When CSI's CEO Anthony Zuiker threw out a thousands Mars bars at the audience at the Virtual Worlds Fall 2007 convention in San Jose this week, he meant to symbolize the sweet mash-up of 50 years ago, when Milton Hershey and Frank Mars traded chocolate and cookies to make the century's winner with "pleasure you can't measure" as the old ad slogan said. But a lot of the candies fell on people's heads, prompting Zuiker to quip, "Do we have insurance?".
That's the question to ask, because the TV invasion into virtual worlds is a gamble for TV (not just a stress-test for VWs), one which appears to have been handled well by There.com with Virtual Laguna Beach, and which remains to be seen as a challenge to SL on October 24 for the first CSI: NY/SL airing. Yet the deeper question to ask is whether the TV invasion will destroy the very integrity of the virtual world that attracted TV in the first place. One workshop was even titled: "Virtual Worlds and Big Media: The Future or the Ruination of the Virtual Worlds Space." The discussion was largely framed around the brand-driven model for sustainable recurring revenue versus the purely socializing experience of Second Life and There. Inworlders are hoping that big media will stop trying to get their ad companies to drop discrete product logos or even discrete miniatures into the virtual streaming scene, and move to a more sophisticated model of sponsorship of community activity, like Philips Electronics was the sole sponsor of CBS' "60 Minutes" to make longer news segments and fewer ads, just as Toyota sponsored Scion city.
One TV producer very matter-of-factly told me that whether the CBS gambit on October 24 with CSI and Second Life succeeds big or fails small, the future of the population in VWS will have to be cross-over audiences for them to succeed, as their user audiences now simply are not big enough to sustain their cost. The people coming to search for clues will be the next wave of residents, not the oldbie craftsmen, the midbie inworld entrepreneurs, and the newbie clubsters and campers -- or for that matter, midbie big business and newbie corporate staff. They'll be TV-watchers or corporate networkers, who may or may not want to do these earlier activities, and may or may not contribute to the existing inworld economy as consumers or even producers.
I'm betting they won't, and that the inworld economy will take a severe hit. It is already being replaced by another model: the company town. In this model, a company like ESC or MOU brings in a big media client and creates not a world or an economy but an event or series of events. They hire a team of people, much like a Hollywood producer would hire a troupe of actors and stage-set designers. These hired hands get union salaries and they don't *need* to sell their designs or services to individual consumers anymore -- so their IP, rather than needing to be protected by themselves individually from a horde of consumers who will knock them off, will insteady be given to a company that will either simply buy it and protect it -- or not bother, because they *real* content is no longer contained in a box, a skin, a building but in *an event*. Companies and their creators can even afford to give away the dress of the murder victim that week, a coffee cup made with the same textures as something in the build, etc. because it simply won't matter -- advertisers will pay them, not consumers.
My thesis is born out by the DRM saga. This week's Economist explains, "Abandoning DRM might at least force record companies to develop new business models that focus not on the songs themselves, but on the activities that go with them, argues Mark Mulligan of Jupiter Research." The Economist notes that increasingly artists sign "360-degree contracts" including concert, merchandise and endorsement deals. I say: what better place to drop down a "360-degree contract" than in a 3-D virtual world?! Sell the event, the swag, the branding as a package of experience, and you no longer have to worry about Copybot.
So what happens to the thousands of craftspeople in Second Life and their Tupperware-like loyal customers? They will either get hired by big media companies and their metaversal development agencies -- as they already are -- or die. Perhaps a few sturdy boutique names will remain, possibly to dance the old native dances and wear the colourful constumes of the indigenous peoples for tourists...
It may be a long time before the dying dinosaurs of the big media companies understand what they have trampled, which is a burgeonining movement of independent intrepreneurs and serendipitous teams of creative people solving problems by making their own content, at levels ranging from amateur to professional. Eventually such entrepreneurs will prevail, however, in the long run in the Long Tail because ultimately, people don't want others telling their story for them; they want to tell it themselves.