GDC08: Raph Koster gets sentimental about Virtual Worlds

In the program for the Worlds in Motion summit, the description of Raph Koster's address (the kickoff event on Monday) concludes by saying "Industry pioneer Raph Koster ... will discuss why virtual worlds and online spaces are more than a fad-and why you absolutely should care."

That description has absolutely nothing to do with what Raph actually spoke about. In fact, most of Raph's speech was quite depressing. He spoke about the reality that many Virtual Worlds are meaningless 'Castles in the Air", the horror and disconnect from 'metaspace' of places like Darfur, and the failure of the design community to really push the possibility envelope.

That said, the packed-to-overflowing room met Raph's harsh realism warmly; as if some of his unyielding statements were reassuringly brutal to a few choice ideas and sacred cows. Read on for a rundown on how Raph began by looking back at the history of online games with a bitter eye, and ended up offering up a rallying cry for the entire industry.

%Gallery-16369%

Raph kicks off his discussion by talking about what his speech should have been about: "Why do virtual worlds matter to gamers?" He discarded that because he'd basically be preaching to the choir at the Worlds in Motion summit. There's no point in trying to explain that topic if everyone in the room has already drunk the kool-aid. So, he flips it around. Should he explain why the virtual worlders should care about games? No ... the VWers are already at GDC, so there's no point in going over that ground either.

So why should anyone care about virtual worlds? "This is where I get all sober and contemplative", he says, as he flashed the warning slide up saying "This talk contains disturbing imagery. Viewer discretion is advised." Despite Leigh's joke, to what degree is the creation of Virtual Worlds really Scientology? He references a quote from from the science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer: "Virtual reality is air guitar writ large ... and ultimately meaningless."

The problem is that it's very easy to group-think in an environment like the summit; he asks how many processors everyone in the room is carrying to note how outside the norm most of us are. "The CPU per human average has crested one." The three or four or five most people in the room have (DS, phone, laptop, pager, GPS, etc.) is still very much abnormal.

Despite almost everyone carrying around a CPU, only an elite class can program them. And even despite that, great things have still be achieved. He presages discussions from later in the day and Tuesday, talking about how monetization of kids, virtual currencies etc, is all very interesting. But, "I'm struck by how much that looks like 'the real world. It's easy to think that that context informs everything. But it really doesn't ... The idea that Milwaukee gives a damn is wrong."

At this point his slides become a big graphic, with imagery of the massacre in Darfur coming up on the screen, followed by a slum in Haiti, and the flooded remains of New Orelans' lower ninth ward. These places, as he puts it are 'kind of far away.' " It's weird and interesting to me that technologies that are not this dream of cyberspace, but really simple stuff like signatures onto petitions and uploading photos or making marks on Google maps are more impactful to Darfur than all the second lifes put together."

He references his mother's work with UNICEF, an opportunity that allowed him to grow up in some interesting places, Places very far removed from virtual torn jeans, ads, and penguins. "And yet, it is of our world. The Neal Stephensons dreamt of the infinite promise, and you wonder how it addresses the things that we wrestle with in the real world." He notes that New Orleans in particular was a really easy problem, it just "wasn't important enough."

When you're faced with stuff like this -- and you wonder what do virtual worlds have to say about this. The collective venture capital at the summit has to be north of 50 million; enough to replace the FEMA trailers the people of New Orleans are living in. "I sit and I look at what we do and I think 'Goddamn we're irrelevent.' Have I brought you down enough yet?"

He looks back at his time working his way up in the industry, reflecting on his shock of grey hair. What have they really accomplished in the last 15 years? Where is the 'toaster' of VWs? Why are we still dealing with MUD Client?. "There was no PK switch in UO because the players would never deal with anything on their own. It turns out that it's really lucrative to take care of players problems. Part of the subscription is to pay for that."

So the ultimate question is, what is it that VWs can offer ordinary people? Lots of developers are still caught up in the technology discussion, when it should be about people. Most worlds are still just getting to the point where they're realizing players should have rights. "I only know of two VWs that have a rights document. What the hell? This isn't hypothetical. This is your grades, Social Security, medical records. There are COPA and privacy issues, big ones. We haven't even agreed not to spy on our users - really wacky stuff."

Eventually virtual worlds will be a way to interact with many different kinds of data, and in Raph's mind that's a no-brainer. His 10 year predictions, 6 years ago, were too conservative. One day he walked into Times Square and saw a giant There avatar - it kind of freaked him out. "We have arrived, but not in the right place." He notes he needs to push more at the boundaries. "I'm not earning my beard. I need to go further. So much that we see is only relevant to us in this room. Get over yourselves, the rest of the world is coming."

For the here and now, he wants to get out of the prediction business. People have a hard time coming at this stuff objectively because for the most part, to date, Virtual World development has been inspired by idealism. That idealism hasn't served the cause very well. It's great to have ideals, but there haven't been a lot of shipped products - and there's almost no diversity. The future has to come from "the idealistic and the practical. Commercial and crazy."

He references his talk from a few years ago about how most MMOs today are just Disneyland - "What we have made are not parks but theme parks. Over the years, more has been done to reduce the scope than expanding it." Even still, most virtual worlds are "no better than MUD1" - they just have a big graphics cache. Web 2.0 is an unfulfilled promise. How many times have you entered your friends into the closed Klein bottle of a database? "Look, they're still in there!" Why are these techs more about capturing data in databases than about getting in touch with your friends? The Web is still not webbish. Things don't hook up and connect.

He then references the classic plea, "Where are my flying cars?" How do we make a difference in ordinary people's lives? Where is that sense of magic and infinite possibility that marked early online projects? We need to get that back. Replicating life in a new context , offering people the real world online, is not an advance.

All that technology has really done, it seems, is work to keep people apart. He argues that VOIP makes us meet fewer strangers; Studies show that replicating height differences in avatars perpetuates real-life psychological effects of submission and dominance. "People do know you're a dog on the internet."

Despite it all - he is still drinking the Kool-Aid. "What we do in this room can have an impact." To bring it all back: Gamers should care because gamers are infecting everything. And virtual worlds have swallowed everything. "We have cybercafes in rural Senegal -- people without food and water still have Google. Virtual worlds are going to invert and swallow us. They'll be plastered on us, on walls, on the floor, your shirt, your eyeballs. It is completely distributed and everywhere -- it is not a thick client. There is a foldable screen you can weave into cloth on the market -- this is on the market right now, you can buy this."

"The bottom line: we need new dreams. We see windows into virtual worlds when we download the WoW client. The metaverse is more windows -- breaking down the barriers between the worlds. We're heading for a world full of windows -- the question is what we'll be seeing through them. Will it be like a mirror or something new? We're not playing with toys but with people. We need to use what we already have and make a difference. Whether we empower each other makes a difference. The sessions this week will be about tools but the hammer isn't the point -- it's what you build with it.