As reported earlier by Dave, Linden Labs and IBM believe the future of virtual worlds involves portable avatars: make one online representation of you, and have it work in multiple games. This is, without a doubt, the stupidest game idea of the decade.
Just about every force in game development would be arrayed against this idea, and it doesn't even make sense for players.
1. Companies do not want easy portability. A company wants people to stick with the game that funds the company, not play games by other companies. No game is going to make a design decision that will work to that game's certain detriment. Second Life can advocate this because Second Life isn't a game, and it requires publicity like this for the world to even know it exists.
2. Games have different purposes, and thus different requirements of the art. Games where a lot of characters need to be on screen at once require polygon and texture efficiencies that other games may not require. Games involving combat require avatars that can animate a certain way, as compared to games that place more emphasis on other kinds of animation, like facial animation. Creating an avatar that can do everything means creating very heavy avatars, avatars that tax most systems and reduce the potential audience of people with computers who can play your game.
3. Games have different themes. I'm Art Director for Lord of the Rings Online, and Middle-earth has a distinct visual theme. If we did not take the visuals of the game seriously, the players wouldn't believe in our conception of Middle-earth at all. If we added random avatars from other random games, our ability to maintain any notion of Middle-earth at all would be nil. So all games are supposed to abandon all control over their own art direction to permit all avatars? This helps who, exactly?
Themeless flying-penis 3D chatrooms like Second Life may not mind elves and cyborgs and waitresses and talking squirrels all standing around talking with one another, but other games take their theme a little more seriously. The Floating Vagabond is cool and all, and has its place, but that place is not "everywhere".
4. Not everyone wants to be the same person online, always. I have a Man in LotRO; a Dwarf in WoW; a blue-skinned alien with a mohawk in City of Heroes; an old, bald, mad-scientist master of a zombie hoarde in City of Villians, and on and on. I don't want to be the same character across games. I want to try new things, be new characters.
The simple fact that Linden Labs thinks that this is a feature that people will want is another clue that points to the fact that they don't seem to have an actual idea: the content is an uncontrolled hodge-podge, which is fine if that's what you want. But some games do have an idea, and do have a goal, and want to work towards it.
Comments (2)
I would tend to agree:
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/10/walking-between.html
Rather than being able to move seamlessly through worlds with the same avatar, what's more important is to have a trunk or asset box that contains things like textures or URLs for videos or whatever that can be utilized easily in a variety of worlds/platforms while still keeping the integrity and even walled garden nature of those games/worlds.
I should have an ID that is a sliding scale of privacy to publicity and that allows for multiple identities to manifest inworld.
It might develop, however, that companies just won't have the capital and the management power to keep running these expensive MMORPGs and VWs and they will have to cede to the investment of old big media corporations, or old business corporations, and those enterprises need uniformity to be able to sell their machines and widgets that connect everything and keep it going on servers.
I view this press release by IBM and LL as a kind of chip put on the board to control the conversation about interoperability, standardizing of advertising numbers and rates to understand ROI, etc. They want to control the conversation through their Open Architecture Working Group. Other stakeholders should disrupt this so that it doesn't get taken over by extremists. The conversation has to be much broader. Users have to be consulted way more than they are being consulted now.
Posted by Prokofy Neva | October 30, 2007 1:18 PM
Posted on October 30, 2007 13:18
Thanks. I read your post and am a little unclear as to where you draw the dividing line between "completely walled garden" (the current situation) and "cross-platform avatars" (the 2L/IBM idea). A notion of shared passports and trunks seems to me, at first blush, almost precisely what 2L is advocating: at least, the work required in simple asset creation and use by the various game engines would be nearly the same. A "shirt" asset in one game may be entirely different for another game, so how do these things get translated? Do you have a "gun" in your trunk? Is that valid for a medieval game? If you're not able to use the items from your trunk in a particular game, what is the use of having a cross-platform avatar? I guess I'm not seeing Second Life's position, and also not seeing yours.
I go back to the fact that different games have different needs, and optimize their content for different things. I have a hard time picturing a situation where a game that isn't a themeless 2L-style environment is going to want to support interoperability. And really, when you already have one themeless 2L-style environment, why do you need another? Is another one going to attract more people? As an industry dev, I'm looking at how relatively poor 2L is, player-wise, and wondering why I should be convinced that their concepts are good ones.
Posted by Harry | October 30, 2007 2:55 PM
Posted on October 30, 2007 14:55