The brand agenda has siphoned talent from the metaverse to create the equivalent of commercial candy, throwing a sucker punch at the idea of virtual worlds without even knowing it’s doing it.
It’s OK, corporate collaboration and education can fill the gap, right? It’s the teachers who advance society not Coke, although it’s not for lack of trying - yesterday’s vending machine in the cafeteria is today’s Coke ad in Habbo Hotel or wherever, someday we’ll insist it’s packed with fruit drinks instead of sugared water, although by then our kid’s hands will be so chubby they can barely wrap their fists around a quarter.
OK. So. I’m irritated. But give me a break. I’m flooded with invitations and blinking banners, I’m enticed to “create my own avatar” and then discover that what they really mean is add hair to the little cartoon guy that I can call me. I’m told that a virtual winter is upon us, and what we gotta do is warm our hands over the crackling flames of small worlds:
“As we can see from the history of computing, it is often the case of “the small gobbling up the big, and everything else”. Trivially small, lightweight yet rapidly replicating platforms often grow up to become all-encompassing solutions. DOS grew up to become Windows and along the way the PC triumphed over the time-shared mainframe, minicomputer and workstation. ”
Sure, DOS was great, we all loved that blinking prompt thing. Windows was even better! Just look at Vista - or is that the big now that will get gobbled up by the small, by iPhone apps and widgets all of it living in the cloud, or running on that Google Gears thing, whatever that is, and all of it slickly linked together by semantic Webs.
Actually, I think it’s the word “trivially small” that’s the telling phrase.
Someone has been drinking some seriously spiked Kool-Aid out there somewhere. I mean, is this what we mean by a, um, meme? “The Future Was Here All Along - It Was Just SMALLER Than It Looked!”
Mini Me
So this is me, once, back when I had blue hair:
This is me last week, also with blue hair:
This is me back when I was cool and hip (OK, well, maybe not but I felt cool and hip, and everyone gets a tail at some point in their Second Lives):
This is also me:
One of these guys probably WILL be me someday:
OK. You get the point, right? Forget child avatars. My avatars have become childish cartoons, they’re not exactly compelling me to explore sides of me beyond some 1950s notion of identity.
Storytelling is Dead
Ruben Steiger tells us that the Internet has failed as a storytelling medium, partly perhaps because of a paucity of talent. He can find designers, but can’t seem to track down any storytellers:
They are familiar with the broad array of technologies and tools that define digital production, but often have gaping holes when it comes to creating compelling narratives as opposed to beautiful websites or effective campaigns.
While applauding blogs and youTube and all the other ways that communities come together to tell stories to each other, there’s a quandry here: someone’s gotta pay for all that stuff sometime, can’t keep going on making stories without some coin changing hands right?
We’re at a weird space then, according to Ruben:
“We’re at a fascinating point in history where a bold group of content creators, advertisers and digital artists are seeking the Holy Grail of online content: the ability to fund and create large-scale stories that attract and engage large audiences. I would argue that these stories will take one of the following forms (and in many cases, a mix of all three): Alternate Reality Games, MMORPGs, and Transmedia Content.”
In the meantime - well, maybe we can get the brands to fund some little things right? And so, from the Creative Diretorless Millions of Us, Ruben’s home, we get an immersive brand experience on Google’s Lively!!
Um. Ok. Wait. I’d better use the word “immersive” with caution.
Let’s see if we can spot the immersive elements! Or even the narrative ones. Or, um, even a point would be nice.
Click pipe watch cement pour out
Click sign watch scaffolding appear
Watch video
JUMMMMP!!!!!!
Maybe the video is what he means by transmedia?
Loose Lindens
OK, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Millions of Us did that for, hmm…the chance to demo Lively? The chance to toy around a little? But I’m guessing they actually GOT PAID to do that! Now, I have nothing against getting paid. I GET paid to come up with stuff - some of it crap, some of it better than crap, and some of it that I don’t mind showing to my parents.
And when you get paid to do stuff, well look - it’s their dime not yours. And sure, Millions of Us is doing all kinds of other Lively things - building up that catalog of squishy looking furniture. Probably porting the same stuff over to Sony just messing it up a little so it’s more teen-friendly and gritty. Who knows.
And if it’s their dime, they can do what they want. And what they WANT (well, less so National Georgraphic maybe, but they’re trying to brand some show about construction workers) is COMMERCIALS.
Life was so much easier back in the day when there were three stations, and a few radio networks, and the major choice was whether to plop down coin for a spot on the Superbowl, the Academy Awards, or to keep sucking up all the airtime on the Gong Show.
And this social media stuff has been a drag too. Best we could do for the poor suffering brands was to come up with the idea of “viral” - which really means “something short, like a commercial, only we’ll get consumers to pass it around rather than pay for media placement”. Because look, everyone’s ignoring your banner ads on youTube, and if you get involved with Facebook widgets you might end up next door to some rocker chick posting half-naked pictures of herself and joining the “I Slept with Someone On Facebook” group, and that can’t be so hot for brand equity right?
So along come Millions of Us, and the Electric Sheep, and a bunch of other virtual world evangelists and they’re all about small worlds now, “Google Gets It, So Can You!” and yeah, I’m bitter, but I feel sold out. They came, they failed, they abandoned the big worlds and now it’s all about billboards in Grand Theft Auto and vending machines in the XBox lounge, and small Flash-based worlds.
And in the end, it’s because they couldn’t reconcile a brand’s desire for control of their message with the lack of control and chaos that you find in large communities where the users generate and consume each other’s content and eat the brand messages for lunch.
“We have a vision, but you don’t have the code”
OK. So like I say. I sell stuff too. You get paid for things and sometimes you flop - you promise something you can’t deliver. You paint a picture of an IMAX movie and it turns out your client has a budget for black and white TV, or your target audience all lives on farms and can’t get to a theatre even if they wanted to.
Sibley came out with his roadmap, reminding us that Second Life isn’t ready for prime time - not without access to the server-side stuff anyways. So instead of pitch in (unless I missed that post) with the servers over on RealXtend or OpenSim they’ve gone Flashy with the rest of them. White label it - build your own virtual world for under $100k, throw whatever logos on the wall you like, embed some games, and you’re off and running!
And what do you end up with? More rooms. More aimless pointless chat, only this time unlike Second Life, you can’t really teleport anywhere to find aimless pointless chat in a better build.
Oh, and commercials. Because one of the things all these small worlds seem to promise, something that gets everyone all excited, is the ability to consume media WITHIN the space! With friends there! Woot! We are building the metaverse, my friends, so we can watch TV together.
But the true metaverse isn’t ready for us yet, they say. You can’t build brand experiences in these places. You’ll never scale to millions of users.
Well, I dunno. A few things strike me: first, the sites with millions of users are ignoring the ads anyways. The ‘branding model’ is still all about bite-sized messages, commercials, no matter how these guys try to disguise it. And if you’re trying to scale to millions of users immersed in a brand experience, you’d either give the users some control, the chance to make something, the chance to mash things up and dillute your brand “experience” - or welcome to what they used to call an empty sim.
Two Words: Loco Pocos
No one’s saying that small worlds don’t have a place. Sure they do. They’re cute. The avatars are cuddly. I can change my hair. I can watch youTube videos. I can sit in my Lively room hoping someone will show up because, um, well because I’m cool and I have blue hair I guess.
The brands headed for the exits. Flash is where it’s at. Metaplace is coming, more games on the way, games everywhere, 3D rooms on every page, avatars ON TOP OF the 3D rooms even! If you don’t have chat, and games, and if you can’t balance the server load - well, you’re SUNK.
But hold on - Lively has a concurrency limit of 20. Most of these other spaces hit a wall as well, Flash just can’t rez much, it’s a LIGHT-WEIGHT client and there’s a reason for that.
And what you’re telling me is that you need a world with games, and puzzles, and socializing, and more than 7 people at a time right?
Well….have fun with that. Let us know how it turns out. Let us know how you manage to get MORE brand attention in a littered landscape of little rooms OK? Once your consumers get tired of being Lively, once they’ve played every poker game and Pirate game and shoot the cannon game that you can come up with, let us know whether they go back to playing REAL games instead, or whether maybe they even just head out and read a book or watch TV.
I kind of wish I could copybot all these avatars I’m creating these days and throw them in a little scrap book, because God knows I can’t remember my passcode to half of them. I know I’ve BEEN to Kaneva but I don’t remember what I look like or what kind of pants I bought. I know I signed UP for IMVU but I can’t remember why. I know I’m on the Metaplace beta list but its been months now.
Whatever. In the meantime, when I want a place where you can chat, be cute, solve puzzles, socialize, make stuff, customize my appearance, I’ll head to Loco Pocos to see what Millions of Us and ESC and all those other gurus of virtual worlds SHOULD have built instead of the stumbling ruins that were CSI with their 100 signs and their obvious clues.
You want game? You want 3D chat? Come on in:
Photos: Loco Pocos Flickr Group
Another quality and timely post.
IMO, nobody knows (because how can they) how this is all going to pan out.
The reason these development agencies pulled away from Second Life?
It’s not because the platform doesn’t work for branding and marketing. It actually does - you just have to have the right strategy. They pulled away because they a) more or less exhausted the number of clients willing to be taken in-world and more importantly b) the vast majority of the campaigns they developed were strategically flawed. They blamed the platform - in reality, they’re largely to blame.
Google Lively: Let us pray the same flawed campaigns developed in SL are not replicated in Lively.
Is anyone actually asking for branded spaces?
“In the meantime, when I want a place where you can chat, be cute, solve puzzles, socialize, make stuff, customize my appearance, I’ll head to Loco Pocos to see what Millions of Us and ESC and all those other gurus of virtual worlds SHOULD have built instead of the stumbling ruins that were CSI with their 100 signs and their obvious clues.”
I hear you, Dusan. Join me down at the pub, we can cry in our beer together.
Indeed now is the winter of our discontent, but keep your chin up brother - if two wrongs don’t make a right maybe the odds are better with the hundreds that are “emerging”.
“Is anyone actually asking for branded spaces?”
What is this, consumer oriented thinking?! That is not what the metaverse is about! Its about 3 dimensional thinking!
Seriously though - that is of course the multi-million dollar question regarding any sort of (virtual world) marketing: What is the added value for the consumer (from the consumer perspective!), can this value be converted to value for the brand (preferably in a sustainable manner and not just a 1 time ‘trick’) and lastly does the result of this equation outweigh the advantages (vs risks) in traditional forms of advertising/branding.
I’m sure MoU and ESC are still working very hard to find the answers to these questions, and consistently found the results in Second Life lacking. By making their client accessible through flash and adding games they lowered the ‘risk’ and upped the ‘value’ for a very specific market. However, at the same time - and if I’m reading you right this might be the cause for your ‘concerns’ - slowly creeping towards that ‘proven concept’ formula, making the innovative pioneers slowly slide back into the blob of ’social media’ marketing masses.
Of course, from their perspective its just easier to find new clients for new ventures into something those clients already perceive to be at the very bleeding edge, giving them time to adopt to REAL innovation as we see it
You think that Google Lively is not about consumer oriented thinking?
Saturday being my day of catching up with feeds, came across the “Electric Sheep The Company”, “Roadmap to the Virtual Worlds,” and “Google Gets Into Virtual Worlds(Technology Review)”.
With all the buzz around the 2.5/3D space. Seems everyones getting funding, all one has to do is a) work on some type of embeddable system allowing avatar customization with b) brand-ability c) a chat feature to boot and or d) some new form of interconnectivity or other bells & whistles. Now that GOOG is in the space, will we be seeing more crop up? I think so …got to love the “me too’s”
But honestly, what am I really complaining about here? Sometimes it’s best to leave people to their own devices.
Granted, I’m feeling the frustration with the current perception from the current crop of VW creative agencies, the outsiders(mostly the media and ill-informed about the true dynamics of SL). Wherever I look there are people taking dumps. Residents are no different either, I’ve been guilty of it at some point or another… way back when, but it’s really getting old to the point of, where is this all taking us?
I don’t believe that any of these small-worlds will have a direct impact on SL in the long run. They fit differing market segments. Is SL the holy-grail? Highly unlikely, but I believe the platform will play a huge and important role, OpenSim init is a step in that direction — we are talking utility.
Even though I may not agree fully with the direction the space is currently going — VW creative agencies came in setup shop only to move on to other worlds, along with the glowing press coverage. They still do have a business to run and clients to service. Have to think about that cash-flow. In that regard, it seems the low hanging fruit are in small-worlds these days. Let’s not forget though they weren’t in it for the residents to start, that much is visible.
When it rains it pours they say. There is a storm coming, prepare yourself.
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I must say I admired your init with fielding the UI redesign contest. I hope M takes you up on looking over and considering the entries.
Hey Dusan ! Really great post and thoughts…
Actually, I don’t get one point… Is brands in Virtual Worlds just a question of marketing ?
“But the true metaverse isn’t ready for us yet, they say. You can’t build brand experiences in these places. You’ll never scale to millions of users.”
I run a kind of smaller MOU or ESC, with a friend, in Europe… We are not talking about marketing with our clients (and they are global leaders too, we have some in Europe :-)).
We are talking about e-Learning, Knowledge Management, InWorld banking (for real :-)), Collaborative work, Merchandising (How-to, not products…)… and we don’t need millions of users to do that ! Actually, Second Life and Open Sim are really cool RIGHT NOW for doing these kind of things.
Virtual Worlds should not be marketing focused, which is the short way to get some revenues from brands.
I love your post and I share your vision on Lively (for example) but I think you are really upset ?!?
There’s a season after winter and I think it’s not talking about marketing. By the way, there will be many other seasons after this one and other winters for sure
“You think that Google Lively is not about consumer oriented thinking?”
I haven’t seen it yet - Obviously Google is in a position where it doesn’t need to generate a profitable platform by itself, in fact, it doesn’t really have to be profitable at all if it gets people to sign up for a Google account so that’s fine as a business model, but as for consumer value? They couldn’t get passed ‘the level of chatting on the internet’ - and we both know the market offering this already is so crowded that if it was anyone but Google behind the platform, it probably wouldn’t have gotten a second glance.
Tools + amateurs = story for virtual worlds…
Even though Dusan Writer’s post on the explosion of small worlds and how they’ve sold out the promise of virtual worlds was a rant, it clearly described the issues at hand. The virtual landscape is splintering, increasingly proprietary, and built for…
[…] this with Dusan Writer’s long rant (I do sympathize with him) Small Worlds, Small Minds: How Brands Have Sucker-Punched […]
I’m laughing my ass off at this, Dusan, because you geeks rant and rave all the time about hating silos and walled gardens, but then when commercial companies break free and create lots and lots of little closed worlds freely, to suit their purposes, which is supposedly what they are supposed to be able to do, you bitch that they aren’t all hooked up into one big One World. You and Gwyn both. You are secretly in fact flogging a giant Walled Garden in which everybody is supposed to be connected in a big commune. But…people don’t want to be connected. So let them alone.
[…] clearly what is important about virtual worlds and where these lite weight worlds fall short (see Dusan Writer) and how they can in no way realize virtual worlds’ potential as innovative disruptive […]
I agree Dusan,I also am irritated with being, “flooded with invitations and blinking banners, I’m enticed to “create my own avatar” and then discover that what they really mean is add hair to the little cartoon guy that I can call me.” Better yet is the “virtual good” I am promoted to buy, or right click, save the jpeg/gif, and email for free.
It saddens me to see that the “leaders” in virtual worlds are so miss directed, and guiding those new/inexperienced to 3d on the web towards short term “highs” with long term “what the “. How refugees from Second Life can put “Metaverse” in a post, blog, or company bio and they are the experts in 3d on the web. What real applications have these people built for the “open” 3d web? What can MoU or ESC build for someone not wanting to sit in a private playground? I have talked with representatives at both companies more than once and although they say they are “platform agnostic” they don’t say they build for the “open” web. What is worse is the growing number of “yes men/women” to these people that have not a clue but their names in the papers a lot.
Let the brands get bled by the development shops that charge for each VW presence. If they are dumb enough to not do extensive homework, they deserve it. A well known person in this space said, “It is like watching companies build sites that work only on intranets, with assets and functionality that can’t be re-used when it becomes the Internet.”
Regardless of One big world or 10k small ones, it is still in closed platforms on closed IP. Open-Sim is a step in the right direction on broken feet.
Let virtual worlds choke in commercial candy, social networks, and 3d chat. The Metaverse, like the web, is so much more than that. What most have seen so far is only a fraction of what is coming or thought possible.
Great blog and good insight. My first visit here, but not my last.
[…] recently argued that Google’s Lively was a play on trying to monetize social media, something that the […]
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[…] though Dusan Writer’s post on the explosion of small worlds and how they’ve sold out the promise of virtual worlds was a rant, it clearly described the issues at hand. The virtual landscape is splintering, […]
[…] and explanatory. However I think I sacrificed some of my personal stake in doing this. After seeing Dusan’s rant on small worlds and oddly enough Scoble’s post about how the blogging community has failed, I feel the need […]
[…] great about the metaverse is being twisted for corporations. He echoed that feeling in his post - Small Worlds, Small Minds: How Brands Have Sucker-Punched Virtual Worlds. The brand agenda has siphoned talent from the metaverse to create the equivalent of commercial […]
[…] then there’s Dusan Writer who thinks browser based virtual worlds (small worlds) might have sold out the dream. My question is simple - why do we have to choose between client and browser based virtual […]
Well Dusan, there is something very important to learn from your article here. You have been visiting all these different worlds, signed up as beta tester to explore them and see what they are about. Still the thing you like best is an island made by people, not computer programmers, marketing staff, virtual world experts but just by people who bought land and started to do their own thing on their island and turned it into loco poco town. They like it, you like it and that is what it should be about. The most important thing to learn from this is that virtual worlds should be created by people, just as the internet was made by people. I think that is the correct direction for the metaverse to follow.
Good crew it’s cool
sexy wedding dresses :-OO