Children of Flickr: Making the Massively Multiplayer Social Web

This was the last morning session and ended up being my favorite. This session was moderated by Justin Hall from GameLayers with three panelists: Rajat Paharia from Bunchball, Christopher Chapman from Areae and Gabe Zichermann from rmbr.

The theme of this session - Everything can be a Game.

This session focused on game dynamics and how game psychology can drive engagement, interaction and loyalty on your website, traditionally a non-gaming environment.

Gabe was clearly passionate about the gaming concept and explains it as "the only force that exists without the threat of violence that makes people do irrational things."

Here's a few key takeaways I walked away with:

• The definition of a game is changing and what people really want is to do something they like, something they consider fun, and/or something that makes them feel like they accomplished something.
• There are three basic things to make something fun: Challenges, Leaderboards and Points - when added to any experience it changes peoples behavior.
  Advice is to think about how to make an experience fun from day 1. If you’re not in a situation to do that you can still go through the experience and layer in gaming mechanics to et more engagement and interaction from your existing community.
• Game mechanics involve rewarding people along their journey. You can have different metrics for success to make them feel like they are 'winning'; for example slice and dice the data - different activities can have different leaderboards and that data can be grouped by network or time.
• Gaming Essentials from Gabe: It needs to be overly simple (no instructions required); you need to be able to play with one hand; you need to be able to start/stop playing at any time; and it needs to be infinitely playable.
• Interesting stats - woman who are 35+ are not thought to be traditional 'gamers' however they are the demographic that drives a big portion of the gaming industry including Yahoo Games.
• Gabe dropped an interesting bomb about how women don’t respond as well to 3D environments and the fact that they are not well liked by a lot of people because they are confrontational. He recommends sticking to a 2D environment like the world we live itn. He says 2D environments are easier to navigate and ultimately more flexible.

Virtual Marketing is a Reality!

First it was virtual worlds, then virtual shopping now it's virtual workspaces! Qwaq, a company that creates 3D collaborative environments for meetings just grew their piggy bank by $7M to grow the company. Similar to Second Life it uses avatars so that each person has a virtual self - but with the focus on an actual 'workspace' there is a focus on sharing and collaborating office apps including Word, PowerPoint, Excel and others. Their initial customer list which includes BP, Intel and HP, is impressive and it validates the growing interest in virtual 3D worlds.

Virtual Worlds and 3D animations is also a growing trend in marketing. Here are a few things that I'm aware of:

3D Product Demos
Already companies like Cisco, Intel and even smaller companies like Mirapoint offer 3D product views. The virtual products are also starting to replace those that get shipped out for roadshows and tradeshows with the help of companies like Kaon Interactive which bring the interaction on a large touch screen so your products can be there without really being there.

3D Holographic Presentations
Musion Systems takes that a step further with true Star Trek 'Beam me up, Scotty' type of functionality where you can have a 3D holographic image of a person appear next to you on a live stage - even if that person is thousands of miles away!



Virtual World Events
A number of companies are hosting events on Second Life - here's a machinima video of a Second Life event I was involved with when we announced Cisco's Connected Life Contest winners.



Virtual Websites
Brookstone's 3D store is a good example of this for B2C situations. The Second Life sites like the one Microsoft has can also be considered a virtual website (or "island").

Demonstration of Brookstone's 3D Store

Here's a show-and-tell demonstration of Brookstone's 3D store.




Here are some related links for more information:

Brookstone Website

Brookstone 3D Store

Previous post mentioned in video

My First Second Life Event

I attended Crayonville's Virtual Branding event on Second Life (SL) this morning - naked!

For those who need a little background on SL before I go any further - it's a virtual world and is designed so that anything you can do in the 'real' world you can essentially do in SL. There are other virtual worlds (Active Worlds and There.com to name a couple) but businesses in general seem to have gravitated to SL as the platform of choice and use it as another medium to communicate with people. SL has it's critics and it's supporters - based on my experience I think I'm somewhere in the middle.

Okay, let me back up and recap my naked experience. When I first tried to join the event I had to log off my company's VPN which blocks SL due to security reasons (I don't really know the details of that). Then as I started the application I was prompted by SL to upgrade my platform which meant I had to restart SL. That took a few minutes but then I was finally in - but I couldn't see anything. I looked like a flashlight in the dark so I thought my screen was still loading but after a few minutes of walking around blind I realized that the app just opened up with a layered window that was covering my view.

Finally I'm in - and I can see. But now I don't have any clothes on! And my avatar looks pretty life-like, so I'm a little embarrassed. On top of that people keep asking me where my clothes are. All I know is that they're not on me! I figured out how to join a private chat and get some help but the function to put clothes on wasn't working - apparently it's a known issue that might be resolved by restarting SL (again) but I decided that I wasted too much time already and wanted to do what I came here to do - listen to the event.

The general message of the event itself was that virtual branding should complement what you're already doing (in the real world) and that measuring it is difficult. The event panelists explained that you need to look at SL as another way to engage in conversation with your customers - where they are. So if your customers are here, so should you. But are they here? Well there's a lot of debate on that one but one thing is for certain: the corporate community hasn't been too shy about building virtual worlds of their own (Cisco , Sun, and IBM to name a few). I know Cisco holds press conferences here, seminars, executive briefings and soon job fairs!

One of the cool things about SL is that while I was listening to the panelists I was able to participate in chat conversations - one person explained it as being able to talk to your neighbor as if you were in a live event. I have to admit that was pretty cool. And it was much easier to start and participate in a conversation than it is in the real world - plus you’re not limited to talking to the person to your left or right - you have the whole room.

I think SL has a ways to go and that Linden Research needs to focus on simplifying the user experience. If they can ensure a consistent and positive experience for users I think we'll see an uptake on the adoption rate. Personally I'm not convinced of the ROI but in any case SL isn't going away any time soon. As a marketer I think it's worth spening time to understand so I will be looking forward to the monthly events that Crayonville is going to host in SL as a way to get my feet wet.