Facebook virtual worlds
So everyone is talking about embedding virtual worlds on Facebook. There’s an article on Virtual Worlds News, for example, listing the few that are out there. I’ve written several posts about stuff like ActiveWorlds launching a Facebook app. There’s even an f13 thread wondering about ActiveWorlds versus Metaplace.
But one thing that hasn’t been pointed out is that really, nobody is using these very much. As of today, for example:
- Activeworlds: Â 32 daily active users
- Scenecaster: 19
- My Virtual World:45
- Second Life Link: 110
- Virtual MTV: 7
There’s a host of plausible reasons.
- Awkward process. ActiveWorlds requires IE and an ActiveX control install, which is a huge barrier for many users. Other apps make you go to a separate page, rather than seeing the content directly on your profile.
- Asynchronicity is the basic SNS approach. Many of synchronous apps on Facebook require launching to a separate page, as mentioned. But fundamentally, most people check Facebook, you don’t live on Facebook. It’s about bursts of time. As a result, the most popular game is Scrabulous, which is turn-based.
- A lack of “stuff to do.” Some of these apps aren’t actually the virtual world — they are more like feeds about the virtual world. Some of them don’t let you do anything but chat, and “chat is never enough.” None of these are real game worlds.
- Lack of total integration into the SNS. The API gives you access to a lot of info about the profile, which can and should enable virality. But not using the info, or simply not being viral enough, will dramatically hurt adoption.
- Facebook apps aren’t instant success. It’s not really a Long Tail market at the moment, as can be seen from the O’Reilly analysis and the subsequent discussion. Winners take all, and the winning categories right now are clearly “ways to make your profile richer.”
In the end, which is the most popular “virtual world” on Facebook? It’s Social Chat, which offers about what The Palace did way back when it launched: chat in static rooms, with disembodied heads. It’s got around 15,000 daily users, and right now it has around 500 logged in.
Needless to say, there’s “something to do” there. Sort of. The room titles are things like “16-19 only!!!!”, “hot BLAK bois”, “soft net sex” (current population 13) and “~fuck me hard”, population 28. Even in the room that aren’t explicitly about sex, that’s what gets talked about. Also unsurprisingly, Social Chat is the one app out of all of these that bludgeons you over the head with inviting your friends in.
Does this mean that virtual worlds on Facebook or other SNSes doesn’t make sense? No, of course not. But it does seem like there’s a few obvious principles that ought to be followed:
- Make it trivially easy to get in.
- Have something fun to do immediately.
- Don’t demand constant attention.
- Make it easy to get your friends in too.
34 Responses to “Facebook virtual worlds”
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Thanks for the link. And while I agree that the facebook worlds now leave a lot to be desired for the reasons you list, I’m not sure those numbers are right. Facebook’s app tracking system leaves a lot to be desired, though I’m still sorting all that out. JP at ActiveWorlds, at least, said he thinks the numbers are higher. So take the numbers, and my take on them, with a giant grain of salt.
Actually, the most popular “game” on Facebook is Vampires/Werewolves/Zombies. 🙂
Well, technically, Scrabulous is more popular in terms of active users than Vampires, which is the next most popular. But I agree that if you sum together Vampires, Zombies, and Werewolves, then in aggregate they are more popular. 🙂 But I meant single individual app.
What I noticed after creating several Facebook Groups was that the total number of members is not updated in real time, and I think the Group search page is actually broken in that regard. The 2008 International CES group (FREE Exhibits Plus pass!) is still reported at 0 members and has been since the group was started a few days ago or so.
Since Facebook does have these problems, I wouldn’t be surprised if what Joey said is true about the actual numbers for virtual worlds being inaccurate.
By the way, if anyone wants to create a Facebook application that would likely be more popular than Vampires, Zombies, and Werewolves but along similar lines, get in touch via my website’s contact page.
It’s posts like this that really make me think Metaplace is not only going to work, but fill a need.
I’m so glad you mentioned the need for asynchronous interaction in games and in social worlds. It’s something that has been virtually ignored (no pun intended) for quite a while now. And yet the majority of our online interaction takes place this way.
Maybe someone will write a MUD client for Facebook…
Richard
Scary thing – I’m one of the 19 for Scenecaster and I have no idea why I added it or what it does. That’s the Facebook problem in a nutshell – I have dozens of friends, whose totally random crap that I ignore at a rate of about 3-4 a day, all of which adds precisely nothing to my professional or personal existence, aside from muddling them together in an uncomfortable pudding. Why, exactly, I am a memeber, I have no idea — except I got sick of telling people why I wasn’t.
memeber = member, though that has to be about the best accidental coinage of a word I’ve ever pulled off
I continually receive invites for Ninjas, Pirates, Vampires, Zombies, and Werewolves. Now I’m getting Warbook and Attack! invitations. One of my friends even asked me, in person, the other day why I was ignoring his invitations. I won’t give in!
Whoever creates the application that auto-ignores that junk will be a hero.
You, Doc! You! 🙂 There are IRC applications. Next up: telnet.
“Why, exactly, I am a memeber, I have no idea — except I got sick of telling people why I wasn’t.”
Same goes for me. I just got tired of the requests.
I might be wrong, but the whole premise of Facebook was to have connection with the real world (your real high school, your real co-workers, etc.), which makes the prospect of entering a virtual world from this platform a little pointless to me.
Pointless? Only if you insist that games are nothing but toys used by people to escape from their dreary little lives. It’s no more pointless to use a virtual world to connect with people and develop relationships than to use the Web to connect with people and develop relationships. You could always argue that instead of chatting via an instant messenger, you could be actually sitting down with someone and having a “real” conversation.
But that argument’s stupid. It’s like saying you could be aimlessly driving around making maps as you go instead of plotting out your course with Google Maps ahead of time. Sure, you could rationalize and say that it’s the journey that matters, not the destination. But that’s not quite true. It’s what you learn from the journey that’s important, and what you learn from getting lost is that you need directions and, quite possibly, a map.
People like to imagine virtual worlds as being greater than what they are, as the future of mankind (or elvenkind, depending on your allegiances.) And that’s cool to do that. It’s good to have a mission, but the fact remains that we, so far as we know, are not bits and bytes and virtual worlds are simply another tool in our evolutionary toolbox.
“It’s not the size that counts… It’s how you use it!” — Sheriff of Rottingham
Facebook is an asynchronous game to some by itself and a full world to others. Build the longest list of friends, as a motivation, “explore” the mini feeds, poke and send items as a type of multi user interaction (expecting a reaction, not always getting it but its satisfying when you do).
The VW applications are now just peeping holes, teasers, previews and interactive ads, not real “applications”. Just like tower bloxx, they are here to push you a free try and get you addicted to yet another wonderful time waster. In that sense they may well do.
Real asynchronous, accessible games and open ended games may come in later. I think all designers should play around with the platform more and with the new context and rules deriving from FB , follow (at least) the 4 points mentioned above until we all “get it” and “get there”. Lets push for the new.
I’m surprised nobody has mentioned Warbook, which basically takes the asynchronicity of Carnage Blender and puts it into a game about warring countries instead of warring bands of adventurers.
The problem with Warbook is that you essentially win at it by having the most friends (which incidentally is also how you win at Facebook).
I don’t think the design limitation is inherent. I just think the asynchrononicity problem hasn’t been solved yet.
For my part, I’d propose that conflict in a 2D space could be managed by allowing people to allocate “patrol” slots on particular squares. If one of those squares is crossed in the next, say, 24 hours, the crosser must engage is dice-roll combat with the patroller (with all sorts of potential consequences), or perhaps solve a puzzle of the patroller’s devising.
I’m suprised no one mentioned Bunchball’s app. It’s basically like Gaia Online using flash. It has all the trappings of a virtual world like avatars, points, virtual items, leaderboards, challenges, etc. It even allows you to create your own little “space” to play with just your friends.
http://apps.facebook.com/games/
To be honest, its become the only reason I come back to Facebook each day. The game No Mas is particularly fun…
It’s also close to what I might imagine a developed “casual” world in Metaplace might look like…
“Pointless? Only if you insist that games are nothing but toys used by people to escape from their dreary little lives. It’s no more pointless to use a virtual world to connect with people and develop relationships than to use the Web to connect with people and develop relationships. You could always argue that instead of chatting via an instant messenger, you could be actually sitting down with someone and having a “real” conversation.”
No offense meant… I simply was saying that it was “pointless to me”. It’s a place for virtual world where I would never use it. Or at least, I can’t picture how it would be used there, other than contributing to the site’s overall clutter.
Facebook is a platform for developing communities, not a game—asynchronous or otherwise. That’s why Facebook is so popular. Facebook appeals to the vanity of its users by providing them all the tools they need and then some to develop communities around themselves. And now with the advent of Facebook Pages (shameless promotion: 1, 2) you can develop communities around businesses, products, and artists/public figures.
Richard Bartle wrote on his blog:
I don’t think the time spent is mandatory for Facebook to be a virtual world, but who am I to argue with the man who created the progenitor of virtual worlds? That said, we don’t call Metaplace a virtual world, so I think you’d be hard-pressed to call Facebook one.
I believe one could call it a “FUD”, no?
Joke: Or MUFFIE — Multi-User Facebook Friends Interactive Environment [insert joke about MUFF-diving].
Quick agreement: Facebook is asynchronous, and apps that try to foil that will ultimately fail. Or fall off, bud, and grow independent of the Facebook app platform. I strongly believe asynch applications will harvest more mindshare.
Main Point: Vampires/Werewolves/Nouns, Warbook, gift widgets, and their ilk on Facebook really bother me.
Let me know if the following statement is wrong: I believe Facebook is a tool, and it’s intended purposes are: (a) assist people in finding other people, (b) assist in staying informed about people of interest, and (c) generate advertising revenue for the owners of Facebook. Many of these games seem to implicitly interfere with (a) and (b) by coercing strangers into marking strangers as “friends,” and by filling the message channel with game noise or recruitment noise. Not all games are contrary to Facebook’s purpose: Scrabulous has made people I know in long-distance friendships warm up to each other. Many other Facebook apps seem to be designed with the purpose of muddying-up Facebook’s purposes, for the sake of making either “the next nifty thing” and amassing people’s attention for the sake of… ego? pride? wuffie?
I wonder what would happen if these Facebook apps — since their output can include links and images outside of Facebook — decided to explicitly interfere with Facebook purpose (c), and started embedding their own advertising content in their Facebook app output?
WoW!! How can you leave the Facebook application My Room from this list? It was there wayyy before Scenecaster and has tons and I mean of more daily active users than all those listed and was even featured in ComputerWorld.
Well, My Room is more like a trophy case than it is like a virtual world. Scenecaster intends to be multiplayer… does My Room?
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Here, I found you very well explained about “a host of plausible reasons.” The other day I saw an article which says that we can go to our own Facebook world where only our friends move, and we can customize our own world just like our page.
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You nailed it here, Raph. I signed up for the Second Life one because I had this odd idea that while in that “time burst” on FB, I might want a brief glance at the friend list in SL…except I don’t. It’s really enough. These things do not all HAVE to mash up, meld, integrate, be interoperable, blah blah blah. It’s fine if they have separate entrances and exits, and when I’m ready to do my SL job or go talk to those SL friends, I open up SL itself, which after all, isn’t that hard.
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I disagree that Facebook is a tool purely for finding other people and keeping them informed of our progress in life. The only reason I moved from Friendster to Facebook was because Facebook aloowed much more interactivity with your contacts, as opposed to just seeing their picture, looking at their profiles when they upload something new or sending them a message once in a while, you can actually play games with them and interact on a regular basis even when you haven’t really got anything to say. Bored? Engage an old friend (who you might never ever see again in RL) game of Scrabulous, or drop them a challenge to respond to a high score in Tower Bloxx, or race them in (fluff)Race or just feed their pet to show them you care and are still thinking of them. For those who have vampires/werewolves/zombies/slayers, have a little scrap and see who comes out top, poke them, throw them burgers, Jedi-choke them .. whatever. What is actually done is irrelevant, much of it is. It’s the knowledge that anytime, anywhere, you can reach out to your old friends and interact with them just for fun, and just to let them know you are around.
Of course, there’s the problem that some people who don’t want to play certain things keep getting bothered by it, but over time we learn to figure out which of our friends like what sort of things, and only involve them in the activities we know they will respond to. We’re all friends, after all. If users go about simply adding any Tom, Dick or Harry to their friend list simply because they were asked, or because they can gain benefits from certain applications then it’s their fault that they let strangers into their lives. As far as I’m concerned, my friends drive the applications I use, not the other way around.
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