There is a wall people run into often, yet they haven't figured out the pain they feel. They don't quite say "ouch" when they hit the wall. They do, eventually, say something else. They say it when they reach out and can feel the wall of frustration. Do people profit where others give up?
Skip below the Daft vid if you don't have any questions about VWs.
Before we try to make this wall obvious, lets stereotype two kind of virtual worlds. One type of virtual world lets you connect and interact with objects, which you can edit and change, and these changes you see immediately like a seamless experience in real-time. Then there are the type of virtual worlds where you have to pre-render and construct while the world is off-line fully disconnected in order to update the experience until you eventually reboot it to make more changes. Games you buy off the shelf of the store to play on your game console are typical of the rebooted worlds designed by a company, yet some come with a level editor. Do you get to interact with others and share architectual design changes live? As you try to answer this it makes it a bit more clear the difference between these two types of virtual worlds.
Is it a live band or is it Memorex Machinma?
You can actually see the wall mentioned above. It looks like a set of tools in order to get a job done, or in some cases, it looks like an imaginary wish-list of tools that aren't available, especially if you don't know what you had until it is gone, taken away, or left unimplemented. Such wall of imaginary tools is smack in the middle between those two virtual worlds mentioned above. Once this becomes more clear you may wonder why the wall continues to exist despite all the advancements in technology and user interfaces. Can we blame the need for profit? Maybe, probably, soft-of, kind-of, yes.
Businesses help guarantee their own success by being able to create content with the tools they have. At least, that is the typical short-term drivel revisited for every shock-n-awe feature or new virtual product added. Of course, you can buy the same tools they have to create content. How many users do that? Users haven't been able to create content because they can't afford those tools, or so-called tools are professionally made pita bread. Some creators became programmers to design their own tools. Aha! (Do you sense how cyclic this sounds?)
Since when does it make business sense to make user-created content harder to develop in order to achieve long-term goals. If we let short-term drivel narrow long-term objectives, then you know another team's survival tactics can just as easily make short-term changes and cause diversion. To ignore this kind of logical sense is like playing Рулетка Rulyetka, except for each lucky round you add another bullet into a eventually full spinning chamber, and you repeat... and spin... one more time!
Don't I sound fascinated to listen for possibilities about how-to make pita bread look like a swiss cheese melt? You might be too when you listen to business proposals that vaguely smell like that wall of imaginary tools, especially the ones put up to make existing finely crafted tools become imaginary. Eventually, we could make a memorex mural wall of the last 5 seconds from those who tried to play another lucky round, yet with another twist. We'll change the shock-n-awe feature of the day to be the multiplatform play button that anybody can use because we already patented the pause button to capture the moment. Above the wall we'll denote the usual unfinished styled sign: "Is it live or is it..."
Momentarily... I got excited about the sound of Netflix mixed with client-side scripting. May it be understood, there are strong different tastes between user-created content and what really is only locked consumer markets. Injustice? Let me google that for you: "RIAA paid $16M + legal fees to collect $391k".
Yet more oddly beautiful found on twitter, the analogy of SOAP and ReST being compared to a hammer and interior design. Did you start with a hammer to put up another brick in this mural wall?
Pink Floyd's manager said, "waste of time," and that sounded like a fashionable statement towards remarkable interior design. "The marginal cost of a digital file is essentially zero," said Jenner. "That means the market is going to be pushing the cost of digital files to zero. This is an inescapable fact." He spoke directly about file-sharing, something that the Internet was born to do with its most primitive protocol transfer block... or prim.
"Attempts to stop people copying are clearly a waste of time," said Jenner.
"We're fighting against the tide, we're fighting against economic reality."
Yes, I still want that old simple drag-n-drop feature that was enabled to take content that I made from my desktop over into my window of in-world seamless experience even if the two points exist on different ends of the Internet. Don't present to me a virtual IDE that disabled DnD, so that user-created content only works in your world to build
Usable, extensible, adaptable, reusable.