A virtual world is a lot like a wendy house; the children dress up, make up their own games, and invent stories to play out. Like the wendy house, a world provides a theme and some games, but leaves the players free to create their own fun with friends; they're making up their own games within loose structure provided by the world.

For example, without support for teams, scoring, or even collision detection, Club Penguin has become home to huge and organized snowball wars!

There are practical reasons for this loose structure: its hard and expensive to create fresh content on every visit, secondly its easy for anyone to participate in a game with no explicit right or wrong, no certain win or loose.

The lack of structure also has a downside, its just a whole lot harder for players to make up their own fun and games. Its far easier to watch a movie with friends than to make up ghost stories around a camp fire.

How does choice change behavior?

Virtual worlds are a place to have fun with friends. With more worlds to choose from players don't need to make up their own games; they can move between worlds enjoying the content in each.

Worlds will become less like wendy houses; players will play the worlds content and then move on, they won't spend time developing their own games and stories.

Its not a question of loyalty, while players are less likely to spend all their time in one world, weekly content updates players will bring players back. Indeed, this is similar to our TV viewing habits, we all have our favorite shows that we watch every week, we don't watch just one program!

What is the strategy?

Rather than invest in strategies to lock players into your world, instead explore how to be open and facilitate the flow of players between worlds. Think of a shopping mall, all the shops benefit from the combined footfall. Shopping is not a zero sum game, because I've bought in one shop does not mean I wont purchase in another shop.

The subscription model for virtual worlds has inadvertently created a zero sum game. Few parents subscribe to multiple virtual worlds, yet players want to participant in many.

A typical subscription for a casual world is around $5. Our research team have found that young people in the UK have more than 10 times the spending potential per month. Only they can't spend their money because they don't have credit cards; their spending is restricted by their parents willingness to subscribe.

While subscription models are predominant, its possible to unlock significantly more revenue when players are able to spend own money as micropayments.

What are the tactics?

• Learn from old media, schedule updates regularly. If your players know that every week there will be new content then they know its worth their time to come back.
• Play to the strengths of the medium. Virtual worlds are a place to have fun with friends. Make your content is social; there are hundreds of sites with thousands of mini games.
• Think about the narrative. Everyone loves a good story; we all get drawn in by a good book or film. Create a narrative for your world, and release a new part of the story every week. Your players should be excited to find out what will happen next! I wrote about the role of narrative in the last post "Our vision of the future"
• Create a shopping mall of worlds. Players want to move between worlds, partner with others to create a federation. Players should be able to access any of the worlds in the federation simply and take their friends with them.
• Build for micropayments not subscriptions. For the life of the subscription players have access to premium features, whereas micropayments buy digital goods that should never be taken away.