How should the Web and virtual worlds interoperate? What’s the role of Flash-based efforts? Mitch Olson of SmallWorlds, Keith McCurdy of Vivaty, Daniel James of Three Rings (makers of Puzzle Pirates), Sean Ryan of Meez were led through a discussion of the integration of the Web and virtual worlds by Giff Constable of ESC at this week’s virtual world conference.
The panel kicked off by discussing the difference between 2.5D and 3D, noting the range of implementation within 2.5D. The motivation for launching a 2.5D game is primarily driven on the lack of friction between the user and experience. Plug-ins, installs, client downloads are all barriers to adoption.
If There’s a Download You’re a Science Project
Sean Ryan of Meez claimed that plug-ins or downloads mean “You’re dead, a science project.” Only Flash or Java are, well, anything other than science projects. So first is whether there’s a download, and then there’s the question of whether the environment should be in 2.5D or 3D which is also incredibly difficult to execute, something to do with cameras getting lost.
Daniel James claimed that 3D graphics are not relevant because immersion happens in the head not on the screen. He noted again the issue of plug-ins and downloads and that 95% of Puzzle Pirate users are lost when the Java security “button” pops up.
Vivaty on the other hand claimed a 50% conversion rate in spite being a downloaded application, although commented that it might be the demographic or the early adoption curve.
Virtual Environments and Social Networks
Vivaty is based on the value proposition of the idea that you want to be in virtual worlds with your friends, thus the integration with Facebook and the ability to upload content into your scenes. The adoption of Vivaty is thus made easier because it can both leverage your social network and content.
James, coming from a gaming background, comes from the perspective of providing a fantasy, which implies not connecting it with your ‘real life’. The co-mingling of a game environment with ‘real life’ social circles isn’t a given, in his perspective.
SmallWorlds sees social gaming as a key driver, however. Social networks offer a way to complement synchronous experiences with asynchronous connections with your friends.
Aggregate Eyeballs
Browser-based worlds were still a major theme at the Virtual Worlds conference. But somehow, not as much as the previous one in New York. And I think there’s a reason - because while browser-based worlds are purposefully designed to overcome the friction point between the user and actually being IN an environment, that’s based on the premise that it’s the world builder who’s attracting users rather than users being attracted to a world.
Most of the browser-based worlds are based on a 1998-type premise: build it, they will come, get enough of them and you’ll eventually make lots of money.
I remember being pitched once on the idea of launching a Web portal. It was all about eyeballs, I was told: if you could aggregate enough content, spoon feed people streams of information, then eventually you could convert all those eyeballs into money.
And now we have browser worlds where it’s not the fact that it’s in a browser that’s at issue: it’s what’s there when you arrive and the philosophy on which they’re built. More than one of the panelists called their worlds “entertainments”. And SmallWorlds certainly is just that - well, first, it’s hardly a world, it’s a bunch of cartoon lobbies where the avatars sort of float there and send chat bubbles to each other but really it’s a “game portal” - we’re supposed to get hyped up by playing fancy versions of tic tac toe I guess.
Browser-based worlds don’t add anything significant to the 2D Web. They give us games. They let us chat. Of the panelists, only Vivaty truly offers something significantly different, which is in the ability to display Web-based content like your Facebook profile stuff, and then to integrate that with your friends list or whatever.
So long as browser-based worlds are built mainly on the premise of entertaining, they’re media properties not worlds. And there’s nothing wrong with media properties, it’s just that it’s very expensive to keep people entertained with the off-chance hope that in entertaining them they create social bonds with each other because you’ve built rooms around the entertainment.
Puzzle Pirates is great, but already they’re needing to shift to a newer product because you get bored. You want to move on. You’ve created some friendships but they don’t last forever - your Warcraft raiding party of yesteryear is your Conan tribe or whatever of today. And that’s fine, there can be money in that…but worlds? We’ll see - in the fight for eyeballs, people are bringing the same media models that have always been attractive to venture capitalists, maybe, but that have a hard time gaining long-term traction with users.
That’s really an interesting take. The common wisdom in the industry is that without something entertaining to do, people don’t form social bonds — so just as Puzzle Pirates relies on the gameplay to create social bonds, SL relies on building, and the activities users have built, to create the social bonds.
So “the off-chance hope that in entertaining them they create social bonds with each other” is currently considered to be the biggest chance, just about. What would you suggest is the alternate approach?
Hahaha - oh dear. Yeah, you’re right Raph. It’s what you get for live blogging it and then not thinking too much before you hit publish.
I guess my issue is sort of philosophical. And I don’t mean to pick on SmallWorlds, but to use it as an example, but when it was launched it wasn’t a world. It was a series of semi entertaining games. When you played the games, you had a little cartoon avatar that stood there, that you could buy clothes for, and that could chat with other people standing 2-dimensionally in a sort of lobby. It felt like “bolt-on” social bonding. The mechanisms for socializing were disconnected from the purpose of the space.
It felt like going to an arcade when I was a kid - you might be in an arcade, you might be standing beside someone, and your connection to other people might be about sharing a few tips on how to clear a level or shoot the asteroids or whatever, but it didn’t make it a ‘world’. The ‘world’ part of a video arcade existed outside the arcade itself - maybe you meet people and maybe you go out to a movie with them or head home to play on your Commodore, but the arcade was a space in which there were games and people collided because they were there for the entertainment, but it didn’t make it a world.
I like Prok’s definition: a virtual world feels like a place, it has other people in it, and it has drama.
The sense of drama in an arcade could be around getting the high score. Plunking your allowance down on the off chance you could hit the top of the leader board. And sometimes games would allow two players and that was about as close as you got…competition as the source of emergent experience, but within a narrow window.
So the philosophical point, I guess, or maybe one of nuance, is a question of whether the mechanics of the space facilitate shared drama. Does sociality (which gives us the definition of a world) emerge from the mechanics of game play - shared quests, guilds, group competitions, sharing archetypes, that kind of thing….does it create rich social experiences.
It’s the same, to a degree, with browser-based rooms: just because I can fill my house with youTube videos, that doesn’t mean that sociality emerges - I either port it in, like with Vivaty where you invite your Facebook friends, in which case you’re extending a real social network into a virtual space, or you find other mechanics to facilitate it like the ability to co-create objects.
As I’m writing this, I’m bumping up against the wall of my own fuzziness. Maybe this deserves a longer post. But I’ve been fascinated by the game field’s struggle to add “social media tools” to games, and by the idea that virtual worlds need games to create stickiness, and by the concept of social media embedding games like Facebook. Is Facebook a world? Is it a world if you have a series of games and then add avatars around the games?
I think there’s something here about how tightly coupled the ‘game experiences’ are to the sociality.
My issue is somehow related to the idea that the “publish” model makes the social aspect peripheral to the mechanics of the space itself. That without the user generating content and without sociality emerging from the mechanics of the space then these environments sort of take the attitude of “we’ll provide some entertainment, you provide the social bonding and stick around a while because of it”.
Thanks for keeping me honest though, I think I’m going to need to do a better job articulating whatever it is that bugs me about some of these business models.
(Oh, and while we’re at it…I think that Spore ended up doing much the same thing. It is NOT a world. It’s a game. Judged as a game it has some beautiful mechanics at least in the first few phases, but I really have a hard time calling it an MMO. The social stuff feels like an add-on and doesn’t turn it into a world - it turns it viral maybe, but doesn’t make it a world.)
Hmm. And now that you have me thinking about it, it also occurs to me that I’ve got to think about why these definitions even matter.
[…] panel discussion or visiting another booth and asked about 3d in the browser. For instance, here is a blog post by “Dusan Writer” where the following is noted from one panel discussion: “…plug-ins or downloads mean you’re […]