Kami Harbinger

There's lies, damn lies, and numbers of accounts reported for virtual worlds.

Richard Bartle's list of "The five most important people in the virtual world" has this "gem" of statistics:

"To give some sense of what he's achieved, some eight million people (as I write this) have tried Second Life at least once; for Lineage, the figure is over sixty million (and the population of South Korea is only about 49m). Now THAT'S impact."

The 8.2 million "Total Residents" is not even remotely "people who have tried Second Life at least once" (it may reasonably be in the 4-6 million range), but that's not the worst of it.

But Richard's next statistic is even more wrong. First, according to Wikipedia's article on Lineage, "NCsoft has reported that Lineage had at one point more than three million subscribers". For Lineage II, it says "reporting 610,918 unique users during the month of March 2007"... The Second Life economy page says "Residents Logged-In During Last 30 Days: 889,914". SL is 45% larger than L2.

Second, the number of accounts ever created in Lineage are totally meaningless, because Koreans often play on temporary accounts at netcafes. An "account" may only be used for one session. A single player can easily use dozens or hundreds of accounts. That's why there's more accounts than Koreans.

User-hours are the only metric that can be reasonably compared between VWs, and most of them won't report them, because they know how bad it makes them look. I had 4 accounts on FFXI (one main, three mules in different cities so I could use their auction houses). But I never spent more than a few minutes a day as the mules, I spent several hours a day for 9 months as my main. I have accounts on Runescape and several others, but I only played them for an hour or so each. Those accounts should only count as a single user-hour, while my FFXI usage was close to 1000 hours. I have a main account and an alt that I use for permissions testing in SL. I log into my alt maybe once a month for a few minutes, check something, and log out.

Roy Trubshaw Because if Roy hadn't figured out how to create a shareable, writeable high segment on a DECsystem-10 mainframe in 1978, we wouldn't be having this discussion."

Well, in the sense that they wouldn't be talking to Richard Bartle, I suppose that's true, though he might have ended up another Julian Dibbell or the like. If Rob Trubshaw hadn't built his timesharing system, and Bartle hadn't managed to make MUD commercial, VWs would still have come from PLATO and Habitat, and reporters would be talking to someone else. I played Avatar in the latter years of PLATO, and it's indistinguishable in genre from any modern MMORPG. I never got to play the original Habitat, but I've played Club Caribe, and it's very Second Life-like.

Gygax and Arneson introduced the idea of the role-playing game; taking the part of a single hero piece in a game instead of just controlling it from above. They're the originators of the idea. Colossal Cave, Rogue, and PLATO's dnd followed from that, and MMORPGs were inevitably going to follow from those.

For earliest appearance, it's Oubliette, not MUD. Richard Bartle repeatedly claims in his blog and on other blogs that Oubliette and Avatar had no persistence, despite the ability to play it and assurances by the original developers that it does, and despite the fact that MUD1 was regularly reset, and therefore wasn't persistent!

For most innovative, that's clearly either Avatar or Habitat. MUD was just Colossal Cave for multiple players, but Habitat was weird and yet recognizably comfortable.

And for greatest direct influence, DikuMUD is the source of all modern MMORPGs. While it was certainly based on MUD, it threw out much of what MUD or any other derivative had done (which infuriates many of the old-time MUD developers), made the gameplay simple and mechanistic, and it succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. You can't play EverQuest, DaoC, FFXI, WoW, or almost any other MMORPG without playing DikuMUD.

Richard Bartle's asking over at Terra Nova about alternative design ideas for virtual worlds.

I'm a big fan of really weird gameplay, and creating new environments, but several of the ideas are way off. They seem to ignore the fact that virtual worlds (VWs) are SOCIAL environments. If you're not building it for people to connect and communicate, you shouldn't be making multi-player VWs, you should stick to 1P games (nothing wrong with that, I like both 1P and MP games).

You shouldn't take out direct communication[0], and you can't prevent indirect communication. At the barest minimum level, there's always blockchat (pushing objects, or even just walking, into positions to shape letters or numbers to dial on an external channel). Moreover, unless you have somehow made the greatest environment since sliced bread, people won't put up with heavy obstacles put in their way.

Artificial intelligence and NPCs are pretty close to the perfect example of things that shouldn't be in VWs. There are over 6 billion other primates on this planet, of whom 1K to 10M might reasonably be in the same VW as you. Who needs a crappy software agent pretending to be a person? Do you really need a dragon to slay, if you can instead go to a combat zone?

Do you really need an NPC shopkeeper, if there's a friendly player who'll make and sell stuff? In FFXI there were three economies: the NPC shops, which had hugely overpriced garbage, but were the only source of certain disposables and unique items; the official auction house system, which tended to have lots of crap at reasonable prices, but not much of the good stuff; and people with packs full of goods set for sale, where you got the good deals, and could often haggle with them, and could buy supplies from wandering merchants. They could easily have eliminated the NPC shops, and possibly even the auction house system, and made the world more social. I like running my little shop in Second Life. My sales boxes are basically vending machines, so it's not a 40-hour-a-week job to run it, but I'm often there to meet people and answer questions, and I sell more when I'm present for a few hours a week than I do all the rest of the time. Why is Second Life full of casinos and nightclubs? Because those environments let lots of people get together in one place and share some experience, and you get to meet lots of people. You could make all sorts of profitable solitary businesses in SL, but few people do, because they want to be with other people.

AI is great for 1P games, because otherwise you're all alone. But if you can't get the other players to fill those roles in a multi-player game, you are an incompetent game designer. I don't know how to say that nicely; NPCs in MMOs are absolute proof that you don't know what you're doing. I think Myst Online: Uru Live is a giant empty disaster, but at least in theory they got the right idea: the "NPCs" are role-played by staff at Cyan. Everyone else is another player, and mostly they stay in character.

Richard's dead-on about magic being overdone. I'm not without guilt: I've done my own share of Greek alchemy magic systems, but magic is ridiculous and obsolete and, worst of all, boring. Players will demand some kind of powers outside of the mundane, but it doesn't have to be the same-old, same-old D+D crap. I think Second Life has the best magic system ever. Anyone with intelligence and talent can learn to be a sorcerer who can make objects out of nothing and create complex enchantments that animate them; mundanes who can't script, paint, or build are mere consumer scum. If you're making a game instead of a VW, go ahead and give the construction system some fiction, even simplify it more than SL's system (the Lego Mindstorms programming tools might be a good model), but don't do another magic system. The Matrix Online's special abilities were pretty neat, and did something creative with the setting. If you can't be more creative than the Matrix Online, go home.

[0] The one possible exception being worlds for children. Frankly, I'd rather that parents acted like responsible adults and just supervised their children, but since they're often dumb enough to think the Internet is just like a TV set and therefore a mindless babysitter, censored VWs for children are going to happen.

IBM and Sun are making specialized mainframes for virtual worlds (and additional details from 3pointD).

This is pretty damned cool!

Consider a system like Second Life, with a physics engine on the server where the enemy (malicious users) can't reach it. A virtual world can and generally should be more than just a chat room with some textures. That requires more server-side CPU power. This is why SL requires all those servers, even when nobody's present--physics and scripting simulation goes on constantly. Mainframes and minicomputers have always had superior IO capabilities compared to microcomputer-based servers, but until recently lagged far behind on per-user CPU power. This could be a really big improvement. I don't think the Cell is the greatest CPU choice for this, but IBM can make them in such bulk now that the cost for massively-parallel machines is dropping rapidly, so it must make good economic sense.

The end result is more detailed and realistic virtual worlds.

People hunger for detail and realism (or rather, "comprehensibility from comparison with reality"; fantastic realism is good, having to mentally translate the experience into something comprehensible is bad). Consider:

• The WWW vs. Gopher. Gopher had years of head start, had 10x as much content, was far easier to create content for and use, had a search engine that worked, and was 10x faster than HTTP over the slow dialup modems of the day. In 1993, Marc Andreesen added the IMG tag to Mosaic. Mosaic let you show pictures of your cat with a caption "I LUV MY KITTY!!!1!". Mosaic won. Didn't just "win", it crushed Gopher almost overnight. My Gopher site went from around 1000 hits a month to less than a dozen within 2 months. 99% of the users switched that fast.
• Text adventures vs. graphical adventures. Customers had the choice of great writing and great puzzles from Infocom; mediocre writing and great puzzles from Scott Adams and other text adventure writers; or mediocre writing, great puzzles, and pictures from LucasArts and Cyan. Text adventures have all but vanished from the Earth.
• Do I even need to compare text MUDs with MMORPGS?

The one part I can't comprehend is the use of WebSphere. WebSphere is an appserver tuned to running many apps with individual configurations on one or more boxes; great in concept, but in practice, you should be running one app across multiple boxes on the lightest and fastest appserver you can find, and never share a box with two apps. WebSphere just eats your resources and is painful to manage. I dealt with it in my last project at work, and it's a disaster.

I'm a fairly serious Myst fan, going back to The Manhole and Myst. The worlds are beautiful, if a little lifeless, and the puzzles are usually good, if hampered by the lack of inventory. They're not nearly as good as Infocom's games; few people can write well enough to make good text-only adventures, so I'm no text-only purist, but Planetfall, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Zork series, and the Enchanter trilogy are far beyond anything Cyan has ever done for Myst. But Myst is a solid second-tier adventure game series, and if you care more about beautiful scenery, Myst is the A+ title.

Last week, I downloaded the newly released Myst Online: Uru Live for Mac OS X, and started playing.

I was hoping for a vast world full of puzzles, archeological mysteries, and social interaction in the character of these archeologists. What I got was a rather small Myst game with some minimal multi-player elements.

Initiation

Before starting play, read the Recommended Info For New Players, watch the video, download and read the manual.

Where to even start? The UI is hideous. For a company that makes such lovely worlds, their user interfaces have usually been pretty bad, but this one is beyond the pale. It looks like something from Windows 3.0, run through a blender stuck on "Uglify". Giant blocky square computer buttons, low-contrast blocky fonts, and random stacks of buttons in a box went out of fashion on Macs and Unix before 1990, and even Windows had mostly caught up by XP in 2000. Second Life's UI is ugly, but at least that looks like a professional, boring computer app, and is easily controlled. The Lounge UI beats the crap out of this, so far that it's not even funny. When I first saw this UI, I was about to just quit playing right then and there, on the basis that the game must suck just as bad. Cyan should fire whomever they put in charge of UI design for Uru Live, it's almost malicious.

Ugly developer-created content sucks.

The KI (so-called for the ludicrous reason that it has the number 3 in D'ni numerals on the back, which looks like the word "KI"... Now, why is 3 on the back?) is your personal information manager, message device, and camera, just like a cell phone but not as advanced. The photos are small and grainy, and Uru only lets you keep 15 or so, and then you have to delete some to make room for more. It's nice that they can be shared with others or posted on the staticy public image viewers, but it makes note-keeping in the game impossible. In my old Myst games I kept dozens or hundreds of photos, because I snapshot everything and make notes on them, so I can figure stuff out. Now I have to use screenshots, switch out of the full-screen mode, go label them by hand as to where and what they are, and go back. 30+ seconds per photo instead of 5 seconds. Journal entries are also limited, which is insane, with as little space as text consumes, and the massive amounts of notes you need to keep in Myst games; instead, I have to keep it all on paper. [Glyph of Annoyance]

Anyway, YOU MUST HAVE THIS DEVICE TO PLAY. If you don't get your KI, you can't proceed; once you get to the Bevin neighborhood, it's easy enough to find, but making you run around to get your user interface is insane.

The KI also violates one of the most basic commandments of Myst: THOU SHALT HAVE NO INVENTORY. Now, I like inventory, and not just because I'm a gadget-obsessed geek. Inventory massively expands the range of puzzles you can make. As an indie games designer, even in otherwise very low-state adventure games (i.e., no stats, no skills, not even traditional inventory management), I've always made sure there was at least the possibility of setting flags and describing those as inventory items. But okay, that's not how Myst normally works. You fiddle with machines, and that's your only state. You don't carry stuff... Except in Uru Live, where you can't proceed, or communicate, if you don't have your KI, and there's a side-quest based on collecting markers in your KI.

The user interface is hard to use at first; mouse in the left hand, arrow keys under the right, but now you can't type to anyone without moving your right hand back to home position. Hit F4 to open the options panel, click Navigation, then Advanced, then Key Map, and you can set the keys to something sane (I use WASD, Q/E for sidestepping, space to jump, and / to activate chat--your preferences may vary). There's a long list of emote commands somewhere online, which you might want to print out. At the very least, memorize that F1 switches first/third person view, F2 activates your KI, F3 opens your Relto book, F4 opens the options panel. You'll use those a lot.

The KI interface is totally different from the client UI, and while it's complicated and tedious to use, it's attractive enough, sort of in-genre, and almost usable. First thing, hit F2 a couple times until you see a full screen display, then click the gears icon, and change the chat fade duration to maximum. Now your list of nearby people won't vanish on you.

Cosmology

There's a long backstory to the D'ni civilization's rise and fall, which is all in the game in various notebooks you can read, and most of it's pretty well-written and interesting stuff. Despite being a graphical adventure game, Myst has always done its most interesting stuff in text, and this one is no exception. You'd get 90% of the content in a pure text adventure.

As with all Myst games, the world is divided into Ages, pocket universes which are created by and teleported to by linking books. Earth, aka "D'ni" (pronounced "Dunny") is itself an Age. Normally, when you touch a linking book page, you teleport to that Age and the book stays behind.

One unusual element in Uru Live is a teeny-tiny little island Age, Relto, that you have your own private instance of, and you carry the book for it with you even when you teleport through it (unlike any other linking book ever written). This is especially important because you will reach down to your belt and link back to Relto if you're in danger (say, plummeting to your doom in lava pits). You can't ever be hurt in Uru Live. In some ways this is a tragic flaw, because many areas would be quite creepy and exciting if there could be some terrible creatures out there, or deathtraps... But no, one of the other commandments of Myst is THOU SHALT NOT BE HARMED. So instead it's all pretty boring. You can't even be eaten by a Grue!

You will also have private instances of most of the Ages, and there are shared multiple-instance Ages like your Bevin (neighborhood). It is possible to bring other people to your private instances, but mostly you'll be in them alone. Absolutely, terribly, soul-crushingly alone.

The first major quest in Uru Live is "The Journey". Yeesha, the daughter of Atrus and Catherine from Myst and Riven, has left behind clues that lead you through a series of worlds, seeing some of the underbelly of D'ni civilization, with the intention of bringing you into her faction; it's not clear yet what her plans are (she's never met in person, only recorded holograms of her), but they involve the inhuman Bahro and the D'ni "Least" slave caste. Certainly her plans conflict with those of the D'ni Restoration Council (DRC), which seems to want to turn the Ages into a "Dunnyland" theme park...

Cleft

The Cleft is a very small and simple Age. There's a desert, with the bones of impossibly large animals, a crashed ship, a trailer home with an old man who listens to Peter Gabriel, and a chasm in the ground... Naturally, the adventure is always in a hole in the ground.

Setting the pattern for the following Journey Ages, you'll have to wander around, solving puzzles, in order to reach and touch seven "Journey Cloths" tacked to the walls. When you've touched all seven, you can open a big metal door...

The Cleft was trivial to finish, and most of the seven Journey Cloths were easily located. Basically any large object, go check out all sides of it. "Oh, there's a big landmark object in the desert, I bet there's a cloth on it!"

After finishing the Cleft, you have to subscribe to proceed to anything interesting.

On the bright side, once you pay, you can change your appearance and clothing. While you're customizing yourself, be sure to hit the camera icon to save a better mugshot for the character selection screen.

Journey

I'm not going to spoil anything for you, just summarize and review the following Ages. I could insert a bunch of my own screenshots here, but the official screenshots are just as good and don't use my bandwidth. The only caveat is that most of those screenshots show multiple people. You will never see that.

As adventure game quests go, it's okay. I've played better, but I've played worse. By normal Myst standards, it's much too small and easy.

Gahreesen is a continuation of the facility where you first picked up your KI. Now there's another section open, and from there you can get outside and over to a prison facility... Though most of the gadgetry there can't be turned on, which is rather lame. But you can't complete the Age just yet. You'll have to take a break and go on to the next Age.

Teledahn is a big industrial facility in the middle of a mushroom-infested swamp. Once you get the machinery working, and figure out how to access a flooded area, you can finish it off, and you will be able to finish Gahreesen. This is by far my favorite of the Ages. The machinery's satisfying and logical to work with, Sharper's journal is a treasure trove of information about the Age and gossip about the DRC's internal politics (just don't let him catch you reading it!), all of the clues you need are in Teledahn or in Ages linked from it. I've even been able to get a good sighting of the Shroomie sea monster. I wish there was even more here, and more in this style.

Eder Gira is a live volcano, with a fun but very, very easy steam-based puzzle, and lots of plummeting towards lava and panic-linking back to Relto. Then there's the waterfall... With a cave behind it. Has there ever, once, been a waterfall in an adventure game without a cave behind it? That would be a surprising, mysterious location. "Come see the waterfall that just drowns and crushes you! No cliché hidden caves!" The rest of it requires finding a light source... This being Myst, you can't just pick up a torch from the ground, LOOK IT'S RIGHT THERE, go light it on fire in the lava, and come back in. No, that would require the demon inventory. The only solution they implemented involves a very subtle effect in the linked Age, Eder Kemo. Eder Kemo is a lush garden Age, with giant black scorpion-slug things that luckily leave you alone. Nnnnggh. I hate bugs. I REALLY hate big bugs. Other than my desire to hose it down with DDT, Eder Kemo's lovely and has more backstory about the D'ni, but aside from one impossibly hard and un-Myst-like platform-jumping problem, doesn't have any puzzles except your light source problem. There's a giant levitating, rotating stone obelisk, but you can't do anything with it. Who makes a giant levitating, rotating stone obelisk that doesn't do anything? Once you get back to Eder Gira, there's no more puzzles, just go turn on lights and touch Journey Cloths. [Glyph of Boredom] Very lame Age, all things considered.

Kadish sucked. Kadish is almost the archetype of the worst possible puzzle design imaginable. The answers to all of the puzzles are in the temple, so you go copy down all the diagrams, then replicate them in Kadish, with no way to figure them out from local clues or by experimentation, and no feedback to tell you if you're getting close or not until something unlocks. Most of the scenery is gigantic curving bark walls, or oppressive stone chambers. The final piece of backstory at the end is interesting, and clearing the Journey was good, but I want the couple hours of my life that I wasted in Kadish back. This Age is a crime against game design.

And that's it. There's a bit more running around to do, and you can return to the Cleft and pick up a couple of new shirts and some goggles. They're adding more content, but it's very slow growth. As of this writing, there are two smaller Ages with one puzzle each, and two new "pod" Ages, with nothing you can do in them except look out the windows at the wildlife.

The whole Journey took me 3 nights of playing to complete. Maybe 15 hours, including exploring every inch of D'ni Ae'gura. That's not what I consider a complete game. My own goal for "short story" single-player games is 20 hours, a long-form single-player game should take 40-80 hours, and an MMO like this should be able to keep you occupied for several hours a day, every day, for as long as the game is supported.

You can play Final Fantasy XI or World of Warcraft forever, essentially, and never see all of it. Uru Live being released with just this one quest is like if FFXI was released with only Hume Warriors, a level cap of 10, and only Sandoria (the most boring and cliché-fantasy of the cities) and the nearby field.

Actually, there'd be more to do in that mini-FFXI, because at least you could make parties and big combat alliances to fight the tougher monsters, or fish, craft, work the market at the auction house, complete quests for townsfolk, and gamble at player-run casinos (before I quit FFXI, when I had hit the "bored of level-grinding" phase, I used to run a casino in an empty house in Windurst, and was trying to get some chat hookers to set up shop next to me, for better business for both of us). There's no comparison at all to Second Life, which I expect I'll be in (or in its replacement) for the rest of my life, just as I expect I'll be on the Web (or on its replacement) for the rest of my life.

Society

In the closet in your Relto, you get a few sliders for how old or fat you look, and a rather minimal amount of clothing. Men get: 10 hair styles, 8 beard styles, 3 glasses, 14 shirts (4 designs have some variations in material), 5 few pants (3 with variations), 3 gloves, and 4 shoes (no variations, no boots!). Most of the clothes can be color-tinted. Women get: 15 hair styles, 6 kinds of jewelry (why don't guys get bling? UNFAIR!), 10 shirts (3 with variations), 3 gloves and a nail polish color, 6 pants (4 with variations, including pajama bottoms, which is... creepy), and 4 shoes and a toenail polish color (again, no boots, no heels). There's no slider for breast/butt size for women, so everyone is a C-cup.

The hair and skin can be tinted, but only within mere human ranges. I dislike being limited to human skin colors, because I'm not human. In SL, my current skin is a snow crash static pattern. Last month, it was a repeated fractal pattern. Tomorrow, it might be something else. The lack of height and build sliders beyond how fat or thin you are, relative to some generic pudgy academic body, is very limiting. I don't look like that. Most people don't look like that. Even with color-tinting, it's a really depressingly small wardrobe. I have hundreds of t-shirts in SL, and quite a few good suits and nightclub clothes. Why can't I even have a suit? My Real Life persona doesn't wear them, but in SL I like wearing a sharp suit when I'm working and doing business with people, then change to something else for play time. And how are Nekojin or Kitsune or Nosferatu or cyborgs supposed to live in a world that makes them look like Humans, which they so clearly are not? Human supremacist racist oppression is what that is.

What's in my closet? Not much. Isn't that logo on my "Yeesha Reward" shirt great? That's the Uru logo. Don't get it confused with the Second Life logo, even though they're both swirly right hand imprints; Second Life has an eye drawn in the center. It appears to be independent invention, but someone at Cyan should have noticed and changed theirs during the long, long years they've been trying to get Uru out.

On the bright side, you do get some additional clothes as you explore. A hard hat here, a few shirts and goggles there, it adds up a bit. Good explorers can be identified by their clothes, just as in Second Life, you can identify newbies by their newbie outfits and oldbies by their increasingly freakish or realistic appearances. But all Uru avs are pretty much alike, and don't even have nametags floating above their heads; you have to mouse over them to see who they are.

Visiting the city of D'ni Ae'gura is an odd experience. The environment is huge, and beautiful-looking... But most of it is inaccessible, blocked off by traffic barriers until/unless the DRC opens them up (i.e., as Cyan adds more content). So you're really wandering around a dozen streets and buildings, at most. There are typically 10-20 people present, but it's eerily silent.

I've come to realize that Uru Live is populated primarily by massively introverted people. Almost nobody talks, they turn and run away when confronted by the horror of another person. Most people were pretty friendly if you asked for help, but they didn't shout spoilers out. So they're not antisocial, they're just totally withdrawn, and behave as if this was still a single-player game. Shockingly, there are griefers, or at least people being dicks, in D'ni Ae'gura. Who's so pathetic they grief in Myst?

There's occasionally some newbies in the dedicated helper Bevins, but rarely very many helpers; both times I was there, there was no help. The city was much more useful. There's supposedly some regular events, but I can't hold out any hope for them to be better at this point.

There are some forums and podcasts about Uru Live. Sadly, these tend to be pretty dull. A handful of people do some creative writing about the world, which is great; it's tragic that that creative ability can't go into the world as more content, but at least they're creating something, somewhere, rather than being mere consumer sheep like most Uru players. Mostly, though, they obsess about the actions of the DRC, who are the sole source of new stuff in their world. Mentions of user-generated content or Second Life bring out responses of absolute terror and fear: "Nonononono, we're nothing like those Second Life people! We don't want user-generated content, because those people will just make flying penises!" It would be funny, if it wasn't so very sad.

Back in D'ni Ae'gura, you'll see the odd sight of people trying to jump on boxes and up walls, just for something to do. Sometimes this even works; whether by bug or intent, you can get yourself in some weird places. This doesn't help you explore, any, it's just something to do to relieve the unbearable boredom. Witness, for example, the "art" of arranging traffic cones: Conehenge! That's... Great Cthulhu, that is sad. It's horrific that this is just about the most creative and awesome thing you can do in Uru.

Nobody visits my Bevin, except me. Apparently there's 20 people sharing it, and yet the recent visitors list is just Kami Harbinger, over and over as I pass through. I saw someone there once, early on. He immediately linked out, perhaps to avoid talking to me. He's never been back. There's a tabletop game of some kind, Heek, which needs more than 1 player. I may never learn how to play this game. There's a bright inflated beachball down there, too, but playing soccer by yourself isn't much fun.

There's a photo-journal Kiddofspeed - GHOST TOWN - Chernobyl Pictures - Elena's Motorcyle Ride through Chernobyl. The rapidly-decaying, slightly-radioactive city abandoned and empty, reminds me of everything in Myst. It's an unbearably sad, lonely place. Not because nobody's there at all, but because nobody's together, ever.

SL lags to death at 40 people on old sims (2 sims per server), and just over 100 on new sims (4 sims per server). Uru says it supports 40, but really gets painful, seconds of lag between stuttering moves, after 25 or so. They don't tell you exactly what servers you're using, but I would expect that D'ni Ae'gura is on its own server, and they clearly move users between servers as you travel between Ages. I don't think it's scaling very well at all.

As I was writing this article, I wanted to check some facts in Uru... But I couldn't. The system's down. Found this on the forums:

Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2007 8:51 am

"Maybe it's just because I'm a server developer myself, but I always appreciate when light is shed upon a mysterious outage in the online games I enjoy playing, and since I find myself in a position to shed such light here, I thought I would offer some info about this evening's outage. The outage this evening was due to the way one of our servers caches data. It has an issue where it can use up all available memory. We will be working through the weekend to correct it. Once our change looks good, we'll update said server and all will be well, but until then it's possible URU will experience intermittent outages. Sorry for any inconvenience. We're correcting it as quickly as we can."

-eap (Eric S. Anderson, Lead Server Engineer, Cyan Worlds, Inc.)

It went down early Sat morning, prime playing time. Here it is late Sat evening, still not fixed, might not be for days. If you ever feel the need to complain about Second Life's occasional database issues which last for a few hours, read that again.

Wait... You'll see this logo a lot as you travel between Ages.

Epitaph

There are many emotes in chat, like /dance, /wave, and /doh. /look tells you the name of the Age, and a silly bit about exits, as if it was a text adventure... And then there's this, the most depressing emote I have ever seen in my life:

> /fly
You close your eyes, you feel light headed and the ground slips away from your feet... Then you open your eyes and WAKE UP! (Ha, you can only dream about flying.)

... But ... I can fly. Really.

I'm a Second Life avatar. Flight is one of my most basic abilities, like cam-panning and IMing. I can live with limited teleportation, but a world without flight terrifies and depresses me. I don't care how beautiful your world is, if you can't fly, you're a prisoner. I can understand that a game designer might take that ability out to make level design easier, or because mere humans can't fly, but to then mock you for even trying is unspeakably rotten. I can't conceive what kind of sick, twisted mind would write such a thing. I had to go fly around SL for a while to wash that horror out of my brain.

When I compare Uru Live to Second Life, I just feel sad for Cyan, and then go get some beer and visit my favorite dive bar in SL to cheer up. Sure, there's no quest in SL, no overarching vision, and except in a few themed regions, everything's a mess of what people made for themselves mushed up against each other. And that's what's GLORIOUS about it. It's everything wonderful and terrible in the human and transhuman condition, packed together like Neapolitan ice cream, something tasty for everyone. Political offices next door to strip clubs next door to gun shops next door to shops selling tiny Kirby avatars. There's casinos and all-day-all-night dance parties with live DJs. There's an infinite variety of clothing and skins to choose from or create for yourself, or you could buy or make a total replacement avatar like the furries do.

Cyan says that "Uru" means "deep", as in the cavern city, but also "U-R-U" in retarded teenager l33tspeak, as in "You Are You". Linden Lab says "Your World, Your Imagination". Cyan wants you to be stuck in the body you were born with (or for many of us, one that's much dumpier and more boring), and stuck in a world they create and control. I want to choose the body I live in and create the world I inhabit.

Are you sure you want to quit Uru? Yeah, I'm pretty sure.

Inspiration

Then I exit from the dank, dark, lonely caverns of D'ni, blink at the light from the Linden sun, and truly appreciate my Second Life. There are things I want in SL now, but I want them in SL, not in the crippled solitary confinement of Uru Live.

The greatest consequence of my playing Uru Live is that I'm inspired again. Driven, even. I know we can do better in our world than they can in theirs; we can all create stuff, we all have far more power and better tools than anyone at Cyan does. All their users can do is stack traffic cones. So I'm back at work building puzzle gadgets.

In the days and weeks to come, I'm going to be adding a section to my Shoppe that sells scripted devices and in-SL routers and PHP web services for persisting adventure information. I'm also going to post the background and pencil-and-paper RPG rules for my World of the Eternal Sun science-fantasy setting, which I'll be using as the source for some of my adventure areas, but most of the devices will be reusable in any setting.

If that sounds interesting to you, I suggest that first, you go try out the demo of Myst Online: Uru Live, and play through the Cleft, at least. You don't have to sign up, just try it out and see what an attractive, well-designed puzzle area looks like. If you didn't grow up with Infocom's games, download and play Zork for free, and see what really top-notch adventure design is like. Then start thinking about making stuff of your own. Don't steal anything from Myst, I want us to do better than that.

Robyn Miller has written a few times in his blog about Second Life: Pattern Languages in the Cyberverse and Selenitic Second Life. His claim is that Second Life has potential, but there's nobody dictating anything, so there's no theme, and therefore "it is not an evolutionary design, it is cancerous growth." Yes, he actually compared SL, the SL created by the users, to cancer.

I say instead that our lack of theme, our lack of central control, makes us mighty. It means there's not just one small team of brains creating the world, there are thousands, tens of thousands. We're not cancerous, we're an ecosystem. Evolutionary competition will drive people towards the interesting areas and away from the boring areas, and we'll be able to make suggestions and improve each other.

Copyright © 2007 by Kami Harbinger. All Rights Reserved.

Apparently it's new-MMO-of-the-week season again, because there's also The Tyra Banks Virtual Studio! ... Also known as The Lounge, from when it launched last year.

It scores well up front, because it has Mac and Windows versions. They list the Mac version as alpha, but it worked perfectly on my machine, and was a very easy install and run. There are two city servers currently: San Francisco and Miami. Unfortunately, they're identical, and SF had 200+ people while Miami had 80.

Graphically, it's pretty lame. Very primitive cell-shaded cartoon avatars, with limited selections of clothes and hair from their closet; you can't make your own. The sim is tiny, and has blocky, low-polygon-count models with low-rez textures, portraying a nightclub district.

Moving around's pretty smooth, and the interface is very simple and easy to use (once you hit F1 and find out what keys to use to make the screen bigger on the Mac!). The chat system's good, and it hooks into AIM (or .Mac, which also uses AIM). That's pretty cool. I wish SL hooked into any real chat system. Heck, I'd like SL to just steal that interface. It's nice. It's easy to activate gestures and start dancing and emoting and chatting. You forget, after a while, just how much SL's interface really sucks, but this really points it out. Go play with this thing just to see how easy the interface is.

The music starts playing smoothly as you approach the clubs. Most of it was teeny-bopper pop crap and some mediocre hip-hop, but in the sushi bar, they were playing New Order. New Order in a sushi bar. Awesome. That is cooler than midnight in Antarctica.

Unfortunately, there's not much to do there. You can wander aimlessly and find the various music hotspots. There are touch-spots that'll let you lean on bars, lounge on chairs, or even turn you rainbow-colored or solid black for a while. There's a skating rink, though it's hard to reach, and there's no hockey pucks, or anything else to interact with. There's bots all over the place, tending bar or guarding club entrances, but they don't seem to react to anything; damn it, how do I get them to give me the Unagi Sushi Quest?

You can't build anything, there's no activities except standing on a dance floor and bump-and-grinding on each other. I did start jumping onto the walls to try to reach the elevated train that passes by, but you can't reach it. If you fall in the water, you die and reappear in the starting area.

As Richard Bartle wrote in Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit Muds, there are four major player types: Socializers, Explorers, Achievers, and Killers/Griefers. The Lounge is only aimed at Socializers. Explorers will run around for maybe 15 minutes, get bored, log out. Achievers log out immediately. They do have quick, easy tools for muting and abuse-reporting troublemakers, so they clearly have had problems with Griefers.

I'm a mere shadow of myself in the Lounge: (click to zoom in a new window)

I'd almost want to recommend this as someone's first non-game MMO. Ease of use, interoperable chat, and simple emotes are killer apps. Music would be, if they had more selection, maybe even some personal control. They supposedly have live DJs a couple times a day, so I may go back in and report on that this weekend.

But the primitive graphics are distractingly bad, even by SL's amateur-hour "I made this!" standards, they need activities to prevent boredom in non-Socializers, and they need to add entirely different cities, maybe with activities that require you to travel between the cities. They don't have to go to full player-created content, though that'd be nice, but being able to customize clothes and maybe make your own apartment by arranging their furniture would be cool.

Outback Steakhouse Online! It's hot! It's 100,000x better than Second Life! Robert Scoble says so! It's powered with Magic Pixie Dust™!

Looks useless to me.

No Mac client = no (or far fewer) cutting-edge people. No artists, no musicians, nobody but accountants. So right there, they've cut their own throats. And yeah, I really wanna see someone try building 3D models with an Xbox joystick. Hah. Yes, us Mac users are somewhat condescending. We try to be nice about it, but the fact is, Windows is useless for artistic pursuits. Making any media platform without Mac support is retarded. There.com already tried that, and it's an ugly, fringe system.

Using P2P is insane, or at least very ignorant. Putting the client *and* server in the hands of the enemy (the end-user) is so apocalyptically stupid I can't even believe I read that. This has been known in the virtual world and online gaming communities for 25+ years; if you give the users control of what someone else can see, they will abuse it. And most people simply don't have the upstream speed to support anyone else. You desperately want centrally-located servers on a fast network pipe, not some crappy home DSL.

Their scaling numbers (100x SL's!) are beyond preposterous, into outright, Bush-level lies. You have to download textures, maps, and models sooner or later. You can put everything on a CD, as games do; or wait 10-15 minutes for a region to download fully at the start, as many older VW systems did (and then stream more stuff in when additional people arrive); or you can stream them as you need them, as SL does. Those are your only options. Magic pixies are not going to get your data onto the client any faster.

If you do stream everything up-front, your app will rapidly consume many GB of disk space. How many 100s of GB do you have free? Say goodbye to all of it.

Graphically, SL is primarily limited by video card memory. You can send very blocky, ugly avatars with nasty low-rez textures and get a somewhat faster system, though you won't beat SL's avatar count by more than 5-10x with that, and it'll look terrible, it'll make There.com look attractive. If you send avatars as complex as SL's, or more so, and decent textures, you will get exactly the same performance problems in large groups as SL.

On the server side, to get any better performance than SL, you have to greatly simplify or remove the server-side physics model; if you trust the client, some people will find ways to cheat and abuse others. Maybe you don't want physics, but the physics is a large part of what makes SL feel like a different but equally real world.

This isn't even remotely a serious proposal.

(no, they're not really associated with Outback Steakhouse. That'd be cool, actually. I'm just hungry for steak right now).

Raph Koster (of whom I have previously written) has announced what he's working on: Areae... "Areas", except you probably can't trademark that, so instead he uses an unpronouncable and unspellable Latin word.

And that's fine, except he's got nothing. No screenshots. No product description. Zilch. It's less than vapor, it's less than smoke and mirrors, it's an empty space filled only with the lonesome echo of public relations bafflegab. Here's the front page blurb, in case it gets edited out later:

Areae means "many places" in Latin. Depending on who you ask, you pronounce it "Airy-eh" or "Airy-eye" or "Area-ee"... well. It doesn't matter. What matters is what it means: many places, many worlds.

Areae, Inc. is a company dedicated to taking the tired old virtual world and making it into something fresh and new. Something anyone can jump into. Something where anyone can find something fun to do or a game to play. Something where anyone can build their own place on the virtual frontier.

Feel free to wander around the site and learn about us. We're hiring!

You know, it's a bad idea to tell people your company name doesn't matter. Claiming to be everything to everyone, and so easy that Helen Keller could hit max level in 2 hours, despite her trivial handicaps of being deaf, blind, and dead, isn't particularly encouraging, either.

(click to zoom)

Then there's that company logo (see right), where apparently a child's conception of a medieval castle, a giant kaiju dog chasing a car with no doors, a medevac chopper, a UFO and a Flash Gordon rocketship landing next to the Space Needle, and some high-fiving stick figures are all part of the same world. Someone should tell Raph that "user-created content" doesn't mean "random nonsense".

Looking over the jobs, it's obvious why there's nothing there. They haven't even started. They're looking for the most basic technical talent. Maybe they can get the one artist they're looking for to make them a logo that doesn't look like a child doodled it on a Denny's placemat with the free crayons.

Elsewhere, Raph writes, "We're working on some new tech that will literally change how virtual worlds are made. We've got a cool world or two incubating on the back burner."... What he's talking about here is Magic Pixie Dust^TM. Magic Pixie Dust^TM is any unspecified and nonexistent "technology" that allows you to create vaporware and fuel fanboy discussion without actually committing to anything. He has no technical people on-board in the company, only marketroids, ergo, he has no tech. This is a bald-faced lie, of which any man of honor would be ashamed.

Mark Wallace, usually a sane enough mind, calls Vaporeae "exciting". What, exactly, is so exciting? There's no game. There's no world. It's an empty Web 2.0 marketing website. If it was late March, I'd figure this was an elaborate April Fool's joke.

People, think about this. It's Raph Koster. He's left after trashing [ed: changed from a previous, inaccurate phrase] two giant online worlds already: Ultima Online had to have most of his virtual-world ecology and economics modelling removed because it was completely inadequately designed, it didn't work, it was completely unable to withstand contact with actual players, and anyone who had ever run a MUD for real would have known that and could have told him right up front. Then he repeated the same catastrophe with Star Wars Galaxies, first making the most deathly boring, often just plain unplayable, MMORPG in the history of the world, before saner heads prevailed and fixed it by removing his influences, finally dumping the entire game and starting over from scratch. The man made a freaking STAR WARS game where you couldn't play a Jedi!!! Hey, while you're at it, Raph, why not make a WWII game where you throw flowers at Hitler's troops, or an adaptation of Citizen Kane without a sled? Hardly an inspiring record. If anyone is going to take the "tired old MMO" and make it "fresh and new", it ain't gonna be Raph Koster. The man does not learn from his mistakes, and has such hubris, such hilariously total lack of self-awareness, that he published a "theory of fun", after making two of the most unfun game experiences in the history of gaming. Unspeakably slow level grinds, grubbing in the dirt endlessly for resources so you can build your way up from the stone age every single day and then getting paid nothing for your work, and hunting rabbits to extinction are Raph's idea of "fun".

The rest of his team and advisors are old MUD people (of the lot of them, Richard Bartle is the only one who seems sane and capable of learning from experience, but he hasn't done anything new lately, either...). Great, glad that they're all still around and theorizing about how they'd fix things if they were in charge, instead of these young whippersnappers with their modern technology... But none of them have implemented anything new in 15-25 years. Raph rails endlessly about others not learning the lessons of the past Ancient Wizards of MUDdom, but seems unable himself to learn the lessons of the present, for instance that people like games that don't suck.

What's depressing is, they're probably going to get a few tens of millions in venture capital, based only on their vapor site. In 2 or 3 years, in the unlikely event that they make it that long, in the totally improbable--bordering on supernaturally impossible--event that they finally start to have the vaguest hint of a shippable product, that's the time for them to be announcing stuff. Raph is doing the same routine as Tim Roberts of Infinium's Phantom console: lots of PR for a vaporware Magic Pixie Dust^TM-fueled product that doesn't exist and never will, take the money, and run.

Quit rewarding vapor with praise, people. You just encourage them.