Caleb Booker

There are about a billion or so conferences about virtual worlds these days. The one running right now in San Francisco is the Supernova conference, and one of the first panels involves Raph Koster, Reuben Steiger and Clay Shirky. Ok, a games guru, a content provider CEO, and a professor from NYU. Sounds good. What’s the topic?

Virtual Life or Virtual Hype?

Do most people really want to be immersed in 3D virtual worlds?  And what are the real business benefits of these massively multiplayer environments? This session will examine which activities will migrate to virtual environments, and when physical forms will continue to dominate.

This just strikes me as odd. I could have sworn we had been safely past the “is it all hype?” phase for a few months at least. It is what it is, and the money speaks for itself. Besides, the question for businesses shouldn’t be about most people as much as are there enough people.

Anyhow, three bright guys when faced with questions that don’t quite hit the mark end up giving us a bit of a grab-bag of unfocused insights. Alice over at Wonderland was good enough to type up a few notes. Here are a few hilights:

Raph’s opening salvo:

Near as I can tell there are 35 million people using virtual worlds and almost all of them are playing games. There is a rapidly growing but proportionately small group using them for things other than games – advertising, user creativity, business.

There’s a whole lot of hype surrounding 3D internet, and 3D is a red herring. There’s a lot of hype around metaversey things. A lot of it will come true .. The real estate biz is going to be huge in virtual worlds. But right now we’re in a bubble.

There’s misunderstanding over what their real power is. 

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Rueben on virtual world “stickiness”:

I can talk a little bit about the environment that I understand, which is Second Life: the interesting thing is that the mantra is, it’s not a game.

But it IS. Life is a game.

The set of use cases or goals are just extraordinarily broad. The game is the experimentation… making money, that’s the game. Etc. 40,000 people are logged in having fun with that game. With respect to stickiness, it’s a hard game to get into. 

Most folk don’t get it. They don’t think it’s fun. We notice that – and linden has yet to solve – there’s a really high attrition rate until 3.5 hours of use, then it drops wildly. Well, what happens at 3.5 hours of use? 

Raph: You meet someone! 

Rueben: right. You meet someone. So… funnel users to content? Abject failure. Host a dinner party? Aha!

A lot of reductionists will just say, this is a chat room with an interface. It’s a lot more than that, but yes the critical factor is when you meet someone. The social element. 

If I dropped you out of the sky in Prague, you’d hate it. You don’t know anyone, you don’t speak Czech.

It would suck. That’s what Second Life is like.

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Raph on SL’s conversion rate:

For a free to download product on the net, having a conversion of in the 8% range is PHENOMENAL. That’s triple the going rate. In the free-world it’s good; in the pay-world, it’s crap, a tenth of what it needs to be. 

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Clay on the idea of portable identities from one virtual world to another:

That suggests that federated ID is defensive: it’s not about exploring ID; it’s about not having to have tons of logins. So there’s utility – logins – and there’s avatars/identity, which is much more expressive.

I think people want shared login, but do they want shared avatars? Walking your avatar out of starwars and into warcraft? That’s like going to a costume party in the wrong gear.

Hmm. Maybe. But I’d love to walk Onder Skall out of Second Life and into There or Habbo Hotel. That would rock.

Anyhow, it goes on. Supernova is recording the whole thing so if you end up with a spare hour and a half sometime it might be worth a listen… guess I have something for the MP3 player.

Posted on June 21st, 2007 under futurism, hype, press. RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback.