The Metaverse Summit
Someone held a summit on the Metaverse and didn’t invite me 
Oh well, but at least there are plenty of thoughts around from blogs of the attendees.
Lets start by pointing out the website of the organizers of the conference:
http://www.metaverseroadmap.org/
Basically, the point of the conference was to layout a possible roadmap that will get us to a “Metaverse” by 2016. On the roadmap overview page, they list imminent technological and societal changes to get us there.
In the true spirit of the internet, information about the goings on at the summit can be found in podcasts and blogs and some scattered media outlets. The latter reporting that the conference was not without controversy:
The trickiest salvos in this conflict were delivered just after the conference in the comments accompanying the Metaverse Roadmap blog thread of theoretician of fun, Raph Koster. The leading massively multiplayer games thinker came under fire from Second Life’s most outspoken critic and advocate, Prokofy Neva, in a voluminous and hotly argued exchange that has spread across multiple threads and forums across the blogosphere.
Prokofy attacked numerous aspects of what Koster said, but also much of what the Second Lifer perceived he stood for. The Metaverse Roadmap came under fire for not being diverse enough, and featuring a familiar set of ‘panel-dwellers’, such as Koster:
“You don’t get diversity just from ‘multiple generations of technology’ – for something as big and far-reaching and impactful as ‘the Metaverse’ it seems to me that you need to have people from all walks of life, including non-technological – not just users, but thinkers and doers from a wide variety of fields. I don’t see the different viewpoints appearing in the blogs – not yet, anyway. It’s a lot of enthusiastic cheerleadering. The ‘non-profit’ types were like Randy Moss of American Cancer Society which is already in SL and promoting it – but not people who had never heard of SL. That would be the real test – take people who are smart and involved and doing great things but never heard of any of this and see – does it work for them?”Prokofy was making some valid points amid the contention, arguing that the real innovators on this new frontier might not the developers and gamers, but the people who were using the likes of Second Life for business or education:
“I find there’s a horrible, horrible, hangover from this MMORPG culture you’ve all imbined for decades that is hugely destructive and is near to strangling the infant of the Metaverse in its cradle. You conceive of worlds as if they all involve skilling, leveling up, killing orcs, and getting advice from NPS and Wizards. YOUR goal is to be the ultimate Wizard (like a resident becoming a Linden). But there’s no objective need to force these memes and cultural institutions of MMORPGs, with their rigid, stratified, tekkie-serving forms of governance on virtual worlds just because they’re virtual, and you can fly in them. None whatsoever. Indeed, to the extent that we can shatter this horrid MMORPG culture with its fanboyz and resmods and alt-outings and rare-hoarding, we’re be that much farther ahead.”
More info on the exchange can be found here http://www.3pointd.com/20060516/metaverse-grudge-match/
I’m still reading all this info, so I may come up with some thoughts about it all soon.
