Welcome to Betterverse.org, a chronicle of the evolving and innovative efforts to use virtual worlds to promote various real world causes and improve the lives of people all around the globe.
Virtual world research firm KZero has recently released their latest figures on the populations of virtual worlds, broken down by age group. The big news is that they report that there are now over 1 billion registered accounts across all worlds they surveyed, with over half of those in the 0-15 year old age bracket.
For educators and institutions making a case for the continuing relevance of virtual worlds, the "1 billion" figure is a nice round figure to tell people. And the giant and growing youth market is helpful for educators in particular.
A little over a week ago, Raph Koster wrote a fascinating and intelligent blog post about his views on the future of virtual worlds entitled "Are Virtual Worlds Over?". You can not read it without thinking of Raph's recent experience as the head of Metaplace, an ambitious web-based virtual world that crashed and burned in December. Raph concludes on a mostly pessimistic note that virtual worlds, at least as we understand them, are not going to reach mass audiences for awhile. As he writes:
"Virtual places as they exist now cannot be a mass medium any more than a single restaurant can."
While I agree with many of Mr. Koster's points, I do think that there are specific sectors where virtual worlds are very attractive. I would contend that virtual worlds are growth markets for the education and nonprofit sectors to reach new audiences and promote their missions.
As reported here, on January 1st, the web-based virtual world Metaplace closed it doors. While it never reached the mass appeal of worlds like Second Life, Habbo or Club Penguin, Metaplace was an easy entry point for people and institutions interested in exploring virtual worlds. With it's web-accessibility, simple user-interface and integration with other social media tools, a fairly tech-savvy individual could be up and running in-world within 45 minutes.
For nonprofits in particular, Metaplace was a great sandbox for trying out various virtual projects to see how they might work. There was literally no cost to creating a simple virtual presence in Metaplace. Anyone could build in an afternoon a digital theater for your YouTube videos, a simple learning lab for your students, or organize a fundraiser complete with live music, virtual goodies, and a paypal button.
AFAIK, there is no other virtual platform that can match this kind of on-the-fly experimentation and prototyping. Other virtual worlds like Habbo or Whyville require hiring the company that owns the world to build the experience for your organization. Open ended worlds like Second Life and OpenSim have much higher technical requirements on both the developers end and the end users.
Back in the early 1990s, creating a web presence for your nonprofit was a daunting and expensive affair. Bandwidth was expensive, coding in HTML was a skill few had or could afford, and server space was hard to come by. It fell to nonprofit networks like the Association for Progressive Communications, OneWorld.net and Institute of Global Communications to help small nonprofits and charities to get started online. This helped literally thousands of new nonprofits from around the world to flourish and connect with each other in networks that continue to this day.
Perhaps it's time to think about what the virtual world equivalent of this might be?
UPDATE 1/6/09: Alphaville Herald has an interesting analysis of the closure of Metaplace here.
In 2009, I launched Betterverse as a means of chronicling and highlighting the ways that virtual worlds were being used to promote the public good in the real world. I was led by the hypothesis that the metaverse as an imagination space was fertile ground for supporting the public sector, charitable work, and social justice causes. In the brief amount of time that I've been reporting on this space, I've found a remarkable number of innovative projects and initiatives.
In no particular order, here's are my Top Ten best public good initiatives in the virtual world...
I'm very sad to report that effective January 1st, 2010, the virtual world of Metaplace will be closing its doors. According to Raph Koster, Metaplace founder, "it has become
apparent that Metaplace as a consumer UGC service is not gaining enough traction
to be a viable product." I.e. an open-ended virtual world platform built open user-generated content is not economically profitable or sustainable.
For nonprofits interested in exploring virtual worlds for their causes, this is a major loss. Metaplace combined a rich toolset, open environment, and possibilities for broad-based participation and collaboration that was unmatched. Several nonprofits and causes had begun very interesting experiments using Metaplace over the past year. And the staff of Metaplace were very supportive of all the public good applications of their platform.
So I'm very upset to see Metaplace go away. And I wish those let go at Metaplace, Inc. all the best.
The full message from Raph follows after the jump...
Sounds like the virtual world of Metaplace had their first in-world charitable fundraiser a couple of weeks ago on November 27. Here's the report from them:
On Friday November 27th, Metaplace user MacZ hosted the first ever Metaplace Day of Charity in the Metachange world. The focus for the event was on two charities (3dSquared, and Global PlanIt) who are both currently active in Metaplace.
The festivities included tours of 3dSquared's world Gaming The Planet, and Global PlanIt's world Mali Community College , and a 2 hour concert by Raph featuring songs about charity and giving thanks. Attendees also had the chance to give donations to the charities via PayPal, and hear more about each of the charities missions.
Organizer MacZ says that she loves to plan events for the Metaplace community, and hopes to host more events after the new year, including possibly making the Day of Charity a bi-annual event.
Sounds really great. We'll followup with MacZ to find out how much was raised, and how it went.
UPDATE 12/8/09: MacZ mailed me some more info about the event and their plans for the future. See below...
We've made no secret of our interest in Metaplace as a virtual world with enormous potential for various public good applications, combining the accessibility of a web-based environment with powerful creation tools. Now they set the bar even higher by adding voice chat functionality!
Here's a little video of a test voice chat between myself, my colleague Joyce and ZimZam, one of the developers at Metaplace.
It's dead simple to operate voice chat. Just go to a world that supports it (in this case the "Dating Game"), click on the ctrl key, and start talking! You obviously need to have access to a microphone and speakers / headphones on your computer. But for most users it will work out-of-the-box.
Installing it on your world is just a matter of buying the free module and enabling it in your place. Then invite some friends over and let the gabbing begin.
I ran across a new Hospital world in Metaplace recently, which piqued my interest. The owner Relay was there, so we chatted about what the point of the Hospital was. In real life, Relay goes by Dr Neil Hamilton, Director of an e-learning center at the University of Aberdeen Medical School in Scotland. Dr Hamilton is exploring the use of Metaplace as a learning environment for his medical
students in the UK. His first prototype is "Jim" an "interactive
patient Metabuddy" that you can query about his symptoms and make a diagnosis of what disorder he suffers from.
Right now Jim is pretty basic, only following a fairly simple chain of text questions and answers. But Dr Hamilton wrote "if the students and clinical staff are receptive, I would hope to include digital images, video and sound as part of the medical history taking and the
differential diagnosis."
Further down the road, Dr. Hamilton is interested in adding a "health bar" so you can track the status of your patient based on your decisions, and more advanced AI. He also wants to experiment with integrating the Moodle learning platform into Metaplace, which should be fairly easy since it already has been modified to work in Second Life via Sloodle.
That is all well and good, but I hope that Relay thinks about how others beyond his own medical students might use the Metaplace Hospital to learn about important medical issues, to chat with medical professionals, and, oh yeah, to have fun. The virtual world should not just mimic existing web and desktop app based applications, but add value and richer engagement.
"I
am also hoping that The Hospital will help people see how virtual
worlds can genuinely help in the real world," wrote Dr Hamilton. Sounds like the Betterverse mantra! He is looking for funding to keep developing the space. For more info, email him at n.m.hamilton@abdn.ac.uk .
A couple of months ago, I explored the "Traditional Marriage Support Center" in Metaplace, which provides information about the Biblical basis for marriage as being between one man and one woman. While I was exploring this space, I found out about the "MetaEquality Center," which has, as you can imagine, an alternative view of marriage and relationships.
I got a few minutes today to checkout the MetaEquality Center, and found it to be quite a compelling use of virtual space for information dissemination, civic action and emotional support.
This morning, President Barack Obama gave an address in Accra, Ghana, which was simulcast into both the virtual worlds of Metaplace and Second Life.
I, like many other virtual world explorers, logged into both Metaplace and Second Life, as well as posting to Twitter, adding pictures to our Flickr photostreams and taking machinima video of the event. Just another day in the Metaverse.
All
told, about 100 or so folks across worlds participated in this
experiment, logging in from all around the United States, as well as a
few folks from Europe and Africa. It was one of these strange and fun
mixed-reality events where you
found yourself flipping between various windows the whole time,
listening to the speech while chatting with friends the whole time. So
much more engaging than watching it on CNN.
After
President Obama's speech, there was a virtual debrief with three
African experts: Ghanian musician DNA (Derrick Ashong), Ambassador
Kenton Keith and African studies Professor Timothy Burke of Swarthmore
College. People in Second Life and Metaplace could ask the speakers
questions as well as engage in back channel chat. I liked how within
Metaplace, you were watching a live video simulcast of the avatars of
the three speakers from within Second Life! Truly meta!
The event was co-organized by various virtual world developers and
activists including In Kenzo, Frans Charming, Tori Horton, Keith
Morris, Rhiannon Chatnoir, and many others that I'm sure I'm
forgetting. Amazing job, guys, on putting together this multi-modal, innovative event!
