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Saturday, August 25, 2007

You Got Web 2.0 in My MMO!

I know, I know, it's cool to abuse Web 2.0 right now. There's been a ton of Web 2.0 backlash: a lot of the terminology (including "Web 2.0" itself) is cringe-inducing and companies with horrendous ideas are getting tons of venture capital thrown at them for merely including the world "social" in their business plans.

This criticism is perfectly justified and the bubble is going to explode. Back in the day people thought they would make billions with websites where you could buy cat food online. Now people think they can make billions with websites that have "social networks" for cats. No,
seriously. More than one.

But because of all the trash out there, it would be easy to miss the fact that there are valid ideas in the Web 2.0 world. In the original bubble and crash, were there a ton of garbage websites out there? Sure. But did we also have some awesome sites like Amazon and Ebay that we still use today? Sure. Likewise, sites like Digg or YouTube will be around for years to come and will be enjoyed by many.

So I'm going to try to find some Web 2.0 ideas that can be applied the MMO world. I'm sure there's going to be or already has been a lot of pontificating on this very subject probably with words like "folksonomy" and "clouds" being bandied about. So I'm going to try to be as concrete with my ideas are possible. To be honest, none of these concepts would be a selling point for me in deciding between games but I'm just going to throw them out there.

Feed Me

I want to be able to log on to Netvibes and have a tab fully dedicated to my MMO of choice with tons of delicious feeds. I'm going to use Netvibes and EQII as an example of what I would like to see, but you can substitute any feed-reader and your MMO of choice.

* Official News (obvious)

* Dev Tracker (preferably with different categories for Technical, Design, etc.)

* Community News Aggregator (one feed which aggregates all the community blogs and fan-sites)

Okay, those are fairly straightforward. But let's get more MMO specific...

* Server status

* List of friends/guildmates with online/oflline status and current zone information

* News specific to my Guild, both player generated (i.e. guild news postings) and automatic (guild status points)

* Ranking of Guilds on my server

* Ranking of Wizards on my server

* Ranking of Gnomes on my server

Heck, let's get even more specific on the rankings. Let me choose to have an automatically updating ranking of most damage done with a single spell by Gnome Wizards on Antonia Bayle in the level range of 10-20 in the Commonlands. You have the data - use it.

I'd also like to stick a widget in there which lets me search an item or player database.

The idea here is for me to be able to open one web-page and have absolutely all the news, resources and information I need, updated in real time.

Let Your Users Do the Work

Your users are an amazing resource. May as well tap into them as they are the best marketing department you can find.

The obvious one is supporting the people who contribute to your community with blogs, podcasts and fan-sites. For instance, EQII has the Town Crier which helps users find blogs and fansites they might not know about.

You could also make it easy for your players to capture screenshots or gameplay video and automatically upload them to a Flickr group or YouTube. Alternatively, a game could have it's own screenshot or video sharing page, with rankings for the most popular or most commented on media. Similar pages could be set up which allow players to post stories or artwork and let others comment and vote on them.

Every game should have a Wiki with user contribution. We all know official documentation is hopelessly lacking and dated. New users often have to spend extensive time searching for bits and pieces of information on the forums and it's so important to get new users over that initial learning curve. By having a Wiki, you have an up to date, living resource that can benefit both new and current players.

The final extension of this concept would be to allow for some form of user-created content in the game, itself. But that's a topic I've discussed before already and is too in-depth to get into here.

Get Social

I firmly believe that it's the social connections we make which keep us playing an MMO. The friends we make and the community we become a part of may just be the most important factor in our enjoyment of any game. So if a company can in any way facilitate those social interactions, they should definitely do it.

I don't use Facebook or MySpace so I'm a little out of my depth here, but what I am envisioning is a Facebook-esque page for each player. This page could have all of their character information updated automatically along with whatever personal data the player chooses to enter. There should also be room for a player's journal or blog, favorite screenshots and in-game videos and some fun widgets (some of which could be created by the company and some by users).

And of course, there's the social aspect. A player should be connected to his friends from the game, guild, and people known in real life. Each of these "classes" of people could have different permission settings when it comes to viewing that user's page.

The great thing is that MMO's already have so many ready-made social groups. In addition to player-made groups like guilds or a friends list, each player is part of server, a class, a race, a level range. These groups are the perfect foundation for creating a social network.

Players should be able to send and receive messages or media between individual players and to send out group messages to all of their friends or guild. Friends should also be able to comment on the aforementioned screenshots or journal postings on the page.

And Back Again

Can we take some of these social and community aspects and bring them back into the game? Sure. Players could be awarded titles or house items for having, say, one of the top ten most popular screenshots in a given week. Badges could be given for having a great page in the social network or for other ways of participating in the community. This would tie everything back together and encourage people to utilize the community features. And likewise, the community features would encourage people to keep playing the game.

MMO companies have always been been leaders in building online communities. I know that SOE has already tried to accomplish many of these goals with EQ2Players. I'm just suggesting they keep at it and take it to the next level.

14 Comments:

Blogger Dean Michaud said...

hThis is a great idea Aggro - I'd be lying if I said I'd never thought of similar ideas myself, but what I was not doing is tying it all together as you described. It would be slick to be able to instant message a guild-mate through the website/social-network, much like people can to Facebook via their Blackberry/iPhone today.

I have to admit that I tried Facebook due to peer pressure, but there was something lacking. The people I am in "contact" with through it are, lets face it, people I stopped speaking to 10+ years ago and I no longer have anything in common with them - but if I were to have a Facebook-like network for my MMO-of-Choice (does one already exist by chance??) I just might be able to get into it. It would at least be getting me in touch with people I chat with in-game and have formed a friendship with. It would be a great way to figure when people will be playing while at work or on the bus. It would be a fantastic way of sharing in-game footage/screenshots of stuff that happened. It would allow me to plan what we are doing that night during the day/week without wasting that time in-game ... allowing us to play when we're logged in and leaving the planning to the time out-of-game.

Nice idea, and a great post... even though it has the irksome "Web 2.0" label for the post's title.

:Karnatos

9:35 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I've also been thinking about this subject and I can say that it will happen.
My hopes for a system like this are that it will not be singular to one game, but blanket the community as a whole and offer everyone the benefit of broad based interaction even outside the game.
You have the backbone of elements that should be included and I like what I see.

9:51 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This was a very good blog posting, and it is something that is comming soon. My fellow founders and I are all young Boeing software engineers that are avid gamers and wanted something like this blog described for ourselves. So we set out to create it and more. We have been working on it for a few months and it will be released at http://www.gameralts.com fairly soon. Facebook, iphone, adobe air client and basic mobile apps are planned. Which reminds me, we need to add some behind the scenes screenshots to the coming soon page so that everyone can monitor the progress and give feedback.

For more information feel free to drop me a line. You can reach me by emailing chuck at gameralts, followed by a dot com of course.

4:26 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Guild Cafe has something along these lines, but hardly anyone uses it.

The most important thing in any online community, is how to make money from it. If the developers aren't making money on it, they may lose interest and move on -- servers to host things on costs money, technology often incurs licensing fees, there's a lot of investment going on. Unless there's a revenue stream somewhere, though, it's hard to see how something as involved as you describe could run for long.

And it's a rule of thumb that people hate paying for anything. Advertising through ads and whatnot is the usual answer, but people are becoming ever better at ignoring ads online. And who pays for advertising on gaming sites? Gold farmers.

Building a business model on the willingness of gold farmers to advertise on your site seems like the very definition of a risky move.

Thanks for adding my blog to your blogroll, by the way :)

9:59 AM  
Blogger Jeff Freeman said...

Wouldn't a social network for cats - if it were really for cats - just be personal web pages without stuff like links to other pages, user comments, pictures or videos of anything but the specific cat whose page it was...

At most, they might have a current enemy list in a sidebar...

----------------------------

* The Kitten, stealing my attention.
* The Woman, for bringing The Kitten into my house.
* Birds in the back yard.
* Squirrels on the window-seal.
* Other birds.
* Other squirrels.

The Child is away this week, and so has been removed from my enemy list. This removal is still pending confirmation The Child has been accommodating enough to have died, and is not in fact merely away at summer camp or the like. Naturally if it returns, then it will reclaim the top spot on The Enemies list.

Be sure to check out the gallery this week. There are no new pictures of me, but all of the old pictures of me are still as good as the first time you saw them, if not better. Not to be missed!

I'll post later this week describing how cool I look while relaxing on top of the television. The whole family gathers to watch me for hours.

----------------------------

1:44 AM  
Blogger brackish said...

GuildCafe is a pretty cool site and I have been there for some time now.

I like the resources they have so far, but you are right, it could use a bit more. Give it time and do your part and help spread it around.

11:11 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

cool post

9:39 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Awesome post :)

8:30 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Awesome!! :D!

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