Emerging Virtual Worlds and Emerging Market Niches

The emergence of Second Life have created a splash in the media recently – companies are exploring ways to promote their products in virtual worlds or to research tastes of the consumers, ordinary people explore ways to find avenues for their creativity (e.g. recent article in BBC, the American Cancer Society’s virtual Relay 4 Life just raised $40,000 auctioning off virtual goods, nonprofits in SecondLife). SecondLife is one of the first serious virtual worlds, i.e. not linked to any kind of virtual gaming and not being geeks-only place.

As in virtual gaming, there always will be smart youngsters who will work instead of real users to sell ready-made avatars for those bored to spend hours in the in-game worlds building their virtual incarnations. Such business models look even more compeling for the serious creative virtual worlds such as Second Life. And here comes an interesting thought – such worlds will provide a unique opportunity for Eastern European creative minds to set boutiques there. Being far more agile than their more entrenched Western European counterparts, with similarly good Internet access, small creative companies from Eastern Europe could be a driver behind inhabitation and humanization of virtual worlds. This will not only boost their incomes, but will also help companies owning such virtual worlds to leap frog from the unsettling initial phase of world’s development. Market niche? Potential for partnership? Opportunity?

Virtual Worlds and Online Collaboration

I have stumbled upon an excellent research of Edward Catronova of Virtual Economies. Though it is an emerging topic, there is still not thought put into the Virtual Worlds emerging and Virtual Economies linked to them. Below are some thoughts of mine on Virtual Worlds and Online Collaboration. They are far shot from being a scientific research but somehoe it feels like talking about 22 century.

Real-life questions:

- How to combine the power of attachment that online gamers have to the VWs and power of creating knowledge in a knowledge economy?
- Can we make professional online communities as fun place to be as VWs in games?
- Social aspect of this phenomenon – current gamers are growing from their teens and moving to the real world environment where they are either bored because it is too slow or they create their “avatar” substitute industries, – look who is working for companies creating games, or all those IT companies providing bits and pieces of software to make it run?
- There are obviously many points of overlap between the VWs and real world. Take for example biots in the VWs, – this is exactly what is happening in almost all Intranets, – there is always a standard greeting sent of behalf of the Intranet Manager, thanking for registering of reminding about something. Right now normally there is a person linked to all those messages, – could it become a biot and the Intranet Manager instead will take an avatar to guide users of corporate Intranet around the system? Is this a point where VWs could “sneak” into the back door of the real commercial online communities of practice?
- Skills gained in playing multi-player online games (I used to know acronym for this) are gradually being recognized, at least in some sectors of teh economy. Could playing in oline games become a part of curriculum to make sure that students are aware about the VWs? Can this be part of a training programmes, for, say leadership MBA or an executive trainine course? I bet it is not what executives are doing and it probably good to let them fell what does it mean to start from scratch, to build av avatar of being slottered for a minor mistake – potential for fast-track learning are enormous.

Futuristic musings:

- Countries will start paying attention towards carving a strategic piece of virtual worlds. Political squablings about status of Antarctica will be transformed into UN-guided piece conferences on the borders and regulations in Virtual Worlds. Developing countries will have an advantages over developed countries by having by far more young people actively engaged in populating and gaining status in Virtual World while developed world with its aging population will have slim chances.

- Avatars will become economic agents of their owners creating direct value for them. For example, a market research company paying a number of avatars for evaluating certain social aspects of the Virtual World while playing in the game. The research company will provide a survey they will have to feel in after every session or there will be a piece of software looking at the avatars activities. The research company could sell the report to potential members of the Virtual World or those willing to increase their value (exactly what London City financial analists and herds of consulting companies are doing). Taking into consideration there are more Virtual Worlds than the countries and industries, it has huge economic potential.

- People will treat avatars as children, caring for them (tamagochi principle) and puting them into their will for inheritance for their real children. Such avagochi have economic value for their owners, a historical value which will keep staying important and at the same time avagochi will require constant attention to stay relevant economic actors of the VWs.

- eIdentity discussions will move from the identification of physical persons to the Internet-based avatar environments, – repositories of avatars information and test beds for creating, nurturing and emercing of newly created avatars into the selected VWs. Economic blocks, esp. EU and US will play a game on bar with Galileo vs. GPRS regarding the first truly global reference point in avatars repositories. Moreover, lobbying technologies from the real world will split over to the VWs with the delegations of avatars from one VW negotiating mergers and acquisitions of other VWs. Blocks of VWs will emerge.

to be continued …