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Endless Advertising & Costless Production in Virtual Worlds
What does any business want to be able to do? Increase profits. How do you do that? You can push at both ends by raising prices and by lowering costs. In the widening gulf between, profits proliferate. In this regard, real life is no different from virtual life, as the online game Second Life seems to indicate.
There’s a sweet article on Wired about how a handful of avid Second Life players have quit their real life jobs to focus exclusively on virtual businesses. (Also see responses on Slashdot) In one of the most extreme examples, Wired details the case of one woman who began making four times her previous income hawking virtual products in Second Life. While these results may be less than typical, they seem to have vast implications for the future of business.
Namely, this seems to create the potential of dropping the costs of production down to virtually nothing. If you’re burned out on the hassle of making real world products, consider translating your product into a virtual world. Suddenly your only cost becomes the initial design of the product, which is then endlessly repeated whenever a virtual instance of that product is bought. No messy production costs, no factories to run, no employees to have to communicate with - just profits out the yin-yang.
Admittedly, not all real world products translate perfectly into a virtual setting. But if you look at the type and range of products for sale in Second Life, you might be surprised. Not only can you sell objects like shirts and shoes and cars, but you can sell body-parts, even animations of various activities (ie, sex). Second Life is still only a very primitive virtual world, but imagine how far this could commoditization could be taken within a futuristic fully immersive VR. You could sell intangibles such as feelings, sensations, experiences, memories, thoughts, and any combination of the above. I imagine that at some point the technology will exist that we can fully record our own internal states (and correlating sensory data), for personal playback, uploading, sharing, sale & distribution.
Of course, the question arises: what happens to companies whose products revolve around forming and triggering internal states when internal states can be directly bought and sold? Instead of having to buy a fancy car to feel like a big shot and get a boost of confidence, you could simply download that package to directly experience those feelings. Or conversely, you could just buy a simulation of having that car.
The issue of advertising is, I think, one of the other most interesting ones when it comes to virtual worlds. As Second Life indicates, advertising runs rampant even in virtual spaces. In fact, from a business end, offering advertising may be one of the prime motivating factors behind creating VR environments. What I mean by that is, say you’re finding that people don’t notice your ads anymore because they have effectively tuned them out, due to visual clutter and too many competing ads. One solution might be to create free virtual worlds for potential customers to interact in where your product placement is embedded into the deepest stratas of the environment. Also, within a virtual world, data-collection and demographic research would be a breeze, as there’s likely nothing you can do in a VR environment that can’t be centrally recorded, tracked and analyzed for patterns. You could conceivably correlate sets of data about a person based on their real life and all the virtual worlds in which they dabble as well, to create a completely accurate and predictable model of their behavior, thus targeting them with advertising barrages which span across the many universes (real and otherwise) they inhabit in their daily lives. Advertising targeted on this level could become a matter of magic and synchronicity.
Going down these lines of thought, the mythology of the Matrix makes more and more sense. Except, in our world, I don’t think it would be the machines which trap us into artificial worlds, I think it would be corporations bent on minimizing costs and maximizing profits. And rather than some kind of overt slavery, I imagine that most of us would or will enter into these arrangements quite willingly, because of all the seeming benefits these worlds will offer us. If and when that happens, what happens to our humanity? Does it go up in a puff of smoke as we tune in, turn on and drop out for the final time? Or are we just going to take our all-too-human problems and triumphs with us as we colonize other types of mindspaces? Will these worlds be environments of total freedom and yet total control and surveillance at the same time, with thought-crime becoming the only kind of crime any more available to us? The possibilities, right now, are staggering to think about. And they are only as yet possibilities. Imagine how much more staggered we will be when these things are upon us, when they’re all we have.
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- Virtual Terrorists
- Unting & Ishing
- How Much Are You Affected By Advertising?
- Are You Responsible For Your Dreams?
- Prev: Grocery Store Cards
- Next: Give ‘Em What They Want
March 19th, 2006 at 12:05 am
Few other items worth looking at in this discussion:
1) MetaAdverse - the site that acts as a broker between Second Life players and people wanting to advertise through Second Life
2) Supposedly the real life company Wells Fargo bought an island in Second Life which “aims to teach young adults how to handle their finances, presumably by using Wells Fargo’s financial services.” Weird.
3) A blog that studies in game advertising and “advergames”
4) From MSNBC: “We interrupt this fantasy… Will the rush of advertising into video games lessen the fun?”
March 19th, 2006 at 12:10 am
More from the Wells Fargo press release, linked above:
Sounds like a really shitty gaming environment. What is it’s purpose - to promote WF banking products in real life by showing they “understand young people”? Or is this a move seriously to further indoctrinate people into the monetary systems of virtual worlds exclusively? One of the most interesting aspects of Second Life is that the money in it converts to actual dollars in the real world. This seems to allow people to transfer their knowledge and fixation with money over into the virtual environment. I wonder if we’ll ever reach a time when actual dollars are irrelevant, and the mental transfer into virtual currency is complete. Virtual currency won’t actually refer to anything in the real world at all anymore.
March 19th, 2006 at 12:57 am
I don’t get it. Why spend your time loitering in some made-up online universe when you could have actual real experiences?
Maybe I’m just too old….
March 19th, 2006 at 2:02 am
Just a quick SecondLife aside:
I think virtual worlds are an open door to a niche that previously didn’t care about advertising, and all of that. I mean, even U2 just held a virtual concert in SecondLife. An untapped source of funds, a new audience. Previously, and maybe this is biased, but I would have to say that gamers and geeks in general aren’t the most “trendy” when it comes to superficial things. It’s more about the gadgetry and the innovation, creative logic… Have you ever seen a hacker interface in a movie compared to a hacker interface in real life? Yeah…
But for a place like SecondLife, I think it might’ve come as a surprise that this group of people that maybe don’t pay attention to those sort of things in their daily life, actually care about going around and buying these same virtual things in the virtual world. For example, I was just in there the other night for the sake of being a bit of a tourist, and along the way I ended up buying a pair of wings. Would I buy a pair of wings in real life? Nope. Not only do I not want to spend the money on them, but I also just don’t want them. But in the game I did. It seemed to fit the whole… gothy-punk ambience going on in there.
Considering that I’m only a basic user, the “money” I’m spending doesn’t really convert into real money, since users get an automatic L$50 per week (if you sign in) as an allowance. But some people dish out actual, real money so that their characters can buy land and open stores and do cool things like that.
I saw an advertisement for a special penis that you could buy in SecondLife the other night, and I found it absolutely hilarious. Wow.
March 19th, 2006 at 2:05 am
And, slomo, I agree. But it sure is more entertaining at 1:00 am instead of watching tv when everyone else is asleep and you don’t feel like getting out of your pj’s.
March 19th, 2006 at 2:26 am
Yeah slomo, I’ll tend to agree b/c I can’t get laid or high or eat mushrooms in VR, I’m more into magnetic resonance generators that create religious experience than I am Second Life.
On the other hand, when you work 90 hours a week, you don’t have much time for real-world entertainment. something to consider. Has anyone seen Wild Palms?
March 19th, 2006 at 5:13 am
“I’m more into magnetic resonance generators that create religious experience”
What? They have these? Got a link?
March 19th, 2006 at 9:32 am
OK, I’ll show my hand here. I’m somewhat intrigued by Second Life, especially the creative aspect of it. But I have this sneaking suspicion that something is wrong with it… There is something important about physical presence, being in your body, that is lost in these virtual worlds.
March 19th, 2006 at 6:21 pm
Well, obviously. And Second Life is only the beginning of that slip-sliding away. Because there will come a time when this technology is more refined that you will no longer be aware that your body is sitting at a workstation. You will be “in” the game for all intents and purposes. There will be no outside except as a distant vague memory
March 19th, 2006 at 8:58 pm
Agreed, Slomo. I actually don’t really like the social aspect of Second Life that much. The friends I have in there are friends from real life first. And so that’s why I’m more of a tourist in the game.
Very cool, Tim. I think it would definitely feel different, and I’d feel a lot more social in a place like you described. But would I want to hook up with someone else’s avatar? Uh… I dunno, all of those pointy polygons might hurt!
March 20th, 2006 at 12:10 am
OK, I actually spent the day in Second Life, just to see what it was like (and because I’m actively procrastinating, avoiding some work that desperately needs to get done). Here is my trip report:
After I got oriented and figured out what I should look like and wear, I decided I should try to get aquainted with some natives. Since I’m unwilling to buy virtual land with a tax-rate that approximates that of real estate, nor do I have the time to develop it, I figured the best thing to do was to look for established communities. I didn’t know how to go about looking for any intellectual communities (e.g. like this one) so I went for the first one I knew I could find: a gay community group. All of the “respectable” gay community spaces seemed to be deserted, so then I looked for the places where I figured my fellow brothers-in-arms like to congregate: the “mature” places. After meeting a couple of people who wanted to have virtual sex, I realized that my Ken-doll non-genetalia would not do, so I spent some time shopping around for a penis. After finding one that was in a price range that I was willing to pay during this abbreviated anthropological study, I had to figure out how to attach it (since by default it seemed to want to attach at my knee). After an hour of struggling with the 3-D graphics capabilities of Second Life, I finally had a working penis that was plausibly attached at the pelvis. I was then easily able to find a sex partner, and the sex was seemingly raunchy yet somehow quite boring.
My conclusions: For a gay 37-year-old nerdy mystic who’s too busy to develop unreal-estate, there doesn’t appear to be much to do in Second Life other than have virtual sex. And, personally, I would rather have sex in real life. (Of course, my partner would not take kindly to having sex with anybody in real life other than him, and even Second Life virtual sex is probably a gray area, not to mention these days it’s quite a bit more difficult to get laid on this side of the virtual divide now that I am about 10 years older than the appearance of my Second Life avatar.)
So…. Now that I’ve actually tried Second Life I can freely diss it.
March 20th, 2006 at 1:52 am
Haha, you’re right, that might be all it’s about. (Haven’t tried it yet!) But I really like just flying around (sometimes on a hover bike) and checking out all of the cool things people have built and crafted for themselves. Like a giant, freeform, 3D, art gallery. I guess that’s kindof how I look at the world too. Damn, I’m such an indie hippie bastard…
March 20th, 2006 at 8:18 am
Yes, Ant, you’re right: it is very cool what people have done with the 3D graphics tools available on Second Life. I shouldn’t diminish that aspect. If you view SL as a giant virtual 3D art gallery, it has some merit.
(And I’m even more impressed than I otherwise would have been had I not struggled with attaching the penis to my avatar.)
Truth be told, I’m kind of intrigued by the artistic aspect of it. But it seems a bit overwhelming to learn how to build things.