Interoperability; was: [sldev] Call for requirements: ISO MPEG-V ...

[Argent Stonecutter]

On 2008-06-03, at 10:52, Kelly Linden wrote:
> Argent Stonecutter wrote:
>> On 2008-06-03, at 03:34, Felix Duesenburg wrote:
>>> And, even before that, what's the business advantage for the  
>>> respective companies running those worlds?
>>

>> Getting people who would have absolutely no interest in visiting  
>> WoW as an elf or a thinly disguised hobbit to play the game?  
>> People willing to pay a premium to have a custom avatar, but not  
>> willing to pay a penny to be a dark elf no matter how fantastic a  
>> costume Sony or Blizzard or whoever come up for it?

> I do not think Sony or Blizzard would want that.

And that's probably a good thing. For Linden Labs, anyway. :)

But that doesn't mean there's no companies that do... good golly, I  
can think of at least one example.

> It is not reasonable to ever expect this sort of product to even  
> desire content exchange with other virtual worlds

Maybe. Maybe not. D&D was designed to appeal to people who wanted to  
play elves and hobbits and things, and pretty soon people started  
coming up with other kinds of fantasy settings, and TSR came up with  
SF-based games, and then Steve Jackson came up with GURPS... the  
Grand Universal Role Playing System, and pretty soon everyone,  
including whoever owns D&D this week, had a "universal role playing  
system" ... I think the newest iteration of D&D is the D20 universal  
role playing system.

As virtual role playing environments evolve, people playing in the  
equivalent of Gamma World and Champions and D&D and Runequest and Car  
Wars are going to eventually want to get together, as their avatars.  
You're going to have the online equivalents of Munden's Bar, where  
all the metaverses come together.

And you're going to have role playing scenarios played out in the  
Gallimaufry, or whatever this universal nexus is called. Because  
that's what happened in the tabletop role playing world.

So it doesn't really matter whether Blizzard *right now* wants this  
to happen. Someone will.

Linden Labs thinks Second Life should be that place. I kind of agree,  
but part of me kind of doesn't, and part of me is off making fun of  
the other two parts of me...

Where was I?

> In short these are not "virtual worlds", they are MMO stories or  
> MMO games but not virtual worlds.  The people who don't want to be  
> an Elf etc don't want to play WoW.  Effort on interoperability  
> should be focused on the products (potential and existing) that  
> would actually want it.

It doesn't matter to me whether it's Blizzard or Sony or someone who  
isn't even around yet is the first one to come up with a universal  
MMO, the *business case* for it will be "Getting people who don't  
want to visit (insert other MMO here) as an (insert Tolkein-derived  
species here) to play".

Effort on interoperability is still going to be constrained by  
"you're not going to be able to transport scripted attachments into  
GUMMOS (Grand Universal MMO System) worlds". Whatever universal  
avatar format that evolves, it's going to have to handle custom  
meshes, skeletons, and animations.