The prospects of Virtual Worlds?

Irvin Foster

05 July 2008

As we will be able to see from the history of computing, it is commonly the case of the little eating up the large, and everything else. Does this mean a tiny world embedded in Facebook or some other social network ( s ) is the answer? It is a fascinating article that pulls examples from other ( formerly ) 'new media' ; the increase and sustainability of virtual worlds is an engaging problem.

I believe even the 'big ones ' will be trucking along pretty silently " not unlike a large amount of the renouned free to play MMOs from abroad. I mean, immersion is the total point of virtual worlds, isn't it? It's hard to do that with Flash, or Internet widgets like Facebook apps. It does not even feel as if any one game has had such impact since these articles have turned up, actually. Each screenshot I see with a 2nd Life meeting, as an example, appears to have just a little group present. I won't truly say for sure, as I have never played it and seen it in the flesh, but I have witnessed several footage, all with a sparse assembly. It's three o'clock in the morning here so if anyone's brain is going south, it's mine. Truly though, the day they turn Facebook into a virtual world is the day I stop using it. Perhaps in the future better technologies will make the concept more possible, as the article posits. For the moment, though, I believe that bandwidth and other technical limitations are going to grip it back. We presently have touchscreen, shortly the brain helmets, sometime in the future something even more close to fact.