Gaming / Virtual Worlds

Its interesting - while the whole "web 2.0" movement seems to be hooked on FreeConomics to pay for (ostensibly) useful stuff for real people, the Virtual World crowd are getting consumers to pay real money for nonexistant tat. Second Life, World of Warcraft, Habbo Hotel etc all have business models where you pay to play. Latest up is Barbie the cyberbabe - sez GigaOm:

Starting now, Mattel (MAT) is offering a premium subscription option to its phenomenally popular Barbie Girls web-based virtual world. Since Beta launch April 2007, it’s amassed a record-breaking 13 million registered users, with over 2.3 million of those monthly active users.

At $5.99 a month, the new “Barbie Girls V.I.P” account gives girls a wealth of additional perks for their avatars, like a virtual pet, exclusive access to a “Extreme DreamPark”, and, of course, “a special virtual tiara”. Which means starting this week, millions of parents will face a uniquely 21st century dilemma: should they pay 72 bucks a year so their little girls can enjoy playing with Barbies that don’t, in the strictest sense, exist?

So go figure - why is no one prepared to pay for supposedly seriously useful services like Facebook and its poke plethora yet lash out the lolly for something not a lot different if its clear its a game? Maybe Slide should re-orient their superpokes into Barbie... ooops - another double entendre for the record

Two great posts on Read/Write web for the game theorists among you - this post on gaming digg, and then this post pointing to an e-book on social nets as games, by C. Weng.

As readers of this blog will know, we are great fans of using game theory to understand the emergence of new markets, and have used game theory (as well as system dynamics etc) in quite a few of our consulting assignments, and posts reflect this (here, here and here for eg).

That these social networks are games, and are actively being gamed, should come as no surprise to the observer - after all Google is a constant war between its in house geeks and an army of SEO gamers outside, and digg-gaming is well covered..

What is more interesting is that books like these are appearing about Social Net games, much like hack books for the more usual games like Halo etc. The implication is that SocNets are, like Google and digg, going to have to enter the arms race themselves to keep their systems vaguely representative of reality - and therein lies the rub - a gamed digg is one thing, there are always other options - but if you have put all your links in the Facebook basket, say, and then find yourself in a sharply played gaming world - with all that data out there....

Interesting times indeed...another big thing for 2008

Update - saw this post by Dawn Foster as well, and noted the this re reputation systems:

I recently blogged about using reputation systems in communities with a discussion about people can game community reputation systems. The important thing to recognize is whether people are gaming the system in a productive manner that helps the community or in a destructive way that serves only to clutter the community with worthless chatter that annoys other members.

This is a fascinating area of online game theory - for example eBay reputations, where if you black someone they can black you back. This means people tend not to black each other, and instead "damn with faint praise" by saying nothing or being neutral. It is a good system in that only a transactee can (in theory) comment, so reduces the astroturfing Amazon is prone to - though no doubt eBay is gamed too.

Clearly one person who collects a lot of blacks is a bad risk, but they are few and far between - and in fact most of those re-join under new nom de plumes (yet another part of the game structure on eBay)

For most eBayers though, you look at the length of time, variety of transacters, and individual ratings, looking for the faint praise.

Attended the Women in Games talk last night (part of the London Games Festival), its an area of interest to us in that it is such a clear area of arbitrage - these days lots of women have games devices, yet few in the mainstream games industry really write games for them. Hoped to get some insight into the whys and wherefores.

Emma Westecott, Senior Games Researcher at The University of Wales, Newport (and previously Producer on such titles as Starship Titanic) chaired a panel comprising of:

- Nicola Bhalerao, a senior software engineer at Rare and chair of WiG2008 with a focus on encouraging girls and women to engage with games programming as a creative and fulfilling career path.

- Matthew Jeffery - Head of European Recruitment, EA talking of the need to broaden the talent base of development talent and to attract a more diverse workforce.

- Helen Kennedy - originating member of Women in Games, active in driving the academic context of the event forward. Helen’s PhD is in Feminism and Play and she brings substantial expertise in feminist and gender studies to the event.

My take on it all was threefold.

Firstly, it became clear that the games industry was largely populated c 10 years ago by the sort of men who people like Helen love to hate (being un-PC in every conceivable way it would seem), and has remained so - and they haven't really had to change much because by and large their market was growing with them. Now however it is maturing and structurally an all male geek gamer industry is unable to make the stuff it needs to do to attract new audiences, so carries on making ever more expensive versions of what it already does.

Matthew mentioned most in-industry companies totally did not "get" the Wii (or Nintendo DS), and are now scrambling to catch up. Nicola made some good points about the difficulty of attracting women into games development, but I must note that the argument is not only for gaming - its the same issue with attracting women into anything related to the "hard" sciences.

(Postscript - interestingly, Nintendo - makers of Wii and DS has just recruited a senior Yahoo woman in the US)

Secondly there are a lot of Wii's and DS's now in women's hands, and these are the tools of choice - so for anyone who is going to break through, these (or similar devices) are the platforms to use. Point 1 above implies that the current industry is unable to structurally imagine itself out of its current box very easily, so now is the time for (women?) entrepreneurs to strike.

Thirdly, Women in Gaming seems like it has had what I would call "utopian hopes" thrown at it, I frankly felt uncomfortable with some of the feminist Agendas being bandied about last night. Its probably very un-PC to say this, but my take is that Gaming is just a business like any other, and will stand or fall on serving real (women) customers with what they want, rather than cleaving Gaming to any particular set of ideologies / sociologies.

In my view, given the opportunity, the best way to cure gaming of its (apparent) misogyny is to start up companies with different cultures writing games that women want to buy. That would rapidly start the established players changing their ways.

The billion dollar question, of course, is what do women gamers want. Research so far has shown a few general principles about what women like in games:

(i) creativity - do it yourself, or at least some say in defining environments
(ii) being part of a non-competitive, collaborative system (some wags argue that social networks are really just games for women
(iii) using simple, easy to load and use games systems
(iv) tend to like non-zero sum games (ie everyone wins)
(v) are more likely to play casual, Java and Flash-powered web games like Bejeweled5, generally passing on download-install-and-play “hardcore” online world games like World of Warcraft.

Now these are "high" probabilities, ie they do not cover the whole gamut of what women like by a long shot. To be honest, I suspect the best way to write games that women want is for women entrepreneurs to write the sort of games they would like to play.

A useful event though, and very necessary. Thanks also to Thayer Driver who co-organised.

From TechCrunch

Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, may be extending their crackdown on “Broadly Offensive” behavior to Bestiality, following attempts to remove virtual pedophilia (or Age-Play) from Second Life in March.

The Second Life Herald (NSFW) goes on to ask whether consenting adults dressing up like animals and partaking in virtual sex with each other or with human shaped avatars (virtual bestiality) constitutes broadly offensive behavior.

There is also a wonderful debate going on about how accurately a virtual animal has to be rendered to be a participant in an obscene act - Roger Rabbit not apparently, Jessica Rabbit yes.

The initial thought is that you just can't make this stuff up

However, the secondary thought is that yet again Porn (3.D style) is showing the way..........the issues brought up here point to the future differences in legal niceties between virtual and real worlds (i.e. is what is illegal in a real world also illegal in a virtual one - is a virtual crime like this still a crime, as arguably nothing has happened, and the animal is actually an avatar of a human*), and this is just the tip of it - we haven't even started with religious issues yet, but it will come as early adopter geeks give way to mainstream users.

Over the next few years one can imagine a whole host of virtual situations which will create interesting ethical and legal dilemmas.

The worlds may be virtual, but the issues - as with taxation - are real.

*allegedly

Was mulling over something I read in a piece Nic Brisbourne wrote earlier this week , about marketing people paying Linden avatars to hang around their clients' sites to make them look populated / popular, virtual world spam, and an aside about a little script that can make the avatar move.

I was nostalgically taken back to some stuff I first looked at some 10 years ago, ie Evolutionary Algorithms and the wider virtual science of Artificial Life.

For those unfamiliar with these terms, in a nutshell Artificial Life (A-Life) is the creation of self organising artificial systems that behave in life like ways. The underlying rules of quite complex behaviour can be very simple, for example "Boids" was an early very simple simulation of the way that flocks of birds fly - see an explanation here, and this YouTube video below



Anyway, seemed to me that those advertising wonks doing this are total amateurs at this game....if you are going to have false punters anyway ( sockpunters? ) why not have a whole swarm of 'em rather than a paltry few, and why not stick some A-Life routines in so that all those fake avatars can go do lots more that just twitch to the vibe. Send em touring in swarms, let em breed with each other.....

In fact, take it one step farther.........add some more complex A-Life routines and your Avatar can just go touring Second Life on its own, you need never bother to go there, Linden gets its visitor numbers up (hey, why not spawn a few million of its own using Genetic Algorithms while you are at it.), then the PR agencies that flog SL presence continue to make money and the poor old client is none the wiser

Unless they read this of course....

And why stop there...program those artificial avatars with some Messages From Your Client, so next time some sucker tries to chat up some gorgeous creature in SL, he/she gets a whole reel of real time Spam.

With realistic facial gestures and manners to boot.

Yes, you have just met a Spavatar .............. Turing would be proud of us

3D Spam - hah! - you haven't even seen the start of it yet......

Hmmm..I wonder if those nice chaps at IBM are building one of these

So, here is the traffic curve on Alexa for Second Life, the darling of the Web 3.D world. As you can see. the traffic is going down. Now, this clearly cannot be from Second Life usage declining, surely

So we can come to only one conclusion - that for some Strange Reason, Alexa toolbar owners are going elsewhere.

Wagner James Au feels that the above graph shows the end of the growth of World of Warcraft, not sure thats what it shows - the line seems fairly straight growth except for the release of the Burning Crusade in Jan/Feb....another few months before its clear methinks.

More amusing is his post re Second Life advertising goodness: - how many customers do you think those high profile Second Life launches get

So how does anywhere from 6,454 to, well, zero, grab you?

That’s the spread of weekly visitors to real world corporate sites in Second Life, according to SL demographics expert Tateru Nino. (who analyses this for James)....

....In the three weeks since she began, the highest weekly total belongs to Pontiac, which hosts a kind of virtual autobody island where Residents can customize their cars...followed by a site for Showtime’s The L Word (4,687), where regular events are held on a recreation of the show’s main locations; IBM has an expansive site which includes an open source coding tutorial lab (4826).

The low end, however, is littered with some of the world’s most prestigious corporations and brands. Despite entering Second Life to much mainstream media fanfare, companies like Sears, Sun Microsystems, Dell, Coca Cola, Reebok, Coldwell Banker, and Calvin Klein have so far failed to attract even 500 weekly visitors each (during Tateru’s headcount, at least)— some of them far less. For comparison’s sake, there are currently about 400,000 Residents who log into SL on a weekly basis; about a million have logged in over the last month.

One would assume, guessing what it costs to put something on Second Life, that this is several (tens of?) thousand pounds per customer acquired....

(Ah....a mere 2 weeks on, the news has gone mainstream....)

We wrote several months ago that in our view the major problem with all the various MMORPGs was that they were closed systems - Tharg the Mighty couldn't hop over from World of Warcraft to Second Life for example for a bit of lootin' and pillagin' (though its arguable who'd be doing the rapin', Second Life being what it is.... .

There is an article today in the Economist making this same point - and talking about Multiverse network, a sort of OpenID (OpenEgo?) allowing avatars to seamlessly transfer through a unified - or maybe federated? - Metaverse (the Universe ?). They call this online gaming's "Netscape Moment".

(This is the same problem that Social Nets face....how do you move your data - profile page and social nets - from say MySpace to Facebook, or all that music stuff you've built up from Last.fm to Pandora )

The interesting thing is that they've done it using open source because, in the choice between getting big or going home the only way to get big was to collaborate (as opposed to Netscape who, in time honoured IT tradition, snaffled the technology from someone else's R&D lab ) with the huge Open community.

This trend is inevitable - when my 12 year old son was born I was playing Doom and was entranced, he now programs Doom-like environments with open source software written at a Dutch university at IT club at school. Second Life last year bit the bullet and started to open itself up.

The Economist makes an interesting comparison of this movement with the OSP/ISP battle in the mid 90's - AOL had all the advertising (as does 2nd Life today), so the 'Netizens had to create an open enironment, ways for users to generate - and find - content, talk to each other etv (yes, there was intelligent life before Web 2.0).

Make platforms available in this new open system available and a new generation of "Web 3D" d
developers will emerge to build the applications

Now this is where it gets interesting.....in our view, the 2nd Lifes of this world are too complex (and Habbo probably too simple) for the mainstream user - but given the opportunity, a darwinian world of "Web 3D" developers will find the sweet spot.

The issue in the '90's was that the 'Netizens couldn't get into AOL et al, but once people started to find enough good stuff outside the walls soon were breached - from the rush within to get out. You couldn't go from AOL to CompuServe, but you could go to the 'Net.

So Tharg the Mighty will probably never get to Second Life, but voyages aplenty await to the Open Isles of the new Cyberworld.

Afterthought...there is an implicit assumption that such an open world will be played on a PC. This is not necessarily so - a PS3 is perfectly capable (cyclewise) to run such games, and with its ability to run Linux could be part of this movement. We have also been experimenting with playing computer games on our big screen MyPCTV rig, and its a very good experience - so we immagine an iptv / webtv exprience could be part of this movement as well.

Looks like the beta test of using voice on Second Life will be rolled out.

This is very interesting for expanding Second Life as more than a sex site with user generated environments and the ability to colour in your own trainers. (OK, OK there is more to it than that....though sometimes one wonders !! )

We have blogged before on the huge potential for 3D social network sites, both for consumer and business use, and the ability to add voice does make a huge difference to the overall experience - as anyone who has used voice to play World of Warcraft will confirm..

As Philip Linden (aka Rosendale) put it:

"There are a lot of problems with telephony when doing conference calls. You can't tell who's talking if there's more than one person. But in the virtual world, voice solves it," said Rosedale, noting that avatars with three-dimensional voice integration will likely accelerate using Second Life for holding virtual conference meetings.

Of course this will also increase its...utility?.....as a driver of Porn 2.0 too

I wonder how long it will take Habbo Hotel to add voice to its Habbits.....?

One to watch........

Once upon a time it was simple...you got onto a websystem, set up you profile or avatar or whatever, and there it stays until you come back. No more..the Wii system's Mii's (aka avatars) can roam around the network and appear in other people's games

"To put it simply, Mii Parade is a system that uses the network to allow Mii characters created by many people to mix and mingle," said Mr. Nogami. "You can line up Mii characters in the 'Mii Plaza', but at the start the only Mii characters you will find are those you have created yourself. Over time, however, using the WiiConnect24 system, other users' Mii characters can come and visit. In the same way, your Mii can make an appearance on someone else's Wii, although this won't happen unless the user has authorized it. The user can choose whether or not to allow their Mii to come and go on the network, so the only Mii characters that will appear on someone else's Wii are those where the user has permitted it."

It's possible for Mii Channel characters to interact with other characters from around the globe. "Your Mii can pop up anywhere," said Nogami, adding, "I should point out, though, that your Mii will never go missing from your own Wii."

Maybe now that Second Life is going open source, I'll find my Avatar has gone off to World of Warcraft for its holidays?

At the moment you can't spectate through their eyes, but no doubt that will come too. Coupled with Google's PC snooping on the sound coming out of your TV 24 x 7, it won 't be big brother watching you, it'll be anyone's brother or sister watching you.

(I saw Lynette Webb's post on FutureLabs and then went to the original source)