During the State of Play II conference, TL, Torill, and several others kept challenging the presumption that Norrath and other virtual worlds should be thought of as separate places. This is a good question to ask with regard to Norrath, but I wonder whether if it will be an even more important issue with regard to the future direction of virtual worlds.
With regard to Norrath, I think the point being pressed is simply the continguous nature of social experience and community. I'm generally in favor of the objectionable separation, though, because I think there are important reasons to speak about virtual environments (esp. those that are explicitly fashioned as games) as separate "places" (note the scare quotes) that are independent and meaningfully distinct from Cartesian space. This isn't too radical, I think, because the last decade has seen a great deal of debate about how to characterize the Web and the Internet as a social space (if it must be a space at all) -- and why making that determination might be important for law and for society.
However, having said that, I think it's clear that the future heralds an increasing collapse of any easy lines drawn between physical and virtual spaces. The collapse is well underway, and I'm not talking metaphorically about eBay economies here. When I see things like Google Maps, A9's Block View, RFID, geocaching, Bluejacking, and Catch Bob, it isn't too hard to spot the fact that there can be, will be, and are currently increasing synergies between real space and virtual information spaces. The folks from There.com are virtually rebuilding the real Earth. It's not clear to me (or to anyone, I think) exactly how mixing the capacity for virtual space and the persistence of real space will play out. Will discrete 3-D virtual spaces be useful in localized areas? What exactly will the ambient data fields for places look like? How would people want to skin the world? But putting it all together, I think we can safely predict that the importance of the tangible information in real space will continue to diminish -- posting a virtual signpoint or advertisement will be as effective as -- perhaps better than -- creating a real signpost.
One question to ask is how we'll all feel about this creep away from the physically visible and toward the virtually important. People seem already annoyed enough about how those talking into tiny cell-phones disrupt standard social expectations. What will they think of people playing pervasive games in real space? And if Dave Winer is annoyed now at how Google Toolbar annotates his web pages, how is he going to feel when Google starts annotating him and his physical spaces? If we can dress up Martha digitially, how long will it be before we start enhancing ourselves digitally, dressing our real environments with virtual ornaments, and even dressing other people with metadata that can be "seen" by those who share their local space and own the right virtual glasses? Our increasingly large metadata profiles are out there now, in fact, they're just not geographically linked, so that (most of us) can't currently profile the random passerby on the street. But we're starting to profile locations -- that's a first step down a longer road.
So I'd predict the next significant branch we'll see in the evolution of virtual worlds is going to be the development of an interactive virtual skin for our real environments, a Craig's list-type skin full of local possibilities and data in your space that is there but only virtually there. Norrath and true virtual spaces (MMORPGs for sure) will still exist as separate places (because why should we tie virtual things to geography where we don't need to) -- but virtual worlds like Norrath will have a relationship to an increasingly important cousin -- a virtual skin that is tied to the physical world.
With this discussion of a skin really overlaying the real, I can't help but, as Julian did in My Tiny Life, reference Baudrilliard who referenced Borges:
Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.
He goes a bit too far, of course, but it's a good provocation to end with.
