I did not quite manage to turn the discussion on Virtual Worlds over the last few days around to my favourite topic: biological analogies. Now I can. Throughout the talks of "design", "aesthetics", "laws", "rules" and "software" I kept hearing one refrain. I was sung in many voices and in different words, but it basically went like this: 'we keep making all this clever stuff with all these clever rules and deep stories and then the darned users go and chose to do something else' Now, it is stretching the Darwinian analogy just a bit far to claim that what we are seeing in Virtual Worlds is the inhabiting species putting selection pressure on the environment. Or is it? Because that is exactly what we are going to see in Little Big Planet (a Virtual World that is a game), and in Metaplace.   more »