Video Games, Burning Life and Tipping the Scales

After time spent playing first Dark Age of Camelot and then World of Warcraft, I figured out that MMORPGs were extremely enticing and not at all my thing. The notion of a virtual existence where people from across the globe can gather is exciting. I found myself becoming online friends with folks from all across the United States and Australia. That was fun. But I am not a gamer and would find myself trailing behind my friends as they rapidly advanced in levels, leaving me to fend for myself in a dangerous world. That sucked. So I quit them. The endless questing and killing and searching for the lost Tome of Mashing of the Head Against the Table just couldn't hold my interest. Neither could the rampant Chuck Norris jokes.

But I liked exploring and making things. And the rampant transvestitism. There has to be a place for these activities in a purely anonymous environment. Because guys exploring and making things while wearing a bikini and shaking their fake tits in everyones faces is not only socially unacceptable behavior in real life, it's kind of creepy.

Which is why there is Second Life.

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely created by its Residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by millions of Residents from around the globe.

I also like this description from a news article.

Second Life is a subscription-based 3-D fantasy world devoted to capitalism — a 21st century version of Monopoly that generates real money for successful players. More than 1.95 million people worldwide have Second Life characters, called avatars.

I gave it a shot. My good fortune landed me in the virtual world just in time for Burning Life, a virtual cousin to the Burning Man Festival. The event surprised me. Lots of crazy art that could never be created in a real world environment. I found myself walking around through different installations for days. While most avatars were 'people', I also ran into centaurs, dragons, robots, and other assorted strangenesses. And somehow I always got lost and would suddenly find myself back at the main tent. There you could find people dancing to live DJ's and sometimes a live concert event. That is where I would do something nobody should attempt in real life; break dancing in a kilt. DON'T DO IT! Unless it's in a virtual world. Please.

When they burned the man and then burned the temple, I had to find other things to do. After the wonderfully surreal experience of Burning Life, nothing else I have found could measure up. The Second Life Anarchist headquarters is extremely spartan and always vacant. Not that different from real life. But this is not a video game. No quests, no level grinds, just go out and find your own entertainment. This got me into playing around with content creation. Which in turn got me to download Blender, returning to the world of 3D modeling after a four year hiatus.

Second Life is just one virtual world. At the recent Virtual Worlds Conference in San Jose the leading developers announced something that seems painfully obvious.

Second Life, IBM in open borders for virtual worlds

IBM and Linden Labs, the operator of the Second Life virtual world, said on Tuesday they will work on ways to eventually let people use a single online persona in different online services.

Interoperability is emerging as a key goal of the nascent virtual world industry, which attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in investment on the hopes that video-game graphics and rich 3-D environments will supplant flat Web pages.

"It is going to happen anyway," said Colin Parris, IBM vice president of digital convergence. "If you think you are walled and secure, somebody will create something that's open and then people will drain themselves away as fast as possible."

Of course they should be working on a way to allow avatars to jump from one place to another. The old model was to make something so fantastic that nobody would want to use anything else. IBM learned the hard way on that. The company that was once practically a synonym for Personal Computer is now practically a footnoted relic. Because someone will come along and make something better and you'll be abandoned. Even Microsoft is slipping with Firefox quickly supplanting Internet Explorer as the web browser of choice on all platforms. So being open is a gimme. But can a virtual world really supplant flat web pages?

Yes. Absolutely yes. Can TV news supplant the daily paper? We're extremely visual creatures. But newspapers are still around, still in print, and not disappearing any time soon. Same with radio. But we have quite a ways to go still. The popularity of World of Warcraft has as much to do with the prevalence of high end graphics capabilities at a consumer level as it does with the creation skills of the folks at Blizzard. An MMORPG has the advantage of content being created by skilled modelers who understand the importance of optimization for graphics performance. A successful virtual world that allows content creation by the users of the system is currently hindered by the amount of processing power required to render that world in real time for a broad spectrum of users. Remember dial-up? Remember early video content? Did you ever try to watch early video content with a dial-up connection? Ouch. But as high speed took over and people purchased newer machines, internet video content evolved to a point where you can now download a movie from a retailer nearly as fast as you could run to the video store and rent it. Up the user capacity for processing content and the curious will wander in. That's what it will take for people to leave the web for a virtual world.

And they will want genuine interactivity. Video games: the next generation:

'We worked on this whole kind of physics systems for when you bump into people and push them out of the way, so that tactile thing really felt real.

'So bumping into a group of people will make you fall over, running full force into a small woman will knock her over.'

They are talking about Assassin's Creed, which is a console game.

'We made this rule and gave ourselves the challenge to try and make huge cities that are completely interactive, which means that every single thing in the city can be grabbed, climbed on, jumped from,' said Ms Raymond.

'Which means that we created tools to be able to recognise the 3D models and automatically generate interactive edges on everything.'

That's exactly what a virtual world needs. We may all bitch about the hustle and bustle and jostling of Xmas at the mall. Truth is, we desire exactly that kind of tactile experience and can go a little nuts without it. Things seem real when they act like solid objects, even if they aren't and even if we can't actually feel them.

So let's put it all together. Double the graphics capability, double the processing power, double the connection speeds or halve the necessary packet sizes, and implement 3D tools that automatically generate collision/interaction information for user created content. Do that and we can put Max Headroom in the old folks home. I say less than five years. While bio-feedback and true VR would be cool, they aren't necessary components of success. Though it would make virtual sex more intriguing.