A cross-post from Gary’s main media site Personalizemedia

Tran-social-media-play [tran-soc-shuh-mee-dee-uh-pley] noun, verb

1 noun – a new form, a means of collaborative communication through play in constructed shared ‘media-rich’ environments

2 verb – taking part in game-like activity across and within online and offline social networks and media portals.

Can we truly create meaningful immersive media ‘experiences’ for others? Ones that last, are memorable, have impact & emotion and keeps the ‘experience players’ coming back for more? I am currently building services, working on papers and delivering courses on Experience Design and this post is a quick summation of some of the background thinking and good case studies.

Life is filled with so many exciting twists and turns. Hop off the straight and narrow whenever you can and take the winding paths. Experience the exhilaration of the view from the edge. Because the moments spent there, that take your breath away, are what make you feel truly alive. © 2000 Stacey Charter

Filmmakers and marketeers are clearly moving into #TranSocialMedia Play in a big way with a triple whammy at the moment of Star Trek, Terminator & Lost (fan) ARG’s and a raft of social media campaigns across other film and TV properties (some much better than others!). I have written about worlds immersion and cross-media design many times in the past but this post looks at the addition of social play into the mix – a permanent fixture.

Transocialmedia play design has historically been the domain of theme park builders, after dinner murder mystery writers, letterboxers or installation artistes – always based in the physical realm with the best examples reliant on group social interaction. But immersive play like this has also been with us since the first MMOGs social games inside fantasy environments and are another side of a triangle which also includes the new kid on the block (adolescent teenager) 2D social media. The main premise of the below diagram is simple – all encompassing transocialmedia design should be centered in the triangle and incorporate these three dominant forces. (there is a lot more to the diagram especially around hybrid services, but it will have to be another post)

TANGENT

A minor diversion but totally related to hybrid services, I was sent a tweet from Ms. NPRIL last night.

BettinaTizzy“Could Disney-Pixar’s 3D film up lift virtual worlds?” this blogger asks. http://tr.im/lEkm – What do you guys think of this? @GaryPHayes?

@BettinaTizzy Good 3D opens the door, inside? the anim film delivered as an auto story route in a home 3D engine where you can also explore!

The actual article was about exposing large numbers of non-gamers to 3D and whether this would turn them into ‘virtual world’ participants. But more than this I am always keen on drawing attention to media forms in collision and future looking mash-ups – as cinema becomes 3D and games engines become filmic (quality wise) why not deliver the film inside the game engine – not as cut cinematic 2D but the whole thing in 3D. You press play and the story arcs unfold around your avatar (perhaps your invisible perhaps your an extra – who knows!), voices play out from the characters and in some scenarios you can interact where the story makes sense. You as the film player can move around inside the environment the drama is taking place, certain action scenes you can jump inside characters and so on. That way from a screen entertainment point of view at least, you can also play/backchat with your social peers inside and around the story – now that would be an experience?. But this is really another whole post so I will continue…

BACK TO THE STORY

The ‘online distributed story’ courses to Directors and Foundation students at AFTRS often start with thinking about what is the nature of true meaningful collaborative play and what serves the story. What does one need to ‘create’ to turn passive story viewers into active story players? When we talk about play there are two key ‘spaces’ – within the screen and with-out the screen. Students already immersed in online 2D social space immediately don’t see the value of the social mediums – asking a fish to explain water. They soon see the potential though unlike many ‘non-social online’ creators who often try to merge crude old-school practise into fragile social media and like a bull in a china shop find it hard to engage. I use a variety of tools and exercises but the simple workshop template below helps story tellers plan and quickly understand two sides of the triangle – 2D social media and 3D online worlds.

But as we know screen media only tells part of the story which is why promotion agencies and enlightened storytellers alike are (to borrow from Dale’s Cone of Experience again) moving into memorable forms of contrived and direct purposeful experiences in the real world and realise that real stickiness will come from the activities at the bottom part of Dale’s Cone.

This is all leading to a few recent examples in the transocialmedia space – mostly campaign casestudies hence the marketing bias and hat tip to casemovies for some. The first is from 42 entertainment, demonstrating how to create purpose, community and elements of role play on massive scale as part of the lead up to the Dark Knight film last year.

Another major launch last year was for Halo 3 and as they were really promoting 3D virtual space it made sense that the unique elements of this transocialmedia offering (albeit low on the social side) was the creation of a large physical model to bring virtual into physical space and then promote the ‘memorial’ throughout urban environments. Halo 3 incidentally became the biggest entertainment launch of all time.

I often use these four simple levels of cross-media design that I wrote on wikipedia some years ago as a framework to differentiate using platforms as just distribution (CM1) at one end to a seamless contiguous experience at the other (CM4). The fan created Star Trek Alternate Reality Game linear summary of a typical user journey, certainly adheres to the description CM4 ‘experience’ and goes where other ARGs have not gone before!

Cross-media 1.0 – Push. Minor variations of the same content placed on different platforms. E.g.: A slight re-edit of the audio for podcast or a transcript diced and sliced for a making of type website and more of now, watch the TV show on the TV, web or the DVB-H or 3G mobile phone or an iPod video download.

Cross-media 2.0 – Extras. Content that is already being produced but not destined to be delivered and repackaged onto other platforms so it appeared to be ‘original’ or at least specially created. More about the wonders of a good content management system than the true potential of cross-media.

Cross-media 3.0 – Bridges. Where most innovative 360 thinking is currently rooted – where the content placed on the other platform is critical to staying in touch with the narrative or service.The narratives tease you towards investigating or moving (via a bridge) to another media form/platform.

Cross-media 4.0 – Experience. To some extent this is producer ‘hands-off’- in that they have created an environment, much like a game, that the participant/s ‘lives’ inside of, following their own path, personalizing the experience. A cross-media 4.0 property is at its height a creation, a collaboration with the audience across many devices, which evolves and grows a life of its own.

As an interlude, an example that only uses two sides of the triangle that I had to include which demonstrates the power of a contrived, controlled physical event that then massively propagates across 2D social media – yes it’s Antwerp Train Station does Sound of Music.

An example of traditional ARG design that fails to use two sides of the transocialmedia triangle and will get lost in the noise is the rather stalled Skynet series of videos that were being used to launch the new Terminator movie. It does have an interesting Twitter element at http://twitter.com/skynetresearch that is now spilling out into Facebook and beyond – worth keeping an eye on. “Skynet Research is dedicated to eliminating human error.”

I had to add this example for two reasons. It is very clever marketing first and foremost morphing the meaning of a basic food product into one of the scariest browser ‘environments’ on the web – also it combined the two sides of the triangle 2D social and 3D world by creating the browser world – Hotel 626 as real horror experience. Many users were actually too terrified to explore this space – not bad for Dorritos!

Transocialmedia play design is still in its infancy as all sides of the triangle above evolve. Social networking is constantly moving towards being more real time as twitter growth demonstrates. 3D worlds are becoming much more integrated with real and 2D social space as well as becoming a far more ‘representative renderl’ of the real world which itself is being invaded with highly sophisticated mobile and pervasive computing devices. The real challenge at the moment is avoiding gimmick and surface superficiality but developing deep well threaded stories that afford a deeper more investigative engagement. I have noted the design of recent ‘media plays’ to be rather linear, find clue A that leads to clue B and so on vs much more non-linear quest. Many also fall into being over authored, complete and don’t allow contribution or collaboration (although that will happen regardless somewhere else if you haven’t allowed for it). One of the biggest challenges is to mature the form.

There are many who see transocialmedia play as purely marketing, there to sit on the coat tails of existing well known brands (such as AI, Halo, MacDonalds/Olympics) vs being of themselves for themselves. Admittedly there are a few of these scattered around but the player base is usually much lower. To finish a small, mini ARG transocialmedia play I designed last year called the Old Forest – which had a good mix of 3D mashed with physical world and a team social component. The story was fictional, looking at witches, spells and fires – you can find more detail about this and other mARGS on the Laboratory for Advanced Media Production wiki.

There was a rather sad epitaph to this mARG as exactly a year later the whole town of Marysville was tragically burnt with great loss of life in the worst Bushfires in Australia’s history. Truth is far stranger than fiction.

Appendix

For reference here is a abridge copy/paste from a post on an immersion post from 2006 – looking at the factors that enable immersive experiences.

SCALE – of the experience. The size of the screen and the amount of story world to explore has enormous impacts on immersion – as well as the detail of individual objects within the ‘world’. One of the reasons cinema will exist for a long time is that the large dark room filled with people is a captivating environment. Now, imagine a cinema where the image is a locked off-shot, of a shared world and all the audience are controlling and representing different characters engaged in a common goal or story. Ummm.

SENSES – goes without sayiing that the amount of senses that are engaged by an experience gives it most potential to immerse. Now as I have said before we dont need to consider full immersive reality rather make sure as well as intellectual and emotional engagement you consider sounds and the grammar of visual. Probably forget about touch, taste or smell for the moment – leave that to the porn industry to work out.

SERENDIPITY – how the world or show you are watching has elements of surprise. As mentioned earlier the more scripted and formulaic the less immersive. People only watch a film for the fifteenth time, I believe, because they strangely hope that there may be something different OR they are peeling back the layers, looking at minute detail and looking way beyond the basic narrative.

STORY – does the narrative engage. This is obvious, if there is nothing for you to be drawn along by (even your own story in some cases) then you will switch off.

PERSONALIZATION – Hence the title of this blog. How much can you minutely affect the world and yourself in it? How much will the world reflect you for being there? Most importantly, how much of your real world personality can you bring with you into the experience.

RESONANCE/CHOICE – How much control or agency do you have over the experience? Are your actions permanent and seen by all? Can you really do and say what you want – freedom of choice. True resonance is like a virtuous circle, you do something and there is a response that forever changes the environment. Like real life. The pushed media of TV, radio, cinema has zero resonance, it all happens in your head. Which is why stories ‘have’ to be based on life’s shared drama. In truly interactive models your actions have impact and will reaction will take place.

TEMPORALITY – How real time does the experience feel? Scheduled TV never feels real time – the only successful shows in the future will be live events, music, sports, live news etc: Everything else has a dubious future in the scheduled world. MMORPGs feel real time when you are in them because of all of the above. Ones that have scheduled events or require you to invade or fight at a certain time are more about story than true immersion.

ESCAPISM – or ‘play’. This goes back to my earlier point about the reason for play and associated spirituality. Is it as much about escaping reality or constructing ideality?

Does the representational nature of these ‘experience’ worlds mean so much more subconciously than endless souless advertisements on TV, or another episode of a soap, or fomulaic hollywood film? Does selecting an identity that is impossible to achieve in real life become a most powerful addictive escape? I suspect all of the above. In terms of building ‘play’ – it should be as fun making it as doing it. I have mentioned before that sometimes authors of experience get so lost in the creation process they forget someone has to watch, play or take part in it! Then it is much weaker an experience.

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As I have mentioned on many of my blogs (especially Personalizemedia) virtual worlds (as 3D navigable spaces) will only really take off when there is an effective, easy to use, existing web browser implementation. We already have early entrants here such as Yoville, Vivaty, NewLively, Habbo etc: but these suffer as they are not particularly customisable or graphical true 3D. The other half way houses include Weblin, RocketOn covered in posts here. Exit Reality is another over integrated browser world, which does look much better than the above as it turns web pages into 3D space, but still not easy to use.

“Imagine a business Web site where you can see what visitors are looking at and go and talk to them. Imagine a classroom with educational content like a real 3D exploding volcano and students physically located all over the world. Imagine a family or staff spread around the globe meeting up in a virtual space and being able to see each other and share photos, video and documents. The scenarios are endless with virtual worlds and until now, have been little more than pipe dreams to the average Web user,” says Vincent Teubler, co-founder of Gogofrog.

I am aware of over 15 new worlds that are heading in the right direction and turning more immersive virtual worlds into social, business, educative and networking 3D windows inside browsers. One that has just press-released today is gogofrog (co-founder comes from Melbourne), with a tagline ‘Virtual Simplicity’. Its heart is in the right place and with 30 000 already using it might quickly become a dominant new player?

Gogofrog is breaking with convention to offer a new type of web experience. The basic idea is that you create your own 3D space (pad) that you can decorate the way you want and to reflect your personal style. In Gogofrog you can move from pad to pad discovering sites created by others and chat with people you meet along the way. You can also create your own place where you can invite your family and friends to visit and hang out.

It still has a few lessons for learn from the demise of Google Lively, but several area addressed already. Keen to know how it connects the ‘pads’ properly (vs non-linked rooms) and how easy the customisation (vs importing jpeg images) tools for the 3D elements are. The full press release gives a lot more information and shows how they are across the need for personalization and integrating existing social tools inside the environment (especially video conferencing etc) – this service and the others just about to peek out are definitely worth watching. Just before the release here is a slightly reversioned Gartner Cycle showing how browser worlds are going to have more significance over the next two years.

Virtual Worlds as Advanced Social Networks, Business and Education Tools Possible with Commercial Launch of Gogofrog

Los Angeles, California (PRWEB) February 10, 2009 — The power of virtual worlds as a means of advanced social networks, sophisticated business tools and education tools is now accessible to all Web users with the commercial launch of Gogofrog. Two years after its Beta launch, Gogofrog has taken the advice and input of its global user base of more than 30,000 to remove the prime impediments to making virtual worlds a mainstream Internet tool, access. Fully browser-based, Gogofrog enables anyone with an Internet connection to set up their own world: simple worlds for free and complex worlds for as little as a $10US monthly subscription. No software at all for Users or Visitors to download.

“Imagine a business Web site where you can see what visitors are looking at and go and talk to them. Imagine a classroom with educational content like a real 3D exploding volcano and students physically located all over the world. Imagine a family or staff spread around the globe meeting up in a virtual space and being able to see each other and share photos, video and documents. The scenarios are endless with virtual worlds and until now, have been little more than pipe dreams to the average Web user,” says Vincent Teubler, co-founder of Gogofrog.

Teubler was an early convert to virtual worlds and envisaged the power of worlds beyond the traditional realms of fantasy game play. These worlds traditionally require users to download software and usually participate in a single often poorly regulated world. Whilst businesses, educators and users of social networks saw the potential, Teubler believes the need to download software, poor security and costs associated with participating and developing content or real estate have all contributed to severely limiting the broader use of virtual worlds.

“Due to their complexity virtual worlds have faced a mountain of problems in reaching beyond game players and the odd company with deep pockets,” Teubler says. “As a browser-based platform, Gogofrog users and visitors to the various worlds need only have access to the Internet to fully participate. Since its Beta launch, Gogofrog users have built simple 3D spaces to meet with friends, students and customers. They’ve set about decorating their spaces with photos, simple objects and their writings and have variously created places to meet, educate and do business in.”

Among other enhancements, the commercial launch of Gogofrog includes greater communications tools.

“Anonymous text chat lends itself to fantasy game play but not much else. Our users demanded real-world communication, so we enabled avatar-to-avatar controlled webcam communication. It doesn’t get any better than that. You can request and start a webcam chat with anyone in your virtual Web space — friend, family, colleague or visitor,” Teubler says.

Gogofrog also features a variety of user-defined security measures. The capacity to communicate via webcam is a big security bonus not found in other virtual worlds, as an avatar’s profile can easily be matched against them with a simple webcam chat. Gogofrog further allows users to set who they will allow in their world. With the click of a button, users can set it so only people they know — friends, family, students or staff — can enter their world, or they can set it so only those who know a password can enter. Teubler says the latter was especially important to educators who wanted to ensure their students would have a completely safe virtual experience.

Gogofrog also found participation is crucial to users, so the commercial site enables users to participate in the world’s economy.

“Many worlds already have buoyant economies as a result of allowing users to participate,” Teubler says. “Users need to be able to personalize and brand their worlds and potentially sell items to the broader Gogofrog user and visitor community. Gogofrog allows users to sell their images, scenes, avatars, avatar clothing and accessories and 3D furniture and objects. Everyone can make real money through their contributions.”

With user feedback continuing to be incorporated into Gogofrog’s software development roadmap, Teubler believes his prediction of virtual worlds becoming a highly sophisticated, commercial and entertaining part of social networks and the mainstream Internet is fast becoming a “virtual” reality. For more information about Gogofrog, visit www.gogofrog.com.

Contacts
Vincent Teubler Co-Founder Gogofrog
Melbourne, Australia
http://www.gogofrog.com
+61411265715

Monica Dodi
CEO Gogofrog
LA, California, USA

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We are well into 2009 and there is a lot of news popping about the likely growth of social virtual worlds and their adoption. As a tangent game based virtual worlds are also still in relative growth as covered in SMH’s post Video games thrash movies and DVD, referring to the shift in Australia and reflected in the rest of the world, of more money spent on interactive vs passive entertainment ” video games industry is now double the size of the box office and more than 40 per cent larger than the movie disc industry in Australia”.

But back to social virtual worlds and I have quickly mapped some dates and SVW events (most are recent) onto a slightly modified Gartner ‘hype cycle’ curve. For the uninitiated here is a brief wikipedia definition.

Since 1995, Gartner has used hype cycles to characterize the over-enthusiasm or “hype” and subsequent disappointment that typically happens with the introduction of new technologies. Hype cycles also show how and when technologies move beyond the hype, offer practical benefits and become widely accepted.

Of course in reality we have really been through a sine wave quite a few times since 1987 through 2005 but since the relative maturity of services like Second Life, There and others true and robust applications are emerging, beyond the traditional ‘gamer/entertainment’ use. MUVED created a post a few weeks ago showing widespread investment in a range of niche virtual worlds and this trend is seemingly continuuing apace. Raymond de Villiers, CEO of Wisdom Games is very bullish about the use of these worlds for business communication in a post entitled Growth of Virtual Environment Expected in 2009…

Throughout 2008 the corporate world was exposed to the reality of virtual worlds, which has seen a growing influence on how companies train, market, advertise and communicate. This is a trend that is expected to continue into 2009 as organisations begin to recognise the merits of incorporating gaming into their basket of communication tools.

Raymond makes some mature philosophical points about how the corporate world is now host to a new generation of employee who don’t see these spaces as for geeks and timewasters

For those who have never played a computer game in their lives, virtual worlds look foreign, sinister, scary, and like a waste of valuable corporate resources. However, for those who grew up in a world where they played virtually, their expectation of being able to apply the consequent life lessons will be expressed in their expectations of the work environment. Computer gaming, and the associated virtual worlds, will, as a result, be seen as an increasingly important infrastructural consideration.

Virtual Worlds News puts more of a realistic spin as regards raw investment (tracked over at VirtualWorldsManagement also) into new ventures with a decline (albeit way ahead of the global recession) of venture capital put into worlds – around $101m in q4 2008. In its item $101M Invested in 13 Virtual Worlds-Related Companies in Q4 2008 VWNews believes that there is a move into older generation worlds and those with much more of a niche focus.

With the harsh economy looming larger than ever, it seems like more and more focus is being put on unique niches and markets, established business opportunities, and quick-to-market strategies.

Around the world there are major government and state agency investments looking at the efficiencies and cost savings of using Virtual Worlds. Close to home (Australia) we have the MDA in Singapore committing overall around $70 million to project and services in the virtual world education space, creating around 300 jobs in the process too. I could go on with many examples of global investment in the public sector but we are also seeing expansion of existing services in the private sector a good example being Linden Lab buying two Virtual Goods companies XStreet SL and OnRez. As reported by Venture Beat the micro economy around Second Life is still in growth and Linden Lab will need a slice of that pie (in small rev share of the user to user transaction) to continue its own growth. This is long overdue by the Second Life creators and Venture Beat were keen to state the obvious also

Virtual goods have expanded to become a $1.5 billion market, but Second Life was engineered in the days before the business model was fully proven. Linden Lab residents exchanged more than $360 million worth of virtual goods and services in 2008, making the virtual economy and the ability to make a living one of the big draws of the virtual world. Top merchants in Second Life have made more than $500,000 in real money in 2008.

So there is definitely something afoot at the moment even in serious global recession there is a kind of exodus into virtual alternatives happening. The most important message is that developing on a reasonably stable and mature platform is not a big investment and companies, education departments and entertainment property owners should still see this investment as two key returns in the ‘real time, immersive arena’  – how to create experiential services and how to engage with a community. I leave you with a diagram I created nearly 3 years ago that shows a transition from web 1.0 to web 3.0 and let you decide if and how it maps onto my mapped Gartner hype curve above.

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The Metaverse… the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of  Search Engine, Meta-mole. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly google where no search engine has gone before.

OK the folks at University of Teeside will probably not be calling to get me to write their taglines yet what they are doing with Meta-Mole is pretty adventurous and most importantly critical at the moment to glue the discontinuous metaverse. The Meta-Mole in simple terms from their press release is:

The Meta-Mole, created by the Centre for Design in the Digital Economy (D-LAB) based within the University’s Institute of Digital Innovation, will ultimately be a dedicated searchable online resource for the 350 plus virtual worlds currently existing on the Internet.
Philip McClenaghan, Deputy Director of D-LAB explains: ‘We were analysing virtual world platforms and realised that there doesn’t appear to be a comprehensive service offering to list and compare key data for major 2D and 3D environments. This surprised us considering the current popularity of virtual worlds. We intend to fill the gap with the Meta-Mole.’

The metaverse as we know is the entity that forms when all virtual worlds have useable interoperability, you are able to move inventory between them, have a common profile (to a degree) and be able to communicate across worlds – even teleport between them (Habbo to vSide anyone!). At the moment it is all about walled-gardens, locked in economies/commerciality/currency and propriety tech – basically the metaverse doesn’t yet exist, it is disconnected. So to build a dedicated VW search engine that will trawl and spider as many as “350″ worlds is an ambitious vision – down this long and winding road. The benefits particularly to business and education is obvious (finding consumers or interest groups) but also making many social virtual worlds, more social – finding a long lost friend in IMVU whose into football, then setting up a match in Football Superstars, followed by a bit of post match role playing in Second Life – all ‘fueled’ by one search engine – means social activity will increase. Sadly the Meta-Mole is only digging around a few lower level worlds presently (see below) and I would encourage everyone to support such an initiative -  as long as it isn’t sold to a commercial entity who start advertising all over the search pages!  I would also suggest to the team they look at the open API’s of the big 2D social networks also – migration from 2D to 3D will be far quicker if the 2D (FB, MySpace, Twitter)  folk could actually sample the wonders of 3D social space

“Meta-Mole.com is a comprehensive database of Virtual World environments designed for public, corporate and government use.

Created by d|lab at the University of Teesside in 2008, Meta-Mole.com provides users with a total solution that includes:

• comprehensive search facility
• generalised and detailed technical information for a wide array of platforms
• images and streaming video media
• dynamic matrices for comparative analysis of environment functionality

The Meta-Mole.com application has been built from the ground up as a unique service offering for Virtual World users, developers and researchers to increase the profile of the market, ensure environment/consumer compatibility and enable new development of Virtual World markets through corporate education, relationship building and continued innovation.”

The advanced search, is not very functional or all encompassing yet, but suggests a lot about where they are heading with this. It will need to be pretty generic and high level to be able to map & interrogate elements such as scripting support or development tools. One thing it may bring about is a wisdom of the crowds ‘standard’ – just think for example if (on the development side) 8 out of 10 worlds allow importing from Blender or uploading of AIFF stereo sound then the other 20% might get busy on their backend! Lets hope so. The other key area is being able to link in existing out of world databases, especially from a eCommerce perspective the likes of SLExchange (a big out of world catalogue for Second Life consumers) and where searching for a world that lets you drive an Aston Martin is made easier for Mr Mole as databases such as SLEX are already half way there.

The Meta-Mole will initially be released as a Beta version focussing on 3D virtual world platforms. Forterra, Blink 3D and Twinity are among those who have already uploaded their details. Future developments will cater for all platforms, including 3D, 2D and MMO environments. Platform developers are able to participate in the Meta-Mole by contacting developers@Meta-Mole.com or visiting www.meta-mole.com.

For more information contact:
Philip McClenaghan
Deputy Director (D-LAB)
Tel: 0044 1642 738103
Email: p.a.mcclenaghan@tees.ac.uk

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or thirteen commandments for organisations considering becoming stars in the new web 3.0 revolution…

Originally posted here on one of Gary’s other blogs personalizemedia.

I have mentioned before that I am currently working on a couple of major and one or two minor media companies first forays into the metaverse, or its most accessible incarnation Second Life. I can’t talk about them directly of course pre-launch so I thought why not create a ‘simple’ guide for brand owners using a couple of recent Second Life launches AOL (today) and the LWord (last week). What follows are thirteen basic principles for brand and property owners as they create a virtual presence in any multi user virtual environment which really came about from my own work in the past year considering what works and what doesn’t, combined with an observation of some of the ‘commonalities’ in many recent more mature brand launches. Some of this also cross relates to a post I did mid last year on how to achieve immersion and these are not focussed on ‘formats’ or new forms of entertainment that I cover elsewhere.

I have chosen AOL and LWord because the former is quite a broad media company without a clear single identity and the LWord because it is has a very narrow and defined identity but also as I was the line producer on an eTV version a couple of years ago. Another reason is that both are implemented by Electric Sheep and it is obvious they are developing their own little ‘format’ bible. The recent entries inworld from NBC, Reuters, Dell, Endemol (Big Brother) and MTV on the there.com platform all follow these basic principles which I illustrate below – some more than others. This will be a broad brushstrokes introduction as I don’t want to put the growing number of companies and one-avatar-and-their-virtual-dog operations out of business. I also don’t expect any self respecting brand to try to do this without contracting a company with significant experience either, the social, environmental, game/play, scripting, design aspects of this are very unchartered and it is critical to engage those who at least have some semblance of a map. Anyway on we go.

1 Don’t Become Virtual Just Because You Can

By way of an introduction a cautionary note. Sure there is a certain PR cache, trendy or super cool in being one of the first to participate a new kid on the emerging media block. Every second week there is a new ‘celebrity’ entrant and although I personally think in the medium/long term these worlds will be come commonplace for business, entertainment and education, we should view most of the current raft of services as experiments. The old ‘build it and they will come’ adage is risky at the moment when there is only around 40-50 000 concurrent users across all the fully rendered avatorial based ‘non-game’ virtual worlds. There are a lot of empty streets across the ‘branded’ grid and these early entrants are either in for the strategic long haul or just grabbing a smaller and smaller slice of the Second Life press pie. On the positive side though the learning that comes from each incremental new service is part of building a robust and longer term metaverse for all. There are many who say SL is purely about sex or money (just like the real world then, big revelation there) and that brands are not invited. I used to have the same view until I realised that without some form of organisational presence, educational purpose or celebrity event Second Life was really going nowhere – a glamourised chat room. New ‘brand’ entrants need to realise that they are to a great extent last minute guests at a party and as such need to bring something significant to it. It doesn’t have to be about sex or money but it should definitely be about new experiences and play.

2 Make Joining Simple, Accessible and Branded

One could think of Second Life particularly as the walled garden portal that hosts the content that comes from individuals and companies/organisations. A sign of maturity is creating a way for niche or interest audiences a way to participate without their feet actually touching the ‘aggregator’. So we are seeing as in the L Word example below ways to use exposed APIs to register and download the client without going to Second Life at all. This simplifies the relationship initially for these existing brand loyal audiences, sure it gets complicated later when they realise there is a sea of potentially more interesting ‘stuff’ in lorry loads, but the entry is far more elegant.

3 Once In World – Hold Their Hand, With Your Brand

A third part making the ‘birthing’ process easier for ‘newbs’ is to drop them into familiar surroundings. Their beloved stars (in the case of L Word) telling them how to get the best out of the world. The Linden orientation is simply a ‘tech manual’ approach, its fun, but is still about which buttons to press, the L Word version is ultimately clearer, because most of it is about making your avatar look presentable.

You can see other orientation islands and in the foreground here a simple circular path with very, very basic instructions. Given the audience are likely to be the metro-sexual crowd, we must expect lots of time to preen their avatars. It would have been good to incorporate this as part of the main environment, but I suppose this could be considered the dressing room and rehearsal space before ‘going on air’, where you are the star.

In my experience many RL people spend the majority of their first week tweaking their image, quite naturally, so the L Word (E Sheep) have provided as you can see in the last image in this category four orientation islands, just in case there is a sudden rush of a couple of hundred avatars. Really that is the fourth ‘entrance’ tip, make sure you can handle a rush for the door. People who are bounced rarely return so have enough ‘welcome’ zones, just in case.

4 Design Multiple Levels of Navigation

When people arrive in the main environment you should think of it as a metaphorical homepage. You must make several things clear. All that’s available for them to do (not consume), how to get to these places, a feel of the ‘world’ they are entering and lots and lots of ‘why’ they should stay and explore. The welcome/arrival area should ideally have eyeline to the main sites too. So central and raised is the usual deal. AOL’s environment feels a little like a Disney-type theme park (fun fair) and is laid out that way. Its general theme of entertainment is echoed in the overall consistent colour palette, the signage, the walkways and slight sense of discovery – if everything is telegraphed there is the alternative problem that avatars will think they don’t need to explore cause the labelling is too ‘samey’. This could be an issue with AOL’s signage below – which is a shame cause they do have a few surprises – see point 7.

5 Decide Early On Your USP

I am glad to announce that the last few ‘brands’ that have entered Second Life have moved away from building the office blocks and sticking their logo on the outside, with only a very slight nod to where they are. Thanks to developers who are growing in experience virtually all the new entrants have one or two new things, never before seen. Some are very superficial, some are just ‘ the best implementation of…”. AOL have decided to create a few ‘lets be the best at that…” items such as a fully branded skate-boarding area.

Complete with piped Real Life skateboard championships as you tumble around the heavily graffiti park. One wonders about sport in SL. This is a long way from Tony Hawks as the performance of SL servers and client are just not up to it (unless really optimised – meaning a whole sim to skateboarding only). So these are social spaces, skateboard for a few minutes, then find a corner and chat about it. This must be built in and planned for. See later.

Another fun item which falls in the ‘only one in SL’ bracket could be this other simple offering from AOL, the avatar ‘sticky wall. ‘Physical’ activity needs to be sprinkled across any offering, forcing quests and mind games all very important. This is about delivering an eclectic range of services vs something too narrow in focus.

One of the L Words USPs is the speed dating tables in the central part of their main island. This feels much like Big Brother that I blogged about earlier in that it is an already unnatural social interplay now with the added layer of being virtual and partly anonymous. I haven’t tried speed dating in SL but I suspect inside the ‘virtuality’ of L Word and (as you can see on the instructions here) if it is moderated well, it could be a great way to meet ‘new’ friends. SL is like any ‘club/bar’ situation not an ideal way of finding romantic or like-minded partners, Showtime are moving in the right direction with this.

Torrid Midnight of the SecondCast team and a leading fashion designer, is one of the first to try out the skateboard park which launched today.

6 Make sure the Environment has Synergy with the Brand

Now we can all imagine (I have been there hundreds of times) the discussions that take place when a group sits down to make any existing property ‘immersive’. The ‘we could do that!’, how about recreating one of those and so on. Many metaverse entrants insist on identical duplication, or model building of corporate buildings (NBC Rockefeller) or the actual TV sets as in the L Words version of the Planet Cafe below.

I am not going to dwell to much on over representational builds as I covered that in a post a year ago, but just to say that there are two ways to go here and the middle ground is the dangerous one. The brand should either be in your face and as precise a copy as possible of something that clearly represents the brand (or the context) or something such as Vodaphone’s build (a large megaphone, hearing aid) slightly surreal and tiping their hat to this ‘naturally’ strange world, where anything, seriously is possible. I still yawn a bit at the endless brick walled buildings, blue glass and ‘mall’ness to many of the current builds, but I am also aware first hand of the number of suits in companies who ‘need’ something recognisable and enough branded signs scattered around the place. As an example the easiest option would be for say a French brand to place a model of the Eiffel Tower on their sims, the more brave route is to create something ‘new’ and unique, a place you enjoy going back to. I personally have ‘done’ the real Eiffel tower on at least five trips, I have no real urge to do it again but I absolutely love the ‘essence’ of the French countryside such as Provence though. I wont go on as I will be exploring environmental identity in virtual worlds and what makes some more sticky than others, in a Terra Nova post in the next couple of months.

7 Be Sensitive to The World – Playful, Deliver Expectation and Have Depth

Now for the key ingredients for all new entrants into these spaces. It must deliver expected features in ‘island’ sims such as shops, cinemas/screens, dance areas and even branded things to buy. It is no different than being a tourist to a distant island and feeling that the environment is self-contained. Another major requirement is all visitors need to play/do and even in a ‘no rules’ game like Second Life, you can create smaller, casual games, particularly social ones.

Here AOL provide the staple branded clothing. I have never seen any figures in how many people actually buy this stuff, but I have also never seen avatars wearing non-fashion branded clothing (apart from Torrid above). Perhaps I need to get out more

The quiz in the AOL sim is really good fun. It feels like interactive TV inside a virtual world. Simple multiple choice (the four colour selector – just like fast text keys in UK iTV), timer based questions and a top scorer board on the left. This would be great in a more ‘organic’ pub environment vs the rather board room look and feel here.

Virtually all new branded sims have the dance club/bar combination. For the L Word it works very well and when I was there, it had a constant churn of people. I think part of it is just checking out for reference what are the best clubs to landmark but part of this one is the obvious lesbian overtones. Yes all the avatars in there were female. The club itself was pretty dark and dismal and not on my return list.

The layout of the L Word sim I found a little disappointing. It had a similar feel to the there.com Laguna Beach (I blogged about in Sept), as the stores and buildings were just a little spread out and hidden. Even flying you felt things were disconnected and fragmented. It is important to make sure that although avatars will expect stores, and appropriate ones, that they should be integrated and not glued on as an afterthought.

Most of the shops for the L Word were indeed skins, clothes and various relationship ‘toys’.

8 Make the Experience as Personal as Possible

As I have indicated before in my web 3.0 posts, inside these worlds there is already a rampant web 2.0 paradigm. Avatars want to share and blog their experiences (I know I do whenever I get time). So in any build that has that first ‘wow’ factor about it, make sure there are enough places that allow the users to get the word out (that’s assuming you want traffic). The actual SL interface has much of this built in, but it is buried inside profiles and not where most viewing is – in the real web 2.0 world. So AOL have set up simple sets to take pictures of yourself and drop them onto the AOL blog site. In fact there are a few points where they encourage this, the sticky wall for example. To drive traffic to your virtual space you need to have lots and lots of content placed outside in the web 2.0 space.

One of my favourite bits of the AOL sim from a personalization perspective is the walk of stars for two reasons. One of them is the first picture on this post, a way to leave your mark, collect a copy of the star (because it will be erased by the next avatar of course) and take your picture just like a real ‘star’. The other thing that impressed me was the way a path can be made compelling. I spent as much time reading all the funny SL variants or real world stars names than I did in the whole rest of the sim. Partly because there were a few chucklers, partly because of the depth (a lot of effort from the Electric Sheep had gone into thinking them up as Johnny Ming told me) but mostly because they felt more integrated than everything else. They were embedded in the environment vs being stuck on or in like everything else.

9 If You Are Going to Provide Content Give Enough Choice

As a brand AOL is known as a kind of one-stop-entertainment-shop. So it was no surprise to see lots and lots of content in the various viewing halls and on screens in hidden corners. There was some disconnect here though as the sign outside in the first picture here says ‘millions of high quality videos’ and once inside the option is from a rolling list of about ten. So the outside the environment corporate message is lost inworld. The two have to be aligned. A message like the ‘worlds largest new network’ over a two floor brick office inworld, has a disconnect. Make the inworld messages appropriate and have a proportional scale and those that refer to the real world, clearly make that obvious.

10 Make Inworld Advertising as Integrated as Possible

Companies have seemed to be a little nervous about product placement and advertising from other companies in their spaces. This seems odd to me as in many situations such as the skateboard park below adverts actually work very well, especially ones for inworld services. I suspect that the ad departments in the respective companies look at the raw numbers and think that 3rd party adds will dilute their brand. I suspect there is a little truth in that, but a world without adverts embedded in places you expect them becomes quite paradoxically empty and missing something. This is not a flip-flop statement for me because I have always said ‘appropriate’ advertising vs ads rotating on fifty meter hoardings above residential areas, or above malls dropped alongside a peaceful beach retreat.

11 Be There In Person, Communicate and Learn

Any entrant into these worlds must, and I stress this, must have a constant personal presence. This is not the web. Put up your website and sit back and watch the page views, this is real people expecting to talk to the creators or the brand owners or especially the stars (or people role playing the stars). For AOL’s launch today we have Morton from Electric Sheep and Johnny Ming (of SecondCast again) and now Electric Sheep too. Both are happy to talk but their primary reason for being there is too see how things are used, if people are not getting to their ‘jewel’, how long they spend on the ‘activity’ that they thought would keep them occupied for hours and so on. Never before have we had this sort of ‘research detail’. This is the equivalent of getting inside the mind of the person using your homepage or site for the first time. You can follow them around, ask them why they went left rather than right. I won’t go on cause this will be another Terra Nova post when I am guest there in a month or so.

Adam Ramona and I chat with Johnny Ming about making Second Cast a little more arty, amongst other things.

12 Have as Much Content as Possible Inworld and Not on Weblinks

OK. Second Life is a pain when it comes to getting content into it. I spend most of my time importing textures (images to place around sites), sounds and animations. Getting web pages and RSS feeds is clunky to say the least. The easiest option is to just link out of SL to the default web browser of the user. There are no alternatives to this really but the temptation should be avoided to make every single item a link to a web browser, because simply the user will realise that the place is actually quite empty as they are spending most time on an external website. This is not rocket science. The user has made a concious decision to boot up a resource intensive 3D virtual world browser and not to browse the fast super efficient 2D web. They want social interchange and experiential activity not a bunch of branded web pages. Just as people say ‘oh I could never watch a full length feature film on my mobile’ there are several truths here. Avatars:
1 Will not click through and read more than a few pages of text on ‘your’ site.
2 They will generally will not watch long form movies, unless it is a pre-arranged social gathering. Short 1-4 mins only
3 Previews of audio and video are best, but make sure there is enough there to surprise them and ‘make’ them want to click to the web to discover more and possibly buy
4 Will only blog and send pictures to external sites (yours and theirs) if it is transparent and simple in your space. Take a picture, click this button, chat your blog text. Anything that involves putting notecards into objects, or crossing to a webpage forget it.
5 Enjoy anything that has a live’ness, a happening now in the real and virtual world. The nearer to a database driven website the virtual space is the more of a turnoff it will be. Sims should have lots of randomness scattered about. Sound that changes and shifts, images that tick over on ad hoardings, a sense of life, creatures and so on. This to me is all about content as well. Organising events on a regular basis is fine but they need to join your main group and this should be a priority at the beginning.

For brands that have no specific identity such as AOL, then something may have to be created for them. A virtual world incarnation of their 2D web ‘portal’ness, which I mentioned earlier. They went for the entertainment themepark, they could have easily gone for a vision of the future or a journey into the past, something abstract and unworldly, played with scale or just recreated a part of San Francisco.

13 Give the Environment Identity Make Social Activity Easy

My self agreed 90 minute blog time is up sadly so I will finish on this last point about social spaces in virtual worlds, which again will be part of a few posts on other more prominent blogs. The number of cafes, cinemas, meeting rooms, lecture theatres, living rooms and so on that are completely empty, yet just outside the door are groups of avatars happily chatting away, staggers me. Developers, including myself sometimes, put great effort into lots of interior detail, to then find later no one is using it. We imagine scenes of avatars role playing, or at least imagining they are really in those places, yet there is something quite claustraphobic about these ‘realistically’ enclosed spaces in many cases (as an aside I tend to build broad stuctures with very high ceilings (usually domes) if I want a sense of ‘indoor’ness). Unless there is an organised event at the auditoriums, cinemas and cafes they are usually empty. Design social spaces outdoors or at the very least give them an outdoor feel. Avatars in Second Life can fly and to block this 3rd dimension of travel makes many feel uncomfortable and disabled. It was interesting to be party too the types of conversations, when collecting some images for this post and checking out the new sites – the difference between AOL and L Word. The L Word group below were discussing intimate aspects of lesbianism and societies labelling of single gender relationships while in the L Word stores couples were shopping as if in real ‘L’ life – most kept referring back to the L Word and what was going on in the show or how it is being manifest here. On the AOL site the conversations I participated in were very broad, all topics, no focus and none of them referred back to AOL, apart from the media types who were prowling. Perhaps part of that was due to the fact that like Big Brother the L Word already has a ‘social’ expectation of its participants and back to point one above, if your brand is not already a conduit for a part of the global conversation, don’t expect it to become one in the metaverse.

Posted by Gary Hayes ©2007

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