Tag Archives: metaverse

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What do Snoop Dogg and organic blueberries have in common?

They’re both meatspace brands who’ve seen substantial success from crossmarketing themselves with digital equivalents in virtual spaces and MMOs. If the trend of material minimalism continues (which doesn’t seem utterly infeasible, given the continued rocky uncertainties of the world’s economies), the digital sphere may become the last bastion for affordable and aspirational conspicuous consumption*… and a real moneyspinner for the more established virtual worlds.

And those worlds are already a moneyspinner: Blizzard recently got a US$88million judgement against someone who was running their own (unlicensed) WoW server/world, charging users for access and virtual goods. That’s not pocket change, at least not in this household.

[ * Although, based on my experiences in Second Life, you’d be best not to expect virtual bling and brands to be any more tasteful than their meatspace equivalents. 0_o ]

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Walk a mile in another (wo)man’s virtual shoes

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I’ve often thought the world would be a fairer place if we could all spend a month living as someone of a different gender, race or level of physical ability. Until the gene-mod folks get us to the level of Iain M Banks’ Culture and provide complete plasticity of embodiment (c’mon, people – get a move on with that!), the next best thing is the Metaverse. New World Notes reports on the experience of a Second Life clothing designer who spent some time in a male avatar:

… Rebecca came away with a lot of insights, besides how to better make male fashion: “I learned that you can’t really trust anyone, male or female,” she tells me now. “People in Second Life can tell the truth as easily as they can tell a lie.”

(Lying about oneself is not exactly a thing unique to SL, but the ability to present visually and conversationally as something you are not adds all sorts of layers of complexity into the equation.)

By being a virtual male, “I learned about some of my own weaknesses at the time, such as my tendency to believe what every male avatar told me, especially if they had a good looking avatar. I think the visual aspect of Second Life somehow tricks the brain into taking our past experiences and cultural expectations and placing these experiences and expectations onto others within Second Life… I think a lot of women have the same type of thinking when they go into Second Life and tend to become attracted to good looking avatars, and overlook the avatars who are not particularly attractive.”

It’s hardly a rigorous feminist interrogation of the SL social space, but there’s some value there nonetheless. It’s interesting to note that Rebecca found herself falling back on the default “player” behaviour of male avatars who’d hit on her in the past; score another point for gender as a social construction.

I really wish more people could be encouraged to try this sort of thing out; most of my own (admittedly shallow) revelations about the actual experience of othering has come from spending time in female avatars, as well as observing the persecution of friends who embody as furries or other anthropomorphs. Nothing brings home the casual (and often unintentional) misogyny and privilege of baseline male behaviour quite like being on the receiving end of it.

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We can misremember it for you wholesale: historically layered Londons, and the past as palimpsest

Via Bruce Sterling, one of the more obvious augmented reality applications, done elegantly: historical archive images overlaid onto the real (present/baseline?) world. The older I get, the more I become fascinated with history; if someone did up layers like this for the whole country, I’d probably never switch it off. [image ganked from TechVert; please contact for takedown if required]

London Museum archive photo augmented reality app

Give it a couple of years (or maybe less), we’ll be doing the same with archive video. Another few years, generative CGI that is practically indistinguishable from archive video. Alternate history as real-time immersive gaming experience… think of the 80-hours-a-week WoW player, and it’s easy to assume that some people will pretty much live in AR environments full time. A subsection of those people will make their entire living in that space, geographically contigious with baseline reality but offset (or derailed completely) from historical temporal flow. Whose laws will they obey? Who will they pay taxes to? What will their game goals be? Imagine a Victorian London ARG that’s something like The Sims – your goal is, basically, to survive your chosen socioeconomic mileue for as long as possible without dropping out… or dying in the attempt.

Related bonus link: MeFi points out an experiment into the mutability of memory as manipulated by doctored ‘historical’ images and media artefacts. Apparently not a very rigorous experiment, but nonetheless, the implication is that it’s alarmingly easy to convince us that a fabricated event actually occured. This is, hopefully, a temporary problem. It’s going to take us a little while to evolve the sort of high-sensitivity bullshit filters that an impossible-to-police internet demands, and ubiquitous AR will raise the bar another few notches; I suspect we’ll get there eventually. But unless technological progress hits a brick wall fairly soon, I suspect we’ll never fully catch up. This is a little like what evolutionary science calls an “arms race”, I think… though we’re now in an arms race with the cultural and technological output of our own species.

Thinking about it again, I guess we always have been… I’m sure I’m reinventing the wheel here (and if you can point me toward more thinking alonmg these lines, please pipe up in the comments), but the enormity of this revelatory idea has pretty much scuppered my chances of concentrating on anything else for the rest of the day.

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New MMO character type: the sociologist

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I’ve been chattering on about the sociology of the metaverse for what feels like yonks (and long since it stopped being a trending topic), but academic interest in synthetic worlds and virtual realities shows no sign of abating, according to Ars Technica‘s round-up of recent MMO-related papers, journals and real-money research grants [via Nick Harkaway].

Give it a few more years, and there’ll be embedded ARG/MMO anthropologists. That’s the year you’ll see me heading back into the education system… 🙂

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How to make two million bucks in a day legally

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It’s easy: all you do is sell a sparkly horse upgrade to your MMO client base.

… this morning Blizzard announced the online sale of a new “celestial steed” for use in WoW.    These mounts cost $25 (on top of the retail price plus $15 monthly subscription).  So in a world of free games and virtual items selling for a dollar or two, how popular could a $25 sparkly flying pony be?

Well, the queue for their purchase was at least up to over 91,000 people waiting in the queue earlier today.  When I took a screen shot, it had fallen to “only” about 85,000.

90,000 X $25 = $2,250,000.

In one day.  From one item.  In a game that isn’t free to play anyway.

Also note that the horse in question doesn’t actually do anything different to a regular WoW horse except look pretty. So, there’s money to be made from virtual, intangible and functionless goods… provided you’ve got that client base there with money to spare, natch.

Speaking of mad things you can do in virtual worlds, how about building a Turing-complete 8 bit computer within the game Dwarf Fortress [via MetaFilter]?

All of a sudden the simulation hypothesis doesn’t seem quite so insane…