Gaming / Virtual Worlds

From TechCrunch

Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, may be extending their crackdown on “Broadly Offensive” behavior to Bestiality, following attempts to remove virtual pedophilia (or Age-Play) from Second Life in March.

The Second Life Herald (NSFW) goes on to ask whether consenting adults dressing up like animals and partaking in virtual sex with each other or with human shaped avatars (virtual bestiality) constitutes broadly offensive behavior.

There is also a wonderful debate going on about how accurately a virtual animal has to be rendered to be a participant in an obscene act - Roger Rabbit not apparently, Jessica Rabbit yes.

The initial thought is that you just can't make this stuff up

However, the secondary thought is that yet again Porn (3.D style) is showing the way..........the issues brought up here point to the future differences in legal niceties between virtual and real worlds (i.e. is what is illegal in a real world also illegal in a virtual one - is a virtual crime like this still a crime, as arguably nothing has happened, and the animal is actually an avatar of a human*), and this is just the tip of it - we haven't even started with religious issues yet, but it will come as early adopter geeks give way to mainstream users.

Over the next few years one can imagine a whole host of virtual situations which will create interesting ethical and legal dilemmas.

The worlds may be virtual, but the issues - as with taxation - are real.

*allegedly

Was mulling over something I read in a piece Nic Brisbourne wrote earlier this week , about marketing people paying Linden avatars to hang around their clients' sites to make them look populated / popular, virtual world spam, and an aside about a little script that can make the avatar move.

I was nostalgically taken back to some stuff I first looked at some 10 years ago, ie Evolutionary Algorithms and the wider virtual science of Artificial Life.

For those unfamiliar with these terms, in a nutshell Artificial Life (A-Life) is the creation of self organising artificial systems that behave in life like ways. The underlying rules of quite complex behaviour can be very simple, for example "Boids" was an early very simple simulation of the way that flocks of birds fly - see an explanation here, and this YouTube video below



Anyway, seemed to me that those advertising wonks doing this are total amateurs at this game....if you are going to have false punters anyway ( sockpunters? ) why not have a whole swarm of 'em rather than a paltry few, and why not stick some A-Life routines in so that all those fake avatars can go do lots more that just twitch to the vibe. Send em touring in swarms, let em breed with each other.....

In fact, take it one step farther.........add some more complex A-Life routines and your Avatar can just go touring Second Life on its own, you need never bother to go there, Linden gets its visitor numbers up (hey, why not spawn a few million of its own using Genetic Algorithms while you are at it.), then the PR agencies that flog SL presence continue to make money and the poor old client is none the wiser

Unless they read this of course....

And why stop there...program those artificial avatars with some Messages From Your Client, so next time some sucker tries to chat up some gorgeous creature in SL, he/she gets a whole reel of real time Spam.

With realistic facial gestures and manners to boot.

Yes, you have just met a Spavatar .............. Turing would be proud of us

3D Spam - hah! - you haven't even seen the start of it yet......

Hmmm..I wonder if those nice chaps at IBM are building one of these

So, here is the traffic curve on Alexa for Second Life, the darling of the Web 3.D world. As you can see. the traffic is going down. Now, this clearly cannot be from Second Life usage declining, surely

So we can come to only one conclusion - that for some Strange Reason, Alexa toolbar owners are going elsewhere.

Wagner James Au feels that the above graph shows the end of the growth of World of Warcraft, not sure thats what it shows - the line seems fairly straight growth except for the release of the Burning Crusade in Jan/Feb....another few months before its clear methinks.

More amusing is his post re Second Life advertising goodness: - how many customers do you think those high profile Second Life launches get

So how does anywhere from 6,454 to, well, zero, grab you?

That’s the spread of weekly visitors to real world corporate sites in Second Life, according to SL demographics expert Tateru Nino. (who analyses this for James)....

....In the three weeks since she began, the highest weekly total belongs to Pontiac, which hosts a kind of virtual autobody island where Residents can customize their cars...followed by a site for Showtime’s The L Word (4,687), where regular events are held on a recreation of the show’s main locations; IBM has an expansive site which includes an open source coding tutorial lab (4826).

The low end, however, is littered with some of the world’s most prestigious corporations and brands. Despite entering Second Life to much mainstream media fanfare, companies like Sears, Sun Microsystems, Dell, Coca Cola, Reebok, Coldwell Banker, and Calvin Klein have so far failed to attract even 500 weekly visitors each (during Tateru’s headcount, at least)— some of them far less. For comparison’s sake, there are currently about 400,000 Residents who log into SL on a weekly basis; about a million have logged in over the last month.

One would assume, guessing what it costs to put something on Second Life, that this is several (tens of?) thousand pounds per customer acquired....

(Ah....a mere 2 weeks on, the news has gone mainstream....)

We wrote several months ago that in our view the major problem with all the various MMORPGs was that they were closed systems - Tharg the Mighty couldn't hop over from World of Warcraft to Second Life for example for a bit of lootin' and pillagin' (though its arguable who'd be doing the rapin', Second Life being what it is.... .

There is an article today in the Economist making this same point - and talking about Multiverse network, a sort of OpenID (OpenEgo?) allowing avatars to seamlessly transfer through a unified - or maybe federated? - Metaverse (the Universe ?). They call this online gaming's "Netscape Moment".

(This is the same problem that Social Nets face....how do you move your data - profile page and social nets - from say MySpace to Facebook, or all that music stuff you've built up from Last.fm to Pandora )

The interesting thing is that they've done it using open source because, in the choice between getting big or going home the only way to get big was to collaborate (as opposed to Netscape who, in time honoured IT tradition, snaffled the technology from someone else's R&D lab ) with the huge Open community.

This trend is inevitable - when my 12 year old son was born I was playing Doom and was entranced, he now programs Doom-like environments with open source software written at a Dutch university at IT club at school. Second Life last year bit the bullet and started to open itself up.

The Economist makes an interesting comparison of this movement with the OSP/ISP battle in the mid 90's - AOL had all the advertising (as does 2nd Life today), so the 'Netizens had to create an open enironment, ways for users to generate - and find - content, talk to each other etv (yes, there was intelligent life before Web 2.0).

Make platforms available in this new open system available and a new generation of "Web 3D" d
developers will emerge to build the applications

Now this is where it gets interesting.....in our view, the 2nd Lifes of this world are too complex (and Habbo probably too simple) for the mainstream user - but given the opportunity, a darwinian world of "Web 3D" developers will find the sweet spot.

The issue in the '90's was that the 'Netizens couldn't get into AOL et al, but once people started to find enough good stuff outside the walls soon were breached - from the rush within to get out. You couldn't go from AOL to CompuServe, but you could go to the 'Net.

So Tharg the Mighty will probably never get to Second Life, but voyages aplenty await to the Open Isles of the new Cyberworld.

Afterthought...there is an implicit assumption that such an open world will be played on a PC. This is not necessarily so - a PS3 is perfectly capable (cyclewise) to run such games, and with its ability to run Linux could be part of this movement. We have also been experimenting with playing computer games on our big screen MyPCTV rig, and its a very good experience - so we immagine an iptv / webtv exprience could be part of this movement as well.

Looks like the beta test of using voice on Second Life will be rolled out.

This is very interesting for expanding Second Life as more than a sex site with user generated environments and the ability to colour in your own trainers. (OK, OK there is more to it than that....though sometimes one wonders !! )

We have blogged before on the huge potential for 3D social network sites, both for consumer and business use, and the ability to add voice does make a huge difference to the overall experience - as anyone who has used voice to play World of Warcraft will confirm..

As Philip Linden (aka Rosendale) put it:

"There are a lot of problems with telephony when doing conference calls. You can't tell who's talking if there's more than one person. But in the virtual world, voice solves it," said Rosedale, noting that avatars with three-dimensional voice integration will likely accelerate using Second Life for holding virtual conference meetings.

Of course this will also increase its...utility?.....as a driver of Porn 2.0 too

I wonder how long it will take Habbo Hotel to add voice to its Habbits.....?

One to watch........

Once upon a time it was simple...you got onto a websystem, set up you profile or avatar or whatever, and there it stays until you come back. No more..the Wii system's Mii's (aka avatars) can roam around the network and appear in other people's games

"To put it simply, Mii Parade is a system that uses the network to allow Mii characters created by many people to mix and mingle," said Mr. Nogami. "You can line up Mii characters in the 'Mii Plaza', but at the start the only Mii characters you will find are those you have created yourself. Over time, however, using the WiiConnect24 system, other users' Mii characters can come and visit. In the same way, your Mii can make an appearance on someone else's Wii, although this won't happen unless the user has authorized it. The user can choose whether or not to allow their Mii to come and go on the network, so the only Mii characters that will appear on someone else's Wii are those where the user has permitted it."

It's possible for Mii Channel characters to interact with other characters from around the globe. "Your Mii can pop up anywhere," said Nogami, adding, "I should point out, though, that your Mii will never go missing from your own Wii."

Maybe now that Second Life is going open source, I'll find my Avatar has gone off to World of Warcraft for its holidays?

At the moment you can't spectate through their eyes, but no doubt that will come too. Coupled with Google's PC snooping on the sound coming out of your TV 24 x 7, it won 't be big brother watching you, it'll be anyone's brother or sister watching you.

(I saw Lynette Webb's post on FutureLabs and then went to the original source)

Last Friday eBay looked like it was going to ban all trading of virtual market stuff for World of Warcraft etc - thus either strangling the virtual GoldMines in China or, more likely, allowing a major competitor to itself to emerge - but lo, now it looks as if Second Life is to be spared?

Is this because eBay's founder Pierre Omidyar is an investor in Second Life

Of course not, it is because - on Second Life the user has control of their own IP and thus can buy and sell it on eBay.

Glad that thats cleared up then......from now on its only Second Life that the Tax authorities will want to know about as World of Warcraft trde goes underground with its dwarves and goblins.....

(Postscript...just seen this is also covered quite well here on GigaOm...makes point that open IP will be used by competitors to Second Life )

Oh...and Clay Shirky has a pop at Second Life again today...article calls Jaron Lanier the Babbage of Web 3.D and compares 2nd Life voluptresses to prehistoric clay models among other things....good read)

Following on from yesterday's post, was musing on the MetaGoogleverse and what would really be required to run Web 3.D, and I decided that as well as a webservice you would probably need powerful virtual reality processing devices in the home. Ten years ago that would have been very expensive, but two newly released games devices are very interesting for doing this from a low cost/ease of use standpoint.

Firstly, the user device...the Wii is winning friends and influencing people, but the real lesson to me is that VR end user gear is now do-able at reasonable price and considered commercially interesting - see here for e.g. I don't know how easy the Wii will be to repurpose yet, but I'm sure time and the hackforums will tell.

Secondly, the processor - people have been talking about this since the PS3 architecture became clear, here for example, and the NCSA did put together a cluster of PS2s as well (see here)

I blogged on this awhile back, the architecture of the PS3 for its price (in US dollars anyway, it looks like a rip-off in the UK right now) gives it formidable power, and it will support Linux so its an interesting opportunity to get a really powerful machine up and running with not too much effort.

(Or would be if we could get our hands on them in Europe, they are not officially on sale for a while yet.)

It looks like one can run Linux machines as virtual parallel computers (see here), even over GB ethernet, so if one had a few of them at home....

Now, for processing power what can Amazon's Web Services do for Web 3.D entrepreneurs?

In addition, the Vancouver based International association of Virtual Reality Technologies says it will launch an initial phase of its Neuronet, optimised for linking online virtual worlds and big media users.

This is turning into a space to watch for all the broadband virtual mediaheads out there.....

Is this the beginning of Web 3.D? No sooner does the BBC announce its plans for a Virtual World, then this note on GigaOm seems to imply that things are hotting up for Google's plans too. This has been talked about on and off for a while of course, but adding this article to the purchase this week of AdScape, an in-game advertising house, things start to look very interesting.

We have noted before that Second Life in our view requires too much user investment (as it currently stands) for a real mainstream play. (It hurts to say that, I do like it, but I think as it currently works it is high end rather than mass market). Added to that, although it has started to show the way for in-game advertising in a 3D world, it wasn't really constructed with that purpose in mind.

Now I don't know this for sure, but I would suspect that the simpler games like Habbo Hotel have a lower total costs of sale per $ sold. It seems to me anyway that the costs of store setup, store finding, time required to make a sale and the overall infrastructure support costs are higher in 2nd Life than in the simpler metaverses. When we come to serious 3D commerce, this will start to matter.

But, again as we have noted before, the Habbo sort of environments are too simple to really have the flexibility and potential of a full 3D environment - what is needed for the mass market is something somewhere between the two in complexity and capability.

And if it was built for advertising and e-commerce from the get-go......and was easily searchable.....

If one looks at the other assets that can be mashed up in the Googleworld, like Google Earth for example, it gets very interesting indeed - imagine a Second Life virtual world made on our First Life world.

And if anyone recalls Michael Crichton's book Disclosure, and the film, there were some fascinating scenes where the use of Avatars and the representation of data in a 3D dataworld is described.

Enter the Virtual Googleverse........

So, is this the beginning of Web 3.D?

Postscript - found this article later on at Eirepreneur, who had the same thought as I did - but 5 days earlier. Pipped again