To use the analogy given previously: yes, the website/app is a “place”; I think that's a reasonable construction. However, there is still a story attached to it: the story of a user's interaction with the site.

There's a beginning, when they first arrive; there's the tricky hump of the sign-up process (or not), the first interaction, the first encounter with other users, the slow gaining of expertise. All of this forms a journey for the individual user, and how a site caters to them at each stage is important. Some sites focus on the early stages, knowing that “power users” will cope fine in the end; others try to offer a steadier curve, but perhaps at the expense of the first two hours.

Some sites aren't even open-ended. Think about filling out your taxes online: you come, you perform the task, you (ideally) complete the task, and the story of you using that site is over for another year. It's important to consider what “win states” are for your site – is it a happy user, staying forever, or is there a victory condition that's met by somebody leaving? Too many sites want to be everything to all users; a focused, finite lifepsan might actually turn out more productive for them.

There's also a halfway house: repeat usage. A product-site, like Moo or Photobox, has a repeat-usage story: I go to the site to buy a thing, and whilst my order might be complete, you hope I'll come back. It's not a consistent use, but a sporadic one, driven by demand, and it requires high-maintenance during the purchase procedure, and a lower form of maintenance between visits.

Stories are a useful way to frame interactions, even if the story isn't happening on your own site.

Early web 2.0 presented a new technology, mainly that of a social network populated with people who were clustered together, as well as a compelling new business model … build a large following first, figure out how to keep them engaged, and take the money and run by convincing some 'greater fool' that your community has actual value. Thus it's no shock that the early successes that evolved in this climate involved heavy viral growth initiatives, backed up with very little content of any substance. Such things are what the technology, and biz model, paid off.

But things are a changing. On the creative side, Increased competition for mindshare has forced a lot of the early web 2.0 groups to shape up, or ship out. And on the business side of the fence, any fantasies of being purchased by the 'greater fool than I' pretty much need to be abandoned after the financial meltdown of recent days. Nobody has their over-inflated stock any more … which they commonly use as currency to purchase an enterprising startup eager to 'cash out' before the crash. The crash just happened! A public stock offering is probably not going to be happening any time soon either.

So it occurs to me that it will quickly come down to .. grow revenues … or die. And thus the constraints of such a harsh business model will totally redefine the format and nature of the interactive entertainment experiences that will emerge and catch hold over the next year or two.

Last year's tricks will not yield the treats that appeared even as recently as a few months ago. I think all of us in this business had better be prepared to change our costumes, sooner rather than later.

Best of the best regards

free online RPG game

Also, you get some street cred for beating Diablo. That game takes months to play. WeeWorld might grind to a halt when the new game gets released!

It also makes me think that the best way to deal with these new constraints is to get a bunch of smart new kids to make the rules from scratch, and maybe that works better than trying to reprogram people who already are set in their ways.

I paused before reading it to right down my own thoughts off the top of my head, and it turns out they're quite different (just shows a different professional background / interest-set I think – the broad conclusions seem to be the same) – http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/10/22/cultu…

Only one thing I took issue with in your list:

“But the flipside of this is that it’s not enough to build one product – instead you build 70 product variations, and call each one a level!”

I'm pretty sure that the levelling treadmill was carried over (and extended and strengthened) to MMORPGs mostly for the opposite reason: that you were building that much content anyway, but most users were only experiencing 1/100th of it, and you needed a way to force them to experience more of it, because it was a sunk cost.

I would also add one… in addition to utility vs. storytelling there is place vs. story … on a social media web site you have a richer environment to make the social play into a game, and make your web site a place, not a story. This is fundamentally a different construct than playing a single player videogame.

I remember after weeks of devoting ridiculous quantities of my life to Diablo at the end of the game I defeated the monster and it spewed blood and died… the end. No word from the village people I had spent time “getting to know”, like hey thanks for taking the time to save my world… don't get me wrong I got lots of satisfaction from the gameplay or I wouldn't have made it to that point, but it's just a very different experience from a social media site.

With all of this I agree with you that when you combine the best of both it gets much more interesting.

Such reminds me a lot of the state of many web 2.0 interactive entertainment companies. Often, such are populated with immigrants from the gaming world proper, who struggle with a lot of the constraints created by a business model totally unlike that of the companies they came from. Nor is the management of many of these companies, often from the web world, prepared to deal with the 'product first' mindset of the creative people they bring on board. Obviously it's the few groups who merge minds the best who will end up winning in the marketplace.

I'd recommend EMPIRE to anybody who is interested in these issues … there are a lot of lessons to be learned from how smart people dealt with a very similar situation in a closely related industry, just a few short decades ago.

http://mikegowen.com/2008/08/01/learning-game-d…

Sorry for the self-promo, but it'll save me a rather lengthy comment