[MUD-Dev2] [Design] Personal virtual worlds

[Mike Rozak]

Lachek Butalek wrote:
> Web sites that have grown large due to user content production,
> including YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, Wikipedia etc, have become such by
> not making a clear distinction between consumer and producer. In the
... snip

Your comments brought an interesting clarification to my mind:

The value of a web site is based on its content and design (eye-candy). The
value of a virtual world is based on the other players attracted to the
virtual world, the content (perhaps provided by other players) and design.

For example: If you were to use Wikipedia offline, with all its articles
downloaded onto your hard drive, you'd have 99% the same
utility/experience as the online version.

However, with YouTube, MySpace, and Flickr, the existence of other "players"
affects the experience because you can comment on ther players' content,
talk to them, etc. An offline Wikipedia is fine, but an offline MySpace,
even if other people's pages were regularly updated on your hard drive,
would be less interesting because you couldn't interact with the other
players or create your own page (that people would read).

An offline second life is almost valueless. If people want to design 3d
houses that only they can see, or which other players can download and walk
through on their own computers (alone), then there are far cheaper
solutions.

Rambling...

At one point you mentioned web pages. The problem with using web-page 
analogies is that web pages are like Wikipedia; they don't take advantage of 
player-to-player interaction. (except forums.) A virtual world requires 
other players to be around for it to be fun... or at least the existence of 
other players makes it more fun.

Which is one of the reasons I assumed games, so there's something attractive 
about the world, even if only one player is logged on. Such activities keep 
players around long enough that several players will be in the world at the 
same time, so that the multiplayer fun aspect of the world can actually 
happen. Games also provide something attractive for players to do with each 
other, other than simply chat, which is a commodity.

Since authors find value in having players in their world (either monetary 
or satisfaction), and since authors will realize that a poor/mediocre world 
(relative to other worlds) won't have any players (two paragraphs above), 
then I'd expect extreme competition... which means that programming, eye 
candy, and game design (or something else?) are ALL requirements for a 
successful VW, even a personal one. A VW that's just a dollhouse will be 
largely empty (except when the author's friends visit for 5 minutes and then 
go someplace fun).

This is a bit differnet from a web site, where if I put it up, I'll at least 
get a trickle of people wandering through, and (I'll assume) reading it, 
which is what makes amateurs happy. In an amateur VW, a trickle of players 
results in no players (as above), so the experience for the author is 
unsatisfactory and disheartening, particularly since they'll pay less 
attention to the "players that have logged on" metric, and more to "if I log 
on now, is anyone in my world?".

Side note: A personal forum, like MySpace or blogs, only requires a comment 
every few days to make amateurs feel like their content is a success, which 
means there can be more personal fourms than PVWs, and more personal web 
pages than personal forums.

One way to think the number of possible PVWs is: There are N players that 
play in "virtual worlds"... Lets say 50 million (including non-MMORPGs). 
They spend an average of 5% of their day online (1 hour) in VWs. Thus, at 
any point in time, 2.5 million people are in VWs. (Which is, of course, too 
low.) If there's a requirement that at least 5 players are in a PVW for it 
to be fun, then tha maximum number of successful PVWs is 500K - which is way 
higher than I'd guestimated, epscially since 80% of the players will be in 
the most popular worlds, which will inevitably be professional. So, there'll 
be 100K successful PVWs (with 5 players at any given time), still higher 
than I'd expect.

If there are 100K PVWs, each with an author (or three), then the skill and 
time-commitment to be ranked number 100,000 (with 5 players) instead of 
100,001 (with no players) is where a toolkit should aim for as a minimum 
difficulty/flexibility. An easier (less flexible) toolkit will result in no 
players. A more-difficult toolkit will be usable by fewer authors.

Of all the potential authors in the world (10M- 100M(?) people that would be 
authors if they could be), what skills are available for the 100,000'th 
author... which is the top 0.1 - 1%? I'd guess scripting, amateur 3D 
modelling, and amateur game design. I DON'T think it'll involve C++, 
Maya/3DSMax, or in-depth understanding of games. (Note to all those 
game-design-book authors out there... if my impromptu guestimates are right, 
then there's a market to sell 100K books!)

The reality on the street, based on MUDs/NWN/SL indicates that only (approx) 
10,000(?) such skilled authors (or author teams) exist, and 9000 of those 
are barely able to cope with the toolkit complexity... so don't expect to 
sell 100K books!

Note: This is a very rough estimate, and there are lots of flaws in my 
thinking. I'm sure people will point them out. :-)