Second Lifers talked to themselves today in Metaplace (or their Metaplace avatars talked to their ‘mains’ in SL) as Metaversatility hosted a cross-world event that was ostensibly about developments and trends from the recent Game Developers’ Conference, but which was also a significant test of having two versions of yourself in two different worlds at a time, or at the very least have a conversation that seamlessly bridged two environments.
As Raph noted on his blog, a recent influx of Second Life residents to Metaplace has also led to interesting developments in cross-world communication. Of course, Raph had to point out that Metaplace scripting is like building with Lego or whatever, (and I’ll take his word for it. I can barely get a rotation script to work so I’m hardly a coder) but regardless, he makes a good point:
I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that making such complex stuff in Metaplace is easy. Remote controlling an object from outside is not hard at all for a Metaplace world. After all, every object has a URL, and every object can interact with Web APIs as well… you get the idea, there’s a lot of possibilities there.
I have been sour on “virtual worlds standards” for a while, because it seems to me that trying to force all virtual worlds into a single mold at this stage of their development is a mistake, and pretty much all the VW “standards” efforts have tended to have too narrow a conception of the medium for my tastes.
But standards for bridging data — well, that’s easy and obvious!
And most obviously, using the standards the web already has is the easiest way.
Interoperability is About the People Stoopid
The idea of meeting across such different virtual world spaces seems odd at first. Many of the initial Metaplace environments have more of a kid’s feel than anything, although the code allows for a great deal of variation – whether “flat” games, to text MUDs, to isometric environments.
For someone from Second Life the lack of avatar customization or a ‘true 3D’ experience (and, to an SLer, a disturbing lack of camera controls) can make Metaplace feel more game-like than world-like at first. But like any online environment, it quickly becomes less about the mechanics or appearance and more about the people.
Being able to bridge a meeting or discussion from one world to the next, (or in many cases, having avatars in two worlds who are able to speak to each other) hints at one possibility for interoperability – at least for communication and identity. While the coding geeks chatter away on MMOX (which has gone strangely quiet, or is at the very least going through a navel-gazing period as they try to reconcile, um, why they exist in the first place), we’re starting to see code arise from actual cases of people wanting to get stuff to connect. When interoperability tries to tackle content interoperability ahead of just letting people chat, they’re putting code ahead of use, and they’re putting both ahead of policy.
With interoperable chat, you have policy first, then use, then code, then standard.
These initial forays into cross-world communication may be looked back on as milestones. They’ll also be looked back on, I think, with a sense of “um, yeah, and what was so complicated about THAT” as we lose track of the fact that technologies and worlds didn’t always bridge so easily – but that when people want to connect, there will always be hacks, and that sometimes the hacks become the standard.
As these discussions and events gain traction, the question will increasingly become about “what do we want to talk about” and less about “how can we talk”, and when that happens the interesting work of community-building and shared stories can start to bridge worlds as well.
One thing to know is that Metaplace worlds really are all worlds, so cross-world chat is actually a default part of the experience there.
I should have pointed that out, I suppose Raph – but chat within a platform isn’t as much of a stretch as chat across platforms. You don’t see people in WoW chatting with folks in LOTRO, at least not from “within” the environment.
What’s interesting about your comment is that you are calling them “worlds” – and I sort of think of it as one world (or community, say) which has many smaller environments – it’s a world tied together by the community functionality and sense of shared spaces.
The fact that you call it cross-world implies that you think of Metaplace as a community with individual worlds within it? I think of Metaplace as a world with a very dispersed and widely varying geography that will soon start to propagate across the Web.
And btw – in Second Life, you can chat across “world” (i.e. sims) as well – so does that mean they beat you to it.
Hehe.
So, er, there was chat bridging, via HTTP if I understand correctly. Well.
Ordinal – I reference this particular event because I experienced it.
I wasn’t really talking here about whether the technology was some sort of blockbuster – it’s chatbridge, and Grace’s cross-world concert was another example of sorts. If I made this sound like I was raving about the technical accomplishment I apologize.
Miki Gymnast, best I can tell, has taken the technology component much further.
I’m more intrigued by the experience of bridging worlds and the sense of shared community that it can provide. That was the main point of the post, or thought it was.
you know sometimes… just fot meta yuchs, I actually “email” a person when using SL.
Or if i really want to be cutting edge, I’ll “call someone” on the phone when still looking at the world of wide, the web.
Once i even think i turned my head and spoke to one person on my left, and then turned my head to speak to the other person in the world to my right..;)
ok..im done..lol;)
c3
No, I was being a little snippy there, which I shouldn’t have – these things are useful and I’m sure that it was a productive discussion. I suppose that I am concerned that Metaplace, something which I very much like the sound of, still does not seem to be being used for anything in anger, as it were.
I’m pretty hesitant to use the term ‘virtual world’ – to date, nobody’s been able to define the world part satisfactorily: That is a definition that encompasses what they call a world, and excludes that which they do not.
I find it interesting that people would categorise Metaplace and Second Life under the same umbrella, when truthfully they are very different applications and aimed at very different targets.
Personally, I believe there is a big distinction between a virtual chat room and a virtual world; I think that content and flexbility are equally as important as the community.
Regardless, am I the only one that notice the sign appears to read “S&M Idea City”?
I have a hard time calling a metaplace room a world. The rooms that you see are so confined that calling it a world demises the word world. That doesn’t mean there can’t be nifty games/things in metaplace.
I was exploring a bit, and came across a couple of interconnected rooms, sharing a similar theme. Going from one place to another. Those rooms together gave me more of a world feel, which was nice. sadly I started to wonder, and what can I do here, like a sl noob.
I doubt that there any deeper games or experiences yet that make you come back to it.
Interesting.
First, the definitions of virtual world have been fairly settled for around two decades, so it’s interesting to me to see that people aren’t sure what one is. If it simulates space in some fashion, provides a proxy for users in the space, runs persistently independent of the users, and supports multiple users simultaneously, it’s a virtual world, whether it then has games, chat rooms, or whatever in them.
In Metaplace’s case, each world is a standalone server process capable of running anywhere, with its own completely independent codebase of behaviors. This is not true of an SL sim, where the common codebase of behaviors, automatic sim proxying, and so on, make it a coherent space.
Frans, don’t be fooled by the size we have chosen to offer; the technical capability is far more than that. The reasons why you can’t make places of much larger size have more to do with marketing than technology.
Ordinal, not sure what you mean “used in anger.”
@Raph
Maybe this is just semantics, but while you call an individual “space” a world, my experience so far has been that the SENSE of multiple users being simultaneously supported has been accomplished because of the fact that those worlds ‘connect’ through shared chat, tools, badges, Web site, friends lists, etc.
For you to say that each world stands alone and independently negates the fact that so far, at least, the thing that binds Metaplace together are these tools. In the absence of badges, a friends list, a shared “destination portal” etc – these may be individual worlds but they aren’t worlds I’d particularly return to because there’s no one there.
As Prok says – a world is a world because it has people, place and drama. And in Metaplace the drama is, to a great degree (or in my experience anyways) supported through these tools. “World” as the site of “culture” maybe, rather than whatever technical definition you want to give it, which is where perhaps I split hairs.
So while coherence isn’t currently achieved by a shared behavior codebase across ‘spaces’, the coherence is achieved through these other things. When I’m in Metaplace, I’m glancing down at how many points I have, I’m tracking my friends online, I’m viewing my badges, and I’m jumping back and forth to the shared spaces of the Web site and the main “hub”.
I also think you’re splitting hairs because you want to make the point that Metaplace can be used to create worlds anywhere, easily, it’s like the Web, etc etc etc and god forbid it be associated with SL with which, as Tom points out, isn’t really a serious proposition (not meaning that Metaplace isn’t serious, just meaning they have very different ‘flavors’, attractions, code, etc.).
I don’t really think anyone will get the two confused, but maybe I’m wrong. And sure, you can keep going around and talking about how it’s NOT SL, although it risks sounding like a negation.
In the end we can set aside the semantics and change the conversation to one of ‘culture’ if you prefer: Metaplace may technically consist of 100s of worlds; but Metaplace as a culture is so far bound together by the shared sense of social connection through a broader set of artefacts that bridge those worlds. The resident protest wasn’t about what happened to individual worlds, it was about the cross-world artefact of meeping.
As time goes on and Metaplace worlds pop up all over the Web and those shared artefacts become less significant fine – each may have very distinct cultures. But so far, these shared tools and social connections are what makes Metaplace interesting to me – but if you want the domain of discourse to be on the individual chat rooms (or ‘worlds’) then I’ll be looking for a bit more ‘culture’ at that level, and I fear for now that it will look a lot more like Lively than SL at that level – empty rooms disconnected.
Interesting question actually.
I wonder: in WoW or other MMOs, I’ll take it that an individual shard is a world, per Raph’s definition. But if users on one shard could communicate with users on another while “in” the world, does this bridge mean that it is separate worlds talking to each other?
When we talk about the ‘economy of WoW’ or the ‘culture of WoW’ should we be clear that what we’re talking about are ‘the common economic insights from the individual sharded worlds of WoW’? (The worlds of worlds of warcraft?)
Which reminds me – where was this ‘decades old’ definition finally chiseled in stone? Best I can tell having read pretty much everything out there on the subject, it seemed to me that it was generally accepted as ONE main definition, but that there remains lots of dissension and plenty of alternate views – seems to me the literature gravitates to this for expedience sake in many cases because there are more interesting things to debate, but that it’s not like some sort of Oxford Dictionary entry or world standard or something.
Really interesting points.
I am not trying to make the argument on the basis of Metaplace’s brand identity, really, but more on the purely technical and factual level. I completely agree with you that as far as brand identity, we’re actually pushing entirely the opposite story! When asked by non-VW folk, I generally speak of Metaplace as a singular entity. And I agree that until such time as some of the worlds within the MP network reach a certain level of critical mass themselves, it is a network most interesting as a network, and not because of any given node.
When I made the original comment, it was actually more on the technical basis than anything else. MP’s own chat backend (not the bridge used for this event) uses Jabber, so it’s intended to quite readily bridge to any number of things, really; that’s what we use to allow MP worlds to communicate with one another.
Now, as far as cultural significance of bridging between worlds, that’s an interesting topic in its own right. VWs, particularly “social” ones not oriented around games, have a long history of “calving off” from earlier worlds, often down to the technical level. One consequence of this was a greater sense of shared culture across the different worlds.
Cross-world protocols for chat bridges date back to at least the early 90s, and were actively used in a few cases to bridge between “parent” and “child” MOOs and MUSHes. Meanwhile, the cultural gaps that remained the strongest were actually those that lasted across codebases; the space between Diku players and MUSHers was, and remains, large.
None of this prevented people from fruitfully recognizing that despite truly enormous differences in audience, intended purpose, and culture, game muds and education-centric MOOs were still “the same thing” in a deep and binding way…
As far as the definition… probably the most commonly referenced these days is Bartle’s in DESIGNING VIRTUAL WORLDS, because it was in print and commonly cited as authoritative.
PS, I would consider each WoW shard to be a separate world, yes.
Thanks Raph – I use Bartle as my own reference point.
But this discussion has really intrigued me (sorry if I sound at all argumentative, because this is a fascinating topic, and something I’ve been pondering a lot lately).
I’m wondering whether the definition of virtual worlds is being influenced by emerging ideas around community, identity and ‘space’ as it starts to take alternate forms across the Net. It used to be we’d think of a Web site, but if a Web site also contains a Metaplace world, or a Facebook profile contains a world, and those worlds include connections via Twitter or whatever to other social ‘spaces’ (albeit not always 3D), then I wonder whether our definitions aren’t starting to blur slightly.
OK – kind of a trailing thought here maybe. Have to think about it more I suppose but thanks for an engaging discussion.
Actually, there is only one world. Mine.
I am at the centre of that world, and I dont particularly care how you call the streets, villages, towns, countries, webservices, virtual visual area’s, chat connections and more places that make up my worlds. Thats all metaversial semantics.
It’s funny — while SL and MP don’t have that much in common as platforms, people worked at hooking up their chat – and it was more because the people knew each other to start with. They go to the same game conferences or something. So it was more about people knowing each other and wanting to get these two worlds to sync up then a sort of natural bridging. But I agree with Dusan, that’s the way to do it, because otherwise it’s artificial and even destructive, as MMOX is showing.
I will go on feeling as if Raph’s “worlds” are really like “lots” in the Sims Online or “sims” or even “parcels” in Second Life. I hear what you are saying, Raph, about how there are these stand-alone code bases and whatnot, but I’m just saying what it *feels* like now. I don’t feel as if I have a “world” all of my own in MP. Perhaps if I knew how to work the levers. But I feel as if I’m going to be dependent on everybody else’s knowledge, products, etc. so I have kind of a little satellite to their worlds/parcels/sims.
Maybe when the lots grow bigger and more happens on them they will feel more like standalone worlds.
I also hope you are not wasting resources somewhere keeping my “world” in a standalone box for me because I’m likely never to be able to work it up to much beyond the hotel, i.e. I think it would be a shame to be devoting an entire server to it, it could be shared with somebody else.
Oh, we fit hundreds of those on a box, so no worries Prok.
[...] blogs, briefly mentioned on Virtual Worlds News, and covered more extensively on Osprey’s, Dusan’s, and Rik’s blogs. Rik also has an interesting screenshot on his Flickr [...]