Metaverse Identity Crisis, Part 2: Who's On Your Virtual World Panel?

The public, advertisers, and many developers all turn toward the proclaimed experts of PANELS to tell them what the Metaverse means and what we should be doing. We see a variety of ideas and beliefs and ways all guises as "immersive online interaction", a vague notion in need of serious explanation.

The Experts

This past two years I've been astounded at who the new set of "experts" is with virtual worlds. Gone are the developers doing real projects with real companies, and now are the virtual world developers who don't have proven products.

Of the sort, Sibley Verbeck, CEO of Electric Sheep Company, stands out as one who, while his current virtual world project is still under development, he's had a track record of selling projects and putting them out. And success stories like Virtual Laguna Beach via There.com, popular with the kids, and The L-Word in Second Life, which became virally successful, Sibley has some grounds to talk about the future.

Of the others, I hear the folks from Forterra speaking a lot, and they have some pretty hefty government work. (Which they ironically downplay as if their company weren't based around defense contracting... you know "fort-terra" - stronghold Earth?) They have some pretty solid ground to stand, as success stories go.

These two are two of the most qualified that I hear speak at the VW Conferences and SIGs and such, and yet what they keep getting tapped to talk about is the future of virtual worlds.

Everybody is interested in hearing about the future of virtual worlds, of course. Everyone has a pretty good idea of how they will look in 5 - 10 years, but no one seems to want to give up their perceived competitive advantage and talk about it in the next 1 - 2 years.

The ones that do have successful projects? Habbo and other kids' game-worlds, mostly. And we don't hear from them, because... frankly... they have ROI and want to continue doing that rather than talk about how they are doing it.

Oh, and they're games, not really virtual worlds.

The Bottom line: These aren't experts in the traditional "They've had decades of training" sense, these are people who happen to have companies who haven't totally wilted in the advertising and virtual world downsizing of the last year or so. This makes them the most qualified to be speaking on the subject of virtual worlds, but I fear we as the public assume too much of their experience.

Negativity

I've talked about the negativity on this blog before. I've debunked acclaimed smarty-pants-with-no-real-success-stories-of-their-own, who blame the platforms rather than own up to their mistakes. Sibley joined the Negativity bandwagon this year, after basically pulling out of Second Life and not admitting it, to start Sheep's own virtual world, and at Virtual Worlds Spring 2008, showing a diagram where he showed growth in virtual worlds as a flat line for the next several years. I'm not exaggerating.

Since Spring, Sibley's a bit more nuanced and has much more reasoned arguments than the sheer naysayers and sore-losers. I've been meaning to talk about a speech from September by Mr. Verbeck, and now seems as appropriate as time as any.

What Has Killed The Virtual Worlds Industry Before...

So right up front, I wholeheartedly agree with Sibley that the biggest obstacle to successful virtual worlds is interface. Actually, he sets it as his #2, but bear with me, because his #1 is just part of this:

"Moving around in 3D with multiple degrees of freedom for you avatar and for your viewpoint or camera is a skill that only video game players already have. "

Yup! We've got this beautiful set of commands that are ubiquitous from the web: Point-and-click, drag-and-drop, double-click to navigate somewhere, history, multi-window use, etc etc. Except, only drag-and-drop exists in most virtual worlds, and certainly not to the point where we can do it from our desktop of our computer. (Except Qwaq, thank you guys!)

Sibley's first point is a more vague "we need features" kind of deal.

"However, there is no virtual world platform today that has the features built in that would really make that virtual attendance far more valuable than the cost to attendees – in $ and in time and frustration. "

Given his example, I'd really label that as part of the interface issue. The features that I think Sibley points to are part of making it easier and more natural to use a platform.

Sibley's conclusion, however, was a "war on geekiness" (as if any "war on ____" ever worked). Like, we're supposed to stop revering the geek interface model and go to a simpler one. At first glance, this seems convincing. Second Life, for instance, is often a bit too difficult for casual people to create things. Something like Facebook or MySpace or Blogger.com have wild success stories because they make doing web things easy.

However, peering deeper into the issue, (and finding the notion of having a war on people like Yours Truly) I think that it's less about the Geek ideology, and more about doing the EXACT OPPOSITE - make geekiness accessible to the masses. Like Blogger. Like iPod. Like PDAs. Like Facebook.

The problem seems obvious to me - truly, beta testing is dominated by geeks, so they ask for what they want. But geeks are also fantastic problem solvers. If you bother to ask a geek, "What would the non-geek like in this (insert technology here)?" a beta tester could come up with an equally valid answer. For example, ask any 3rd party virtual world developer how to improve various virtual worlds, and they will, immediately, list improving interface among the chief needs. These developers are geeks, no doubt.

The problem, then, isn't with the geeks. It's with the CEOs, marketeers, and the decision makers failing to understand their own user-base and ask the appropriate questions. The same damn people who keep filling up these panels, complaining about why virtual worlds are too geek-centric. I'm not saying it's Sibley specifically, as he's smart and does his research about his customers; I think Sibley is speaking outloud about how most virtual world developers are doing it, and, if that's the case, I have to agree. (There's further inaccuracies in his blog post that aren't central to the main point, but since I'm essentially agreeing with Sibley's sentiment but not his conclusion, I digress.)

Here's the conundrum:

These CEO people are the alpha-male types, and the showmen-types. They like speaking, and the media eats up their words. And we geeks are content to let them speak, because we're interested in doing innovation rather than leading innovation. In another sense, we feel that doing innovation is an essential part of leading innovation, and speaking is another, but we prefer the doing part. It's not knocking the CEO types; they have their place, and it's important, indeed.

But really. When it comes to decisions and theories about "Hey, where is XYZ technology going?" maybe the geeks should be turned to more for quotes?

Little Roundtable

So tonight I got an instant message in Second Life from a colleague inviting me to Orange hosting a virtual world extension of the Virtual World SIG discussion about The Future Of The Metaverse. It was a star-studded CEO-fest:

Jon Watte CTO Forterra Inc.
(http://forterrainc.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=23&Itemid=40)

Greg Nuyens CEO, Qwaq
Remy Malan VP Enterprise, Qwaq
(http://qwaq.com/company/management_team.php)

Sibley Verbeck CEO, Electric Sheep Company
(http://www.electricsheepcompany.com/about/)

Corey Bridges Executive Producer, Multiverse
(http://multiverse.net/about/mgmt.jsp?cid=5&scid=3)

John Boring CEO, Accelerate
(http://www.accelerate-ld.com/whoweare.html)

David Dwyer, COO, zookazoo.com
(http://www.zookazoo.com/company)

Jon Watte talked about the success stories from Forterra and how we need standards. Okay, I dig. David Dwyer and John Boring didn't talk a whole lot, or at least, nothing they said stands out too brightly in my mind, so I have to assume they did a lot of agreeing with everyone else. (Correct me if I'm wrong here, comment away!)

Sibley spoke a great deal about kids virtual worlds and how cool they are. The group agreed, though I can't see how success in specialized game-worlds translates into a larger medium (kids game worlds being a small subset of virtual worlds), though I do agree that it is helping to train the next generation. (Again, 5-10 year wait, here)

What was probably the most short-sighted commentary of the night was from Corey Bridges, who talked about setting standards a priori (you know, like VRML / X3D and other failed let's-set-3-D-standards! efforts?). He complained about Second Life more than once (even though Second Life has a proven active user base of million+ and Multiverse still has none other than demonstration worlds). The apex of this was when he said Second Life was great "if you like user generated content or flying penises". A few audience members in Second Life joked that he just wanted to say that at a SIG. Maybe.

Or maybe, Corey missed the statistics that show virtual worlds open to adults (like Second Life) have an equivalent percentage of adult content to the whole as say... the Internet? Wouldn't that be a reason why it's being successful, not the opposite? Or, that, as silly as it may be, pornography has helped innovate a great deal of online web innovation? I mean, when Corey's not dissing Second Life, he's usually very intelligent with the possibility of mixed media; indeed, he did mention mixed reality being one of the highlights of his Multiverse platform.

Then there was Greg Nuyens, from Qwaq, whom I kept hearing intelligent statements from, like understanding that rather than dictating standards and hoping everyone adheres to them, we should set goals for standards and see which platforms can be successful. I've admired Qwaq since I first demo'd it, and am anxiously awaiting an appropriate-sized business-centric project that my company can use Qwaq with.

In Reality, What Appears to be A Shared Understanding, is Not

So everyone dreams of this interactive multi-world space where you can port people in between, and it's easy, and it's 5 - 10 years down the line. No one can tell us how to get there. (Not even me, to a greater degree.) But what's interesting is that each CEO seemed to have a different idea of what "Metaverse" means.

Some of them see games as an equivalent to virtual worlds, rather than a subset.

Some see them as mostly business-serving platforms.

Some see them as ways to collaborate online in immersive settings in real-time, both business and entertainment.

Others just see it as social platforms.

It reinforces my idea that we are in a Metaverse Identity Crisis. We should totally back the bus up, read our Metaverse Roadmap, and see if we can agree upon a destination before we go in circles arguing over which route to take.