technology thinker Steven Johnson is a neat summary of a prediction about virtual worlds that's becoming increasingly
common. If you take a step back from the MMOs and other online pursuits of today, you see a lot of standalone bubbles
of activity with one common factor--you. However, you can't cross the boundaries between worlds, taking your Halo
friends list and reputation into EverQuest
or sending your Animal Crossing
from your mobile.
The prediction is that, relatively soon in the future, this won't be the case. As in
, as in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash
, one virtual world (or metaverse, if you prefer) will
connect everything together:Within a decade, then, the notion of separate game worlds will probably
seem like a quaint artifact of the frontier days of virtual reality. You'll still be able to engage in radically
different experiences - from slaying orcs to cybersex - but they'll occur within a common architecture.
The heterogeneous environment of home computing in the 1980s underwent a similar transformation; now it's virtual
worlds' turn. Whether a proprietary product like Second Life
(which resembles a fledgling metaverse) will come
to the fore, or whether it will (like the Internet itself) evolve out of open standards and protocols, only time will
tell--either way, in ten years' time people will look back on this post, from their virtual homes in a virtual reality,
]See also: Wharton Dean:
virtual worlds are the future of MBA education Virtual crucifixion
punishes bad behaviour onlineIs
online gaming antisocial?