Our first virtual world, launched in 2000

A virtual world is a place to have fun with friends. Sounds so simple, but what makes a world fun? It's certainly more than rooms and mini games; like bolting wings onto a car wont make it fly, adding mini games into a world doesn't automatically make it fun! Flight and fun are two concepts that really ought to be designed in from the start.

So where do we start? Thankfully some very smart people have developed frameworks that we can use - these aren't rules that guarantee success, human nature just isn't as predictable as physics. As the second post in this series on game design we're sharing one of our favourite frameworks: the three types of immersion. Lets begin.

Ernest Adams separated immersion into three categories: narrative, strategic, and tactical.

• Narrative immersion occurs when players become invested in a story, and is similar to what is experienced while reading a book or watching a movie.
• Strategic immersion is associated with a mental challenge, often choosing a solution among a broad array of challenges; these are the games like Fallout where the player is managing their avatar statistics and balancing their skills.
• Tactical immersion is experienced when playing games involve skill where players feel "in the zone"; these are games like Halo or Fifa where the player is absorbed in the moment.

The best worlds use all three types of immersion, but rarely in equal measures. A bit like mixing cocktails, we combine the types of immersion in varying strengths for different audiences. In this post I'm going to assume we're designing for casual players - not the gamers.

Unlike gamers, casual players often won't have the skills to succeed at tactical games like Halo. You may laugh, but it really is skill - to beat a game like Halo you actually have to become more talented. Think of these games like sports - players are immersed in the moment but only most talented tennis player wins the tournament. To win the game you're playing against the game designer - he controls the pace and difficulty. So if you're not talented enough, you've not played enough games, or don't have the hand eye coordination, and the game progresses faster than your abilities, then you're out of luck!

Virtual worlds create this type of tactical immersion through Flash mini games - you know the kind of game, skill based requiring good hand eye coordination and fast reactions. At the end of the game the player's score is usually translated into some kind of virtual currency, while breaking into the leader board unlocks the bigger prizes. Yet most of your players will never be that good at the game and they'll find it hard to earn currency, let alone getting close to the leader board! Mini games are not the answer to making your world fun, instead your casual players need a different type of entertainment.

Maybe you don't buy that argument, so instead consider the millions of free Flash games you're up against! You cant make the best mini games, and you can't beat MiniClip on that front. So offer a different experience.

To be clear, I'm not advocating a world without mini games. In fact I think these mini games play an important function in the economy. But they're not the foundation for your worlds entertainment.

Narrative, however, is perfect for virtual worlds. There's no learning game mechanics, rules, or skill required to be drawn in by a good story - such an easy way to engage players. Yet most virtual worlds have no narrative, maybe they have a theme, but they don't hook me in like the first page a book. Indeed, I feel more like I'm in a 'virtual world' when I'm reading a book than actually in a virtual world!

What a missed opportunity. Everyone loves a good story, and in a virtual world you've got the chance to turn a story into an adventure. This is huge, because I don't think kids have adventures any more. When I go back to my folks house there are no kids playing outside, the paths through forest behind their yard are overgrown, and the playing fields have been turned into parking lots.

Kids want to explore, make up stories, and go on adventures. But where do they go? It could be your world. One such world is Poptropica, they seem to be doing quite well with around 8 million monthly unique players. In perspective, that's nearly twice Club Penguin!

So we think narrative is important, what about strategic immersion. For a long time the strategic games, like Fallout and World of Warcraft, have been considered the "hardcore games for geeks" (I can say that as a huge fan of the Fallout series). But, peel back the layers, and you see that these are not 'hardcore' games, they're just set in 'geeky' environments like Fallout's post apocalyptic America.

Unlike Fifa or Need for Speed, strategic games don't need great hand eye coordination, and you don't actually have to become better at the game to win. I gave up at Fifa, I'm just not good talented enough. With Fallout all I really had to do was spend the time playing the game - my character levelled up so I didn't have to get any better! This is the false achievement we explored in the last post.

Take away the post apocalyptic America and replace with something more friendly, and we have a game mechanic thats accessible to your casual audience. They don't need skill, just time. Anyone can win, and everyone loves to win! Zynga figured this out with games like Farmville and now FrontierVille.

Your world is going to include all three types of immersion - a big dollop of narrative that pulls the players into the strategic gameplay, and just a few tactical mini games for earning virtual currency. The graphic below (hopefully) summarises how these three fit together.

We've been pretty quiet on the blog for the last two months. But, don't panic, we've not been kidnapped, we've just been busy launching a new virtual world for girls, Brit Chicks

The launch has gone great. In the 3 shorts weeks since opening the doors the world has already attracted over 55,000 players who have cumulatively spent more than 4 years in the world!

I thought it would be fun to share what these 55,000 people have been up to. And, for anyone thinking of launching a world, here's some real data that you can use to drive your design decisions.

How are we capturing the data?

Everything that happens in the world, from changing room to making friends, goes through our GAML engine. Whenever something happens that we're interested in we add one line of GAML that logs the event out to google analytics. Quick and simple.

What are the players doing?

We've split all the different games and activities into 5 categories. The chart ranks these activities by the number of times our players have interacted, for example, talking to a non-player character counts towards the questing category, while shopping counts towards personalization.

We see that questing is by far the most popular activity (51%), followed by exploring (34%), and playing mini games a modest 3%!

What do we mean by questing?

These are stories and games played across the different rooms, they could be simple missions to photograph a landmark, or more complex puzzles requiring many artifacts that must be found and used in order.

Brit Chicks has a couple of different activities that make up a quest, this next chart splits these out.

So, in only 3 weeks the players have already completed over 160,000 quests! Meaning that on average, all players have:

• talked to 7 non player characters,
• picked up 6 different artifacts,
• taken 5 photographs,
• completed 3 quests,
• but played only 1 mini game.

In other words, for every Flash mini game the users have engaged with 19 different quest activities!

Where are they exploring?

Exploring is our second most popular activity. The players have changed rooms over 700,000 times and interacted with 470,000 things in those rooms. Rather inexplicably, the 'Zoo Keeper' is by far the most popular, players have interacted with her over 80,000 times!

A full 30% of those 700,000 room changes are coming from players clicking sign posts in the rooms, and yet only 7 of the 23 rooms have sign posts.

As expected, the three most popular public rooms are Tower Bridge, Central Park, and Eiffel Tower; these are the 'landing' rooms for London, New York, and Paris. Closely behind is the Champs-Élysées in Paris, and the Sea Lion Pool in Central Park Zoo, NY.

What have we learnt?

It's clear from the data that our players are choosing to immerse themselves in the world, explore, and play quests. Yet most casual worlds are a mix of rooms, customizable avatars, and Flash mini games, with no questing and little narrative. Quite the opposite of what our data shows players want!

We're delighted with the results! We've been talking about the importance of narrative and why every virtual world needs a scripting language for a long time. Indeed, we've developed our own simple to write language called GAML - Game Application Markup Language

Creating all this questing content was quick too. The Brit Chicks team knew what types of adventures the girls would enjoy, but we're too busy creating all the artwork, rooms, and customizable avatars. So we brought in James, an avid gamer, but not a programmer. In less than a week James, who had never wrote any programming code before, was able to create rooms, quest, collectables, and games using only GAML.

In only two months James:

• Setup up 20 parallax scrolling chat rooms,
• Created 40+ quests and adventures,
• Scripting conversations with 20 non-player characters, and
• Added over 400 items into the 4 virtual shops

If you're interested, read our case study, how Brit Chicks were able to save £25,000 using GAML to create their world.

In this post I'm going to try and answer that question.

I believe that, no matter who you are, you already buy virtual goods, and have been doing for years.

Why do Paul Smith jeans cost over £100, when physically similar pants can be had for one-tenth the price? They both have similar practical utility, so what are we paying extra for? The same is true of brand-name products in almost every category. Brands are so pervasive that even those people who want to make a statement against 'the logo' have to invest substantial time avoiding it, which is just another kind of premium.

Every product contains both tangible and intangible sources of value; its this intangible value that is in fact virtual, everything you buy has at least some "virtual" component. By recognizing these components, we can make better sense of what's going on in the online virtual goods market, and craft strategies that leverage people's pre-existing experience with virtual goods. Paying a premium for a branded pair of virtual jeans is actually a pretty similar experience for most virtual goods customers.

There are four sources of value a product gives to a customer:

• Practical utility: This is the tangible benefit that a product enables, whether that's transportation, warmth, cleanliness, or entertainment. Many products derive all of their value from this utility, online as well as off: generic drugs are pretty similar to a number of non-epic consumables in your average MMOG.
• Perceived value: This is the extra value a customer perceives as a result of good marketing, product design, product quality, or exception product/market fit. For example, many customers derive satisfaction from feeling like they bought the "best" product in a given category, even if that product has no objective performance difference from its nearest competitor.
• Social value: When I can use a product to my benefit in a social situation, it can be transformed in value. All gifting-type products are influenced by this source, as Hallmark has long understood. But plenty of other product categories depend on social factors: status purchases, beauty products, and fashion products.
• Identity value: This is the strongest source of value of all, and it's a little tricky to differentiate from the preceding two sources. This is the benefit you get from incorporating a product into your self-conception. For example, take your average Mac fanatic. When they buy an Apple laptop, they are doing more than enjoying a premium product and showing off. They are saying to the world and - more importantly - to themselves: I am the kind of person that buys Apple products. Apple has done a phenomenal job of convincing us that we, too, can be a little like Steve Jobs, if only we had one more iFoo in our lives. Many fashion and beauty products create this kind of affinity. Identity products are not easily displaced, because the emotional investment is very high.

We find that consumers generally have separate budget for each category (not necessarily consciously). We've observed from our own products, and others, that if spending can be moved out of the entertainment budget (which is often constrained) and into the identity budget, it is possible to make a lot more money per customer. Even in tough times (actually, especially in hard times) people spend significant sums to bolster their sense of who they are.

Matthew Warneford

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