Seeing one virtual world after another fail is kind of depressing and really, how much can you learn from failure? It’s not all failure, some virtual worlds like World of Warcraft are thriving. What did WoW do to separate it from the rest of the lot? A strong context is certainly one aspect of its success, but how exactly did they build that context and reinforce it through the integration of story?

Virtual Worlds 1.0 = 3D chat

I like some people jumped into virtual worlds with both feet. I thought finally the time was right, but in the end I would argue that the majority of virtual worlds 1.0 were little more than 3D chat. You could personalize your avatar and virtual room in Google Lively but neither feature moved it beyond 3D chat and Google closed its experiment after less than a year. If you stumble upon a newbie in many of these virtual worlds and you’ll most likely hear – what’s the story or how do I start the game? As a product manager I dreaded hearing such questions. It meant that at a very basic level users didn’t get it, other than it being nifty they didn’t see any point. They have expectations though, they just weren’t being met.

Successful Virtual Worlds incorporate story

Not all virtual worlds failed to answer the newbie questions however and became some wildly successful – Club Penguin, WoW, Pirates of the Caribbean. These virtual worlds had either strong context (story) or goal architecture, or both. Many people have studied the goal architectures but I haven’t seen as many focus on the integration of the story. And integrating it is no easy feat, Disney Imagineers have practically made it a study in itself. So much so that competitors copy them; Six Flags has been trying to add story to avoid bankruptcy.

Six Flags also acquired Dick Clark Productions, which produces the Golden Globes and American Music Awards, and Mr. Shapiro positioned the company as a mini-Walt Disney that offered families a similar experience, but at lower cost.

How does WoW integrate story?

So how exactly does WoW integrate story? I’m going to dive in and spend 60 days in WoW to try and learn just that. I’ve always had friends who were obsessed with WoW and told me to join, but I’m simply not a gamer. I was also biased, I thought the future of virtual worlds lay in the personalization features Google Lively and others were incorporating. Comparably, MMOs seemed old school. Boy have I learned that to be wrong. So I enter WoW not only as a novice but as someone outside their core gamer audience. Let’s see if it can pull me in. But more than that my goal is to see how they incorporate story.