Immersive Gaming
One of the concepts that interests me in terms of User Experience design is “Immersive Gaming”, or “
Immersive Reality Gaming“. There are some similarities between what you’re trying to do in an immersion reality scenario that you’re also attempting to achieve when you attract someone’s attention and keep it within the Social Media or Social Networking context, or everyday business processes.
For many years I’ve been involved in trying to encourage people to do things like:
- Fill out a tedious form online;
- Visit an intranet or extranet site to encourage open collaboration or knowledge/information exchange;
- Carry on a social networking conversation, perhaps encouraging people to visit a URL I’d like them to visit or consider a concept they might be unfamiliar with;
And many other similar situations.
Can you think of a time when a company created a business proposition that you accepted wholeheartedly right away, and continued to spend small amounts of money on and probably still do? Consider:
- Apple:
- embracing the $1.00-a-song model, and allowing individual songs to be purchased from any album in the iTunes music catalog.
- creating the Application storefront for the iPhone, where full applications, games, etc. can be bought for a low dollar cost, i.e. $0.99-$10.00 range.
- Amie Street:
- following the expectation that a lot of customers willing to pay $0.05 a song is a lot better than a few customers willing to pay $1.00 a song, and it leading to an amazing success story.
- encouraging the participant to listen to music as a part of a community, providing reviews, and as a reward for your review (and by people agreeing with your review) earning credits that can be used to purchase new music).
- Everquest:
- providing storyline, community, exploration of new, fantastic environments and personal growth through your virtual avatar, to the point where it’s so engrossing you commit hours (and money per hour) to the effort.
- Microsoft
- Launching XBox Live, providing both a multi-player verbal avenue for game play participation but also using this service as a primary method for making quite a bit of money off Multi-player participation after the purchase of the game. It is currently the only service on game consoles that charges you a fee for multiplayer gaming.
- Following up with “Games for Windows – Live”, which recently abandoned (12/2008) the pay-as-you-play model in the PC Genre, in part because people were no longer willing to “pay-to-play.”
- America On-Line
- Once famous for their massive selection of chat rooms, forums, Instant Messenger and content channels, America On-Line hosted chat communities, using volunteers to run those communities and for years charged all of their members by the hour toparticipate on the service. The longer you talked, the more money AOL made. In one particular case (mine) I found my wife by being a part of and helping run an AOL community.
