Doppelganger Studios is best known for The Music Lounge, which through partnerships with record labels like Interscope and partnerships with artists and personalities including Tyra Banks and Maroon 5, brought celebs and pop culture together in a virtual world with an ultra-hip, cel-shaded vibe.
Now, on the crux of more big expansion announcements, Worlds in Motion got to talk with Doppelganger prez and CEO Tim Stevens on his vision for virtual society, and how he feels vSide, Doppelganger's soon-to-launch expanded world, will bring a fresh wind into the idea of online society. Click on the screenshots to see full-sized images.
How it Began
A self-styled "early stalwart of the internet," Stevens' background is in internet content advertising and marketing. "My whole focus has been in developing online content and properties that provide outlets for user engagment and advertising interwoven," he says. "It dovetails pretty well with the evolution and development of Doppelganger, and the manifestation of those ideas through our virtual worlds."
"If you look at what the web is, it's a very many-to-one type of medium," Stevens says on how he began moving into the virtual worlds space; he saw something missing. "It's a very effective and efficient bulletin board; you can put up photos, type, read, view videos, link them and so on-- but it's still a type of experience that's kind of the 'many' portion of the computer to the one, individual user. There's little realtime engagement with other people—there’s that personal element that’s been missing. Then you look at what is possible, and how other traditional media [have been] unable to really engage an individual to be participatory."
Stevens' priority is precisely that participatory feel. "There's really an opportunity to change the paradigm to create a new media property," he says, describing his aspiration to blend entertainment with personal communication, environmental control, social networking and the idea of a real-time community. "It’s our own brand category—we call it social entertainment."
Expanding the Experience
The first manifest of these germinating ideas was The Music Lounge, Doppelganger's virtual nightclub-- and Stevens found the results enlightening and encouraging. "What we found is we had such an engagement by our users, the ability to express themselves in terms of how they dress, emote, express themselves, in terms of how they dance and what types of music they like to listen to and when they’re getting together. We got a lot of user feedback that said, 'wow, we love this model, it’d be so much better if it were part of a bigger city and there were more venues and bigger opportunities to explore.'"
Thus, Doppelganger's vSide was born-- a series of three city districts interconnected through transport mechanisms. There are no flying avatars or teleportation devices here, though. "Part of what our users have really told us they like is that there’s density, there’s foot traffic, that you get from place to place by exploring, not by pushing a button and getting teleported somewhere," Stevens explains.
The three districts will all feature variegated cultural vibes; rather than being direct architectural copies of real-world cities, Steven says he hopes to allow users to experience elements of cultures that pique their curiosity, all in the same world.
It'll feature the same partnerships with music labels and real-world celebs that attracted users to the Music Lounge experience initially-- and Stevens that the celebrities themselves are always live behind their avatars. "We absolutely insist on it," he stresses. "This isn’t fake; this isn’t a game. This is real, real-time, you are who you say you are."
User Engagement: The "Aspirational Lifestyle"
In that vein, Stevens is passionate about the idea of allowing users to live what he refers to as an "aspirational lifestyle" in the game. vSide will focus on the mid-teens to early-twenties audience who, as Stevens says, "are entering that portion of their life where it is-- they are now starting to figure out their place in the world. What defines them as a person? What’s unique about them? They’ve seen a lot of TV and magazines, they’ve gone through a number of years of school, they're starting to think about what to do for the rest of their lives."
Stevens continues, "They have knowledge about their own interests-- music, photography, journalism, you name it. And what we very specifically develop our world toward is, this is the place where you can go and be those kinds of things in a community where if you’re good you can actually get recognized for those contributions in the world."
The recognition element is something unique-- users will be able to gain respect statistics in the community through the participatory elements, and higher statistics will allow them access to more exclusive content and special areas. In that way, vSide encourages a high degree of user engagement by rewarding involvement with advancement-- while there will be a microtransactions element to vSide with the virtual currency, "Creds," there are some features in -world that can't be bought-- for example, the opportunity to meet a favorite band.
What Makes it Different
The music element still features prominently in the vSide experience as it did with The Music Lounge; Stevens hopes that ongoing partnerships with Interscope, Warner Music, Downtown Records and various music-focused social sites will be a big win for all parties involved-- attractive to users and advertisers, and useful for those labels' talent, who Stevens says enjoy the opportunity to reach this coveted userbase in a brand new, cutting-edge way.
Stevens also feels that the continual evolution of the real-time participatory content will differentiate vSide from totally freeform experiences like Second Life as well as the pure game content updates of popular MMOs. He described an ongoing murder mystery story in-world constantly being updated with new info and evidence for users to explore on their own-- and noted that players won't be able to solve the mystery without partnering up. Story elements like these are aided both by in-world NPCs and real guide avatars, and are an example of the customizability of the vSide experience-- there's plenty to do for both the casual user and the deeply involved.
User Engagement
In fact, Stevens strongly believes that user engagement is a better measure of a world's success than sheer numbers-- while Doppelganger's 150,000 registered users in closed testing certainly sounds small alongside other worlds, those users spend, according to the company, 9.5 hours in-world per month, and most recently in June, the average in-world session was 1 hour, 11 minutes (up from 51 minutes in April). Compare this to figures that suggest the average amount of time spent on social networking sites adds up to 2 hours per user per month.
Stevens eschews the idea of working on existing models, and says his greatest inspiration for vSide was not in any other online community, but in highly-detailed video games-- he cites Halo and CounterStrike as influences, and hired an art director formerly of Bungie. "Nobody out there has figured out the power of the virtual world," he says. "Lots of sites have figured out how to provide an activity that has generated a lot of interest and a lot of users, but nothing that has really captured the imagination like television did when it first came out. I think all those companies are absolutely phenomenal and I think there’s space in the landscape for all of those kinds of experiences. It’s really knowing and being crystal clear... why are users coming into your online experience? What are they getting out of it? How are they connecting? I am building a business that will engage users 10-12 hours a month or for an hour each time for 4 to 5 years. I want ‘em from 14-15 all the way to early twenties. "
He continues: "Our vision is about delivering immersive, emotionally connected entertainment experiences. 'Immersive' is a key word there, because the world just... envelopes you, and you're are part of what’s taking place."
More expansions and partnerships with big-name personalities are on the horizon, as well as more in-game stories and opportunities for users to add and create their own. So when will we get to check out vSide for ourselves? The official launch date is August 7th, though stay tuned with Worlds in Motion and you just might snag a special sneak peek with us!
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