Onder Skall's criteria for virtual worlds

Onder Skall of SL Game Park gives a meta-mega post of criteria for virtual worlds (Second Life if the standard) and their histories.

His big three pivotal points of SL-likeness:

Real money must move in and out of the “virtual” economy freely. RMT (Real-Money Trading) is designed in, not forbidden by TOS.

Users must be able to create unique content and retain ownership over it. Things like scripting and accepting uploads are important here. Multimedia is a bonus. We must be able to control the rights to our content.

The world must be persistent, and the users able to change it. Residents like being able to build the world themselves, and don’t need somebody stepping in and erasing their work.

+ links to archival video of AlphaWorld, Furcadia, and others.

I don’t agree with Onder’s big three entirely. No one does ;-). But #3 about persistence and impact of user play appears, to my eyes, to be a universal if we are talking about virtual world design…but already there are qualifications if non-sandbox worlds are included. Anyway, have a go and add to the list.

Thanks Raph Koster for the heads up on this.