kidmercury

Venture capitalist Albert Wenger has a couple blog posts (here and here) about social media and game play. In my opinion, the game economy is the ticket to how the Internet changes the world, revolutionizing everything from economics (i.e. control of money supply) to laws to culture and everything else.

I also think the publishing revolution, meaning the economy that proliferates around the free distribution of media, is a critical part of the game economy. Instead of relying on copyright protection to sell media, I expect publishers instead to create a social media destination, and incorporate gaming elements to this.

With this in mind, one of the things I meant to do, but have not really gotten around to it because of more pressing work needs related to my trading site, is to turn my concept album, Love and Truth, into a game. Community members could earn MercBucks by spreading Love and Truth -- i.e. by referring members to the community, by submitting their own songs of Love and Truth, by creating shirts/poster/artwork that can be sold in the store, by doing cover versions, etc. Those who do the best job of spreading Love and Truth win the game! Hooray!

And of course, MercBucks can be purchased as well, or can be used to buy any of the products in the (currently non-existent) store, which sells products designed to help you learn Love and Truth.

An interesting question is does the publisher even need to be involved for this to happen? Meaning what if someone else took Love and Truth, a CC-BY licensed work, and decided to make their own game out of it? Would they steal my potential audience, thus robbing me of MILLIONS of dollars while simultaneously shattering my dream of attaining eternal rock stardom?????

Sure, I suppose. Anything's possible. But highly unlikely, in my opinion. The reason for this is that in order for the game to work, the community members need to have a lot of passion. They need to be truly passionate fans (see Albert's post in which he references the types of gamers, one of which is devotees -- those are the passionate fans that are the engine for the game economy). And passionate fans want to connect with the real deal. The real interaction with a person cannot be faked. And thus, ironically, by embracing free distribution and open licensing, publishers pave the way to building an asset (their brand, their community, the passion of their audienlce) that cannot be stolen.

With that said, most mainstream book, film, and music publishers don't do a very good job of engaging their community online. For this reason, often the best fan communities I see are those created not by the publisher, but rather by passionate fans. As the Internet becomes the dominant means of media distribution and as free media is inevitably embraced as it refuses to go away (and because of new media economics, i.e. attention, rather than content, being the key scarcity), I think this will change, and publishers will invest seriously in building the best community for their audience they can.

Admittedly, progress down this road has occurred at a very slow rate. I've been working on this stupid business idea of mine since what seems like forever, 3 years full-time but 2 years before that back when I was working for The Man at a currency trading firm. Yet we became profitable and on the growth track only recently, in October of 2008 (just after I turned 28!). While there are an increasing number of publishers like Trent Reznor who are embracing these ideas, I think what's needed are new types of media firms that can create games based on published works. Such media firms will be positioned to ride the trends that enables digital media to disrupt old media, and will also be positioned to become the ad networks of the future.

The song for the post is another Eminem song, "Nail in the Coffin." Because that's what's happening to old media: the nail is being put in the coffin, so that the economy surrounding social media can thrive, thus enabling messengers around the world to more easily deliver the Truth that sets us free.