According to the PICNIC website, the audience of the annual media and technology event includes a lot of people with diverging interests. We can find ‘creatives, artists, scientists, designers, entrepreneurs, thinkers, lawyers, format developers, agencies, cross media content production creatives, advertisers, programmers, investor, writers, filmmakers, journalists, and technology-and service-providers from around the world’. Being a (new) media researcher, which is missing from this extensive list, I suppose makes me somewhat of a relative outsider. PICNIC is after all aiming at business, not at academia.
Luckily, PICNIC 2008 organized a special program called Enquiring Minds, set up to bring in new media researchers of all sorts and conditions, which made me feel very welcome indeed. I was glad to be invited to this program as it enabled me to dive into the wondrous frontlines of new media industries and arts. In return, PICNIC would like nothing more than that I ‘review’ the event through the eyes of my research. Thus, what follows are encounters, observations and other ramblings from a PICNIC outsider-turned-insider.
As my own work revolves around participatory culture and massive multi-player online role-playing games (or MMORPG’s) I chose to focus my attention on PICNIC’s programs on virtual world and related issues. My research is all about games (ie. World of Warcraft), while a lot of the talks where about social worlds (ie. Second Life). Unsurprisingly, many of the themes and issues under discussing are the same on both ends of the virtual worlds spectrum.
The undeniable main attraction of the special programs on virtual worlds was the presence of Linden Lab’s founder and CEO Philip Rosedale, better known as ‘the man behind Second Life’. Although its impact has lessened somewhat over the last years due to the Second Life hype bubble burst, Rosedale still is a force to be reckoned with – especially on stage with his charisma mode in overdrive. He did not hide the fact that much of SL’s success was the result of media hype at all, fully admitting that the recent months have been tough on subscription levels. This honesty is to be applauded, as a lot of Second Life-like virtual worlds are still very much oriented at and ‘played’ by a happy few.
The masses, it seemed, have settled for more casual, less ambitious virtual environments. That is not to say that these virtual worlds aren’t interesting. With ‘less ambitious’ I mean less malleable by its users and/or more controlled by its owners. We can think of social networks like Hyves, or the highly successful Asian online communities based on mini-games. Rosedale might be the face of virtual worlds, the big money is somewhere else.
As a result, the special program on the ‘future of social gaming’ was an interesting one. On paper, this gathering was all about nurturing social communities. In reality is was just as much about harnessing these social communities into money making machines. We could for example see the business development manager of the Netherland’s most successful social community, Hyves, inviting other game developers to use their extensive social network for all kinds of fascinating data mining purposes. Or the enthusiastic people behind social network GoSupermodel, who showed the perfect way to promote your brand to their tween audience. Privacy and other ethical issues were not discussed. They were not ignored either. Worse: it was as if they did not exist. But maybe that’s just the critical academic in me speaking.
The most informed and thought-through talk in this program came from the product analysis director of game portal Bigpoint. He was not just talking about business models and opportunities but really showed to understand how the communities around their games functioned and thrived. Their focus on guild leaders and other key community makers/breakers was refreshing. Especially among some of other talks which treated ‘their’ social communities as a homogeneous mass you can just tap into commercially (whether they actually believe this or not).
Naturally, gaming and social communities are only one part of virtual worlds. There’s always the more serious applications of these platforms, like their possibilities for e-learning. One of the most inspiring presentations by a company called Method showed the virtual healthcare centre they made some years back, Vielife Island, for people with lifestyle and health issues. One of the difficulties of virtual worlds when aiming for serious applications is the lack of user control. That is the ability to control what the user can and cannot do, not the amount of freedom of control users have. Avatars can fly all over the place, breaking up or interfering with the planned course of action, creating the danger of turning coherency into chaos. This healthcare station, while still allowing flying and running around, was nevertheless cleverly designed to guide the user through the story it wants to tell. It’s space, based on architectural studies, was limited and full of visual clues steering users through the environment in meaningful ways. Also, the 3D PowerPoint presentation they had in there is a riot; who doesn’t want fruit falling from the sky when discussing healthy food.
The lack of user control I mentioned earlier remains one of the most difficult issues to manage in virtual worlds. On the one hand, the whole idea of a lot of these platforms is user freedom and creativity. The idea is to break free from the constraints of tightly controlled design in more commercially oriented virtual worlds like MMORPG’s. On the other hand, user creativity and especially user created content isn’t always on par with professional design. It shouldn’t have to be, but in a shared environment it can cause both adoration as irritation between users.
At one point Linden Lab’s Rosedale addressed virtual world disbelievers by urging them to ignore the current look of software like Second Life which, in comparison to, say, computer games tends to be perceived as less then next-gen. Think back of a film like Toy Story, Rosedale said, and see how far CGI technology has come since. Imagine then how good virtual worlds will look ten years from now and start to focus on what they can do, not on how they look. When I asked him if it could be user generated content instead of the underlying tech which makes Second Life look ‘bad’ or at least not visually coherent, he dodged the question by emphasizing the amount of beautiful stuff which exist in the current build. Well, the argument is not how pretty some parts of Second Life look. It’s how jarring it can be that next to these beauties are as many if not more beasts – ‘ugly’ content made by users with too little time, experience or interest. Even if technology improves in the next ten years (and it will), these user-created design discrepancies will remain, whatever the amount of shiny polygons or shaders you throw at them.
Managing user creativity and community is a tricky and difficult juggling act for the platform owners, both on the side of money-making as well as in the more ‘serious’ corner. And with millions and millions of users pouring in from all sides, the choices about where to draw the lines of what should be possible within the virtual environments, or how far we want to go with tapping these social networks for profit will become more and more intricate. These issues are important as the great ‘unwashed’ masses who are now entering virtual worlds are not always that well equipped to differentiate between right and wrong both in their own practices as well as what is done to them.
What PICNIC showed where all kinds of companies and individuals pushing both virtual worlds as well as their own stakes within this platform forward in all kinds of profound ways. Fact remains that the profits are currently reaped by a few (like Blizzard) while many startups in this burgeoning field are struggling. Here’s to hoping that their struggles don’t result in users and social networks becoming pure marketing targets or, scarier, sellable products.
