Someone asked me about Second Life

I was recently asked, in the comments section of this blog, whether there is potential in buying advertising space in Second Life.  I wanted to answer this question more generally- instead of dealing with just Second Life, is it worthwhile to develop a real life business through a virtual game of some sort?

The answer to this question is not a very simple one at all.  These games are very social, more social than even the typical users of social media are.  They involve flights of fantasy, the kinds that reach back into parts of our personalities that we normally may or may not let be seen.  When we engage in these games, we engage parts of ourselves, in groups, that we probably haven’t engaged in since we were children.  We let ourselves play pretend for a moment, and allow ourselves to be stronger, more powerful, smarter, prettier, and more amazing than our real life selves could ever be.  As a result, the lessons we learn in those worlds (if we learn them), much like the lessons we learn as children playing pretend, are applicable to the world in life.  Just because the game isn’t real, doesn’t mean the psychology in them is also not.  Oftentimes, it is more real.  Betraying teammates will cause players to fail and lose friends, just like in the real world.  Game theory still works there.  One can make money and start businesses.  Opportunities are abound in these games.

Advertising in these worlds is therefore a messy business.  Unlike the games we played as children, there are no bodily limitations, just the norms of the game, and the technical specifications of your computer and the far away servers that run the game.  They don’t need food, nor naps, in any traditional sense of the word.  One could take a powerful laptop and eat a three course meal while playing one of these games, totally forgetting that s/he has gourmet food in front of him/her.  How is someone, therefore, supposed to get the real life player of the game to remember the brand of gourmet food in real life, and buy it, and therefore eat it?

One suggestion I found in a book called Influence, writing about the works of Dr. Albert Bandura, is that one needs to model behavior in a supportive group setting.  Further, extrinsic rewards don’t often work; the rewards have to be intrinsic.  Modeling doesn’t even need to be done by a real person.  it could be seen on a TV, it turns out.

So why not a game?  The problem is, that it is a huge investment of time and energy to develop a community that will model the behavior one wants to advertise.  One not only has to build the objects/advertising engines to repeat the behavior on, one also has to go out, and convince people that this is the “right way” or “best practice” when it comes to behavior in a game.  From there, companies then have to then model that this behavior is then to be modeled in real life.  It is a huge effort, which is why the largest running businesses in all of these games seem to run on fantasy, whether adult (IE sex), or childish (IE running around beating up monsters).  For many people, the effort in a virtual world, considering the time put in versus cost, especially when one considers the social time to develop a community, for say, developing an expensive art commune that specializes in virtual contemporary and also interacts with the real world gallery scene for its value and verification, isn’t worth it.  It is cheaper with a bigger payoff to not bother.  It pays more to make objects that provide fights of fantasy in a shorter period of time.

Breaking through this wall though, will provide more access to larger amounts of people, who right now feel hampered by these games.  So it’s a huge choice.  Do you want to be a pioneer with a group of people, knowing that currently, the case in these games is that you are dealing with a very sensitive part of people’s life that has not been acted upon in any real way, or do you want to develop it into something a little closer to reality?

(Please note that I do not mean any of this as a value judgment when it comes to people’s choices about MMORPGS.  I think one should have spaces to be childish, fantastical, or adult.  The question is, how do you advertise in that space, when advertising may run contrary to those spaces where those value are ok.  Not every space needs to share the same value sets.)

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