[wsfii-discuss] we're forgetting 3d

Tue Oct 18 22:09:56 UTC 2005

I've been putting off sending an email here for a week now.  Instead
of waiting for the time to write an essay, I'll just fire off a few
points.  This is not something I feel 100% sure about because I
haven't discussed it with enough, but I thought that you would be the
right people to tell get feedback from.

A) I tried to talk to a lot of people during the conference and I
don't know if anyone there could really comfortable articulate what
free information infrastructures are.  That's a problem - not least of
which because it makes it difficult to attract allies.  But also it's
a problem because it means we don't really know what we're working
towards.

Why are projects like: Munich adopting open source, theyworkforyou,
mesh networks, ipod linux, google mashups, and creative commons
similar?  I can *feel* the answer, but I have a lot of trouble
articulating it.  I think the organizers were geniuses in there vision
of bringing these people together, but they failed to supply a
political argument for the overlap of players that they assembled.

B) Because of that absence of a political vision/argument, we haven't
really identified what we're working towards (and against).  Until we
know more precisely what we're trying to do, we're going to make
mistakes because we can't see the situation clearly.

C) Mistake: we forgot about open-source 3d-environments (gaming).  We
are having lots of success currently on the web know in terms of
open-source development, open (and mostly adhered to) standards, a
powerful sense of "web-ecology", creative commons of content, etc.
This leads us to be hopeful and optimistic for the future.  But what
(IMHO) we're forgetting is that there is a very large chance that the
future of the web/internet comes from gaming, and not from the current
web/internet.

Even if most of us aren't gamers, if we're serious about this WSFII
stuff, we can't ignore the success of stuff like WoW and particularly
Second Life.  Not their financial success, but the success of their
uptake.  And the success of their tools (they work really well from
the point of view of user satisfaction).

The other reason that we may have ignored this paticular battle
(that's what I think it is) is that we don't know how we can compete
with this.  After all, these games take hundreds of people several
years to complete, and running them is hugely expensive.

But we've showed that we are getting better and better at
collaborating across huge projects.  From developping artistic
content, to writing code, to doing evangelization/marketing - we're
getting better day-by-day.

I think if we had realized the political importance of what we are
attempting to do (and already succeeding at in many ways) that we
would have seen projects like Rob and Matt's online course in Second
Life with an enormous sense of alarm.

Read what Rob said about his project (an an interactive training
platform that covers networking and wireless issues):

. . . "I know, I know, this looks like a complete and utter waste of
time, money, and bandwidth. Don't let all that talk of video games
fool you. SL only a video game in the same way that the web is a video
game... Think of it as a communications platform and hosting service.
Think of it as what VRML should have been and what Metaverse might
someday become."

He's right.  But it's educational material that's being created in
someone else's proprietary world.  And even if he did have legal
ownership rights to that content, it's not like he can take it and
host it somewhere else.

Where is our movement towards an free/open alternative?

It doesn't matter if the whole world is a beautiful mesh network if we
all have to log into Blizzard or Ubisoft every morning to work.

We need a open-standard, open-source immersive environment
alternative. It has to be federated or P2P to deal with resource needs
(as well as to prevent undue centralization).  And it has to have an
upgrade path that doesn't mean starting from scratch every 2
years.This is an almost overwhelming task, but 1) we're getting really
good at those (ex: linux, wikipedia), and 2) it might be our only
option. Because if we don't take it on, then we're going to just have
to hope that market-wise it shakes out that the big guys agree on
open-standards between themselves instead of each of them going for
the whole pie, and that's definitely far from being a sure thing. 
That would be hoping for market fragmentation and there are certain
forces like social networks and proprietary content which could
prevent that from happening - or at least delay it's occurence.

And I apologize if it seems like I'm trying to sensationalize this
issue.  I've been thinking and worrying about it since the conference
(and about the importance of open-source MMORPG's for years before
this).

I would really appreciate any comments/thoughts any of you might have
on this.  As I said, I'm not 100% convinced that I'm right about this
- but you all are probably some of the best people in world to ask.

Sincerely,
Michael Lenczner

Relevent links:
Rob's blog post
http://nocat.net/~rob/secondlife/cabling.html

Joi Ito's had a few posts around this:
http://joi.ito.com/archives/2005/10/10/web_x0.html

http://joi.ito.com/archives/2003/02/04/croquet_the_os_of_the_future.html

If any of you are interested in this - we've just started to tag
relevant stuff as "immweb" (immersiveweb)
http://del.icio.us/tag/immweb