The Harvard Business Review has posted (subscription required) a fascinating feature about marketing directly to the avatars of MMORPG players. Aleks blogged about this a couple of weeks ago, but I wanted to go off in a slightly different direction. As Collision Detection points out, it's often strange to see games like Second Life written about in this way - with little insight or passion for the content or experience, but heaps of excitement about the money-making and marketing opportunities.
What really does it for the author, are the incredible data mining possibilities. Everything we do on an MMORPG can be monitored, collated and analysed. To the marketer, an online game is like a supermarket reward card, a hotline to our activities and desires that bypasses the need to survey us, which is inconvenient and misleading (because we rarely admit to what we do or want - not even to ourselves). Although this is a business publication, it makes a very salient point about the nature of massively multiplayer games - the avatar is the id. From the abstract:
"Of course, the human behind the avatar controls the money in the real-world wallet. But the avatar, as a distinct creation of the user's psyche, can influence its creator's purchasing behavior and even make its own purchases of real-world products in the virtual world, deliverable to the user's real-world door. At the least, avatars offer a window into people's hidden preferences and a means for achieving sustained consumer engagement with a brand."
Spooky stuff. And there's more...
The feature talks about avatar-to-avatar transactions, the selling of in-game or real-world goods within a virtual world. By tracking each avatars' actions, businesses operating within the virtual world could personalise their marketing assault to individual players. From the article:
"the avatar clerk might automatically adjust his or her behavior to become more appealing to the avatar customer. Research conducted at Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab has found that users are more strongly influenced by avatars who mimic their own avatars' body movements and mirror their own appearance. This virtual manifestation of an old sales trick makes avatars potentially, if insidiously, powerful salespeople. Using a simple computer script, the selling avatar clerk is able to subtly and automatically tailor its behavior - its gait, the way it turns its head, its facial features - to the avatar buyer's, thus making the clerk seem more friendly, interesting, honest, and persuasive."
Marketing professionals love the communities and environments that we create ourselves, because our collective guard is down. The super ego is shut out. It is like selling within a dream.
see also Business Week's interesting take on the virtual economy
