Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of virtual world and MMO fashion
Hamlet may be a bit smitten with Facebook-driven virtual world Cloud Party, but so far it hasn't done much to get my attention. Although I am curious to see what many SL designers will be doing on this new platform, the truth is that right now Cloud Party is just not very fashionista-friendly.
So why does that matter? In my experience, virtual fashionistas are big spenders in online economies, and the demographic overlap with avid Facebook gamers (in particular women age 30-50) means that Cloud Party could be a great platform to develop a big market of big spenders... If it can keep them interested. Cloud Party as it is right now lacks key fashionista-friendly features, making an avatar-focused online life way more difficult and way less fun than it is in competing virtual worlds (including Second Life).
Here's three features Cloud Party needs, to succeed with virtual fashionistas:
We're nearly at a point in gaming and virtual world avatar customization where sliders can be taken for granted. When even hack-and-slash free-to-play MMORPGs have sliders to fine-tune your facial features, how can a Facebook-based virtual world only have preset heads and bodies?
It's possible that sliders or shape-changing functions simply have yet to be implemented, but the current shape selection interface seems to imply that, like clothing, different shapes will be pre-set and unmodifiable. I can handle this in a generic fantasy game experience, but the more a platform tries to resemble reality (or connect itself to my real life), the more I want to be able to customize my appearance, and the less I'm willing to let slide in the name of fantasy. Shape modification is one of the most fundamental staples of avatar customization, and it's very hard for me to get excited about a platform that so far lacks even a scrap of it.
More Advanced Navigation
Cloud Party will eventually have user-made content and stores, that's a given, but every time I look at the Navigation system I get quite concerned about how exactly I'll be expected to get to those stores.
Right now you can hop from floating island to floating island, or access popular/recent locations from the phone interface. This works well for a small world, but it will need serious modifications to adapt as the world grows. I'm assuming this more advanced version of Navigation is in the works (or will be) because the alternative is almost unfathomable. For all the shit we talk about Second Life's search function, the idea of being in a virtual world without any kind of location search is practically a nightmare to me. Imagine finding a new shop and trying to give someone directions to it? "Well, go to Beginner Zone 8, then go to the island floating in the north-east, then go to the island floating on the left of the island in the north-west, then..."
3rd Person Camera Controls
I love Cloud Party's smartphone-inspired UI menu (which is about a million times clearer and more intuitive than Second Life's interface) and I think the idea of a cameraphone-like snapshot interface is absolutely adorable. This is something that The Sims has done as well, and it makes the world feel a little bit more immersive. But here's the problem: If you use Instagram, Facebook, or any other platform that exposes you to other peoples' cellphone photography, think about how often people take pictures of things around them compared to how often they take pictures of themselves. Now think about Second Life snapshots-- how often do we take pictures of just a place or another person's avatar without our own avatars in the shot as well? Personally, I'd estimate that of every 50 SL snapshots I take, 5 at most don't feature my own avatar. Sure, not everyone is a self-centered blogger like me, but the fact remains that our avatar is the center of our metaverse experiences... So including a camera mode that cannot physically capture that avatar is a tremendous problem.
You could always just take a screenshot of the window as I did for my header image, but because you can't float the camera around freely, you need to zoom out quite far if you want to fit the whole avatar into frame. One simple thing could fix this: a 3rd person mode for Cloud Party's camera; just one button that you click when you're in Camera mode that turns the lens on you, but lets you control the camera with the same freedom as you can when shooting in 1st person. Vanity shots would be fun, easy, and still maintain the same immersive smartphone aesthetic.
Fellow fashionistas, have you tried Cloud Party yet? Did it click with you, or was it missing a certain je ne sais quoi? Tell me in the comments below!
Iris Ophelia (Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.
Yes, I can see how the world will require all these features. However first and foremost it requires customers to purchase all this wonderful content. To me it seems an ideal environment to role play, with friends clustering their islands around themselves. SL have created a load of content creators with mesh, so at least there's that where blue mars didn't have this in their favor.
Posted by: Cube Republic | Wednesday, June 27, 2012 at 10:55 AM
Shape-Tweaking Sliders
Yes this is very much a problem.
Despite heads and bodies being entirely switchable with user created alternatives in Cloud Party, it's still only switching between the same inability of making fine-tuned, minute adjustments to one's appearance.
Cloud Party supports COLLADA which has for a very long time supported morph targets. Should a feature request medium ever arise I'm betting this will be near the top of the list.
More Advanced Navigation
1. Every single position in Cloud Party has an associated URL. Notice that when you move, and stop, after a second or two your URL bar updates. That's the URL to your exact location in world, and shareable to others.
2. Everyone has a 'landing pad' objects in their Utility palette. When you place one, that spot becomes available in the navigation pane for everyone.
3. Apparently a 'Marketplace' is coming. If it hooks into the above two points, I think stores will have an easy time sharing location.
Posted by: Ezra | Wednesday, June 27, 2012 at 11:23 AM
I've been visiting Cloud Party a lot and I have to agree with a lot of what you've said. The biggest issue for me is the camera, even more so than the avatar customization. Perhaps I feel that way now because I've been seeing people upload all sorts of mesh items? I dislike the default avatar so much that I wasn't even thinking about wanting to tweak it, lol. I just figured that it's so ugly, some genius content creator is going to create a mesh avatar for me to wear that will completely hide the default.
Going back to the camera. They REALLY need to fine-tune that, and not just for the sake of snapshots. Besides spending on clothing and accessories for their avs, fashionistas like to beautify their homes. The way the camera works when you're placing furniture in Build mode is, frankly, vomitacious. No really, I've found it a little nauseating, like virtual vertigo or something.
With all that said, I just want to clarify that I'm not bashing Cloud Party. I personally like it so far because I see potential in it. I hope this doesn't go the way of Blue Mars. The people running the Cloud Party show have been in-world a lot of the times I've visited, hanging around the Beginner Zone sandbox and playing with the building tools alongside other avatars, as well as listening to the random comments that pop up in the chat log (although I'm sure their forums are still their preferred method for providing feedback). (Example: I mentioned how snapshots stopped going to my Facebook album. Sam Thompson was there and asked for some info; a day later, the log in page had a message about FB photos being fixed.)
And speaking of the Beginner Zone, it's so awesome to enter that region as the 20th avatar and still have everything rez instantly and get a solid 60 fps, ha! I love SL but the lack of lag in Cloud Party is a thing of beauty.
I've been fairly snapshot happy, here's what I have so far: http://www.flickr.com/photos/melaniekiddofsl/sets/72157630233664652/
Posted by: Melanie | Wednesday, June 27, 2012 at 11:25 AM
All valid concerns that I agree with.
But I feel the reaction people will have will not be, "Ok, that sucked, what can I use instead" but "Ok, that sucked, virtual worlds are not for me."
But because these games on Facebook are so good at getting so many to look, and spend a few dimes - they don't need to improve it for retention. They just need you to buy a hit of their crack once, because the line out the door of people waiting to find out how much it sucks will be endless.
They might not bother with fixing these issues, as it might take them months to discover the impact of leaving these flaws as they are. And by that time some folks will have already collected their check and moved on.
Posted by: Pussycat Catnap | Wednesday, June 27, 2012 at 11:32 AM
@Pussycat -- you are confusing CP with SL. It's LL that believed they didn't have to fix anything because the suckers would always be there to shovel money into their coffers. CP appears to be not only adding things we have been asking for for about a decade, but fixed the FBPhoto issue in less than 24 hours when it was reported to them.
I can only imagine the joy the CP users must have felt, reporting a problem and having the dev team fix it. It has been many years since LL has been so attentive to my needs. *sniffs*
Posted by: shockwave yareach | Wednesday, June 27, 2012 at 11:44 AM
@Pussycat, beware of prejudging something simply because it is FB based and, in theory, linked to one's RL identity. You've made it abundantly clear why you hate that idea.
For other issues, it's simply too early to draw the conclusions you do. LL has let outstanding problems sit untended for years; the CP team has had only a few weeks.
So while I am prepared to again be disappointed in a purported online utopia, as most dreamers get disappointed, I'd say that suggestions such as Iris' are where we might start.
Posted by: Iggy | Wednesday, June 27, 2012 at 12:08 PM
Thanks for this feedback Iris. I am extremely impressed with CP so far, and imho it is already ahead of where BlueMars was and in some ways already ahead of SL. The biggest thing to consider here is that we are talking about 5 people who make it, 4 programmers and an artist. Anything that gets done is going to take a bit longer to implement than if it were a company of 100, though in some instances, like the FB photo fix, that small size is a benefit and led to a veryquick fix.
I look forward to 3 things from CP before I see it succeeding:
• Economy (with the ability to cash out, which they were not originally going to do but have since decided to include) and a decent exchange rate.
• Land/Island rentals for both residential and commercial use with lower prices than SL.
• Non-FB authentication for identity and age, thus opening up the possibility for both anonymity and adult content controlled within age-restricted areas.
On the last point, I dont think anyone wants an open orgy of adult content and the folks at CP certainly want to stay away from the bad press SL got on it. However, adult content is almost imperative for the survival of a virtual world to some degree. In the case of CP, that degree would lean more to simply adults being adults and not having to babysit a bunch of 13 year old Beiber fans than it would toward anything sexual, though some will want that ability between consenting adults also, and on your own land the choice should be available. Many businesses rely on the existent possibility of sexuality to survive, including fashion and furniture and housing; Houses are purchased by couples more often than not. Couples exist because romance and sexuality are possible. It is a necessary aspect of re/creating many types of reality and certainly fantasy. The result of having any virtual world, with or without adult content, that has human beings inside it includes human sexuality, as the people who tried to run IMVU without it found out. People find a way, so it is perhaps better to allow it via control and regulation than to attempt to ignore or repress an important part of what it means to be human.
I am very eager to see where this platform goes. At the very least, LL having some solid competition is a welcome thing. They have grown complacent through the lack of it.
Posted by: maxwell graf | Wednesday, June 27, 2012 at 12:39 PM
Its just another tech startup-like idea. My opinion is based on what I've seen coming out of these folks for years.
They put out a thin product, grab a lot of investment, IPO, and sell off, fold, or neglect.
Catering to the FB crowd means catering to a crowd that doesn't invest deeply in -anything-. So the above tactic is often the right tactic to take. You get their cash before they see the next shiny popup somewhere and both parties move on.
Posted by: Pussycat Catnap | Wednesday, June 27, 2012 at 03:02 PM
@PussyCat
If they were giving interviews to TechCrunch instead of Hamlet, answering questions at trade shows and conferences instead of in-world, were applicants for YCombinator instead of bootstrapping, and planning to sell 'Energy' instead of virtual land, you'd have a point.
Posted by: Ezra | Wednesday, June 27, 2012 at 03:11 PM
"Catering to the FB crowd means catering to a crowd that doesn't invest deeply in -anything"
That's a pretty broad statement -- how many Facebook games have you played?
Posted by: Hamlet Au | Wednesday, June 27, 2012 at 04:24 PM
Don't invest deeply in anything? Really? Tell that to my college friends who've been spamming me with invites for the same damn games for the past 3 years! I've played about 150 hours of Skyrim and know that world like the back of my hand, and that time investment doesn't even compare to what a lot of casual gamers put in to their favourite FB-based titles.
Posted by: Iris Ophelia | Wednesday, June 27, 2012 at 05:32 PM
Thank you for the feature suggestions. We are very much on the same page, all three of these features were already on our todo list in some form or another. In fact, we pushed a very basic island name search function (in the navigation app) just moments ago.
The self-portrait mode on the camera phone is definitely coming soon. In the meantime you can zoom out by scrolling back, and then use left-click to rotate around your character. Not nearly good enough (no panning or composition control), but a start.
Adding sliders for avatar adjustment is a bit more complicated, but something we've built these avatars to handle, and something we have a lot of experience with from working at Cryptic Studios. We also have more initial clothing choices coming, but figure that getting a marketplace up and running will be a quicker solution to the problem of not having enough clothes selection.
Also, I understand being skeptical about us as we are a new company on the block and no one knows who we are, but please believe me that we are here to stay and absolutely listening to our users. We have not taken some massive VC round or hired a bunch of marketing people: we're 4 programmers and an artist in an old office with an ant problem. This is our first company, and we're all game developers that wanted to try something new. I'm pretty excited about where Cloud Party could be in a few more months, and I hope you will help us build it into something lasting and great.
Posted by: Sam Thompson | Wednesday, June 27, 2012 at 07:12 PM
@Sam - One last suggestion would be to consider creating a special kind of Performance Island. It's like a regular one, but has two states - open and onair. When in onair mode, nobody else can enter and every shard that is created mirrors what the avatars in the original are doing. You have now made it possible for a band to play to as many people as want to see the show.
I look forward to this, I really do. But I will have to create a FB account with my avatar's name, since there is no way I'll permit my gaming to be tied to my real name. I not only do not want my recreation posted far and wide for all to see, I do not want even the possibility that my recreation will be posted far and wide for all to see. Or you could have a login system that doesn't require facebook; that would be nice as well.
Posted by: shockwave yareach | Thursday, June 28, 2012 at 06:48 AM
Actually some of that is a plus. Get a little tired of female avis with a butt 4 times too big for their bodies (and them thinking its sexy), or newbies machine-gunning LMs -- "Hi - oh, you're gone already"
Posted by: Ajax Manatiso | Thursday, June 28, 2012 at 09:54 AM
Possibilities are huge, without limits.
The normal map use can bring high quality avatars and upload free is great.
Help for french people : www.cloud-party.fr
See you in clouds
Posted by: Cloudpartyfr | Monday, July 30, 2012 at 12:44 PM