The Theory Of

Here you'll find discussion of all manner of topics relating to the theory of multiplayer games. As I see it, anyway. A note to commentors: if you stray off-topic or if your reply contains ad hominem attacks, your comment will be deleted.

Author: JB47394

Back before the world wide web became a reality, there were things like America Online (AOL).  You dialed into AOL by phone and once in, you were in a simple form of virtual environment with all sorts of things that you could do.  It was a kind of private world wide web.

When I joined Microsoft in 1995, the world wide web was turning into a reality.  It hadn't exploded yet, and the folks at Microsoft had a vision of where the money was.  They saw it in building another AOL.  It was going to be the Microsoft Network, or MSN.  I had been hired to help build the tools that would let people author content for that product.  As everyone knows know, MSN became something rather different and my job changed as well.  That happened because Bill Gates eventually realized that the world wide web was a phenomenon, not a product.

Come forward 12 years.  World of Warcraft is a spectacular success.  Everyone and his cousin wants to duplicate that success in some way.  People can see how they can make money by building a monolithic product that people go to in order to get a certain experience.  Just like people went to AOL when it was a monolithic product.

Interestingly, there is a kid in town that may do to World of Warcraft what the Tim Berners-Lee did to AOL.  The Metaplace project, which I have mentioned in past blog articles, is Raph Koster's Warcraft killer.  He's not positioning it like that, of course.  He'd be a fool if he did.  The world wide web is the success that it is not because it tried to kill AOL, but because it was a good idea.

Raph Koster and company also have a good idea.  I know precious little about the details of their project, but I know the basic idea: create standards for virtual environments to operate on the internet so that they can be streamed around like web sites.  They have some serious technical challenges before them, so something as verbose as HTML or XML isn't going to do the job.  But that's the basic plan - streaming standards.

This will ruin the World of Warcraft model of creating one massive monolithic structure to entertain players.  Instead of "Warcraft or the Highway", you will be able to get dribs and drabs of entertainment from many different virtual settings.  Collectively, they will offer far more than World of Warcraft ever could have hoped to provide.  The challenge may be in making avatars portable.

An avatar is the virtual you.  Today, when you visit a web site - such as MMORPG.COM - you find that in order to interact with anyone here you have to create a new avatar.  Web sites call them profiles.  I don't know about you, but I've had to create a pile of profiles out there on the web.  If the Metaplace project is to succeed, it will be important to eliminate that mess.  We will create a single avatar and then use that avatar wherever we go in the Metaplace.  That single avatar will gain and shed various attributes according to the environment that it enters, but it will remain the same avatar.  It will be your floating profile as you hop from world to world in Metaplace, just like a single profile on the web would permit you to visit web site after web site without constantly logging into each site (or forgetting what you called yourself at a given site).

Once Metaplace is available, MMOs would never be the same again.  Anyone who can build a web site can build a virtual entertainment venue.  Given that you and I can build a web site, we could build an MMO.  It wouldn't be very good, just as our web site wouldn't be very good.  But there are talented people out there.  As a group, we can start to create artwork, systems, quests, equipment, costumes and all manner of content that people can use, switch around, modify, nudge or just throw together to create something interesting.  Just like the web.

The business people will love it.  If Metaplace catches on, there will be just as many types of MMO authoring services as there are web authoring services.  The people who run FaceBook and MySpace and other social sites can upgrade their experience to include avatars that own homes and apartments instead of simple web pages.  They would become very much like Second Life, except that everything would happen through browsers instead of monolithic custom software.  We would move from buying a service to simply having the service around.

How does anyone make money from this?  Sadly, it will mean a continuation of the advertising model, though I can imagine Metaplace worlds being pay by subscription just as there are still sites such as newspapers and magazines that charge to read them.  The AOL experience was pretty mild compared to that found in MMOs, so if an experience is sufficiently in demand, the owners of the world site may well still be able to charge a fee for entry.  In the very least, we will have our pick.

If you buy my When Flocks Collide argument, you may see the benefits of creating private worlds that permit only those who know the password into the world.  Do you really want to open your virtual world to everyone and anyone who cares to visit?  It's one thing to create a FaceBook profile and let the world see you.  Do you want to be able to see them looking at you?  What if they use their avatar to point at your posted content and laugh?  What if you forgot to disallow visitors from writing on the walls?  And you thought securing your computer's ports was fun.

However it works out, it really does seem to me that World of Warcraft may be the culmination of a breed; monolithic virtual worlds that stand apart from the rest of the internet.  Like America Online, it may be swallowed up and integrated into the standard experience of the world wide web.  It might be kinda nice to be able to visit Orgrimmar by clicking a link in Wikipedia.

[edit: Metaverse references changed to Metaplace]