There's still only one world that counts
I've just finished reading Edward Castronova's Synthetic Worlds (2006), which is something I probably ought to have done some time ago. Reading it seven years after its publication, however, reminded me that synthetic worlds — notably Second Life — seemed like big news in the computer community at around the time that Castronova was writing. I remember being told that major companies were opening stores in Second Life, luminaries were holding press conferences there, entrepeneurs were making money there, and that anyone who was anyone would shortly be living, at least in part, in a synthetic world. Yet I don't hear much about Second Life or any similar world anymore.
The worlds themselves are still there and, presumably, making a living for the companies that develop them. But neither the media nor the conversations in which I'm involved have much to do with them. Was I, in 2006, hanging around a bunch of starry-eyed gamers unaware that not everyone was interested in their hobby? Is the media still not taking computer games seriously, as Castronova suggests in his introduction to Part II? Has everyone disappeared into a synthetic world, leaving me wandering alone on the outside?
In both the mainstream media and in conversations of which I'm a part, the giants of the computer industry aren't synthetic worlds of the kind that Castronova wrote about, but web-based tools like Facebook, Twitter and Google. And, to go by the numbers, rightly so: according to Statistic Brain, Facebook has over 1100 million accounts, Twitter has over 550 million accounts, and Google responds to over 5000 million searches per day. The largest synthetic world, World of Warcraft, had a comparatively measly 12 million subscribers at its height.
If there are synthetic worlds to which humanity is migrating, as Castronova puts it, they're surely Facebook and Twitter. The home pages of Second Life and World of Warcraft themselves sport those ubiquitous offers to "like" them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter.
I can think of several possible explanations. Firstly, Facebook and Twitter are free, where the synthetic worlds studied by Castronova ask for subscriptions. Secondly, the user base of game-like synthetic worlds is fragmented into numerous followers of different worlds, while Facebook and Twitter completely dominate their markets.
Lastly, though, I wonder if synthetic worlds have themselves met the fate of virtual reality identified in the appendix to Castronova's book. As Castronova has it, the researchers behind virtual reality originally supposed that virtual worlds would be created by completely immersing the users' senses in computer-generated stimuli. But it turns out that relatively crude representations of characters and landscapes on an ordinary computer are good enough to keep users' minds in a synthetic world. But maybe most of us don't even need those crude representations, at least not most of the time: our needs are adequately met by augmenting the real world with web profiles and instant messaging. After all, it's the one world from which we cannot migrate.
