Squarebobbing for avatars
Virtual worlds fascinate me. Creators of these "matrices" seem to be going in two directions right now--horizontally sweeping and vertically targeted. The former case is perhaps best typified by Second Life. Horizontal worlds are a big, digital sandbox in which the inhabitants can do what they might do (or wish they were doing) in the real world, except they'll be thinner and better-looking when they do it.
Vertical worlds can be aimed at a particular demographic or an interest area. The latter would include most of the MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft. It also includes topical entertainment worlds such as the ill-fated Matrix Online, tied in to the movie.
The newest entry in the specialized category is aimed at young kids and is sponsored by Nickelodeon. It's called Nicktropolis. This world allows kids the ability to interact with their favorite Nick characters like Jimmy Neutron and SpongeBob Squarepants. The network claims that it's amied at 6-14 year olds and that they've protected the kids by not requesting personally identifiable information and notifying the parents when their progeny joins up.
They will, however, be showing the kids real advertisements in the virtual world.
Where's it headed?
IMHO, we can't handle too many of these virtual worlds because the identity and financial logistics would get too hairy at some point. If people go through the effort of creating their virtual personas, they're cerrtainly not going to want to do them over again every time a new movie comes out or they pick up a new hobby.
This screams for identity interoperability--where avatars and pseudonymous identities are independent of any one world and certain personal metainformation is owned by YOU, the consumer, not by the company. If I spend hours designing an avatar in Second Life, why can't I use it in Nicktropolis?
By the way, for the record, if some kid created a persona in Nickworld and named it "Squarepants", even without the anatomically suggestive "Spongebob" part, it would almost certainly be censored by the publisher.
Posted on January 30, 2007
