Telegram

There are many many things I want to say, and not that much time. My mental list of "things to blog", each promising an huge post, makes me think that maybe -- just maybe -- most of those blog posts are never going to be written. So, for now, I'm writing you a little telegram, telling only some things, and quickly.

The first, and obvious, is to tell you I'm going to marry soon. That's right: we knew we would going to do it for a long time, but it was only while celebrating her birthday that I did the actual move of asking her. As my friendfeed followers noticed, or her blog readers, she said "Yes". I'm really happy, but there are lots of things to do now: people still don't get married over the Internet, at least in Portugal ;-) Thanks a lot to those who gave us "congratulations" messages, I know I didn't replied to most of you... bear with me.

After a quick talk on Friendfeed between me and Melo, he decided to write Rasputine. Rasputine (or Ras, as Corto Maltese called him) is a generic Moo/MUD/Talker-to-XMPP gateway. You add a buddy to your roster and then you can use it to connect to that world. That means that now, a couple of days later, you can use Jabber to connect to several services, including Selva (add selva@rasputine.simplicidade.org, Second Life (via SLTalker, add sltalker@rasputine.simplicidade.org), Portugal Virtual (add pv@rasputine.simplicidade.org) or MOOsaico (add moosaico@rasputine.simplicidade.org). This also means that I'm now feeling back the urge to make SLTalker a lot more useful (and less buggy) than it is at the moment. It is being completely rewritten, using now libsecondlife 0.5.0.

I'm returning to have a good reading rhythm. So, I've been reading Cory Doctorow's books (he's also now freshly married, congratulations!), finaly got into the mood of getting and reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (you know when you know that you will read and like a book, and you're so certain of it that you just keep postponing it? I've been doing that with this book for years...), Satrapi's Embroideries, some more SciFi, some Fantasy, some Manga, some essays... Well, a lot of stuff, but still not as much as I wanted to. Regarding to Cory's books, I have a funny thing to tell: despite all his books being freely available to download on his website, with a Creative Commons license, I've been buying and reading them in the physical book format (and reading a lot of his not-in-books essays in my mobile phone). Well, with "Overclocked" I stumbled into a problem: the book had 16 pages missing!. Frustrating, huh? Well, not that much: thanks to Creative Commons, I just picked up my cellphone and in less than two minutes I was reading what was supposed to be in those 16 pages. See one more case on which Creative Commons is a good idea? ;-)

Oh, speaking of Creative Commons: to celebrate their fund-raising campaign, Creative Commons has released "A Shared Culture", a cool short video by renowned filmmaker Jesse Dylan, explaining very well why Creative Commons is important. Since it is in English, without translations, and I wanted to write about Creative Commons in one of my twice-a-week column at "Programas Livres", a Portuguese web publication, I ended up doing a free translation and adaptation, in both text and audio formats.

And... well, I told you, I have lot's of stuff to talk about, but for now, this is it. If you want to keep more updated than this, consider following my Friendfeed.

Text-based virtual worlds podcast

Quick yet awsome news: Alan Schwartz decided to create a podcast about text-based virtual worlds. From what I've already listened it, it is great. And now, sorry, I'm going to stop typing and press "Play" again...

Why Virtual Worlds shouldn't be Businesses

Virtual Worlds

Soon after the appearance of CRPG's (Computer Role Playing Games), a similar concept appeared, to present Multi-user CRPG's, what were to be called MUD (Multi-User Dungeons). In 1978 appeared MUD1, a platform to build MUD's: Virtual Worlds full of monsters and users willing to slaught'em. The concept evolved, and, besides the appearance of different types of MUDs, several other Multi-User Virtual Worlds appeared, with different focuses other than MUDs (like, for instance, Talkers or MOOs). In 1984 appeared "Islands of Kesmai", the first MMORPG (heavily inspired of MUDs) to be explored commercially.

Let's forget all the technology advances made on Virtual Worlds: while a good use of graphics, sounds and other technology advances might enhance the experience (specially embodiment) one has in a Virtual World, those aren't a part of the Virtual World per se: the Virtual World is the concept, not its implementation.

Business Models for Virtual Worlds

"Islands of Kesmai" had a business model quite similar of those we usually see nowadays on Virtual Worlds, including MMOGs: at the time users were paying $12 per hour. There isn't much evolution on the "new" business models, and while a lot of research is being made on that field, there are basicly three possible business models: the Time-Based Subscription Model, the Virtual Currency Model and Second Life's Virtual Real Estate Ownership Model. Some new models are being purposed and appearing both in research and real implementations, but they're always inspired by these three, and can be seen as simple derivations.

Defying Virtual Worlds' business models

The problem with the actual Virtual Worlds business models is simply that we are building Virtual Worlds as businesses, and thus modelling that Virtual World in such a way that it can optimise the results of its Business Model. While it's easy to understand the need for a company that decides to create a Virtual World to do things this way (and it's comprehensible if his objective is to make money), we're seeing the problem in the wrong perspective. Users don't want to be a part of a business - they want to be in a Virtual World. The implied limitations of these kind of Virtual Worlds are obvious when you see the difficulty in creating your "virtual persona", your avatar, that isn't just "your avatar in world xx" but is simple "your (ubiquitous) avatar". The need to fix that is seen if you take in consideration the creation of some "structured virtual ubiquitous societies", like the NationStates. So, while there's no wrong on having companies building businesses by the use of Virtual Worlds, taking the Virtual World itself as a business is what is really stopping the evolution in this field. Not the technical stuff (like better graphics, less lag) but the design of the Virtual World.

Building a better Virtual World

"So, if all the well-known VW's are wrong, how could them be right?"

Imagine a World Wide Web where, instead of being just a protocol running on top of a network (the Internet), each website had its own protocol, made by a company, and you had to have that websites client program (the browser), made by the same company, to go there. Cnet's browser would let you visit Cnet's website; Amazon's browser would let you visit Amazon's website. Cnet was making money by selling its browser, as well as Amazon by selling its see-a-list-of-books browser. Insane, right? Well, that's what's happening with VW's nowadays. So, how to fix it?

Well, we could use the parallel between the Web and VW's and say that what we need is to use a network where each node knows each other and that give us the chance of having each node linking to each other, and use that to define space. With it, and using a standard and unique protocol, it would be trivial to map from one layer to the other, and, with it, to have a "Virtual World Framework". Think of Neal Stephenson's metaverse, think about what is needed to reach that kind of ubiquity. Simple, isn't it?