posted on Thursday, September 14, 2006 3:08 AM
by
Endie
Terra Nova, Virtual Worlds and mySpace
Ted Castranova, continuing his recent rich vein of form in producing talked-about posts on virtual worlds blog Terra Nova, has managed to do so again, with two paragraphs saying "is this even worth discussing?" I wonder if he is for hire? (I am not being snarky: he must do wonders for TN's Nielsens...)
On this occasion, he casually asks (as an aside in another discussion) if a site dedicated to virtual worlds should discuss related issues like "Web 2.0" or 3d internet. Regular commenter Michael Chui then expands this to assert that mySpace is the largest virtual world out there. Cue forty-odd rapid and often lengthy responses wondering specifically about mySpace and generally about how broad a definition of virtual worlds should be.
To borrow some tools from Plato, mySpace is a kinda peripheral case of a virtual world at best. It has things that make it like a virtual world (communication, customisation, personal space), but it's not what you'd use if you only had one example with which to show someone what a virtual world is.
If you changed the interface from text to graphics, 2d or 3d, you'd indisputably have something fairly worldy: virtual housing, with the ability to decorate it in horrendous combinations of epilepsy-inducing flashing red/black, all set to a soundtrack of Deftones or My Chemical Romance. Go on to call the friends list a phonebook and the comments list an answering machine and you're getting towards a central case of worldism.
But as has been mentioned, how is this different from putting a VR-ish interface on a blog, a chat-room or a filing system? It *doesn't* have these features (yet). When it does, it'll be competing with that other glorified chat service: Second Life. Is it sufficient to make a Gibsonian front end to a package, with representational, graphic iconography, in order to have yourself a world? I'm not terribly interested in using Terra Nova to discuss mySpace itself. But I'm extremely interested in how you would make mySpace more worldy, and whether that would improve its popularity and stickiness.
It can only be finger-in-the-air speculation. I suspect that mySpace would shed some users if it became worldier. Its competition would be Second Life, which cannot dream about reaching mySpace levels of use right now. But with a suitably simple worldlike interface something already extant like mySpace would carry over huge numbers, for whom it would be positively Korean in its stickiness. I've ofen thought that the best growth route for Second Life, on the other hand, would be to move in the other direction: if they want to be huge then they should be looking to sell their technology as the front-end to a major chat service.
I might just be caught up in the Stephenson/Gibson/Sterling dream though.