The other day I re-watched War Games, a 25-year-old hacker flick starring Ferris Bueller who nearly incites global thermo nuclear war after accidentally breaking into a military mainframe to play an online game.

This proto-Internets was an amalgam of text-based electronic “bulletin board systems” which usually boasted boring chatrooms and awesome multi-user dungeons (or MUDs) that eventually evolved into massively-multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft.

MMOs then spun-off into “virtual worlds” like Second Life which removed crawlable dungeons and respawning orcs and added the ability to design and sell virtual goods and real-estate as well as all that virtual sex (they don’t call it scoring for nothing). These metaverses didn't offer traditional game tropes, but achieving goals and amassing currency were still pretty game-esque.

Now Google has entered the VW realm with Lively, which eliminates the genre's trademark virtual economy, digi-sex and user-created goods—there isn't even a persistent world to wander about. Instead, users customize individual rooms and invite friends (or strangers) to drop in.

Yes, it’s an advance that these rooms can be embedded in blogs, MySpace and Facebook—rather than requiring a dedicated client—but really what we’re talking about is a glorified chatroom with cartoonish 3D accoutrements and a disappointingly limited avatar selection.

So far Lively is clunky, slow, Windows-only and crash-prone. Its themed rooms, like an Ewok tree village, are mostly full of avatars standing around doing a whole lot of not much. I spent some time hanging out in a virtual high school but aside from doing backflips and causing a small explosion in a science lab, I mostly just loitered by the lockers while avatars engaged in inane banter. Um…whee?

It's an inauspicious entry from a company that became a verb by simply being the best search engine—and joined the email and online map markets with high-end products that offered something new (massive storage capacity and satellite imagery).

Sure, Google even venturing into this arena goes a long way towards mainstreaming it. But since experts expected an ambitious virtual world rooted in Google Earth technology—rather than this easily accessible but ultimately empty exercise—Lively can’t help but seem dead on arrival.