Into the Lion's den....

In preparation for an upcoming presentation, I made the (evidently treacherous) step of attempting to aggregate the entire population of self-proclaimed virtual worlds. This is a tricky effort for multiple reasons:

1) "What's in a name?"- The 'Virtual World' moniker runs the gambit from children's educational sites like Mokitown/Mobilekids through game-narrative-driven sites like World of Warcraft, and from web-based marketing vehicles like Coke Studios/MyCoke through to proprietary walled-garden worlds like Second Life and There.com. You may as well have called them 'Web 2.0' for all the ground the VW term covers.

2) "Actual Mileage may vary"- Each company measures users/residents of their virtual worlds differently, as you would expect for marketing spin reasons. These include 'total number of signups' (Second Life's 9M number comes to mind, as does the 80M Habbo Hotel number) to 'active users in last x days' to 'paying subscribers'. Many companies do not advertise the numbers at all, like Moove.

3) "Let me see some ID, kid!"- For some reason the industry has begun pushing an artificial boundary between 'kids worlds/games' and 'adult worlds/games'. This may just be a simple case of wanting to push the large kids worlds into a different category to make other worlds look larger (in their weight class).

4) "The Medium is the Message"- If you want to see a virtual world platform vendor get red in the face, mention some subscriber numbers from casual web/flash-based games. They will argue endlessly how they are two different species and do not deserve to be contrasted against each other. Ditto for social networking sites like Bebo who are re-skinning their social networking portals with some rudimentary avatar chat.

I'm going to waltz right in to the Lion's den at this point, and make some proposals for some common semantics and conclusions so we can at least harmonize the concepts we are talking about. This way, the people we are talking to don't need a decoder-ring to separate the hype from reality.

1- Name

Who cares what it is called! Honestly.

Call it Virtual Worlds, 3D chat, Applesauce. As Randy Farmer said to me, "You don't need to be 3D to be an avatar." What we are talking about is people connecting with each other, either pre-arranged or spontaneous, for educational, business or recreational purposes, with everything from cartoonish-lego avatars with text to photorealistic avatars with spatial voice. If they are playing Mahjong or going on a WoW raid, they are connecting with each other. If they bump into each other in the Wondermark-meets-Terry-Gilliam-looking ff0000 world or in Second Life, they still connect. Then we can devolve into the 'which interaction is more signal-rich', when comparing text-chat+canned-2D-avatars against uncanny-valley-photo-realistic-avatars+wideband-audio-chatting

Recommendation- Companies will call their offering whatever is hot and trendy (many dot-com busts in the Valley were red-hot again after they re-treaded themselves as Web 2.0 companies) and nothing we do is going to change it. The market will sort it out, don't intervene.

2- Users

The answer has to be around 'active users'. Total number of downloads/signups is pure fiction, no equivocation. Paying subscribers is a nice standard convention, but precludes use by free and ad-supported implementations. So, lets talk about 'unique individuals (excluding alts) who have been on longer than 2 minutes in the last 30 days'. There, simple and easy. There will be people who mask their alts, so there will be some double-counting, but that's ok. We will then not count people with one account and ten avatars, pets, whatever.

Why is this important? Three reasons:

- Young users go where their friends are. Watch teenagers and IM platform usage and you can see the cliques based on a top-down graph of IM-platform usage and friend-lists on MySpace. Other curious monkeys like myself will go to where my friends are not, so I can explore. I'll need to know enough about the heterogeneity of a platform to decide to go there or not.

- When you are talking about content creators going to a platform, be they users creating content or content firms like Sony, they make their platform decision based on the amount of people there. Individuals may want to freedom to create in a small community, whereas Sony will follow the Windows-developer creedo and aim for the place with the most users.

- When we talk about people advertising in these worlds (as distasteful as we all may believe it to be, it is happening), they will require hard metrics to determine how much the platform/intermediary will be paid.

Until we all agree on some common conventions about measuring users, then we have our current problem, which is that when you add up 47 of the major virtual world platforms, the total advertised users exceeds the population of all of North America. This may be true, especially when you add in Korea and China worlds, but we'll need to show bigger rigor in our bookkeeping before we can light the fireworks and break out the martinis.

Recommendation- If you want to be counted in the future major tracking indexes (Chris Sherman and Nick Wilson, this opportunity has your names all over it), use the 'unique users in the last 30 days' metric. This is why section two of the Wall Street Journal isn't denominated in fifty different currencies, but a single common denominator.

3- Age

Newsflash- Not all avatars in Second Life are over 18 years of age.

Newsflash 2- Not all users of childrens sites are young children, or else there would be no market for a mobile phone widget for Webkinz, as most young children do not carry web-enabled smartphones (yet).

There is too much crossover between games, with kids and adults playing puzzles, and kids and adults exploring virtual worlds. MySpace is a good example of how hard it is to segregate 'grown-ups' from 'children', as there are probably more young teenage male fans of Led Zeppelin than Gen X'ers. Habbo Hotel is a quaint, lego-like cartoon environment that hosted the Prince of Darkness himself, Ozzy Ozborne, in March. I suspect all the pre-teens were expecting his cute little lego-avatar to bite the head off a lego-bat.

Recommendation- My advice is to implement a common identity model (OpenID is a great start), plus an industry self-imposed rating system for content like the ESRB, and implement it quickly before some government somewhere decides that it is their responsibility to 'protect the children from the Charleston, Jazz, Elvis, the Beatles, Internet porn, and online games' again.

Entertainment and Socialization are general enough concepts that you cannot segment platforms or sites based on an entirely subjective age-range. I hope we don't even try any further than we already have.

4) Medium

Ok, so immersive virtual worlds like Kaneva, Makena, and Second Life are unique snowflakes that deserve some treatment different than the avatars in web-based platforms like IMVU or Metaplace?

There are already a number of companies, including IBM, that are building chat gateways into SL, so you can communicate with your SL brethren from outside the grid. What happens when there are more people using the web-based chat client into SL pseudo-twitter than there are concurrent avatars 'in world'?

What happens when voice gateways connect Skype or the PSTN to There.com voice?

What about mobile virtual worlds from your iPhone? What about other hybrid use-cases?

Then the boundary between the virtual world and the real world becomes very permeable and the distinction between web-based and proprietary-immersive-free-roaming-worlds becomes very small.

Tish Shute mentioned to me this morning that the entire conversation around this to date also discounts the impact of P2P implementations, which I completely agree with.

Recommendation- Count them all together, as they are all facets of the same diamond. Lets rationalize this industry soon so we can 'skip to the end' of the platform wars and focus on the useful content piece. Imagine if we had debated HTML vs. 49 other options for a decade before de-facto deciding on HTML. Shudder.

And the only thing worse than multiple competing proprietary platforms is multiple competing open standard platforms. I understand why companies keep claiming themselves as a platform, but we are rapidly approaching over-population of the ecosystem, and there is neither flora nor predators enough to sustain the quantity of fauna popping into this industry.

In the immortal words of Dennis Miller, 'I rant therefore I am'. Here endeth the rant.

Comments

[Jeff]

Christian,
You are a brave man diving into this effort. But reading your post reminded me of a recent discussion I had with a colleague about the direction of "business" virtual worlds. It was sparked by the ever-present rumors of Google's foray into the VW market called "MyWorld." My thoughts are basically this.

There has been a lot of talk about a Google social networking applications. I see MyWorld and this social networking piece being intertwined. Imagine a sort of combination of Facebook and SecondLife. You would have so many new and different ways to interact with your contacts. When you log into your profile you would be able to see which of your contacts were in the virtual world and where they are. You could join them if you want, or maybe just IM them to see what they are doing. I see Google completely opening this up so that Facebook users could also participate. Facebook is never going to build a virtual world so they should be happy to join in. Once this happens, all the other social networks would be forced to join in or be left in the cold. And there you have it, Google is the center of the "Virtual Networking World"

Another benefit, and a huge one in my eyes, is that you would be able to take your "reputation" into the virtual world through your social network profile. Currently this capability is not available which I feel is a shortcoming of SecondLife. This would seem to be a necessity for a business type virtual world.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. And while we're talking Dennis Miller, he mentioned a great quote the other day from some guy I've never heard of..."The English language is the creme de la creme of all languages." That's a classic.

[Alex]

Cristian, your analysis of VW domain is deep, insightful and... plain awesome. Thank you so very much for doing what you do.

2Jeff,
I'm not quite sure that being able to "take your "reputation" into the virtual world through your social network profile" will ever be valued very much. It's the same old 'single-sign-on' saga... It just didn't happen (for many more or less obvious reasons). Also, VW is a 'reputaion' and 'profile' in itself! And I completely agree that web-vw mashups will be multiple, very interesting and are the most promising direction to move in.

Regards.

[Prokofy Neva]

Christian,

Great to see you at VW 07 and glad you got this conversation going. It's fascinating and important.

My own sense is that we don't need to rush headlong into making VWs thin out and "become the Internet" or make flash and browser games and social networking sites like Facebook fatten up and "become worlds". It's more than fine to have a line that divides not even 2-D and 3-D, but immersiveness versus augmentation, for example.

1. If you create the 3-D Internet out of worlds and subscriber games tomorrow, it will be so heavy technically, and so expensive to design, operate and maintain as a "Metaverse" that only wealthy educated urban centers will be hooked up to it. On the other hand, if you dumb down immersive complex worlds to fit into a browser on the existing lighter Internet, you will destroy the integrity of the economies and social and business relationships created in these "walled gardens" -- and there is no need for that, and it is more than fine to grow them slower and therefore with more stability and stakeholders.

2. I'd like to see you come up with some formula to reduce the figure of 40 million by the number of multiple platforms/games/worlds used by one person. You can't say there are 40 million users of virtual worlds if in fact that includes lots of my alts not only in one game, but my memberships in a dozen worlds. What is the factor to divide by? 6? 10?

3. I'm sorry, but my Yahoo "avatar" on one of my Yahoo accounts, who is a 2-D pixelated eye-blinking creature to whom I happened to give the same name as my Second Life avatar and dress him similarly, is NOT my Second Life avatar by that name, and frankly, I'm not so especially eager to join them at the hip like Siamese twins.

They are very different in their roles and functions -- though related -- and I'm happy to keep it that way. Whatever bridge there exists between worlds and applications, it really needs to be a bridge, and not a weld, and an opt-in, and not an opt-out.

I have no objective need for a Global Avatar, Christian. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, "I am large, I contain simultitudes." : ) I'd really like to see the hard sociological or marketing research data on users wanting this, as distinct from geeks.

Now, as to OpenID, yes, I realize they have fixed up the site to be more user-friendly and FINALLY given the average non-geek user an easier sign-up "Create your ID now" instead of "have a geeky dev discussion now!"

HOWEVER, there are still many babysteps filled with too many decisions and problems chasing people away, even people like me who are non-technical but will spend an hour to parse something out.

o The screen tells you if you have AOL or one of the other services, you may already have an "open ID". But...wait a minute! I don't want my AOL password now to be going to gadzillion VW related OpenID sites, let's say, to be sucked up by third-party fanboy sites who may be my enemies in games or worlds. I want a brand-new OpenID that I will use just for virtual worlds, let's say. Does my AOL id in fact open up OpenID? I can't find the answer to that question -- and so I give up.

o Or...let's say I persist. So then I'm faced with a list of a dozen providers, some non-English language, which makes sense, but the others there evidently only to give diversity because many companies want a piece of this or something. So I'm baffled again -- which provider to pick? why? Can't you all get along and make just one OPENID creation button, then have the offering of diverse company services (language, theme, whatever) later?

o So...let's say I got through those two hurdles. Now I go to a blog that says "Use your OpenID here". And whoops...it doesn't work. Why? Because of...extensions? Or...something? who knows?

Here's how it *has* to work:

o one-stop shopping -- one web page to rule them all (sorry, doesn't sound so open does it?!) where I get one button to make my account

o *then* a list of everything under the sun that I might wish to identify for myself, with an optional check-off, so that I can decide "for this gaming site, I will put the minimum; for this work-related site, I will put the maximum". The slider has to be on the customers' side.

I have had the enormously frustrating experience of trying to use OpenID so many times, with the best of will, that I have now given up, and I am back to letting many systems just pick my Live Journal ID or go with Anonymous and write in my known avatar name. Seriously, I so want this to work -- and it doesn't yet.

I've blogged about some of my other concerns here about interop here:
http://metaversed.com/11-oct-2007/behind-closed-doors-tech-giants-discuss-virtual-world-interoperability

Prokofy

[New Balance 574]

My fellow Americans , ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country . My fellow citizens of the world ; ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man .

[ugg outlet]

We want change and should bring the change.

Stop blaming others, if any of you is truly serious for change, lets make a movement from this forum today! With all the bright idea, it must be a success. Who is in?