More Online Madness
Dictionary Dancing
As I mentioned previously, my wife plays a lot of Disney's Virtual Magic Kingdom. VMK has been targeted at kids and is therefore "kid friendly." This means that they run everything you type through a very limited dictionary to prevent all that dirty talk. You can't talk about any personal details, exchange any personal information, or try to intentionally circumvent the filter. You can't even use numbers since a kid could give out their phone number to a pedophile.
This leads to the art of "dictionary dancing" where players use words that are in the dictionary to try and communicate information. For example, I might say my high score in a game was "too ate tree though sand" for 283,000. The staff mostly looks the other way on these types of exchanges, but you can still be warned or temporarily banned for such things. The more interesting thing is that certain word combinations are flagged and sent to an event log. The live log monitored by some Sulake staffer sitting at home. Phrases like "yeah who" are sent to them so they can evaluate the conversation and determine if, for example, that person is trying to communicate their Yahoo! name to someone. If that's the case you can expect a ban of some duration.
We Gotta Get Out of This Place
All of this leads to some pretty tame conversations in game. If you read my other post you know that a lot of adults wind up playing VMK. Since people crave better conversations and since VMK closes at midnight CST the "after hours" discussions have to happen somewhere. At some point a lot of players started having chats via IRC.
On one of the channels, any time a new person showed up (that no one knew) the regulars would put them through the ringer of questions. It's kind of like hazing. They'd ask them about their hair removal habits with regards to their genitals, anal / oral sex, penis / breast size (usually one person doesn't get both of these questions), public sexcapades, etc. After the introductory period the conversation was pretty normal, with slightly sexual tendencies.
IMVU
After a while more of the players migrated to something called IMVU. It's 3D avatar chat. You can buy more adult clothes, perform more adult moves, etc on there. One of the more interesting aspects of IMVU is that players can "develop" their own in-game items.
They have a set of developer tools you can download that will allow you to create our own items based on anything in their catalog that is marked as "derivable." You can then use a simple paint program to change the opacity of areas of the item and the color of the item. Making your own t-shirt with some custom text would take you a few minutes. You can then pay IMVU credits to list the item in their catalog so others can buy it for a price you set. You then get a portion of those credits on every sale.
You can also completely create new items if you have more skill and access to a copy of a 3D modeling program like 3D Studio Max. The other cool thing is that IMVU makes it easy for developers to sell their in-game credits to other players for cash.
Numerous copyright enforcement issues aside, this is just plain bad ass. By making it easy for people to create stuff you have a nearly endless army of developers. Developers that in this case are paid for directly by your other customers. The lure of "easy" money as well as a fairly cool creative outlet keep the new ideas gushing in.
IMVU itself makes money by selling things like credits, the ability to have a permanent name, and adult passes (extra moves, full nudity, more access control to your IMVU home page, etc). And because it's not a game, people never "win" and stop playing. It isolates the social aspect of massive multiplayer online games. Of course the absolute king of doing all of these things is Second Life. I'll have to go into its strange details in another post.
Leave a Reply