In the ‘70s and ‘80s kids couldn’t escape into hi-def fantasy realms on the Xbox, but they could map out their own worlds with graph paper and a number 2 pencil. A generation of Dungeons & Dragons players supplemented the official manuals with their own DIY maps, character sheets, and drawings. Brooklyn artist Timothy Hutchings lovingly preserves this geeky ephemera in the Play Generated Map and Document Archive (PlaGMaDA), an online repository of thousands of pages of artifacts that outline the handmade history of RPGs. PlaGMaDA’s holdings date back to 1975 and include early works by game designers like Ken St. Andre (Wasteland, Tunnels and Trolls) and oddball obscurities like Everything is Dolphins, a homebrew RPG about sword-wielding cetaceans. Hutchings is now publishing some of his “prize holdings” in printed book form. The centerpiece is “Habitition of the Stone Giant Lord,” a dungeon module created by 14-year-old Gaius Stern in the early ‘80s. The hand-typed text describing the realm is interspersed with fantasy art so crude that even a loving mother would pause before sticking it up on the fridge. But look past that and you’ll find succubi, demons, trolls, and more gold pieces that a raiding party can carry (provided you abide by the rules of encumbrance). Hutchings is also raising money to bid on the papers of Dave Arneson, the cocreator of D&D. It looks like he won’t have to deploy the Orbs of Dragonkind to score funding — BioWare founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk have each pledged sizable donations for the project.

The Facebook IPO, however rocky, marked a coming of age for the loose collection of technologies and services known as “social media.” If Mark Zuckerberg had been elected governor of California, it would not have done as much to confer society’s seal of approval. It was almost as if the internet itself went public.

The promise of new and richer means of interacting remotely with friends, colleagues, associates, and strangers; the medium for distributed communities to come together in meaningful fashion, create new forms of narrative and entertainment (as well as new form of marketing), and connect in ways not possible in the physical world; the ability to be just who you are, or whoever you’d like to be, or to drop off the grid entirely if you so chose (and could manage it) — if those promises sound familiar, it’s no wonder. They are the promises (or threats) that have been made by every new communications technology since at least the telephone. Most recently, though, they were being made by a class of online service known as virtual worlds — and if Facebook’s IPO was an apotheosis for social media, it also marked a harsh awakening from the dream of the future presented by virtual worlds, a dream that has kicked around the internet in one form or another since the late 1970s.

Almost all the promise once held by virtual worlds has since been realized by Facebook. For every social interaction, brand engagement or persistent multiplayer social experience that Second Life or World of Warcraft or MTV’s Virtual Lower East Side was supposed to provide, there’s something the same or very similar available on Facebook — probably better, cheaper, and more reliable, and no doubt more accessible.

Facebook’s rise, of course, has not always been smooth. But it is now on track to register its billionth user by the end of 2012. Second Life, by contrast, the best-known virtual world, has signed up nearly 30 million people in its 10 years of operation, and still sees only about a million new or returning users log in every month. Other social virtual worlds have fared no better — and some much worse. Places like Meez.com and IMVU have struggled to become more than 3-D chat rooms, even with something like three times the user base of Second Life. There.com, a more youth-friendly virtual world that was the basis for early marketing experiments, including MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach project, closed its doors in early 2010. [There.com reopened in May 2012 as an 18-and-over platform.]

Why? For denizens of virtual worlds, the race between “Web-based social network” and “3-D social environment” was lost long ago by Facebook. Without the virtual physicality of 3-D space to explore and character models to customize, there’s no comparison. The world is not as flat as a webpage, they maintain. Flat or not, though, the more important point is that Facebook has delivered the tools of social connectivity in a way that virtual worlds have tried but never managed to do.

In 2006, I co-wrote a book examining both the promise and perils of virtual worlds. When we started writing, Facebook’s membership was limited to school campuses and corporate rolls — no trivial cohort, but hardly the world-dominating collection of profiles it has since become. With Myspace fading and brands like IBM, Nissan, and the U.S. State Department flocking to places like Second Life, it was hard to see Facebook as the universal community of tomorrow.

“Second Life will probably not be the platform that will sustain the metaverse,” we wrote, but it demonstrated that “3D virtual spaces could be effective tools for business, education, collaboration, socializing, and entertainment.”

Although not as effective as Facebook, it turns out.

While Facebook has seen more than its share of clumsy rollouts — the introduction of the News Feed, perhaps its most important feature, was met with vocal resistance by users — it has remained the easiest way to connect with friends, family, and colleagues online. Even its warts are not as ugly as they could be. It’s still easier to navigate Facebook’s notoriously abstruse privacy controls than it is to find, buy, and wear a new outfit in Second Life (an issue the company was addressing as late as 2010 — a year I spent working at Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, before leaving amid a wave of layoffs and resignations). So confident is the social network of its continued growth that it now voluntarily deactivates more accounts every day than Second Life signs up (20,000 versus 16,000).

On a deeper level, Facebook is the realization of dreams and ambitions that weren’t dreamt in a Harvard dorm room but have been accumulating since the days of BBSes and AOL. Online community, online identity, online entertainment — Facebook has brought them to more people than any technology other than the web, and in some cases has been the thing driving adoption of the internet itself.

Facebook’s near-universal appeal — and virtual worlds’ near-universal failure — has as much to do with presentation as anything else. The very concept of a virtual world works against its acceptance. If I’m your great-aunt and I need a place to post pictures of your cousin’s bat mitzvah, I don’t necessarily mind joining a network in order to do so. But do I really want to join another world?

Yes, Facebook often feels like the downmarket version of the original internet dream. In term of the free exchange of ideas, it is more of a nightmare. And it was not Zuck who brought us a new kind of interconnected commerce. But being downmarket about the dream (instead of demanding and exclusive) is what brought critical mass to the new mode of social connectivity in a way that virtual worlds were never going to do.

I wouldn’t discount virtual worlds entirely. A new crop of massively multiplayer online games is exploring new possibilities for entertainment and narrative, in gaming, on television, and elsewhere. But even in games — and increasingly, even for graphically intensive multiplayer games — Facebook is pressing its advantage.

Sadly, virtual worlds have few advantages left to press. To paraphrase myself: Facebook will probably not be the platform that will sustain the web. But it demonstrates that distributing the new tools of social intercourse is more a matter of making them easy to use than it is one of bells, whistles, shapes and colors.

At least, until the next future comes along.

Pity the simulated citizens who will live in SimCity, the reboot of the franchise of the same name, due from the god-game guys at Maxis sometime in 2013. No easy life for them, no appearing as if by magic on the streets of your town and scurrying back and forth between the busy districts of the day. No – instead, life will be a precarious crap-shoot of existential uncertainty, in which no satisfaction, however small, may be taken for granted, and no need may ever be filled in more than momentary fashion. And, as if it need be said, in the game.

“It’s not like each Sim has a specific job that’s his, and a specific house that’s his,” says lead designer Stone Librande, like this knowledge might mitigate the situation. Instead, each Sim that will inhabit your thriving metropolis (or crime-ridden housing project, as the case may be) will wake up each morning and start the day by looking for a new job – if they’re not sick, that is, in which case they’ll look for a hospital. And every evening, that same Sim will leave work and take a moment to look for a new place to live. Filling out employment applications and being interviewed by already-unbearable roommates every single day. Oh, the humanity!

But it’s in that tale of quotidian ennui – repeated thousands, or tens or hundreds of thousands of times per simulated day, once for every Sim in your city – that the real difference between this game and previous iterations of SimCity lies. For, when you finally become mayor of your own little cleverly named town at some point next year that can’t come soon enough, each of the Sims that moves into it will be its own discrete software agent, running its own little simulation of its own little life. Each car will be its own little simulated car, with a specific origin and destination. Each coal-burning power plant will have its own little simulated coal hopper, which you’ll see fill up as a delivery truck arrives (running its own little simulation of itself), and then slowly empty out as the plant burns coal. And each traffic jam will be not a simulated traffic jam, but a real traffic jam, the result not of a subroutine somewhere that decided it was time for a traffic jam, but of too many individually simulated Sims driving too many individually simulated cars along too narrow a stretch of simulated road.

“What you see is what we sim,” says the cleverly named Ocean Quigley, the team’s creative director. Rather than a top-down simulation in which the system itself might call for a traffic jam animation on a stretch of road between a high-density residential area and a high-density commercial area, the new SimCity is “built from the simulation up,” Quigley says. “All the simulation behavior is embedded in the individual buildings and objects.” The result (it’s hoped) is a world that is finally more than the sum of its sim parts.

SimCity has always been a gloriously fun exercise in spinning up a big complicated interconnected machine – and then tearing it all down again via earthquakes and UFOs. But it has also always been a game about that machine, a matter of understanding which levers controlled which chutes, and which buttons produced which widgets. If the levers dictated a system in equilibrium, the simulation produced happy Sims. If the settings spat out unhappiness and neglect, the simulation called for a fire or slum.

The new SimCity will turn this situation on its head. Rather than the city’s overall condition trickling down to determine what kind of animations you see, individual simulations determine individual animations, and the condition of the city itself is merely the condition of all of its inhabitants. Much like Dwarf Fortress (which Quigley says he hasn’t played much, though he cites it as an inspiration), it’s a god game that decidedly gives the power to the “people”.

The task of simulating all the Sims, cars, buildings, businesses, air currents and river flows (don’t put your agricultural runoff upstream of your residential areas, as groundwater pollution could send some Sims to the hospital — if there is one) is made possible by Maxis’s new GlassBox engine, designed to run not only SimCity but possible future games as well. GlassBox also brings full 3D-ness to SimCity for the first time — including fully destructible buildings that shatter nicely under the impact of enormous ping-pong balls flung from the sky. (Final decisions on available disasters have not yet been made. The smart money says ping-pong balls don’t make it to gold.) Leaving sprites behind has also brought with it the most hotly requested feature of the franchise’s history: that’s right, curvy roads! Nuff said.

Curvy or not, those roads will run past buildings that are a bit different to past SimCity infrastructure as well, and not just in their destructibility. Rather than dialing tax rates and maintenance spending up and down to determine what resources to direct toward various industries and services, most buildings in the new SimCity will be highly modular, and will be managed on an individual basis. Want more police protection for your richest residents? Add a heliport to the police station on the east side of town. Can’t afford so many cops in the poorer neighborhoods? Close down the extra jail cells you built last year. (But watch out for the arsonist’s van that will show up from time to time.)

Some of this will be directed by your Sims themselves, who will occasionally offer you optional missions to complete that can be used to guide you through the game, in addition to the news reports that will remain a fixture. Build a big enough coal industry, and a coal baron may waltz into town and offer you the chance to have his “Big Business” (akin to a multinational, see below) open its HQ in your city, for instance.

While the new SimCity will be the most granular yet it will also work on a broader level than ever before, due to the introduction of a multiplayer mode that’s intended to bring a new kind of play to a franchise that’s older than many of the 23-year-olds reading this article – and all of the 22-year-olds. In multiplayer mode, your city will be one of several – or several hundred – in a shared region. While cities won’t start out connected, the winds blowing in from SmudgeVille may actually pollute the skies above your carefully greened YouTopia. And if you do care to build some roads between the two, watch out: you may actually find smudgy SmudgeVille workers commuting in to take your higher-paying jobs.

Multiplayer does present some fascinating possibilities for SimCity. A new class of industry, the “Big Business,” can trade goods on the regional market. And if you’re connected to one of your neighbouring regional cities, you can make direct player-to-player transactions as well. The “what you see is what we sim” rule applies to trade as well: the road system between cities is crucial, Librande says, because trade actually flows via trucks between the cities in question. Power lines can be built as well. If YouTopia is producing surplus energy, you can sell some to SmudgeVille, which in turn can shut down some of its air-polluting power plants and open some casinos to generate cash.

This kind of “city specialization” will be a key to multiplayer, Quigley says. Like everything else, it will be a bottom-up occurrence, something that will evolve naturally rather than being a top-level choice like the class of your RPG character. The SimCityState you run in multiplayer will likely fare better if you don’t try to be all industries to all workers. SimGlobalization, anyone?

While you won’t be able to have any direct effect on your neighbours’ cities, creative griefing will be a distinct possibility. While details of multiplayer remain somewhat scarce, there will be a mechanism for booting players when necessary, whether because of egregious behavior (and is that really a reason?), or because they’ve simply stopped playing.

The GlassBox engine is “built to be moddable,” according to Quigley, but Maxis aren’t yet saying when or if that function will be made available. But the fact that each entity in the game runs its own simulation system opens a whole new world of possibilities on the modding front. The GlassBox engine itself is also built in modular fashion, making it easy to add new systems, according to lead producer Kip Katsarelis. No word yet on DLC, but Katsarelis says SimCity will be as easy to update as The Sims games have been in the past.

Whether thousands of individually simulated Sims and their surroundings will add up to something more than just another SimCity game remains to be seen. But Maxis have clearly been at pains to take a franchise that has not seen a full-blown release in ten years (sorry, Societies) and give it a lot more than just a new coat of paint. Not only do they want SimCity to look and feel better than ever before, they want you to care more as well. “Your Sims have to be able to suffer in various ways,” says Quigley, not holding back on the schadenfreude. “If they’re invulnerable and don’t need you, you don’t have an emotional reason to come back to the game.” And would anything really be wrong with just another SimCity game anyway? I ask you.

Lounging by a bright blue pool, Kyndra and Cami, stars of MTV’s hit reality show Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County, chat with a bunch of other teenagers. Kyndra’s white bikini shows off an artificially enhanced figure, while Cami’s dark skin glows against an unnaturally bright blue sky. This is Laguna Beach, after a fashion, but it isn’t the TV show. It’s a live appearance, a chance for the show’s bitchiest characters to hang with some of the 2 million viewers who tune in to their breakups and hookups every Wednesday night. As the pool fills up with fans, someone asks why the girls are always so mean to fellow cast member Tessa. Kyndra shrugs: “We just don’t like her personally.” Cami can’t be bothered to answer; she’s busy tongue wrestling with some hipster dude in sunglasses.

Kyndra and Cami are kind of fake — and not just in the catty teenage sense of the word. The two girls by the pool are computerized 3-D replicas of the cast members, who are using mouse and keyboard to navigate their avatars through a multiplayer online environment known as Virtual Laguna Beach. Anyone with a PC and a broadband connection can join them.

You want your MTV? These days, that means going virtual.

Read the complete text at Wired.

Like Capt. Mal Reynolds stumbling in after a bar fight, the short-lived but much beloved sci-fi series Firefly will soon make an unexpected return, not as a TV show, but as a massively multiplayer online game.

Now that’s shiny.

Multiverse, maker of a free MMO-creation platform, plans to announce Friday morning that it’s struck a deal with Fox Licensing to turn the show into an MMORPG in the fashion of Star Wars Galaxies or Eve Online.

The “Browncoats,” as Firefly‘s most devoted fans are known, have been campaigning to bring the show back almost since the moment it was canceled in late 2002. Now they’ll get their wish, albeit in a new form.

“We see virtual worlds as an extraordinarily promising new entertainment medium,” said Adam Kline, Fox Licensing’s vice president of media enterprises in an e-mail. “We believe Multiverse can deliver an experience that will remain true to the original series, while enabling a whole new level of personal involvement for fans.”

Canceled in the United States after only 11 episodes, Firefly has become the Star Trek of 21st-century sci-fi fandom: a show that seemed to remake the genre even as it stayed faithful to the conventions of “hard” science fiction, like engine room problems and menacing hordes lurking on the edge of known space.

What made the show special was the wry, often self-deprecating humor of its characters, from the captain with the checkered past to the unwittingly sexy engineer, the dull hunk of a mercenary with a girl’s name, and the mysterious young woman passenger with special gifts.

The online version will move away from those central characters — after all, there’s only one Mal Reynolds. In an MMORPG, “everybody has to have their own story,” says Multiverse co-founder and executive producer Corey Bridges.

“Television series can be really good properties to turn into MMOs, because when you make a TV series, not only do you need great characters, but you need to create a full, rich, compelling place,” Bridges says. “If you’re doing science fiction, you have to really think it out and create an incredibly rich environment that is compelling in its own right, and worth exploring and going back to week after week. That’s what Joss Whedon did with Firefly.”

The universe of Firefly and its spinoff film, Serenity, featured everything from Old West-style towns to futuristic urban environments, gritty spaceships and pastoral retreats — freedom fighters, oppressive government agents, smugglers, outlaws, mercenaries, trader, townsfolk, futuristic geishas and a race of corrupted humans known as the Reavers.

Bringing those environments and character types to life as an online game will be a challenge: Multiverse is not a game developer, but rather a platform provider whose product is still in beta. Instead of making the game itself, the company will hire a development team that will craft the virtual galaxy using Multiverse tools.

“We want to find someone who wants to do something unique and fun and interesting, not just a re-skin of World of Warcraft or Star Wars Galaxies,” Bridges says.

Because the underlying technology is already in place, “I feel confident that we’ll see something the public can play sometime in 2008,” he adds.

Founded by several early Netscape employees, Multiverse hopes to do for virtual worlds what Netscape did for web pages: provide a universal browser that lets users access any world built on the Multiverse platform using the same client software.

Already, some 7,000 development teams have registered for the Multiverse beta, according to Bridges, and more than 150 are making MMOs and non-game virtual worlds on a full-time basis. The tools are provided for free, with Multiverse taking a cut of revenue only if developers charge for their games, or for virtual items available within their worlds.

Landing Firefly on the Multiverse platform would seem to be a sure-fire promotional move. But satisfying the show’s committed fans will not be easy. Online communities like FireflyFans.net, the show’s premier fan site, have generated an endless stream of fan fiction, art, blogs, pod casts, meet-ups and even a fan-produced documentary, Done the Impossible, which briefly broke into the top 1,000 in DVD sales on Amazon.com.

The announcement comes just in time for this weekend’s second annual gathering of Firefly fans at the Hilton hotel in Burbank, California. The “Flanvention” has already sold out, with 500 prepaid attendees signed up.

Bridges shrugs off the pressure; he just wants to make “something worthy of the show,” he says. “This all springs from the genius that is Joss Whedon. It’s rewarding beyond words to be able to hopefully be a footnote in the history of Firefly.”

An online game is an odd place to have your reputation precede you. But that’s exactly what happened to me not long ago in the massively multiplayer universe of EVE Online. My character there, a spaceship pilot named Walker Spaight, was minding his own business one day when I got a message from another player, who wanted to know if I was “the same Walker Spaight from Second Life,” another 3D online world.

Read the complete text at PC World.

The last 12 months have seen the virtual world of Second Life leap into the media spotlight, with a cover story in Business Week, a feature in Popular Science, and any number of other appearances in magazines, newspapers, radio and television. But does the reality of this virtual reality live up to the hype?

To the skeptics, many of whom have seen 3D platforms like VRML come and go leaving nothing but virtual corpses in their wake, Second Life is little more than the latest passing fad. But for the 400-plus Second Life “residents” who showed up for the second annual Second Life Community Convention in San Francisco, their world is nothing less than a revolution in Internet technologies.

They and the world’s half million other users heard their viewpoint backed up at the convention by Mitch Kapor, who came on the technology scene at a time when it looked like the personal computer itself might never catch on.

Read the complete text at Gamasutra.

It’s the middle of the night and I’m standing in an empty, starlit field in the virtual world of Second Life. In the distance is a low-polygon-count shopping mall. But at my feet, there’s only pixelated grassland – a simple green texture that repeats to the edges of the computer screen.

Just hours ago, a lavish mansion stood here. It was a custom job built for a player known as BallerMoMo King, whose blinged-out avatar carries a diamond-studded cane and is never without his posse of bodyguards and harem of “MoMo hos.” Baller is one of Second Life’s most notorious gangsters, famous for hiring talented residents to script weapons that can bounce an avatar across the gamespace and bombs that produce enough smoke and fire to occasionally crash a server. It seems Linden Lab, the company that runs Second Life, has had enough. The MoMo mansion – and Baller’s account – has been erased.

Read the complete text at Wired.

Boston, the Harvard Faculty Club, a snowy morning in February. About 30 technologists, encryption experts, academics and corporate execs, plus a handful of journalists, sit facing each other around a long horseshoe arrangement of tables. The assembled luminaries include leading developers from IBM, Microsoft and Mozilla, not to mention former FCC commissioner Reed Hundt; Esther Dyson, the founding chair of ICANN; Marc Rotenburg, president of EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center; and Doc Searls, editor of Linux Journal and an author of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

It’s cold outside, but the faculty club has laid out coffee and pastries for breakfast. It’s a good thing, too, since it’s going to be a long two days here, talking out the issues, approaches and possible solutions to the problem of how we create identities on the internet and, once created, how we keep them safe. Phishing, stalking, secure desktops, one-way hashes, World of Warcraft and the Department of Homeland Security will all come up over the next 48 hours. It’s pretty obvious nothing’s actually going to be solved in this room, but it’s an impressive collection of talent nonetheless. What does it have to do with the future of online games and virtual worlds? Quite possibly, everything.

Read the complete text at The Escapist.

As we all know by now (and the rest of the world is rapidly learning), the imaginary currencies that are earned, spent and traded in massively multiplayer online games and other virtual worlds are anything but virtual, themselves. While no government authority stands behind them to insure their value, a seal of approval isn’t needed for a currency to become “real.” A World of Warcraft gold piece is worth as much as you can get for it on the market – about $0.10 at the moment. The U.S. dollar derives its value in exactly the same way.

Read the complete text at The Escapist.