Austin GDC - Habbo Hotel

This the the biggest room yet:
A lot of the sessions that have interested me the most here at the Austin GDC are the ones relating to online communities. As a parent with two young girls, one rapidly becoming a tween, the interactions and community psychology of online worlds is something I've been paying attention to more and more. I was able to see two keynotes today, the first from Sulake lead designer Sulka Haro. Here's a few things I found interesting.

In Finland, cellphones are common enough among teenagers that the initial sales were SMS based, directly selling the in game furniture items that you decorate your room with(called furni),but when the game introduced a UK version, they moved to selling credits for money which turned out to be one of the most complicated things in the game. Worldwide there are around 100 different ways that they sell credits.

They use the idea of one in a million when thinking about users figuring out loophole in the game. With 80,000,000 users 80 will find the loophole.

With advertising, they're try to get away from standard avenues such as banners and heading more toward branded items, such a a Mountain Dew couch. It's been very successful with branded items becoming more valuable than readily available item that might even have more functionality.

Some items are apparently worth up to two thousand real-world dollars, they recently calculated the total market value of all existing items at around 550,000,000.

When dealing with cheaters and scammers, the fear of their parents finding out what they've been doing is a much worse threat that jail time.

In a recent survey, 70% of habbos wanted a foreign friend but only 44% have a positive attitude toward foreigners(!). So many Finnish teens crowded the Japanese hotel when it opened that they had to develop IP blocking technology to prevent the Finns from overtaking it.

He doesn't like the terms web2.0 or game 3.0 for Habbo since they've been doing it for almost 7 years. Also dislikes the term User Generated Content. It's too generic and makes users sound like content creating robots. Prefers the term "player created activity". Proud that Habbo is a non-violent non-game.

He then showed some of the content of Habbo(which has gotten pretty insane since I dabbled with it 5 years ago.)

There is now a music mixer and audio samples that can be bought. Habbo was silent for 6 years and now music is everywhere and most is player created. The resulting music can be bought for about 15 cents an album and burned to a CD.

He showed a room that looked like a McDonald's with people standing in line to order and as he said "people are role-playing a minimum wage job". There was also a police station with people acting a police officers, there are numerous armies, mafias, pretend gambling casinos. He pointed out that they can't actually do anything malicious, it's all just role play. There are also record stores and he also showed off a room with 20 rare expensive items that totaled up to 200 dollars. Since that particular item is no longer offered it's actually worth much more now. He then showed a room of people dressed in brown role playing as horses "for hours and hours and hours."

Habbo is almost completely user driven and they try very hard not to define content. There are no pre-defined feedback loops, no in-game rewards for doing anything. Players get enjoyment from fame gathering or just loving to play. The players usually know what's hot before the designers do. He has to resist the temptation to think he knows that the users want. In other MMOs community managers end up becoming superstars in the world and they try to avoid that like crazy.

A couple of examples of in game Habbo transitioning out side of the game world, Habbo-themed wedding invitations and cake topper for a couple that met in the game and the "pool's closed" phenomenon - a giant raid by 4chan that temporarily shut does the US hotel and is now a t-shirt and meme repeated by people who might not even know what it originally meant.