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. :)

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