Tuesday, June 15, 2004

Second Life releases XML-RPC interface

Massively Multiplayer Online Building Toy Second Life has released an update that, among other things, allows player-written scripts on in-world objects communicate with the outside world via XML-RPC. I've been interested in Second Life for a while, both for the technology (3d models, textures, and sounds are all streamed to the client on the fly) and the economics (players retain intellectual property rights on things they build in the world, and the publishers encourage the exchange of in-world goods for real money). It's the closest approach so far to the metaverse from Snow Crash. In spite of this, I haven't found the "gameplay" to be a very compelling experience - if I want to build something, I might as well play with something like Blender. I wonder if this connectivity to the outside world opens up enough possibilities to make it more interesting (just like how the internet changed the nature of personal computing)



One thing that I think could really bring a lot of users into a world like Second Life would be instant messaging integration. Imagine being able to log into your in-world identity via an IM-style client (either a custom client for the particular world or using XMPP to open it up to third-party clients), and then hop into the world when your friends show up. If you can maintain some sort of presence in the world even when you're not actively walking around in it, the world becomes a lot more suitable for casual socializing. You can of course achieve an approximation of this by exchanging handles for the IM system of your choice, but the separate identities make this awkward (and receiving outside IMs while you're in the game is disruptive).



Of course, the question is whether the publishers would want such an influx of players. In the case of Second Life, the answer may well be no. In Second Life, a basic membership has no monthly fee - you only have to pay a monthly fee if you want to own land (and you need to own land in order to build anything outside of designated sandboxes). Landless sightseers soak up bandwidth without paying anything. They're valuable only to the extent that they are likely to convert to paying memberships, or that they encourage other builders to join or stick around. This last point raises the interesting possibility of in-world advertising, but that's another story.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home