What Second Life got right, and no one else has since
internetevolution.com
internetevolution.com
The subtlety lies in the fact that MMOs are games, and that Second Life tried to tackle the problem by being more of a "lifestyle" application; sure you could play games, but you could also read content, talk with people merely for the sake of talking, and so on. The point was that content in Second Life would be mostly created by 3rd parties.
In other words, while MMOs offer a shared experience by being the content consumed by the users, Second Life positioned itself more as a platform for content that would be consumed by users all over the world. Second Life is the city, 3rd parties are the shops and businesses and movie theaters and so on.
It's a noble cause, and we are far from having solved that problem yet (as any couple in a long distance relationship will tell you). However, I don't believe we will solve that problem with software, but rather with interaction embodied in physical objects (which is an extremely recent field). For example, see [2] for a great example of what that could be (there is another, older project I have in mind that involves beds, lights and webcams but can't find any links right now).
If you're interested in tangible and embodied interaction, the academic TEI conference is the best place for that- sadly it's an ACM conference, which means you need an ACM account to access the paper archives, but you can easily access the proceedings index (for example for TEI2013 [4]) and google the PDFs from there :)
[1]: http://www.latimes.com/local/la-fi-c1-rodrigos-world-2013090...
[2]: http://littleriot.com/pillowtalk/
[4]: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2460625&CFID=242863494&CFT...
Things they got right: a way of building and dressing your avatar that was simple, comprehensible, yet extensive. In one afternoon I made an avatar that was a reasonable facsimile of actual me, round-faced gray-bearded professorial type, I even found a leather-elbowed sweater to wear. In another afternoon I made a muscular mustachioed dwarf.
Also well-done: their system for crafting persistent 3D objects. For professor me I made rose-colored glasses, transparent pink lenses (alpha channel) in a delicate gold frame, and easily had the avatar "wear" them. For the dwarf I purchased a gaudy axe but made an elaborate gold armband.
Once you'd done all that, you could buy property and build quite interesting buildings on it, but that needed a degree of OCD-like persistence I didn't care to invest because the reward for all this was zip. Building a scale model of the Eiffel Tower out of toothpicks would be somewhat more rewarding as you'd have the tower for your mantel afterward.
I was very critical of Second Life at the time: I thought that most people were using it in the wrong way, and that the "gold rush" would soon bring problems.
However, I've been lucky: I found my job through Second Life. You can read the story here. [2]
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE282TzLH3M
[2]: http://www.brunozzi.com/2008/05/22/how-i-got-hired-by-amazon...
I see no problems with this.
WoW = paint by numbers
SL = paints and a blank canvas
It seems clear why WoW has more users: most people believe they have no creative ability (sadly).
As a software developer I wouldn't play SL because I create all day. I don't want to play a game that requires the creativity I am out of for the day. Sometimes it's fine to paint by numbers.
Your second point explains you, but not why the population at large (most of which is not doing anything creative at work) prefers to paint by numbers when not at work.
I think however that people have been using things like World of Warcraft in a similar way though.
I never understood how little interest or actually how much hostility there was towards SL by people younger than me.
I would like to build something a little bit like SL (but with less virtual sex obviously) using webgl and webrtc scripted in JS.
IRC's solution is that each IRC network is pretty much a world full of communities, so it's not hard to find a sex/drug-related community to talk in, and one can participate in both communities at the same time.
The problem with translating that to "virtual world" type spaces is that generally, since one has an a single avatar that can only be in one place in the world at once, one can't interact with multiple communities at once.
Thus, some significant amount of people spend significant amounts of time in the sex and drug communities, and the other communities end up being overshadowed, and eventually leave the world. Niche communities can never develop in the first place, as they'll never reach the critical mass of people in the same place at the same time.
The second you say "I want to build a virtual world but with some aspect of control," you've already lost.
Just don't even try.
SL is just there for the VR, it's useless. You have the worst of both worlds. It's like saying "why the replica of Paris in a vegas cassino does not get the same amount of visitors that real paris get?"
I guess VR of some kind of (Oculus, or Meta, or Glass, or something better than any of these) will be the ultimate platform for this. You could pretty much implement the peak of 1980/1990s standalone-VR-using-$5mm-rigs with $1-2k in equipment now, and make it networked.
A company I used to work for had a building in SL in about 05. We were encouraged to use it for meetings for about a week then never heard of it again...
However, i think gamers still experience it on more "regular" MMORPGs. I know I used to.
I used to play AstroMUD in the 90's and grew close enough to the community that when I stopped playing in college and started 5 years later, there were people who still remembered me. For some reason, that sense of community never transferred to the graphical mmorpgs (for me, anyway). Instead, the gaming community grew more and more toxic and I've since cut all ties with that part of the internet. Something similar happened with the progression from IRC to public chatrooms and livejournal to facebook.
The only real pattern I've been able to see in all this is one of inclusiveness. MUD, IRC and (the early years of) livejournal were hard to use for normal people. It artificially restricted the user base. The restricted access increased the value of the interactions therein. The threat of a ban also carried more weight, since getting another IP wasn't as easy in those days as it is today.
The theory is still kind of half baked and I'm not sure if I can focus it into a service that will reward people for maintaining a smaller, more intimate online network instead of the sprawling thing we have today.
shrug just thinking out loud...
I think a lot of it has to do with the bar for entry: "RTFM" requires both reading and a manual. Anyway, half baked theory.
Back then groups were formed over interests, and the interests itself could be very niche, but the people you met were also interested in what you were interested in. It was like a self selecting group of uber-friends. The only step in relationship building was really "oh you like thing? I like thing too." Relationships then were really about shared-interests.
However once facebook rolled around cyber communities became more like digital archive of real lives. You don't friend someone on facebook because they had a similar interest with you (most of the time), you friend people that you had some in-life experience with. Now internet relationships are now really about shared-experiences.
Another way to look at it is if imagine you went to a bar by yourself, and everyone else in the bar came alone. You might imagine eventually people would group themselves by similar interests (although certain human dynamics might lead people to group with other people visually similar to themselves.)
In the post-facebook era its the same setup, but this time everyone bring 8-12 of their high school friends. Your high school friends may have not been had as much deep rooted interest in AstroMUD, but they are generally all-around ok people. At the end of the day you are really only together because you went to the same high school, and weren't assholes to one another.
It boils down to the question of what makes one feel "together" with another person? With the success of social networks like Facebook and Twitter as proof, many people find a common expression of sentiment typed-out and displayed on a shared-view in a timely manner is sufficient to engender feelings of togetherness with other people.
What 2L brought to the table was the virtual environment. While many people find that online gaming brings a strong feeling of togetherness, I would argue that this feeling is driven largely by the common purpose present in most games. It doesn't matter whether the game is an MMORPG, or a shooter like Battlefield 3. The game provides the purpose, and the gaming network provides the social conduit. This doesn't mean you can't have deep and meaningful relationships through these networks; just that the game provides the impetus.
With Facebook and Twitter, the common purpose exists in the real world, which makes the virtual reality of 2L redundant. Most people simply don't need it to feel connected while watching a TV show, finishing their run, lounging around reading online, or attending a concert.