Multiverse Co-Founder: Finding the Right Game
Matt Mihaly, CEO of Iron Realms Entertainment, which makes text-based MMOs like the highly entertaining Achaea, has an interview with Multiverse co-founder Corey Bridges up on his blog. While there’s not much there we didn’t already know, there is an interesting passage in which Corey talks about how the platform — which is designed to provide a universal portal to games created with Multiverse — will bring “the right game to the right player.”
That’s absolutely, hands-down critical. Otherwise, only the top couple dozen games will ever be seen. There are many ways to do this. When a consumer launches the client, they go to the network login screen. . . . As you log in, for example, you could see a message saying “Oh, you play games X, Y, and Z. People who play those games also play game A.” There will also be taxonomies (categorized lists, a la Yahoo) of the worlds on our network, as well as search engines. We’ll also have at least one virtual world that functions as a hub–-The Nexus we’ll call it–-for finding other worlds. You can meet your friends there, and talk to an NPC who asks you what sort of experience you’d like. It will eventually point you through a portal. Jump your avatar through the portal, and you’ll go to that particular game. Part of the “long tail” notion is not just the democratization of creation, but also the democratization of distribution.
Nice stuff. For more interesting tidbits about Corey’s recent experience at the Firefly fan convention and how Multiverse fits with the long tail, read the rest of the interview.
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I do wonder about this long tail stuff.
People make long tails on their own — they niche, create niches, nest, etc.
It sounds to me like the amazon.com-type push message that assumes that you’re going to be like 2,758 other people who *also* read a certain book (don’t you find those dumb?!), and the NPC who steers you to a niche-game based on automatically-aggregated data — isn’t providing you choice, but using the veil of the niche to push at you.
I wonder if that Nexus NPC will start getting very political, in the insect politics sort of way. Like, he might say, hmm, my servers are all overloaded on Blingworld today, so even if I get 12 more blingtards, I’ll steer them over to Zingworld so they can even my balance out. They’ll never know the difference or if they complain, they will only complain in small numbers, etc.
I picture a real mess bottlenecking up on Nexus there, just like in the welcome areas and infohubs in SL.
Good questions, Prok. Plus, “insect politics” reminds me of David Cronenburg’s version of The Fly, which is one of my favorite movies.
interesting, I wonder though, if Matt can ‘get passed the recent scandal’, I suggest if you don’t know you look around the blogsphere for answers.