The World Ain’t Slowin’ Down
The post title comes from a great song by Ellis Paul, but the import of the post has more to do with the massive movement in the virtual worlds space these days. While the gamer side of things is awaiting Warhammer, there’s a lot of activity going on around user-created content, microworlds, web-embedding, and so on.
It isn’t just the constant flow of new kids’ worlds — the latest being World of Neopia, FlowPlay‘s ourWorld, vSide coming out of stealth and announcing a deGrassi partnership, and the new Nickelodeon announcement of Monkey World as well as its Spongebob world.
It’s also the announcements like SmallWorlds, a 3d world in a browser where users decorate apartments. It’s Whirled, newly launched by Three Rings, where users can hook together 2d rooms, build their own avatars, and even upload SWFs into the environment. It’s Vivaty, formerly known as Media Machines, putting an X3D-based 16-player space in 3d in a browser window. And now Multiverse has a 2d Flash client as well, which lets you put a 2d facing on a world also accessible via 3d (though Multiverse does still seem aimed more at indies and middleware than at end users).
And we can’t forget things like SceneCaster and myMiniLife, which while not multiuser, are still piling up giant quantities of user-created content via easy to use tools.
I think it may actually be time for that user content stream of virtual worlds to spill over more mainstream.
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[…] theme of linking to blogs from people who know a hell of a lot more about MMOs than I do, Raph Koster has a post today about the growing amount of user-created browser-based content that is hitting the […]
Let’s all just agree that this is presaging the Singularity.
I have to ask, are you worried that people are getting into the “meta” field moreso, and earlier than you are with Metaplace? Also, some of these (such as Whirled that I just found today) seem really refined, and have extensive demos and abilities for users to play with them and apply their own creations. Are you too late already? Or does Metaplace still have more to show? Or do you feel that Metaplace somehow fills a different niche?
There’s lots and lots of room still, so I am not that worried. And honestly, what Metaplace does is significantly broader than what something like Whirled does, in many ways — Whirled is about a particular experience, and Metaplace cuts across many sorts of experiences. I don’t think anyone is going to bridge Whirled to Moodle, for example, but someone has done that with Metaplace.
So we’re definitely not too late. But we do need to hurry. 😉
It’s also not a bad thing that there are so many folks chasing this particular broad goal. It’s good for the market and the industry.
I guess these other things do have some limited functionality, but there’s only so far you can go before you hit the wall of cross incompatibility between customizable platforms. Things like connecting a game world with a photo slideshow. I suppose it’s just hard to imagine not having a core target audience or really even a secondary audience. It seems that Metaplace is almost trying to target EVERYONE and may be too broad for it’s own good in the effort. In some of the demos it almost seems like (since it’s so broad) that the backbone to all this is more of a web framework than a program, which is all fine and good if someone builds a good community out of it with their own program, but could be a downturn if it ends up too generic to attract initial users who are interested in the next new shiny web toy.
Oh, there’s a core initial experience to Metaplace.
Er, no. Let’s all agree this is presaging the Multiplarity — a zillion of these little things all over, many of them proprietary.
I was at VW08 this last week and saw the demos of Scenecaster, which is also like a single-player scene-maker into which you can put versions of real-life objects in 2.5 D that you then can sell on ebay. I also saw the Multiverse 2-D thing. And also tried Barbie Girl, their new world, and Whirld.
Most of these browser worlds don’t have user-generated content, except in the sense that you can customize your own avatar, select furniture, etc. They don’t have a way for the user to monetarize his experience online, either.
I wondered when I saw all these things whether they had scooped Metaplace. Perhaps for the 9 year olds and the Neopians and the tweens, yeah, maybe they have, but perhaps not. I think if Raph’s world has UGC it could position itself differently.
Whirld has a very shallow feeling after SL and the Sims on Line because you are just in one room, then changing rooms like a scene change on a stage set. You can play all these little games and have other people in the room, but I don’t see that you can interact with them and the stuff in the same way. Not sure. Seems an important aspect of these worlds to be able to edit someone else’s content with their permissions, i.e., that you have don’t change, change for my buddy list, change for anybody.
As a player, yes, it’s hard to go back to these experiences after Second Life, like going back to records after playing CDs for years.
Don’t sell Whirled short — you can actually upload whole SWFs, so you can do quite a lot in terms of UGC. But I agree it’s a very different vibe.
And yes, we definitely have a lot of UGC. The iso tool I posted isn’t for high-end users, certainly, but hopefully is indicative of that fact that we’re focused on users making stuff.
I think that’s an insightful point about edit permissions, Prok. There’s a certain magic in starting something and coming back to discover that others have worked on it without you being there.
I’m curious about your analogy, Rik. Is it purely because of the 3d? If not, what else are the key ingredients, to your mind?
Well, I’d say “Zoning” and “ease of starting content creation” are why these (ourworld and Whirled) seem like steps backwards.
When I say “Zoning” I mean a loss of feeling that it’s a virtual world by how you move from one place to another. Puzzle Pirates and Neopets have the games-for-points thing going on but Puzzle Pirates does it without losing a sense of place or theme. Neopets makes a good try for those things, and it does it without you having a personal avatar.
When I say “ease of starting content creation” I mean being able to make something new but maybe not good should be quick and easy. Second Life lets you start to make your own content pretty easy. First you get the blocks, then if you want to do something fancy you can add pre-done scripts to get some interesting effects. If you still feel like creating you can then tweak those or upload textures. Making an avatar for Whirled is probably pretty simple but it looks like the first one will take you a while so it’s probably something I’d only get excited about if I already wanted to spend a lot of time there.
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The vast majority of virtual worlds have zoning, of course; so I think there’s something psychological going on there, regarding the immersiveness of the space.