Recently the folks at Linden Labs and IBM have teamed up to port the first avatar between virtual worlds. See more here.
This is an interesting development. To what extent will characters/avatars/data be transferable between worlds? Will your 70 Tauren Warrior be able to hop in a car and drive around a virtual town? Will he be able to walk to the end of Azeroth and into Second Life? Probably not. More likely, you’ll be able to communicate with players of other virtual games…. even people playing your game, but on a different server. In the future, anyone playing any sort of online game will be able to communicate with everyone else. This is a cool proposition.
An important thing to keep in mind is that content from other games may ruin the feeling that I’m immersed in a world. When I’m slaying beasts in Azeroth I don’t really want to see some guy from Second Life flying around. It’ll be interesting to see how companies make use of this cross-platform technology without hampering upon the immersion and culture of each individual game.
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