Ah, the term “game changer”. It gets bandied about a lot, whenever something comes along that’s so new and different that it…well…changes the game. I’ve used it myself, in reference to Apple’s iPod Touch.
The latest game changer, according to the children’s publishing industry, is J.K. Rowling’s site Pottermore. By combining e-book sales with a virtual world, it offers an entirely new way to market e-books, and one that looks as though it could be wildly successful.
An article on The Bookseller seems to think there’s something particularly special and attractive about virtual worlds.
Lisa Edwards, publishing director at Scholastic, which has its own virtual world with Horrible Histories, said: “Once young people have seen a brand, they want to experience it from different angles and to engage with other people experiencing it at the same time. Publishers are starting to look at that.”
The article doesn’t really elaborate on what it means by that, but I imagine it’s talking about the virtual shared environments that those of us at college in the ‘90s first knew as text-based MUDs, MUCKs, and MUSHes, and that live on today in graphical MMOs. While there have been plenty of MU*s based on literary works (the ones based on Amber and Pern come immediately to mind), it seems that Pottermore is going to be the first attempt at actually synergizing the two.
And it could work amazingly well. Historically, people have read books and played on-line games for the same kinds of reasons: to “escape into another world,” albeit in different ways. If Pottermore incorporates the same sort of virtual worlds as those, it could bring those two kinds of “escapes” together as never seen before.
I wonder if there’s a way for some of the existing virtual worlds to piggyback on this idea and add a little more literariness to themselves. For example, there have been tie-in novels and comic books written based on the MMO City of Heroes (that apparently didn’t do well enough to merit continuing). And the City of Heroes mission architect system (in which people can create their own in-game missions) has led to new ways of storytelling (including missions written by such notables as Mercedes Lackey). Is there some way they could take it further, and offer e-books that somehow tied into their story in a way that would increase interest in both the game and the books? Probably not, but it’s an interesting idea.
Another intriguing bit from that article:
Digital consultant KZero said there are now about 500 virtual worlds but that figure is predicted to grow to nearly 900 in 2012, with revenues more than doubling to $9bn by 2013, up from $4bn this year. The bulk of accounts—some 561 million—belong to 10 to 15-year-olds, fuelling demand for social networking within virtual worlds.
I’d really love to know what criteria that consultant uses to define a “virtual world”. I would imagine that, if you count all the MU*s that are still out there, you might get an order of magnitude more than 500.
City of Heroes isn’t the only game to have gone the novel/comic tie-in route – off the top of my head World of Warcraft, Rift, Guild Wars, and DC Universe Online (that one has a lovely Ouroborous quality to it – a comic book based on a game based on a comic book) have all gone that route (and all failed. Probably because the tie-ins were universally mediocre). Going in the other direction, Lord of the Rings Online (pretty much exactly what it says on the tin) has been reasonably well-received critically and commercially, but isn’t a game-changing runaway hit by any means. Then again, Prof. Tolkien isn’t directly involved in the game’s development for obvious reasons.
Not a game changer for ebooks; it’s a new entertainment destination. The ebooks are pretty much irrelevant to this kind of service; being a consumer of the movies would be good enough. A small handful of these destinations can become wildly successful; the balance will be wildly expensive disasters for their investors. Through it all, people will continue to read ebooks as books.
I would say this is just one more place online for folks to take time out of their already jam-packed lives to visit… It might spike as a fad, but I wouldn’t buy shares.Question: since no more books are forthcoming, what would be the point of hanging around potterworld?
http://www.starbasec3.com http://www.starbasec3.com/c3info.html we did the virtual world/ transmedia /ebook thing about 10 years ago. scholastic and other pulbishers passed then.. they didnt get it. i guess they do now.;) game finally changed it seems.