A few weeks ago at the Game Developer’s Conference (and every conference I’ve been to prior) I heard the usual guff about how games now need more innovation. I’ve honestly come to the conclusion that this isn’t actually true. Yes, innovation is nice. Innovation builds more innovation which leads to the next… innovative thing, but I don’t think it’s what will attract more people to gaming. What will? In my opinion, emotional content.

With innovation, people tend to get bored once they explore all facets of the new feature, and for the average clever player, this takes less than a week. Currently, when playing a game (specifically an MMO) the primary attachment is the time investment put into your character. This can branch out into different subsets, such as your l33t items, or level, but essentially they’re all a factor of the treadmill. Yes, there are other aspects that hold people to games, such as the ‘community aspect’ I mentioned in a previous post, but there’s no real emotional attachment to the game itself.

What this leads to is players who will, on a whim, cancel their accounts. No thought goes into the process; they’ve become bored with the game. The latest ‘innovation’ is now just another aspect that they’ve gamed to death. Creating an emotional aspect to the character or the game is what keeps people coming back. You see people playing Meridian 59 ten years after the fact because of the emotional impact that it’s had on their lives. This can manifest itself in a myriad of different ways, of course, whether they met some good friends in the game, or it was simply their first foray into the world of online gaming, or perhaps it inspired a career in game development.

Now that MMO’s are becoming old hat, the options for innovation are becoming fewer and fewer, so focusing on a different aspect could be the solution. There’s been a lot of chatter about the future, and a few comparisons between Second Life and WoW and this got me thinking why people where focusing so much on Second Life. With the option to buy your own land, build it from the ground up, create content that’s unique to only you, I think this is creating some of that emotional attachment. There’s a personal bond between player and game which is a lot harder for people to leave behind than a hollow game experience. So maybe all the latest rants are right. Maybe it’s time that developers stop waiting for the next innovation, and focus on another way to keep gamers interested.

Reading Psychochild’s recent blog post titled “Why games will still matter” he touched on the subject of the use of avatars. Brian claims that people “…tend to ignore the avatars while chatting because they aren’t important.” I’m going to disagree slightly with him on this point.

Being a bit younger than Brian, most of my online gaming and interaction is centered around the time of graphical MMOs as opposed to text based MUDs. In this context, I actually find myself, in games at least, searching for another person’s avatar, and focusing on that while having a conversation. Using City of Heroes as an example, I would widely ignore the chat box and instead read the bubbles attributed to the character speaking. This was just more comfortable for me.

As games progress more and more into the 3D realm I’ve noticed the use of visual emotes coming into play. Users will bow at each other, wave, dance, sit while waiting, or read the newspaper while AFK. With each new round of online games that comes out, the options for ‘emoting’ become more and more vast. Falling back a bit into earlier games, in Meridian 59 the use of simple emotes has always been an important part of conveying messages to other players.

This of course relies on the assumption that the communication is happening in-game, and Brian made several points about normal chat spaces. While I’ve only had limited experience with 3D virtual chat spaces (mainly Worlds Chat back when they consisted of a space station portal which led to some other less populated 3D areas, I think that as communication technology expands, and video chat becomes more the norm, those wanting to maintain their anonymity will come up with digital avatars for discussion. With the social networking of online, having a visual to focus on helps to personify the other person. Even with games like Meridian 59, I can spot a person based on what they look like, occasionally, without even seeing their name.

As for Brian’s question of:

Is there really a business model that makes sense for the avatar service providers?

I’m going to reply by asking, isn’t this essentially what Second Life is?