Richard Bartle recently named the five people he thought were the most influential in the history of virtual worlds. I’m in no position to argue with Richard and think his list is pretty darn good anyway.
Then I started thinking about who would be on that list were it confined to the most influential people currently, and I came up with this list. It’s woefully inadequate as I simply don’t know as much about the Asian market as I do about the Western market. In no particular order, except for Rob Pardo as first:
- Rob Pardo. VP of Game Design at Blizzard. Lead mind behind WoW’s polished excellence. Time Magazine named him one of their 100 most influential people in the world due to the 6 million then players (8.5 million now) that call it hobby or habit.
- Timo Soininen. CEO of Sulake, creator of both Habbo (there are individual websites for something like 19 regions, so the .com is just for the US, explaining their not-particularly-high Alexa rank on the .com site) and Disney’s Virtual Magic Kingdom. Habbo is one of the most popular virtual worlds in existence, with something like 8 million unique monthly players. They continue to grow
- Jun Zhu. CEO of The9 (Not an English site, sorry.) The9 is the publisher of World of Warcraft in China as well as MU, Ragnarok 2 Online, Guild Wars, Granado Espada, and other games. China is is easily going to surpass the US in internet users and they are, like the South Koreans, absolutely mad for online games. Jun Zhu seems to have his finger on the pulse of the Chinese online gaming culture.
- Andrew Gower. The founder and driver of Runescape. His game is more popular in the US and Europe than World of Warcraft. 7 million players can’t be wrong.
I promised five people but the truth is that I can’t decide whom the fifth should be. I’m almost positive it should be someone in Asia but I just don’t find myself connected enough to what’s going on over there. There is a very large cultural divide even now, exacerbated by the fact that so few of us speak Korean or any of the Chinese dialects. Richard put Jake Song on his list, which I completely agree with, but Jake left NCSoft to do his own thing and has yet to prove his relevance to the right now.
Richard opined that Philip Rosedale (CEO of Linden Labs, which develops Second Life) could be on the kind of list I’m giving but I’m looking mainly at how many people’s lives have been significantly affected and Second Life is not one of the major virtual worlds there despite the media attention. Having said that, were this a list of the top 10, Philip would be in there, as would Lane Merrifield, the CEO of New Horizons Interactive, developer/publisher of the immensely popular Club Penguin, as well as Matt Bostwick, Senior VP of Franchise Development at MTV, where they have released something like five or six virtual worlds in the last year, backed by big money and big brands.
Who would you put on there, particularly from Asia?
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July 23rd, 2007 at 11:14 pm
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July 23rd, 2007 at 11:18 pm
Raph
How about TJ Kim, CEO of NCSoft? Or the CEO of Nexon?
July 23rd, 2007 at 11:25 pm
Matt
Both sound like good suggestions to me. It’s a pretty tough list. You posted the other day that things seem to be happening so fast there’s no keeping up, and I definitely take my list with a huge grain of salt as a result of sharing that sentiment.
–matt
July 24th, 2007 at 6:53 am
Ola Fosheim Grøstad
I’d be more interested in a list of the top 5 projects to watch than the popularity contests (in terms of impact dating sites would rule any gameworld, right?).
I am currently keeping tabs on Iron Realms, Area, Three Rings and Google. Which ones am I missing?
July 24th, 2007 at 9:06 am
Matt
Hrm, well, I hope you don’t think my list is a popularity contest. I’ve never even met or corresponded with any of the people on the list. It just seems to me that they are the ones really driving virtual worlds among users (as opposed to the f13.net niche crowd or whatever).
–matt
July 24th, 2007 at 9:24 am
Matt
Ola: Sure, in terms of impact dating sites, Google, Myspace, Facebook, etc crush any gameworld, but I’m not sure what your point is.
As for projects to keep an eye on, I suspect a high percentage of them are in Asia but it’s just so hard to keep tabs on things over there.
In the West I’d certainly include Sulake, Bioware, Jagex, New Horizons Interactive, MTV, and more before I’d include IRE, Areae, or Three Rings.
July 24th, 2007 at 11:09 am
Ola Fosheim Grøstad
No, not the list itself, but the worlds you list in terms of their popularity, and influence through popularity. I just mentioned dating sites, because they actually have very solid long term emotional impact on people’s life. I suggest one would learn more about how to fix SL by watching those designs than say WoW. Not that this is relevant for you, I can see why WoW matters to you, given the focus of your upcoming world which might attract customers with similar preferences. For me and people who are more interested in moves out of that section of the design space WoW becomes another datapoint in the DIKU realm which isn’t all that useful. (That is my impression, might be wrong since I don’t have time to examine it in detail.).
What makes IRE, Areae and Three Rings interesting is that they are upcoming, not yet released. I assume the budgets are limited and they suggest that they are doing things somewhat differently in one way or another. By being smaller they also more easily can adapt to users, allow users to have more influence than a juggernaut like Blizzard. Granted, I could be wrong about the budgets, but it matters to me that the budgets are limited. (What do they focus their resources on? How do they position themselves in the market? How do they utilize the users as a resource? Does this prove that others can have success in this or related niches? Etc.)
I don’t think popularity is the most important factor for picking worlds to learn from. E.g. Habbo isn’t that difficult to analyze, so I don’t feel like revisiting it. I am better off looking at other worlds with similar characteristics. There has to be something “new” to the proposed world “study object” in order to make it interesting, for me.
Thanks for the suggestions though, I’ll give them another look.
July 24th, 2007 at 11:11 am
Galleus
This is somewhat out of left field, but how about Doug Dohring, formerly of Neopets? Not himself a big name in the virtual world community, certainly, but his work in transforming the Neopets brand prior to the Viacom buyout was amazing.
Neopets as a virtual world is a contentious classification, I suppose, but many of the elements are certainly shared with some of the more straightforward browser-based virtual worlds, and with 140+ million accounts, can’t be readily ignored.
July 24th, 2007 at 11:17 am
Matt
WoW matters because it affects so many people’s lives. Same with Habbo, the worlds The9 publishes in China, and Runescape. This list isn’t about what’s most influential/interesting to me personally as I don’t actually use any of the many worlds developed/published by people on the list. I’m trying to take a global perspective and look at who has had the greatest impact on the world through their work in virtual worlds. Small companies like my own are simply unable to have that kind of influence though of course it’s always possible that small companies will grow into the next big influencer.
You seem to be talking more about what’s interesting to you rather than what’s really influencing the world. My list is probably quite suspect in fact because it’s not Asian-heavy enough.
As for limited budgets: Everyone has limited budgets. The difference is just in scale, not in whether there are limits or not.
I think you’re very wrong about Habbo being easy to analyze, incidentally. If it was that easy, other, better funded competitors would have come along and had success crushing them. The devil is usually in the specific details of implementation and a high-level overview of a product does not give you much of an education about those details.
In any case, what you can learn from isn’t the same as what’s influential. Madonna influenced millions of kids but I wouldn’t say there’s a lot to learn there.
–matt
July 24th, 2007 at 11:19 am
Matt
I don’t think Neopets is a virtual world (just being an online community with games doesn’t make something a world) but in any case this list is meant to be who are the most influential -now- rather than 2 years ago or whatnot.
–matt
July 24th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
Ola Fosheim Grøstad
Well, smaller budgets forces more focused spending and it also forces developers to not compete head-to-head with the juggernauts. Sony and EA can decide to compete directly with Blizzard if they want to, for others that proposition doesn’t make much sense. Hence the importance of smaller enterprices in relation to design.
(You’re right, of course I judge worlds by whether I find their type of influence or potential influence interesting. I don’t think these types of virtual worlds have much noticable impact on the real world, yet. Except perhaps on worried governments and academics.)
July 24th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Ola Fosheim Grøstad
Re Habbo, if one abstracts out the presentation you are essentially left with a social website. There are many national successful sites of that kind. One important thing that seems to separate Habbo from the others is that they have spent time on making the product smooth and easy to pay for. Since cell-phone companies are proprietary monopolist monsters and different nations have different preferences that is probably a very daunting task… What they have done is challenging, but I don’t feel it is difficult to understand why they succeed. Though, there might be important details I have missed.
July 24th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
Matt
By “these types of virtual worlds” do you mean the smaller ones like ours or do you mean existing virtual worlds of any size haven’t had a noticeable impact on the “real world” yet?
–matt
July 24th, 2007 at 1:27 pm
Ola Fosheim Grøstad
Sorry for spamming. A comparison of the failure of The Palace and the success of Habbo is perhaps telling. The Palace was popular among teenagers and used the same way as Habbo when the plug was pulled on it. I can’t say for sure what The Palace missed. One thing was perhaps timing, since teenagers are now more used to pay for cell-phone content than they were then, but I feel that The Palace could have done more with the particular design of their business model. Easy and seemingly negliable (tiny) purchases creates a comfort zone for the users (i.e. they learn to familiarize themselves with spending money for glitz in a new way with very low perceived risk.) Would The Palace have been a success with Habbo’s payment options and strategy? I don’t know, but not having it is another nail in the coffin.
July 24th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
Ola Fosheim Grøstad
I meant any size. I didn’t mean not noticable (wrong word) as they make the headlines and seemingly affects at least some Asian countries. I meant that they (WoW, SL etc) have no serious impact on the world, even though they have some impact on some obsessed/addicted individuals’ lives. In other words: nothing that governments need to worry about. They are currently on the level of celebrities, shiny and fun, but overall low impact. In comparison the WWW has high impact on the world.
July 24th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
Matt
I can’t think of anything that is ultimately more valuable than human attention and time, and virtual worlds have impacted tens of millions of people’s lives by occupying their attention and time. Does VWs have the impact yet of television or aluminum? No. But it’s not a binary condition. Everything has an impact on real life and it’s simply a matter of how large of an impact.
Whether governments have to worry about them or not is an odd metric, but since multiple governments already do “worry” about them (South Korea, China, the US, Thailand, among others) they surely pass that metric.