Thoughts: Project: MyWorld

So Realtime Worlds just announced a new project, Project: MyWorld. They're billing it as "if Nintendo built Google Earth", and thus far, it looks quite cool. Essentially, here's what it is (from what I saw, anyways):

• Take Google Earth and generate 3D models for every building, mountain, river, forest, lake, etc. Basically, generate the world in 3D.
• Give people the ability to edit said world in a Wikipedia-esque fashion. That is to say, let them modify or add buildings so that the virtual world is more accurate to the real world.
• Toss in minigames: Driving, flying, fishing (from what I saw in the demo, probably lots more to come).
• Add on top of that a Monopoly-like property system, allowing people to purchase specific buildings, etc.
• On top of this all, overlay social networking: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and so on and so forth.

And in a nutshell, that's what it looks like RTW's trying to accomplish. It's definitely an ambitious project.

The videos released thus far can be found here (I would just watch the walkthrough, as it has everything from the trailer plus explanation and much more in the way of features). [EDIT: It seems that the walkthrough video has disappeared for the time being.]

From the commentary thus far, it looks like people are pretty split between cynic- and optim-ism on Project: MyWorld. I'm a bit ambivalent as well: While there'll definitely be room for typical internet-immaturity, the "Wikipedia-style system" that is hinted at in the extended walkthrough video just might work, if this project does catch on like Wikipedia did, with a dedicated group of player moderators.

One thing that I am a bit concerned about is the "property system". Although the video doesn't fully flesh it out, I'm wondering how property ownership will work. Could someone in the first week or so of the game accrue huge amounts of money, then purchase any and all desirable property? Time has proven that people are very good at finding and exploiting ways to gain huge amounts of money, both in the virtual and real world, and it'll be interesting to see if and how RTW fights this.

That also brings up the questions of the monetary system. The walkthrough video hints that currency will be obtained by contributing. Will contributions have to be approved before they "earn" compensation (I seriously hope that this will be the case)? Will players be able to earn money through the minigames? Or purchase ingame currency a la Second Life (Actually - and I'm a bit embarrassed because I just thought of this - Project: MyWorld seems very evocative of Second Life)? In any case, I fully expect a fairly robust virtual economy to develop.

Finally, I'm curious about how (and if) players will be "split up". Traditionally, massively multiplayer games tend to have multiple 'servers', which are separate copies of the game world. Players are split up into these 'servers' (sometimes called shards) to avoid overpopulation and stress on the game. A few games, such as EVE Online, choose instead to put every player into a single game world. These games tend to feature much larger worlds (In the case of EVE, an entire universe), and for this reason I'm predicting that Project: MyWorld will opt to put all players on a single copy of the world (Hell, if the real world can support all of us, the virtual one should hopefully be able to support a much smaller community of people).

All that said, I'm interested in how this develops. Second Life, when it debuted, was also billed as game-changing, but from what I've seen, it hasn't majorly changed the face of the world - virtual or otherwise. Regardless, I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that RTW can live up to its ambitions with this project.