metarand

The Arcade Called You

Rex Sorgatz has written a must read about reality as game.

Awesome imagery – welcome to the arcade called you… gaming mindset is pervasive…gaming the system …

        We’ve moved from a society that creates goods to one that solves puzzles.

Rex explains his motivation for writing the piece on his blog:

The whole idea started by noticing how several of my daily interactions — watching TV, reading RSS, dating — have become very game-like. At first, I didn’t know what to call these instances, but I eventually started using the term gaming moments. And then soon enough, a definition arose: “competitive interactions in daily life that involve play.” Sometimes the interactions are social, sometimes they are you versus a computer algorithm. But once you’ve noticed them, they suddenly become ubiquitous.

“Gaming the system,” it seems, has become standard operating procedure for everything from booking an airline ticket to battling your TiVo’s automated recommendations.

[Photo courtesy of ue06]

Untethered Avatars Take Their First Steps

The NY Times has already covered IBM and Second Life’s announcement at last week’s Virtual Worlds Conference to untether avatars from specific worlds, but it bears further mention.

As with other forms of social media, I am a firm believer in open systems and interoperability and this move by some of the key players in the emerging virtual world arena, is great to see. It is one giant, albeit baby, step forward and points to a  much higher likelihood that virtual worlds will become a key part of the social fabric, unlike their hapless cousin virtual reality.

Tim O’Reilly makes some excellent points regarding the path forward:

* Just as the web put an end to the competition between early online communities to the one-size-fits-all destination, an interoperable 3D web will allow vertical 3D application niches and platforms to flourish [I agree, it will also allow for greater depth of horizontal, meta layers as they will be able to achieve greater carry].

* Virtual worlds are far more than a game. They are ultimately a simulation layer that can be overlaid on the real world, as well as creating new purely virtual “real estate”.

* We shouldn’t think of this interoperability as being just for virtual worlds. Ultimately, virtual is just another layer on top of physical [Yes, but we should not only think in terms of layers, there is embedding, additional dimensioning and geometric tagging that can take us way beyond our current mental lines, squares, walls and barriers].

I applaud the thought leadership and initiative taken by Colin Parris and his team at IBM and totally agree with TimO’Reilly’s prognosis:

There’s quite a future ahead of us here. It’s silly to try and recreate the wheel when by working together we can build something that is so much bigger.

Virtual Worlds Get Billion $ Infusion, Big Media Takes Notice

Headlines sell. Strictly speaking, companies that can be lumped together as being in the virtual world arena raised $200m, or thereabouts, in the past year. However, if you add in M&A activity of $810m you can make the claim that they have had $1bn thrown at them.

Virtual Worlds Management have compiled a comprehensive, if somewhat incomplete, list of all this activity. At a first glance I notice companies like Hong Kong based Frenzoo, which received a seed round from Tallin, Estonia fund, Ambient Sound Investments, is not included on the list. ASI are also the initial seed investors in FlowPlay – which is listed, but no details are given re the investors.

No offence, Chris – this is a great initiative, but I’d like to see a table listing all the investments that have been made ( I suggest you look more closely in the Asia Pacific region, which is a hive of virtual world activity ) with columns including Location and Stage of Investment. These data points may seem trivial now, but I’ve been involved in enough nascent areas to know that over time the trends that emerge will be most the most valuable information, ie how many of these seed bets translate into Series A, B and are eventually acquired or IPO (yes, the tap is turning back on, folks).

It would also be worth listing partnerships and strategic alliances linked or formed around these ventures. For example, privately funded Kaneva has inked a one year deal with Turner Broadcasting enabling the owner of brands like CNN and Cartoon Network to build communities and immersive spaces around their brands.

The next 12 months sure is going to be interesting!

Virtual worlds go meta

Next week San Jose will be abuzz with virtual worlders. The big question is what to focus on if you are attending VWFall2007.

In my view, since the demise of the virtual world I was working on, the most interesting one to watch is Areae‘s Metaplace. Raph Koster has pulled together a great combination of web meets virtual world components, including an open standard markup language.

One thing I find curious though, is that Metaplace will apparently not have digital asset sale facilities. As Raph says in an interview with Virtual World News:

Our virtual currency is a network level currency. It’s mostly for network usage. We don’t have anything planned for asset sales in a world. The thing we’re thinking of are upsell costs for aspects of the service. I’m not a fan of the gameplay-affecting transactions anyway. It is important for the game to have a level playing field.

Personally, I think this is a blind spot, and I cannot believe that with backing from one of the biggest virtual goods evangelists, Susan Wu of Charles River Ventures, Metaplace will not introduce some form of digital assets sales either directly or through an external application.

UPDATE: Raph has clarified the situation. Metaplace has a virtual currency; which can be used for virtual goods sales by anyone. They have digital asset sales at the network level. What they are not doing is making a whole bunch of digital asset sales worlds however. This is a good thing : Metaplace is not  Metamall.

China: King of the Virtual Worlds

China is set to become a key player in the virtual worlds arena. As Kaiser Kuo over at Ogilvy China notes: China’s virtual worlds have the advantage of being able to learn from the mistakes that Linden Labs’ Second Life has made without any real direct threat from SL in their huge home market.

Kaiser gives a good run down on Novoking, a Chinese virtual world due for release soon. They have a sound approach — prebuilt for ease of use with external graphics software for ugc and a restricted economy.

Virtual World Revolt: Avatars Untether

Joey Seiler has become the unofficial avatar union representative in real life by asking the question: “Do Avatars Need Virtual Worlds?“

It’s a valid question and it certainly fits in with my thesis that the world (of mass adoption) is not entirely ready yet for full immersion.

I agree with  Sean Ryan, CEO of Meez, when he says: “We don’t believe most people are going to spend their entire time in a world…they will spend time in (sic) the Internet, and some of that will be (in) a world, but not all of it“