I think the main reason is that Second Life really doesn’t offer much more value than even IRC, and IRC is better because it has a very low barrier to content creation. You don’t need to know how to manipulate prims, just type. The only way virtual worlds can rise above them is by letting people make complex visual content, but the barrier of entry is high enough to discourage most people. So they just use it like IRC or an IM, and it is inferior to socialization compared to that.

I think the virtual world was always seen as a really intuitive UI. A lot of the more compelling VRs in fiction — like Snow Crash — were windows onto the net. You could visualise online shops, social areas, and so on. But maybe we’re finding that visualising a shop isn’t really easier than using a good search engine.

The other sign is people being far more willing to use their real names and pictures online these days, rather than handles and avatars.

My gut feeling is that we’re not done with this yet. Some of the neat augmented reality work being done on smartphones is going to make it easier to put a virtual overlay on the real world. Maybe actual reality is the best UI of all

The rise of Facebook games should remind us that a lot of people (perhaps the majority) have a fundamentally different gaming goal to people like us. My favourite example is one of the smarter engineers where I work. This guy is *really* smart – but every time you go up to his desk you find he’s playing Windows solitaire – hardly the most challenging or innovative game out there. I once actually asked him why he bothered with something so trite. The answer was that he liked it precisely because it was a mindless distraction. In the midst of complex and pressured work he relaxed by doing something completely unchallenging and mindless. As well, the game is interrupt-able – you can play it when the software is compiling, or in between answering phone calls or whatever. That’s a big plus for the time-filler type of game. We all know what happens in MMOs when someone goes AFK – a social virtual world would have 99.5% of its population in that state at any time.

To me there’s a real lesson in the rise of the Facebook game – that a big block of game development effort is always going to go in the opposite direction to the direction we want it to go in.

I guess in other words, the question is how much do we need to simulate for a virtual world? I have a post half written about web games, and one of the ones I’m looking at is HSX which is a stock market simulation. It’s a really really cool simulation, for its limited scope.

Maybe graphical worlds have tended to lean too heavily on the graphics, which is after all only a part of the simulation.

Then you have deep level barriers, for instance in real life we traverse spaces by walking and this is an efficient as well as mildly interesting form of transit for us. We rarely get truly bored of walking, at least in mid step, and the thought of stopping mid-walk rarely occurs to us. However, in a virtual world we do not have bodily feedback, there are no fine muscle control procedures to float into our consciousness. There is only the high level thought ‘I wish to be there’ and the wait time between this thought and the goal. Thus walking becomes interminable leading to the creation of permanent run states or flying, so on and etc… but this creates a subtle schism in the mind, an expectation, walking as the norm, that is broken preventing suspension of disbelief.

While there are no truly intuitive interfaces, we have all, without exception, had an entire lifetime to learn how to live in a given space. In order to create the kinds of virtual worlds that fill our dreams, there will have to come a reckoning with that simple fact. Whether we do so by perfectly emulating the process of living, or by completely eschewing it is probably less important. What is important is that you cannot achieve the highest potential while making only pale, uncanny shadows of life.