Session: Reality Bites: the Future of Gaming + Virtual Worlds 2.0
Participating:
- Susan Wu, moderator
- Raph Koster from Areae
- Craig Sherman from Gaia Online
- Joichi Ito from Creative Commons
- Lane Merrifield from Club Penguin
- Ginsu Yoon from Second Life
Ginsu: last night, talked about how we'd do the panel, other people decided he had to go first, because SL is over-hyped, 5 minute limit. Spent 3 years understanding it, can now explain it in 10 minutes.
Ginsu: [puts up picture of Gutenberg press] It all started here, you've heard this before. Before it, media was tightly controlled, creation was sacred act. Had to be literally a monk to write and distribute media. Since that point, continuation of the idea of lowering the bar, making it cheap to produce mass media and market. Gutenberg press had a slow distribution time-line.
Ginsu: same stuff, but now it's faster, using technology, text, images, video, voice. Shared collaborative space. Not different from books, that much. Instead of it taking decades / centuries, it's now nearly real time. What do virtual worlds have to do with web 2.0? It's an extension of the same sharing, creating impulse
Ginsu: New topic, emoticons. Hate them, love books. Good writing is amazing. Write everyday, so do you probably, mostly for work, try to avoid emoticons, when dashing messages off, the emotional bandwidth is thin, constraining. Forced to use emoticons. But with Second Life, you get more emotional context, based on avatar choice, posturing, clothes, hairstyle. Susan says say something poignant, this is it: this cultural and emotional bandwidth that is available in a VR environment, is maybe a little different from the printing press.
Lane: Love to get into how everything was chosen. Reality is that it wasn't complicated. A group of parents who looked at what was available for kids and saw:
- UN-entertaining, sterile
- purely built on marketing and merchandising products to kids
Lane: Sat down and asked: can we do this better? For the most part, we think it did. Different paths, but we built this for our kids.
Susan: Club Penguin is a VR with millions of users.
Lane: Built using Flash 6, so it would work in all the browsers. Looked at barriers to entry and looked at how to burst them. Demographic they looked at is not patient. Would rather have 2D graphics than long download times. Built to be easy interface, load up on "grandma's computer". Built around two things, fun + safety. Express that a lot, because it's still their values. Fun enough to keep kids hanging around, safe for them to be there. Big challenge to make it safer than anything out there.
Lane: asked what I hoped to express, good values, good ethics, good morals does work and you don't have to be controversial to sell. Safety is important, beyond just a marketing tool / pitchline. Has to actually work. Built to take months and months to explore. Lots of features which haven't even been found yet. Built by parents for parents.
Joichi: going to talk fast, assume everyone knows what WoW is. ( He wasn't kidding, I was barely able to keep up with him, typing, so several invisible gaps in the transcript of his words. ) [puts up a slide] Content is on one side, Context on another. Music is stuff you can put on a truck and ship around. When you used to feel lonely, you listened to music, knew others felt that way, too. Then video games, a little more interactive, Karaoke, much more interactive and now with Text Messaging, very much more interactive. Entertainment industry going from Content to Context and this is where it intersects Web 2.0.
Joichi: Similarly, Communication Technologies range from Mass Media, Magazines, Blogs, Social Networks, Email, Instant Messenger, Presence. It's like the US finally discovered SMS. Kids in Japan, SE Asia grew up knowing they had the internet in their pocket. Studies show kids forming intimate presence communities where they know where 5-8 people in their circle are at any given time. Twitter isn't boring, it's not about content anymore, it's context. A lot of people miss context when they think about games because they think it's about content. The whole notion of co-presence is an important part of the game / entertainment thing.
Joichi: A lot of WoW players have WoW full-screen, do everything through it. Blizzard allowed creation of Addons, using lua, brilliant thing. Now you can integrate all the information into one interface. It's all about real-time presence, not static web stuff. Web 2.0 is catching up with WoW.
Joichi: [Richard Bartle slide] "Not Yet, you Fools!" envisions game as immersive
fantasy, considers voice immersion-bursting, reality-intrusive, ruins
role-play. Reality is that voice is there, Western notion of the internet is
logging in to cyberspace [closes laptop] and then you log out. Eastern notion
is less binary. [shows South Park clip] A lot of people look at the surface
of education. "Simulation" v. "Metaphor" Simulation is close likeness to real
world. If you wanted to use a game to teach someone how to be a better
manager, using simulation, you'd recreate the conditions of their job, same
environment. But metaphor is a different way.
Metaphor is like a raid, where all aspects are different but it has a
shared core of the idea. Uses the word "Ensemble". [Shows 40 person ensemble
going after dragon] So it has nothing to do with your job, but you have
exposure to the same core principles, managing large groups of people toward a
goal. There's a zone you get into when everything works and you
get a reward, not the same reward as getting a higher score than anyone, it's
a reward from collaboration, easy in WoW, hard to get anywhere else.
Joichi: Where you have social software, social forums, you have tools to collaborate, shows Rupture
Susan: you were CEO of myfamily.com or whatever. Why Gaia?
Craig: I went to Benchmark with an EIR with one goal, building it up. Looked at consumer internet, only wanted something with an enormous consumer value, something that would sell without marketing. Looking for a product where founder has enormous grasp of end product. Someone building something for themselves. Looked at 250 startups over 14 months.
Craig: Gaia world's fastest growing hangout for teens. #2 forum, a billion posts, over 1M posts yesterday, 2M monthly unique visitors. Avg simultaneous users 64k. 3x growth since May 2006. Avg minutes per session: 48, beats myspace, facebook, habbo, runescape, puzzle pirates
Craig: why do they love it? basic concept, is building profile, then you build avatar, friendslist but a cute friendslist, can build a blog, they call it a journal, communicate and self express. Build a home, write fiction, poetry, join a club, draw art, submit creations to user-managed newspapers or just have users vote hotornot style on it. Or just play games. Free flash games. Hang out in towns. A little like Club Penguin, but for the older demographic of kids. Gold falls from trees in Gaia. In fact, everything you do there gets you gold, that's the basic metaphor. Use the gold to trick out your avatar, 11 stores, 5k+ items for avatar or house. There's an eBay marketplace, where you can [re]sell creations. 50k+ auctions daily.
Craig: behind it all, rich storyline, they build a lot of the content. Beginning of October, had a Tom Cruise doppelganger, jumping on a couch, yelling about aliens. Movie theater, like mst3k. The combination of content they create, plus user content. 7 banks, including one that is a result of a merger. Weddings online, with a wedding planner. Gaians throw their own parties where they perform plays. [shows screenshot of dress rehearsal] Got into this because it's a great value proposition. In a world where teens are constantly branding and packaging themselves, Gaia is where you go to get away from it all, and just be yourself...or who you want to be.
Susan: I get that game designers know more about UI than web 2.0 designers. Question: if that's true, why are all the successful online game companies, why don't they use game designers for their site design?
Raph: the Game Industry is oblivious. They're all big traditional content owners. The answer is they're completely clueless. They don't realize that's what's happened in virtual worlds is their lunch has already been eaten, by people from the outside. The people on this panel work for companies where games are part of the culture. The virtual world hasn't come completely to grips with the user-generation phenomena. Many game people have fled big media because they don't get it.
Raph: everybody but the game industry is rushing into this space. Everyone references WoW. WoW is a wild outlier. Viacom has published more virtual worlds in the last 6 months than any vw publisher. Game industry is being marginalized from games business as everyone rushes for the game space. Game design is not an arcane science.
Craig: having you in our office was amazing because everyone in our office is a huge fan. Why can't we make games free, why do people have to go buy in stores? People feel it started with Raph, with Ultima Online, etc.
Sue: Craig you showed a visual aesthetic style, which may appeal to teens but maybe not mass market, question in general, perception is that online gaming is very niche, hard-core audience. How respond?
Craig: first, we are mass market. 2M unique visitors last month, no money on marketing, PR. We only have one language. I think games which cost $20 and take four years to make are obsolete. 2-3M WoW players, but it's an enormous amount compared to previous gameplayers. Club Penguin is radically mass market because it's easy to get in and figure out what to do. Most games cost $20 or more, hard to understand; myspace and facebook are free, take seconds to figure out.
Lane: from day out set out to serve parents and kids, shun interviews and events like this. Put aside what we personally wanted to serve community which wanted more features, better features. Growing up in the game industry it was about what do I want, my friends want, no, it's about what kids want?
Ginsu: is this a fad? can't understand how people could ask this. Were you told growing up you would have a persistent online media, 15-20 years ago, that you would find spouse, be able to buy stuff, interact online like we do now.
Raph: manga and anime, if you think that isn't mainstream, you're old and out of touch. It's all over TV. Look at avatar, airbender
Craig: but tv is becoming a little niche... Virtual reality dwellers outnumber population Canada.
Question by Susan: expect future web to be visually rich, given that many virtual worlds require emotional commitment, how can you reconcile what will happen when people have many choices?
Raph: interoperability standards, OpenID
Question by Susan: people are being overwhelmed by choice now, what happens in 5 years? How compete for people's attention?
Raph: don't even understand the question. who watched buffy? emotional investment in buffy similar to WoW. Of course, there will be big sites and small sites. Good shows / worlds will get cancelled, people will gravitate to worlds that interest them.
Craig: if you're in the audience and you're wondering if it's too late, no, it's not. You still have time to build interesting worlds. In that space, there will be many, many, many winners. It's a mistake to look at where you fit in versus somebody now. It's time to put on blinders and build a world which fits your vision. When the question is asked, which world you go to? It's like the time you spent as a kid, going to school OR playing soccer OR hanging out with your friends? No, all of those.
Lane: cable channel analogy. 50 channels? how could they thrive against the big three broadcast networks!
Question by Susan: another way of asking it: look at social networks, thousands, majority of users concentrated on a very few of them. as we move immersive, are we going to see that? club penguin, gaia online, we see deep segmentation. what do you think the distribution of success will look like?
Ginsu: try but it's hard to not sound self-serving or be self-serving. at the point where we are, cost of virtual world creation is expensive. Easy to do a web site, channels are expensive. if you're going to create and experiment in a way that is open and extensible world where you don't have to hire 50 developers, spend millions of dollars. If you had a system like that which was open to everybody...that would be pretty cool. That's what we're chasing at Second Life. Vast majority of users are consumers. Small, powerful, minority are creators. Not just virtual shirts, shoes, things like that. It's about having a large virtual space to yourself, managing community, managing experiences of others.
Question by Susan: what metrics do you use to measure your site's success?
Craig: number of users, time spent, 4-5 secondary metrics: retention rate, revenue, etc. whole site is fundamentally free, revenue generation is not chief goal
Ginsu: several hundred dashboard reports daily, about 20 everyone looks at, other people look at specialized reports.
Lane: quite simple, put a lot of time and effort into listening to the audience. spends time reading blogs, looking at forums. users are very quick to say it's not fun and not safe. easy to quickly see where things are because they're a great vocal demographic. Have people on staff solely to keep an eye on blogs, find out what people like and don't. Working in real time means they don't have to wait for service packs, can roll out changes real time.
Lane: 70% of staff are doing customer service
Raph: conversion is an important metric which didn't get mentioned, uniques v. 30 / 60 day trailing revisits. Linden has now released stats showing users checking in every 3 months, used to be every other day. Need to know how many people are bouncing off their sites, how many sticking and core.
Joichi: drag it back from numbers, look at behavior. It's hard to change behavior. This co-presence thing is a trend but we don't control it. WoW is great because they figured out what was going on and added a little bit of value to it. It's rare to hit upon something new which is going to change everything. Flickr isn't successful because they don't have an e or because it's blue, it's because they spotted what people wanted and feed it. A lot of technical people think it's just feature add, we need to think about it more like sociological anthropology.
posted at 16:33 PDT (-0700) (comments disabled) permanent link Technorati tagged as: games, mmorpg, transcript, web2expo
