In Escaping the Gilded Cage: User Created Content and Building the Metaverse, Cory Ondrejka argues that current technology should allow for the establishment of a large scale online world in which content is generated and owned by users. He cites Second Life as an example of this, describing how players can make different objects with different scripts and behaviors, and how they trade these items for in game currency. Given my current, albeit limited, experience with second life, I see two issues with his assertion that the metaverse could now be created.
The first of these is the relative difficulty of the building tool. While it is easy to place and move different geometric objects, putting them together and modifying them in the correct ways is difficult, and requires that a great deal of time be spent learning the building tools of the system. If a large scale virtual world such as Ondrejka envisions is to come into being, it will be necessary for content creation to be as user friendly as possible.
The second issue is that a cursory exploration of Second Life will reveal that much of it is deserted. Countless players have purchased virtual land and put it to a variety of different uses. However, much of this effort is wasted. The countless houses and stores and towns lie unvisited and unused. While in the real world, space is at a premium, and will not be allowed to lie vacant, in a virtual world, unused properties will continue to exist indefinitely, the only constraint being server space, which can be added with more servers. This means that any large scale virtual world will quickly accumulate a large amount of useless creation, forcing participants to sift through the dross to find places and things of value. Unless there is some mechanism for pruning out substandard content, users will be swallowed in an avalanche of mediocrity. Until adequate solutions are devised, these issues will continue to preclude the development of the kind of virtual world that Ondrejka envisions.
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