October 14th, 2007
Having just returned from the latest Virtual Worlds conference in San Jose in which a number of panelists / presenters implored attendees to consider VWs as social media, I re-read Raph Koster’s recent well-thought out rant on the same issue. As Koster adroitly notes
“…virtual worlds are their own thing, and they have more in common with media than with message. They are more like television than like I Love Lucy. They are more like newspapers than like The New York Times or The Weekly World News. They have more in common with 16mm film than with Casablanca or Fahrenheit 9/11.
…The core systemic characteristics of virtual worlds include synchronous communication, spatial simulation, multiple simultaneous users, and use of publicly visible profiles (aka avatars). But there’s a lot of blurring at the edges of that, which brings things like PHP massive games or “Colorform†style apartments a la Cyworld into the fold despite the largely asynch nature of the interactions therein.
Compared to IM, email, or Facebook, Habbo and WoW are clearly “the same thing.†In fact, you could easily and profitably stick all of those things in a virtual world because the core of the virtual world has more to do with the “place†thing than with the “chat†thing…”
I believe that as the industry becomes more developed and more mainstream, the fewer debates about what constitutes a MMOG, virtual world, social network and, even, an alternate reality game, the better. I like the move to identifying all such innovations as social media; I just wonder if metasocial media may be more apropos?
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