The 'Metaverse'

Recently … that is, actually some time ago, but I was rather busy so I could not post about it, LL has released some new metrics about the status of SL and the economy on the grid:

http://blogs.secondlife.com/community/features/blog/2010/10/28/the-second-life-economy-in-q3-2010

Now of course those numbers can be interpreted in one way or another, but reading the comments to the post as well as following the various discussions on forums and inworld would show that many people are generally not really satisfied with the data provided. And I can't blame them since the numbers and graphs given only show a very limited picture of what is going on. I miss the detailed data LL has been giving out before as well.

On the other hand, this data is at least something and some interpretations of it (after all it is not easy to get the whole picture with just a part of the data) are rather doomsdayish. I don't entirly agree with this, but it will need a lot to make me swing to the other side as well. Things are not rosy at all, but this is not really my point at the moment. Besides, SL is part of the overall RL economy and while it is recovering in some places again, it will still take a bit until people have more money to spend on virtual goods.

What I am more thinking about is the virtual economy as a while. I have said several times and still believe in this, that the future way of virtual worlds might be better seen in projects like the hypergrid then in closed economies like SL. After all, SL has a build in barrier of growth that exist in the moment when LL wont be able to handle more servers. The Peak-Oil of SL you can say. Peak-Server would mean that no matter what LL does, the technical barriers of the system will make it impossible to growth. And without growth, the economy will stop as well. Now of course growth in this case mean something different then in the RL related economic theories. In a closed virtual economy like SL, growth is related to new users who buy content and make creators provide more content or provide content themselves. When there are no new users, the old ones will sooner or later have bought everything they want and the sales of the merchants will decline making it not profitable to provide more content. It all stops since everyone is happy with their possessions and the only chance to sell something is to create something completely new. But this again will only last as long as everyone who wants it buys it. After all, we do not need to replace the things we buy and they stay with us as long as we have our accounts.

So without growth in numbers, the economy on a closed grid like SL will someday choke itself. Luckily, this can be moved further into the future with the introduction of new features like mesh and new products and creations being made. But is this enough to provide provide the long term growth impulse needed to sustain the economy? I am not sure on this. I rather think, that while the economy on SL is still bigger, the potential economy on the virtual internet as a whole is gigantic.

Now of course I thought about writing 'metaverse' on this point, but I am not sure that this word is still the correct one to use. We now have grids. Second Life, Blue Mars, Inworldz, etc. We also have a emerging connected grid with opensim and the Hypergrid.

What will we have next?

I give the Hypergrid more chances actually. However to get back to the word 'metaverse' I think that if virtual worlds really become the (or rather a part of) the next internet they wont have a distinctive name. They have one today with being called 'virtual worlds' but once they really merge with the other online content they will become just this. They wont be something new with it's own name or with any difference existing between the different content versions. They will become a part of the internet and as such they wont be the 'metaverse' any more.

They will become so normal, that no one will really think about giving it a different name.

On the other hand, this is all theoretical. Virtual worlds are real and the fact that despite everything that was said about how it was just a 'hype' they are still around and still growing. Some have fallen away, others have never managed to launch and some that started promising are now forgotten. Most people don't even realize, that there was something before SL. It might be, that SL will face the same fate, or it might get back on track and continue to develop. LL has lots of projects running and despite their sometimes strange and damaging policy decisions, they are continuing to work on SL and to expand it's possibilities. Of course they might just want to make it to look shiny enough to sell it, but that is beside the point. Virtual worlds as a whole have a future and while google might be careful with restarting their lively project others will think different. It is all there and being done. It is slower then many have thought at first and even goes in strange directions at times, but I do think, that we are seeing the emerging of something that will be with us for the foreseeable future and maybe beyond as well … of course this depends a lot on the ability of human civilisation not to wipe itself away from this planet, but I can still hope the best.

But anyway, virtual worlds are here to stay and it is safe to assume that they will have their place in the future development of the internet. Maybe not as a distinctive 'metaverse', but for sure as a feature commonly used by many more users then we see at the moment.

The problems associated with it … economy … community … technology … however are rather big, but not really different then we see already on the flatweb. And there they are dealt with or at least people know how to live with those. Many things are just seen as different on a virtual world, because the virtual world is seen as different. In some cases this is actually true, but in others it is not, so many things can be applied to a 3d as well as to a flat web. But that is something I will write about later and for now I will happily continue to learn to expand my content creation abilities.

Hopefully the knowledge will be useful all over the future 3D internet.

The future is in connecting and working together … always and everywhere.