Feel free to consider what follows hearsay, since I haven’t actually played any of these games myself.
While the idea of the full virtual-reality immersion of The Street in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash is alluring from a software-toy point of view, what’s really attractive for me is its ability to grow beyond what the original founders or coders envisioned.
Its unpredictability.
The first signs of online economies appeared on massively multiplayer online games such as Ultima Online or Everquest, where people traded money for online property or game cash. Unfortunately, this doesn’t go beyond a very basic exchange of goods, and isn’t actually adding anything to the game world. Recent online games like The Sims Online or Second Life, however, may just be the first step towards a more organic online environment, something from where the first version of The Street can actually spring.
Second life, about which you can find out more here, is the most interesting of both since it allows people to create and add content to the server: anything from new clothes design to buildings and businesses to apparently scripts (the extent of what you’re allowed to do with these scripts is still not clear to me). Linden Lab, the company that created and runs Second Life, has also publicly acknowledged that users have intellectual property over the content that they have created for the game, which means that third party developers can conceivably extend the game world and eventually profit from it in the real world. More importantly, it means that Linden Lab is encouraging user interaction with the game world above and beyond just playing out your alter-ego in a glorified 3d-chat room.
There’s also The Sims Online, another example of a virtual world, also allows people to create an online persona and allow them to have a home, which you can customize to the extent that your online fake money allows. As with anything that involves a large number of people, unpredictable behavior has ensued as exemplified by recent Penny Arcade and Salon. Maxis actions on those matters also raise some questions about how much can an online world actually grow when it’s fully controlled by a single entity, and leaves me wondering who - if anybody - has the resources and would be willing to finance the massive expenses of an online world without any assurance of profit, or even how such an online world can survive beyond its original corporate backers or philanthropist financers.
Having a distributed world, where many machines around the world host a bit of it and communicate through a common protocol is one option. Having a virtual world that is emblazoned with Coca Cola, AT&T and American Pie: The Wedding ads is another.
I’m sure the lessons learned from the current crop of games will point the way.
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