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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”