Business Week has a couple of articles out about virtual worlds — one on the pioneering, once-feted and now oft-maligned Second Life, written by virtual world evangelist Wagner James Au, and the other by Beijing-based Chi-Chu Tschang about China’s SL “clones,” HiPiHi, Novoking, and UOneNet. I’ve written about the first two here and here. UOneNet’s still unfamiliar to me but I’ll certainly check it out.

So far, despite some publicity, HiPiHi doesn’t seem to have gained a whole lot of traction. One San Francisco based virtual world enthusiast named Suezanne C. Baskerville, whose blog is rich in expert advice on how non-Chinese-speakers can “immigrate” to HiPiHi, commented in late April on Twitter that the current population on HiPiHi was 65 - the highest she’d seen to date. In his Business Week article, Tschang quotes a lonely avatar saying, “This world feels like it has been destroyed before.”

But Don’t count Chinese virtual worlds out. There’s still a lot that suggests to me that they’re really going to flourish — at least in users if not as profitable businesses.

For one, there’s China’s deep-rooted MMORPG culture. Couple that with the amply demonstrable willingness of Chinese to strike up online friendships with strangers — the whole culture of QQ really got started this way, and I’ll bet you anything the proportion of “real” to “we only know each other online” friends on IM buddy lists in China is far, far lower than among U.S. users. Of course, it may prove to be that the actual gaming elements of the experience — fighting monsters, gearing up with spells or armor or weapons, gaining gold and experience points — might prove more compelling than flying around, trading real estate, blinging out their avatars and chatting up strangers. I’m curious to see whether some teleological elements might end up entering China’s virtual worlds.

Chinese operators of these worlds, to repeat something I’ve said before, have had the second mover advantage of being able to watch what Linden Labs has done wrong with SL. The far lower barriers to entry in Novoking and HiPiHi — you don’t need to be a skilled coder to actually make things in the world and participate in economic life there, and there are lots of prefabricated public spaces to visit — are a smart approach by my lights.

Micropayments, as we’ve seen with the success of many online game companies and of course Tencent, are a well-established means of collecting revenue. The ubiquity of the free-to-play, pay-for-item model in gaming could easily be applied to the Chinese virtual worlds, sustaining them long enough to build large enough user bases to attract brand advertisers.

As for what advertisers should be thinking, Wagner James Au’s piece includes what, to me at least, seem like very sensible suggestions for the dos and don’ts.

 

The worst mistake that would-be virtual world marketers make is assuming their Second Life presence should mirror the real world—in other words, making their branded location look like a shopping mall. Some of the most successful grassroots locales play in the full spectrum of possibility: dystopian, Blade Runner-esque cities of the future, for example, or interactive art installations that seem like 3D dreamscapes. This is the essential eclecticism of the Second Life experience—what I call “bebop reality.”

Smart marketers will imagine their brands not as they are in the real world, but as they fit within this free-form play space. Among Second Life’s most popular locales is “Greenies,” a giant living room that makes avatars seem as small as ants. It’s here that a British agency launched a campaign for its client, L’Oréal Paris, not as a traditional billboard, but as custom-made virtual products discretely placed inside a lady’s SUV-size purse. After the first three months, Second Life residents had snatched up 34,000 copies of L’Oréal-branded objects—an amazing virtual item click-through rate of about 3% of the active user base (assuming some individuals took more than one).

With China, as with SL and its ilk on the Anglophone Internet, I tend to take a long view of this, and my sense is that there are enough investors who are sanguine about this area’s long-term prospects to sustain it. I would caution against being prematurely dismissive of virtual worlds however slow adoption looks today. I do see a trend toward avatar-based online interaction becoming commonplace — that prospect may chill you, as it sort of chills me — in education, job training, collaboration, meetings, and in many other aspects of work and leisure life.