A version of this piece was published in Marketing in 2008
Over the last few years, the web has come alive with avatars. The word comes from Hindu mythology, where it describes a spirit coming down to earth; and on Second Life, World of Warcraft and dozens of other online worlds, people use these digital representations of themselves to interact with each other.
But digital being digital, these avatars don’t have to look like you, or even look human. Entire subcultures have emerged for non-human avatars, with their own art, literature and websites.
Furries – anthropomorphic animals with human characteristics, Weres (people who claim – mostly spiritually – to be lycanthropes) and Otherkins (elves, ETs, dragons and other fantasy characters) abound, and have even attracted academic interest.
The University of California (there’s nothing surprising in this sentence) looked at the sexual aspects of furry culture, which is certainly evident in Second Life, where things can get quite, well, hairy.
All this might seem pretty bizarre to the average resident of Tunbridge Wells, not to mention the rest of us, and we might have been able to remain comfortably insulated from this other world carrying on somewhere behind our computer screens.
But avatars are set to break out from the games, worlds and chatrooms they live in, and they could be coming to a website or a TV near you.
Second Life and IBM recently announced a collaboration to bring portability to avatars, allowing them to be transported between games and sites, like characters from Eastenders popping up on Coronation Street.
The idea’s already been pioneered by Weblins.com, who have created a social avatar community that’s spreading across the web. Installing a piece of software on your computer, you get an avatar which you can customise to your preference – man, woman, character from Horton Hears a Who – it’s up to you.
Whenever you visit a website, you’ll see your avatar standing at the bottom of the screen – alongside all the avatars of other people visiting the same site. You can wave to them, wousle them (a bit like poking in facebook), chat to them – the idea is to make visiting a website a social phenomenon, rather than a solo one, and it’s revealing.
The average level of conversation is just as banal as most chat rooms, but if you’ve got a website it could be a valuable tool for talking to customers – when was the last time you could hang out in a website and watch others?
And it’s not just the web that’s seeing avatars shaking off the ties that bind them.
On the Nintendo Wii, players can personalise their Mii – their avatar on the game console. But by selecting the right options, they can set it free to wander around. Since Wii can be connected to the internet, this means your character can start turning up in the audience of your friends’ games – when they’re playing tennis, there you are in the crowd. Importantly though, you’re not controlling this – your Mii goes off to find things to do when you’re not playing the game.
As far as I can tell, nobody’s yet figured out what the point of this is, other than curiosity value.
But its significance is clear. We have no sense of shared experience with the web. With TV, we are conscious of the fact that others are watching the same things we watch, because people talk about what they saw on telly the night before. But online there’s no equivalent water cooler moment – and it’s hard to conceive the number of people who see what you see.
But Weblins and Mii gives you a little of that sense – somehow putting a face to the audience, and an idea of their existence.
The rise of social networking whilst rapid has nevertheless been constrained to individual sites. Portable avatars could change that, embedding social activity into every site, and creating an awareness of others in cyberspace that we take for granted in the real world.
Showing posts with label games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label games. Show all posts
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Friday, March 14, 2008
Gamification and life
A version of this piece was published in Marketing in 2008
Spiralling petrol prices and blanket coverage of global warming don’t compare with the thrill of tearing up to the traffic lights and standing on the brakes. Let’s face it – driving a car in an ecologically-friendly way is dull, and the personal benefit is remote; a petrol bill at the end of the week (which might not be paid until the end of the month).
So being driven last week in a Toyota Prius hybrid taxi the other day, I was struck by how the car was creating feedback for the driver, and how he in turn was responding by altering his driving technique to improve fuel economy.
The screen on the centre console has a graphical representation of the wheels, the engine and the battery. When the driver accelerates hard, energy is shown being conducted from the engine to the wheels. Gentle driving shows the engine unused, with the battery powering the electric motor, and braking is illustrated by energy flowing back to the battery.
The energy flows directly represent the economy of the driver, and the result is a game. My driver had half an eye on the screen, and as he negotiated his way around town he was constantly striving to maximise his score. Fuel economy had moved from a worthy but irrelevant issue (he’s not paying the bill) to a little game that could leaven the dull routine of city driving.
As digital media have become a greater part of our lives, games have been emerging as a key tool in influencing behaviour, helping to inform and developing skills.
The US army produced America’s Army with game creator Ubisoft in 2002, and is about to launch its third version, to play on the Xbox360 console. Over nine million people have registered for the game, which has become a key recruitment tool for the military, as well as a training tool.
The US military are no strangers to video gaming, having commissioned games before, but America’s Army reflects their view that games can be an effective marketing and communications medium – an approach which has led to accusations of propaganda.
In the UK, the Home Office used an online game back in 2003 as part of a consultation exercise on the Youth Justice green paper. Knowing that this group would be unlikely to complete a Home Office questionnaire, the COI created an online game with scenarios that dramatised real crime situations – a talking point to explore teenagers’ views on rights, responsibilities, crime and punishment. And this game-based approach worked – three times as many teens completed the game/survey as would have been expected from a conventional study.
Games have always been a naturally accepted way for children to learn. Whether hand-eye coordination, interpersonal skills or language, children’s own games help them to assimilate these skills. Education has long made use of the principle that learning within a meaningful context is more effective than in the absence of such a context – as is the case with most formal learning. Psychologists call this ‘situated cognition’, and it’s behind the popularity of role playing in all sorts of training.
But there’s an increasing understanding that those who grow up with digital media learn more effectively in these environments, and are developing new ways of consuming information. Graphics vs text, random access vs step by step, parallel processing vs linear – characteristics identified by Marc Presky, a writer on education, as the new norm for the learning style of the digital native.
So whilst much of the attention given in recent years to the marketing potential of online and video games has focused on their capacity as an advertising medium – placing posters and banners in-game, the real potential of games though would appear to much greater – as the game itself becomes both the message and the means by which we learn from consumers.
Spiralling petrol prices and blanket coverage of global warming don’t compare with the thrill of tearing up to the traffic lights and standing on the brakes. Let’s face it – driving a car in an ecologically-friendly way is dull, and the personal benefit is remote; a petrol bill at the end of the week (which might not be paid until the end of the month).
So being driven last week in a Toyota Prius hybrid taxi the other day, I was struck by how the car was creating feedback for the driver, and how he in turn was responding by altering his driving technique to improve fuel economy.
The screen on the centre console has a graphical representation of the wheels, the engine and the battery. When the driver accelerates hard, energy is shown being conducted from the engine to the wheels. Gentle driving shows the engine unused, with the battery powering the electric motor, and braking is illustrated by energy flowing back to the battery.
The energy flows directly represent the economy of the driver, and the result is a game. My driver had half an eye on the screen, and as he negotiated his way around town he was constantly striving to maximise his score. Fuel economy had moved from a worthy but irrelevant issue (he’s not paying the bill) to a little game that could leaven the dull routine of city driving.
As digital media have become a greater part of our lives, games have been emerging as a key tool in influencing behaviour, helping to inform and developing skills.
The US army produced America’s Army with game creator Ubisoft in 2002, and is about to launch its third version, to play on the Xbox360 console. Over nine million people have registered for the game, which has become a key recruitment tool for the military, as well as a training tool.
The US military are no strangers to video gaming, having commissioned games before, but America’s Army reflects their view that games can be an effective marketing and communications medium – an approach which has led to accusations of propaganda.
In the UK, the Home Office used an online game back in 2003 as part of a consultation exercise on the Youth Justice green paper. Knowing that this group would be unlikely to complete a Home Office questionnaire, the COI created an online game with scenarios that dramatised real crime situations – a talking point to explore teenagers’ views on rights, responsibilities, crime and punishment. And this game-based approach worked – three times as many teens completed the game/survey as would have been expected from a conventional study.
Games have always been a naturally accepted way for children to learn. Whether hand-eye coordination, interpersonal skills or language, children’s own games help them to assimilate these skills. Education has long made use of the principle that learning within a meaningful context is more effective than in the absence of such a context – as is the case with most formal learning. Psychologists call this ‘situated cognition’, and it’s behind the popularity of role playing in all sorts of training.
But there’s an increasing understanding that those who grow up with digital media learn more effectively in these environments, and are developing new ways of consuming information. Graphics vs text, random access vs step by step, parallel processing vs linear – characteristics identified by Marc Presky, a writer on education, as the new norm for the learning style of the digital native.
So whilst much of the attention given in recent years to the marketing potential of online and video games has focused on their capacity as an advertising medium – placing posters and banners in-game, the real potential of games though would appear to much greater – as the game itself becomes both the message and the means by which we learn from consumers.
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