I just finished Snow Crash, a novel by Neal Stephenson about the “metaverse.”
Welcome to the crowd, Fuzzy.
Shut up.
The whole reason I read this book was because the developers of Second Life, Linden Labs, cite it as their primary inspiration. If that’s the case, then they either didn’t read too closely or tried to do the wrong things too soon.
In a two-year-old blog post on Terre Nova, Mike Sellers argued that it is time to end our romance with the concept of a metaverse, a virtual reality world that can replace the Web. He argued that a virtual 3D world is a horrible interface for all the things that cloud computing now allows us to do. I couldn’t agree more. Even if Second Life wasn’t a buggy, unintuitive mess that can barely interface with the Web, computers currently lack the tools for an interface (like a smart, facial recognition camera) that would make a metaverse useful for anything besides entertainment.
But even the entertainment sucks. In trying to give its virtual citizens options for travel and creating virtual “land,” SL has destroyed any verisimilitude that would make a virtual world attractive and fun. Anyone can fly and teleport at will, so traditional or even fantastic forms of transportation and even transportation routes are rendered useless. Stephenson saw this problem and addressed it directly in his concept of a metaverse:
You can’t just materialize anywhere in the Metaverse, like Captain Kirk beaming down from on high. This would be confusing and irritating to the people around you. It would break the metaphor.
Indeed, but the Lindens ignored this warning and proceeded to wreck any value of good, dramatic or practical design. They also decide to make selling virtual land their primary business instead of taxing transactions. As a result, they crashed the land market. Land is too cheap. Everyone has it and no one uses it. The sims of SL are ghost towns. No one is forced to stay in a limited space, so no one does, and there is no sense of community or interaction. There is no zoning, so SL mainland is a visual blight of sign farms and clutter. And so the teeming metropolis imagined in Snow Crash with its celebrity guests and hip advertising placement is all lost. With no way to control traffic or zone land, there is no way to create land value or encourage density.
Limitations on travel and creation are anachronous and stupid for a file sharing system. But they would go a long way to making online meetings more comfortable. Sellers is right that there is no need for a virtual world to replace the Web, but I think that there is a need for a virtual world to facilitate long-distance meetings and discussions. One of my favorite experiences in SL was attending Unitarian/Universalist services in a small, picturesque, open-air enclave with 20-30 other strangers on a private island away from the mainland. It was the closest SL ever got to challenging reality’s supreme grip on gatherings. But, so far, Linden has made the same mistake as the characters in Snow Crash – they underestimated the need for facial recognition.
And once they got done counting their money, marketing the spinoffs, soaking up the adulation of others in the hacker community, they all came to the realization that what made this place a success was not the collision avoidance algorithms or the bouncer daemons or any of that other stuff. It was Juanita’s faces.
Most of SL’s users do not build sims, design or manage land. They use SL as a glorified chat room – the most advanced, detailed, customizable chat room ever. The first virtual world that manages to take us past the chat room, past the emoticons and pre-loaded animations, will make buckets and boatloads. Even a primative facial recognition program for a web cam, applied as real time animation to an SL avatar, would take the program leaps and bounds over its current state of maddening chat windows and tinny voices.
If Linden wants to transform SL into the premier platform for education and business conferences, as is its stated goal, then it needs to radically alter and improve its interface pronto. …or just keep their customers from talking to Zonja Capalini.
