The Mobile Phone is the New Virtual World

(C) Photo by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick June 2, 2012

I was surprised to see Mark Wallace write a piece, Facebook Killed the Virtual World on Wired.

This is only a geek-keyhole view of the problem -- in fact, Facebook killed television; Facebook killed a lot of expensively-developed MMORPgs; Facebook killed lots of other things.

CNN has hit a 20-year low in ratings and has lost half of its audience -- but it isn't that it loses it to Fox News, which has only 2 million viewers. I bet the real reason they both are losing viewers is due to Facebook -- and not even Facebook, but the mobile-phone-as-virtual-world. 

The virtual world you can hold in your hand!

And did Facebook actually kill virtual worlds, or only virtual worlds, or are there much larger phenomena going on, and in fact SL's persistence and usage by a million or so people regularly a surprising statistic despite these larger phenomena?

In fact, if CNN has only 399,000 viewers at prime-time, that's hilarious, because Second Life has at least that many regular users -- it has about a million monthly unique viewers. They don't show the concurrency numbers any more, but they were around 70,000, and even if dropped to 50,000, that's still amazing, given that it is a very niche activity with a highly-demanding graphics set up and user learning curve (by contrast to just pointing your remote and watching CNN passively).

Even so, we realize that that there was a Virtual World Winter -- again -- and the caravan moved on as the dog barked.

Why weren't immersive virtual worlds online, whether downloadable or in the browser, as compelling as their makers and most enthusiastic users thought they would be?

Short answer: because the user -- while given many affordances, like being able to fly or rez out blocks of wood and build in defiance of gravity -- could not sufficiently control his environment. There were too many insurmountable problems or recurring annoyances -- graphic card demands or crashing browsers and servers, or people who built ugly shit in the view of your expensive land. (I was reading the forums the other day and found a woman who had bought a fair amount of mainland and was paying $300 in tier, but one little club on one of her sims on a 4096 m2 parcel would regularly take up the 40 avatar slots on the server, making it impossible for her even to go to her home, or if there, to be able to do anything but crawl. What an old story! What a fixable story if the Lindens would just zone clubs on certain higher powered servers!)

By contrast, Facebook, and especially the mobile version of Facebook and other apps, is completely in the user's control, despite everything that a certain category of tech journos and geeks keep hyping as a huge privacy problem (it is, but it is one that there are enough solutions to, including the one of simply not sharing what you don't want to be public, that it is an over-hyped issue.)

What is it about virtual worlds that are so loved by some and so hated by the industry-insider tech journos?

I'm not surprised that the piece was on Wired, as Wired has kept up a smug and smirking derision of Second Life and any other open-ended virtual world as long as they have existed. There is something about the typical cynical Silicon Valley tekkie who finds virtual worlds undermine their manhood, so they cop a posture of hatred and scorn for them. As I've often noted, maybe it's because the porn talks back in Second Life. Or maybe because it turns out it *isn't* about porn as it is more of a girl's game and that frightens them. Or maybe, for the technocommunists at Wired, it's the realization that digital content is not devalued to $0 by the copying function they gleefully celebrate in the Internet and all its works -- and in fact, people make money from paid content, contrary to their touting of the "liberated content" business model.

Nor is it a surprise for Mark Wallace to turn on Second Life, which once constituted his bread and butter -- literally. He doesn't disclose in that piece that not only did he work for a time (a year or two) for Linden Lab, makers of Second Life, before that, he also worked for the Electric Sheep Company, a "solutions provider" company which had paid commercial projects in Second Life. And before that, I don't know if he was paid for producing his old blog 3.D on virtual world developments which was sponsored by the Sheep -- the ads likely didn't make a living for anybody there, nor did they at the Alphaville Herald, where Mark was "publisher" for some years (a strange an undefined role which included editorial interference against writers who criticized Electric Sheep).

You would never know that Mark Wallace also once opportunistically wrote an article for the New York Times in which he enthusiastically described the relationships of couples who met in Second Life and married in real life. Like most journalists of this sort, he didn't stay with the story honestly, and pick up some of the sordid saga after the marriages broke up, and she left him with the kids from another marriage to go follow a BDMS master she met in SL. Instead, he just kept recycling the story and not following up later. And so on. Whatever.

Wired describes Mark Wallace as a writer and "entrepreneur". He is indeed a writer. He's considered a talented writer and indeed he is published in the best places. To be sure, he publishes by exploiting what sells. Like virtual world real estate. There's nothing wrong with that -- people need to live. But I'll remind everyone that what sold especially well in 2007 for all those companies (really, PR agents) coming into SL was the idea that a lot of people might come there for the sex, but that the sex might be kept PG enough to sell their products. Hence an article by Mark titled exploitatively and provocatively "Touching Aimee's Panties," for Escapist magazine which was about the allure of the pixelated lingerie that celebrated SL diva Aimee Weber, early adapter and member of the Feted Inner Core (FIC) of privileged customer-developers, was able to make and sell. And sell not just to women who wanted to be beautiful and not just to men for their girlfriends, but to men with female avatars -- probably the largest market in SL. Someone once explained to me the mystery of Aimee: "She makes ugly female Lindens feel beautiful." Men, too, I might add.

Then Mark worked with the infamous Urizenus Sklar (Peter Ludlow) to write a book about The Sims Online and Second Life. It was alright, but didn't tell the story the way many others would have told it particularly on some key episodes, and it all had the feeling of a hack.

Next, infused with cash from Silicon Valley venture capitalist Susan Wu, Mark joined Jerry Paffendorf and some other former ESC coders to work on a secret project. I believe it was tentatively called Wello Horld, after a fake rock band of Jerry's. Remember the Virtual Goods Summit?  Somehow, the theme or the office itself had turtles and a turtle tank -- that's all anyone would say. I gather it was avatars on a mobile, or maybe one of those early app things for mobiles that was going to tell you everything about everyone in the room where you were so you could IM them, since you were sitting at a table with your nose in your phone anyway. Or something... Today, sonar.me does that -- lots of other things do that. I don't know for a fact that that was what they were working on -- it was secret.

But something fell apart. They worked in Brooklyn in a big garage for awhile; they went to California to strike it rich and didn't. Some (all?) of them got let go from the project. I don't know if it persists. Susan Wu also funded a vampire game that involved hiring Hamlet ne Linden Au -- it featured the ability to show your Facebook name and connection on your avatar. I don't know whatever happened to that game...

And I don't know what Mark could possibly still be working on, and with what funds, such as to be called an "entrepeneur". Nowadays, it seems to me, start-ups are more public about what they do to compete for attention and VC dollars, and are less secretive.

Maybe he had secondary Linden stock? I would imagine that he would have to have been given stock options, because for an independent journalist with a good reputation to come and take a game/world company job that involves marketing or "curating the conversation" would require some handsome compensation I would think. Actually, I could be wrong. It might be just that Mark needed a job. And that I can respect. He may or may not have been able to unload the stock.

So here we all are, and Mark has now written a quick piece making it seem like Facebook killed off Second Life when that's not what it's about at all.

I'm not going to crank up the loyalist arguments that Second Life isn't dead, that Mark just doesn't get it (he did in fact live very thoroughly in SL -- he had a land parcel for a time, he built things like a cool bathysphere (which unfortunately got lost out of inventory, although I still have the docking station), and he even got SL-married -- to a TV bot named Destroy TV which was a kind of stalking webcam experiment of the Sheep for a time.

But here's the problem with his thesis -- it isn't virtual worlds that Facebook killed, it's TV and much else in mainstream media and MMORPGs, too. And actually, it isn't Facebook that killed it, it's the mobile phone.

The mobile phone is the new virtual world.

Marshall McLuhan described the television 50 years ago as "the great reducer." Before it could reduce, first, it imported. In the 1950s and early 1960s, TV often seems like radio -- there's something to the truism that each new media imports intact the culture of the previously-established media and doesn't shed it easily. Walter Cronkite developed an authoritative, booming voice for radio; this was the nature of TV news narration in the early days of TV. (And people like Scoble still want to use new media like Twitter as a radio show with lots of passive listeners.)

What does McCluhan mean by reduction? In the 1960s, the TV would take the Vietnam war, an ad for cigarettes or perfume, and an Ozzie and Harriet type sit-com and put them all at the same level on the small "blue screen" for Joe Six-Pack to consume. A war, a product, a show --they were all in a mid-sized box. The world was put into that box and virtualized.

So media became a minimizer and a virtualizer of the real, but then, there were competing trends for people to become producers and not only consumers of the minimized and virtualized -- the Polaroid camera, the portable movie camera, the tape recorder. So in the 1970s and early 1980s, TV was displaced a bit by people making and sharing their own amateur media products. You still had to invite people over to your house to see your photograph album or to make instant photos during a party, or to hear your tape, or watch your home movie. I wonder if you could call this maximizing reality rather than minimizing it, however -- that is, the individual takes a picture of his kid or his cat, he tapes himself and his friends singing "Happy Birthday" or tapes a Grateful Dead concert; he makes a home movie of a football game. In this media use, reality, which in a previous era would have remained private and small and diminished in a million small stories becomes elevated and maximized -- although not really for long as soon there are a million more people doing the same thing. Perhaps more of what it does is extend time -- what used to be lived and experienced and then only written about, perhaps, now had an instant picture to prolong it forever.

Then with the advent of the Internet, the trends for minimizing and maximing met -- and competed in some respects. And one manifestation of this was the MMORPG and the virtual world. So now instead of taking reality and putting it into the blue TV box, or taking reality and exaggerating its importance beyond the immediate family or RL social circle to wider circles and the immortality of the ages, now the individual was *putting himself* into the virtuality. He was the last thing to be virtualized, but it came readily because he had already virtualized even entire wars, and minimized their significance, and then maximized his kids, who only stayed 3 years old for a fleeting time, into immortal gods, along with their pets. So now the self was the next thing to be minimized/maximized.

So in the 1990s and early 2000s, first nerds avidly played the text game of Dungeon and Dragons, and then geeks avidly played World of Warcraft and other massive multi-player games online, and then their moms came and their neighbours. Even WoW began to peak, however, and today, with numerous lay-offs in the video game industry, and the collossal failure of some like this Rhode Island debacle described by Lum Lumley, games that you have to enter -- that play you -- seem in decline.

Why is this? Because we are already in the next cycle of enabling the immortal god-individual to minimize reality again and put it in the palm of his hand.

Why go into a virtual world -- a download, a log-on, rules, constrictions -- when you can now port around your own custom virtual world right in your hand?

It does all the minimizing and maximizing you could possibly want. Absolutely any scene you encounter can not only be Polaroidized, it can be Instagramized to look like Ansel Adams or Walker Evans themselves took it. You can video anything and edit it. You can have real-time Facetime on your iphone or Skype with video and put all the people in your friend list into an ongoing real-time video drama with constant chatter and media sharing.

Facebook is only part of the story of the minimalizing of reality into the palm of your hand. It's only a platform that facilitates the mobile phone. (That's why Facebook needs to make or buy their own phone device). Facebook is perhaps the best or easiest thing on your phone, because it's where you can add friends easily, take and share photos and videos, and share anything else that they circulate around -- it's a big pool. And log on to many sites to comment.

Once you add into this virtuality the greater sophistication of apps, you have even more of a customized, delightful virtual world. In this virtual world, the user can feel as if he is on a great exercise plan just by downloading a Walking GPS app. He can fancy himself a connoisseur of fine dining and wines by downloading those types of apps. He can Storify everything.

Oh, and then there's the games. Angry Birds and tons of other easy, hand-held, riveting games. Those games on the smart phones are what took away the customers from WoW and other worlds-that-play-you.

Of course, that's something hard-core gamer geeks could never, ever admit. They pride themselves on never playing something as light-weight and pointless as Angry Birds. Except...lots and lots of people play Angry Birds, and they play it instead of other things. Instead of being played by the exigencies of the war and quest games.

Mobile phones once seemed like they only filled in the interstices between the times you were on your desktop or laptop at work or home, stationery. That's because new media, as noted, often gets played by the rules of the media before it. It seemed like the mobile phone was just the extension, the tethering, to the main show which was on the desktop or laptop.

But with the portability and all the huge selection of customization and apps -- and new addictive activities like checking in on Four Square or getting Groupon deals -- people would stop and stand on the street and play their mobile virtual world game; they would sit down on a park bench to play their mobile virtual world game -- park benches that sat idle, or were dictated by city building codes and never used by real people -- are suddenly getting a work out all over the place.

Now, people don't seem to mind if they have to sit in a meeting at work or go to a boring talk or training session -- that's because they can keep thumbing their VW i-phone while they are there. The meta-meeting they have on their i-phone in their new virtual world has in fact displaced the real meeting which is merely an old frame.

Some people just never avatarize well. The thing we all discovered with why Second Life in particular didn't take off for the masses is because a lot of people just don't like "investing their consciousness in a toy" as Will Wright brilliantly put it long ago in describing how the Sims and the Sims Online in particular worked. Some people easily said "I" or "me" about the constricted, dancing, 2-D figure on the screen that only had set routines in the Sims -- they didn't so much invest their consciousness as reduce their consciousness, but yet in doing so, still flowered out with a maximizing of their consciousness in self expression. Because even though their were hard-coded limitations in that world, people pushed them out to the max, making many creative residences and stores and games. Second Life of course took this to another level, although with its own set of restrictions. Yet just as some people can't curl their tongues or become hypnotized, for reasons of nature or nurture, some people just don't like bothering with an avatar and either can't get the puppetry down or just feel stupid.

People hate feeling stupid; they hate getting killed in the first frame of the story, which is why especially women won't go for the war MMORPGs or the Second Life welcome area, and they also hate feeling like they look stupid, in ugly newbie clothes or suddenly made naked by some glitch or their own wrong click. SL has come a long way to get rid of the second problem, with ready-made outfits, but still hasn't licked the first problem of getting killed or heckled to death in the first frame of your story.

As I've always been saying, Second Life is always prototyping the future and adapting the human to that future. That is its well-kept secret. In Second Life, you became completely adapted to right-clicking and looking at the object description of many things in the world, either to find out the creator and go shop at their store, or to see how many prims it had and find out if it would fit in your house, or to see more about what it was made of. You also got used to right-clicking on every other being in that world to find out the short social-media type description they had about themselves -- their groups, their preferences, their likes, their dislikes, perhaps even their RL information (Second Life did this long before Facebook or Twitter were in massive use or even in existence).

In the same way, now with your mobile phone in hand, you can wave your phone over a QR Code with NeoReader or some other app and get the information about that thing. Some people have already starting putting QR codes on their business cards -- both Russian and Chinese developers I met at TechCrunch had QR codes which, when read, took you to the page to download their app in the app store. The other day I walked by an apartment building that had a large QR Code sign out in front with "latest listings" in that building. My avatar hand stretches out in this new virtual (virtualized) world, and I click and see the information.

In the same way there are apps now like the afore-mentioned sonar.me but tons of others that give you that reductive social media car about the other avatars you now encounter in this new virtual world that is both controlled by you in the palm of your hand, the way you like worlds to be, but also interactive with the real world -- which is the aspect that Mark Wallace has fastened on.

The other thing discovered about Second Life -- in addition to people not liking to be avatarized -- is that many -- not all, but many people don't like being anonymous and don't like meeting anonymous strangers in experiences over which they have no control.

What Facebook does is give them an interface that lets them talk to known people in their lives -- and the friends of friends -- without being overwhelmed by them and have them interfere in their real personal lives. That old boyfriend from college, that distant boss from a former job, that relative you haven't seen in 20 years -- these people could all be potential nuisances if they showed up on your real-life doorstep or called you in person on your real phone.

But in the fantastic virtual world of Facebook, they are virtualized and minimized. Whatever could make you uncomfortable about them is whisked away. Only their stories -- the stream of news and photos -- which you can tune into selectively as you wish -- remain. You can chat in real time or asynchronously, but a lot of people use FB without ever using the real-time chat. You can consume and minimize or create and maximize, as you wish, with whom you wish.

There is only so much time in the day -- you might be willing to lose sleep over social media or virtual worlds, and many do, but even so, there isn't THAT much more time. So displacement occurs.

Long ago, after I started Second Life and my children had various MMORPGs or video games they played whether WoW or Neopets, and after the Internet began producing short TV news segments accessible directly from the news outlet's own website, or on portals like Yahoo, we ditched the TV. Who needs a TV with lame sit-coms and movies you could watch online if you really needed to see them again (and I didn't). Few shows or movies that were new were of interest. The news itself was an insipid entertainment -- weather extended into a vaudeville act, a sensationalized fire in New Jersey, a kidnapped baby, a celebrity scandal, and little or no foreign news. Real foreign news was on Twitter with a link to Youtube.

For someone like me with poor vision and slightly crippled hand, the virtual world of the mobile phone will not be as interesting and captivating as a virtual world. You could say I avatarize, but I don't virtualize reality as successfully as others.

Comments

[c3]

the phone. the tv before it.. are the INTERFACES to the VIRTULAIZED....

THE more flat ,,the more ROI...

so we get simple borgs.... eating and shitting.... and lots of chatter.

beleiveing they re the "comunity" colective" but not understandign they have a borg queen...

gov. 3.0

[c3]

"but I don't virtualize reality as successfully as others."

but if you are infected by MIPS...
"media induced psychosis"....

you virtualize just fine...

"for me to poop on!".

good article.. wallace still a hack.;) remember he wanted virtuality to be like 1968.. not 1938... so he got what he wanted i guess... and he gets to write fodder for rolling stone for pennies again

[Prokofy]

No, the TV, the phone *are the virtualizers*. They are not mere "interfaces" beyond which lies that perfect virtual world intact which you so believe in, even after everything.

They are the virtualizers AND the interface *and the world*. Like Chinatwon. *Slap*. "She's my daughter *and* my sister."

Don't exaggerate, people don't shit online, well, except in The Sims Online, which, of course, preparing them for that eventuality...

[c3]

interface : nothing "mere" about it...

in·ter·face   [n. in-ter-feys; v. in-ter-feys, in-ter-feys] Show IPA noun, verb, in·ter·faced, in·ter·fac·ing.
noun
1.
a surface regarded as the common boundary of two bodies, spaces, or phases.
2.
the facts, problems, considerations, theories, practices, etc., shared by two or more disciplines, procedures, or fields of study: the interface between chemistry and physics.
3.
a common boundary or interconnection between systems, equipment, concepts, or human beings.
4.
communication or interaction: Interface between the parent company and its subsidiaries has never been better.
5.
a thing or circumstance that enables separate and sometimes incompatible elements to coordinate effectively: The organization serves as an interface between the state government and the public.

i believe in perfect virtual worlds?..
i believe in moments of art...thats about it. thats the best virtual or real can provide us.

your the one who believes in "another world" beyond this.

the interface between two people brains..with out technology, are the 5 senses... --- and we do so well with them alone...

[c3]

BTW-- Google trends seems to be telling me that "famous A actors" are now "peeing on film" so "my guess is that shitting online" will soon be all the relevant rage....

and btw-- i used to have "using gui" dreams when i first began on the mac in the mid 80s... after 14 hrs straight of icon clicking/mouse dragging images on screen, having dreams that continued such interfacing..was common for a year or so...

i had drawn, painted, culted, built stuff for decades before... very few of those actions ever "repeated in my dreams" in such direct "iconic" visual ways...

this is again "virtualities" over realities... due to interface and the electric medium.

[Desmond Shang]

We are all at the very beginning of something monstrously huge.

I wonder what people said of the nascent automobile industry in 1895. That's about where our perspective is now, for this coming 'world of ideas' ~ not just the internet, but much, much more.

* * * * *

I'm bullish on mobile tech too, much potential there, but if there was ever a hype curve then smartphones and tablets are riding the crest of it.

[Prokofy Neva]

Really, Desmond? Monstrously huge? I can't help thinking of the tag line I've seen lately, "We dreamt of flying electric cars, what we got were 140 characters." And that's about the size of it.

This tiny screen, as portable and controllable as it is, isn't going to amount to much until it becomes the remote control to Screens Everywhere, which are being made and tested, of course, on refrigerators, table tops, walls. I didn't realize that one of the down-sides of ubiquitous screens are the projectors you'll have to mount in the ceiling like lights, and the question then of how that affects your health or how hackable it becomes.

It's hard to see how you are both "bullish" and admitting a "hype curve".

BTw, more on the death of the video games industry here:

http://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/video-game-industry-dying-175530304.html

And more evidence that Mark Wallace, in crediting Facebook with killing SL, is merely singling out one thing that FB has killed -- and hasn't actually killed (yet).

[Desmond Shang]

Both bullish and admitting a hype curve. That's worth explanation.

Let's talk flying cars, for a moment. One could be bullish on cars in the 1960's, and also admit a hype curve. Here we are in 2012 with, let's face it, pretty good cars. Less polluting, safer, more efficient, way more reliable... but no, they don't fly.

Hype doesn't negate actual honest value, it just inflates it to the point of being stupid.

Now back to mobile. Ironically, those "140 characters" eliminated a lot of need for transportation.

Here's a really mundane example. My son will text something like "pick me up at 5" at lunchtime. His school is 5 miles away through heavy traffic, not around the corner. Rather than sit there wondering what happened or have to drag him to a library later, separately, this is just plain useful.

* * * * *

The neat thing about mobile tech is that it's finally becoming culturally accepted, and it's also removing a lot of the old assumptions and excuses of past times.

Far beyond communication, we all walk around with the entire knowledge of mankind in our pockets, if we care to look. I've looked up a bird species in the park (happened to be an American Widgeon) and so forth. Reading and books are now more available than ever. I can do business 24/7 from nearly anywhere, if I wish.

It's not spectacular or anything, but this kind of access can only mean good things. It's driving basics like literacy, and opening up markets too.

[Cathiee McMillan]

"It's driving basics like literacy, and opening up markets too."

How do you see that mobile tech is improving or driving Literacy.
Look at Twitter or any other texting its about 1 line segments.
Being a slave to your device is getting people killed. Look at the kids who text while driving and killing people? The Polls show the younger generation knows its not good but do it anyway.

Having to be in touch and wired in 24/7 is bad, you miss the wonders of things with that device wired to you. Yea so you were able to look up a bird but while you were looking down at the device you missed another interesting looking bird or some other thing.

I do believe that eventually being wired all the time like we are to devices we will get what Gibson called the Black Shakes. Where we are finally affected from all the wifi and cellular running around.