There *Is* Innovation in Web-Based Virtual Worlds -- Just More Social, Than Technical

My pal Daniel Terdiman of CNET has been writing about Second Life for about as long as me, and last Friday, wrote a rather downbeat editorial on the state of 3D virtual worlds, which are losing investment dollars to social games like Farmville, and web-based kid worlds like Club Penguin and Gaia Online. "[While those] make financial sense," he writes, in comparison to Second Life, "they aren't all that satisfying intellectually." Second Life, by contrast, has "a complex economy, a deep social structure, sophisticated politics and always seemed, to me, at least, as the jumping off point for truly groundbreaking technology."

Of course Dan's right that Second Life has the lead on most technological and governance topics. But I think this understates the social innovation going on in casual web worlds. You will often see in them the kind of emergent behavior we admire in Second Life -- namely, user-generated content, and deep engagement within the virtual community, and the real world. Consider these data points:

• Club Penguin has an in-game newspaper called the Penguin Times, almost all of which comprises stories, articles, and artwork submitted by the user base. (The company gets 30,000 submissions a day.) It boasts a readership of 6 million (making it larger than most real world newspapers.)
• The avatar-based user forum of Gaia Online attracts one million posts a day. (That was in 2007, it's likely much larger now.) These range from topics on every imaginable subject, from pop culture to politics and deeply personal issues, as kids learn to express themselves through their avatars.
• Users of the social network game FarmVille have donated over $1 million worth of virtual seed donations to benefit Haiti in a very short time.
• There is a large community of FarmVille users (well over 13,000) devoted to creating and sharing artwork made on their farm plots.
• In YoVille, the social network virtual world, a number of player have used the in-game whiteboard to create drawings -- then sell them as art to other players. (This was entirely emergent behavior unplanned by YoVille's developers.)

As I've said before, it strikes me as strange that advocates of virtual worlds, especially educators, non-profit groups, and other idealists, are not devoting more attention to emergent social behavior coming out of casual worlds like these. They may not look or act as immersive as Second Life, but that doesn't mean they don't inspire similar levels of engagement or innovation.

Comments

[Arcadia Codesmith]

In UO, people used to create art by arranging objects on the ground. When decay was introduced to clean up the clutter, they created artwork inside bags instead.

There's been much discussion of late about why MMO developers should pay attention to social worlds. Nobody seems to be devoting many pixels to the fact that social world development, in a great many ways, is simply recapitulating MMO development.

[Two Worlds]

Most social worlds are free.
Most MMOs are not.
Free is not profitable.

There's your answer right there, Arcadia.

[Hamlet Au]

There's a bunch of free-to-play virtual worlds that make a lot of money, actually.

You're right, Arcadia -- thanks to social games, what we're seeing, I think, are gaming concepts quickly getting adapted by a mass audience. Including improvised UGC.

[Sidney Smalls]

** There's a bunch of free-to-play virtual worlds that make a lot of money, actually. **

Yes. Including Second Life.

[Two Worlds]

It helps if you can literally print your own money.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Creating your own currency is cool. Creating a currency that other people value enough to buy with real money? Priceless.

Ooooo, that reminds me, time to go check Faunasphere and see if I got my monthly allotment of Bux!