4 changes I’d make to Second Life October 14, 2007
Posted by mwj as environment, games, media, second life, technology, virtual worlds, web2.0, web3.0, world of warcraft. trackback.I’ve been out of the blogosphere for far too long, so I’m just going to jump into it and not make any apologies. I’ve been spending more and more of my time on Second Life lately, at the University Project that Sun has set up for the Masters of Digital Media.
Second Life is a great big open playground, where you can build a lot of different things and add scripts that make them do a lot of different things. Anything that citizens make in Second Life belongs to them, and they can resell their items at any price using Linden dollars which can be exchanged for real money. But you know all that already.
What I’m interested is where Second Life falls short in its claim to be heralding in a new paradigm for cyberspace. In particular, there are at least four areas that need significant work before virtual worlds like Second Life can be part of Web 3.0.
- Peer to Peer networking: I put this first because all the other changes I’d make require far too much computing power for a single server to handle. Put simply, the old paradigm is client-server based–everybody logs on to a central server which holds the guts of the virtual world, doling out information as it deems necessary. Peer to peer networking uses bit-torrent technology to make everyone a server. This fundamentally changes the way we think about infrastructure: whereas before more people meant more money spent on central computing power, with peer to peer more people actually means that you have more power to play with. This has been done before, for example World of Warcraft uses bit torrent to distribute their patches and the SETI program uses distributed computing to find aliens. The big issue here is trust–how do we allow only the right people to turn our extra computing power into server space?
- True 3D Modeling (and physics): 3D Studio Max allows beautiful models to be built and exquisite physics to be applied to them. It does this using an insane number of polygons and lots of math. Second Life tries to lessen the load with shortcuts like treating circles as squares. The full power of 3DS Max needs to be harnessed and used in virtual worlds, but only after the computing power is there.
- Object Oriented, persistent Scripting: Scripting in Second Life is frustrating because everything is linear and data storage is tentative at best. In order to allow objects to do the things that they can do in single-user environments, a fully-loaded API must be developed which gives programmers even more free reign than they had before.
- Make it matter: This last one is far more philosophical than the rest, and hinges around the way in which World of Warcraft sharpens the minds of its players.
There, everyone has at least some goals in common–stay alive long enough to make money/gain xp/gain equipment or whatever else you want to do. In Second Life, there is no such unity of purpose. Of course, that is the way they built it. But aside from being able to push other avatars around, interaction between players is limited only to what can be programmed, which gives player-to-player interaction something of an arbitrary feel. I’d solve this by introducing death, or not being able to fly, or some limiting factor that makes the environment matter that much more. C.S. Lewis once wrote a book called The Great Divorce in which he expressed a very poignant view about hell. Hell, he said, is not a place where you are punished and forced into certain modes of behaviour–no, hell is a place where everyone can do whatever they want. What this amounts to, as the protagonist finds out, is an endless wasteland of mansions, castles, monuments to greatness, all built by people obsessed with themselves. Not having any need, they are pushed out further and further from each other, surrounding themselves with their own creations and drowning out their solitude with their own newest invention. My experience with Second Life has often been similar: I fly around beautiful cities, speeding past stunning buildings, vehicles and clothing, but rarely do I run into another human being. This is the dark side of user-generated content, and Web 3.0 must take this into consideration and ensure that players are tied together in ways to prevent it from becoming just another beautiful wasteland.
Comments»
From what I understand when you talk about peer-to-peer networking you’re talking about grid computing. As the purpose behind Second-Life seems to be a sort of online shopping mall, figuring out the trust issues behind the computing could lie in the very backbone that’s already built into the system. Have people who want to make shops give up enough computing power from their own computer, plus a little bit extra for the world. Work it like interest on sales. Get the right algorithm and you should have enough power for everybody. From what I understand of grid computing, seems to me like the trust issue here lies more in the user trusting the company (provided the info regarding that person’s interactions don’t rely on his own hardware, in fact the best way to do it would seem to be to space out everyone’s transactions over multiple domains so that no single person would have access to a single transaction binary-wise).
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