I guess my issue is sort of philosophical. And I don’t mean to pick on SmallWorlds, but to use it as an example, but when it was launched it wasn’t a world. It was a series of semi entertaining games. When you played the games, you had a little cartoon avatar that stood there, that you could buy clothes for, and that could chat with other people standing 2-dimensionally in a sort of lobby. It felt like “bolt-on” social bonding. The mechanisms for socializing were disconnected from the purpose of the space.

It felt like going to an arcade when I was a kid – you might be in an arcade, you might be standing beside someone, and your connection to other people might be about sharing a few tips on how to clear a level or shoot the asteroids or whatever, but it didn’t make it a ‘world’. The ‘world’ part of a video arcade existed outside the arcade itself – maybe you meet people and maybe you go out to a movie with them or head home to play on your Commodore, but the arcade was a space in which there were games and people collided because they were there for the entertainment, but it didn’t make it a world.

I like Prok’s definition: a virtual world feels like a place, it has other people in it, and it has drama.

The sense of drama in an arcade could be around getting the high score. Plunking your allowance down on the off chance you could hit the top of the leader board. And sometimes games would allow two players and that was about as close as you got…competition as the source of emergent experience, but within a narrow window.

So the philosophical point, I guess, or maybe one of nuance, is a question of whether the mechanics of the space facilitate shared drama. Does sociality (which gives us the definition of a world) emerge from the mechanics of game play – shared quests, guilds, group competitions, sharing archetypes, that kind of thing….does it create rich social experiences.

It’s the same, to a degree, with browser-based rooms: just because I can fill my house with youTube videos, that doesn’t mean that sociality emerges – I either port it in, like with Vivaty where you invite your Facebook friends, in which case you’re extending a real social network into a virtual space, or you find other mechanics to facilitate it like the ability to co-create objects.

As I’m writing this, I’m bumping up against the wall of my own fuzziness. Maybe this deserves a longer post. But I’ve been fascinated by the game field’s struggle to add “social media tools” to games, and by the idea that virtual worlds need games to create stickiness, and by the concept of social media embedding games like Facebook. Is Facebook a world? Is it a world if you have a series of games and then add avatars around the games?

I think there’s something here about how tightly coupled the ‘game experiences’ are to the sociality.

My issue is somehow related to the idea that the “publish” model makes the social aspect peripheral to the mechanics of the space itself. That without the user generating content and without sociality emerging from the mechanics of the space then these environments sort of take the attitude of “we’ll provide some entertainment, you provide the social bonding and stick around a while because of it”.

Thanks for keeping me honest though, I think I’m going to need to do a better job articulating whatever it is that bugs me about some of these business models.

(Oh, and while we’re at it…I think that Spore ended up doing much the same thing. It is NOT a world. It’s a game. Judged as a game it has some beautiful mechanics at least in the first few phases, but I really have a hard time calling it an MMO. The social stuff feels like an add-on and doesn’t turn it into a world – it turns it viral maybe, but doesn’t make it a world.)

So “the off-chance hope that in entertaining them they create social bonds with each other” is currently considered to be the biggest chance, just about. What would you suggest is the alternate approach?