Online gaming's Netscape moment?

Video games: Existing virtual worlds are built on closed, proprietary platforms, like early online services. Might they now open up, like the web?

In their own little virtual worldWHEN you sit down to play a “massively multiplayer online” (MMO) game such as “World of Warcraft” or enter a virtual world such as Second Life (pictured), your computer connects to a distant server which holds all the data needed to model the synthetic realm and to co-ordinate the actions of different players. The “client” software on your computer updates the server with your every move, and the server keeps all players informed of each other's actions. This enables each player's computer to render a vivid, three-dimensional world.

The software that does this, however, is proprietary: each game requires its own client and server software. MMOs and virtual worlds are, in short, like walled gardens. You cannot move from one virtual world to another. Just as with early online services—CompuServe, Genie, AOL and Prodigy—users exist in separate communities, each of which has its own way of doing things. “There is a place for such worlds,” says Richard A. Bartle of the University of Essex, who was the co-author of MUD, the first ever multi-user adventure game on a computer. “But that's by no means the whole story, any more than AOL is the whole internet.”

What happened on the internet, of course, was that the web came along and provided common, open standards for both client and server software, doing away with proprietary online services and bringing together previously separate communities as CompuServe, AOL and the rest adopted the web's open standards. Now a firm called Multiverse Network hopes to do the same for MMOs. It has created MMO client and server software based on open standards, and a way to move between virtual worlds built on its platform, just like following a link from one web page to another. And it has made its software available for free download by anyone who wants to build and host a virtual world.

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