The Future of Virtual World Building Should Go Beyond Entertainment
Wired just published a piece on how world building games are now a new means for self-expression. World building is not entirely a new concept. It’s been around in fiction writing since Lord of the Rings, and now more common in popular mainstream media.
As for video games, we’ve seen some early iterations from popular titles such as SimCity in the late 80s (and all its subsequent Sims titles), to the more contemporary titles we see today like Minecraft.
I took a peek on the more recent titles in this up and coming genre, and stumbled upon Dreams (the same game that was featured on the Wired article), and needless to say I was blown away by the sheer amount of creative control the game gives its users.
You can look at the demo here. It may seem a tad whimsical at face value, but if you search the web for the creations early access users have put up, you can’t help but imagine the insane potential this game can have in unleashing one’s creativity.
The possibilities are endless. All one needs is an open mind, an obsessive attention to detail, and possibly a lot of time.
The future of virtual world building should go beyond entertainment, and into more utilitarian, more practical applications.
Which leads me to think about the future potential that this genre can provide beyond gaming.
While many of the current creative software we use (Photoshop for images and photography, GarageBand for music, and video editing software plus camera phones / consumer DSLRs for videos) has vastly democratized the creation of media, a realm that was decades ago reserved for professionals, perhaps “world building” software has the potential to give everyday users access to an even wider variety of complex, more meaningful applications.
Creating virtual worlds for art and entertainment is not just the tip of the iceberg, it’s also an awful waste of advanced tech.
As the technology becomes robust enough to accurately simulate real-world physics and even human interactions, the future of virtual world building goes beyond entertainment, and into more utilitarian, more practical applications.
Urban planning enthusiasts can use it to design smaller scale neighborhoods, to large scale cities. Politicians and other civic leaders can use it to simulate the impact of its community-related policies. Social scientists to market research professionals can use it to test social experiments in virtual groups of people and places. Space agencies can use it to visualize planned human settlements in the Moon and Mars. The applications will be endless.
But one application that could also potentially be realized much closer to the present is how these virtual worlds can be a new platform for social interaction, that is, when the time comes that individual creations become accessible to citizens of the wider web.
If the Great Digital Platform 1.0 is the searchable web (late 1990s), Platform 2.0 is social media (mid-late 2000s), and Platform 3.0 is the Mirrorworld / the AR Cloud (the near future, which I’ve recently wrote a piece on), then the open platform of Virtual World Building is “Platform 2.5”.
It’s a platform not yet advanced enough to properly bridge the physical and virtual worlds, but it’s robust enough to simulate a lot of the characteristics from our real world to create a virtual one that we can interact and learn from. Or at least be entertained with.
And once these virtual worlds become open-access to the public, it could, and should be subject to the same rules and regulations that currently govern the web and social media.
Until then, individual “world builders”, no matter how wild their imaginations will run, can enjoy creating their virtual universes in the privacy of their closed-wall gaming consoles and PCs.
