Inside Lively rooms.
Not impressed? Create your own! Stock your room with furniture. Paste your favourite pictures from a Picasa album on the walls. Let a streaming video from YouTube take over an entire wall. That done, you can invite friends to your virtual room or place a link to it on your blog. Unlike Second Life, a Lively room can link anywhere on the Internet. For instance, adding it to your profile on a social networking site completely changes the interaction. Visitors click, add a small browser plug-in, and join you on your online adventures. The best part: Lively runs on almost any computer with Windows XP or Vista—no need for a very high-end machine or a lightning-fast Internet connection.
Like most Google products, Lively simply adds on to your existing account, with your usual settings and preferences. Movement and interaction with this virtual environment is mostly via the mouse, so there is no need to remember a long list of keyboard shortcuts (a staple for Second Life and online gaming worlds).
Yet, there is a reason Lively is still in beta. For now, it’s only supported on Windows-based computers. No economic transactions yet; nor can users create new products. The graphics feel more cartoony than “real”. However, most of these shortfalls contribute to mainstream appeal. The lack of any real economics renders Lively immune to bank runs such as the one Second Life faced. A lack of extreme graphics encourages more users—even those without high-end computers—to enter Lively.
One expects an advertisement-based revenue model, as with other Google products (from Gmail to Orkut). Its wider accessibility will definitely make it the most populated online world-cum-social network. The right to create items online should be released via development kits similar to the ones that spurred a mash-up mania on Google Earth.
From the onset, one thing makes Lively different: Communication, whether through text, voice or video, is extremely easy. That definitely makes it more alive. And the freedoms offered by Lively should finally make online worlds a mainstream experience.
GAMING ONLINE: THE MANY WORLDS OF PAY-TO-PLAY
The Matrix Online (MxO)
This MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game) is a continuation of the movies, the animated series (the Animatrix) and graphic novels. Unlike Second Life and Lively, it is for players who want to live out their fantasy of inhabiting the mythos created in the Matrix trilogy of movies. To do this, each player has to choose a side—they can opt for Zion (pro-human forces), the Machines (the forces against humans) or the Merovingian (a side working solely for itself). Each player chooses one of the three classes of characters—Coder, Hacker, Operative—with specific advantages and limitations.
The player is given missions, according to the side chosen. Successful missions earn a higher status in that particular side, while diminishing a player’s value to other sides. Missions are further divided according to their importance to the player and to the overall storyline.
Unlike Second Life or Lively, the MxO isn’t for people wanting to just interact with others online. Instead, it is for enthusiasts of the Matrix series who are well versed in its mythology. And “walking the path” isn’t easy online—apart from the oodles of firefights, there is also a fee the player must play to jack into this world.
World of Warcraft (WoW)
WoW is the online continuation of a computer game series with the Warcraft name. This is by far the biggest online world, with 16 million players (according to ‘www.mmogchart.com’).