Links for today

Another round of links...

http://www.worldsinmotion.biz/2007/09/agdc_biowares_gordon_walton_gi.php
Lessons we can take from the WoW success

http://mashable.com/2007/11/21/holiday-facebook-functionality-updates/
More facebook privacy issues

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_moveon_beacon_privacy.php
More facebook privacy issues, part II

http://lmms.sourceforge.net/home.php
Yet another open source tool to produce music. It looks cool, and I installed it, so I expect to give it a try this weekend or so...

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/21/chris-collins-from-linden-lab-stability-is-the-key/
Interview to Linden Labs about the future of Second Life. Hot points: they aim to open up everything; they'll introduce more registration requirements; they're working on the best way of implementing verification that is inclusive of all legitimate signups no matter where users live (forget anonymity :-( )

http://secondliferesearch.blogspot.com/2007/11/second-lifes-virtual-potential-is-real.html
The second life potencial is real... Now let's see people using it, shall we?

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=3898293
Making Second Life more like real life

Augmented Reatity vs. Virtual Worlds

With the rise of adoption of Massively Multiplayer Online Games such as World of Warcraft or "maybe this is not a game" Virtual Worlds like Second Life, it is arguably now more than ever the interest (and confusion) around these two concepts: augmented reality and virtual worlds. In this post I'll try to focus on some items to help both defining and distinguishing both.

First of all, augmented reality and virtual worlds are two different, distinguished and uncommon concepts. The two refer to two quite different yet emerging things, both with a quicker evolution and adoption then ever. The confusion grows when people try to relate concepts by using words, since, for instance, most Virtual Reality gadgets are gadgets made to help creating an augmented reality, and usually not related to virtual worlds, despite having "virtual" in the concept name.

Augmented reality is the term often used to describe how technology is used to enhance your perception and interaction with reality. While it is often used as a buzzword to sell you the latest ubiquous gadget ("with a mobile phone you're everywhere at any time!" or "listen your music everywere!") this concept of "augmenting reality" defines something that is happening since the rise of humanity: basicly we're constantly developing more ways of expanding our communication, expression and presence.

Virtual Worlds are "alternative realities" or "another worlds". They usually define other place (other planet, other universe, whatever) where other beings (humans, orcs, flying pigs, whatever) live.

The idea that augmented reality and virtual worlds can cross is usually wrong. The most common misconception is that a virtual world is a virtual place where people go to meet each other, which is basicly is a way of augmented reality. You can put in this type of augmented reality places technologies like IRC, where real people use virtual places (a #room in an irc.serv.er) to be able to chat with each other without distance constraints (you can talk at the same time with your nighbour, and your friend living in the other side of the world). But IRC just can't be seen or defined as a virtual world: there's no "virtual place where virtual beings exist).

In WOW or SL you can be a human or an orc or a flying pig, with a name chosen by yourself. Your avatar (the being in that virtual world) has to follow and live with the social and physic rules of that world. You and your avatar are different beings, different kinds of beings, living in different worlds. Your "one world" needs, relations or behaviour aren't your "other world" needs, relations or behaviour. Dying in one world doesn't mean dying in the other, if you eat doesn't mean that your avatar ate, and vice-versa. They are two different entities. If you have, or can have that in some system, you're probably on a virtual world, and not just some augmented reality technology.

The fact that you don't have the imposition to role play in a virtual world, it doesn't mean it is not a virtual world but just an augmented reality. Furthermore, virtual worlds can be thypicaly used as a mean of augmented reality. As an example, in Second Life you'll see avatars that are (or try to be) exactly like the humans behing those avatars are, but you'll also see RL executives with female avatars that do sex for money, or RL lawyers whose avatars are of mythical beasts.

If you use a Virtual World as a way to achieve an augmented reality, or even if most people use some virtual world as a way to achieve an augmented reality, it doesn't mean that the described technology isn't a virtual world but just a way to achieve an augmented reality, it only means that in that Virtual World all avatars are being used as a way to achieve an augmented reality, nothing else.

permadeath

"Permadeath" is almost a taboo word on the gaming industry, but it's almost a need in having a immersive Virtual World. I wrote about it a couple of days ago, saying:

Death is death. If you died, you're dead. Dead. You shouldn't "respawn", you shouldn't turn into a ghost. Most critics on MMOG's are on the fact that they are "excessively violent". Well, if death meant death in a virtual world, players wouldn't be killing each other (at least not that much). On the other hand, if in real life when someone dies he respawns in another place, people would be killing themselves all the time.

Now that known MMO's are getting in the wild, with both the number of MMO's and number of MMO players growing, the issue is getting hot again - people start to be sick to see "yet another hack'n'slash MMO game", specially when the differences are only names, graphics and, with luck, the background story. The Guardian has a piece exactly on this issue: "Why do we have to die in games?" formulates an answer: no, we don't. Let me quote a little bit (but you really should read the whole article):

But do you need to die at all? Eric Zimmerman, a New York-based game designer who helps run the studio Gamelab, says: "Dying in games is a strange artifact of certain kinds of historical forms and content, and there is no good reason for including it in many cases." Molyneux concurs: "If we were starting from scratch, we wouldn't come up with this paradigm."

The only thing I have to add to explain my point on permadeath, is to give a footnote on a previous affirmation I did. When i said that:

I also agree that if you're paying to play a hack'n'slash game like World of Warcraft, you have to have the ability to respawn after death, but I'm not talking about building another WoW-like world, I'm talking about building a real good, new and innovative Virtual World.

this doesn't meen that hack'n'slash games can't have permadeath, or that they shouldn't have it. That sentence is meant to say that "the hack'n'slash trend we see is hugely flawed in it's concept". See, if you take into consideration that those MMORPG's are just varients of MUDs, heavilly inspired in D&D, you'll have to ask yourself: "Why is death permanent in D&D and not in a MMORPG?"

What makes a VW really a VW?

Terra Nova has an excelent blog post, specially because of the comments, on "what should a Virtual World have to become better than WOW and Second Life in a way you would never go back".

Obviously he was not talking about the upcoming "World of Starcraft", and while I don't find them the VW, there are some alternatives coming there that are in all ways better (or so it seems for now) than those two (take Darkfall Battle as an example).

Yet, that post also gave me a new way of looking to VW's by looking into those items that I'm naming as "requisites to make a Virtual World into a really Virtual World". Let me get them for you:

• A World - a defined space which existence is independent of the existence of the players, persistent, and with physics
  
• Players - that operate within the physics, and that represent one virtual individual (avatar)
  
• Interaction between players
• Interaction with the world
• Reaction to the world's changes
• Concept of time, equal to all players and the world
  

And then I had all kind of thoughs on this issues, some of them possibly to be explored in future posts here. You might find these self-evident, but they are not: these, for instance, include talkers as "really VW's" (we should get a name for this), and exclude GuildWars as a VW.

Predicting the tech-future

Following my yesterday's post about predictions of the tech-future (one predicted a Dystopian world controlled by Linden Labs in 2016, the other an overall controll of the tech-world by Google in 2017), now here's a link to an article talking about an upcoming paper that represents the result of a summit and they will "define/predict" a "metaverse roadmap". Yes, I know, having a bunch of folks in the industry "decide" a roadmap for such a thing is, well... ahem, anyway, the article is quite interesting, and gives us some food for thoughts. They predict that we'll have such a world and metaverse (first self, second self and mixed self) in 10 years from now (2017). They think that the upcoming tech-world is going to have four basic metaverse kinds:

• dubbed augmented reality
• lifelogging
• virtual worlds
• mirror worlds

For starts, I really don't think that you can apply the world metaverse for any of those items but the third: virtual worlds. The concept of metaverse appeared with the excelent book "Snow Crash", and defines a Virtual World with certain characteristics, but it is a virtual world.

But let's talk about those four items there.

Dubbed augmented reality is a concept where technology enables you to have an allways-persent body-widget that lets you know more about the reality that envolves you. Think about Plazes on steroids, in a allways-present device (like the eye-screening we see on GiTS), that enables you to have any kind of info about where you are, realtime. You can enhance the concept and think about stuff like getting info about people as you look at them and that sort of stuff. Possible? Yes, even probable, but that isn't a Metaverse, it makes me recall more other aspects in Snow Crash...

Like lifelogging. Remember that guys on Snow Crash that did something like wearing a full-body gadget-suit that was used to stream images into the future version of YouTube? Well, consider that lifeblogging with a little of the previous item (correlation between video footage and the people in that footage, and stuff like that).

On virtual worlds, it seems that what's been talked is about a more immersive version of Second Life, as the previous predictions also talked about. On a side note, while the previous prediction talked about Linden Labs (the company behind Second Life) buying google, in this event the general ideas were on whether would Google create GoogleOS and Microsoft would buy Linden Labs, positioning Google as the developing mega-softwarehouse with the future of Operating Systems, and Microsoft as less a technological company and more like a big pocket of money available to investiment, which isn't really surprising if you notice that we have really nothing innovative from Microsoft for years (the Wow from Vista is a big pile of FUD about a defective Operating System with nothing innovative compared to the alternatives). I intend to write soon more about my own visions of the future of Virtual Worlds real soon. And no, I don't believe that Second Life will turn into the "final and perfect VW", as much as I don't think that WOW (not Vista's Wow but World of Warcraft) is to be the ultimate MMORPG. Oh, and the nobody-knows-what-this-is extremely-hiped areae isn't going to have persistence, which is a big no-no for me (even if I usually agree with his vision on VW's.

Last but not least mirror worlds, which makes me remembers this list of Games on Google Maps. Mirror worlds are defined as virtual worlds like ours, with places like ours: a real representation of the "first world" but where people are only virtually, without meshing virtual with real people. I really don't see this happening unless you're trying to do something like Idlewild.

The final article is yet to be released, but I'll surelly be a reader of it.