Croquet 2 Play

With online social networking at an all-time high, the music industry increasingly is turning to the next stage of the user-generated content phenomenon–the virtual world.

“MySpace is about promoting who you are to a broad community to find people with similar interests,” says Courtney Holt, head of new media and strategic marketing for Interscope Records, who greenlighted the Pussycat Dolls Lounge. “This is the next step–take those people that have found that common interest and give them another level of communication. Once you’ve committed to being a fan, how much deeper are you going to go?”

Holt and others in the music industry hope it will be deep enough to buy products…. The lounge is not alone in the virtual world. Last year, a similar community called the Habbo Hotel began hosting virtual visits by such acts as Gorillaz, Ashlee Simpson and Bow Wow.

ZDNet: Virtual venues create real dollars

In 1995 when Warner Bros. Black Music Division was about to release The Gold Experience CD by The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, I was hired as an outside consultant to develop their website. I wanted to use Virtus Walkthrough(developed by David Smith, one of the Croquet architects) to implement a virtual world architecture I’d previously implemented in Smalltalk/V for Windows, but there wasn’t room in the budget or schedule to bring that off. With help from The Graphics Artist Still Known As JC we were able to implement a virtual space with a club, a church for gospel music and the [insert unpronounceable symbol] Cafe. Given the politics of the time, the Cafe ended up isolated from the rest of the Black Music Divsion buildings - see low-res image I was able to snag from the web archives:
.

Nevertheless, we learned a lot from that um experience which when combined with what’s being done in MMORPGs and Second Life could be quite valuable especially for folks thinking about dropping $25K - $3M into virtual world development:

1. Virtual venues as marketing gimmicks won’t really work - they need to have deeper integration with business processes.
2. The economic upside isn’t in selling more records, tshirts or other stuff, but rather in creating the compelling, thriving locations for user-generated content.
3. There are important relationships between real world locations and those in virtual space

Online spaces: The new frontier | CNET News.com
On Thursday, there were more than a dozen venture capitalists in the room, a clear sign that investors are looking at virtual worlds as real opportunities to make money.

…

Some here argued that the view of virtual worlds as potentially profitable ventures makes a conference like this much more attractive than it could have been even a year ago.
…

While virtual-worlds enthusiasts acknowledge that MySpace and its ilk aren’t games, and aren’t virtual worlds the way that “WoW,” “EverQuest,” “Second Life” and others are, they do feel that the sense of community developed through virtual spaces means there are more similarities than many would think.

Steiger said that he’d like to see the spectrum of virtual worlds–”Second Life,” “WoW,” MySpace and so forth–move closer together by adding tools on each side that can give users more choices, more ability to interact on meaningful three-dimensional levels and more social-networking elements.

The more the tools, the greater the flexibility people will find in virtual worlds. That’s important, Ito suggested, because such flexibility could give people the scope to engage in complex interactions regardless of whether they feel like going questing in a game like “WoW,” hanging out in “Second Life” or having simple text chats as they can with instant messaging.

All of this adds up to a significant window of opportunity for Croquet. However, the Net abhors a vacuum and if Croquet developers don’t fill the building(pun intended) demand, others will.

Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger » Wow: 3D operating system, Open Croquet
We’re getting a demo of Croquet from Julian Lombardi and David Smith of Open Croquet, which is a 3D world. Something like Second Life, but runs P2P.

We have just seen a new world.

Real diplomacy from the virtual world | CNET News.com
Eric Brown and Asi Burak think a strategy game, of all things, could help forge a new level of understanding between Israelis and Palestinians.

Their game, known as “Peacemaker,” is all about tearing down decades-old walls of mistrust between the two peoples, all the while turning one of the best-understood video game dynamics on its head. In the game, players assume leadership responsibilities on both sides of the conflict as they face real-life issues, such as diplomatic negotiations and military attacks, that divide the camps.

“The public often sees press on all the negative aspects of games. This is a fight, in a way, for better games.”
–Jean Miller, project manager, Public Diplomacy and Virtual Worlds competition

“It’s a strategy game that’s typical in form,” said Eric Brown, a graduate student in interactive educational design at Carnegie-Mellon University, “except we inverted the model, so it’s not a war game. The point is to make peace with the other side.”

What Croquet’s model brings to this conversation is the possibility that individuals and small groups can choose to establish and pursue world changing agendas independently of large entities - be they governments or corporations. Instead of a handful of huge IPO’s emerging from this wave Imagine instead hundreds of OpenIPOs and thousands of very prosperous privately held entities that choose to evolve more self-sustaining and wholistic community ecosystems.

CNN.com - Virtual game jumps to real world - Apr 28, 2006
This month saw the launch of what is apparently the first game to be developed within another game.

Given the escalating cost of game deveopment and testing, I suspect that we’ll see more and more titles springing from the online world.

Google just released a free versions of the Sketch-Up 3D modeling tool they recently acquired. Erick Schonfeld asks:

Is this an attempt to give Google Earth a Second Life by turning it into a virtual world where visitors can create their own buildings, vehicles, and other objects or just roam around?

Business 2.0

Perhaps, but the thing that’s driving SL is ownership of content which is awkward for Google. One thing is for sure it looks smooth and a lot of people will find it difficult to see the value in Croquet until the easy content creation tools allow developers to look as good as SL and GoogleEarth/SketchUp. Although Croquet is just a much more potent architecture for doing this kind of stuff we’ve got to find ways to make clear the value.

This post isn’t about games but rather the business of open source.

Every open-source program companies download, investors say, marks one step closer to changing forever the applications business long dominated by the likes of SAP (SAP ), Oracle (ORCL ), and Microsoft (MSFT ). Software that companies once paid millions for is now available for free via the Internet. Harried tech managers can simply download an operating system or application and play with it …
…  “We were looking at these open-source component companies like MySQL and JBoss, and every one of these things is just a little piece of a big puzzle,” says Lane. “We said, ‘Why don’t we play the whole puzzle?’”

Open Source: Now It’s an Ecosystem

Larry Ellison wants to play with a full stack, but he doesn’t want to pay a premium price for it:

I’m not gong to spend $5bn, or $6bn, for something that can just be so completely wiped off the map.  … So its all very interesting. You can build a sustainable business [in open source], you just can’t charge a lot for it. There’s brand value – there’s real brand – there’s people, and that’s it.

Financial Times Interview with Larry Ellison

Good food for thought for folks wondering about the economics of developing with the Croquet SDK. We’ll be much better off IMO with a thousand small businesses that are “highly profitable making $15 million year in and year out ” than than a few multi-billion companies dominating the ecosystem. We still have some large predators in our physical ecosystem, but they’re not dinosaurs.

Virtual worlds may end up playing an even more sweeping role — as far more intuitive portals into the vast resources of the entire Internet than today’s World Wide Web. Some tech thinkers suggest Second Life could even challenge Microsoft Corp.’s (MSFT ) Windows operating system as a way to more easily create entertainment and business software and services. “This is why I think Microsoft needs to pay deep attention to it,” Robert Scoble, Microsoft’s best-known blogger, recently wrote.

A lot of other real-world businesses are paying attentio. That’s because virtual worlds could transform the way they operate by providing a new template for getting work done, from training and collaboration to product design and marketing. 
My Virtual Life