Virtual worlds pundit and blogger Dusan Writer points to two pieces in the US and Canadian press about virtual worlds gaining greater acceptance in 2009.
The whole space has long fascinated me from a social point of view, especially academic Edward Castronova’s idea of ‘internal emigration’ (emigration in our minds to a better place), the research carried out at Stanford, about how attributes and character traits of the avatars we create in virtual worlds ‘bleed’ into real life and the idea that we could even be immortalised and uploaded into code in a virtual world.
It’s also been an enduring mystery to me why this sector has – quite frankly – underperformed to such a huge degree.
It’s a truism that every day millions of people look for escape from their daily lives, ranging from slumping in front of the box and watching mindless telly, to substance abuse. Giving you the chance to recreate yourself, virtual worlds are the ultimate form of escape from what for many is the desert of the real and so should in theory be enormously appealing.
For a relatively small amount of money, you can have what’s been called the “awesome you” - and the possibilities to create and express yourself are almost endless.
Why it’s not performed is the subject for an entirely different post, but in summary I believe it’s down to a combination of it seeming too complicated, the toys out of the pram reaction from marketers when SL consumers didn’t buy into their virtual ads (and the resultant media backlash) and what you could call the ‘Sadville’ meme – a perception that it’s for people who are socially deficient in some form (see one blogger's account of explaining virtual worlds to colleagues).
Onto the recent press articles. Today’s Washington Post talks about Arlington County (part of the Washington DC metro area) setting up an office in Second Life. More interesting though are the other two examples mentioned in the piece.
The US National Library of Medicine has created ‘tox town’, an environment in Second Life to encourage visitors about everyday health hazards. Meanwhile at the University of the District of Columbia, criminal justice students practice investigations and patrols in a virtual setting.
Meanwhile the Toronto Globe and Mail calls the age of the avatar one of the big ideas of the year, saying: “Avatars will enjoy greater mainstream acceptance in 2009, and although convergence is not likely to happen overnight, expect certain sites to begin thinking about partnering up to allow character crossovers the way social networks are trying to make profiles more portable.”
The prompt for the Globe & Mail’s prediction is the creation of an avatar portability system being trialled by German software company Weblin, which allows you to create one avatar to be used across all virtual worlds (e.g. The holy grail of interoperability, something similarly being tested by Second Life owner Linden Lab and IBM).
The age of the avatar or yet another false dawn? Time well tell.
The Globe & Mail article is incidentally well worth reading for it’s full range of predictions, which includes ‘reality check for social networks’ - just like they found with virtual worlds two years ago, advertisers are discovering that littering social networks with apps and ads isn’t producing results.
According to Maggie Fox from the social media group, quoted in the article:
“The reality is that when you look at that type of revenue model, all we're doing is slapping an old model on a new platform and it's clearly not really working.” Indeed. Or as commentator Joseph Jaffe put it back in the summer, too many of us are still stuck in what he called the fireworks business.
Image - Morpheus to Neo in the film the Matrix, "welcome to the desert of the real"
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3 comments:
In my opinion, for virtual reality systems to succeed, they need to become more than glorified chat rooms.
Most (but not all) people appear to use Second Life et al to escape the mundanity of their first lives. But successful systems have hooks - World of Warcraft offers challenges; Club Penguin offers fun; virtual worlds need to offer something beyond socialisation to draw people back - the virtualisation of Berlin (afraid I can't find the link) is a small example of what can be achieved
Thanks for the comment Simon. I agree that a lot of people go to places like Second Life for escape, which is exactly why I would have expected it to be a success.
I mean, don't a lot of people look to check out of their real lives every day. And in somewhere like Second Life you at least interact with other people (albeit via an avatar), something you don't if you are zoned out on the sofa in front of celebrity big brother.
I agree though World of Warcraft has a hook, which to me seems that it has a more defined idea of who it is for.
There is a large group of people who were into Dungeons and Dragons style games even before WoW - the game has found a ready audience through them.
On the broadest level, Second Life, WoW, Twinity, Entropia, FaceBook, Twitter et al., are all ways of communicating with others. As Simon says, becoming more than a glorified chat room is certainly going to help a virtual environment be sustainable.
Being able to communicate is one element of the four features for a virtual world to succeed. The others are the facility to construct things, engage in commerce (seek things), and have some form of constitution - a set of rules or Terms of Service.
The ability to create your own virtual world using things like OpenSim software means that we should expect many flowers to bloom, especially as disaffected users of current worlds decide "I can do that better." Of course, many will get choked by the weeds and every new world has to compete with all the others - folks still only have 24 hours in a day to spend in real and virtual worlds.
So I don't so much see "another false dawn" as simply "another day, another virtual world."
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