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I really do try not to bring politics into this blog too often but I cannot help myself sometimes and am likely to give in more often with the primaries coming up. I think all the major candidates on both sides of the aisle suck but Rudy Giuliani scares the hell out of me. He was recently asked if he thought waterboarding constituted torture. His reply:
“It depends on how it’s done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it.”
What I think Rudy is implying here is that if the Iranians were to use waterboarding on a captured American, it’d be torture, but if the Americans were to use waterboarding on a captured Iranian, it’d be “aggressive questioning” or some other euphemism.
This kind of double standard (along with, for instance, America telling Turkey that it shouldn’t strike at the Kurdish terrorists sitting across its border when America went across the world to invade a country that did not contain terrorists striking at the US) exemplifies why America has lost its role as the moral leader of the free world. It is indefensible to decide that behavior A is evil if done by actor Y but fine if done by actor Z. We are defined by our actions, not the other way around.
Raph has a great post about the way in which virtual worlds are likely to continue to enter the mainstream. In short, he points out that chat is not enough. Purely social virtual worlds are destined to stay out of the mainstream as socializing-only will not keep people around. What does? Unsurprisingly, gamey virtual worlds, which account for probably 99% of virtual world users (something the media seems to forget quite often). Why unsurprisingly? Well, as with so many things in this space, one just has to look at the venerable text MUD market. The social worlds (MOOs, MUCKs, etc) are dwarfed in popularity and number by the gamey worlds. There’s no reason to expect that’s going to change just because you write a 3d client for a world.
What it comes down to is that games are one of the best way we know to engage users. Games are often some of the most engaging experiences available. For instance, Runescape is the most engaging website for UK users - they spend more time on it per user than any other site. AdventureQuest is also in the top 7 in the UK, though neither of these are in the top 50 sites in terms of page views.
If we look at the platform du jour - Facebook - we find that of the top 25 apps in terms of daily active users, games account for about 15 of them. The most popular tv broadcasts? Games (Superbowl, World Cup, etc).
Games are mainstream. Virtual worlds are not yet but the gamey ones are the only ones that come close to it. Second Life might get namechecked frequently in the media but the frequency of that is completely unrelated to how many people actually use it. I feel like saying this is stating the obvious but there’s such a bubble around social virtual worlds that I’m unsure how distorted ‘obvious’ has become to those in the bubble.
(What Would Don Draper Do?)
If you’re not watching AMC’s Mad Men, I feel sorry for you. Season 1 finished last week (though I’m just watching it now thanks to Tivo). Go get it on iTunes.
That is all.
This is pretty cool. The NFL is creating its own virtual world, with an area for each team. Looks like somewhat customizable avatars w/ minigames. The style they’ve chosen is interesting. I am not the target demographic of this world (in as far as I don’t like watching sports) and upon showing this to one of my football-obsessed friends I am wondering who they are targetting. My friend (in my highly scientific survey of one person) thought it looked ridiculous and embodied absolutely nothing that he loves about football, but he’s got to be among the hardest of the hardcore (brags that he hasn’t missed watching a Bears game since 1985 or something).
This looks to me like a play to get kids interested in football and the NFL brand at a younger age than many do currently rather than a play to extend the NFL experience into virtual worlds for adult fans. This kind of brand-strengthening play is, I think, going to be the dominant form of virtual world going forward (think MTV’s various virtual worlds, Barbie Virtual World, etc) though I wonder how many we’re going to see that aren’t targeted at tweens/teens until the generation that has grown up with somewhat mainstream virtual worlds gets older.
On a related note, though there’s no CSI virtual world, this week’s much-hyped CSI tie-in with Second Life is squarely aimed at adults, and I think it’s going to be interesting to see what kind of adoption SL gets from this brand tie-in.
About a year ago I wrote about the idea of using split-testing to refine the user experience in online games (it’s not really suitable for stand-alone retail games). Today I caught a brief article on Redline China talking about how the Chinese online game giant Zhengtu is using a very simple version of split-testing for its newest online game - Juren. (For those who aren’t familiar, Zhengtu’s biggest game - Zhengtu Online - is, I believe, the #2 MMO in China, behind Fantasy Westward Journey. Don’t feel too bad if you’re a Westerner and haven’t heard of them.)
Zhengtu is running two version of Juren during its beta test, and will launch the game with the more popular one, along with selected favorite features from the other version. It’s the most basic, single-pass implementation of split-testing that one could implement but it’s an interesting step in the right direction. What I’d love to see would be a multi-step process, since split-testing works best when you can fairly quickly pick a ‘winner’ and a ‘loser’ among two options, and then take the winner and put it up against another version, rinse, and repeat.
Figuring out how to do multi-stage split-testing in games is kind of a holy grail in terms of user acquisition I feel like. It’s hard, because it requires real, live users and because altering games to set up new cases for split-testing is a lot more work than doing so with ad copy (where split-testing originated), but think of the potential for tuning your newbie experience when you can, in a matter of a day, objectively measure what is the stickier experience, then take the winning experience and pit it against a new variation, etc. It’s actually kind of ideally suited for text MUDs given the relatively low content creation costs except for the fact that text MUD populations are not big enough to split in half without major social costs (though one could possibly separate off the newbie experience and then route people into “the game” once they’re done with the newbie stage).
No-chance-in-hell-but-sports-a-hot-wife Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich has opened an official HQ in Second Life. I’m unsure how significant this really is though. The director of multimedia for the campaign, Chad Ely, had this to say, “We do them all,” said Ely. “Any and all ways we can get out to the people and let them know about Dennis Kucinich. That’s all we have to do. He’s got all the other candidates beat on the issues, so his stand on the issues will do the job for us.”
I certainly agree with Mr. Ely regarding Kucinich having all the other candidates beat on the issues but it won’t make a bit of difference in the election. He has zero realistic chance of winning, which is why he can afford to get into Second Life. He doesn’t have to worry about tarring himself with SL’s image problems, so I’m not sure whether this represents a vote of confidence in Second Life or just effectively checking off a box on a list of any and all social networking opportunities they can think of.
I have an interesting dilemma. We have 16 player races for Earth Eternal, but the world is not black and white like, say, WoW’s (where either you are on the Horde side or the Alliance side, and what race you pick completely determines that. There is no real possibility within their story/world/game rules for a human (Alliance side) to decide that the Tauren are noble creatures worth allying with and effectively switching sides as a result. This certainly simplifies things in some ways as you’re able to, 100% of the time, easily identify an enemy or a potential friend by just glancing at his/her race.
And 
in equally timely news, Next-Gen Biz writes that a new report out from consulting firm the Yankee Group says that Second Life is overhyped.
The report’s conclusions are fairly silly though, at least from the quotes in Next Gen, which writes, “Yankee Group said that the lack of growth may be attributed to the fact that people are opting to go mobile instead of sitting in front of a PC.” They quoted Yankee Group as saying, “Despite near-continuous coverage in the popular and business press, metaverses like Second Life are experiencing slowing growth and limited impact because of the tethered nature of their virtual world experience.”
Second Life isn’t stagnating because it’s not got a mobile client or because it requires a PC to use. It’s a niche product and it’s captured about as much of its niche as it looks likely to capture.
MPOGD has an interview with me today about Earth Eternal. I talk a bit about the character customization we’re going to allow, address the “furry issue” briefly, and expose my megalomania.