Second Life, Habbo Hotel and the happy (social) medium

You know something is happening when there are TWO events on Virtual Worlds in one night. I went to This One by Music Ally et al and missed out on That One at the Dana Centre.

The thing that I have been mulling over for the last few days is what the next phase is for virtual worlds. The reason for this stem partly from my own experience with these virtual worlds and gaming in general, and partly from a conversation I had afterwards with IBM metaverse evangelist Roo Reynolds.

Essentially, 2nd Life and Habbo Hotel are on two opposite ends of the "ease of use" spectrum for Virtual Worlds

Habbo is designed to be a "low usage threshold" environment. Your avatar looks like a little lego man and the clothing options are pretty basic, and the environment is pre-constructed. Your own options for self expression revolve around decking your hotel room out (ie a 3D profile) and buying furniture from Habbo (with real money of course). Bad behaviour is not part of the Habbo Way.

Second Life is the other extreme - you can build your land, your house, your chattels, yourself, and any darn thing your pixel-dusted mind can think of. You can stream video, audio, bloggio or whatever in from outside. Anything goes, from gory S&M bondage cultures through to joining the Second Life Liberation Army

However, the time taken to get used to operating a Second Life avatar and in getting connected in this huge virtual planet is not small - 20 to 30 hours I would estimate to be vaguely competent. I would compare that to 20 - 30 minutes with a Habbo Avatar.

This matters...the evidence from the Gaming World is that not many people have the time / inclination to immerse themselves in the increasingly complex gameworlds emerging. During the Virtual World talk, it was mentioned that Second Life was c 1.5 m users and growing rapidly, and that c 1m of these users were mainstream (I would put it much higher than that, personally).

This has changed usage - rather than being Creators, building Byzantine palaces and other New nirvanae as their profile signatures, these new arrivals' creative bent goes about as far as putting cyber-bling on their avatar - or buying new branded trainers and colouring them in. You hardly need a system as complex as Second Life to do that.

Habbo, though, is just too restricted - you can't configure the environment, and there is no easy ability to import media.

But at the end the day these sites are, in fact, (as the session panel convenor Toby Lewis of Music Ally heretically put it), just glorified chat rooms (or social media sites as we term them in 2006)

This is where the conversation with Roo comes in - IBM uses 2nd Life for virtual conferencing and more, and it has a number of benefits - its much easier to see mixed media in a 3D world (Powerpoint, video, text, avatars), and people react better to an avatar as there is simply a bigger bandwidth interaction - they even have water cooler conversations. Its not quite real world face to face but its better than 2D IM

But IM is easy to use for the mass market, its almost Habbo level of entry threshold - Second Life is decidedly not. And for the business / professional market, who has the time to learn to use a Second Life Avatar (and the self confidence to look a complete dummy in front of colleagues). However, getting 3D conferencing and services right will save companies and people large amounts of money in travelling and markerting costs alone.

For these reasons I think that the major growth area will be some form of mid-range Virtual World. As I already discussed in "You can't sell Soda on a Sword an Sorcery Site", the world will have to be modernistic to attract ad revenues.

Sort of like a Second Sims....