How much does the world matter?
Virtual Worlds News reports that Stardoll has reached 10 million registered users, with 6 million monthly uniques (it’s so nice to see people reporting uniques lately!).
Their audience is 94% tween and teen girls — which is just extraordinary. They’re the most popular site on the Net for girls ages 9-17.
But there’s not much world there, beyond a fairly simplistic “virtual suite.” Which begs the question, how much world do you really need?
Sites ranging from Facebook to Kongregate are proving that in terms of community and value as a “hangout” you really don’t need much. Immersiveness is not dependent on graphics, as we have known forever and ever. I will go further and say that immersiveness is not dependent on spatiality either.
Early virtual worlds used highly nodal maps, without coordinate systems within the node — a way of saying “rooms where everyone stood on the head of the same pin.” Spatiality was premised on the illusion of geographical relationships between the modes. In other words, space in a text mud is based on the convention of naming a hyperlink as “north.”
So how much of the “new virtual place” will be based on worlds that are barely spatial? Do you even need an exit to your friends’ place, if you can just bookmark it?
The trend in future virtual worlds may be to remove the assumption of spatial relationships between nodes (rooms, zones, apartments, worlds, whatever) and instead have spatiality solely within said places. Patches of coordinate systems in a floating sea of hyperlinks. And likely, smallish patches focused around areas of interest, so that the spatial simulations are dense with stuff and stuff to do, rather than there being large swaths of empty coordinate space with nothing in them.
In other words, zones. And so we come full circle… even Second Life is talking now about how grids would be distinct, and hyperlinked — so there would not be one seamless Metaverse, as has been their guiding vision thus far.
This will become increasingly important as we see more attempts to interconnect worlds of different stripes, I suspect…
18 Responses to “How much does the world matter?”
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Interesting observations Raph. Thank you.
I guess a question is, how do you handle overflow? What do you do if a node is too small for the population that tries to enter it?
Perhaps this can be attributed to the lack of variety in the animations being used to communicate the act of transference. When an avatar walks from one location to another there is nothing unique about the action. In many cases, when there are obstacles in the way, it can be very frustrating. If there isn’t any difference in the terrain or features then the experience is exactly the same and only delays the goal of reaching a destination.
If there is meaning to the journey,something unique to the path, or the avatar reacts in an entertaining manner, then the spatial experience could still hold value. If the development effort were focused on the path versus the destination this value could be increased, but the development effort and cost would likely increase faster than the value.
In another entry you commented that games are in essence.. many many many small games put together in whatever fashion. I think the same is true of any kind of game world; though the world is made up of many many many nodes rather than games.. but ven the node itself could be considered a game since there is a goal (to get there) and a challenge, even if the challenge is so simple as typing n and pressing enter.
So in that context, taking out physical spatiality is simply removing one branch of the game tree. It’s not really a big deal, it’s just something we may or may not enjoy doing, like any game.
The web is perfectly suited for a node type system, you even used the word hyperlink to describe node relationships. Myspace is one such sea of nodes in a floating sea of hyperlinks, it’s only a matter of time until we see a virtual world based on the same concept. It’s probably already been/being done.
Sort of like if someone were to make a web hosting platform for 3D spaces which are connected by hyperlinks.
Man, I wish someone was working on that. 🙂
That’s fine, even great, for 3D social spaces. Not so much for “worlds” where players expect to actually be surrounded by a world. For true MMORPGs (not these social spaces you’re including as “games”), skimping too much on the game world can be bad news. As DDO and AC2 showed. And this in even these times of many new gamers who have no expectations and can accept games like WoW as a “world”.
Question 1: Which begs the question, how much world do you really need?
None, obviously. The return question is, “What is the world there for?”
Question 2: So how much of the “new virtual place” will be based on worlds that are barely spatial? Do you even need an exit to your friends’ place, if you can just bookmark it?
I wonder if Second Life will think to do this. In a way, it’s already there with teleportation and saved locations and islands. But there’s a lot of unnecessary empty space that doesn’t really need to exist per se.
Then again, you have the browsing effect, a.k.a. “Bookshelves in libraries are better than search on the Internet because you can browse!” But social spaces aren’t about that at all, so it’d be fine for pure social chatter.
Btw, have you seen Bradfitz’s Social Graph thingy?
Even as a SEAK gamer, I find these social-centric platforms less appealing than games that encourage social aspects. I have a myspace account as well as facebook, but only drop in and do anything maybe twice a week. I’m more of a lurker on message boards, except where story sharing is concerned. I need a much more significant escape vehicle before I feel immersed. Maybe the ability to establish and define (or join) a small community within the playerbase built on more than friends lists/guild membership is the key that opens me up. Without wide open spaces to explore, adventure through, or build on I feel contained, constrained, and limited in too many ways to fully enjoy what is being offered.
94% teen and tween girls, and 6% FBI agents??
Switching to a hyperlinked model would be a huge step toward making Second Life legitimately useful. I don’t want people mixing their advertising and trendy cyberpunk sunglasses with my furry pron and dwarf bashing simulators in the first place.
The grid was a mistake right from the beginning. It scales really badly and effectively forces people to be spread out geographically so they don’t overload the server. A square mile of tundra might only need one server but a busy city block might need a hundred, split dynamically between the floors of buildings. Right now it’s barely capable of emulating suburbia.
Actually, some games like Wow in a way evolve towards the hyperlinked method. Think about it. As a low level character you walk everywhere and the only “hyperlinks” are boats that go between continents, plus flight paths. Later, you get mounts that speed up the land travel time, and eventually some people even can portal between areas. Plus you can summon members of a group to an instance so you don’t have to wait forever for them to walk/ride/fly to the group.
What they do though is only give you this ability to hyperlink once you understand the space. Once you see that village X is north of city Y and there is a forest in between, you are allowed to skip the whole in between and just fly directly from X to Y. Or actually walk it if you’d like.
I think it’s been obvious for a long time that sometimes spatiality can be a negative thing. Think back to all those “3D shopping environments” during the dot-com days. I don’t need to push a virtual cart around a virtual store looking at virtual shelves to buy my virtual items. Just give me a list, let me click and be done with it.
One consulting gig I did that was heavily socialization based wanted to require people to walk around a city, and have different neighborhoods connected via subway. I told them that was unnecessary and, in fact, harmful to the social fabric. If I go somewhere to chat, I want to go to my friends and chat, not spend 5 minutes “walking” to them because that’s what I have to do in the offline world.
Likewise, I think you have the same thing here. What’s the point of spatiality on a networking site?
But, there are sometimes when you want spatial feelings, particularly in gaming worlds where you are trying to build an immersive environment. But, I think Tim Holt’s comment above shows that even then you need to sacrifice some of the spatiality for convenience’s sake when people want to get around, particularly to play with friends.
I think the difference in there lies in the fact that you could actually get out a paper and pen and map out the whole world and it would make spatial sense for the most part.
Whereas in MUDs which are purely hyperlinked nodes, nodes can logically exist in the same place as other nodes..
For example you could start from node a, go north to node b, east to node c, south to node d then west to node e, never again encountering node a without backtracking.
I’ve even seen examples where you could start at node a, go west to node b then east to node c.
To a gamer in WoW this would seem nonsensical and impractical, because the game creators have gone to great lengths to make sure the space is realistically plotted on a coordinate plane. They even have a map.
Gah why do I always think of something else I wanted to say after I hit submit? :^) Continuing on my last paragraph…
The thing that sticks in my mind is that you gain a sense of the spatial relationship between things when you have to travel, which is important as far as having a sense of a larger world or space. But as you gain that knowledge you’re also gaining more things to do, more tasks to take on and so forth. So after a while your “life” becomes a lot more complex, and you don’t want to bother as much with the “mundane” tasks such as travel between areas. It’s similar in a way to how low level mobs don’t “aggro” on you when you are higher level.
Travel between areas is also one of the early skills you master in some MMO’ish type games. You start off in some central spot that is safe, and begin to make a series of tentative journeys away from that safe spot, learning what your bounds are, what the worlds bounds are, what’s safe and what’s not safe. Your eyes are usually always fixed on things very close to you, as you wonder what’s around the corner, if something is a threat and so forth. Your mind only has to manage a smaller more finite set of information and isn’t overwhelmed with data. Imagine exposing a level 1 player in WoW to the entire world at once, and allowing them to just go anywhere they want?
However as you become familiar with the game world, your eyes begin to look much farther afield. You don’t care about the smaller details, more the larger ones. You don’t wonder what’s around the corner, you wonder what’s on the next continent. And at that point, the space between where you are and where you want to be becomes more like noise and annoyance, and most people just would like to skip it to get to their destination. When you know what’s around the corner, those hyperlinks are pretty handy!
I agree with the overall point about immersiveness without spatiality, and the point about how future online spaces will mimic the hyperlinked and amorphous nature of our online lives.
But – I don’t think Stardoll is a good example of that. I don’t think Stardoll is immersive in the general sense, and you’d be hard pressed to call anything a common social “space” on Stardoll.
I don’t want this to turn into another ridiculous debate about what a “world” is, let alone a virtual one. My only point was that there are many online properties that are very, very, popular but that doesn’t make the same analogies work across all of them. Some products have different types of entertainment value.
I suppose the quick sound-bite version could be “Spatiality locally, Link globally”. Which sounds a lot like the way we’ve been tending with Furcadia all along, based on what I learned from the MUCKs and MOOs in the early 90s. Though a lot of what I envisioned is still not implemented.
IMVU seems to be a case of really taking to the extremes the idea of only putting spatiality where it’s most needed. Two users (or sometimes more) start a chat, much as they might with ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, etc. Then it puts them in a 3D room together, with avatars. You can have more than 2 people in a chat, too. But as far as I’m aware, there’s no “world” for all these disconnected places with 2+ people chatting in them to connect to, no way to “go outside and walk into another place”, etc.
One of my friends is totally hooked on it. Seems compelling enough.
I’m just wondering. Can repeated instances be used to create large tracks of land between the more detailed zones? For instance, between the city and the dungeon, can layers of the same zone of forest be laid out to form a simulation of a much larger forest? Do instances require that zoning pause? Or can they be set up with the soft seamless zoning? Do instances have to have entrance restricted to parties, or can they be opened to any who enter (I would think so).
In old board war games, they had map boards that could be layed out any way you wanted, with the edges designed to match up no matter how you placed them or spun them around. Roads lined up, etc. If these instances were designed the same way, they could even be spun around. So if you go from one instance’s north edge to the next, you might actually be going into the next instances eastern edge instead of it’s southern edge. But the players north would still read north, it just would add more to the simulation of traveling vast expanses.
Players would expect different content though, so there would need to be ways to place different things in different aspects of the same instances. I would think that roaming spawns would be easy to keep track of, just like with players, and even cross instance zones. Buildings or ruins shouldn’t be a problem either, as long as the original instance leaves room for them to be placed in them. Heck, trees could be substituted in empty spots, or grass, or whatever. Deserts would be easy here. I would think it should be possible to even add underground entrances, as long as there’s something above ground to allow for it, like a crypt, with stairs going down into a small dungeon.
Is this a viable idea to expand a world to make it seem much larger, yet reduce the costs in production?
(Of course, some believe that players don’t want large worlds, but I have to come back with “which players?”)