Real Limits to Virtual Worlds

Article in my Economist today on the real limits to Virtual Worlds, specifically the Google world, Lively - here is the online version:

Lively is a simple environment, amounting to little more than a series of 3-D chat rooms. To enter, you must first download and install a plug-in for your web-browser. You can then choose from a list of rooms, the most popular of which are (inevitably) themed around sex and dating. And although some popular rooms—“Love Sweet Love” and “Sexy Babes Club”—have had thousands of visitors, the number quickly drops into the double digits further down the list. Hardly anyone is using Lively.

Why has it been such a flop? “There’s nothing to do in Lively if you’re not talking to someone,” says Greg Lastowka, an expert on virtual worlds at Rutgers School of Law in New Jersey. Second Life, he says, offers “commerce and creativity”, and Club Penguin (a popular virtual world for children, owned by Disney) has lots of built-in games.

Not very surprised - we did a small comparison piece about 18 months ago on various worlds - Second Life, The Sims, Runescape, WoW, Cyworld and Habbo Hotel being the main ones studied. It was fairly quick 'n dirty - the main work was on the economics of virtual worlds - but the chart below sums up the views we came to. Below the curve = FAIL



The more complex worlds like Second Life also have a minimum time you have to invest to get much benefit - we reckoned it took about (very broadly) 14 hours play to get to a level of basic "unconscious competence" in 2nd Life, and thus felt it was way out of the realm of the mainstream user unless it was simplified. That is represented by the vertical line.

Similarly, my teenage son - the tester of Habbo, got bored with it after about an hour - to quote "Dad, these guys look like Lego men but don't do anything" Granted, an early teenage boy isn't really into "pure" social networks - he is captivated by World of Warcraft (Runescape is seem as a "tweens" game in his mileu as it happens), and it acts as game and social network (and voice telephony system).

But the point is made - it took about 1/2 hour to master Habbo, 1/2 hour to check it out, and then - well the point of decorating your room and talking was lost on them. Buying virtual knick knacks is a staple of virtual world economics, but there is - in our view - a limit to the utlity of just being a social network - which is the horizontal line on the graph.

(I put the "limit to social networking" line a bit into 2nd Life, because my observation was that 80% of the people there hung about in bars or tried on new clothes - and I don't know how many of those stay long term but I suspect thats where the higher dropout rates come from).

By the way, The Sims is the most interesting dynamic - watching teenage boys "game" the system to maximise it is an exercise in human cynicism - god alone knows what they will do with the insights it gives them into people's underlying motives. The girls I watched (older teenage girls) don't play it this way, acting more in the constraint of the game* (and before you go off on your high horse, I must note that is just a game - but not an inaccurate one)

* I think real life experience impacts how you play a game - I learned to play various dogfighting flight sims first by learning to fly, then to shoot etc - the kids learned it by throwing the 'planes around the sky, guns blazing all the time, crashing repeatedly until they got it....

By the way, check out this amazing 2 - world journey from Laurel Papworth's blog. Respect....