Are we mainstreaming?
The short answer is “yes, but not where the hype is.”
So the episode of CSI that featured a crossover to Second Life aired last night. Near as I can tell, the impact on the virtual population of SL was not huge and perhaps disappointing, but the new viewer made by the Electric Sheep guys is getting positive reviews. There’s a good roundup of links at Clickable Culture.
(Particularly priceless is the way in which sex webcams co-opted “csi” as a search term in order to drive in-world traffic. Not exactly the sort of mainstream that was probably intended).
It’s been interesting seeing the discussion surrounding whether or not the industry is actually heading in a mainstream direction. And I think the answer is that there’s definitely a bit of a hype bubble around specifically the social virtual worlds side of things.
Over at Metaversed there was an interesting pair of posts that started out trying to define “virtual worlds” (of course not using the phrase as an industry umbrella term, but instead referring to the “metaversey” sorts of worlds) and ended up by concluding that there just aren’t very many.
So with all of that fantastic debate in mind, and you really should read the whole thread, I’ve revised the definition originally put forward by Joel and Giff to this:
A Social Virtual World has game-like immersion and social media functionality without narrative driven goals. At its core is a sense of presence with others at the same time and place.
And the revised list of Social Virtual Worlds now numbers just 8.
- Second Life
- ActiveWorlds
- Kaneva
- vSide
- Entropia
- Ogoglio City
- There.com
- MTV’s Worlds
Leaving aside the fact that this ignores all the MUSHes and MOOs that exactly fit this definition, and the fact that Entropia really is a game world, and the fact that MTV runs several worlds some of which fit and some of which don’t (whew, lots of facts to leave out…) we’re left with the conclusion that, well, yah, this isn’t a large segment of the overall virtual worlds industry.
It never has been, in fact. Worlds that fit the above definition have existed since at least 1985, and they have always represented the smaller segment of the industry relative to their larger sibling of entertainment-driven worlds.
And really, that is where the mainstreaming is happening yet again, driven not just by the juggernaut of World of Warcraft, but also by casual gaming. Not just on the kids’ side, but on the general side of using casual games as advertising and marketing tools. And of course, stuff like the recently announced MySpace deal to allow users to embed casual games in their profiles, or the whole NFL virtual world thing, shows that once again, it will likely be entertainment that leads the pack.
In fact, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that even in the CSI example, the draw for logging in was to play a game.
The last time I talked about this, it was May 2006. Since then, the industry has “boomed,” but in specific directions. The hot segment is unquestionably kids’ worlds. Enough of them, in fact, that their use as mainly marketing devices has started to raise questions.
Far too many people accepted the “$1 billion in investment” figure uncritically without examining exactly where the money was going — a quick glance shows that the lion’s share was for Club Penguin, and much of the rest was actually to game industry plays (Trion, Winking, etc), game middleware (GarageGames, Emergent, Havok, etc), and lots of mobile plays. (In fact, for us at Areae, a lot of what Metaplace is about entertainment, as we see that as a core component of the platform).
The bottom line is something that has been known for a very long time. Chat is never enough. Try to find a real-world business built on social interaction without something to do, and what you will find is that successful social (or “third”) places generally rely on a shared activity: drinks at the bar serving as a lubricant, bingo at the church, bowling at the lanes, a movie to ignore, and so on.
So, is there hope for mainstreaming for non-entertainment apps? Absolutely. But in my opinion, it’s not going to come from pure social virtual worlds. Entertainment is going to continue being the key driver.
What if you’re not interested in games? Well, the mainstreaming growth area outside of games seems to me to be in mirror worlds: geospatial annotation, augmented reality, even connections between virtual CAD/CAM and real-world fabbing. The potential is obvious in markets such as real estate, tourism, retailing, advertising, navigation, architecture, conferencing, education, and as Charles Stross points out in Halting State, even policing.
14 Responses to “Are we mainstreaming?”
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>Far too many people accepted the “$1 billion in investment” figure uncritically without examining exactly where the money was going
Amen! Said roughly the same thing here:
http://www.vgvc.net/?p=52
SL was also on The Office and WoW got a mention and a quick in-game scene on How I Met Your Mother this week.
Yet more mainstream recognition.
Any such list like the one presented on Metaversed is guaranteed to generate a LOT of discussion. 🙂 Not only will there be a lot of hair splitting involved, but platform vendors have their own positioning statements to defend, which are driven my marketing goals, not academic criteria.
I was at the Virtual Worlds Forum in London the other day (where you were sorely missed) and you would not be surprised, probably, to hear that every second panel discussion has a sub-discussion about “what is a virtual world” 🙂
As “Virtual World” seems to be a rather generic term to me I am tempted to say, that any definition should include a wide selection of platforms. The three criteria which make a virtual world are, IMHO:
1) the “world metaphor”: i.e. the presentation of a space, in which objects have a location and where there is distance and proximity
2) the avatar, i.e. representation of the user as a persona/character at a certain location in this world
3) a social, consensual experience, i.e. every user at a certain location is aware of other users (their avatars) near her or his location
Maybe that is the same as Christian Renaud’s definition of an NVE. Maybe it is the same as yours. I am not sure.
This definition includes a lot. It is not limited to 3D or a graphical presentation at all and it includes MMOGs, of course. All these platforms “feel” like a world and can facilitate an immersive experience. (Purely text-based “MUDs” certainly did that.) And most of the platforms included, I would call “games”. 🙂
A subset of these virtual worlds would be the open-ended, social oriented virtual worlds like Second Life, There, HiPiHi etc.
It might NOT be easy to create a set of hard criteria that determine, which platforms to include in the latter category or not. One could try to use the absence of game-like goals as such a criterium. On the other hand: even Second Life had a “leader list” for a long time, which ranked residents by the money in their accounts, their popularity, the area of land they owned etc. So, one could say, that economic success or popularity certainly was presented as a kind of official goal. 🙂
I am NOT sure, though, that the most important application for virtual worlds will be “games” (or what people experience as games) indefinitely. What I am sure of, is that the dominant applications will all fall within a category one could call “entertainment”. But that is certainly something else. There are many, many forms of entertainment than just gaming – and they are what drives a lot of the revenue generated on the web these days. Why should it be fundamentally different in the Metaverse?
I’m glad you’ve submitted the hype to a thorough-going analysis, Raph, and I couldn’t agree more: these social/economic virtual worlds like Second Life, Entropia, There etc are a fraction of all virtual worlds and games due to the Pets games, and then due to things like World of Warcraft.
And not only were the results of trying to weld CBS and the Sheep’s viewer into Second Life disappointing — they were werely abysmal, given the hype in advance that talked about “a million people” coming in and burning the servers down, based on a mistaken analogy to web pages tied to tv shows which *do* show 50 percent increase in log-ins.
I counted a generous 4,000 (10 per each of 420 islands) for this ESCapade. Cocoanut Koala manually counted 729, which someone else correted to 900 at any one time. Given the 3 hour window, that was no million, that was not even 27,000. Of course, people may come asynchronously. We’ll see. But there is a lot of secrecy and monkey math going into this — where again, views of a web page, or signups on a web page, even if a person didn’t download the client, are counted as some sort of important “hittage” (even though the 9 million claimed as SL sign-ups dwindles down to figures like “300,000 people who spent more than one Linden dollar this month” or “50,000 logged on right now).
There is another big critique to be made of the viewer, which I’ve done here and here
Basically, there’s a very troublesome problem going on, which is that the Sheep’s viewer’s first-level view shows SEARCH ALL which turns up a total grab-bag of junk (LL mixes in People, Land, Land for Sale, Groups, Places in this SEARCH ALL). That chaos then either frustrates people, or they get mainly the sex palaces or whoever put their land for sale at some ridiculous amount and got camped traffic on it just to sell poseballs lol.
The SEARCH ALL view then forks as follows: 1) some give up searching completely, and turn to the HUD which is clunky 2) some give up searching completely, bat the annoying HUD out of the way, and press SHOP, another big blue button that takes them to only Sheep-sponsored properties or websites; 3) they figure out how to drill down further and press on tabs in categories lying under this first view. That 3rd option isn’t as likely.
I’ve discovered in recent days with intensive research that one of the reasons the geeks of Second Life so loathe the SEARCH function and claim it is “broken” is that they are using *only* SEARCH ALL in the mistaken belief that it will produce “the best and most results like Google” and often with closed quotes, as if they are on Google.
But they aren’t on Google. They’re on something more like amazon.com where they have to pull down “Books” to get rid of the clutter of electronics out of their search.
When I ask geeks about this, they shrug. They can’t be bothered to tab over to cleaner results like PLACES or CLASSIFIED that would arrange by price or traffic and in fact give more merited results. I’ve also found that when I tell some of them the amazon.com, they say they don’t use amazon.com. When I ask them if they read books, they say no, unless it is on their computer monitor.
There you go.
Basically, whoever pwns SEARCH, just like Google pwned SEARCH for the Internet at large, will pwn virtual worlds, such as they are (and you are right that pets and casual games and browser stuff will probably have gadzillion more users than these worlds).
So that’s why there is an unseemly scramble to control the viewer, which literally controls the search — the Sheep are creating their own search system accomplished by scraping the grid with a robot, which drove everybody mad, as it was opt-out, not opt-in.
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You left out Jewel Of Indra. They are social, they have get-togethers, contests, but mostly they chat, look at pictures and hang out. They have some stunning 3D artwork in there. Oh yeah, VRML97 doesn’t count. 🙂
I agree entertainment is the mainstream for the MU worlds. There are other expressions that use 3D worlds (eg, the virtual reality music album). But the point is that social worlds can also be about other forms of getting together. By far the most common social experience across all cultures is worship. Worlds Of Worship (TM) would do well. The problem is infrastructure and means to enforce norms. Unlike ‘let it all hang out’ worlds, worship worlds come with a long history of traditions, rituals, norms and affordances and so on.
So why hasn’t it happened yet? Possibly because of games. The game culture itself may be in the way because the technology is adequate for this form of social expression. In fact, it is possibly a perfect application for virtual worlds combined with facebooks.
There actually was one world that tried the religion angle, can’t remember what it was called.
Hadn’t heard of Jewel of Indra before. I can’t get the site to load though. 🙁
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[…] an excellent post on Raph Koster’s website where he considers just how close to becoming mainstream ‘virtual worlds’ really are […]