The Multiverse

The Economist wrote an article on a new company called Multiverse Network. The company's plan: make an open platform for the easy creation of MMOs, and provide a network to connect them. The idea is that the barriers to entering the world of making Massively Multiplayer Online games or worlds are extremely high, and by lowering them a greater variety of interesting worlds will be created. In other words, you, yes you, could make your very own World of Warcraft or Second Life! Hopefully though, people will create something new, something the big companies didn't think of or dare do before.

Despite the quality of the demo worlds, this is an exciting development, maybe even "Online Gaming's Netscape Moment". It might be more than that. Two questions stem from the concept of easy-to-make, connectible worlds: What sort of worlds will people make, and what can connecting them do?

The upcoming games are all RPGs, except for one. That one is a largely undefined "social hub" created by Studio SFO; it's very possibly a Second Life bubble in the Multiverse.

What's the point of another Second Life clone? The original already has a user base, and people are the good in a social hub. But Second Life is more than a social hub! It's a programming playground, which people use to make experiential experiments. Second Life is one continuous world with very few restrictions. Unless Multiverse has significantly better performance and graphics than Second Life (it doesn't), it can't clone and compete. The innovative social hub will impose more structure on a virtual world than SL. The next social worlds will lie somewhere on a continuum between Second Life and a game.

The other aspect of the Multiverse Network is that worlds can be connected. It would be boring if the "connection" was just a web portal with a list of worlds. The interesting sort of connection is a virtual gateway within a game world to another. This world allow game developers to choose who they link to, just like websites.

More than that though, it opens up the possibility of transferability between worlds. This could mean avatars. This might mean currency. It could mean other goods.

In an MMO, customizing your character is a big deal. It's a sliver of your identity. Now many people are on several social bookmarking websites, like Facebook or Myspace, but we link them all together into one meta-document, call it MyFace. It's hard to manage many identities when they actually matter to you socially. If 3D Worlds really start to matter socially, we will want to carry our avatars with us! Game makers, take this into account.

What else should be transferable? Let's say there are two types of goods, worldly goods and interworldly goods (we could call worldly goods from another game Otherworldly). Obviously an experiential good like Peter Yellowlees' experience is strictly worldly. You would think that a sword from an RPG would be worthless in a social game. But it could be it would make a great accessory! The value of that sword could fluctuate a lot between worlds as its worldly value would change. When game designers make transferability, they had better think about this.

There is one ultimate interworldly good, currency. Will money flow between the worlds? Will there be regulation? These are all topics I hope are discussed at the Virtual Goods Summit this week.