Business & Games: The Blog

The thing I’ve noticed in the Google launch is its constant comparison to Second Life. I wasn’t there in 2003 when SL opened its doors for the first time but I can imagine it being a similar empty experience to the first visit in Lively. The completely empty spaces or extremely laggy clusters of pioneers just exploring the 3D environment. However, in Second Life, this ‘nothing to do’ feeling stimulated a number of ‘residents’ to start making sure something would be happening there pretty soon. By having access to the tools to really customize the experience, and express themselves in artistic and entrepreneurial ways they created content. The content that is the glue of Second Life at this time, the thing that made it work.

Lively does not have these features yet - but they might or might not appear lateron. The browser based  shop set up indicates it might have this system lateron by tagging ‘who made it’ and labeling all items ‘FREE’ hinting at a content economy at some point (see example product page). But whether this will be more like Habbo Hotel (Content is provided by the developers of Habbo) or Second Life (content is created and sold by the users of Second Life) is unclear. However, it does seem pretty difficult to design for the 3D environment without using specialist tools and 3D design software (but then again, i might have thougt the same of Second Life in 2003).

So to me, any comparison to ‘Googles Second Life’ pretty much stops there - it’s not the same. If anything Google is going to be a direct competitor with the aforementioned Habbo Hotel or the virtual chatbox IMVU, targeting teens who want customised rooms for free or next to nothing, and just chat. Simple as that. And to me, that is the smart choice given Habbo Hotels sign-ups outnumber those of Second Life by a factor 10, and all the growth seems to be in kidworlds. The problem here however, is these kidworldsdid provide context (and content) from the word ‘go’ - Disney provides mini games and meetingthe characters you might recognise from TV as an experience, Habbo outperforms Lively by far in the all-important usability for teen, Club Pinguin educates and doesn’t lag when there’s more than 10 people in your neighbourhood, conceding graphics for content.

So I’m left with the feeling Lively might be Microsofts Xbox in the most positive scenario, or Zune in the most negative - just entering a market they hope to claim by name alone. Perhaps they also pushed their deadline to beat Ralph Koster who seems to have been promoting his closed beta platform Metaplace for a long time now, offering simular features to Lively. Either way - the decentralised, embedded virtual world structure might be interesting to some, I don’t think it packs enough of a punch to really reach out into this market, even when that punch gets delivered by the 800 pound Googlerilla.

Original Post: http://digado.nl/lively-anything-but-lively.html