Networking, Games, and Virtual Environments : Virtual Environments

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 :)

Crashing WoW servers

John L. Miller — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 11:35:00 GMT

Yesterday I was forwarded a link about retirement of a long-time player from World of Warcraft. While that in itself might be interesting, the really juicy bit was the way he went out: with a mighty 'crash' from the server. Scalability issues, or something else?

Check out Boom's Goodbye Blog, where he describes his farewell, including the convergence of more than 1,000 players in a single capital city, and three different 40-party groups (in addition to lots of individuals) engaging in combat.

It's nice to see that WoW can scale past the 100-200 player limit (within mutual interaction range) I had privately hypothesized. It would be very interesting to find out exactly how many it could support sustained!

DVE Scalability - More to be done?

John L. Miller — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:53:00 GMT

Much of my last year has been spent reading about distributed virtual environment scalability. As it turns out, perhaps it shouldn't have been.

A lot of research papers I've read begins like this:

"DVE's consume loads of bandwidth, and there are lots of opportunities to improve their network usage."

Network games researchers have source access to - such as Quake III - have different behavior than the latest generation of multiplayer online games. Being an avid player of World of Warcraft, I finally spent some time analyzing traffic usage for a few basic scenarios:

Sitting in a capital city with a few hundred other players
Playing a battleground with 79 other players
Fighting in close proximity to 30+ players and several computer-controlled avatars.

I was shocked at how LOW the traffic usage was. Even when I was beating on the keyboard and mouse along with 30 other players next to each other in the battleground, my upload bandwidth stayed below 5 kbps, and download below 50 kbps. Better still, when I moved away from other players - out of interaction and viewing range - I stopped getting information about them.

There could still be issues with massively scaled games where thousands of players will be within interaction range of each other, but it's unclear if other computing resources (such as video cards) can keep up with the demand of displaying those avatars.

Does this make scalability research in DVE's obsolete? Absolutely not, but it does mean we need to be careful about what we assume is and is not already implemented.

I wonder if Blizzard talks to researchers about their Networking design...

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.

World of Warcraft hits 9M + active subscribers!

John L. Miller — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 13:06:00 GMT

The holidays gave me a chance to re-acquaint myself with World of Warcraft (WoW). I have to say, it's still the single most impressive online game I've ever seen. For my money, it does everything right. It literally *is* for my money, since I'm one of those paying 9 million subscribers.

I'm researching distributed virtual environment (DVE) scalability. As part of that, I was curious about the populations in WoW, both numbers supported per server, and total number of simultaneously active users. "A Measurement Study of Virtual Populations in Massively Multiplayer Online Games" provides a great peek into WoW, based on results from the CensusPlus UI add-in for WoW. Based on that paper, and on CensusPlus results published at http://www.warcraftrealms.com/, it appears:

There's a peak of almost 900,000 simultaneous users logged in and playing in the US and EU.
Average daily populations on a given server fluctuate by around a factor of 4-5 between minimum and maximum number of players online.
The peak number of simultaneous users on a given server appears to be around 4,000.
Data on maximum users in a zone (able to interact directly) isn't provided, but appears to be on the order of a couple hundred.

I've downloaded and added CensusPlus to my characters addins. It's out of date, but still works fine with 2.3. It's fun to see the numbers for your own server.

In summary, congratulations Blizzard on the incredibly successful World of Warcraft, and thank you researchers and add-in developers for giving us insight into player populations!

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.

Fiddling with Second Life

John L. Miller — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 15:36:00 GMT

I downloaded Second Life yesterday and played with it some. I was impressed with how good it looked given the relatively small size of the installer. It must be doing some significant texture transfer in the background to flesh out the world, depending upon where you go to.

The application was easy to install and start running. Controls were fairly intuitive for someone familiar with FPS games, and even if you're not there was a great deal of easily accessible help. There were a few sample games near the starting point, including a 3D version of space invaders.

After familiarizing myself with the controls and environment, I teleported to the closest major server, apparently in Korea. I wandered around for a few minutes but didn't find much to do. I opened up the search screen and was able to move to a Washington-based server, which had a much fuller environment. I even found a few stores peddling virtual wares. I browsed the goods, and then asked myself the critical question: what now?

What now indeed. Second Life is a well executed environment modeled around the properties of our physical world, yet with liberties in personal appearance and navigation that make it much more convenient. Having said this, it still doesn't necessarily have a lot to offer me. I play computer games, watch TV, and travel for entertainment. Most of these activities are goal-based. Unfortunately Second-life doesn't appear to have a way of satisfying goals like these. It's like a MOO, an interactive mutable environment where you can add your own content and chat with friends. A virtual mall to hang out in, without the easily accessible fast food.

Second Life has gotten a lot of press lately, which would make you think there's millions of people wandering around in this virtual world, making tens of thousands of dollars if they choose to sell their handiwork. When I signed in, the welcome screen indicated a unique population of a few million accounts, 800,000 of which had logged in over the previous month. Not bad. On the other hand, I checked out their subscriber numbers from http://www.mmogchart.com/ based on data from July '06. It shows that about 125,000 users were willing to pay a bit of money each month to continue using the system, an important metric IMO. For the same period, World of Warcraft was showing 6.5 MILLION subscribers. Second Life isn't a game, and that probably contributes to the significantly lower user base.

Will Second Life sink or swim? For what it is, I think the developers and people participating have done a great job. BUT, it doesn't provide an experience I personally find compelling. I'm too goal-oriented, far better suited to an experience-based game-centered virtual world like World of Warcraft. Nowhere near the same freedom, but a fine platform for competition and entertainment, while still providing a way to get together with my buddies and chat.

If you've used Second Life or other virtual environments, I'd be very interested to hear what you think. Am I missing the point? And if you haven't tried it, it might be worth a peek. It only takes a few minutes to download, and it doesn't cost a cent to explore.