When I last debunked a Sacred Cow I talked about the orientation experience and concluded that the best thing to do was remove the avatar customization process from the grid entirely:
(With Tabula Rosa once I entered the game I) became nearly instantly bored. But what occurred to me is why I stayed – and part of the reason I stayed, frankly, is I had spent so much time BEFORE I EVEN ENTERED the game setting up my avatar.
Simple stuff. Choose your height, musculature, hair, eyes, and clothes. Choose a name. Decide whether you want the kick ass boots or something more sprightly looking. As best as I could tell once I got in the game none of my choices made the slightest difference. But I was INVESTED in my avatar.
So – make editing your avatar external to orientation. Like this maybe:
I furthered my suggestion with the idea that avatar creation could be its own mini-application:
It’s not orientation island that’s the problem. It’s that number one, we arrive in the world looking bad. The tools for avatar design should be OUTSIDE the world. Even better, they should embed their own little mini apps and training modules so that in addition to being able to tweak and refine our avatar appearance, the tools for moving and chatting should be embedded in that process itself.
Create a little micro-site. Flash-based, no download. First thing that happens – you have a blank avatar space. In order to choose a basic shape, the system prompts you with a question:
- Would you like to begin to develop your character?
And in order to begin, you need to reply YES by clicking on the only button on the screen – a little chat button in the bottom left corner. Yay! You’ve learned to chat!
Well, you get the idea. Try on some new jeans, some new hair, by clicking on a little button that says “Inventory”. Or maybe you need to walk your avatar over to a little changing area where they can try on some clothes. Yay! You’ve learned to walk! And at the same time, you’ve given them some decent duds, some decent hair, and some cool clothes. A newbie should NOT look like one when they first arrive – it’s not that the rest of us won’t know…they’ll still still bang into walls now and then, and they’ll still attach a new purchase and a box will be sticking out of their stomach, but THEY won’t know.
Avatar Creation as a Mini Game
I further thought that avatar creation could almost be a mini game:
The point is to get potential users to invest in their avatars FIRST. And through it, teach them some basics. Actually, the avatar customization process is kind of fun. Maybe people don’t even get IN the world. Maybe they just toy around with body shapes all day – and it would be kind of fun if you could EXPORT your avatar to a little Facebook widget or mySpace mini-application.
I can see all kinds of mash-ups and cut-ups. Have a contest – create the best Paris Hilton look-alike, win a prize. People don’t even need to GO to the Grid to have fun with the avatar creation process.
Spore Gets it Right
Now, with the coming launch of Spore, EA games is launching – a Creature Creator as a STAND-ALONE product. According to Gamasutra, next week, EA will release a free trial creature editor, and a $10 stand-alone product. In other words, even before the game is available, they will allow potential players to INVEST in their avatars before they even enter the world.
And that’s not all, but the avatar creation process will include, you guessed it, the ability to export your avatar to Facebook or mySpace:
Spore.com, which is only partially accessible until the free trial release of Spore Creature Creator next week, will essentially serve as a social networking site where users can share their creatures (which, in true Web 2.0 fashion, are tagged and can then be sorted by users) and interact with one another.
And in a clever move, much of the user-generated data from Spore.com is output in RSS or as embeddable HTML, and can be easily integrated into blogs and other social networking sites such as Facebook.
EA has also signed partnerships with services such as YouTube and an online comic-creating website. With a couple clicks, Spore will upload a demonstration video of your creature directly to a YouTube account. There is even a button that automatically creates an animated GIF avatar of your creature.
Linden! Wake up! This isn’t complicated! We invest in our AVATARS. Build an external avatar editing engine, link it out to social networking sites, and it will be useful for both attracting new users who will have FUN tweaking their avatars, and could provide useful to those of us who might want to embed little 3D versions of our avatars in social networking sites!
Creature Editor – Why Can’t SL’s Avatar Creation Look Something Like This?
Good ideas Dusan. It’s kind of like that in WoW. The problem with learning these things in Orientation is all the distractions–moving in the environment, other avatars, lots of things. I suppose you could look at it with a Cognitive Load framework–we can only effectively process so much at once. SL Orientation is definitely into the Cognitive Overload zone. hehe
[...] I’ve posted on this before: orientation is a sacred cow that should be killed, and the model that Spore’s using is a game changer. Tagged: microsoft, Second Life, sony, [...]
[...] not unlike Spore. And in fact, I wrote about Spore some time ago, saying: The point is to get potential users to invest in their avatars FIRST. [...]
i like this game