Second Life, truly revolutionary MMOW ideas, a step closer to true virtual worlds

Cafe Society
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I’ve been trying out Second Life http://secondlife.com on their free 7 day trial after hearing about it from a friend. I doubt I’ll be sticking around for the reasons below, but it’s utterly fascinating and well worth a look around for a bit.

Basically it’s a world full of people with fully customizable terrian, avatars, objects, physics, scripting, and so on. You can upload your own sounds and textures, and as you play, all the content you need is downloaded on the fly. The result is a world created by entirely its users, chock full of crazy creations, vehicles, games, and stores.

Now, is it fun? In some senses, no. Gameplay is, in the end, basically an infinately customizable front end to IRC chat. The most interesting things I’ve come across so far are costume balls, dances, races, trivia contests and the clothing stores. There is no overarching plot and no real danger: just people chatting, shopping, building crazy art projects and generally being friendly neighbors and tourists.

But still, it’s pretty amazing that celebrity players in the world have designed entire lines of virtual clothing and artwork. Or that one guy built a functioning UFO, probe, and other animationed objects to allow him to float around abducting people as a gag. Or the giant flying cities, sprawling mansions, art shows, etc.

I think it’s worth a look for anyone thinking about the future of online interaction, online society. Truly an amazing piece of work, though not something I’d spend a monthly fee on.

Anyone have any idea about how future games like this could revolutionize online play and bring about the virtual worlds we’ve envisioned for decades now? And what could be done to make a game like this more interesting than well… essentially a second life?

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Games are about what we wish we could do, fantasies of what we’d like to be. An invincible barbarian warrior. A super-spy in a high-tech world. A wielder of magic. The top thug in a lawless world, etc.

So rather than a “second life”, what features do we wish the real world had? How would you rewrite the rules of how reality works if you could? Part of the fun of simulated worlds is the ease of construction: you can create almost any object you can design. Unless the world is deliberately designed to impose “material” constraints on you (like having to earn virtual credits to buy virtual necessities, etc.)

Currently virtual worlds are too restricted because they have to use a limited set of objects whose behavior has to be specified by preprogrammed rules. A big breakthrough would be enough computing power to actually calculate objects’ behavior from first principles (like being able to create virtual lumber by sawing down virtual trees and building virtual houses with it).

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Well, part of what makes SL so neat is precisely that you CAN build things and make them do just about anything within your imagination. Certainly any objects you make have to be pre-programmed with behaviors if you want them to do something other than be just plain physics objects, but I would count that AS being able to make the rules.

The problem is not necessarily the flexibility, but whether that flexibility can be put to good use. SL doesn’t so much lack flexibility as it lacks clearer sets of goals and challenges. Like real life, it’s too open ended to work up any sort of suspense or mystery.