I happened upon this excellent resource by John Rice who is an educator, author and speaker specializing in educational technology and instructional gaming, when he noted a recent entry I did on griefing. I really like his blog perhaps because I feel vindicated that spending my high school time reading TSR’s Fiend Folio and memorizing THACO tables really might have practical applications. Sorry Dad- you might have been wrong.

John has not only a great blogroll–

• Bud the Teacher
• Clark Aldrich’s Blog
• Education Business Blog
• EduGamesBlog Feed
• EduQuery.com
• Electric Archeaologist
• Future-Making Serious Games
• Karl Kapp’s Blog
• Miguel Guhlin’s Blog
• Research Quest
• Richard Carey Associates
• seriousgames.blogspot
• seriousgames.ning
• SharpBrains.com Blog
• Tim Holt’s Byte Speed
• VG Researcher
• Zone of Influence

and he also puts together some fine pieces and resources like Top 10 Education Video Games, gives us the truth about “Virtual Shakespeare”, follows how virtual worlds are spewing real life creations into meatspace, and I like his take on VastPark.

John Rice on VastPark

Educators love to appropriate existing technologies for pedagogical purposes. And so we have educational radio programs, TV programs, videogames … and instructional applications in virtual worlds (VWs) such as Second Life and Active Worlds. However, there is an unfortunate lack of control in VW environments, as griefers manifest themselves with online terrorism, and students may potentially wander into explicit adult areas. What educators really need are VWs they control completely, regulating who has access as well as the pedagogy that is covered. Dr. Greg Jones over at UNT is a pioneer of this idea. Now, the potential for teachers to easily create their own online education worlds is proffered with a new service from VastPark, which bills itself as a “distributed virtual worlds platform.” Essentially, you design your VW using VastPark’s tools, invite users to stroll your virtual realm with their avatars, and achieve your online objectives whether that be making money or teaching students at a distance.

Second Life Innovates but Will Serve Niche Community in the future

Lately I have been looking at Second Life “economics” and how to disrupt the market. Finally it hit me and I think it can be done by using modified classical models in the far more mature affiliate marketing space. I am seeing the same sort of entrepreneurial patterns I saw with performance marketing in 1996 and I think it will follow a similiar maturation cycle. Snowcrash anyone? I believe the struggles with Second Life have been based around its hyper-freedom. You cannot fit square pegs into round holes. This does not mean it does not have value, only that its value is misunderstood or misused.

Is Second Life Going to Die?

I don’t think so- it will continue to serve niche and fringe markets and attract hyper creatives. I think new worlds or platforms like VastPark will fill the gaps that Second Life cannot due to the nature of the platform. Their 9 new rules is a great read starting with their view that a contigious metaverse is not going to happen.

The vision of an organised single world (or even a world of worlds) where the rules apply throughout might fall nicely into the Second Life fan club’s imaginations, but we don’t think it is going to happen. We all owe SL a debt of gratitude for putting virtual worlds on the agenda. On the other hand, gamers generally look at SL and think it’s a lame place for middle aged furries and academics. Corporations want to run their own meeting places without fear of flying penises. Media companies such as MTV want to enable their audience to get deeper involved in a variety of media properties and they will generally run their universe of virtual worlds quite separately from external influences. There’s no need for a Metaverse.

VastPark’s Vision

From what I gather reading their blog VastPark posits a virtual world can be thought of as a collaborative wiki hence virtual world is controlled like a distributed content management system (CMS). Also the decentralization of content with portable worlds, platforms and purposes combined with the use of “atomic portable Widgets” will lead to an explosion of meta-worlds and quests that will become the new arena of layered interactivity that fosters exploration. Exploration equals immersion in my experience.

Also see Future-Making Serious Games VastPark piece by Eliane Alhadeff, who also covers two emerging genres that I think hold promise- alternate reality games and augmented reality games.

MetaPlace Rising

I do like their value proposition too even if their view is slightly counter to another potential contender for this lucrative space- MetaPlace, headed up by CEO, Raph Koster.

Metaplace marks itself as next-generation virtual worlds platform designed to work the way the Web does. Instead of bloated custom clients Metaplace enables gameplay on any platform that reads their open client standard. They supply a suite of tools so people can make worlds, and host servers so that anyone can connect and play. Thus the client could be anywhere on the Web.

They too boast some interesting business and marketplace with some unique value propositions as per Jason Hable’s blog post.

What is the Future?

No one really knows, but no doubt MMOs, virtual worlds, 3D environments and rapid content creation tools for gaming environments are poised to explode. There will be no one “killer world or platform” but diverse companies that are honed to fill the needs of certain environments e.g. workspace collaboration, game play, teaching and education, and simulation.

Ultimately what I am looking at is how the traditional Web and 3D space will collide and what kind of real world fragments will be thrown off as this happens.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Share This