Web communities - the missed opportunity for game developers
Why is the games industry so slow to embrace the social networking phenomenon that is changing the way everyone consumes their entertainment media?
The changes being wrought by the Internet are radical and far-reaching. Your consumers are changing the way they expect to interact with each other, with entertainment and with brands. Developers who fail to embrace these changes are certainly missing a trick and possibly sowing the seeds of their own destruction.
The high-falutin' sociological bit
Who do you trust? For most of the twentieth century, Western societies lived in the era of "Trusted Authorities". We believed what politicians told us, what doctors told us. We believed journalists, the police, anyone who was in an established position of authority.
That trust has been eroded over the past thirty years. From Watergate to non-existent weapons of mass-destruction, from miscarriages of justice like the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six to detention without trial in Guantanamo Bay, Western societies have been presented with clear evidence that they cannot trust authorities. The press, originally seen as a protection against overbearing governments, have lost much of that respect from the public, as they chose to publish paparazzi photos rather than investigative journalism or hard facts in a desperate bid to halt declining circulations.
So far, nothing new. Societies have frequently challenged authority in the past, but have ended up maintaining that trust due to lack of alternatives.
This time, however, something is different.
That something is the Internet.
When citizens do not believe their authorities, they now have somewhere else to turn. At first, the Internet was derided as a second-class source of information. As a place populated by conspiracy theorists and friendless fantasists. That has now changed. Wikipedia is the first source of information for millions of people on almost any subject When the tragedy at Virginia Tech was unfolding, not only did citizens turn to Facebook and other social networks for their information, so did mainstream news media outlets. Student Bryce Carter saw police racing past his dorm room with guns drawn, screaming at students to get down. He recorded it on a mobile phone and posted the video to his LiveJournal page. Within an hour, his grainy footage was picked up by Fox News and dozens of other media organisations, and Carter had been interviewed by the LA Times, the BBC and other journalists desperate to get a first-hand account of the tragedy. These examples show that we have moved from the era of Trusted Authorities to the era of Trusted Environments.
A Trusted Environment in this context is a place where the behaviour of community is regulated by the community itself. In Wikipedia, anyone can edit an article. Although there will always be issues of perspective - one person's terrorist has always been another person's freedom fighter - generally Wikipedia is highly accurate. A peer review of four articles from each of Wikipedia and from the venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica, by respected science journal Nature found an equal number of major errors in each (four) and a roughly similar number of minor errors (162 in Wikipedia; 123 in Encyclopaedia Britannica). Attempts to spoof Wikipedia have usually failed, with incorrect postings usually spotted and corrected by volunteers within hours. Facebook, the fast-growing social network, uses the fact that your networks tend to consist of people you know in real life to regulate behaviour. Although many people disclose more than is perhaps sensible in Facebook ("Nicholas's status is "playing Minesweeper when he should be working"), the reality is that the same social checks and balances that exist in the real world exist online. Plus you can always block someone if they become really annoying.
The practicalities
This shift to trusted environments is absolutely fundamental to the way people will consume entertainment in the future. It implies a world where the consumer, not the publisher/channel, is in charge of the media schedule. In television, the Sky+ and TiVo phenomenon has devalued the decades-old skill of scheduling. iTunes has heavily damaged the album, and sent it headed in the direction of extinction. Spotted the implications for games yet?
And there is more. In a trusted environment, the consumer expects not just to consume content, but to create it. From citizen journalists to social networkers, entertainment is rapidly moving into a two-way street.
However, the great thing for games is that we have been at the forefront of these changes for decades. Remember the importance of high score tables in Space Invaders or Gauntlet in the arcades. A very basic social network. Now the arcade has been transmuted into an online league table or a Gamertag. Modders have been creating their own content for games since before Doom and what are MMOs but a social network with fantastic graphics?
All of this makes it surprising that developers are not falling over themselves to exploit the Trusted Environment. Nearly all of the developers I have spoken to simply see the Internet as a way to cut out the publisher. But to think of the Internet as just a shop is to miss the real opportunity.
