Worlds in Motion - “Entertainment Content Convergence in Virtual Worlds”

Live-blogged from Worlds in Motion Summit. Presented by Reuben Steiger of Millions of Us.

We tell stories in weird environments. Those stories we learn are most successful when they employ methods of game play.

The Internet has failed at storytelling. The first time I had ever heard of the Internet was from someone in college. A fellow student had dropped out of school to be part of a “virtual society” called Geocities. When she described it, Steiger envisioned something that looked like Second Life and was underwhelmed when he saw it.

Up until recently, virtual worlds have been defined by a lack of rules and a different definition of fun. *I* get to define it, not the game designer. There is a new generation of virtual worlds, some on consoles, some simply on web browsers, that look much more like hybrids that look much more game-like and are mass market friendly.

Second Life has garnered to date about 95% of the media attention, comprises about 1-1 1/2% of the addressable market. This is really a point of inflection.

The forms of entertainment such as film, tv, and entertainment are beginning to blur. As TV came out, entertainment got a little lonely. You could consume packaged entertainment. This continued until broken by MMOs.

Movies lead to gaming. Arguably, Star Wars was the first to show people that not all the money was just in the movie. People are willing to pay for complimentary experiences. One of those additional experiences was gaming. We had arrived.

Club Penguin reverses this model. There’s a character franchise, yes, but there’s not really a story. They just got bought by Disney. Wouldn’t it be interesting if Disney creates a film based on Club Penguin?

Webkinz has extended the game play and the longevity of their product by pairing their product with a virtual world.

Reuben makes three predictions:

1. Social networks will become avatarized. Small virtual world plugins will be released into MySpace, FaceBook, etc.

2. Virtual worlds will become more like social networks. What we’re doing today are very small projects. In the future we will see major projects that drive entire shows.

3. Television tie-ins will increase for virtual worlds. In other worlds, virtual worlds are going to hit the console.