know | Future

When I was growing up in the late sixties/early seventies, the term generation gap was always front and center as the country was roiled by what seemed at times to be an incipient civil war across generational lines. The fact that we no longer hear the term bandied about on the press does not mean however that generational schisms have disappeared. Peer just for a minute into the world of a teenager, and you will see them floating in a technology bubble that would have been inconceivable to those of us old enough to have lived through Watergate. Between the cell phones, texting, pervasive access to the Internet and an ever expanding market for video games, you will also find a category of entertainment with the unwieldy moniker of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, MMORPG’s for short. They represent the most socially disruptive technology to have gained a solid foothold in the new millennium, they are already creating a vast generational gap, and they are going to impact your business directly.

Many of the most popular video games, even console based games, have an online component where player may hook up together over an Internet connection and play together, often in teams or clans. These games are one dimensional though, they are immersive, but they are essentially sophisticated shoot em up’s, a prime example is Halo (http://www.gamespot.com/xbox/action/halo2/review.html?q=halo) These games hook kids as tweeners and leads them on to more all encompassing immersive games, where you lead a parallel life through an online representation of your persona called an avatar. The most popular MMORPG’s currently are World of Warcraft (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com) with seven million users and Second Life (http://www.secondlife.com) with one million members and growing at 10 to 15% monthly. Users essentially live parallel lives in these universes where the work, make, buy and sell virtual goods and even real estate, sometimes in real world currency over E-Bay. It is estimated that the total economic activity inside these games is expected to surpass the billion dollar mark (that is real hard currency transactions folks) by 2008. The cyberspace first described by Neal Stephenson in the seminal cyberpunk novel Snow Crash is becoming a reality.

Over the past couple of weeks, Second Life has been burning up the news wires with the likes of Cisco and Sun joining American Apparel and Wells Fargo in having varying presences in that virtual world. This week the jump of commercial enterprise to cyberspace has been legitimized as Reuters has opened a presence on what is rapidly becoming its own small country. Commercial presences range from traditional billboard advertising, interestingly enough mostly end-user generated, to stores like American Apparel (no shopping there yet though) to provision of branded game elements like Reuters free heads up news display and branded community news space.

As science fiction rapidly becomes reality, you need to take steps to make sure that you are prepared for it:

• Connect with Second Life and other MMORPGs and explore their current partnership deals.
• Include virtual world advertising in you interactive budgets.
• Consider establishing a virtual presence in Second Life if only for the power of press coverage. There are huge opportunities right now to do something really innovative.
• Designate someone to stay on top of this market, imagine how well you would have done if you had been forewarned in 1993 of the power of the web.