Virtual World Analogies (plus a lot of hot air and good old fashioned RL BS ...)

http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/02/liveblogging-me.html#more "The Analogical Divide and the Future of Virtual Worlds: "Ginsu Yoon followed up to discuss “The Analogical Divide and the Future of Virtual Worlds.” When we discuss virtual worlds, we usually speak in analogy and metaphor. Yoon’s favorite analogy for virtual worlds is the Worldwide Web. The other big analogy out there is the comparison of virtual worlds to the world. “You absorb this analogy so deeply, that sometimes you forget it’s an analogy,” said Yoon.. “You start to pull in your knowledge from the world, sociology, economics, etc., and it’s very powerful.” The differing analogies have different strengths. For Yoon, the Web model has strong predictive power. You can look at what happened with the Web over its history and make educated guesses about where virtual worlds are going. The world analogy has a very powerful descriptive ability. It’s easier to explain the experience in terms of powerful experiences that people have had in the real life. “The Web is a very, very small section, not just of human history, but of your life,” said Yoon. “The world makes it easier to understand.” From the Web model, it makes it easier to look at business predictions on models, interoperability, usage patterns, regulation. “These are really simple questions,” said Yoon. “You just look back at the Web and see it happen again. It’s incredibly obvious. It’s incredibly dull to keep hitting this, which is why I think a lot of people just touch on this and walk away, but it’s still my way of looking at this to see what’s going to happen.” It falls short, though, to describe emotional weight, user expectations, and the scale of social interaction. You can have experiences at a real, human scale. But this divide isn’t that controversial. Where it goes wrong, says Yoon, is when you try to take the analogy from one side and use it to explain the other side. “One thing that I think is a fallacy is the Muddy Well fallacy,” said Yoon. “When you have someone who has been deeply involved in the Web for a long time and look at MUDs as communities, you tend to remember what that community meant to you and assume it has the descriptive power to look at today. With all due respect to those guys, I don’t think it has the power to look at what the Well or MUDs did and describe virtual worlds.” This “inductive fallacy of description” uses the Web to look at emotion. The “Weather Fallacy” goes the other way. It’s a deductive fallacy of prediction when users look at how compelling the “feeling of being in the weather on the beach and watching the sun go down as the same thing as the real world.” When users try to look at the degrees the virtual Sun takes up in relation to the Earth and see it fall short, they start fretting about the virtual ecosystem. [NB: Yoon’s impressions of those that wall into the Weather Fallacy are faster and funnier than I could get down here. Well worth watching the video.] “The area I bash on for the most on this is economic principles,” said Yoon. “When you say all of the things I understand about economics apply here. But I’m going to pick on politics this time. When users say, ‘I look at this TOS and it’s like the constitution and it’s incorrect and users are going to rise up out of this oppression and fight back!’ that’s over-reaching.” There will be regulation, but you can’t use typical politics to model predictions. That doesn’t mean Yoon doesn’t see the emotional impact. He predicts that there will be an increasing trend toward a human scale of interactions, but he still thinks that if you’re looking for business models, interoperability, and user adoption, the Web is the way to go. When asked for a post-mortem on the open-sourcing of the client, Yoon said “Open-sourcing the client had a lot of different technology and business goals. From the start, from a business point of view, the hope was to see people take that and make interesting commercial and personal applications. I think that has borne out incredibly well.” On the server side of open-source “We’re already seeing interesting reverse engineering open source examples of Second Life-type experiences. I don’t know if I understand a lot of what could happen in business goals and models, but we’ll see.” When asked about to still ensure the ability to play: “Our point of view continues to be that if you allow as much creativity as you can and consumer-level tools, people are enormously creative and will make use of the environment you give them.” The perennial question: “If virtual worlds are analogous to the Web, what year is it?” Yoon: “This is the favorite parlor game of people on my side. Is Linden Lab more like Prodigy or Netscape. Compuserv or AOL. My personal guess is somewhere between ’95 and ’97.”