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ments of industry lobbied hard with media producers and the public to adopt VRML
(virtual reality markup language) and universal standards for 3D imaging.
At the 1998 conference, four computer scientists delivered a paper entitled “Growing
Virtual Communities in 3D Meeting Spaces” in which they state:
This new understanding of the Internet as a social medium constitutes a basic assumption
for many developers of browsers for 3D virtual worlds. Environments such as Blaxxun
Interactive's Community, Cryo's Deuxiéme Monde, OnLive! Technologies' Traveller, and
Sony's Community Place are all based on a similar model—
a more or less realistic visual
world in which people meet to socialize
[emphasis mine].
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Who reading this currently has an active account with Community Place or Deuxiéme
Monde? In regard to those pioneering 3D interactive worlds, the problem with sustain-
ability echoes the problem with new media adoption. Historically, “new” fails to be
popular until it becomes old enough for people to fathom. “Old enough” means a new
technology has been sufficiently vetted by the early adopters and the hobbyists; and
then the rest of us join in
if
there is sufficient motivation, which persists as a powerful
caveat.
Two coinciding factors prepare the stage for the emergence of pervasive media as
social media engagement: the arrival of immersive platforms, such as massively multi-
player online games (MMOs or MMOGs), and increasingly rich-media social network
platforms, such as Flickr (the photo sharing site). Online multiuser video games ad-
vanced the technology for graphical avatar-based play so profoundly that by 2004 mil-
lions of gamers had essentially trained for more expansive uses of navigable 3D space.
In parallel, we have used social media platforms to practice ever increasing degrees of
connectivity. For example, the unprecedented massive use of a multimedia social net-
work site such as Facebook builds on these combined histories of networked media.
In regard to MMOGs, in the span of a few years, with the emergence of multiplayer
platforms and the increased accessibility of broadband Internet in developed countries,
we stumbled upon an entirely changed landscape. Ultima Online (Origin Systems/Elec-
tronic Arts), a multiplayer fantasy game or role-playing game (RPG), did not invent
the genre in 1997, but it did change the game, becoming the first “massively” played
networked game with hundreds of thousands of players at its peak. Everquest, the 1999
Sony/Verant interactive MMO offering, became fondly known as “evercrack.” It broke
the mold not only in player numbers but also in player addiction, the strong feelings
