What are players doing in a three week old virtual world?
We’ve been pretty quiet on the blog for the last two months. But, don’t panic, we’ve not been kidnapped, we’ve just been busy launching a new virtual world for girls, Brit Chicks
The launch has gone great. In the 3 shorts weeks since opening the doors the world has already attracted over 55,000 players who have cumulatively spent more than 4 years in the world!
I thought it would be fun to share what these 55,000 people have been up to. And, for anyone thinking of launching a world, here’s some real data that you can use to drive your design decisions.
How are we capturing the data?
Everything that happens in the world, from changing room to making friends, goes through our GAML engine. Whenever something happens that we’re interested in we add one line of GAML that logs the event out to google analytics. Quick and simple.
What are the players doing?
We’ve split all the different games and activities into 5 categories. The chart ranks these activities by the number of times our players have interacted, for example, talking to a non-player character counts towards the questing category, while shopping counts towards personalization.
We see that questing is by far the most popular activity (51%), followed by exploring (34%), and playing mini games a modest 3%!
What do we mean by questing?
These are stories and games played across the different rooms, they could be simple missions to photograph a landmark, or more complex puzzles requiring many artifacts that must be found and used in order.
Brit Chicks has a couple of different activities that make up a quest, this next chart splits these out.
So, in only 3 weeks the players have already completed over 160,000 quests! Meaning that on average, all players have:
- talked to 7 non player characters,
- picked up 6 different artifacts,
- taken 5 photographs,
- completed 3 quests,
- but played only 1 mini game.
In other words, for every Flash mini game the users have engaged with 19 different quest activities!
Where are they exploring?
Exploring is our second most popular activity. The players have changed rooms over 700,000 times and interacted with 470,000 things in those rooms. Rather inexplicably, the ‘Zoo Keeper’ is by far the most popular, players have interacted with her over 80,000 times!
A full 30% of those 700,000 room changes are coming from players clicking sign posts in the rooms, and yet only 7 of the 23 rooms have sign posts.
As expected, the three most popular public rooms are Tower Bridge, Central Park, and Eiffel Tower; these are the ‘landing’ rooms for London, New York, and Paris. Closely behind is the Champs-Élysées in Paris, and the Sea Lion Pool in Central Park Zoo, NY.
What have we learnt?
It’s clear from the data that our players are choosing to immerse themselves in the world, explore, and play quests. Yet most casual worlds are a mix of rooms, customizable avatars, and Flash mini games, with no questing and little narrative. Quite the opposite of what our data shows players want!
We’re delighted with the results! We’ve been talking about the importance of narrative and why every virtual world needs a scripting language for a long time. Indeed, we’ve developed our own simple to write language called GAML – Game Application Markup Language
Creating all this questing content was quick too. The Brit Chicks team knew what types of adventures the girls would enjoy, but we’re too busy creating all the artwork, rooms, and customizable avatars. So we brought in James, an avid gamer, but not a programmer. In less than a week James, who had never wrote any programming code before, was able to create rooms, quest, collectables, and games using only GAML.
In only two months James:
- Setup up 20 parallax scrolling chat rooms,
- Created 40+ quests and adventures,
- Scripted conversations with 20 non-player characters, and
- Added over 400 items into the 4 virtual shops
If you’re interested, read our case study, how Brit Chicks were able to save £25,000 using GAML to create their world.
