Betsy Book of Virtual Worlds Review and Terra Nova fame has posted about a few novel virtual worlds she's discovered this year. While they aren't games per se, they do provoke interesting thoughts about our relationship with online space - are the designers creating platforms for multi-modal identities (a la Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk classic Snow Crash), or using the power of the connectivity of the internet to allow people to create wider social networks using more data than just gender, race and level?
The new selection includes an English-language world from the Korean creators of Cyworld which, Betsy says,
offered a non-Korean-speaker like me a glimpse into the setup and structure of sites like Cyworld.
A reader comments,
This integrated community approach seems like it might be a bit of an Asian trend. One of my Japanese publisher informants recently told me that they're approaching their MMOs as part of a larger community strategy involving social networking, IM, matchmaking, blogging, etc.
That's an interesting point in light of research released last month which suggests that people from Western and Eastern cultures perceive the world differently. Yes, this is an essentialist statement, but according to Prof Richard Nisbett at University of Michigan (and analysis by and Ren Reynolds at TN), the former sees a tunnel vision of information focussed on the fine details, whereas the latter population sees the bigger picture and the relationships therein. Perhaps this reflects how people use multi-modal elements of virtual spaces more readily in Eastern populations, and therefore how designers tailor their products according to the audience. While the gamesblog has touched on this social networking element in virtual worlds in the past, I wonder if the emergence of European-language Western virtual worlds with these aspects reflects a desire by residents for more in/out world interaction.
The list also features a mobile-only virtual world (I believe this is a very important space for VW creators to explore if they want to truly ricochet through the mainstream), and a place where you can take the best bits of celebrities and add them to your own avatars.
There really is so much more out there than just WoW.
