Virtual Worlds 2007: Day 1 afternoon
These are some of my thoughts of observations from day 1 of the Virtual Worlds Fall conference in San Jose, California.
Event planning – Keeping users engaged:
- Events are about getting people together around a common set of interests. This is a big part of building community – just bringing them together.
- People stay in communities because they have made friends and made connections.
- But one consideration is that it’s not always easy to draw people into a community through an event and then have them remain members of that community. What if you instead target people who are already members of a community, and then give them some common interest focus points to create niche communities?
- Companies want metrics to measure their success, but that’s hard. Time spent at an event seems to work, but it doesn’t give a lot of information about residual goodwill earned through the event.
- You need to make events as easy for people to attend as possible, from everything to making sure builds are stable to making sure things are well marked.
- Coordinating well with the platform’s operations teams and doing rehearsals are good ideas. You should plan to do those.
- How do you let people attend offline or post-fact? Podcasts, video, etc are options, but often they miss the excitement.
- Free t-shirts are ALWAYS important. They show that you were at the event, so you’re part of an in-group.
Entertainment in virtual worlds, It’s not a game, it’s not TV, it’s…
- Microsoft is in virtual worlds, mostly through gaming, and has been thinking about virtual worlds for a long time
- Millions of Us and Electric Sheep create experiences in virtual worlds.
- Turner Broadcasting is CNN, Cartoon Network, etc. They are all about aggregating content and being innovative in that field. He told a story about Myst Online, which was really interesting to hear. They’re doing some work with Kaneva now.
- Virtual worlds are the only new medium on the web.
- Virtual worlds are defined mostly by virtual face-to-virtual face interaction. This is basically the avatar age of the web, because virtual communities (which you could therefore argue were virtual worlds) have been around for a long time.
- We’ve had communication media that has made interactions virtual for a long time. Adding the immersion with the avatars is the next step that makes it 3D. This shouldn’t be that scary.
- People don’t like ads. You can either try to disguise them, or you can try to find ways to engage people to give them the same message, but in a setting that seems like entertainment.
- Control is a big factor in choosing a platform.
- Biggest challenges in either proving virtual worlds or making the decision to do something in a virtual world: lack of open and consistent standards; lack of proven case studies for success; getting enough scale that alternate models (ad-sponsored, product placement, etc) make economic sense
- The Internet went through stages: walled gardens, then portals (aggregating content), then search engine (find the content anywhere). Virtual worlds need to get there, too.
- Machinima is going to go more and more mainstream. But what’s more interesting is that by default, you can then go to the machinima sets and interact with the avatars. The real magic is that the story can be altered and interactive.
- ARG narratives are being used for advertising purposes and they’re very effective.
- You need good content and you need to combine socialization and entertainment. You need a reason for people to show up in the first place.
- The TV viewing habits and most memorable virtual world experiences were fun to hear as well.
Human interconnectivity and togetherness in virtual worlds
- Persistence of identity is important
- Virtual worlds are too insular – they are immersive powerful experiences on their own, but they end when you leave the world. People want to extend brands into virtual worlds, but what about extending virtual world communities out of the world?
- Having a portable ID is probably where we’ll end up, where you can reveal aspects of your identity at your own leisure when you’ve established trust
- You learn a lot about people from non-textual context information, though, like what their avatar looks like, what their Flickr stream contains, etc.
- A lot of people are scared by these issues of privacy and trust
- Fan bases are a great place to create communities. But once you bring them together, the object of fandom is actually no longer the glue of the community.
- Voice is powerful, but it has social barriers if people role play other races, creatures, etc. But if your avatar is your ideal you, as it is in many worlds, then it’s a good tool.
- The more tools you can give people to communicate, the more you foster community
- You need to pay attention to the style and culture of the community, though. One group might want one set for their style, but that may not work for another style.
- You need to think now about how you might help users from many countries, languages, cultures interact with each other. Tools can help, as can things like just putting up a map or a sign that shows what different areas are like.
- But these international mixes may be exactly what users want, and also they are great opportunities for cross-cultural learning and understanding
- Bringing together asynchronous communication tools (email, blogs, forums) with synchronous communication tools (IM, voice chat) creates a very powerful set of tools that enables your communities to communicate in most ways possible
- There is not one type of togetherness (e.g. how close are their connections, what kinds of connections are they) that is best; it’s best to give people tools to do what they want, and let them decide the nature and depth of their connections to other members of the community
