The Fractured Metaverse
At the Metanomics meet yesterday someone mentioned how all of these worlds springing up lately weren’t interfacing. They saw that as a problem. The Metaverse is coming, but it’s coming fractured.
I’m starting to realize that it’s a good thing.
Web 2.0 applications don’t all communicate with each other, and while there is some demand for some interactivity between them, it’s hardly a make-or-break to the viability of any application. MySpace doesn’t need a Facebook interface. They exist parallel to each other just fine.
Take this concept to the Metaverse. There would be world clusters, small collections of worlds in groups of a few hundred to a few thousand scattered around the Internet. They’d interface with each other in a wide variety of ways, sometimes enabling people to walk their avatar from one world cluster to the next, sometimes allowing inventory transfer, and sometimes even allowing virtual currency exchanges.
They wouldn’t always allow it these exchanges, however, and the reasons for that wouldn’t be technical by any means.
Take There.com and Second Life for example. Imagine you could exchange Therebux for Linden Dollars. A brisk trade in currency exchange would definitely spring up for one simple reason: Therebux are available at a discount if bought in bulk. People would buy large amounts of Therebux with USD at a discount, then switch the money to Linden Dollars at the standard rate, and then back to USD. They’ve just made a profit. Repeat until one or both economies are dead.
That’s only the beginning. Imagine someone says that you can no longer buy currency at a discount in There because they don’t do it in Second Life. Is that fair to There residents? Imagine they make it possible to walk your avatar from There to Second Life, but since There doesn’t have the same Identity Verification process that Linden Lab is shoving down everybody’s throat, we just can’t have mature content in Second Life at all now. Is that fair to them?
What could work is if there was an avatar import process from There to Second Life, but the user established separate accounts in both. That could work (some legal issues involving intellectual property aside) and people would still maintain a sense of identity while having travelled from one world cluster to another.
note: I'm referring to There as a world cluster as Virtual Laguna Beach and the Hills are separate yet connected, as will be the wider open-source Second Life grid.
People might not see this as a fluid movement from one world to the next, and it might not match with their personal vision of the Metaverse, but the barriers will always be as necessary as a nation’s borders are. For reasons of trade, culture, and harmony, a fractured Metaverse will be a happy Metaverse.
… or did you just want one big New World Order? 
September 28th, 2007 at 1:57 am
Hi Caleb,
Glad you liked the photo! No problems with you borrowing it, so long as it’s credited and linked, as you’ve done here. All part of the evolving etiquette of online copyright, I guess.
Interesting post as well. There are some behavioural economists who are starting to use Second Life etc to study various phenomena, so I’d imagine some of them would love the possibility of currency arbitrage. Then, with more permeability between virtual worlds, you’d have to get into tariffs, quotas, etc. Fun!