Are virtual worlds just for kids?
(Visited 44701 times) Game talk
Jun 032011
Observed:
- Virtual worlds have gained great popularity among the younger audience, dwarfing their popularity for most adults.
- Virtual worlds take a lot of time to engage in.
- Virtual worlds for adults have become less and less like worlds and more like single-player or multiplayer games.
- Adults use virtual spaces regularly, but with a very different form of identity control largely focused around real-world ties.
Assumptions:
- Richard Bartle is correct in saying that virtual worlds are about self-knowledge. (“Virtual worlds are about identity” — Designing Virtual Worlds, p.433).
- The Laws of Online World Design (in the humbly named “Koster’s Theorem”) are right that “Virtual social bonds evolve from the fictional towards real social bonds. If you have good community ties, they will be out-of-character ties, not in-character ties. In other words, friendships will migrate right out of your world into email, real-life gatherings, etc.”
- Child psychologists the world over are right that youth is a time of identity formation and experimentation.
Corollaries:
- Users grow out of virtual worlds. They may grow out of one of them, or all of them, if they achieve sufficient self-knowledge.
- Users might fall back into them if they lose their community ties or sense of identity, or have high amounts of available time.
Hypothesis:
- Kids find virtual worlds, and being at the prime age for identity exploration, dive headlong into them.
- Then they grow out of them, and don’t need them anymore.
- Most adults don’t need that sort of identity exploration anymore. Some do, and some just enjoy identity exploration in its own right.
- The virtual world boom was about those that did discovering this tool, using it, and then moving on.
A thought I have had for a while, but was brought briefly to mind by this post on NWN… basically, the question is whether it is in fact an inevitable destiny of the medium that it gravitate towards being for kids because of social and market pressures. This would make me sad — not because kids’ worlds are bad, but because they cannot fully express the power of the medium.
54 Responses to “Are virtual worlds just for kids?”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
I don’t agree. Sorry for the short answer, I know it deserved more, but… basicly, your corollaries are wrong. Most of the people grow up and leave virtual worlds because they lack the time for it, not because “they achieve sufficient self-knowledge”.
Here’s a TED talk you might find interesting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1KJAXM3xYA&feature=youtube_gdata , I’m sure you will find out the relation with Virtual Worlds and my hypothesis.
Isn’t this the old immersionist vs. augmentationist argument? For some, virtual worlds are more about being in an environment where the normal laws of physics don’t apply, than about exploring identity.
Just to chime in as a player. I think most players in games like WoW and Rift see worldly VWs as something older gamers enjoyed – Ultima Online, Everquest, Star Wars Galaxies. There would be a lot of interest in an old school game with good production values and marketing.
I think there’s an audience of players who want a decent quality exploration sandbox VW game but make do with Rift and WoW because that’s what’s out there and is popular.
I’m convinced that the next decade will see the MMO genre fragment into multiple different styles. Games like WoW that try to please everyone pvp/pve; hardcore/casual are creaking at the seams. Rift is already creaking after three months in some regards – the raids are great but the pvp is a disappointment to most players.
In short no, virtual worlds aren’t just for kids. They will soon be for everyone including people who used to be served what they want but aren’t any longer. It may be that the use of VWs as a tool for questing for self-identity is for kids but that’s just one use of this software. At 46 I know pretty well who I am and it’s someone who likes pottering about in large imaginary landscapes.
Noori, it has long been observed that the typical user of a VW plays VWs for two to three years, then quits.
I’m not questioning that there are plenty of folks who stick longer…
I’ll take a look at the vid when I am not on my phone. 🙂
From what I gathered from Norri’s response, it’s not that people leave VWs, but the reasons behind them leaving. I would agree that I’m not sure the “achieving of sufficient self-knowledge” is the main reason behind people leaving.
The half-life of a player in virtual worlds is easily explained with the “shallow” content offered by the worlds themselves. At some point, there is nothing left to do, and this stage is usually reached after 2-3 years.
The fact that the demographics is skewed towards young players is also easily explained by two facts:
* Older people have less familiarity with computers
* Kids have a lot more free time
Doesn’t mean these explanations are true, but without an experiment, they can equally explain the observed phenomena.
I don’t have a lot of evidence to back it up, but I feel that the idea of social bonds jumping to another media is incorrect. Yes, people will develop bonds than transcend the character, but I would argue that they will prefer to use the same medium they formed those bonds in. In other words, if you meet someone in WoW and you both leave, you will want to encourage them to play another MMO so you can interact again.
It’s not that virtual worlds are just for kids, it’s that if you’ve played them as a kid they’re not for you as an adult. It’s something I’ve been dreading since I saw the first virtual worlds aimed at children appear. The thing is, kids can’t appreciate them as well as an adult, so miss out on what virtual worlds can be; we end up with adults who don’t understand what virtual worlds can give them, because they don’t see them as anything special.
When I was a kid, I didn’t get to go to London. I lived too far away. As a student, I went there for the first time and was amazed by it. I was walking up The Mall and Buckingham palace was right there! And it was really close to 10 Downing Street and the Houses of Parliament! And there I was, walking up a road I’d only ever seen before on TV! It was awesome! Yet my children got to go to London on a school trip. They saw the same things as me, but didn’t get the same feeling of awe that I did. They missed out on that. Now they’re older, London is just a big city to them, there’s nothing special about it.
It’s like this with virtual worlds. If you experience them as a child, you miss out on that whole awesomeness thing that people who first came across them as adults experienced. You don’t experience them the same way when you’re in a very formative stage of your life, because you’re not really equipped to do so. You can only gain a superficial understanding of them because you’re a child, and you’ll carry this through to adulthood. Sure, you can come back to them and see through all that, but most people don’t. The whole concept of virtual worlds’ use as an exploration of identity passes you by, because you didn’t ever get to be not-you when you played as a child and you don’t connect virtual worlds with the ability to experiment being not-you. Throw in things like VoIP and you end up having to wear the same old identity the whole time.
We’re getting closer and closer to the time when people will look at virtual worlds and wonder why anyone ever thought they were at all special.
Richard
Cast your mind back to your childhood. Didn’t you live much of your life then in a virtual world? Wasn’t the the world of your imagination as real, even more real, than the “real” world? Isn’t that a huge part of what childhood is about?
Had we had online virtual worlds when I was a child in the 1960s I’m sure that they would have been just one more way to engage with each other and with ourselves. I doubt we’d have seen immersion in a screenworld as radically different from immersion in the imaginary forests, castles and caves that we created with and for each other from our own minds.
By our teens, most of us cease to be able to live in this kind of consensual collective imagined world. We seem to require or need the permission of game rules before we can agree on a shared fantasy life. I doubt this has much, or anything, to do with the medium in which the imagined world is presented to us. Whether it’s LARP or cosplay or MMOs or amdram, most adults need a codified ruleset to step out of their everyday world.
The interesting question for me is whether the underlying ruleset for a game set in a virtual world can become sufficiently complex, and can be sufficiently concealed, that the worldness outweighs the gameness. I suspect that only when technology allows the VR experience to approximate the human sensual experience quite closely will adults begin to react to virtual worlds primarily as worlds rather than as games.
just like fantasy movies and cartoons kids saw in the 80s… theve grown out of them…. er… anyone got a movie listing for this summer?
the days of finding ones adult self left the building 30 years ago. when boomers with electric media tools decided thet they would never die.:)
AARP and Oprah.keeping 50 then 60 the new 30, thus making the cultures interest in you- youts… in keeping you sub 10 years old.
oh yeah theres a few “adults” out growing the need to 24/7 be judged and score and level up… but they dwindel and dont represent the ROI, that tech biz driven media needs in todays systems. so theyrell be lucky to find the no cineplex indie thearte equivalent of 2030. oh, and they better be rich, cause no one pays for bandwith of storage of stuff only a few want..:)
so virtual worlds…become real. but we knew that when we saw tron or read cyberwatever in 1980.;)
virtual worlds futures? just like TVs/films past… i told a VR worlds audience that in 06-7… nothings changed, only the money counted.
and yes.. being an adult once meant not having time to play “60 hrs of play”… of so old games ad from before online 24/7 poker/farms.:)
but the matrix was all about just being a battery…;) run till you drop…its that you exist, not what you do as you exist.
id check those assumptions with other realities they dont really run true for the most part.imo:)
id like to believe we can break the chains of our parents failings… but as the old standup saying goes, we all become our father…and then make his noises.
Hiya,
I question your observation, certainly in relation to ALL virtual worlds. I think you have over-generalised, done insufficient observation and maybe poorly interpreted. Of course I could be wrong but you offer no evidence on the makeup of virtual worlds. I don’t have stats and have no time to conduct such research but my observations in Second Life and similar worlds are somewhat different, IMVU would on the serface fit your theory better but I’m not sure about even that demographic under the surface.
Emma
As far as I can see, participation with virtual worlds by age appears to be an inverted Bell curve. Kids and teens have plenty of free time, but as they take on the responsibilities of building a career, finding a spouse and raising children, their available time dwindles.
Conversely, once the kids are off to college and the career is stable, participation picks up again amongst people in their 40’s and 50’s (though usually in different titles).
People between the poles, caught up in the pace of modern life, may be more drawn by short video clips, asynchronous social media and bite-sized gaming.
But I think the proposition that virtual worlds are for kids is just focusing on half of the equation.
Or in other words, people in certain age categories have more “disposable time” (in the sense of disposable income) and fewer things to spend it on, while adults have less discretionary spending and more competing interests? Thus making the question more about the ranking of virtual worlds relative to other competing demands for recreational time.
I can agree that perhaps, one of the things that might knock it lower (so to speak) as an adult would be the non-novelness of it if it’s already been thoroughly explored as a conceptual space in youth, though I wouldn’t think it’s necessarily a functionally different effect than thoroughly exploring it at any stage, or that it takes a differing amount of time (as I’d suspect either way it’s the same 2-3 years; the adult might gain a deeper appreciation but likely does not require more time to have done so).
I would suspect, as a personal opinion, that it is because social media provides enough of a similar social interaction as a background to people’s online lives, that they can fall back on it and thus not miss the “deeper” interaction provided by a given virtual world (if Second Life starts seeming like it’s just a chat room -> if a person is only making use of Second Life as a chat room -> if a person moves from Second Life back to the chat and messaging offered by Facebook and their phone, are they experientially missing anything at all?)
At a certain level, the game provides an excuse to get together, to form new social bonds and nurture faint or weak ones. Once strong enough, the game isn’t needed as much, and as the bond transcends the game (just meaning, becomes OOC) other interests can be jointly explored; the game isn’t needed if (once) the main motivation for logging on becomes the strong social bonds and not the already-mastered gameplay.
This is very consistent with how my relationship to gaming has changed over time. I’ve linked it to my MMO-addicted acquaintances who have expressed consternation over my transition from multiplayer virtual worlds to single-player RPGs in order to explain my feelings.
I might extend the first sentence of the first corollary, however, to something like, ‘Users grow out of virtual worlds for purposes of identity exploration.’ I’m not convinced that self-knowledge is the only, or even the primary, benefit of simulating a fictional world, although I’d agree completely that it’s the main attractor of children and teens.
Because, digging deeper into adulthood, I’m still interested in virtual worlds, perhaps even more so than before, but for very different reasons. It has become much less about identity exploration and instead about expressing the identity that I’ve found. The project needn’t be multiplayer for me to achieve this, of course, but building and/or becoming immersed in a secondary world is, itself, a very effective medium for creative expression, I find, as a developer and as a player.
I’m kind of interested in making the real world into a hybrid of real world plus virtual world. But then, maybe that’s just me. 😉
I think Kylie has touched upon another dynamic in play. When you feel you’ve outgrown your virtual world, you’ve got a number of options:
* You can walk away from all virtual worlds.
* You can move on to another virtual world.
* You can stick around in the virtual world and seek to expand it in ways that further your personal goals, or make it a more enjoyable experience for everybody.
* Or, if you’re one of the few mad souls with more vision than common sense, you can make your own virtual worlds.
Is it all kid’s stuff? Are virtual world enthusiasts in a state of arrested development? Maybe so. Maybe we’re stuck in the state where we can ALWAYS find something to be fascinated with in the emergent patterns of a sufficiently complex system — social or not. And if that’s childlike… I don’t wanna grow up.
In a sense, part of the cause is that more and more adults live comfortably in both the real and virtual space. Richard defined “virtual” in DVW as both real and not-real, and I think the not-real component is inexorably being wiped out in the minds and imaginations of incoming people.
To your conclusion, I think not. Identity exploration does not have to remain the province of the individual. There are the identities of groups, of cities, of nations. But these kinds of identity exploration require a stronger tie to the real world than virtual worlds have traditionally provided, and adults who have grasped themselves are better suited to it than children who have not.
And oh yes. I am totally bringing the Arab Spring into this.
I have to agree with Noori (and others). People grow out of virtual worlds because they lack time … their first world (the real one) increasingly demands more focus. To complicate matters, in recent years MMORPG’s have changed to require more and more time. There’s less to do in short sessions. And what there is, is solo play. And no, that’s not necessary. It is possible to have asynchronous social play.
I really don’t think it’s time.
For one, weekly average playtime in MMOs doesn’t seem to have changed since the text mud days — up OR down.
For another, this phenomenon was observed among college students during text mud days too. The amount of free time did not change significantly for them.
Rather, I think when we speak of “less time” we mean “less willingness to devote time.” WHY does the real world demand more focus? Because we have prioritized it more highly, and lowered the priority of the VW for ourselves. And the question then is why we do that.
because we are not “of “a” vr world” but of the “natural world” and the priority of the majority to “procreate” and “protect ones prodigy and property ” is the genetic psycho gift we all get… a minority fight it, and they just happen to be the possible majority of your stable mud gamer ground.
what of the “matrix” or the “brain storm”? will we soon be “thinking we have families” and survival of the fittest actually taking place in a synthetic coccoon -world? will we be able to trick “evolutions” human sense?—- to only be the singular entity?..no other… and with no other, no need for time other than with my NPC or even real but distant-untouchable- co-habitants… no survival of the species needed?
you cant talk about why people spend time in VR worlds without being very specific to their value and context in the persons realife. both for children and adults…
Sociologists observe the oldest ties are the strongest ties. If a well-established group finds a means to meet conveniently (emphasis on convenience) they will and continue to do so.
I check into one VR world with any frequency: VR3D. Two reasons: they listen to very good music and talk about it (there are some very good musicians there hosting). The owner of VideoRanch is Mike Nesmith and the crew he has around him are most hospitable.
I check into Facebook several times a day. Reasons are easy: many of my extended friendships and oldest friendships are there and coordination among my local social events has migrated there because it is free and effective.
The test of most theories is when they are stressed by environmental changes, in this case, if these services quit being free or noticeably degrade other aspects of life or become unreliable.
Much is made of virtual world theories but I assert the services have the most evolutionary effect. Too much stress and too little benefit and I’m outta there.
Nothing lasts.
And in my opinion cloud services are not enough convenience for the risks. The death knell of the PC is yet another California wet dream
that thrills stockholders, offers glimmers of restoring the old republic of the entertainment industry, but will leave end users bogged down and losing opportunties. As has been the pattern for many technological tar pits but most particularly the web, it will take the end users a while to notice they are stuck and going nowhere more interesting fast or ever.
Would we ultimately be talking about the law of diminishing marginal utility (per economics) at this point?
Perhaps it’s simply that VWs aren’t yet so different an experience from each other yet to prevent the diminishment of utility from applying to them as a group. When you move from one to another, it’s not felt to be a completely new experience. The basics are the same, the general means and channels of interacting with the (new) world are the same (“Thanks for signing in, here’s your quest log, here’s your chat box, here’s your key to the official forums, default keybindings are posted in the Help menu…”). At some level, it’s all hours in front of a computer, at least so far….
When I look at the people who have stuck with virtual worlds and MMOs since the beginning, I see designers, commentators, analysts and community leaders who have built a legacy for themselves within the world or within the industry.
When I look at those that play a short time and disappear, I see people who carved out a shallow niche or no niche at all. They left not because they learned all they needed to from the virtual world but because they never invested enough of themselves to learn much at all.
If you want people to invest deeply and stick around a long time, there has to be a payoff that matters. “Raid rinse repeat” is kid’s stuff. Building something that will stand the test of time and inspire future generations of players? Priceless.
From a strictly player point of view, I think Yukon is right about the personal investment. From an art perspective, it is expensive to paint when the canvas costs more than the studio and the paint gets updated every six months by folks who think learning how to mix red in a new pigment should be a reason for the painters to repaint finished works.
Software rots. Fast. Too fast for the actual improvement. So again, personal investment. To preserve River of Life I had to finally render to video, same for the Vivaty worlds and losing the interactivity and the richer color palette is a heartbreaker. Again, personal investment. At some point, the codeheads are going to have to take their heads out of their rear ends and understand that the rate of change in platforms mean that virtual worlds are the most disposable art since sand castles.
That’s dangerously close to a tautology, though. “People who invest heavily become heavily invested.” It doesn’t speak to motive: why do some people become heavily invested? Why do the majority not?
Also consider that a big payoff that matters within the game is exactly where raid-rinse-repeat comes from (loot jackpots and whatnot), while a payoff that matters outside the game is something someone can walk away from the game with (valuable emotional insights, connections with other people, etc.). If the former becomes unsatisfying and the latter doesn’t require more play once gained, then what?
Or, are we saying that the goal of long-term virtual world design is to create a space that facilitates the emergence of profound experiences? How do we do that?
(…actually, if that is what we’re asking, I’m totally naming this the “Gnostic Playground Theory of Game Design” as of right now. 😀 )
Speaking as a “codehead”, we’d totally do it if the business people were up for it. :p
*points at the rest of the tech industry*
welcome back to the arts, len.;) youve finally given up hope on those codeheads..and the bankers that with them create the vapid loop with no history?..;)
over in NYC a bunch of 1990s ” tech meme evangelists” are getting back to conning a new gen of creatives into “believing” in the machine as creative saviour of the arts;)
http://contactcon.com/ only 300 a seat…
names look familiar?
the net is perfect to repeat history with..;) everything gets to look shiny again.
the long Fairy Tale.
I’ve given up on everything I can’t do with my own resources. Seen too much and all that’s left is becoming Betty White. 🙂
c3 is right about historical revisionism and the cost of joining the new elite. It’s American Idol: one per year. If you don’t get above it before the year is out, you become Bo Bice playing the third tier rooms. On the other hand, it’s not like having your work consigned to the o-bin of a failed startup. Oh wait! It’s exactly like that.
There’s no invention like reinvention. For some time I’ve said that public virtual worlds resemble the nightclub business. Unless the room can be reinvented every season with a new look, new acts, remixed drinks, more elite and a higher cover charge, it dies. The problem Raph is describing is “butts in seats” and the reason anyone is mystified is so many suckers have been captured by the Terra Nova nonsense of alternate realities, worlds as independent nations, etc. It’s fake, it’s self-serving, and it’s got a burn out period that one can delay but not stop. You’re codeheads trying to grasp the fundamentals of the entertainment business and it’s time to wise up.
The Grateful Dead
What statistics do you refer to for this (I’m not doubting, just interested).
In UO, you could run the dungeons in a very short amount of time. And, you could, in effect, “pause” the game. I used to make decent gold marking rune books for semi-safe locations in various dungeons. The theme-parks of SWG took a little longer to run, than UO. The dungeons of LotRO take much longer. “In the old days” it was feasible to play for an hour and accomplish something. Now, it can take that long just to get the right group together.
For me personally (which I know is only anecdotal), it’s a shortage of time (yes, I agree, it’s about prioritization of time). I still *want* to play an VW-like game … but it has to be playable in short spurts rather than in big sessions. Most games require long contiguous sessions.
Your original article suggested that, since VW’s were about identity, and identity was primarily developed in youth, then VW’s are destined to become something only for the young.
This site suggests the average age of MMO players is 33, only two years younger than the population average. I have no idea if these numbers are correct. Assuming they are and given that the *very* old haven’t grown up with VW’s, the average age of MMO players reported is surprisingly, OLD.
I think that people engage in VW’s for many reasons, identity experimentation being only one of them. Getting a sense of accomplishment, meeting up with friends, and many more.
As the genre of MMO expands, I think you’ll see them appeal to an even broader range of ages. When will we see the first MMO designed to appeal to geriatrics? And what would that look like. Lots of perky nudity, I suspect.
I’ve hardly invested any time to a MMORPG since my teens. Since then, the only situation I’ve invested a large amount of time to one was when I was facing a great deal of depression. It helped me greatly while I was changing my lifestyle (changing colleges from online one to a much cheaper state university – had to wait 3 months). It kept my mind off of the bad things until I was back full time in college (thus the depression ending shortly after).
So, I use MMORPGs (or any game for that matter) as a tool, unlike when I was kid I used video games as a way to just waste time. I found that my time spent in games could’ve been spent doing something much more constructive (socializing, learning an instrument, studying for classes, exercising, and other hobbies). And this had started about the time I turned 18-19. Also it is the reason why I cringe at the number of hours a person spends daily in games.
Perhaps it is a reason why I’m beginning to stray away from game programming, and therefore much rather be working in some other field of software (be it business, medical, research, networking, etc.). Ofcourse, I still play games mostly everyday, but it is not a largely time invested MMORPG. It’s a quick FPS or Starcraft-like match. And mostly only with real life friends (I’ve never pursued e-friends for specific reasons).
Hamlet doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
And I think your theories belong to games, not open-ended virtual worlds.
So much of what you say isn’t borne out in Second Life.
I know people there I’ve been friends with for 6 years, and I’ve never found out their RL name or talked to them even about RL issues.
When you can make your own life and house and objects, it’s different. User generated content makes the difference.
People get tired of Second Life, but “outgrowing it” doesn’t seem quite the word to describe it.
You’re right that people do seek RL relationships and start with virtual or game relations and move to real relationships. But not always. And I think less so when you have the scope and freedom to make an identity not bound by game mechanics, that always get boring.
As for this self-knowledge stuff, that doesn’t make sense to me. I think it’s wishful thinking.
as for “self-knowledge” from Bartle, I think he wants the quest and the game to be some sort of mystical self-improvement quest — a religion or a mystical journey — but it isn’t for many. It’s overstating the power of the medium.
The phenomenon of talking to people more in an IM than in person is very common in Second Life, and what it often means is that you are talking in IM to a person not on your sim, even at the same time that you are talking to someone else on that sim. There are a lot of people keeping multiple IMs going even as they have their main relationship right on a sim with them. There are also people that teleport over to you and like to see you when they talk to you. But just because you talk a lot in IMs doesn’t mean that the world has dropped away and you’re “in a glorified chat room”. The world matters. And often you are doing something else in that world as you chat in the IMs, i.e. waiting on customers or exploring or building something.
The average time spent per week, per account, was just about the same in text muds, in UO, in EQ, in SWG, in WoW… it always hovered around 20hrs a week. The way in which they were arranged varied — SWG had shorter sessions than EQ, but people came back more frequently. Total time, however, was a near match.
prok.-
“It’s overstating the power of the medium.”
it isnt. and THATS the scary thing..the medium is still so young, and yet its still heading for its “triumph of will” years…..
followed by its “MTV” and then “American Idol” years, as Len has so acurrately described.
in the accelerated world of networks and money machines, i think metaDisney and metaViacom with a guest star from metaApple will have us all suckling from the virtualized teet in less than 25 years.:)
kids, adults, and even dead people when they figure out how to keep charging rich peoples estates after theyre long dead, uploaded and/or frozen;)
Huh! Interesting point of stability. If I wasn’t at work…
I’m not intending to say otherwise, but rather ask how much the world matters to people that are at their three-year mark (so to speak), given that you don’t need the world to IM.
“Feel like I’m in a glorified chat room” is something a portion of folks say regardless of game/world; I know I’ve felt this way about EQ1 at times, way back when. But that’s not at all saying that using IM itself has anything to do with people getting tired of a given world, in either a causal or symptomatic way. I’m only really saying that IM might make moving on easier because it can still be used apart from the virtual world.
I think c3’s kinda nailed it. Our culture’s rife with previously “kids only” things that are now for adults. Just look at the median age of video gaming.
I think your assumption about Bartle’s idea is a misinterpretation. “virtual worlds are about identity” isn’t the same as “virtual worlds are about *discovering* identity”. People flock to the Internet at all ages to reinforce parts of their identity that they like – whether it’s music taste, political interests, or best jogging route. They do it because it’s what they like, not because of a conscious introspection. However, at the same time, by interacting with others on the subject, it certainly fosters growth of one’s identity in that area.
Hey Raph! (Waves)
Interesting points both you and Hamlet make. I wonder if they apply though to the somewhat different set which is – shared creativity tools?
In the case of Second Life for example you can squint at it and say its part of the set of types which include Flickr, or you can look at it in another way and say it is part of the set of types which include MMO’s. Or does it belong in the set of social experiences? Or is it like the internet, or books? simply a tool which can encompass a lot of content?
I think first principle ontology can be useful when thinking about this kind of thing. It is even more useful if it proves impossible to do so, it demonstrates we do not have a complete understanding of something, which I rather like.
Hope all is well with you!
Rod
@Rod – Nomenclature and presentation have a lot to do with it. Control how people talk about a technology, and you steer how people use the technology.
In Second Life’s case, you folks have doubled-down on escapism. First, the name, drawing a false dichotomy of the physical world (“real” world – hate that term regarding not-VW) and a “Second Life”, like some utopian secondary existence. Then the former CEO canned your enterprise and educator projects and outreach, and the PR shifted to “ZOMG GLITERRY VAMPIRES!” and “It’s summer! Let’s hit the beach in your bikini-class barbie doll!”. Which is *fine*, so long as you don’t care about Enterprise or Education as your client / consumer base anymore. I think Linden Lab can capture the entertainment use with Second Life and make money.
But.
It does mean you’re pigeonholing yourselves. And the sign above that pigeonhole isn’t “platform” or “Internet”, it’s “game”. SL now is more like IMVU than Facebook. But if you folks are really smart, you might be like Zynga. But hopefully not *too* much like Zynga – they’re a fairly exploitative company with aggressive anti-competitive practices.
@Prokofy:
“People get tired of Second Life, but “outgrowing it” doesn’t seem quite the word to describe it.”
Agreed. And I think you’re right in that you’re validating use cases Raph’s bringing up, but stating that they’re not the totality of use cases.
“as for “self-knowledge” from Bartle, I think he wants the quest and the game to be some sort of mystical self-improvement quest — a religion or a mystical journey — but it isn’t for many. It’s overstating the power of the medium.”
Agree except for the last sentence – maybe it just needs clarification? I think the medium *can* be that powerful for some, but the medium isn’t *so powerful* that it demands it from everyone. “Second Life: The Question For Enlightenment” — so in that sense, if that’s what you mean, I can agree.
Here’s the actual page:
http://books.google.com/books?id=z3VP7MYKqaIC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA433#v=onepage&q&f=false
“PD” refers to “PermaDeath”.
Michael, I was referring to much more than that one page — though that page has the handy quote, it’s not the only place where that concept is mentioned. Bartle explicitly discusses looking at the process of experiencing a virtual world as being akin to a Hero’s Journey.
Rod, good to hear from you. 🙂
I think people see SL as world first, creativity tools second. YMMV. 🙂
Then again, I also think of WoW as world first, game second. I think that way of all virtual worlds.
Ron,
I actually don’t think that people tend to go to virtual worlds for identity reinforcement, in the same way that they do with signaling devices and shared cultural stuff like music. I have observed in the past that plenty of people tend to play the same character over and over in different VW’s, it’s true… but I have also seen so many people simply seem to outgrow the worlds altogether…
It may well be that the kids of today who grow up with Club Penguin or Habbo will keep engaging in VW’s when they are 40. But I suspect that the typical one won’t. Do you think they will?
I think that if the work in virtual worlds for organizing other social activities such as technical conferences or collaboration ever happen at scale, the kids who played games and visited virtual worlds have a head start. I don’t see that happening and believe IBM poured a lot of money into a hole in the water, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. There were a considerable number of online hypertext attempts before HTML and HTTP finally got traction.
Actually, I do think they will return if there are new reasons to do it and they enjoyed it the first time. After hearing the Buffalo Springfield has reunited and hit the road, I believe in miracles.
You know, most kids “outgrow” making music too. They “outgrow” drawing and painting, writing stories, exploring the woods, building forts, playacting, having tea parties with princesses and running their own small business with a corner lemonade stand. Most of them “outgrow” reading books for fun or engaging in any sort of activity that might be considered play.
That’s not growth. That’s having your every creative and inquisitive impulse crushed through an industrial grinder into narrow channels of socially-acceptable self-expression.
Virtual worlds are wonderfully dangerous to the extent that they smash those channels and empower people to take charge of their own destiny. Sadly, when you hand people the reins to their own destiny, most of them mill about in confusion for a bit and then hand the reins back, because they’ve been processed for so long they’ve forgotten how to set their own agenda, have their own goals, and hatch some harebrained, brilliant, insane scheme to achieve them.
They just want to be entertained, like the glowy box in the living room with more buttons. And yeah, you’re never going to keep them for any length of time, as long as they have the remote and the attention span of a gnat.
So either you build gnat games (the direction most of the industry seems to be heading), you ignore the gnats and make games for sentients instead, or (hardest of all, and I don’t think anybody is doing it well), you find a way to evolve gnats into sentients.
raph.
id offer that it was the opposite for both.. SL as “making first” world second” same for WOW.. it was the simple game first… world second.
the majoe influx into SL was about self interst- building making virtualized realife money/fame etc. onlt after you set up house, do you need or desier to enter into the community.
its same as realworld interactions… you go to school, graduate THEN when you have something to offer do you join comunity…
@Raph:
Regardless of what’s actually true, I want to say that raising this topic was very important. I’m going to just brain dump a bit, in the hopes that maybe I’ll say a few insightful things.
Our anecdotal evidence from our experiences seems to both overlap and have some differences. I know people, for instance, that go to virtual worlds regularly to enjoy live music. I pick this as an example because it doesn’t depend on the DIY nature of VWs, nor does it depend on roleplaying. Is that the totality? Hm…
I think the majority of virtual world users – including adults – use them because they’re a form of social media, and it’s a richer experience than Facebook. Explain the success of Zynga, for example. Those are some pretty mediocre-at-best games, but because people like to *hang out on Facebook*, people are looking to deepen the experience. (I wonder if something like Metaplace was just 2 years too soon?) People instead log onto virtual worlds because there’s this … people are bored and want to hang out online because TV is boring and passive for the most part. Or maybe people enjoy television but it’s so passive that they want to do something else at the same time. (I no longer watch TV, but when I did, that was my habit. I’m 31, if that means anything.)
So, I think there’s this boredom-needs-to-be-online-socializing that is filled. It certainly explains why people sit around on WoW in the cities chatting /OOC, etc. Ever since AIM made chatting online accessible to the masses, people have wanted to do it.
With that in mind – do we outgrow virtual worlds? No. I think since the motivation is boredom / search for socialization and entertainment, then people leave because they stop finding it. So,yeah, it can be a novelty factor that wears off. Or perhaps it’s the inability for virtual worlds to connect to the rest of their network of friends that’s the problem. Maybe if virtual worlds were tied to social networks, and/or were just more ubiquitous, then more people would stay. Of course, that’s the old, “My website would be immensely popular if it already had a larger user base!”
Perhaps it’s best to look at the long-tail of things. I think there’s a certain “catch-on” population for social media outlets, including MMOGs. If it doesn’t hit that level, it plateaus and withers. We saw this with MMOGs, even. (remember the MMOG charts when they were being kept up?) With each successive virtual world, that plateau has been higher, but we haven’t broken the barrier yet to widespread adoption. But, each successive one gets a little closer. From the hardcore-computer-people MUDs and VWs of the 80s and early 90s, to ActiveWorlds and There.com, to IMVU and Second Life, to what? To whatever has learned from the mistakes of previous VWs and takes the next big step – or maybe just learns from the mistakes and makes it easier to use. Or more integrated with mobile. Or facebook.
Or maybe it’s just a social Angry Birds.
But regardless, there’s direction to the technology, and while I can’t say that the next wave / next big VW will be the-one-to-do-it, I can say that there will be a next one, and it’ll be even more popular.
But “outgrow”? No. Tire of, yes.
@Yukon Sam,
I’ve spent the last few years muddling around in the education space and I’m convinced that the problem is very similar. People have argued against alternative education for decades on the basis that mere anarchy would be loosed upon the classroom if you let kids direct their own learning. And it’s not true.
There’s a very interesting middle ground that can be walked between “sandbox” and “theme park”. It has to do with a strong foundation (a cohesive world, in our case), strong role models (who are human, not archetypes with a few pages of lore), and safety (to take “magic circle” to mean “it’s okay to be weird in here” rather than “keep all those bad things out”).
I would suggest doing what I’m doing: blend virtual world design with research into 21st century school design.
So, with 3 days left on the comment thread clock (last I checked, comments are closed after 21 days), I want to reopen this with something I found via Hacker News:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.emacs/msg/821a0f04bab91864?dmode=source&output=gplain
It made me think of what Richard Bartle has said about the tyranny of the newbies in MMO design: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2157/soapbox_why_virtual_worlds_are_.php (okay, so “tyranny” is my word).
Now granted, the interfaces of VWs these days are exactly the way he describes: you do a lot of upfront work to make it so that you can play the game flowingly. But what about the game mechanics?
I don’t know where I’m going with this, but I felt it was something worth sharing.
I’m thinking back to an analogy I made a while back; virtual games as swimming pools. Right now we’ve got games that are all shallow end (fun to splash around in, but don’t expect to learn platform diving) and games that are all deep end (great for Olympic class swimmers, deadly for people just trying to learn to float). We’ve got few games with a shallow end that gradually transitions to a deep end at a pace that’s comfortable for each individual swimmer.
I know I just finished referring to shallow-end swimmers as ‘gnats’ for their short attention spans… but even gnats contribute to the balance of a healthy ecology.
At the same time, my latest obsession is Wurm Online, a quirky little independent MMO that weeds out newbies with Darwinian glee. Sometimes you’ve got to chase the kids out of the pool for an Adult Swim.
A lot of vitriol for an article that could easily be rephrased as just manual versus automatic transmissions. 🙂
Misplaced, also. True, there is a thrill to having that mastery to where you don’t think about process and can just do. Moved instead to the realm of learning an instrument, or learning to cook (with celebrity chefs now), indeed, there’s a necessity to it, to getting to a point where it looks easy and natural because it is easy and natural now, to that performer, who we look to as a performer because that skill lets them accomplish enviably beautiful and enjoyable things.
But!
Master chefs still enjoy buttered toast. A master chef has a huge range of tools and options available, likewise hard-learned and opaque to the uninitiated, and likewise can probably make better buttered toast than we even think is possible, and with their ingrained skill they can do it easily. But they don’t enjoy buttered toast more for being master chefs, and something as simple as buttered toast should not be cut off from all who aren’t master chefs. The two aren’t quite as connected as they first appear.
Are we missing out on the true bounty of taste sensations, of the true potential heights of toast for our lack of knowledge, skill, and equipment? Absolutely. But what’s the real margin of pleasure between “good buttered toast” and “professional good buttered toast”? How does it compare to the investment in time, energy, pain, all the rest?
Real Life includes all sorts of “its as deep as you want it to be” things, from music to cooking to painting to programming, all the rest. Real Life is a whole heck of a lot more complex and detailed than our recreational virtual models and simulations. And Real Life isn’t ever easy the way our games can be made easy, is it?
In fact, we pay to make life game-easy: consider toast, where about the best way is just a little oil in a hot frying pan, yet we still buy a tool to consistently produce a minimally competent version, trading the true heights of success for a near inability to truly fail. Push-button toast. No-skill toast. Newb toast.
Real Life is big enough for both automatic toasters and manual frying pans. Our simulations, we do often have to make tradeoffs in development. The ask being made, though, is to destroy all toasters so I can become a master chef.
Or, made later, destroy all toasters because I am a master chef and toasters detract from me.
The tradeoff being asked for really isn’t less.
And I sympathize, sincerely. You’ve put in the hard work and pain to become a master chef, and the game sticks you in a kitchen with nothing but push-button toasters, push-button blenders, frustrating you that you could do so much more with what you’ve learned but for the lack of non-newb tools. You aren’t able to get what you truly paid for with your time and pain and dedication.
But, that’s the rub.
Yes, the devs are going to crank out another cheap, easy to use, limited utility kitchen gadget. They aren’t going to invest in coding up combi ovens. They aren’t going to raise the non-monetary cost of playing their game, and as much as I agree with the principle having the combi ovens and pressure cookers and all the rest for folks to grow into, I also see why they get cut, why they often just don’t make good business sense.
As the article said, it’s an investment to get that skill. Time, pain, dedication, perseverence. And at the end, reward, huge reward, when it finally is easy after all that effort spent and you can effortlessly craft epic toast any time you like!
Last I checked, though, culinary academies are still a niche product, in the overall scheme of our society. And my only real beef, is don’t look down on folks for choosing to do something else with their time besides working for that mastery even if it frustrates you how they then behave, and how they’re catered to for it.