Why virtual worlds died
iteratingfun.com
iteratingfun.com
> Great technology doesn’t mean a great user experience.
Of course, but IMO the real missed opportunity was that the one virtual world with real traction - Second Life - just made most kinds of games impossible because of technological limitations. The client-server model they chose made it impossible to play responsive games in Second Life.
Imagine if it were possible to enter a SL region and jump right into a platform game or an FPS. Yes, virtual worlds are not games, but they could have incorporated and enabled games.
Instead, Second Life focused on showing how much it was "not a game", and never even tried to address the technological limitations that prevented games from running on it.
I agree with the post on the reasons virtual worlds failed. But it could easily have been otherwise - allowing games would have grown the entire virtual worlds market.
Personally I think that the "separate games with common avatar and spanning community" is a better way to go.
Side note - A couple other players also tried that:
Blue Mars had better technology and 3d graphics, and ability to make some pretty impressive games, but it never really caught on, mostly because the virtual world itself never took off and retained the players.
Raph Koster's Metaplace tried that approach on the web, building games into an avatar community, and players also didn't really warm to it.
Any new game will require you to set up a user account, download or install something, learn the controls, and so forth. A game inside of Second Life would decrease each of these problems if not remove them entirely. That's the potential.
Yes, it has been tried multiple times (in addition to the ones you mentioned, I founded a startup called Syntensity in that field), and always failed.
I think the problem is gaining initial momentum. Second Life had that, no one else did. But Second Life squandered it.
Both StarCrafts and WarCraft 3 had excellent custom game/scenario engines. Three leading game genres, MOBA, Tower Defense and Tug of War, got started as scenarios for these games.
There is a lot of demand for a place to play games, especially if the tools are right.
You described Club Penguin: http://mashable.com/2011/12/13/club-penguin-disney/
I'm not sure the common avatar is a prequisite, though. Steam doesn't have one, but Valve tries to build its social aspects into the games as deep as possible.
There is only one thing that dimensional space is good for, and that is for serendipity. When you can talk to anyone, you talk only to those you already know you want to talk to. When you're located in a point in space, you talk and interact with others that happen to be near that point in space. This is why the few areas that virtual reality does seem to be useful is for meeting new people, or for activities where limiting yourself is the whole point -i.e. games.
Maybe for exploring, but if the main thing you wanted to do was to talk with people, why not let you jump straight to them.
It's interesting that arguably the world that got the most traction, IMVU, eschews movement and only lets you jump to predefined spots, which lets people stand or sit next to each other faster..
Here we get explained how minecraft is a failure.
Minecraft has some simple mechanics. You can collect stuff. You craft stuff. You have to survive. That makes it fun to get into. And yes the creativity and community builds on that to achieve some amazing things which amplifies the fun, and at that point you can ignore the survival/goal part of it. It's quite a bit different from a virtual world like Second Life.
The people who design and build giant amazing things in Minecraft are analagous to the poets and sketchers in the blank-paper example.
Expectation wise virtual reality is like artificial intelligence. Whatever AI solved just became "computation", while the mythical "real AI" was always just past the horizon.
During the early years, VR was 3D immersive MMO dungeon (MUD) environment. VR caves and head mounted displays aren't common place. But I'd say in most other ways, the vision for VR has been largely realized.
In the mid 90s, I worked on a blacksun (Snowcrash) inspired virtual world kinda thing. We tried to divine a collaboratively built world that would then be used as the scenes to host other games. Not too different from SecondLife. It sucked.
At no time did any one come close to conceiving something as simple and awesome as Minecraft.
[1] http://gamegenus.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-minecraft-generati...
WoW was popular with kids, but there were never 3 million children playing it. The majority of WoW and EverQuest players have been adults. MMOs, even kids MMOs, are unmodifiable theme parks which don't hold a child's attention for very long. Free Realms, the MMO made by Sony Online Entertainment targeted at kids, had to run TV ads to remind them to play[1]. Meanwhile Mojang has spent zero dollars marketing Minecraft (if you don't count Minecon expenses). Viral spread among children has helped make it the seventh highest selling PC game of all time[2].
MMOs have numerous specialized blogs covering them; the popular MMOs have dozens of blogs devoted specifically to each title. Minecraft has almost no blogs covering it because blogging is an activity done by adults.
In contrast, searching YouTube for "minecraft" currently yields "about 70,200,000 results." Instead of reading, most children would rather watch a video and quite a few have mastered making and uploading their own. One top YouTuber specializing in Minecraft makes enough to earn a living off it (he's young and single), and he's still gaining subscribers[3].
Minecraft is different. There's never been a game like it.
[1] http://gamegenus.blogspot.com/2009/09/john-smedley-on-free-r... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_games [3] http://socialblade.com/youtube/user/sethbling
Every attempt to unseat WoW from its throne has failed miserably - most recently the incredibly big budget SWTOR that fell with a big fat splat in the mud.
Even more niche MMOs are having trouble succeeding financially. APB, Star Trek Online, the Final Fantasy MMOs, all were commercial failures (big ones at that).
The game industry as a whole is a pretty risky investment overall (big-budget AAA-titles fail routinely and spectacularly), MMOs are even a notch above. Sometimes I wonder why they keep getting funded - EA poured a reported $200 million into SWTOR before watching it fail.
It still sells amazingly well.
http://d1y0oqfyli6x95.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013...
Keep in mind, that's a game developed essentially by one guy.
Would love to play a next gen game like Watch Dogs on a VR headset. But if it was just walking around in the Watch Dogs world, less interesting.
I'm kind of feeling the same way about tablets.
- The sequel to LucasFilm's original Habitat still is alive and running online, 18 years later.
My two cents, in virtual worlds the users are the product. The more mass market they become, the more the less interesting the average user becomes. Unlike social networks, people visit virtual worlds to meet new people. In some regards, more could be learned from PlentyofFish than Facebook.
So for now we are stuck with purpose-built networked games and applications that enhance reality rather than replace it. I don't see the next step happening until either a major breakthrough in computing power and/or AI. Assuming we can find a new hockeystick from the current plateau, I expect virtual worlds with the addictiveness of heroine are inevitable.
I will be an old man and yell at the kids to get off my lawn.
It'd be interesting to see what people could do with it now. Unfortunately, VRML seems to have been taken out of a few browsers.
What's the modern equivalent of VRML?
I used to love VRML though. In fact back in the 90s I built a whole web site in VRML. Sadly it's problems ran much deeper than bandwidth and it's syntax. VRML suffered from the same issues that HTML did back then; every client rendered the document slightly differently. Plus VRML was a victim of being too premature as back in the 90s a hardware 3D accelerator was a thing of luxury - rather than now when even the modest onboard chipsets are relatively powerful. So most PCs just didn't have the horsepower to really take advantage of the 3D websites.
The weird thing is, despite it's problems - of which were many - I actually do miss VRML. It was fun and felt really futuristic. And while I don't want to take anything away from the developers who port cool demos to WebGL, the whole concept of virtual worlds has lost the same magic as it had in the 90s when people were building such things with no idea where the journey would take them (I guess like the decade before when I first got into micro computers and had no idea where that journey would lead me).
VRML the language is still a superior scene / object graph language. The event model was almost the correct answer for describing interaction and has yet to be surpassed.
ARON (a righteous object notation) is derived from my VRML work. I hate JSON, XML, etc with the passion of a billion burning suns. So I stripped out DEF/USE prototyping and the JavaScript events and made this, cleaned up a bit of the syntax, and made this:
1) What you can do there is so limited unless you pay $___ (fill in the blank for the price of land, etc.) to build something.
2) If you don't want to pay for land, you'd naturally go elsewhere to check things out -- I looked around, but many of the places I visited offered a very low level of interactivity. You want to ride a cool car in the field? Nope, you do not have permission to do that, and I believe that was a pavilion set up by some sort of car company or something.