Comments on: Five Most Influential People in Virtual Worlds

by: Matt

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 20:52:33 +0000

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.

by: Ola Fosheim Grøstad

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 20:35:52 +0000

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.

by: Ola Fosheim Grøstad

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 20:27:05 +0000

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.

by: Matt

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 20:26:06 +0000

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

by: Ola Fosheim Grøstad

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 20:13:57 +0000

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.

by: Ola Fosheim Grøstad

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 19:53:58 +0000

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.)

by: Matt

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 18:19:53 +0000

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

by: Matt

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 18:17:26 +0000

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

by: Galleus

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 18:11:06 +0000

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.

by: Ola Fosheim Grøstad

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 18:09:20 +0000

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.