Networking, Games, and Virtual Environments : Cyberspace

Second Life paper answers many questions

John L. Miller — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 13:07:00 GMT

A recent paper by Matteo Varvello et. al. answers a lot of the questions I've found myself asking about Second Life and its community. The paper Is There Life In Second Life? and if you're interested in Second Life's popularity, community, and performance, it is a must-read!

A quick inspection of recent web articles about Second Life shows a common sentiment that perhaps popularity its is waning - or was never as great as total user account statistics suggested. When user comments are enabled on these articles, you also see that whatever their numbers, Second Life aficionados are extremely vocal when defending the popularity and functionality of their world.

It'll be interested to see how the Second Life community reacts to this paper.

It presents a lot of salient statistics about how many users are online at a time, and what those users are up to - at a macroscopic level.

So check it out! Is There Life In Second Life? is extremely accessible, so don't worry about needing a PhD to make heads or tails of it :)

Distributed Virtual Environment Scalability

John L. Miller — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 11:26:00 GMT

In the previous post I parrotted scalability figures for World of Warcraft. While investigating DVE's, I tripped across interesting figures for WoW and several other environments.

Halo-3

From this press release, we can see that in the first week of Halo-3's release,

2.7 million people played Halo-3 online
They logged 40 million hours of online play that week

That's absolutely astonishing for a single game! 40 million hours is 19,230 US person YEARS of work, in a week!

World of Warcraft

From Neilsen video game figures for September 2007, we see that

WoW was the most popular PC game by a factor of 3
The average player played 1051 minutes per week - 17.5 hours!

If the math holds up, that's 10 million subscribers * 17.5 hours/wk = 175 MILLION hours of WoW play per week, or 84,135 US person years of work equivalent for each week of play.

As a side note, "Traffic Analysis and Modeling for World of Warcraft" describes WoW traffic overall, and says the median download bandwidth for a player is 6.9 kbps, and the median uplink is 2.1 kbps. If we accept the peak number of simultaneous active users as 900,000, that's a total of 6.2 Gbps peak average upload from WoW datacenters for gameplay. Imagine all the processing that goes into calculating what's being communicated... Zowie!

Second Life

It's difficult to find reliable statistics for Second Life, and I haven't gone far into the research literature. From my own observations and inferences, and a quick search on the internet

Online user population tends to be between 25,000 and 50,000 at the times I connect.
A given region (a land parcel whose simulation is handled by a single server, and whose inhabitants can interact) looks able to support no more than one or two hundred users. I've seen limits of 63 attendees at invitation-only performance events, for 'technical reasons', which makes me wonder if perhaps the limit isn't 64 users per region?
Checking just now, it says 1,271,025 users have logged in in the last 60 days. Several months ago I saw a figure of 25,000 to 50,000 new accounts per day. If those numbers hold true on an average day today, and each new user logs in once, that would be 1.8M to 3M unique user logins. This leaves me uncertain of the active returning population in Second Life. Does anyone have better figures?

Anyways, enough random numbers for now. If you have anything to add, please leave a comment or send me mail, this sort of stuff is fascinating for me.

Second Life - Reality sets in?

John L. Miller — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 10:46:00 GMT

Earlier I commented about the disparity in numbers quoted for Second Life's population. It's not that any of the numbers are wrong - for what's being expressed, they're no doubt correct. Rather, it's a question of what's being measured. For my money, steady-state population, and those willing to pay for the experience are both fine metrics.

A recent LA Times article talks about a trend of some large businesses either reducing or eliminating their presence in Second Life. The article is short, insightful, and worth reading IMO. Some key quotes from that article:

"Even at peak times, only about 30,000 to 40,000 users are logged on, said Brian Haven, an analyst with Forrester Research."
"[Philosophy professor Peter Ludlow] said most firms were more interested in the publicity they received from their ties with Second Life than in the digital world itself."
"Between May and June, the population of active avatars declined 2.5%, and the volume of U.S. money exchanged within the world fell from a high of $7.3 million in March to $6.8 million in June."

My two specific longest-term motivations for being a computer scientist are making games and to enable some sort of global cyber space, not that I've done much for either of these in the last decade.

Where's the future of virtual communities and communications, and for that matter, is there one? I still think lack of a payoff for time invested in Second Life is its biggest conceptual challenge. World of Warcraft (WoW) has an incentive and reward structure built in, with social interaction as a side-benefit. WoW continues to do well, with more than 8.5 million subscribers, each paying more than $10 a month for the privilege.

World of Warcraft taps a large existing community - computer gamers - and offers an experience attractive to that community with significant value-adds. Perhaps the biggest challenge in Second Life is that the only existing community it really taps into are those who frequent online social mechanisms such as ICQ, MUD/MOO, and others, and press and the curious inspired by the press, who are no doubt a highly transient population.

I definitely want to see Second Life (or similar environments) succeed. It seems like they need to offer something else, though, in order to be anything more than a niche application.

Second Life Slashdot stream

John L. Miller — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 12:00:00 GMT

I stumbled across a recent Slashdot posting about Second Life. There are some interesting comments amidst the dross, worth a read if you're interested in virtual worlds or Second Life in particular.

The gist is, Second Life has made its client side open-source, and the article claims it'll be doing the same for the server side. Very interesting for someone who wants to research distributed systems and distributed system security. Getting the servers correctly federated and working well together is an interesting enough problem.

If the client code and the server code are both really open sourced, it may be worth a peek to see what would be required to make a P2P implementation. No doubt there are a plethora of legal and logistical requirements for servers to support monetization and integrity of the world, but heck, that just makes the problem that much more interesting!

While looking up pointers, I stumbled across a tech special report from business week online which is centered around 'Virtual Life,' with lots of Second Life articles. Looks like time for more reading...

Cyberspace

John L. Miller — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 18:34:00 GMT

What exactly is cyberspace? For me, it's what I read about in William Gibson's Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. It's an immersive datasphere which provides utility information to the common man. It's a playground to the fringe-dweller, where anything can be learned about anything. Tactile representation of this data was always a key feature of the fictional cyberspace, allowing intuition, interpretation, and artistic mining and synthesis beyond that afforded by a naked page of numbers. So, cyberspace is a marriage of a pervasive data plane and an immersive, intuitive interface.

Some people no doubt consider Second Life the ideal platform for cyberspace. It's an artificial world which provides a great deal of control to the user. You can specify your appearance and control your interaction with the world. Even more, it's a social environment where people can meet and exchange views (and information) in relative anonymity. It even includes a currency with an exchange rate, in case part of that information exchange requires a little economic lubricant.

I have to disagree.

Second Life falls short of my personal definition of cyberspace. The interface is there, sure, but is it the right interface? And what about the data? The internet and the web already provide the data aspect of cyberspace. Asimov posited creation of a Universal Library with all the world's data, and I think that day is already here. An ever growing fraction of mankind's knowledge finds its way to the web every day, eagerly transcribed and hosted by the teeming masses. Even better, the barrier to publication is practically nonexistent: anyone can say anything. When was the last time you needed to physically visit a real library to do some research or read an article?

A better answer to creating cyberspace is a purpose-built interface to the world's data. We've already got a lot of the data out there in a standard, mineable format, thanks to pioneers like Tim Berners-Lee and global adoption of standards he (among others) proposed. Which begs the question, if there's already a format AND a consumer for that format (web browsers), why not use it? It's a great way to see the data as the presenters intend.

I'm a fringe-dweller. I want to see the data in a way which serves my own nefarious ends, not have it filtered and spoon-fed to me.

The internet has an amazing amount of data on it, both immediately available as html, and as data in other protocols such as P2P file sharing, instant message, VOIP, and SQL. There's a fascinating (though slightly dated) study called How Much Information? 2003 which summarized information generation and availability for a wide variety of mediums. It estimates 167 terabytes (thousands of gigabytes) of static content ('surface web'), and another 91,850 terabytes of 'deep web' (generated content based on obscured databases). Add in email and instant messaging, and you're up to half an exabyte, 532,897 gigabytes.

Given the amount of data available for mining, is there a better way to view all of it than a web browser and a stable full of one-off applications?

The Challenge

Design an interface to allow ready access to the world's data. It can use formatting information (such as html tags) provided as part of the data, but shouldn't be restricted the presentation specified by that formatting information. The electronic world should be navigable as a vast sea of data, organized in a fashion that enables new insight.

Key questions:

Is a 3D, immersive, or haptic interface desirable, or is good old-fashioned 2D the best way to go?
What new navigations mechanisms do you provide for trolling through data?
How do you prove your interface is better than the status quo, good old-fashioned web search?
Can a useful interface be made interesting and entertaining to use?

If you're already working on this, I'd enjoy hearing about any non-confidential efforts you've made.