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Umair Haque writes a blog called BubbleGeneration that I like a lot. His writing has consistently helped me expand my thinking in many ways. He recently commented on my post about why avatars are the web’s most undervalued asset today:
“Controlling the emotional intensity of an industry is an incredibly powerful source of advantage in the post-network economy.
But that’s a small part of the reason avatars are valuable.
The truth is that the post-network economy is an interaction economy. The avatar is a focal point for interaction - a sticky, context independent, information-rich focial point…which should be enough to explain why they can also be explosive focal points for value creation.”
I think we are actually making the same point, we’re just using different words to describe it.
Whenever I evaluate a new consumer startup, what I am constantly ruminating is “What is the relationship between this service and the user who uses it? Is it a weak emotional relationship or a strong emotional relationship? What is the nature of this relationship - is borne of need or desire?” and so on.
I care about this because emotional intensity has a direct correlation with 1) how much attention a user is willing to spend on any given product/topic (Quantity) and 2) the Quality of the interaction the user is likely to have with this service. Emotional intensity creates option value for the service provider.
Think about your most recent romantic relationship. The stronger you feel about someone, the more likely it is that you are going to 1) spend more time with that person and 2) explore the depths of the relationship’s possibilities.
As we are moving into an era where attention is the most valuable currency and the user is pummelled with more content they could possibly consume in a lifetime, the strength of one’s emotional connection with a service, a brand, or a product is of utmost importance. The dominant strategy for creating defensible unfair advantage around your product in Web 2.0 was community and the associated network effects. But in a world where every single service has deployed a community platform with identical feature sets, how do you differentiate? It’s not enough to deploy communication platforms, user profiles, and voting tools. Social game mechanics help, because they lay the foundation for a number of different emotion states: tension, exhilaration, accomplishment, delight, etc.
As product designer, your role is similar to that of a conductor of a large symphony. Only, your instruments are peoples’ emotion states. Each user experience is the orchestration of numerous emotion states. The value of a customer to you is completely correlated with his/her set of emotional reactions. To add complexity, the timber of each note varies by instrument and by person. For example, the emotional footprint of surprise is different than that of longing. Surprise has a big high and tapers off, leaving it with a short tail. Some people may be frustrated by a feeling of longing, whereas some people may find it stimulating. Ad infinium.
In short, this matters because emotional intensity is the most important filter by which people determine how to spend their time and energy. If you understand what the emotional relationship with your user feels like, you can then figure out what the possible range of monetization opportunities might be.
Folks like Wagner James Au and Mitch Wagner of InformationWeek have already blogged about the panel, but I wanted to share my presentation with the folks that couldn’t make it. This is my take only. The other panelists - Wagner James Au, Robert Scoble, and Robin Hunicke all had great things to say. By the way, Robin is brilliant. She’s the lead designer for the forthcoming MySims on the Nintendo Wii and a PhD candidate in CS/AI at Northwestern. As she spoke, I thought ”Sheesh, it’s going to be hard to follow her.”
The question I was trying to answer was, “Is the next generation of the consumer web 3D?” I think the answer is not necessarily.
1. The reason why we’re asking this question is because there’s a bubble forming in the virtual world space right now.
That’s a pretty incendiary statement. What do I mean by it? What I see on the horizon are dozens and dozens of new virtual world platforms and titles hitting the market - far more than the public will want to consume. By ‘title,’ I mean a self contained, branded version of a virtual world much like “Virtual Laguna Beach.” All the big media and consumer goods companies are looking at what’s happening with online community sites like MySpace and Facebook and want in on this action desperately.
However, I think that all of the media hype around Second Life is misleading the public about what the next generation consumer Internet might look like. That isn’t to say that Second Life doesn’t have tremendous merit in moving the dialogue forward about what collaborative work and play spaces feel like. What I mean is that there are now quite a few companies who equate “future of online communities” with “3D graphical world.” The mad rush by these big brands to create empty showrooms in SecondLife is proof of this. Just like in the dot-Bust days, there will be lots of shoddy substandard products brought to market in the mad frenzy to create a ‘presence.’
But the good news is that in this crazy landgrab, there will be a couple of winners that shine through. There is considerable appetite for online play spaces right now - you can see the proof of this in the many bootstrapped and under the radar services that are getting a lot of traction.
2. What does the next generation consumer Internet look like?
What I’m interested in above all else is the nature and evolution of people and our constructs [culture, economic and belief systems.] As I’ve said before, I think the real story behind the consumer web today is what’s going on cognitively - how our relationship with the Internet is changing.
Here’s how I see the evolutionary arc of the online user experience:
Web 1.0: Information Sharing
Web 2.0: Interaction
Web 3.0: Immersion
By immersion, I mean that people will demand experiences that are more emotional, engaging and genuine. 3D graphics are one way to create immersiveness, but not the only tool we have in our toolkit.
Let’s look at how the ways people have expressed themselves online have changed over time:
Pre-Web: Text based worlds
(I am looking at a character named Ulion and the text he has used to describe himself)
Web 1.0: Geocities
Web 2.0: MySpace, currently the world’s largest massively multiplayer online game
Then, there are a few sites that reveal glimpses of what the future might look like.
Web 2.1: Gaia Online
(Gaia started as a bulletin board system that has slowly layered in a 2D virtual world graphical metaphor over time. What you’re looking at is one user’s profile.)
Web 2.1: Yelp
Web 2.1: Flixster
3. What are the implications?
We are moving from web pages to web places. More and more game-like features will find their way into everyday web design - you see this already being implemented successfully on sites like Yelp and Flixster. People will seek out experiences, rather than just content. 3D is just one tool out of the many we have available to create immersive, engaging experiences. 3D should be used tactically - it makes sense for some audiences and for some applications. There are many ways to think about presence and dimensionality online. 3D graphics facilitate spatial/physical awareness. But we should also be thinking about 3 dimensional social presence and shared/collaborative presence. Luckily, there are a couple of good examples in this space already.
This post will be continued…
Best conference I’ve been to in a long time. Fantastic creative energy. Incredibly inspiring community of people. So many interesting ideas percolating. I feel like I’ve been missing out for years and my LFG was finally answered. ;)
I heard some awesome rumor that I hitchhiked back to Austin from dinner at the Salt Lick last night. I did catch a ride back with a crazy dude and his friends, but it was the known kind of crazy - the Scobleizer. Thanks Souris and Michael for putting together such a wonderful dinner event. I would like to reciprocate at the next geek gathering. As far as right now goes, I’m exhausted. Which is why I’m in my hotel catching up on email, rather than out at the many parties.
Next week I’ll be in Boston and the week after in San Diego for ETech. Feel free to ping me if you want to catch up.
I think the future of online gaming eventually converges with the future of Web 2.0. This session will explore what we think the future of online games looks like. On the panel with me are Raph, Craig Sherman - CEO of Gaia Interactive, Gene Yoon - VP International of Linden Lab, and Joi Ito - my guild leader and Creative Commons guru!
Early bird registration ends today, so if you want to go, sign up and receive a discount.
Also if you have any thoughts or ideas about the type of content we should cover, I welcome your suggestions.
Today I was on a panel about avatars with some very fascinating folks, each of whom has followed a very nonlinear path through life. For example, I learned that Mark Stephen Meadows hitchhiked from Kuwait to Baghdad a few years ago, wanting to experience first hand what the mass media filters might not reveal to us. Ben Cerveny escaped from a Beverly Hills childhood and now lives half time in Amsterdam. Justin Hall showed me this totally kick ass passively multiplayer “game” he’s built - it is implemented as a Firefox plugin that tracks and turns your normal clickstream into something engaging and interactive.
Here are my notes from what I said (and wanted to say but didn’t get to). Caveat: it’s very one sided and only reflects my perspective.
1. Identity is at the heart of everything:
How technology is transforming people’s understanding of themselves is the basic assumption and premise that I have that everything else hinges on. Essentially, the cognitive dissonance between people’s online and offline selves is dissipating. Meaning, all the stuff we do online is very real. The very term ’second life’ is a misnomer. There are so many panels here at SXSW about avatars and virtual worlds. I find the treatment of these topics to be a bit backwards - concepts like avatars and virtual worlds are symptoms of the larger underlying trend. I’m not sure that people are asking the right questions. Let’s start with the basics - “What happens in an online environment when there are absolutely NO cognitive barriers between our online and offline selves?” “Why does an avatar matter at all?” “What types of relationships do people have with each other online and how can an avatar make that more or less meaningful?”
2. We already all have avatars, we just don’t see them:
So I think that the mainstream audience finds the topic of avatars to be a bit esoteric. It seems foreign to them, either something kids and teenagers ‘play’ with, or something that ’strange people that inhabit SecondLife gravitate towards’. But the truth is that everyone who uses any web site today already has an avatar - we just aren’t using the graphical metaphor of a virtual character to represent them. We don’t notice them today, because we participate in the web largely through 1st person camera view with a fixed perspective. We shouldn’t assume that avatars are the best possible way to solve a product design problem - namely, personalization, customization, and enhancing the immersiveness of an experience. Sometimes they are. There are a few different ways to think about presence online - there’s the spatial-physical 3D approach, but there are also ways to create more dimensionality around social and shared social presence.
3. Why Camera Angles are Important in Immersive Environments:
The position and design of a camera view is the metaphor we use to filter our moment by moment experience. We have very little concept of ‘camera’ manipulation in our web environments today. But camera design is actually quite an important component in thinking about player immersion. There’s a huge amount of prior learning in the game design space pertaining to the use of cameras and how it correlates with good user experiences. Some of the best games give liberal camera control to the user - because camera angles should be situational, and because it allows players more control over the context of their engagement.
Cameras are important because not only do they define our physical relationship with the world around us, but they also determine how a story is told and sets the framework for your relationship with the characters are around you. In the future, good web product designers will need to understand camera placement and its emotional effect on users.
4. Avatars are the most undervalued asset on the web today:
As I mentioned before, I think most folks generally regard avatars as being fairly disposable today. I think this attitude will change. From an investment perspective, I am actively looking for interesting projects in this space. For any web property/community, the avatar is the single most valuable piece of real estate. It’s the focal point of greatest emotional connectivity with the user, across all environments and pervasive across all my interactions. We talked on the panel about why being able to fragment your personality into various channels of expression is important - I think that the model for avatars in the future involves one descriptive container that contains many functional subcontainers. And each of these functional subcontainers includes an avatar or some expression of your personality that is most relevant to whatever environment you choose to express it to. Very similar to what’s being proposed with OpenID today.
5. Big learning from past experiences that is relevant to my VC work: Timing is everything
Being able to understand where consumers are today and what they are capable of absorbing is very important to creating successful products. Understanding the user behavior / learning curve is incredibly important. We might academically know all the “best” answers, but having the “best designed” product isn’t nearly the sole factor in determining user uptake. We are now making the leap from web page to web place. I am much more likely to invest in an avatar company/product that is fun and cartoony than one that is photorealistic, given the current state of where consumer sentiment is.
6. Current observations of what consumers are responding to in the market:
Mybloglog/Trakzor are early broad successes in shaping 3D social presence. I like MyBlogLog a lot as it facilitates passive, serendipitous discovery - something sorely needed in my daily web experience. These two services mark the first of many steps that brings the idea of avatars and alternate camera views to a more mainstream audience. These services also facilitate “together aloneness” - an incredibly important design principle that all web/game designers should incorporate into their product design.
7. Why avatars are important:
There are going to be a bazillion virtual worlds coming online in the next several years. Every major media company is going to try to port all of their brands into some sort of virtual 3D environment. These may be poorly designed, inferior products, but they are going to have the very real, very important impact of training the consumer to think about virtual worlds in a certain way. As product designers, we can help inform these big media brands who want to foray into virtual worlds.
Avatar design and avatar mechanics have huge implications for the types of relationships that are possible online and huge implications for future product design. I certainly don’t even begin to pretend to know any of the answers. I would point to game designers who have been iterating on these problems for years. Also - I haven’t yet spoken about the role of NPCs (non player characters) in online virtual world environments. How we think about NPCs also has a lot of impact into our future world design. NPCs can help us reframe the web product design question into one of ‘interactive narration and storytelling’ rather than ‘product utility.’ It’s an awesome time to be a product designer! There’s so much to create.
8. A couple of insightful academic studies:
There was a fantastic session at GDC (game developer conference) that Raph blogged about - the 10 most interesting academic studies on games/players/game design of the last year. This is must read stuff - it’s super insightful. The download to the presentation is available here at Jane McGonigal’s site. One of these studies particularly pertained to the panel discussion -
Thaddeus Griebel’s study revealed that there is strong correlation between player race and game character choice, but a weak correlation between player personality and in-game behavior. Females are also much more likely to make their Sims have babies than males.
Takeaway: players are a little likely to want to enact their personalities, but very likely to want to enact their race
or gender.
Nick Yee also has a number of studies that relate to avatars and user behavior. Btw, Nick does fabulous ethnographic research in Second Life. His most recent study investigated how our choice of avatars impact our behavior (paper download here.) His study revealed that the two are inseparable: people assigned more attractive avatars were more intimate in self disclosure and interpersonal distance than those assigned less attractive avatars. Also, people assigned taller avatars behaved more confidently in a negotiation task than those assigned shorter avatars.
A caveat, as with all academic studies, that nothing is fact until plenty of people have tried assiduously to disprove these theories. 
Hi all, it’s been so busy here. I’ll be at SXSW from Sunday-Wednesday, in case anyone wants to meet up and say hello. I’ll be speaking on two panels:
Sunday, 3/11, 3:30-4:30 pm:
avatars and their role in online communities and
Monday, 3/12, 10:00-11:00am:
(I’m of the opinion that fancy, more photorealistic graphics do not necessarily correlate with the idea of more engaging, immersive environments. Iterating on Web 2.0 has less to do with 3D than it does with good user experience flow and community design.)
I’m really looking forward to Austin and its fun, creative energy.
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