sophrosyne_sl: Old Media Thinking In New Bottles

Sophrosyne Stenvaag (

sophrosyne_sl) wrote,
@ 2007-10-03 22:20:00

Entry tags:

business, ideas

Old Media Thinking In New Bottles
So, I've been thinking a lot about community in SL, since it looks like I'm going to be building and nurturing one.

I'm trying to talk to everyone who might know something, or have ideas to share, and reading everything I can find.

Sometimes, that's not such a good idea...

Take this article today -Why Virtual Worlds Are Overtaking the Game Industry...

Why? Community, of course!

"There will always be a place for platforms that just want to allow users to play a game together, but now interaction is key. Community is key," said Sherman [Christopher Sherman, Executive director of the upcoming Virtual Worlds Fall Conference and Expo] who jumped from the game industry to the virtual worlds industry late last year. "The content revolves around and facilitates the community. Treating the online environment like less of a game and more of community or virtual world is key. Major media companies are now looking at anything they do as online entertainment - with a virtual world tied to it."

Oookay.... that started off *very* well, but how does "online entertainment-with a virtual world tied to it" equal "community"?

It doesn't. In fact, they're *opposites*!

Community is lateral, equal, mutual. Entertainment is hierarchical, unequal. Twentieth century media was about entertainment - shoving product down the mouth of a "consumer" like food into a foie gras goose. 21st century media is about community - peer to peer content sharing. The role for big corporations is as an enabler - in building the marketplace, not in selling the day-old fish.

From there, the article goes into a death spiral of Old Media That Doesn't Get It:

"How many games have a strong community?" asks Kaneva CEO Christopher Klaus. "If you go to a lot of the game sites themselves, the website for the games, almost all of them are microsites. In most cases, what's happened is that the community has created their own websites around the game. That's fine, but ultimately I think that it would be stronger if the game producer thought about, 'Why not build that overall community into the game site itself?'"

Even massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings: Online haven't kept up with the social needs of their community. Instead, a virtual cottage industry of MMOG-themed social networks has sprung up to fill the void, with one, Curse.com, seeing 3.5 million unique visitors per month. That's great for Curse, but less than ideal for Blizzard. Kaneva is solving that problem by creating Web interfaces for when players can't sign on to the virtual world.

OMG, the *community* created the community! And Kaneva is "solving that problem"!

Which is it- are people really *that stupid,* or is the impulse to control others that strong in the human psyche? I don't know which answer I fear most!

OTOH, here's someone who gets it as profoundly as the corporate zombies don't: I'd mentioned last week that Tateru Nino gave a brilliant talk at the Life 2.0 Conference, and posted the chatlog. The whole final text of her speech, with graphs, is now available, and it's worth reading, to rinse the taste of cluelessness right away....

(Post a new comment)

	http://getopenid.com/dandellion 2007-10-04 09:09 am UTC (link)
	I got confused when you said that community and entertainment are opposites. Hey! I am having a lot of fun and entertainment in my communities. I would agree if we define entertainment as it was in 20th century. But, 20th century passed (and I am personally very pleased it did) and some terms and definitions need to be changed. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	sophrosyne_sl 2007-10-04 07:23 pm UTC (link)
	That's a good point... I'm stuck on a definition of "entertainment" that sees it as a transitive verb - something the active authority does to the passive consumer. That may be my own backlash against 20th Century brainwashing, I dunno - (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	galatea_gynoid 2007-10-05 01:54 am UTC (link)
	I always find my friends entertaining. ;) You're conflating "entertainment" with "the products produced by 'The Entertainment Industry'". But I knew what you meant so I wasn't going to nit-pick. :) As long as it's understood that "The Entertainment Industry" does not in fact have a monopoly on "entertainment". (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	sophrosyne_sl 2007-10-05 06:10 pm UTC (link)
	laughs I know I'm an endless source of amusement! :P And, yeah, I think that's my point - that "entertainment" doesn't need to be a commodity, and we can do just fine generating it peer-to-peer.... (Reply to this)(Parent)

vidaltripsa
2007-10-04 10:13 pm UTC (link)

I think I'm willing to go out on a limb here and say that virtual worlds can never survive as a business platform, and because of that what we perceive as virtual worlds are either on very shaky ground (like Linden Lab of late), or are simply not true worlds as they try to keep on the profitable side. The reason I say this is because there is no way I see for these worlds to overtake the games industry, itself enjoying a higher turnover than Hollywood (at least, that's what I heard a few years ago).

Once punters get logged into virtual worlds like Second Life, the biggest business and creative obstacle seems to be to keep them there, and I do believe that by human nature most people will seek out direction or prescribed challenges like those of a game. SL and its kin are wonderful places to relax and explore, but sometimes you just want to be led along, immersed in someone else's vision or take part in a narrative that can be shared with others like you would a film or book. Games offer that in a much more solid form than user-generated worlds.

My point is perhaps that community is overrated. For we that use it, it's brill, but I hold back from seeing it as a focal point in gaming's future. Good games are those led by artistic vision, a solid understanding of what it is to craft fun and the sheer accessibility of an interactive film or virtual toy. Virtual worlds are something entirely different, and as much as MMOs may seem to cross the divide I'm now not so sure they do. It's like comparing a book to those collections of fridge poetry magnets, the ones where you rearrange the sentences.

(Reply to this)(Thread)

sophrosyne_sl
2007-10-04 10:58 pm UTC (link)

Dang, you're good!! This is a brilliant analysis - and I see the makings of a *great* game designer!!

I think you're absolutely right - real community isn't a commercial killer app.

Maybe... and I need to play this out a lot more... real community, like we see in SL, has a strong *anti*capitalist flavor to it. It's not about the quick sell, the status symbol, but about sharing, about that word that LL so horribly abuses, trust. And while that can be earned, it can't be bought or sold.

"Social networking," though, that's commercial. That's what singles bars and nightclubs have always sold - and most everything that happens there *is* commercial, in one way or another, as Lillie Yifu says.

So, where's the money? In social networking plus avatars, and in structured narratives plus avatars.

And that's fine - provided that companies recognize that. There's money to be made in building the town square, the gated suburb. It's not sick, "buy a European country and name it after yourself" money, but it's money.

LL seems to be in the housing-development business but want to be in the beer business. What'll happen is, it'll fail at both, of course...

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	galatea_gynoid 2007-10-05 02:01 am UTC (link)
	If I understand the analogy... they don't want to be in the beer business -- they're actively avoiding getting into the beer business. But they're trying desperately to get some big companies to come into town and build breweries (on their land development, of course). (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	sophrosyne_sl 2007-10-05 06:11 pm UTC (link)
	Yes, much better-put! More like, they're paving over the swap meet field and laying sewage lines for the breweries.... (Reply to this)(Parent)

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