Chaos’n'Coffee

Today we hit the 100 participants limit for the skyp chat rooms in the TorCamp always-on brainstorm (of TransitCamp fame). We migrated to a new one with fewer members but probably it’s time to look for alternatives…

Sure, the drag’n'drop feature to “opt-in” people is still overkill…

Home, the new online world made in Sony, is creating a lot of buzz these days.
The video, available on YouTube, shows some of the features and possible directions of the project.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRb-mCsHQ0c[/youtube]

After watching this one could think: well… ok, so here we have yet another Second Life!?

It’s ot exactly like that.
Leeander thinks it’s going to be just a glorified chat, since there is no “creation as social practice” that is instead part of the core values of the Linden world, and is thus doomed to stay in the realm of games (no matter how successful).

Now, I agree with the fact that “Home” is probably going to be seen mainly as a game facilitating environment, but I think there are a couple of feature that shouldn’t be underestimated: first is that it is less pretentious than SL. The aim is clear, communication. The gameworld is mainly set and clearly divided in public and private spaces. Everything seem to be built to flatten the adoption/learning curve and let the users engage in the virtual world.
The same can’t be said of Second Life, that requires a significant amount of practice and commitments to practice and even more effort to master the advanced features.
Moreover, from what is shown in the video avatars are pretty “average” and probably push players toward building a “polished” image of themselves, while SL definitely encourages extravagancy and the embracing of alternate personas, which is great, but gets in the way when you want to embed more rich communication media, like voice: to support the “masquerade” you should be able to modify your voice to match the avatar general appareance. Therefore, Sony again seems to aim toward a more sustainable route.

The other point is, as Anil Dash points out about twitter:

The sign of success in social software is when your community does something you didn’t expect.

And in the past we already had examples of game worlds used to this extent. The most notable was probably Ultima Online (were the players managed to overthrew the in-game king), but more recently even the ultra-controlled World of Warcraft generated unexpected emergent behaviours (think for instance at all the machinima like make love not warcraft).

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cng9e7_Enyk[/youtube]

One thing is sure, not second life nor PS home will be that cyberspace we dreamed about while reading through the pages of Neuromancer, as William Gibson explained recently:

Chia and her buds build their treehouses in corporate ghost sites. That’s the difference. Interstitial. Gotta be interstitial.