Liveblogging Worlds in Motion: Raph Koster's "High Windows"
Raph Koster was supposed to keynote on why gamers should care about virtual worlds. His question, though, was why should anyone. What dreams have we been missing and how can we get back to them. The point (in a very small nutshell), he says, is that everything we'll be discussing over the next two days is just tools to get to the virtual worlds, and not the point of them. Why do we build theme parks instead of parks? Why do we build clients instead of relationships? And what can virtual worlds do about Darfur?
“It is a valid question,” he said. “To what degree is it Scientology? To what degree is it Kool-Aid? To what degree is it castles in the air? I mean, by definition it’s often literally castles in the air. We’re building a lot of dreams and sometimes nobody is coming to see them. Sometimes we’re not building our dreams big enough.”
This is a myopic group, though. This is a room carrying around four-five CPUs a piece. Most people carry one—and they can’t program on it.
“Don’t get me wrong: this is amazing stuff. This is astonishing stuff,” said Koster. “But when we get really involved with something, perhaps to the point of obsession, it’s easy to get to think that this is the context for everything. With the view from Sand Hill Road is that it’s easy to think that Milwaukee gives a damn.”
Koster then showed a slide of a rotting corpse in Darfur.
“It’s weird and interesting to me that technologies that are not the ultimate technology dreams we build, but instead getting signatures on a petition, making marks on a Google Map, or uploading pictures are more impactful to places like Darfur than everything in Second Life,” he explained.
Koster’s mother worked for UNICEF. Showing a picture of a slum in Haiti, he explained some of the awful conditions they live in.
“That’s a little removed from torn jeans on avatars,” he said. “But it is of us and our world. It is exactly the thing that the Neal Stephensons and John Perry Barlows dreamed of. You look at where we are now, and you wonder how does it address all of the things that we struggle with now that are really easy, stupid, simple problems. [Slide of post-Katrina New Orleans] New Orleans wasn’t a hard problem. It just wasn’t important enough.”
He then guessed that the collected VC money in the room was well above the amount necessary to buy every Katrina refugee a house instead of a broke-down FEMA trailer.
“Sometimes I just think, ‘Goddamn we’re irrelevant,’” he said.
Koster’s been speaking and thinking about the game industry for a long time, but he says he still feels new at it.
He then quoted himself from a MUD interview 15 years ago: “Information is only secondary. It is the human contact that keeps the Net-addicted coming back. Someday the Net, and muds, will have an environment stable enough, extensible enough, real enough that they can rule themselves—but right now, the implementers still call the shots and it is hard to tell how much that has stunted the [growth of this community].”
Things haven’t changed, though, he says. The questions of governance haven’t been resolved.
“Even in the most open spaces, people are still subject to Gods,” he said, referring to game developers solving problems instead of people.
10 years ago, synchronicity was nowhere on the Web. Now it’s “the killer app that MUDs have and virtual worlds have,” but it’s also everywhere else. Communities are happening outside the virtual worlds.
We’re too focused on tech, still, and not people, he said. The question is what happens when we don’t have administrators to write to. The rights of avatars is real now, said Koster, but only two worlds have adopted the idea.
“What the hell,” Koster exhorted. “This is your medical records. This is your environment. We haven’t gotten around to making clear rules for protecting that information. We haven’t even gotten around to ‘don’t spy on your user!’”
Other predictions have come true, said Koster. The problem with that is that it means we haven’t been wild enough. There’s cool stuff coming, but it’s mostly only relevant to those of us in the room.
The point of all the looking back is that change happens fast or change happens slow.
“What that means for all of you is that I have no predictions for you today,” he said. “Too many of the predictions that I cared about haven’t come true. And too many of the easy lowball predictions have come true too quickly.”
He’s sick of the hype cycle. It’s all true, but “I’m sick of the phrase ‘hype cycle,’ particularly ‘the trough of disillusionment.’ I’ve been doing this too long. Eventually the trough just looks like where you are.”
There are different ways to look at the narrative, though. Person A might see all the kid’s worlds as crass commercialization and that we’re all just here to make a buck. The hippie crap doesn’t matter. Great things can still happen.
Person B says the opposite. Club Penguin is made up of idealists. There are people out there with dreams.
“It’s not that the two sides can’t be real,” he said. “It’s somewhere in between. We just don’t get to read it. The media is still the hype cycle. Reading about the dreams is the human interest article that shows up once every few months.”
And now the talk turns inspirational: “What is our imperative in this room? Why do we do this?”
“Bluntly, the impractical idealism has not actually served us that well,” Koster said. “The flip side is the commercial stuff is, eep, a little scary. We don’t have the kind of diversity we need. The kinds of dreams virtual worlds can achieve cannot come from just idealists or just commercial interests. It’s got to be commercial and crazy.”
The worlds, though, have been “not parks, but theme parks. It’s been not about expanding the scope of possibility, but reducing.”
Virtual worlds should be setting a different direction, though. See, for example, the lessons on experiments in learning with virtual reality from yesterday. Ditching real world physics can empower us, but we’re still stuck in our old metaphor.
The Web has the same problems. “Technologies are more about capturing data and databases than you getting in touch with your friends,” said Koster.
Science fiction can be realized. There are flying cars out there.
“What is our flying car?” asked Koster. “What is that one thing that we dreamed of as kids that we now are older and wiser and know it’s stupid to shoot for that flying car? Remember the first time you logged into a virtual world. Remember the first time you saw someone move and talk and realized it wasn’t a computer. Do you remember that Holy Shit!? What is our flying car!?”
Koster offered what it isn’t. It’s not making money in Second Life. It’s not replicating life in a new context.
“These stories are wonderful, but we’re just scratching the surface,” he said before showing a slide of a mass grave. “There is plenty of life that we could replicate that we don’t want to or isn’t the most appealing. It’s odd to me that the distance between a mass grave in Serbia and the aftermath of a WoW raid is very small.”
Voice stops us from meeting strangers, taller avatars get treated better than short avatars, and customizable avatars just lead to hypersexualized females. 3D technology is one of the most democratizing and inaccessible technologies available, but we chase the tech anyways.
“The old technology closed more boundaries,” said Koster. “Look what we’ve inadvertently brought over.”
To conclude: “we have to stop using the buzzword as if it meant what it says.”
Is ‘presence,’ presence? And partial attention isn’t attention.
“We need to look past the cool phrase,” said Koster. “All of those quotes, all of those crazy dreams, me personally, I’m still drinking the Kool-Aid. I still do believe that what we do in this room can have an impact [on the Haiti slums]. I can. I think it does. I think there are thing we have done that have had an impact.”
Gamers should care because virtual worlds have swallowed up consoles and gaming altogether. They’re going to consume the rest of our lives as well.
“This is why it matters to gamers,” he said. “Frankly they’re the same damn thing. It’s all the same industry. We have Internet cafes in Senegal. […] It didn’t come from a crazy Snow Crash vision. We need to recognize that our crazy dreams don’t quite match.
“Virtual worlds aren’t Klein bottles. Virtual worlds are putting a stick of dynamite in a can of paint and waiting for it to splatter everything. Virtual worlds are going to be everywhere. What’s missing is mostly the will, not the means. We need to get some new dreams.”
The crazy stuff is here. Digital paper, digital contacts, wearable computing is real.
Things like Unreal and thick clients and 3D isn’t the client we’re working on. “It is on any screen on any device it is on RFIDs woven into the hem of your skirt,” said Koster. “That is the virtual world. It’s not crazy talk. It’s here right now.”
That’s why gamers should care. Virtual worlders should care because traditional worlds are dead. The technologies are not MUD 1.
“If what you’re building right now is not built for this future, go give your money back to Sand Hill Road. It’s not about virtual worlds; it’s about the real world. It’s about people. That’s what makes virtual worlds the killer app. It’s us. It’s other people.
“When we download a viewer, we have to remember that we’re not looking at a virtual world. We’re looking at a window into a virtual world.”
There are lots of windows. Koster showed visions from clients across the years, text to full 3D.
“The metaverse is more windows,” he said. “We’re heading for a world full of windows. The question is what we see through them. It’s easy to see this [showing a picture of poor children] and see squalor or possibility. It’s easy for us to look into the window and see toys. It’s how we can reach through the windows and make contact.
“This is what virtual worlds are about. Sure, you can make money. You can go to conferences. You can sell virtual goods, but that is not the point. These are tools, I want everyone to remember that the hammer is not the point. The point is what you build with it.”
"Du musst Amboss oder Hammer sein" You must be the anvil or the hammer. - Goethe
Is it the anvil that breaks the hammer?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Language - George Orwell
Virtual worlds become games because ultimately all communication does and our technology cannot free us from our wiring.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammer_Into_Anvil
Posted by: len | February 18, 2008 at 12:29 PM
Marshall McLuhan said the "Medium is the message" and he later played with his own famous phrase, saying "the medium is the massage." I feel at a certain point the medium isn't any longer the message, and you really do have to engage in the old fashioned thing of thinking and articulating your message, and your call to effective action, regardless of the tools at hand. They are only tools.
Obsession with them then does lead to a massage of egos -- Raph is right -- but again, they're just tools. No need to get psycho.
In the early stages, media can't help being the message itself, because its newness and awkwardness of adaptation makes people sometimes go into paroxysms of liberal guilt and rent their garments, as Raph is doing here over the awful thought that virtual worlds are expensive rich white guy's toys.
But, hey...Somebody said 20 years ago that it was humanitarian organizations that went and fed Darfurians that were the expensive white guy's toys. Seriously. That is how it evolves. They used to think only soldiers made sense -- or missionaries.
So, on the last go-around, somebody was complaining that e-mailing or Internet posting pictures of Darfur was the waste of time, and what you really had to do was f2f meetings with Congressmen and snail-mail campaigns! Oh, and on the round before *that*, people said no, that's no good, you have to go into people's living rooms and talk to them directly before they vote.
All virtual worlds do is make it easier to do the living room part again, that's all. No need to go into a spasm about it. Raph, please just come to Second Life, fly around, and talk to people within it instead of having these rants based on an imagination of it.
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/02/using-virtualit.html#more
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | February 18, 2008 at 05:35 PM
Yes, media can change people not because it changes the way they think but because it can change what they think about and the act of thinking can change the way they think. D'oh.
A series like The Prisoner, as quoted above, can change what we think about and did. It is great art and remains relevant or is possibly more relevant. If one sees games in this view, then games that give more to think about are positive.
Virtual worlds are different. They don't tend to have the same 'god like' Number 2 running the show and defeating every attempt to escape, though it is to be noted that through iron-will and persistence, Number 2 did break the will of his captors.
But these are still just works of art. Reality changes in much more complex and difficult to control ways. Did the Prisoner cause the kids to go to the streets in 1968 to stop the war? Some, likely yes. Did they stop the war? No. That happened when the cost began to bankrupt the economy, there was no political advantage, and it was clear no win possible except for the locals. Like Number Six, iron will and discipline broke absolute power.
So is there some lesson virtual worlds and games should teach with respect to Darfur? Maybe. If you want to create worlds that teach lessons, they can certainly do that.
Or perhaps Darfur will be another example to the West like Vietnam that absolute power simply will not change hearts and minds. It can aid them when they are ready to change but otherwise, human suffering like human evolution is controlled by humans who ARE the emergent controls.
I see the campaigns of the left and well-intentioned as hollow when it comes to acts. It takes incredible experience and planning to create real change. It is not enough to say, "We Can"; we have to say "We Can Do THIS" and this must be doable. Otherwise, as Orwell is quoted, the anvil breaks the hammer, and the follow on is that whatever was between the anvil and the hammer at that point is left undone.
Frustratingly sad but so. I am in sympathy with Raph because we can lose consciousness of what is to be done and what is doable by retreating into fantasy worlds. I agree with Prok we can lose it just as easily while shopping for groceries. I disagree that art of any kind is the means, just a reflector. In this is the heart of the problem of our media society: leaders should not be simply reflectors. Hope is a condition, not a goal. Actions without a goal are as dangerous as words without a cause.
If you want to make a change, put $25 into an organization feeding the refugees. This will not solve the problem. It will keep someone alive long enough to make a plan and maybe act on that. Little acts can lead to great victories if they follow the human instead of directing them.
Posted by: len | February 19, 2008 at 09:05 AM
Imagine having thousands of TV channels to choose from, but you can't watch all channels on all televisions. Further imagine that you have to purchase each channel individually and upgrade your TV all the time. Now imagine trying to make money by producing a television program. (oh, by the way, notice that there's no advertising involved in the above dream)
There's the reason that games and virtual worlds are stuck in the condition they are in now. If you really want to reach out to the masses and see a grander vision come to life in virtual worlds, then you need a platform to allow it to happen. (that means regulation and standards, boo hiss)
Maybe browser-based applications will open things up a bit.
I ask this question: How is it possible to produce a Hollywood movie which costs several times more than game production, only entertains people for about 2 hours, and takes far less money from each customer, but still make millions of dollars? My real question is: Why can't game/VW producers do the same?
Posted by: Swift | February 19, 2008 at 10:02 AM
Because we are still in the early days similar to early television when to get a network's programming, you also had to buy the TV from them. I'm not sure the TV comparision is apt, but consider the following from wikipedia:
o First description of cathode ray tube for image rendering: 1911. Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton. All-electronic transmitting tubes (early 1920s) Farnsworth/Zworykin
o First single line rendering: 1927 Farnsworth. First live humans, 1929. Farnsworth.
o RCA pays Farnsworth for the patents. 1939.
o world's first high-definition regular service: 1936
o First field test of color television on February 20, 1941. Color TV is incompatible with black and white receivers.
O World's first network color broadcast June 25, 1951
o NTSC to submit its petition for FCC approval in July 1953,
o Storage scan cycle: 1926.
"...1959 RCA was the only remaining major manufacturer of color sets.[34] CBS and ABC, which were not affiliated with set manufacturers, and were not eager to promote their competitor's product, dragged their feet into color.[35] CBS ceased all regular color programming between 1960 and 1965, while ABC delayed its first color series until 1962.[36] The DuMont network, although it did have a television-manufacturing parent company, was in financial decline by 1954 and was dissolved two years later.[37] Thus the relatively small amount of network color programming, combined with the high cost of color television sets, meant that as late as 1964 only 3.1 percent of television households in the U.S. had a color set. NBC provided the catalyst for rapid color expansion by announcing that its prime time schedule for fall 1965 would be almost entirely in color.[38] All three broadcast networks were airing full color prime time schedules by the 1966–67 broadcast season, and ABC aired its last new black and white daytime programming in December 1967.[39] But the number of color television sets sold in the U.S. did not exceed black and white sales until 1972, which was also the first year that more than fifty percent of television households in the U.S. had a color set.[40] This was also the year that "in color" notices before color television programs ended, due to the rise in color television set sales."
As you said, 'standards boo hiss'. X3D is making inroads slowly but not in the games market where to-the-metal performance matters. Flash is still the one to beat for casual games but it is by no means, a standard.
There are multiple economic forces at play that will drive standards to the mainstream, but they are not very powerful yet. Some proposals for a National Gaming Network have been made. Sony, Microsoft, EA, and so on will battle on.
Posted by: len | February 19, 2008 at 11:22 AM
If you're obsessed with Darfur, go there and try to stop the killing, or get involved with politicians and try to get them to stop it.
But it has nothing to do with virtual worlds, or movies, or novels, or anything else except politics. Whining because people engaged in making entertainments aren't obsessed with your political obsession is insane.
And ultimately, what's happened to all these post-colonial countries is their own responsibility to clean up. It is just a continuation of the "white man's burden" racism to state that it's our problem. If you're not a member of one of the colonizing European nations who created the mess, it's absolutely none of your business. Feel free to be a racist and give them money if it makes you feel good, but recognize that you're doing it for your own selfish feel-good reasons, NOT because it'll actually help or because it's your responsibility. It sure as hell isn't anyone else's responsibility.
Posted by: Kami Harbinger | February 19, 2008 at 11:42 AM
From Arkwright to InterVerzaL.
Richard Arkwright invented the first automaton i.e., a machine that replaced the human intervention in the manufacturing process; this rendered the human to a machine minder.
InerVerzaLs or Virtual Real Worlds will perform the same to Education, and other similar domains by implementing the 3D to 3D paradigm. The InterVerzaL will make the individual responsible for their education by promoting experience as the prime method using 3D environments.
But what is the connection of Arkwright to InterVerzal? Preston UK; both were born there.
An InterVerzaL is a non-game (serious game to some people) 3D environment that utilizes the 3D first person perspective provided by a commercial 3D engine used by the gaming industry.
Using the 3D engine as a platform we remove all weapons, slow the pace, create high resolution and definition meshes and textures and create realistic animation, sounds, with true physics with 6 DOF. InterVerzaLs are Massive Multiplayer Online Virtual Worlds (MMOVW) that can accommodate up to 64 "Avatars" in the same virtual environment. This therefore enables people to remotely enter from anywhere in the real world with internet connection.
This promotes world wide collaboration, in design, business, entertainment, social networking, architecture, etc.
See http://mellanium.com
Skype id joe133952 for live demonstration.
Copyright©Ken Rigby for Tele3DWorld and MellaniuM Design. 2008
Posted by: Tele3DWorld | February 19, 2008 at 03:42 PM
http://www.vimeo.com/705449/
Posted by: InterVerzaL | February 20, 2008 at 03:09 AM
@Tele3DWorld:
Oh, kinda like a message board or forum then? Only there are distracting graphics and navigation mechanics that take longer than clicking web links?
I hate to be a cynic, but how does that make collaboration better? I can see that it is novel or maybe even fun, but I don't understand how that is more productive than a video conference or an online forum. To me it just sounds like a fancy web site that can't be accessed from platforms like a handheld computer very well.
I can see how 3-d models can be used to improve learning, but that's being done already. What I don't see, is how making it an MMO helps.
Posted by: Swift | February 20, 2008 at 05:28 AM
@Tele3dWorld again:
Nice artwork by the way. Really cool stuff there.
Posted by: Swift | February 20, 2008 at 05:42 AM
MMOVRWs provide the sense of "being there" with people you know. It's like going to a pub on your own or with friends; it's a totally different experience. When you learn with friends you gain a bonding so when you reminisce you both have the same mental mindset.
MMOVRW are simulations of the real world so the experiences are like the real world.
Posted by: Tele3dworld | February 20, 2008 at 07:41 AM
Hats off to Raph for being concerned about real-world problems. For me the news here is simply that someone like him talked about Darfur and Haiti at a Game Developers Conference. Whatever specific point he was making is rather secondary. His idea seems to be that the virtual world is a tool, but for what purpose? In the end it should be about people and the real world, not just about virtual worlds, and so on. This provides an easy target for Prokofy Neva to go on about rich white guy guilt and forgetting that virtual worlds as a medium can be used for social change. But Raph shows that you can even transform a Game Developers Conference into a medium for social change!
Raph mentions a hammer, just as a name for a generic tool. Then len does a thing about "the hammer and the anvil," calling Darfur the anvil that breaks our hammer – all our tools are powerless to stop the killing. In the original quote Orwell used this expression as an example of a *dying metaphor*:
"Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase."
The dead metaphor is given new life by being turned around, to express Orwell's counter-idea, that the anvil breaks the hammer. This is a surprising outcome, given that Orwell was trying to kill off the *original* use of the metaphor - and succeeded.
Posted by: Danton Sideways | February 21, 2008 at 03:04 AM
N.B: I picked it up from an episode of The Prisoner where the quote is also turned on its head. IMO, it's a good series for exemplifying some of the points of view about virtual worlds and social change. Ascribing potential to the tool ignores the hand, and focusing exclusively on the hammer or the anvil ignores what is between them.
Our tools are not powerless, but are not the source of our power. It is within the power of people to stop the killing, but not within the power of the game devs on the west coast. They can illuminate, but the killing stops when the locals stop killing. What we think of as the absolute power of western society simply isn't.
Posted by: len | February 21, 2008 at 06:14 AM