Wired: When Virtual Worlds Collide

[Morreion]

When Virtual Worlds Collide (Wired)
Grand Theft Auto crashes through EverQuest into The Sims! The walls dividing the game universe are coming down.

Sometimes futurists get the future right. Millions of us now commute to massively multiplayer online games in worlds much like the metaverse predicted by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and the Wachowski brothers. We live vicariously through our digital avatars in lushly rendered virtual environments, building and bartering, chatting and flirting, even falling in love. The population of the computer-generated universe is increasing at a rate that rivals email's growth 15 years ago. A decade hence, you'll drop a reference to your virtual doppelgangers just as casually as you give out your email address today.

Within a decade, then, the notion of separate game worlds will probably seem like a quaint artifact of the frontier days of virtual reality. You'll still be able to engage in radically different experiences - from slaying orcs to cybersex - but they'll occur within a common architecture. The question is whether the underpinnings of this unified metaverse will be a proprietary product, like Windows, or an inclusive, open standard, like email and the Web. (The Open Source Metaverse Project is currently working on such a nonproprietary platform.)

One way or another, consolidation is all but inevitable. A single, pervasive environment will emerge, uniting the separate powers of today's virtual societies. And then we really will have built the Matrix.

This would be a fantastic thing. Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk novel Snow Crash had this concept. Think of a universal Second Life with every online universe within it.

[Regolyth]

Actually, this made me thing of the Internet on Futurama. There was one world, and the characters walked through halls and corridors to game rooms. They opened the door to go into the game; everything from shooters to chat rooms.