The Future of 3D Worlds: Game Integration

So I decided to follow up the kind of negative post about Lively with something more positive. There have been a few small positive news stories on the 3D Virtual World front: XBox Live has added their own Avatars similar to Wii Miis, Football Superstars is now in Open Beta so anyone can sign up, Playstation 3 Home will be opening as well in December, Project Blue Mars has announced plans to go beta in January 2009. A new casual gaming site called Moondo opened up this month. The only negative news is that Awomo is putting their 3D social game on the back burner to focus on their streaming gaming platform.

What all of these stories have in common is that they point to the future of 3D social virtual worlds, namely 3D game integration. I have been advocating this for 5 years now.

The basic pattern is this: Group meets in 3D social world and decides to play a multiplayer online game. Group migrates to that game and plays. When they are done, group moves back to social game to chat about experience.

The result is that it enhances the gaming experience in both ways: The problem in social virtual worlds is there is not always stuff to do or talk about. The problem in multiplayer gaming is you do not get an opportunity to chat with your co-players. With integrated 3D gaming, you get the benefits of both.

As I see it, this is the future of the 3D web. If you can also move your ID or better yet avatar from game to game even better.

Despite all the news stories above, we are not there yet, but that is the direction we are headed. Lets start with the Xbox360 live story. One of the fun little “toys” that came with the Wii was the ability to make mini avatars. They are very simplistic, but there are enough ways to change them that everyone can make unique ones. Then once you create a Mii, you can use the character in some Wii games, particularly Wii Sports. These have proven so popular that Microsoft decided it would do something similar for the XBox360, and their avatars are now available to live subscribers starting this month.

Two years ago, when the latest console wars began, Sony announced Home for the Playstation 3. The closed beta has gone on for a year and a half now, with apparently a lot of internal drama. The primary role of PS3 Home is to do exactly what I described above, the multiplayer games being limited to Playstation 3 titles.

Two new online multiplayer games also demonstrate this concept, though incompletely. First is Football Superstars. This game is a combination multiplayer football (Soccer) game and 3D social virtual world where you can live the “lifestyle” of a pro athlete, cashing in fame for goodies.  This an excellent proof of concept that could be expanded to other online games, or multiple online games could share a social virtual world.

A second demonstration is at moondo.com. There is no “social” virtual world on this site, but it does have the ability to design avatars that can play multiple 2D and 3D online games with the same character/avatar and again gain rewards for avatar add ons.

Finally, there is the upcoming Project Blue Mars, which I wrote about earlier, starting a beta test in January and aiming for April for full release. Built on a gaming engine platform rather than a VW platform, integrating video games into this social virtual world should be easy.

What I do not see happening yet in any of the above programs is a true combination of 3D virtual world and 3D gaming. The makers of PS3 Home insist on no user created content, and no accommodation for “role play”, making it purely just a meeting and shopping world.

The ideal will be a 3D world that does everything, and if the transfer protocols are done right, there can be more than one 3D social virtual world, just a simple protocol to move from one game to another, alone or in a group, via some teleport hyperlink.

That would be the true beginning of a 3D internet!