Virtual Worlds

After reading the texts on virtual worlds in the reading packet, I cannot but feel a bit slow. Slow as in slow in finding, with my own power, the reasons and motives of the writers behind the texts. They apparently have found something I have completely missed.

I'm not ignorant, and I can agree with much of the minutia and minor details that's spent on character communication and so on, but seeing smart people speculating in Second Life as an incarnation of the ”Web 3.0” is mere nonsense. Perhaps as an extremely early pre-alpha, and certainly some of the potential exists right there, but many aspects of the more simple web tasks, as information gathering and searches, will be inevitably complicated in a virtual environment. Embodiment and avatars are indeed interesting, and might someday work out as more apparent factors than they are today when thinking about the web.

Anyway, jumping straight to present-day multi-user environments, I can tell you that I still haven't ”played/used” Second Life yet, though my character Yasukami Petrov is created and the game is installed. My expectations on SL are low, since much of its so-called qualitites have been strongly questioned by persons whom I trust in matters of taste and . Since it's not a game I won't get into Second Life the way I would into a game, but am at the moment a bit frightened of the entire SL thing. To me, SL simply doesn't look like a viable alternative to any other more ”traditional” means of communication. Even World of Warcraft seems like a better alternative. At least as good/bad.

To conclude, it seems that MMO's (or all games, for that matter) are only taken seriously when numbers are playing some vital part in their representation in traditional media (ex. X million users on game X or, Game X is a ”real” economy which pushes X million dollars every day). This has also been the case of Everquest, which was more widely known for its economy than for its gameplay etc. The fact that the sources for these articles are CNN Money and The Economist says quite a few things about (pseudo-)games.