This week, in The Virtual Whirl, we're looking at virtual environments (and their subset of virtual worlds) as products and platforms.
As their developers and operators seek to grow and mature their markets, they carry the risk of rendering themselves irrelevant to the very customers that they court.
Products iterate, but platforms evolve. This is because a product is a discardable or replaceable entity, whereas a platform is an underpinning substrate that supports products.
In order to survive, a platform technology must first drive usage, and then it must accommodate usage.
Driving usage means establishing a hook or a niche that makes people want to engage and involve themselves in the first place. Without driving usage at the outset, you have nothing.
Having driven usage, you need to then retain users, and that means accommodating common usage scenarios. In other words, evolving the platform. If the platform can't evolve, it dies.
Walled-garden platforms of the past did not die solely on the basis that they were bounded spaces, but because they did not evolve to accommodate users. Users migrated to platforms that did.
Raph Koster asks "Are virtual worlds over?" and concludes that – in a sense – they are. That doesn't mean they're going away by any stretch of the imagination, but that they are evolving out of the naive and simplistic definitions by which we have traditionally defined them.
Koster's (quite workable) definition of a virtual world is less of a formal definition and more of an observation of common-classification features. This overall grouping seems to lay the virtual world as a specialized subclass of the broader virtual environment category.
While those virtual worlds have hitherto driven usage, many are moving out of their tight categorizations as they evolve to accommodate new uses, users, markets, niches and user-needs.
Virtual environments are increasingly embedding themselves into different sectors and industries. Educators have adopted virtual environments as a tool, and will continue to use them, migrating to whichever platforms and products deliver. Pedagogy is not beholden to brands or suppliers.
Doctor Jason Zagami of Griffith University's School of Education and Professional Studies finds that education is moving beyond the commitments of a branded virtual campus and that any virtual space that is pliable to lessons can be meaningfully supportive for education.
"Less and less am I finding that I need a specific location to use [Second Life] for educational purposes. Other than student building activities (which can be done in various [sandbox locations]) there does not seem to be a real need to maintain a large themed location."
"Most of the time we only use it as a place to begin before moving off to locations scattered throughout [Second Life]. We do like to gather for discussions, but I have a couple of sites elsewhere where I have rights to manage these processes."
Dr Zagami is discovering that as virtual environment pedagogies evolve, the things he looks for in a VE to support his teaching have similarly evolved, "more and more [I] am looking for complex gameplay elements in order to better guide student concept development. [Second Life] is still the most versatile environment available, but like many others, I am looking forward to its successor."
Regardless of how engaging the initial hook is, the user requirements of a platform are always evolving, and any platform that does not is ultimately left behind.
As users and communities become more comfortable with virtual environments, their requirements become increasingly sophisticated, and a lack does not remain a lack for very long. It becomes a hunger.
Every industry seeks to grow and mature its market, but that carries a risk with it. As the market matures, the products and platforms must mature with them. Those that do not are inevitably discarded.
In my opinion, virtual worlds and virtual environments are not going to be exceptions to that rule.
