
Why virtual worlds died - hkyeti
http://iteratingfun.com/post/50274986215/reasons-virtual-worlds-died
======
azakai
> Virtual worlds don’t have explicit goals. [..] They aren’t games.

> Great technology doesn’t mean a great user experience.

Of course, but IMO the real missed opportunity was that the one virtual world
with real traction - Second Life - just made most kinds of games impossible
because of technological limitations. The client-server model they chose made
it impossible to play responsive games in Second Life.

Imagine if it _were_ possible to enter a SL region and jump right into a
platform game or an FPS. Yes, virtual worlds are not games, but they could
have incorporated and enabled games.

Instead, Second Life focused on showing how much it was "not a game", and
never even tried to address the technological limitations that prevented games
from running on it.

I agree with the post on the reasons virtual worlds failed. But it could
easily have been otherwise - allowing games would have grown the entire
virtual worlds market.

~~~
hkyeti
Agree better performing games would have made SL more interesting. But I doubt
it would have turned it into a big success. Why go to a place to play games
when I can just play the games directly.

Personally I think that the "separate games with common avatar and spanning
community" is a better way to go.

Side note - A couple other players also tried that:

Blue Mars had better technology and 3d graphics, and ability to make some
pretty impressive games, but it never really caught on, mostly because the
virtual world itself never took off and retained the players.

Raph Koster's Metaplace tried that approach on the web, building games into an
avatar community, and players also didn't really warm to it.

~~~
rubinelli
> separate games with common avatar and spanning community

You described Club Penguin: <http://mashable.com/2011/12/13/club-penguin-
disney/>

I'm not sure the common avatar is a prequisite, though. Steam doesn't have
one, but Valve tries to build its social aspects into the games as deep as
possible.

~~~
iosnoob
Good point about Steam. The community part is more important than the visual
identity. Actually the avatar as a 2d icon or profile pic could do ok. Like in
all the fb games.

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iterationx
The Internet conquered Time and Space. Want continue a chat with someone from
another continent in real time or have your messages stored and retrieved over
a period of years? No problem. But now with time and space conquered we decide
we want to add time and space... Hmm... So do I have to walk over to his
avatar? And chat? I would like to see someone solve this conundrum and make it
compelling. I find it an interesting problem to ponder.

~~~
VLM
I would extend your remarks with the observation that the worlds most
successful online bookstore looks more like a superspammy point of sale system
or superspammy order entry system, rather than a virtual 3-d world with
virtual grep-less bookshelves and a virtual check out line with a virtual cash
register staffed by a virtual teen slacker. Peapod is also a good example.

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zimbatm
> Give people a blank piece of paper and ask them to “have fun!” A few might
> get excited and start writing a poem or sketch a masterpiece. But most will
> be annoyed, grow bored and give up.

Here we get explained how minecraft is a failure.

~~~
hkyeti
Lego is very fun (well I think so), but an app to just play lego isn't going
to do as well as a lego app with game mechanic and goals to accomplish.

Minecraft has some simple mechanics. You can collect stuff. You craft stuff.
You have to survive. That makes it fun to get into. And yes the creativity and
community builds on that to achieve some amazing things which amplifies the
fun, and at that point you can ignore the survival/goal part of it. It's quite
a bit different from a virtual world like Second Life.

~~~
iosnoob
I think also minecraft abstracts the detail, allowing you to use more
imagination.

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sbov
I must be misinterpreting this - how have virtual worlds died? Every MMO is a
virtual world, there's still millions who play them, and they're still
releasing more and more.

~~~
potatolicious
They're still releasing more and more, but the profitability is highly
suspect. To be somewhat simplistic, the only profitable MMOs are WoW and a
small smattering of niche MMOs like Eve Online.

Every attempt to unseat WoW from its throne has failed miserably - most
recently the incredibly big budget SWTOR that fell with a big fat splat in the
mud.

Even more niche MMOs are having trouble succeeding financially. APB, Star Trek
Online, the Final Fantasy MMOs, all were commercial failures (big ones at
that).

The game industry as a whole is a pretty risky investment overall (big-budget
AAA-titles fail routinely and spectacularly), MMOs are even a notch above.
Sometimes I wonder why they keep getting funded - EA poured a reported $200
million into SWTOR before watching it fail.

~~~
warfangle
If you try to take the addiction formula of a game that's been honed over a
decade and re-implement it imperfectly, of course you won't be able to unseat
the king.

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nazgulnarsil
Horrible timing, virtual worlds are about to make a major comeback as the
oculus rift makes them compelling again. Just wandering around a static
environment with the oculus is more fun than the best AAA titles on
traditional consoles.

~~~
JamesArgo
Second Life is adding support. This may make it actually useful for
collaboration. I also sometimes wonder what programming with Oculus rift would
be like. A screen as tall as ones entire field of view, multiple monitors
without the multiple monitors, a bit of a sensory deprivation effect to help
with concentration--it might be pretty cool

~~~
nazgulnarsil
I love the videos where people interact with the settings from within the
environment they're virtually standing in. Very much a 'Matrix' moment.

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lmm
The virtual world was never a good idea; the whole concept arose from a bad
analogy made by nontechnical people. I'm not sure it's even worth looking for
anything good to come out of them; my impression is that what success Second
Life enjoyed (and let's face it, when we talk about virtual worlds we
basically mean second life) came not from its virtual world status per se but
by giving certain subculutres a place to roleplay. Just let the concept die
and get on with producing things people actually want.

~~~
abecedarius
I wouldn't classify Chip Morningstar, Vernor Vinge, Neal Stephenson as
nontechnical people.

~~~
kybernetikos
"I started hearing about people that connected home computers distantly via
telephone, and because, fortunately, I knew absolutely nothing about
computers, I was able to smoosh that all together and get this vague vision of
my arena, which I then need a really hot name for. Dataspace didn’t work, and
infospace didn’t work. Cyberspace. It sounded like it meant something, or it
might mean something, but as I stared at it in red Sharpie on a yellow legal
pad, my whole delight was that I knew that it meant absolutely nothing."
-William Gibson

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wildgift
I tried second life a couple times, and just didn't get into it. Either it was
totally boring, or way too kinky. Often, both. I designed a couple objects. It
was exciting at first, but got tedious, and I lost interest. The idea of
making a simple gambling game kind of got me interested again, because greed
is often a good motivator, but I had so little interest in those games to
start with, that my idea just seemed crappy after a day.

I'm kind of feeling the same way about tablets.

------
AJ007
\- Just because virtual worlds didn't results in a multi-billion dollar IPO
doesn't mean they failed.

\- The sequel to LucasFilm's original Habitat still is alive and running
online, 18 years later.

My two cents, in virtual worlds the users are the product. The more mass
market they become, the more the less interesting the average user becomes.
Unlike social networks, people visit virtual worlds to meet new people. In
some regards, more could be learned from PlentyofFish than Facebook.

------
dasil003
The technology was just premature. Of course fantasy worlds ala the cyberspace
of science fiction are something people will be interested in. The problem is
that we are nowhere near the technology to make a virtual world that is 1/10th
as compelling as the real world.

So for now we are stuck with purpose-built networked games and applications
that enhance reality rather than replace it. I don't see the next step
happening until either a major breakthrough in computing power and/or AI.
Assuming we can find a new hockeystick from the current plateau, I expect
virtual worlds with the addictiveness of heroine are inevitable.

I will be an old man and yell at the kids to get off my lawn.

------
mintplant
"Died"? Second Life has a booming economy and a consistent 50,000-60,000
_concurrent_ user count. Many of us still enjoy it; the only thing that "died"
was the unsustainable media hype.

~~~
drill_sarge
thats not a high user count. look at Wow or other popular MMOs. I bet the role
playing stuff in Garrys Mod has more players.

~~~
lifeformed
Not concurrent players. Garrys mod has around 20k. Here are more stats:
<http://store.steampowered.com/stats/>

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DanBC
VRML was pretty clunky and my connection was lousy.

It'd be interesting to see what people could do with it now. Unfortunately,
VRML seems to have been taken out of a few browsers.

What's the modern equivalent of VRML?

~~~
laumars
There isn't as such, but there is things like WebGL which is more akin to the
traditional style of programming 3D graphics (eg turing complete C-derived
language rather than an XML-styled markup language).

I used to love VRML though. In fact back in the 90s I built a whole web site
in VRML. Sadly it's problems ran much deeper than bandwidth and it's syntax.
VRML suffered from the same issues that HTML did back then; every client
rendered the document slightly differently. Plus VRML was a victim of being
too premature as back in the 90s a hardware 3D accelerator was a thing of
luxury - rather than now when even the modest onboard chipsets are relatively
powerful. So most PCs just didn't have the horsepower to really take advantage
of the 3D websites.

The weird thing is, despite it's problems - of which were many - I actually do
miss VRML. It was fun and felt really futuristic. And while I don't want to
take anything away from the developers who port cool demos to WebGL, the whole
concept of virtual worlds has lost the same magic as it had in the 90s when
people were building such things with no idea where the journey would take
them (I guess like the decade before when I first got into micro computers and
had no idea where that journey would lead me).

~~~
specialist
I wrote a VRML browser. Super fun.

VRML the language is still a superior scene / object graph language. The event
model was almost the correct answer for describing interaction and has yet to
be surpassed.

ARON (a righteous object notation) is derived from my VRML work. I hate JSON,
XML, etc with the passion of a billion burning suns. So I stripped out DEF/USE
prototyping and the JavaScript events and made this, cleaned up a bit of the
syntax, and made this:

<https://code.google.com/p/aron/>

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unsignedint
From my experience in SL:

1) What you can do there is so limited unless you pay $___ (fill in the blank
for the price of land, etc.) to build something.

2) If you don't want to pay for land, you'd naturally go elsewhere to check
things out -- I looked around, but many of the places I visited offered a very
low level of interactivity. You want to ride a cool car in the field? Nope,
you do not have permission to do that, and I believe that was a pavilion set
up by some sort of car company or something.

------
jpalomaki
Back in the days most so called "virtual worlds" I tried looked pretty ugly
and were hard to navigate compared to FPS games from same era.

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zapf
Nothing new here.

~~~
hkyeti
Hey, there's an expanded section at the bottom, maybe some new ideas in
there..

