Abercrombie's virtual world, in every mall in America

She's 24 years old, studying environmental design in Vancouver, and we just finished dancing our asses off and when she says, "So, Nabeel, what do you do?"

What do I say? I could bow out with something like, "I'm in computers" but then where would the fun be. If there is one fun thing about a big wedding, it's that you get asked this question 30 times in an evening and you have a split-second to read the person and answer in the proper vocabulary.

Here's what I know: she's young, she's into green architecture and design, grew up just outside DC. So I take a chance and start with virtual worlds, "have you heard of Second Life?"

No. She has not heard of Second Life. No need to try MMOs then, lets backtrack a bit. "MySpace?" - she's heard of it, doesn't use it. Crap. God I love the crushing blow that a nice, large, wedding can have on your worldview. Just when you think everyone is in their underwear dancing for YouTube you realize that over half of Americans still don't have broadband. Still, I get her talking about her love of instant messaging and go from there.

When I finish my mini-pitch she says, "It sounds really interesting, but I'm not sure I understand why a virtual world is necessary, it's just communication." She says this, and I'm looking at her RUEHL purse, and I know I've got her.

Allow me to explain -- you see RUEHL is one of four brands owned by Abercrombie & Fitch. Abercrombie's stores are, like several forward thinking retailers, treated more as a place than as a store. In Abercrombie's case they have gone as far as to invoke an -actual- place with each of their more recent brands.

or,

Abercrombie & Fitch = ivy league campus
Hollister Co = Santa Barbara
RUEHL = New York

To give you an example, this is a description of Hollister's store:

Ruehl targets a 22 to 30-year-old customer and is the fantasy of what it's like to graduate college and go to New York and make it. It's the New York fantasy. The entryway looks like a brick house in New York City's Greenwich Village, complete with a wrought iron gate, antique glass windows and flower boxes. Without a prominent sign, it has a dark, mysterious presence in the mall. The address is posted: Ruehl, No. 925 Greenwich Street, N.Y.

I think the idea of a "virtual world" or, if I might rephrase, artificial construct, isn't so alien to most people at all. It turns out this tireless dancer from the wedding spends quite a bit of time and money at RUEHL, and it's fairly obvious how powerful a sense of "place" can be by talking to her about that experience.

Consider that even simple adjustments to our communications can have dramatic changes in their purpose, such as making email instant, or changing a blog from unlimited characters to 120. Where does a sense of place fit into the quality of our online relationships? Think about how an evening with the very same set of friends might be different if you went to DisneyLand versus Joe's House of Pizza versus Versailles.

I think there is still much that builders of MMOs and virtual worlds can learn from designers of real world environments. Perhaps even environmental designers.

Comments

[Charlie Cleveland]

Great stuff Nabeel, as usual.

You should check out The Experience Economy for more on this. The basic premise is that you get more value as you move "up" the chain from commodities to goods to services to experiences and finally, to transformations. Going up the chain affects people more and is worth more.

The classic example is a cup of coffee. The coffee beans by themselves cost maybe a cent or two to make a cup of coffee (commodity). A cup of Folders might be 10 cents. A cup of coffee at a diner might be $1.50 and cup of coffee at Starbucks can be upwards of $3. What you get at Starbucks is at its essence the same thing, but you're also paying for the Starbucks "experience" - the furniture, the cool location in your neighborhood, the good music they play, etc.

What's particularly exciting to me is that video games are clearly all about experiences, but designed well, have the distinct potential to be about transformation as well. This makes the most money, but more importantly, can affect people the most profoundly as well.

-Charlie

[Patrick]

But Charlie, I think you're under-emphasizing the service step. Most games are maximized by the conventional production process as goods to be bought. That business model has been a historical accident of distribution nessecities. If you're really going to effect an experience, you've got to have a service that enables a community. For instance, people who buy a "premium" clothing brand like RUEHL do it in large part because of the social implications, the experience stands on that foundation. I can see how you were getting at that with Natural Selection, and thats the gist of most MMOs, Web 2.0 start-ups and casual destination sites.

I think thats worth emphasizing because there are a lot of new, interesting business models in that vein. A clothing store gets away with selling goods as experience because its a physical place, but maybe on the net you need of the fluidity of a model other than a sales conversion. However, you can sell games in the traditional sense and still engender a community experience. A great example of this is the DROD forums.