[MUD-Dev] Future of MMOGs

[Crosbie Fitch]

From: Koster, Raph

> Then there's the issue of content and intellectual property. If
> you had a network like this, and people uploaded content freely,
> it's naive to suppose that it would be user-generated
> content. It'll be user-pirated content too.  Basically--whatever
> the Web is, this would be. Expect to see alternate (and better!) 
> versions of Star Wars and Star Trek and Pern and Disney and
> whatever. Worse, expect to see areas for trading college papers or
> copyirhgted music or whatever. (Just like we have now). Oh, and
> porn, of course.

You can't put file sharing back in Pandora's box.

It's also a great tragedy if a whole class of computing (distributed
systems) is banned because it erodes the viability of copyright
based revenue models.

> There's a whole thorny thing there, and any given answer is liable
> to be ideological, of course.

There's a practical answer at:

  http://www.digitalartauction.com

>> Just as with the web, users avoid the crap sites, and frequent
>> the good ones. It's all interest driven. Why not have a public
>> MMOG comprised of PGC, given that players can hang out where they
>> fancy?

> Sounds great. Give me $20 million dollars to make it. Oh,
> wait. Who wants to spend $20 million dollars with no hope of
> return? Hmm.

The Web arose out of a pretty small piece of technology http+HTML,
certainly technology within reach of the Open Source development
community. With or without CERN funding.

Commerce cannot create a public MMOG precisely because it cannot
countenance creating something that it doesn't own and doesn't have
protection mechanisms built in that assure a future return.

> The classic model you're proposing is that each participant pony
> up their own money to be on the Park. But then you get the
> "popularity kills" effect--anyone who makes good free content is
> forced out of the Park because of their bandwidth costs
> spiking. The infrastructure they rely on is owned by someone, and
> what's more, it's firmly under a commercial model at this
> point. Sprint and Deutsche Telecom are not going to donate their
> bandwidth for the future of virtual reality.

Er, noo, it can be done a better way.

The more interesting the content the more widely it is
duplicated. Unlike the web, a distributed system doesn't have to
keep content located in one place or a single place.

The creator of content is just like someone who posts a message to
Usenet.  They can offer their computer up as a relay, but just
because they post a message, it doesn't mean that that message must
reside on their computer.

> Making a powerful distributed system whereby people can contribute
> their own content, maybe even make money off of it, link together,
> and form a big ol' Sprawl or Matrix or Park or Net or whatever is
> going to have to be commercially attractive or it won't
> happen. And once it's commercially attractive, it will also have
> to be IP-friendly, at least relatively so.

Do people participate in file sharing networks because they get
money out of it, or because they get entertainment out of it? I
think it's the latter.

IP is irrelevant to users. IP owners will just have to deal with the
fact that IP is an oxymoron. Or on the other hand it's quite
accurate, i.e. once intellectual property leaves the intellect and
is transcribed into digital form, it is no longer intellectual
property, but public property.

> The Web followed the same path. It started out as free-for-all
> cyberspace.  But of that free content you find out there is being
> monetized by *somebody*, and usually, it's not the content
> creators but the hosting services. If you like someone's blog, the
> money is wending its very indirect way into the ISP's hands from
> both the content producer and the content consumer.

Yes, bandwidth/QoS will become the precious fuel of the information
age. Buy shares in the network providers because they own the oil
wells.

>> It'll be just like flowers and bees. The flowers bend over
>> backwards to attract the bees so that they obtain
>> publicity/promiscuity. The bees have fun flitting from flower to
>> flower and get free food all the way.

> Don't get me wrong. This is the game I want to make next, as it
> happens. But despite the hacker ethic and the dreams of freedom of
> information, it's gonna HAVE to be monetizable and *profitable* or
> it won't get made. Food isn't free. The real question is whether
> you think the content consumer should get a piece of the pie, or
> whether it should ONLY go to the host.

The food appears free to the bees. Just as content appears free to
users, despite the fact that they have to pay their ISP to get to
it.

Anyway, as we saw with the dot-com boom, the monetisation and
profitabilty of the Web (even thought it was illusory in most cases)
was not what prompted Tim Berners-Lee. Necessity is the mother of
invention. We NEED a public 3D cyberspace system. The wishful
accounting and dot-com type land-grab can happen afterwards.

But it's a chicken and egg. Does the first version happen first, and
then a community of Open Source coders join in, or do you gather the
coders first, and the first version happens later? The pump needs
priming, and so we need a CERN equivalent....




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