TechgnosisWeb Prime

Not that long ago I was all excited about an online game world known as There. It seemed like a unique and interesting idea: an online world that wasn’t so much a game as a place, where you could create a virtual avatar, with virtual objects in yoru virtual home, and go exploring, to see what’s out there, meet new and interesting people, and not kill them. I was supposed to have gotten in to the beta for it, but they never got back to me. It’s been several months now, and while There seems to have progressed somewhat, it’s not out of beta yet, and I’ve grown somewhat suspicious of their revenue model, that is, selling virtual items for real money. Into this situation comes a world that seems very close in spirit and execution to There: Second Life.

If you’ve ever read Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, the idea behind such worlds as There and Second Life should sound familiar: A virtual world, not a game per se, but an online place, with virtual plots of land, items, places, and online avatars. A digital world coexisting with and given life by the ‘real’ world. Inside this vitual world, power and wealth are determined only tangentially by your power and wealth inside it. But what really matters most inside these worlds is skill. Everyone is free to program new places, new things, new everythings. This who have the skill to create great places, places that are interesting, useful, or unique, gain the notoriety that is the true lifeblood of such a system. While Second Life has a virtual economy of sorts where the game gives you a weekly stiped to spend on objects and to pay a ‘tax’ that is collected on the items you own, the system also rewards those that make themselves useful, famous, or both. As people come to know you and know about you, the world itself gives you more resources to create with. You could be a pauper in real life and a king in the virtual world, or viceversa.

The difference between this virtual world and the myriad online games out there is that there is no real plot to Second Life. There’s no leveling, ro adventuring, or combat, other than that which you yourself put there. It is simply a place, a location, a world where you can create whatever your imagination and skill allows. If you wish to just have a nice little online house where your friends can come and visit and hang out, you can do that. If you wish to create a haunted tower, complete with spooky forest filled with puzzles and monsters to fight, you can create it as well, given enough time, skill, and support. Second Life actually allows you to model new objects in game, upload your own textures, and assign script to them, allowing you to create everything from vehicles to pets to weapons to almost anything you can conceive of. The possibilities are astounding.

There are, of course, limitations. Censorship exists in this world, it is, after all, run by a corporation that wants to make money by making as many people as possible happy, so unpopular content or content that is considered illegal int he real world will likely be removed or at the very least censored. That;s to be expected, and not really a mark againt this world. I think that the most important thing abou Second Life and There is the way that they’ll show us that these worlds are possible, and I have some hope that eventually, the Open Source community will create their own worlds based on these models that anyone will be able to host, perhaps a distributed, anonymous sort of thing, like Freenet, which would end up being closer to Neal Stephenson’s ideal: a virtual world exisintg almost indepenedently fromthe real one, subject to its own laws, rules, and controls (Second Life allready runs on a scalable Linux cluster, and the way objects are streamed fromt he servers to the users is tightly tied to emerging P2P technologies, so it’s not that far off). I’m excited about what the future will bring.