
The Man Who Created Second Life Thinks We Can Make an Earth-Sized Virtual World - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/the-man-who-created-second-life-thinks-we-can-make-an-earth_sized-virtual-world
======
NathanKP
I've played enough MMORPG's to know that big is not always better. Usually as
more expansions are added the player base spreads out and the world ends up
feeling empty and boring.

The best games tend to stay fairly medium sized so that they can maintain
density and contact between players. The vast wastelands of Second Life are a
testament to the failure of rapid expansion.

~~~
zardo
A 1:1 Earth makes sense if you want to make a virtual world compatible with
AR. Otherwise, I think it only makes sense for flight simulators and games
involving space travel.

~~~
Lambdanaut
Even Kerbal Space Program shrinks planets and space down! It's simply too big.

~~~
Crito
The kerbal planets are already so big that there is nothing interesting on 99%
of the surface area of them. There are mods to make them "full sized", but
they don't make the planets less interesting than they were otherwise.

Really the planet size in that game is about game balance.

------
fencepost
Perceived surface area is relatively insignificant - Minecraft is already at
least several times the surface area of the planet (details vary by version)
even if it's much simpler and vertically constrained.

~~~
a3voices
Are you sure about that? How long does it take to run from one edge of the map
to the other?

~~~
prawks
[http://farlandsorbust.com/](http://farlandsorbust.com/)

That guy's been doing it for quite a while.

> At the end of that most recent FLoB-ATHON Weekend in 2015 we discovered that
> I was 2,266,779 blocks in the furthest 'Z' coordinate, the equivalent of
> 2,266-kilometers from spawn! Amazing, yes, but it means we are still only
> 18.06% of the way to reaching the Far Lands located at 12,550,820 meters!
> They don't call them "far" for nothing! INDEED!

~~~
a3voices
Ah, I guess I was used to playing on multiplayer where the map size is much
more limited.

~~~
Roodgorf
You may have only played the Xbox version, which did have a strict constraint
on the map size. The PC version, IIRC, has no such restriction aside from
perhaps memory and/or maximum possible values. The Far Lands referred to are
actually a result of this lack of constraint allowing the player to reach a
point where floating point errors begin to wreak havoc on the map generator.

~~~
tehbeard
Most PC servers have limits enforced to prevent runaway disk usage.

In fact it's now baked into the vanilla game as a command.

------
Terr_
I think the SL-style obsession with "we'll do X, but virtually!" is something
of an investment-chasing joke. Look at E-mail as an example of a wildly
successful global cultural and economic phenomenon.

Do you buy virtual stamps? Virtual envelopes?

Do you use a "lick" emote to adhere them?

Do you virtually walk your avatar to the post-office?

Do you virtually transact with a virtual postman?

...Hell no. The major benefit of virtual worlds is not work or commerce, but
entertainment and escapism. It's simple: Most _practical_ tasks can almost
always be accomplished better by _dropping_ the messy and incidental
limitations of reality, rather than laboriously simulating them.

Before sending a message, I don't walk down a wood-paneled gallery of my
friends portraits, I just start punching in their name and I pick from a
narrowing set of choices.

------
bkanber
Tangentially, Ernest Cline's "Ready Player One" explores a future where a
universe-sized virtual world is pervasive in society because everything in the
real world has fallen to hell. Not the best literature out there, but
entertaining and apropos to the discussion.

~~~
Carrok
Also Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" deals with a very similar society. I
recommend both, though probably would recommend "Snow Crash" to this crew more
readily.

~~~
Karunamon
Interestingly enough, the "metaverse" of Snow Crash was the direct inspiration
for the Second Life game mentioned in the article.

------
Animats
Technically, it's probably possible, but the problem with Second Life isn't
that it's not big enough. And no, the Oculus Rift isn't going to save Second
Life. There's already an Oculus Rift interface to Second Life, and it's been
around for over a year.[1] Maybe with more resolution... Then again, maybe
resolution won't help either.[2] (That's an Oculus Rift used to view a roller
coaster simulator.)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQVXl-
jOKqQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQVXl-jOKqQ) [2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nHvPopqYkA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nHvPopqYkA)

~~~
Karunamon
Big enough re: population wise, at least. SL's still quite profitable, but the
numbers are trending down, and having been a user of that world on and off
since 2004, I can say it's probably because there's not a lot to do there
anymore that doesn't involve making, buying, and selling things.

It demands a lot of technical literacy on the part of its users, both from the
hardware demands (the SL client, or "viewer" is infamously demanding of the
local graphics hardware and internet connection), and from knowing how to
navigate the sometimes obtuse interface and conventions of the world.

..that goes double if you actually want to make things. Then, your corpus of
knowledge needs to include 3D design and familiarity with Serious Business
modeling programs like Blender or 3DSM. If you're making things besides
furniture and clothing, add some programming knowledge into the mix for their
own custom programming language (LSL).

This sounds damning with faint praise, but the magic's just not there anymore
for me. Still, if you haven't actually had a look yet, you should. There's
plenty to explore and there's quite a lot to see before you get bored. The
client is free, as is an account.

~~~
irl_zebra
I've never played. Was there ever anything to do there that didn't "involve
making, buying, and selling things," or are you just saying that it has become
boring doing the same things over all the years?

~~~
Karunamon
tl;dr: There used to be, at least it felt like it, a lot of games and social
experiences and other "cool stuff" that was less about showing off how you
decked out your avatar and more about either playing games with others or
exploring strange environments.

An example: There was this Tetris/bingo hybrid called "Tringo" that was big in
the early years. You'd buy a board, and then anyone could click on it, get a
human-sized "card", and play the game against anyone else that was in the
area.

There was even a reward element to it - you could set a game as pay-to-play,
and then the top X players of each round would get a share of the donated
proceeds.

Anyways, it was _everywhere_ for a while. If you looked at the ingame list of
registered events back then, it was absolutely dominated by Tringo.

(The guy who invented the game even made a Gameboy Advance version of it!)

Eventually, people got bored of it, and now you hardly see it around anymore.

There were lots of other gaming fads (Chariot Races, Tech Warfare, skydiving
at Abbot's Aerodome..), but people just stopped coming.

Part of this is due to the server side being _really quite awful_ at having a
bunch of people in the same space. Tringo worked because those people weren't
doing a whole lot other than clicking on the board in front of them.

This never really got much better over time. More than about 20 people in the
same space and the server starts dropping frames (increasing "time dilation")
to keep up. It gets worse if those people have any scripted bits on their
avatars (and many do, since those run on the server responsible for simulating
the region)

The absolute hard limit is 40 people in the same region (65535sq/m) before it
won't let anyone else in, but it becomes unusable much before that.

------
Zigurd
Minecraft and Second Life make for an interesting contrast. Minecraft is a fun
game. Second Life is... what? I've seen presentations that claim that virtual
worlds would be good for virtual meetings, but no commercial products based on
that idea have gained traction vs video-conferencing and screen-sharing.

The simple idea of a fun game turns out to be subtle and critical to success.
What is Minecraft? A game. Is it fun? Yes. OK, it has a purpose. Is there
another purpose for a virtual world? Unclear.

------
oberstein
Even if we can, playing around with
[http://www.outerra.com/](http://www.outerra.com/) makes me question if we
should.

~~~
xlm1717
I'm curious, what argument would there be for why we shouldn't?

This is the first I read about outerra, and it actually looks really cool!

~~~
oberstein
Mostly the argument expressed by others here: it would be too boring and it
will encourage the further production of things like _No Man 's Sky_ that will
ultimately fail to satisfy because the number of hedons per game frame is very
low, and the huge/infinite world aspect only makes it harder to increase the
density. Outerra is pretty cool for what it is, but I don't see it as the
basis for a new Second Life or even an MMORPG. Perhaps there's potential for
something on the scale of Dwarf Fortress like populating the planet with
billions of unique agents with history, or as an interface to the real world
via data collected from the IoT tracking the geometry and movement of every
interesting thing on the planet.

------
CapitalistCartr
Work on improving the interface, and drawing people in, then the size will
take care of itself.

------
lux
Sounds similar to what High Fidelity are building
([https://highfidelity.com](https://highfidelity.com)), which they're also
open sourcing.

~~~
zacharypinter
"Riding this wave of virtual reality expansion, Rosedale’s new company, High
Fidelity, is developing the successor to the Second Life experience."

------
Karunamon
Philip Rosedale is pretty high up on the list of people I admire.

He's got a ton of knowledge and experience, (used to work at RealNetworks
before his stint at Linden Lab and now this new outfit), has plenty of crazy
ideas, executed on many of them (to varying degrees of success and
profitability), always keeps moving, and has a downright infectious vision for
the future.

Even if that vision doesn't completely pan out, we'll get some very cool stuff
to see from the attempt!

~~~
BatFastard
Phillip is a great guy, no question.

Being at RealNetworks would seem more a like downside to me. I hated that
product with a passion! I think RealNetworks has the distinction of being the
only technical product I have ever disliked that much.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
First make a usable one. Second Life, even today, is a sluggish and unpleasant
experience with a world that takes forever to load even on fast Internet
connections.

------
TrevorJ
Minecraft already has a theoretical land size that's larger than the landmass
of earth.

Interestingly, the defacto behaviour with players is to start brand new maps
every once in a while, even though only the barest fraction of the available
space has been used up.

------
teekert
As No Man's Sky proves We can also make an infinite world.

~~~
rtkwe
The biggest problem with infinite worlds like that is that it's difficult to
make locations feel alive and to knit stories into the world, which limits the
stories that can be told. It's great for exploration games where just going
through and seeing each location is the game but trying to give areas anything
other than cookie cutter stories/interactions is something I haven't seen from
a procedural game yet.

~~~
prawn
Yes, I think we're more likely to see interesting, finite worlds rather than
expansive but desolate worlds. As it is on Earth, people like to visit
particular locations for their natural or man-made sights.

------
yoodenvranx
> Earth-Sized Virtual World

"reamde" from Neal Stephenson come to my mind.

------
a3voices
This only sounds like a good idea if you can get vehicles that move faster
than airplanes.

------
cypher543
> The next generation headsets — head-mounted displays like the Oculus — will
> pretty likely have gaze tracking in them

How am I supposed to take this guy seriously if he doesn't even know the name
of the product he's targeting? The HMD is called the Rift and the _company_ is
called Oculus.

~~~
jchendy
He knows. He's speaking colloquially.

