Virtual Worlds

Will Microsoft and Xbox rule online identities in the future?

March 22, 2011 By Dan Thornton

A really interesting Microsoft internal team video has appeared on the web, showing the ambition of the Windows Gaming Experience team for your Xbox avatar to become your identity and persona in the digital world.

It’s really interesting in light of some of my previous thoughts regarding Xbox Live Avatars, when I claimed back in 2008 that introducing avatars was a big mistake. And more rcently on both gamification, virtual worlds, and the idea of any company providing a single digital identity for us.

I’m a big Xbox gamer and fan, and I don’t think that Microsoft would be any worse than trusting a single identity to Facebook or Google. I also don’t think they’d be any better, despite the fact that avatars are slowly becoming better implemented and utilised in ways that are actually interesting and useful. My thoughts are probably summed up by the fact every article I see on single identities is tagged in Google Reader with ‘oneidisaf*****gstupididea’ – I’ll let you fill in the blanks.

But so much of the momentum for a single ID seems to come from educated white male digital professionals who are comfortable with their online personas – and indeed often build businesses around them.

People are human, fallible, and occasionally secretive for good reasons as well as bad ones. Or will Microsoft introduce a ‘private browser’ setting that puts your avatar in a hat, shades and a long coat if you want to isit somewhere digitally that might be adults only, for example?

There is one other possibility which I’m starting to think about – the sanitised proprietary web experience of being locked into Microsoft or Facebook worlds with an ID which is tied to you for life, and a seedy underworld open web, where you can be who you want, do what you want (within reason), and actually learn, grow and evolve by mistakes as well as successes. I know which one immediately seems more fun and interesting to me.

Real investments in virtual worlds continue

January 3, 2010 By Dan Thornton

I was pretty surprised to see social media blog Mashable is ‘utterly baffled‘ by someone investing a record $330,000 in a virtual space station in the online MMORPG Entropia Universe, despite the fact they themselves quote figures of $600 million invested in virtual worlds in January 2009 alone, and the $2 billion virtual economy in China.

Don’t forget back in 2004, David Storey paid $26,500 in Entropia, then Jon Jacobs invested $100,000 in a virtual space station in Entropia in November 2005, and of course Anshe Chung became a millionaire via Second Life in 2006.

Apparently both David and Jon have made their money back and more. Meanwhile back in 2004, Julian Dibbell wrote Play Money: O r , How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot about his attempt to match or increase his income by trading in Ultima Online – he also wrote a great blog about the experience.

What’s surprising is that the Mashable author, and probably 50% of those commenting, still express disbelief that investing in a virtual good can be worthwhile, despite the fact that we’re all happy to discuss investments in websites, or even in media companies. If your media company goes bust, you might get a share in a building and some outdated PCs locked on a defunct corporate network, but the real value is in the minds of the employees – another virtual asset!

And given the economic climate, I’m not sure I’d count any investment as being comparitively reliable – but the move is certainly towards investing in ‘idea’ companies. And of course, the rapidly expanding, already massive, social gaming companies such as Zynga. Pervasive gaming as entertainment is here, but pervasive gaming as a legitimate, recognized career follows whenever a game is designed to allow the exchange of goods by players (or the players themselves find ways to exchange – e.g. Ebay).

It’s another hugely interesting impact of gaming as the interactive entertainment medium which has risen up to compete with traditional entertainment forms (TV, radio, print), and at the same time powers so many new entertainment forms (Facebook’s gaming population is massive, as one example).

After all, in checking back through this blog’s archives, I’ve invested around 3 years in this version of the site, which only exists virtually on my hosts servers, and on a hard drive backup.

When everyone is virtual, it will be in Grand Theft Auto – not Second Life

May 14, 2008 By Dan Thornton

Having played quite a few hours of Grand Theft Auto IV, the latest game in the series, I’ve become convinced that future evolutions of the game are far more likely to bring virtual worlds to the masses than Second Life ever will.

I’ve experienced the whole GTA series, including the original 2D games for the Playstation, the original switch to 3D, and the gradual expansion of the gaming universe and variety of missions, side missions, and alternative exploits (Why is it the press always focuses on the hookers, rather than the fact you can play darts, pool, or go bowling?). And now there’s a range of really enjoyable multi-player missions.

It’s a consistent world, with rules loosely based on those of reality – but bent for more fun. All it takes is a mechanism for an ongoing economy, and suddenly it’s a virtual world.

Second Life, by contrast, has the barrier of requiring a reasonable PC, a sign-up procedure, and learning how the world works…as opposed to ‘insert cd and play’.

This might be a risky prediction, but some figures do back it up. March 2008 saw 13 million Second Life accounts registered with no idea of how many were active.

By contrast, GTA IV sold 3.6 million copies on the first day of release, and 6 million in the first week. The previous instalment, GTA:San Andreas hit 21.5 million units in total. (Figures from wikipedia.org)

And with copies of the game costing around £40, people are definitely going to play it until they get their money’s worth. It already became the most played game on Xbox Live for the week of it’s release.

It’s got the fans, the brand reputation, and mainstream appeal on consoles which offer easy online access alongside home entertainment. And I know I’m not the only person who bought his copy on the day of release – and without reading a single review.

If GTA hasn’t become a persistent virtual world within the next couple of years, I’ll eat my copy of GTA IV!