Battle for Virtual Worlds 2008: Microsoft takes shot at Google

With all the attention on whether Google will launch a virtual worlds version of Google Earth (possibly connected in some way to SketchUp), two moves by Microsoft into the Serious Games and in response to SketchUp market further demonstrates that 2008 will be the Year of the Virtual World.

ESP

Reworking code and experience from MS Flight Simulator, ESP is targeted to the corporate training and simulations market - the so-called Serious Games market that Microsoft conservatively estimates is a $9 billion market. While nothing close to a virtual world - the ESP site promises that it can connect up to 30 people at the same time, and that the simulation engine:

Help reduce travel costs and augment costly full-flight and fixed-base simulator training time with realistic immersive simulations that run anytime, anywhere on Windows PCs.

Accurate, cost-effective modeling—Easily and affordably adjust simulation variables to visualize outcomes, plans, and design specs in 3D for decision making and R&D modeling.

ESP offers the code and build structure for the creation of “serious games” and the move was covered in depth at Future Lab.

SketchUp MatchUp, SilverLight
In a previous move, Dassault Systems launched, in partnership with Microsoft, a virtual Microsoft Earth called 3DVIA. The Dassault link-up to Microsoft enhances an ecosystem of products and platforms targeted primarily to the corporate market.

And finally, Microsoft’s launch of the Silverlight beta offers competition to Flash for creating richer online experiences including the ability to embed video.

The combination of small steps by Microsoft, including entry into the Serious Games market, may at least act as protective flanks against the possible entry of Google in the virtual worlds market, while laying claim to some of the corporate turf that has been the domain of smaller studios.

Open Ended Virtual Worlds: What do you like to DO?

Our friends at Not Possible in Real Life have posted 2 brilliant overviews meant to guide newcomers to virtual worlds, Second Life in particular, and it’s a combination of almost tactical advice but also opens up the much larger question - what do you want to DO?

It’s my personality type - I just don’t LIKE being told what to do - to me, a well-designed GAME is one where there’s enough flexibility to chart your own path, which is why simulator games like SimCity and broader strategy games like Civilization always appealed to me. You have CHOICE, and those choices are guided by the code towards giving feedback and rewards based on those choices.

Virtual worlds are also governed by code, and while the code can inform choice, some of the more profound issues that are emerging in virtual worlds are at the level of policy: economic, governance, identity, trust, and intellectual property. Because many virtual worlds are being constructed as platforms on which their users can perform choice, the balance between avatar rights and the rights of the platform providers will increasingly be fraught with legal, political and social consequences. As more users migrate to virtual worlds, they will expect and deserve rights much as migrant to new countries do.

The Challenge for Designers
The challenge for designers of virtual worlds is multi-layered. Worlds can be constructed to offer a combination of advantages based on technical, social, economic, or personal rewards. Many 3D worlds bypass the technical challenges of being true 3D environments - you can move forward, back, up and down, but you can’t rotate around - 3D, but with a flat view plane. Instead, they focus on their economic model and creating bridges to Web services and Web sites - Twinity comes to mind. Others focus on the technical platform, building a virtue out of interoperability or open source architectures. Others are primarily social, and with the explosion of interest in “Web 2.0″ we can expect a lot of venture funding to flow into social worls that lift off the Facebook/mySpace phenomenon in the year ahead (in many cases simple for the sake of funding, to my mind - Kaneva, for example, leaves me cold and the novelty of chatting with people in a virtual club wears off quickly). VLES is a better example mainly because its driven by a solid stream of published content.

The challenge is to create the right balance of features to appeal to users and to keep them. Game platforms have history and academic study on their side. The four “gamer types” has become standard issue methodology for game design - combine activities, quests and rewards based on the needing to please the social gamer, explorer, etc. But games have the advantage of having a sense of progression - the challenge with open worlds such as Second Life is there’s no specific goal.

For the Second Life Newbie
I love this quote from NIPRL:

There is very little about Second Life that truly parallels Real Life. Just as a day in Second Life is only four hours long, so goes the speed, the immediacy with which things take place once you become an active participant. It is also so much easier to expose yourself to new information. Fact is, Second Life is a library, a school, a conversation… on steroids.

Speaking for myself, nearly every sentence I uttered in my first few weeks in the metaverse ended with a question mark. You aren’t alone in worrying that you don’t have enough time in your Real Life, let alone a Second Life. I also worried that it was unproductive and possibly not the wave of the future that the media kept reporting on. I was quite frustrated with the technical glitches I was experiencing, too.

The challenge with Second Life, and the reason that I believe a lot of the virtual world development in the coming year will be either highly focused or absurdly broad, is that the choices are daunting. The lack of structure is likely one of the top reasons for newbie attrition in the first 90 days (only 10% remain). People like to know where they’re going, to know what they SHOULD do. In my experience, those who stay in Second Life do so for one of two reasons: they’re either there for a very specific reason or with a specific motivation (for example, to hang around with a specific group of people or to perform a specific business task) OR, they’re like strangers to a new city who avoid guided tours like the kiss of death and prefer to just WANDER AROUND.

Imagine going to a large city - New York, say. Why is Second Life any different? You can take the quick tours and get a skimming sense of what the city’s really like, or you can get down in the street, talk to people, explore, and find the little places off the beaten track where you might meet people with diverse interests whose experience and insight can benefit you, illuminate, inspire, captivate, perplex.

Lessons from Second Life: Imagination, Discovery and Negative Consequences

A long and thought-provoking post on the dangerous lessons of Second Life reminds me again of the “strange loop” and offers insight into how the issues of identity, emotion, trust, and immersion will shape issues in the years to come: years when more and more people will migrate to increasingly “real” synthetic worlds.

Dave Pollard summarizes the negatives of his immersion in Second Life with two observations:

On Appearance
In Second Life we can have both. Everyone in Second Life appears lovable, aesthetically and erotically. So from the safety of our lovely avatars we can afford, and have a platform, to put our hearts and minds out there, completely, nakedly, and be accepted for who ‘we’ truly ‘are’.

On Anonymity
We are attracted to those who offer mystery, passion, attention and appreciation, even when that is unhealthy, insincere, needy or manipulative.

We love who we imagine people to be, and that can create terrible problems when, as the relationship matures, they are revealed to be something very different from who we imagined.

It’s easy enough to dismiss these observations with the reply “and what makes this so different from real life?”

But Dave touches on points that are both the peril and the promise of synthetic worlds. Not to over-quote Castranova, but as he points out, people migrate to virtual worlds because they find some part of it better than ‘real life’, because the time spent there is more rewarding than the real world for at least part of the time. Castranova would argue that the question shouldn’t be whether there’s something about virtual worlds that’s addictive but that we should rather ask, what is it about the real world that is less attractive that we’d seek time in a synthetic place.

Migrations happen from country to country because of war, famine, poverty, or lack of opportunity. Migrations happen because there’s hope for a better life. Migrations to virtual worlds happen for similar reason - first, to be amused when real life isn’t amusing, we’re sick of television, or shooter games just aren’t enough anymore. Second, for economic opportunity, a better life including all the trappings of consumed goods, or even for a sense of belonging when we don’t find community in the world around us. The countries we live in can be harsh, cold, and yes, Dave, filled with ugly people. In Second Life you can find beauty both in environments and avatars - yes, everyone is beautiful, and we can probably find our ‘dream date’, letting our minds block out the idea that we might be talking to a man when we think we’re talking to a woman, or that their “magic” hides issues of dependence or emotional instability.

Virtual World Growth Forecast

Not sure if this is an update from my previous post of this chart, but Massively reports the latest KZero forecast for virtual world growth:

Interesting, anyways, and visual.

Mind you, KZero is also the company that charges 117 pounds for a report on SL statistics that includes stats you can practically get entirely from SL itself (but hey, they took the time to put it into slides):

Registered accounts
Unique accounts
User account metrics
Growth rates
Gender splits
Total and average hours
Age ranges
Accounts by region/country
Usage types by region/country
Demographic state of play
Qualitative research

Virtual Worlds and Social Science Conference

Forthcoming in February at Emory, for all you thunking types out there, the press release states:

On Monday, 11 February 2008 Emory University will host a public forum
discussing both research and long-term implications of virtual and
real-world interactions with regard to commerce, politics, and society.

Castranova positions the conference as the first gathering of the growing community of academics examining virtual worlds:

These possibilities have now been thrust into the spotlight by the publication, in Lancet and Epidemiology, of research on the Corrupted Blood plague in World of Warcraft. A trickle of virtual world social science papers is appearing. It appears we are now entering the next phase, in which hard-nosed, quantitative, social and behavioral scientists will address the likely impact of virtual worlds across all society. A community is forming, and the first conference of this nascent community will meet at Emory University on February 11, 2008.

See you there! I’ll be the one wearing tweed with patches on the elbows.

Second Life: There are NO Unique Users

…or, at least, unique users are no longer being tracked by the Lindens for ‘algorithmic reasons’.

The latest economic statistics were posted by Linden and although trends were stable, it doesn’t feel like a way to head out of 2007 on an upbeat note.

First, the stats were late - and for corporations or agencies looking to keep an eye on traffic stats towards deciding tactical projects to kick of 2008, it must be irritating to read that the latest statistics were delayed:

Apologies for the delays in getting these out, folks, we’ve been busy behind the scenes trying to focus on some service improvements, stability, and instrumenting the system to deliver us more internal metrics - such as Teleport problems.

Now, if I’m sitting around in the lull before the holidays mulling over whether to open a virtual office, hold a conference, or get involved in SL, those are hardly words to inspire hope and confidence.

What’s more worriesome is that Linden has decided to dispense with the unique user metric. They say, in a very off-handed way:

Change: Due to data quality concerns under the “Unique” population figures published historically, we are discontinuing publishing this figure. It had several challenges, regarding retroactive cancellation of accounts and the algorithm used for determining uniqueness.

This is worrying on so many fronts.

First, one of the arguments against Second Life usage statistics is that the numbers are inflated for a whole variety of reasons. The number of visitors in the last 60 days, for example, posted at the top right of the log-in screen, hides all kinds of questions and assumptions - how many of those visitors relogged? What’s the attrition rate in the first rate of newbie sign-up? There’s a common impression that only a small percentage of people who log-in to Second Life actually survive the learning curve and stick around. Linden’s promise to improve orientation and help for newbies needs to be made a top priority. One of the problems with SL is you can sell it as a concept, but as soon as a client logs on to try it they’re so baffled and confused that they assume (rightly) that many others must feel the same way.

Second, if Linden can’t deal with the ‘algorithm issues’ of tracking unique users, then are there other problems with their stats package?

It’s also worrying because without a unique user count, we have no way of knowing the validity of user concurrency or trends. The use of multiple avatars inflates the numbers. I’ve experienced this myself with lag-inducing, bandwidth sucking camping bots. On more than one occassion, I’ve seen multiple avatars used to camp traffic on sims, much as reported on the NIPRL blog.

Are these some of the “unique users” you didn’t want to count?

But finally, I think it’s worrying because I think SL is being coy. They don’t want to publish unique users because it puts them at a competitive disadvantage. Too LATE. Hiding the stats won’t go very far in convincing people that you have momentum on your side. Providing better service to users, business, and the grid WILL. Let’s see some action on your ballyhoed priorities, Phillip, before time runs out. I’ve heard enough about HAVOK and Windlight. I’d like to see better orientation, better business and concierge services, and a saner approach to the JIRA.

All in all, the new stats package will leaves us with a few doubtful numbers to try to get a read on whether the SL population is growing, what the bleed-off rate is for new users, and whether there’s an alt underclass driving camping scripts and sitting in skyboxes borking sim stats.

On a slightly more positive note, the in-world economic transactions trended very slightly upwards. However, considering that October/November should have been breakthrough months for SL on the heels of the media coverage and flood of newbies attracted by the CSI New York and The Office episodes, the net result is a bit disheartening.

Like many others are saying, it feels as though SL is taking a breather. Over the past several months I’ve heard anecdotally and first hand of any number of businesses and educational institutions who are taking a wait-and-see attitude headed into 2008. My belief is that the markets, both within SL and of those wondering whether they should bother, is waiting to see how things shake out in the first part of 2008.

The anticipated launch of Metaplace, other virtual worlds picking up momentum, and an eye cast in the direction of Google might be enough to leave hope that a virtual world platform can do what SL can’t - provide a stable, easy-to-learn, interoperable, and user/business-friendly platform that makes more sense than the creative and technical chaos of SL.

Games Everywhere - and the ubiquitous metaverse

Livegamer’s move into a “free economy” of sorts is the topic of an insightful blog posting by Wayne Porter, and I’m hesitant to comment much because I’m such an amateur at this stuff.

Porter points out that the trading of virtual goods is brought repectibility by LiveGamer and its significant venture capital backing. The broadening of economic trade outside the magic circle of games is further evidence of not only a migration of people to virtual worlds but wealth and economic production as well.

From my amateur’s armchair, I’ve given my take before on the economies of virtual worlds, riffing off the work of Edward Castranova, including my disagreement with him over the concept of protecting the magic circle.

Castranova argues for the protection of the magic circle, but I’ve been arguing that the membrane is too porous to protect - so long as people value objects, markets will be created for those objects whether in shadow economies, black markets, or legitimate exchanges. While there will still be true game environments, I can’t think of many MMORPGs that could survive without some sort of economic engine - it doesn’t need to be gold, necessarily, it could be tools, equipment, etc. Otherwise, they’re not virtual worlds, they’re shooters or simulations.

Knock Knock Metaplace: Let Me In!

Not being one of the super-elite (or lucky registrants) currently beta testing Metaplace, my curiosity is, of course, insatiable. Being in the alpha group on other worlds just tends to disappoint - I suppose I’m more of a beta man. But I’m mostly curious because I’m interested in knowing whether Metaplace will tend towards being a gaming platform or will be broad enough to entertain other approaches.

Well…it’s not much, but a few screen grabs from projects of Raph Koster are at least crumbs to the starving.