Roughly 18 months ago, a small group of people with diverse talents, including game design, Hollywood-style animation, technology, research on children and computers, and business, met to form ZooKazoo.com. What we shared was a vision for a safe, virtual playground for kids — one richer than any available at the time, and one with the ability to evolve over time.
Since we started down this path, we’ve had the pleasure of watching thousands of kids simultaneously exist and interact everyday in virtual worlds – in pioneering sites like Club Penguin, Neopets, Webkinz, and Gaia and in more recent creations like ZooKazoo, Buildabearville, Smallworlds, Our World, and Dizzy Wood. What we’ve learned is that success in these worlds is as much about what the kids bring and teach us, as what we offer them.
At ZooKazoo, we focus on an audience of 6- to 12-year-olds, an age group with significant diversity in skills, preferences, and styles of interaction. These kids not only hang out and play, but they critique our collective works and directly shape what is to come. These players help set the new bar for what they expect to be able to do in imaginary, interactive spaces. We believe they will carry those same expectations to subsequent generations of all types of interactive entertainment, specifically the kinds of titles that are the focus of publications like Edge.
How are Virtual Worlds Games?
Virtual worlds differ from the more traditional interactive games that Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman — the team behind the wildly successful Diner Dash — describe as places where creators have pre-defined fictions with characters, conflicts, rules, and quantifiable outcomes. In virtual worlds, players more or less shape their own fictions. They define their own goals, build their own spaces, establish their own characters, build communities of friends, create and resolve their own conflicts, and in many instances share the responsibility for the continuous development of content for the world. Sometimes that content has value only within the imaginary world; more and more, that content may have surprising external monetary value.
We consider the key trends visible in the evolution of virtual worlds and their inherent social networks as participation and presence. Participation in interactive video games can be intense, even instructional, as evidenced by real changes in heart rate, hormonal flow, and mental acuity when gamers engage in violent fictions or time and decision driven simulations.
In the virtual world, the notion of participation casts the frequent visitor in the role of information or content producer. The extent and importance of this kind of participation is exemplified by the proliferation of hundreds of engaging mashups and blogs describing, illustrating, or decrying Club Penguin, and in the fact that an article written about one’s imaginary pet in Neopets may have a readership two orders of magnitude greater than the print edition of the New York Times. While we still believe that the fundamental reason children frequent virtual worlds is to hangout and have fun, the sheer volume of content they create is evidence of a different level of participation, an identification with the people, situations, and places in the world as real, evolving, and deeply personal.
Personal Spaces
We use the word presence to describe the richness in the way individuals outfit themselves in clothes and accessories; in the hours spent creating virtual but personal spaces abundant in telling trappings; in the elaboration over extended time of profiles that capture their predilections, accomplishments, and reputations; or in ego-at-risk acts of introducing one’s self to others, stating opinions, offering assistance, or contributing content that may receive public acclaim or disdain. Presence in virtual worlds may be representative of the person in the real world or it may take on an exploratory, expressive, and imaginative bent. Whichever, presence represents “I’m here. I’m now. I matter.” This is a difference that is immediately felt watching the interactions of virtual worlders.
Participation and presence can also be collective. Kids form sub-networks, small communities, affinity groups, or clubs in virtual worlds. These may be fleeting or persistent. They come together around common concerns and interests. Their individual presence is enhanced by groupness, again — “I matter. I’m not alone. I have a place.”
Successful virtual worlds, then, provide the means, the necessary functionality, and the opportunity to enhance participation and presence. They recognize and cater to a few simple facts: kids – and in the bigger picture, people – like to create; to share; to learn (with and from peers); to hang out and interact; to express themselves with varied means; and to obtain status. Judging by the numerous “drama queens” we encounter in ZooKazoo, they also like to create their own situations and conflicts; they invent their own games within the confines of our world; they carry on conversations with us – the producers, and blast us when we fail to provide all of the above. They know what they want. They know what they want to do.
The viable virtual world must be an organic place. It must be open to change. The environment must reflect the actions and interactions and preferences of its community.
What Hardcore Games Can Learn
There are lessons here for the broader enterprise of interactive media and games. We already see stunning changes in mainstream interactive gaming that reflect some of the same awareness about this generation of players. Take the Wii phenomenon, for example. What could enhance presence and participation more than the direct insertion of individuals’ gestures, movements, and spontaneous acts directly into the game interplay? The explosion of multiplayer and massively multiplayer games is a recognition of the same sociology we see in virtual worlds – people like to interact (play and compete) with other real people. They like to establish reputations and see their prowess reflected in their game play. Further evidence of this can be found in the rapidly growing attempts to surround or integrate the game screen with social networking tools. I suspect that this is just the beginning of a momentous metamorphosis in interactive media.
The challenge may lie in the extent of the expectations that virtual worlders bring to the arena. In ZooKazoo’s case, they have been aptly trained by Club Penguin and Neopets. They demand from us everything they experience in the other worlds and then ask for more. And, thanks to the organic nature of virtual worlds, they often get it. It is not a stretch of imagination to predict that today’s youthful virtual worlders and future gamers will make the same demands for open-ended environments that support participation and presence in the more traditional games they will embrace as they mature. If this holds true, the key to success may lie in our ability to stay one step ahead of their expectations.
David Dwyer is the Chief Operating Officer for ZooKazoo.com, an imaginary world of adventurous destinations on the Internet where children can play, socialize, have fun and make their world a better place. A twice recognized Outstanding Secondary Educator of America, Dwyer has more than 20 years of research and development experience in educational and interactive technologies.