With a hat tip to Cristiano at SLUniverse for his post on the subject, it seems that Richard “Lord British” Garriott is planning a virtual world social hub called Centerport, which you can read about here. The blurb starts well:
“When it makes its debut in 2012, CenterPort will be the virtual world social hub for the OpenLife ecosystem, a broad yet fully integrated meta-community. And, it’s also a robust game unto itself.”
There’s talk of reward systems, games, friends lists and when it’s initially launched it will be as a social network app for the likes of Facebook, MySpace and hi5 …. will Myspace still be around in 2012? Facebook will be and that’s going to be one of the problems for this venture, but that’s a different issue for a different post.
However before folk get too excited, let’s look a bit deeper:
“Learning providers can create entire campuses composed of multiple learning environments. Game designers can create custom games Virtual world providers can provide any type of environment (within similar constraints as the Entertainment Software Ratings Board [ESRB] content ranges, we intend to avoid the issues that Second Life is wrestling with due to the adult/erotic/pornographic flavor of so much of their content).”
Hmmmm……..