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The user interfaces for general-purpose virtual environments get a pretty bad rap. It’s not surprising, actually. They’ve generally been pretty awful. Not that they are actually hard to learn, but they’ve been far from comfortable to use.

That’s not really very surprising. Those virtual environments don’t really fit any of the accreted body of knowledge of user-interaction models, and building comfortable user-interfaces is no easy task.

Continue reading The Virtual Whirl: User interfacing

Filed under: Business models, Opinion, Virtual worlds, The Virtual Whirl

The Virtual Whirl: User interfacing originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 24 Jul 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It has long been a matter of considerable debate among virtual-environment pundits about what constitutes an ‘active user’. In some ways, subscription MMOGs have it a lot easier than many other kinds of virtual environment. You can always count paying subscribers, and that’s all that matters.

In a general-purpose virtual environment, free-to-play or ‘freemium’ model, though, counting active users is important. Trends in active users measure the health of your user communities, as well as allowing you to credibly measure your virtual-world’s e-peen compared to that of the competition.

Continue reading The Virtual Whirl: Is one hour enough to be considered an active user?

Filed under: Culture, Economy, Opinion, Second Life, Virtual worlds, The Virtual Whirl

The Virtual Whirl: Is one hour enough to be considered an active user? originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 05 Jun 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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EEDAR hosted a two part panel at GDC this year. In the second half of the panel — you can read about the first half here — Jesse Divnich presented the results of an Xbox Live Achievement study the firm recently conducted. The info was pulled from a pool of 32 million data points — provided by MyGamerCard.net — and centered on a random sampling of 100 different Xbox 360 games.

Probably the most interesting statistic that Divnich dropped: An average of only 4 percent of Xbox gamers actually managed to earn all of the achievements in any given game. When focusing only on major, “AAA” titles, that number drops to 2 percent. Meanwhile, less than 10 percent of consumers get more than 80 percent of Achievements. Furthermore, Divnich noted that only 27 percent of users manage to unlock more than 50 percent of Achievements.

Divnich concluded his talk by saying that developers should learn as much as possible from Achievements. He advised studios to use them as motivational tool for users noting that the number of unlocked Achievements tends to drop off at around 30 percent. He added that gamers who manage to unlock at least 80 percent of Achievements are typically motivated to unlock the remaining 20 percent.

Finally, Divnich stated that developers can use Achievements as a form of direct user feedback. By observing which Achievements are unlocked, developers can see the parts of a game that players enjoy. This, in turn, can help developers decide what to focus on in the sequel. Beyond that, Achievement monitoring could even help them decide whether to make a sequel at all.

GDC 2010: EEDAR on Achievements, user behavior originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 14 Mar 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You may not be checking LittleBigPlanet for new levels as obsessively as you once were, but that doesn’t mean that junior designers aren’t still out there trying to perfect Super Mario Bros. 1-1 or trying to recreate the myth of Sisyphus. The game’s community has just reached another big milestone: Two million available levels. It took them nine months to get the first million in late July of 2009, meaning that development isn’t slowing down. In fact, it would appear to be speeding up.

It’s inspired us to dust off our LittleBigPlanet disc and … oh, wait.

LittleBigPlanet reaches two million user created levels originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Companies are trying to take their message boards and user forums to wireless devices as people spend more time on their cellphones, but the move to mobile isn’t without challenges.