Requiem For There.com
Celia Pearce has written a thoughtful and touching article about the closing of There.com that will resonate with anyone who has ever watched the closure of a virtual world they loved.
As an ethnographer who has devoted six years of her life to serving as a kind of emissary and folklorist for the people of There.com, I feel both a sense of loss and a special sense of responsibility. The book I published on the Uru culture in There.com was meant to describe a living, breathing culture. But, as real-world anthropologists know, when a culture is eradicated, anthropology can tragically become history.
I agree with a lot of her assessment of what There did well, too — a bit unsure on the UGC aspect, but the social design she describes was really excellent, and inspirational for aspects of SWG.
8 Responses to “Requiem For There.com”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Raph Koster. Raph Koster said: New blog post: Requiem For There.com https://www.raphkoster.com/2010/03/30/requiem-for-there-com/ […]
Any reduction in the number and variety of virtual worlds is a blow to virtuality as a whole, and in that light I am saddened by the loss of There.com even though I never visited it.
By the same token, I’m dismayed by the number of postmortems for There.com that incorporate veiled or not-so-veiled slams against Second Life. SL has its faults, but perpetuating the stereotype of the world as a haven for anarchistic techno-geeks is a disservice to the entire genre.
The best tribute to the memory of There.com and other vanished virtual worlds is to advocate and explore more flexible, sustainable ways to create and support online communities.
This is a wonderful opinion. The things mentioned are unanimous and needs to be appreciated by everyone.
I appreciate the concern which is been rose. The things need to be sorted out because it is about the individual but it can be with everyone.
The above thought is smart and doesn’t require any further addition. It’s perfect thought from my side.
Jobs in Canada
As long as VR customers and authors fail to demand the standards required to take the content out-of-world (eg, portable avatars), it is the dumbest market on the web and no investor in their right mind should be investing in it. The philosophical whining about what wonderful communities they were/are is yet more silliness.
Seriously. Let ’em die.
There are utilities to “back up” Second Life inventories, which are handy for moving content that you’ve created to other compatable worlds.
Unfortunately, they’re also handy for stealing content that you haven’t created and have no right to reproduce.
I like the idea of portable avatars; I just forsee big, ugly cans of worms on both the IP front and in convincing the back office that it’s a good idea to let your players easily move themselves and their “stuff” to a competitor’s world.
All so but until the risks and rewards are understood, these worlds have a lifecycle not unlike a nightclub or restaurant: quick early adopters, some regulars, slow but irresistable decline with ever cheaper bands until you walk in one day and there are six true alkies at the bar and a juke box in the corner.
What is the SL format that enables one to move content to another world or is it an SL-only thing? Is it geometry-only (eg, behaviors are lost)? Who uses it? I’m not knocking SL per se. The only worlds I know about that have kept the value of the content assets after the world shuttered were VRML worlds. Why is that?
This isn’t a new idea. It’s been kicked around a lot in the last decade and yes, the problems you mention are indeed challenges to be overcome because essentially, moving graphics from system to system isn’t that hard. I suspect if something like WebGL gets real traction, old solutions will be quickly rebranded as new innovations, but until then, investors have to be pretty dense or IBM to invest serious money in virtual worlds unless they treat it like quick-in-get-out-before-the-suckers-catch-on forays into boiler rooms.
I see this as an obstacle to new market emergence such as augmented reality systems for professional use in location-based systems.
The fact that all these “vr worlds” go to the extreme to protect the “code” -theirs- but not the “content”-others- pretty much tells the story of the last 15 years of online 3dvr world platform failures.
wake me when anyone learns anything.;)
Oh, I take that back. Unity3D. though they have a long way to travel yet, has learned some from the past of web media.
SL textures are all standard graphics files. There are (third-party) utilities to translate prim-based builds into mesh files (and the ‘sculpted prim’ system allows import of mesh models of modest complexity). Model animations are in a standard format.
The biggest technical hurdle to exporting SL content is Linden Scripting Language, which is proprietary, quirky, and largely designed to keep residents from overburdening the servers, which means its functionality is crippled in some very basic and annoying ways.
Linden Lab has articulated plans to allow residents to use some standard programming languages within Second Life, but concrete progress in that direction has yet to be revealed.
SL content can be backed up for archival purposes with 3rd-party apps engineered from the released client code. Because most of the file formats are industry standard, they can be translated into formats compatable with any virtual world that accepts standard files.
Primary usage at the moment seems to be importing content into OpenSim worlds.
It could be a lot more portable. As it stands, you usually have to do some wonky stuff with some badly-documented freeware to cobble things together (reinforcing that stereotype of VR as a technogeek refuge). But it can be done, and it could be made all polished and pretty for people who are not code monkeys.