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Originally Posted by Walker Moore  I just see it as more of an alternative chat medium to Google Lively (albeit with a better content creation toolset) than an immersive virtual world.  |
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Originally Posted by Walker Moore Immersive, it wasn't. Care about the content, I did not. |
Please forgive me Walker, I'm afraid I got out of my (even-more) pedantic side of the bed this morning.
I think that immersion comes from many different sources, and the relative importance that we attach to those different sources varies from person to person. As I've rabbited on about before, *for me*,
SL feels like a giant movie-set - if you take a photo it looks wonderful, but if you poke your finger at it you can feel it going through the plywood.
Immersion can also be found by giving people the ability to *do* things (rather than just *look* at things), to make choices, and to have those choices have consequences inside the world. An example of this sort of immersion, admittedly outside the realm of VWs, is the success (and addictiveness factor) of "Dwarf Fortress" (
Slaves to Armok II: Dwarf Fortress - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia),
a game with little or no conventional graphics. This is speculation on my part, but I think that the richer scripting environment in MP will enable people to more readily build world systems of greater "action" (rather than "visual") complexity than we've seen thus far. We'll only know for sure once MP has been in public release for a year or so.