Virtual Worlds: The future or a fad?

Back in December after Clay Shirky's piece on Second Life, Stan who writes the PacificRim Exchange Blog took out his "I'm Sticking With DOS" buttons from the attic to make some points -- maybe something about keeping an eye on the future horizon.

Allan Benamer has written a post called Why Project Agape's Cause Is Better Than Second Life.  I think the title should have been more aptly "Why Project Agape's Cause Is Better ROI for Fundraising Than Second Life in 2007!"   Nicole Wallace's frames the post with these questions:

What do you think? Is Second Life a passing fad, or is it something savvy nonprofit groups should be watching and participating in?

Now this should set the stage for an interesting debate!

Ruby Sinreich notes in the comments, it isn't an either/or:

"It’s not like we have to choose either/or! Second Life is great for enabling rich learning experiences, creative expression, and complex interpersonal interactions."

Susan Tenby writes in the comments about the special qualities of Second Life:

There are few places where the security issues and the individual time of a member are rendered less significant. The boundaries of SL allow you to have access to many whom you wouldn’t be able to meet with in the real world (for example,business executives, celebrities and those in remote locations). It also allows you to create experiences that the two-dimensional web would never be able to produce (for example, walking through a human heart or experiencing schizophrenia as if you were the schizophrenic.) As soon as we have web directly enabled on Second Life (or whatever other virtual world takes it place), you will be able to have a seamless experience between your satellite office and your web documents.

It comes down to understanding what is the best tool/strategy to reach an organization’s outcomes and having an eye on what is on the horizon and what is being learned today. 

My feeling is that although we’re still in the early phases of virtual worlds, we shouldn't ignore it or label is a passing fad.  As such not all nonprofits organizations should be investing heavily in resources to implement a fund raising campaign in Second Life.  As Allan points out, there is a steeper learning curve and will require more resources to go to scale than say a Facebook profile. 

But, what about education programs?  What about the networking opportunities?

If I were a development person, I’d certainly want to get on avatar and get the chance to chat with Mr. Fanton directly about the foundation’s funding interests, find out what they learning about virtual worlds and philanthropy.  If my nonprofit's programs were geared for young people, I'd want to learn from first hand experience what opportunities virtual worlds present for my organization and its programs.  Exploring a tool with a low risk experiment to see if it is the right fit is not a waste of resources. Having knee jerk reactions – whether to immediately reject or immediately jump in with full scale implementation – is.

There's an interesting article over at the MacArthur Foundation Spotlight highlighting some recent virtual worlds research.

In a strange coincidence, I received an email from Jackie Marsh, a UK-based researcher looking at social media and early childhood, telling me about her blog, Digital Beginnings.  (We discovered each other via a post I wrote called "Mommy, what's a blog?" which was my attempt to explain blogging to my pre-K aged son, Harry.)   GenWe, today's kids, are a glimpse into the future.   And, it isn't just social networking sites they're using, today's young people are exploring and using virtual worlds.   So, are virtual worlds a fad or is it showing us what is to come.

Comments

[Allan Benamer]

I don't think my reaction really can be characterized as a knee jerk reaction. If anything, it's an extension of what we as technologists should be teaching our non-techie counterparts. That is, we should be teaching them what ROI means and how to apply it to the business of nonprofits.

It's clear to me that right now, ROI for Second Life is extremely low. The cost of building a 3d landscape, populating it with content, and then running a special event for it is a pretty staggering investment for the average nonprofit (under $10 million in revenue) and it's not clear that even the largest nonprofits have attained a positive cash flow from their events in SL. And aside from the quantitative issues surrounding SL ROI, the qualitative ones concern me as well. It's not sticky, not viral, not scalable, not open platform and statistics that determine intentionality of the user are difficult to get.

However, I'm entirely open to the notion that other virtual worlds may take the spot of a Second Life (habbo.com, Runescape, World of Warcraft, etc.) and that someday the ROI will be reasonable on those worlds.

This is why I find the comparison of my stance to "those guys who stuck to DOS" particularly objectionable. It's a caricature that's easily used on people who don't "get it". It's an easy one to make but if you read my post carefully, you will see I never called Second Life a fad. That was Nicole Wallace's framing of my article, which is really quite unfortunate. It's never that simple. I think Second Life is a tool where you should not expect a high ROI and that has limited uses simply because of its architecture and high marginal cost of participation. Does that make it a fad? No, it'll be around for some time to come. Could it be in vogue some day? No, not without some heavy duty re-engineering.

I would suggest that SL proponents really really need to make the case here. They can't just let people like me take easy potshots at them like I do. I'd love to eat crow on this issue but without hard data from SL proponents, I'll be making these easy comparisons all the time since the data from Causes is heckuva lot more transparent and accessible to me.

As a case in point, I was very skeptical about ChipIn when I first saw it, but was very much turned around on the issue by your case study and after talking to Carnet. I'm now one of its biggest fans. So make me a SL fan... show me some hard data.

[Susan Tenby]

Responding to Allan's comments, although it is likely that another virtual world may take the place of SL, it would never be a game-based one like Habbo or WOW. They have a totally different audience and their audience has a different reason for joining (entertainment).

As SL is now open-source, it is more likely that someone may invent another virtual world platform that allows it's users to create their own content on a new virtual world, but this new world will take a long time to attract the same amount of members (and at the same rapid rate of membership increase) that SL currently has (nearly 7 million members).

ALso, re: ROI... I think you are thinking about ROI far too narrowly. Cash is not the only way to define ROI. For example with our own organization (TechSoup) we are attracting a completely new audience that may not have known about us and was probably not visiting us before this work on SL. The ROI may not be a direct and immediately trackable cash transaction. But if you think about ROI a little more broadly, the press, conference speaking gigs, new members (who may eventually become donors) and volunteers are all evidence of an ROI that will increase the interest-level in the brand of an organization beyond it's pre-SL days. That is, I am not speaking exclusively about my own org, because I know of many orgs that are having increased interest from funders and increased interest from members, due to their recent involvement and activity in Second Life. The publicity that being involved in SL has provided them is invaluable and was not possible before the SL involvement.

The nonprofit orgs that are joining in this new platform (SL is a platform, not a game like WOW)are exposing themselves to a new population of technology innovators who will usually be willing to help them build something, produce events and who are eager to join in an effort to raise awareness about the organization and the community they serve. SL is another place, full of untapped constituents who are eager to make the content on the platform as rich and community-focused as possible.