Within a decade, then, the notion of separate game worlds will probably seem like a quaint artifact of the frontier days of virtual reality. You'll still be able to engage in radically different experiences - from slaying orcs to cybersex - but they'll occur within a common architecture.
So said Steven Johnson in May in an article he wrote for Wired. But when will this Snow Crash-fuelled fantasy become a reality? When will we be able to bridge our online identities, from our virtual world personas to our XboxLive monikers, under one meta-identity, so we can visit new places with our existing selves?
Community content practices are undoubtedly becoming an increasingly important part of game development. Current and future home consoles encourage mass personalisation on a networked scale - the carefully constructed "who I am" in my game library (and how good/rubbish I am at each) is broadcast to anyone who cares to listen, and just like the positive remarks from complete strangers I occasionally get on Flickr for my published photos, I can now expect to make new friends via the networks that the platform holders are integrating into their hardwares. But I can't take 'em with me. I have to start afresh every time I start something new.
There are options, of course, and they don't have to be limited to online virtual worlds. Sure, you could check out the Second Life of Warcraft wiki, which is hoping to build a window between the two spaces (baby steps, people). You could build/become part of a metaverse in Multiverse, a platform of the kind Johnson suggested. But maybe someone could hack Nintendo's forthcoming Mii channel together with Xbox Live's community facility to form a kind of Miispace/Xbook.
If this seems implausible, you can still broadcast where you are in the (online) universe(s) with a third party tool like onxiam.
