good to me. (A lot of websites already have this functionality) But that would still be on a 2D website.

Look at the picture you linked to. It's just a 2D site pasted onto a 3D block off-angle so it's hard to read and doesn't take up the full screen.

When you open a document in word it doesn't create some snazzy 3D book that you can rotate. Because text+image is best served out as a simple orthographic projection and most data is text+image.

The vast majority of websites have nothing interesting to offer in 3D and certainly the navigation/interface itself is much better suited for 2D display. Just as the UI on a 3D game is still essentially 2D.

Still not seeing what a 3D interface on the web would do for me. Do I get to Google up my location on Earth and get a 3D representation of the rain all around me? Just like going outside, only not?

As an adjunct to the web, sure 3D things like Sketchup can help. Virtual tours of houses and buildings and future projects. None of which needs a 3D interface on the web.

Pr0n? 3D pr0n? Great, I can see the money shot in bullet time. SO WHAT?

If your version of 3D Web (displaying 2D pages with a 3D card) was any good, it would be already in use. No need to slam it any more, yes, it sucks.

When I start from a news aggregator site, I sometimes have to go thru a site or two to get to the real story. I would like to see this path visualized before me before I click the first link. If the path ventures to the pus-filled pit, aka blogosphere, I'd like to skip right to the end. Imagine, if you will, the starmap of Eve, and a journey from empire-controlled space to another empire's space thru 0.0 security systems.

ah, but see, that muddies the water - let's imagine for a minute you get what you want - and behind that main page you see.. what's this? 30 pages? that's right, most pages have dozens of hyperlinks on them, and the computer's not going to know what you want to look at.. if you want to do 3 or 4 deep you quickly get buried. Theoretically goggle could step in, maybe, and look for similiarities and key words between the first and second, but there are bound to be flaws... in the end, it's likely no faster or better than what we've got now.

I'll be sure to remember that when MySpace impliments personal 3D spaces for their ~60 million users instead of a single 2D webpage.


And here I thought my apathy was strong at 60%.


No. Currently available open 3D software/content is expensive, kludgy, and not widely deployed. Shockwave 3D has 55% browser penetration and I don't know of anything with a higher penetration. And only now is broadband reaching critical mass in the US.

If this were the Next Big Thing, there'd be so much research money pumped into it by the likes of MS and others it wouldn't be funny, and it'd be well and ready to go long before broadband penetration hit, so content creators would be getting a head start.

The fact that you're having to wonder if Second Life will be the savior of the interweb suggests otherwise.

Pro Tip: Don't quit your day job at the soup kitchen.

I haven't worked there since high school, thank god. Also, you failed to respond to my point, which is that your predictive powers do not likely outstrip those of, say, Microsoft or Google.

I've yet to hear how the 3D web is useful at all.

Let's take some websites I visit regularly:

ESPN
Yahoo Fantasy Baseball
f13

Why do I want these in 3D again? Again let me point out, the web is mostly about browsing information and most information is in the form of text + images.

That's awesome that myspace is going to have "3D personal spaces" or whatever but I don't think the MySpace main website is going to be 3D anytime soon.

It has little to do with penetration. The problem is 3D in a web browser is trying to force a square peg into a round hole most of the time. Right now I'm posting this in a text area. How would that be better in 3D? Let's not forget that HTML is not a 3D markup language...

3D renders of things make sense for objects that have volume. Text does not have volume. Baseball stats don't have volume.

[1996]Someday cyberspace will be virtual reality![/1996]

Imagine Clint's gun popping out from the screen in glorious 3D!

I already addressed this when I said a 3D web probably isn't going to replace a 2D web. A smart '3D browser' would simply co-op 2D and 3D into one application. And as I already pointed out a sandboxed DirectX in Internet Explorer which reads from a 3D markup language would do the trick nicely.


I didn't say it was going to. Someone wanted examples of 3D uses and MySpace adding personal 3D instances would be one example. They may do it. They may not. Or someone else may do it. I have no idea. However, it torpedoes your '99% of the web doesn't need 3D' in my opinion.

We won't know all the ways one billion internet users can think up to do with a 3D web until it happens.


They tried it. It was called VRML. It never received wide enough market penetration. No one had 3D cards. No one had broadband. Game over.

VRML was also slow as shit, required actual knowledge of 3D rendering and such. Oh and it DIDN'T provide anything useful to the web. There were a lot of reasons it died, but that was the biggest one.