Random stuff in my brain

I’m heading off for the Austin Game Developers Conference this afternoon.  I’ll be there through Friday evening, if anyone wants to meet up.

I realized recently that I speak mostly in conclusions. That is to say, I am really bad at exposing my thought processes to other folks.  It’s one of the reasons why I blog so infrequently.  I only feel comfortable blogging fully formed thoughts – ones that have relatively well tested hypotheses.  But so much of relationship formation and bonding – the good stuff – happens in the in-between spaces.  I decided I need to actively work on exposing these thought processes.  

So I guess I’ll try posting more casually to my blog. I don’t have a lot of faith in this yet, but I suppose it’s the kind of thing that takes practice.  =)

I had a very enjoyable conversation yesterday with Byron Reeves.  Byron’s the Director of Stanford’s Language and Information Program.  In his spare time, he does a lot of consulting and startup work in the area of virtual worlds and virtual economies.  He told me about some fMRI work he’s done, studying people’s brains while they play World of Warcraft.  And the difference in people’s brain responses depending on whether you tell them the other characters they are interacting with are other people or NPCs (computer AI.) 

One of the companies he’s working with is Seriosity.   They are basically creating a platform to allow companies to create virtual economies by assigning currency values to different types of interaction and communication.  They are coming up with all sorts of very interesting, unique data about how virtual currencies drive behavior and group dynamics. 

Anyways, a few random thoughts have been percolating in my brain:

- What does it do to a [company's] culture if all interaction can be boiled down to some quantitative representation?

- Isn’t a company’s culture really just some expression of a collective utility function?

- And, has anyone done any studies measuring what type of correlation exists between the rate of change of a [group|country's] economic growth and the rate of change of its language? I guess I’m curious if various Chinese dialects are changing more quickly than languages in more static socioeconomic conditions.  I feel this must be true to some extent, but I wonder to what degree.

Vote for my SXSW panels please!

Dearest Readers,

If you enjoy reading my blog or liked any of the panels and conferences I put together this past year, I would greatly appreciate your vote for my proposed SXSW panels:

Virtual Goods: The Next Big Business Model! 
What’s Wrong With Today’s Major Social Networks?
Human and Property Rights in Virtual Worlds

I haven’t put together who the rest of the panelists are yet - I’m waiting to see if any of these panels get selected, but I guarantee any panels I put together will be interesting, fresh, and relevant.  Why? Because I really hate wasting peoples’ time. And I really enjoy being a catalyst of enlightenment, in whatever small way I can.

SXSW is my favorite conference of the year.  It’s just a really cool mix of product oriented people: creative people who build stuff.  These are the kinds of people I love to spend time with.  Plus, it’s in Austin and Austin is a super fun town. 

Greatest thanks,

s

update:

p.s. To all of you lazy folks who are reading this post but not voting (e.g. most of you), because SXSW uses awesome Ajaxy Web 2.0 technology, it only takes you 1 second to vote.  So you have no excuse. 

Interview with Worlds in Motion

Leigh Alexander, who is one of my favorite writers on the subject of virtual worlds, interviewed me about the future of online gaming.

The whole thing is worth a read – it turns out it’s a lot easier to speak casually with someone than to blog (surprise!).  In it, I talk about one of the holy grails of online gaming:

“One of the hallmarks of a successful Web company is — if you look at the track record of the most successful companies that have stayed independent and sustainable, like eBay, Google or Amazon — they have built platforms [which can] foster entrepreneurs. There are ecosystems that spawn innovation from the community members themselves, and Facebook is falling in with that too, with the new platform launch. Few gaming people understand this intuitively — though, Xbox Live Arcade really fosters an entrepreneurial ecosystem, too. That’s something Areae is trying to focus on – how to build an actual ecosystem and a real, [open] web platform for people to [work, build, and extend upon].” 

Introducing Conduit Labs

We just announced our recent Series A investment in Conduit Labs, a Boston based company that’s focused on building a social networking / casual MMO hybrid.  Well, what does that exactly mean? And aren’t there a hundred companies now doing this exact same thing? 

This new space – the intersection of Web 2.0 and online gaming – is a very difficult one to define.  This categorization encompasses companies like Kongregate to Areae to Three Rings – each of whom is vastly different from the others.  To make it even more confusing, Conduit Labs is not really like any of the three companies I just mentioned.  They’re inventing an entirely different interpretation of what it means to sit at this intersection. 

Conduit Labs is building a gaming environment.  That is to say, the primary driver of user interaction is game mechanics.  This gaming environment lives in an immersive, graphically rich world.  But the gameplay Conduit Labs is building isn’t exactly like other online games we’ve all now become familiar with: there’s probably not going to be much kart racing or princess saving or dragon slaying.  We aren’t yet disclosing what the gameplay or graphical metaphor will consist of, because that’s part of the secret sauce. 

Leigh Alexander from Worlds In Motion wrote up a great interview with Nabeel that provides more insight into what Conduit Labs is up to.

Nabeel: “I think probably every other day now over the last couple months, I see a new casual MMO or virtual world startup; it’s been constant…and what I saw was the same kind of dichotomy — two types of startups. There’re hardcore MMO gaming guys trying to make that experience more accessible, sort of like World of Warcraft meets the web. And the other side of the coin is a bunch of web guys who want to build a web site with virtual gifting and more gaming.”

While Hyatt recognizes the value in both of those approaches, he adds, “I think they’re missing the larger point – which is that there is no interaction on the web that is like a social game. I don’t mean a single-player game, which is based on a legacy of, really, only video games; it doesn’t last hundreds of years. There’re actually thousands of years of games that are primarily social activities like dancing, or bowling. And those are about you bonding with your friends, and there’s nothing like that online right now. And I think the web and social networks provide a whole new medium to create something that’s never been seen before.”

Just like the Wii and Guitar Hero reinvented the social gaming metaphor for a broader audience, Conduit Labs is trying to do the same for your web gaming experience.  I’ve also seen innumerable business plans in the last year for startups in the online gaming and virtual world space.  But most of them have been rehashes of things we’ve already seen, building things like “making the MMO even more casual” or “putting casual games into Facebook” or “Club Penguin but with chimpanzees.”  (disclaimer: I actually like chimpanzees quite a bit, probably more than I like penguins.) 

We invested in Conduit Labs because I believe the team there really gets it: there’s an entirely new type of immersive experience waiting to be built.  It has less to do with technology (although we are building on the basic assumptions/principles of the zero-barrier MMO and all that entails), and more to do with social engineering.  This is a great team that has the right blend of experience that includes Web 2.0, hardcore MMOs and the scalability expertise that comes from supporting tens of thousands of concurrent users, and understanding how to design “fun” for a mass market audience that comes from building groundbreaking social games like Guitar Hero.