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Comment by guiambros | Hacker News Reader

Likewise. I missed Lucasfilm's Habitat, but tried most of the virtual worlds after that, from MUDs via telnet in the early 90's, Worlds Chat in 95-96, Active Worlds right after (my company spent $1,500 buying a server copy), The Palace, Second Life, WoW, and more recently DK2/CC, etc.

We're getting close from the technology perspective, but the storytelling and the "massive" portion of an MMORPG is still not there. Visually impressive, but the social interactions are dull and unsophisticated, without emotional depth.

It's funny to look in hindsight. What Habitat has apparently nailed in the 80's [1] is what is missing, 30+ years later.

[1] http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html

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> We're getting close from the technology perspective, but the storytelling and the "massive" portion of an MMORPG is still not there. Visually impressive, but the social interactions are dull and unsophisticated, without emotional depth.

However ambitious MMOs and virtual worlds get, I worry that they'll always run into the same barrier restricting their potential past a certain scale: the MMO experience is made out of people, and a whole lot of people are awful.

Snow Crash actually deals with this if I remember correctly. When you go out onto the street you're likely to encounter people in the shape of Penises (etc).

Most chat and social apps deal with this already by limiting your interactions to selected people that you whitelist.

That shouldn't be hard to replicate into VR.

Yeah, that's kind of the problem I mean. MMOVR promises vast and intricate human worlds, but past a certain critical point you wind up self-filtering down to a few dozen people so you're not overwhelmed by assholes.

I think you can solve this by limiting anonymity. You won't see people dressed in penises once you're connected to your FB friends.

I know there's valid arguments against forced real identities to be used, but it's always a trade off between signal and noise.

>but the storytelling and the "massive" portion of an MMORPG is still not there Thats because of hardware and network limits. MMOs are optimized to reduce latency and expensive computations. Having too many people concentrating on one place creates a huge stream of data that has to be broadcast to everyone in range. A few players in one area/instance don't need that much bandwidth(since most of world is loaded locally, only the changes are needed).

"Massive" does exist in some worlds. Eve Online has been pretty remarkable in shying away from programmatic content in favor of building an architecture for people to compete on their own terms; And it has 50k simultaneous users on one shard.

What are "DK2/CC"? I've not heard of them.

In this context the parent is probably referring to the Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 and the Oculus Rift Crystal Cove prototype (which was very similar)

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