One more little step into Snow Crash
So, I posted a bit ago on our little globe is rushing headlong into Snow Crash-land - on a few fronts. The obvious one was the Metaverse and how the Web and MMO’s are slowly approaching Neal Stephenson’s view of online interaction.
His view of cyberspace was a unified, non-traditional gaming environment with a low-tech (for cyberpunk, at least) interface. People hung out in their avatars, programmed their own equipment, exchange information and just generally existed in this consensual world. As the web and environments like Second Life slowly drift closer together, this view becomes pretty realistic.
You couldn’t have missed the ongoing hubbub about companies exploring what they can do with Second Life. But I just read that companies are creating their own internal MMO worlds as intranets where there employees can meet in a workspace regardless of where they physically are. Both IBM and Sun are getting in on this and actually developing their own software to run these worlds.
IBM’s “Innovate Quick” team (it’s pretty funny that IBM has a team named Innovate Quick) had actually been checking out Second Life and experimenting with that as an alpha of what they wanted their intranet MMO to be like. I guess they liked what they discovered and took the next step of building their own. See, now this is what I’m saying - if Second Life was free software, IBM could have taken it and run their own servers using that software. Then that’s a hop and a skip from linking their internal Second Life world to some structure in the public Second Life servers, so you get a big black cube that you walk into and suddenly you’re in IBMland. Of course, you have to hack your way in, dodge the black ICE - ok sorry, I’m mixing novels again.
Nevertheless, I think there’s growing acceptance outside of the hardcore gamer world for these “gameless” online worlds. I’m guessing Second Life won’t be the one to be the Metaverse, but I don’t think it’s too far from happening. It’ll be interesting to watch what happens next.
