Since Jason is calling me out to compare nerd portfolio's, I got to thinking about online gaming's evolution and it's influence on technological evolution.
It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that gamers have been the driving force behind all of the major hardware evolution's we've seen. They scream for faster machines, bigger video cards, more and faster memory, RAID (although servers should get the credit for this technology). If it wasn't for them we would most likely still be staring at monochrome monitors and having to buy daughter cards to add expansion memory. My home machine is a custom built gaming system from one of about thirty companies that specialize in building the biggest, baddest, and fastest pc's on the planet, all optimized for gaming(that and looking cool). The first game I can remember playing over a network was the original doom circa 1995, on a bunch of NeXt machines networked via coax (high technology back then). It grew to MUD's (Multi User Dungeon's) which I played for a long time, if you could speed read and type fast you were usually ok on those since they were completely text based. When you walked into a room the client would type a room description on your screen and the available exits, you had to figure out if and how you could interact with anything in the room, and if a monster decided to start attacking, you better read fast and type faster or you'd be dead. Learning the syntax was a pain, but I wasted hours doing this. Half-Life and Quake were next, and improved the technology by making it video based. I'll also give them credit for starting the "bot" problem/revolution. The idea was simple, walk around and shoot anything that moves, don't talk unless you want to get yelled at by other players (eats up bandwidth, which translates into framerate). Then Everquest came along. As far as I can remember this was the first online game to charge a fee, but it was video based, you had characters you could look at and interact with. Also, it was more than just kill, a whole culture emerged, commerce, online "relationships", and user interaction. WoW was spawned off of that idea, with, according to Jason, improvements in the interface and the fact that you don't have to live in front of your screen. I guess what I'm driving at here is that we shouldn't be surprised about Second Life, it's the next natural evolution. Take online, video based gaming technologies and turn it into a place that people can use to be someone else, be it a dog, an alien or whatever they want. You can buy and sell virtual property, attend an educational lecture, or just wander around running into people and buildings(which is what I'm best at). I've been rambling for a while now, but one more thought just popped into my head. Not too many years ago I read a book(shocking, I know) where the basic plot was someone had created a virtual nation, to join all you had to do was get on the web and sign up, that and renounce your citizenship to your home country. Once a "citizen" you were immune to the laws of your home country, state, county, just think, no taxes! Dramatic yes, but is this where we're headed? BTW, send me one of those passes