Avatars as Customers

Greg here at the office gave me the February 2006 issue of Harvard Business Review, pointing me to their Breakthrough Ideas for 2006 (subscription required or you can buy article for $6.00).   I don't pretend to understand all the management business lingo - but one idea stood out to me -  Idea #15 - The Avatar as Consumer.

What's an avatar?  Basically it is "a being created by a user as a representation of himself in an online environment."  In other words, you can remake yourself in your own image or any image and so give yourself a new personality, a new look and a new life online.  "The experience of living through another self is most powerful in so-called massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMOGs), which enable thousands of players to  interact within the same three-dimensional world."  The most well-known of these MMOGs are Second Life, EverQuest and World of Warcraft.  Paul Hemp, the article's  author, says these avatars "represent a huge population of shadow customers."  I have to agree, since "players lay out upwards of $100 million a year on auction sites like eBay simply for accessories..."

I've written about  fantasy/reality blending before, but this is a whole new level.  I am seeing more and more crossover between our physical lives and the lives we lead online:

Lawrence Lessig lectures in Second Life (via psfk): Stanford IP professor joined a packed audience at a stage in Second Life where he discussed with SL's founder Philip Linden copyright and democracy issues. Some of his talk looked at how real-life copyright was unworkable in the speed that Second Life existed and that if enforced, IP controls could dampen creativity within virtual worlds.

BBC Newsnight broadcasts from a virtual studio (an exact replica of the real thing):  Business correspondent Paul Mason and presenter Jeremy Paxman broadcast TV's first ever face-to-face studio session from inside the computer game Second Life. (via Influx Insights)

A new book, Synthetic Worlds, delves into the real money made in these worlds (via Kevin Kelly's Cool Tool):  Edward Castronova is an economist who began studying the exchange rates of token money in these games, analyzing the emerging prices as powers and characters were sold on eBay. He quickly concluded that these games have robust economies as large, and as "real" as many real countries. The clincher to this tale has been the recent stampede of newbies signing up for the game Second Life when USA Today revealed that amateurs were making hard cash (US dollars) selling virtual real estate in this unreal place. This is the fantastical stacked on the implausible stacked on the unexpected, but it is all very actual.

Now you can buy real items in a virtual store with virtual dollars: At the online store Second Life Boutique, trees, cigarettes and new body parts are for sale. And that's not the weird part...What's genuinely unusual is that earlier this week the store's owner started selling something real — computer hardware — and he did it by attaching a price tag that's figured not in greenbacks, Euros or even pesos but with Linden Dollars, the virtual money earned by playing Second Life.

Some say that eventually everyone will have a virtual life.  It does seem only a matter of time before companies recognize that within these games are potential customers who would be open to products that tie into their fantasy world.