Raph Koster on the State of Virtual Worlds

A recent community rally in a Metaplace world, being addressed by Metaplace founder Raph Koster.
Alice over at Wonderlandblog is doing her annual play-by-play of the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco. She has an excellent summary of Raph Koster's introduction to the World's in Motion Summit.

Alice highlights a number of interesting points from Raph's well-researched presentation, which include:

Access-everywhere worlds available to people with simple systems on small screens and via social networks is where you'll hit your Really Big Audiences.

and ...

But we have no universal solution. Flash is announcing the Open Screen Initiative. Unity is gaining traction. The battle for owning the web interactive desktop is ON. That battle is yet to be settled.

The future is not in downloadable clients any more: we have not yet mastered the trick of what I call the "multi-head experience": the experience on your watch, phone, toaster, browser. The ambient world is coming. What is a virtual world in an environment when there is no place, you just have tweets and updates and feeds? Not yet fully answered.

Virtual goods starting to get really real: there are folks in Kenya who keep their savings in safari.com cellphone minutes. These are virtual goods! When we build virtual worlds we don't often think of masai warriors with cellphones. But we're here today to learn about this stuff. We might not solve the ambient cloud question, but we have the best folks working in the field here. It's real and we live and die by the data.

With this focus on the rapid evolution and merging of games and virtual worlds, it it's important to note that Alice figures prominently into the history of games and virtual worlds entering into the broader public sector consciousness. When she was at the BBC she was instrumental in moving them from the teevee world to the virtual one. I frequently refer to her superb essay on public service gaming as a resource thinkpiece.

Alice's post reflects how Raph, who consistently plays a leadership role in this arena, continues to step beyond the bounds of his history as a game developer into the role of sage and visionary.

Games and virtual worlds are increasingly merging into one meta-narrative. The semantics of what distinguishes games from virtual worlds is becoming increasingly blurry. It's an exciting time to witness and be a part of.

One last word on Raph, about whom I've blogged frequently. I have found myself completely sucked into Raph's new virtual world, Metaplace. I'm looking forward to blogging about it once it's out of beta. Exciting times.