Visualizing the Future

From the Institute for the Future

Jason Tester  speaking about Context-Aware Games.
Gobi and Human Pacman as location-aware games.   Nintendo's Revolution.
Tech developments (Devices, GPS, wifi, sensors and RFID)   
Video Game History (Trajectory from MUD's and Pong to increased realism and scale of WOW)
Social Experiments (Scavenger Hunts/Puzzles, geocaching, flash mobs, in-store games -  Ministry of Reshelving) -- tagging
First context-aware experiments
    Botfighters -- early 90's in Sweden
    Dodgeball -- sms with location to db, db tells which friends are close
    Yellow Arrow -- sms and paper
    Organum -- project at Berkeley where voices control 3 xyz axes of navigation
    I Love Bees

Future Scenarios
Bullseye -- RFID-triggered messages in a global story.  Fun in shopping
the Real world: warcraft
Nintendo You -  environment becomes game input device
Search Party -- groups collaborating to solve puzzles

Contextual Activity will come from4 places
environment
physical activity
other people

Anyone can play these Games -- ones that tweak reality will outcompete ones that try to replace it
Gaming will occur anywhere, anytime or with anything

Game Space and Real Space will Become One.
Other People Are Essential in Context-Aware Games
Most Exciting Games will Come from The Bottom Up

My Talk at the SL Community Convention

Thought I'd give a little rundown of the speech I gave at the recent Second Life Community Convention in NYC. This event was special in that it was the first time that a very large group of Second Life users had convened in Real Life.  140 Second Lifers from around the country converged on New York for nearly two days of "metaversal madness". 

On Saturday night, everybody met up at a bar in the West Village.  Everybody wore nametags around their necks, with their avatar's name and picture on it.  People hugged, laughed and screamed things like, "My god, you're Chosen Few/Epitaxial Playfair/(any bizarre SL name you can think of)".  While there was certainly the expected oddness (people with Vampire teeth, etc.), what struck me was actually how normal it all was.  A little nerdy, perhaps, but the crowd was almost 50/50 male-female and everybody was very social, bright, and cool.

The next day, I spoke at the convention, and focused my talk on Evangelism.  What I discussed was how much we as a company and a fledging world are driven by evangelism, relying on the word of mouth and zeal of our users to grow.  What I tried to focus on was answering the following questions:

1. How can we talk more effectively about SL?
2.  What tools/programs can enhance and leverage this evangelism to take us to 1 million users?
3.  What makes something especially easy to evangelize? 

This last point is really interesting.   I would argue that Second Life is easy to Evangelize because of how interesting, bizarre and open-ended it is.  This contributes to our strong, linear growth.   But we lack several chararacterics necessary for us to grow exponentially:
1.  Simple to explain and learn
2.  Open Systems
3. . Social Network effect.  In most viral products, the individual’s quality of experience is directly correlated with the # of friends they pull in.

I also said that way we think of Second Life will change in the future.  It will not be an alternative to or escape from Real Life, but rather an enhancement of it.  And it’s up to us, the enhanced, enlightened early adopters to convey that to the next 940,000 users.

Finally, I brought up some dangerous ideas that will inform Second Life's course over the next year.  Some will certainly come to fruition -- others will simply begin their course to an eventual destination. 

i. We will continue to lower barrier between SL and the web
ii. We will begin the process of thinking about what it will take to put a metaverse server in Your Basement

iii.  Avatars that Speak in Real-time
iv. A Globally-accessable, Babelfish-enabled world.
v. Avatar Breeding

 

State of Play #3

Sitting here at the State of Play Conference in NYC next to  Ren Reynold and  John Lester listening to a panel of architectural scholars discuss archictecture in virtual worlds.  The theorists are slightly disappointed that the builds done in Second Life mimic the real and physical world, and I feel like standing up and shouting out, "Theory here is meaningless.  The point is that this stuff is being done people with no formal training!"  In the same way that in 1994, people publishing on the web were not known writers, but instead marginal people for whom the idea that they could write and be read was intoxicating.   Known writers wrote and ignored the web until it became impossible to ignore. 

In general, despite my occasional frustrations, its been a  fantastic and inspirational event, bringing together academics, writers, virtual world theorists, lawyers and virtual world architects.

Much of the conversation that's interested me so far has centered on answering the question: "Where is this construction of Metaverse going and what does that mean?"

In particular, the resonance is being drawn out between the Metaverse instatiated by Second Life and others in 2005 and the web circa 1994.  What are the parallels and what are the differences?  Is Second Life the equivalent of an ISP in the early nineties, is it more like a browser such as Netscape or is it a sort of hybrid like AOL?  My feeling is that the truth is a sort of "all of the above" right now.  The interesting thing is that strategically, it is in everyone's interest for us to not to attempt to control or monopolize all aspects of the equation.  This means servers, content and the rich panoplay of interconnects and value-added services that will eventually constitute the Metaversal ecosystem.  If this proves true, the path ahead will be a struggle for us at Linden Lab to generalize the server technology while writing standards to lead to a day when anyone can host a Metaverse server in their basement.

In the meantime (since doing the above is rather challenging form where we stand today), we must continue to focus on lowering the barriers between Second Life and the public Internet.  This means nurturing services like Snapzilla, Landmarker, SLTV,  Digiluv  and others that meld Second Life content with web-resident content and promote the idea of travelling back and forth from one to the other.