I spent much of the second day at Engage! Expo like I did at the first; taking notes and tweeting during the sessions then heading back to the press and speakers room during the breaks to recharge my batteries and compare notes with friends. In many ways, it was an interactive way of making sense of the conference, which seems somehow appropriate, because the most important theme to me of the second day was interactive sense making.

It started off with a fireside chat with Jack Buser, Director of PlayStation Home. Jack was enthusiastic about his subject, almost to a fault, but when you got past the superlatives and the ‘That’s a great question’ responses and when you got past the lack of enthusiasm for Home by some PlayStation gamers, PlayStation Home is really an interesting idea.

Forget for a moment the comparisons to Second Life and the concerns about being able to create or upload user generated content. The real message of PlayStation Home is that gaming is a social activity. It used to be that it took place as gamers brought their consoles to friends’ living room and spent the evening gaming together. Now, with PlayStation, you can play together over the Internet without all those incontinences of travel. Yet something is lost, all the out of character discussions of which game to play, which strategy to adopt and the spilled cans of Red Bull.

PlayStation Home seeks to bring that back, so that people can gather virtually, talk together about their plans and then launch into the game. Yes, perhaps some people still gather in living rooms. Yes, perhaps some people gather on Skype or IM to work out their strategies, but Mr. Buser maintained that the three dimensional virtual world of Home is better suited for it. He pushed this further to talk not only about planning a campaign, but also to listen to music or watch videos together. He started off by talking about PlayStation Home as a social network, instead of as a game or virtual world. In that context, Home is compelling and provides an interesting opportunity for interactive sense making.

The first session after the chat that I attended was Sally Schmidt, Executive Producer of Circle 1 Network, talking about how to ‘Tap Into the Emotional Triggers Of Tweens’. They had done a study for the top sites for engaging tweens, and came up with Club Penguin and Neopets leading the list.

Looking at what made these, and other sites engaging, they came up with their Five Cs of Engagement:
Creativity, Collection, Caring, Community and Competition. Tweens want to create their look and the environment. They want to collect virtual goods. They want to care for pets in virtual worlds as well as donate to causes or find ways of being more caring for the environment. They want to be part of a community and they want to compete at games, on leader boards and so on. Ms. Schmidt noted that different sites focused on different mixes of these five Cs.

She was followed by Ted Sorom, CEO of Rixty. Rixty presents itself as “an alternative payment system for today's online youth” and Mr. Sorom presented the statistics on why Rixty was needed. There are close to 26 million youth in our country, spending $30 billion a year. $12.8 billion is spent on education, which works out to be about $10 a week per youth. So, where are youth spending their money, and how do you get them to spend it in your virtual world?

Mt. Sorom said that most youth spend money in the form of cash at local stores or malls. Much of this is because there aren’t good options for youth to be able to spend money online. Less that 3.5% of teenagers have credit cards and only about 13% have checking accounts. Even for those that do have accounts, these accounts are typically set up and monitored by parents. Youth want to spend money the way they want without being monitored by parents and spending cash at the mall is much less controlled.

The session ended with Jouni Keranen, President of iLemon talking about International Strategies: VWs Around The World. The key message was know your audience and act appropriately. He noted that the average revenue per user (RPU) in China was about 20% of the typical RPU and that Japan had very high RPUs. He spoke about the importance of having mobile as part of your strategy in Japan and being prepared for surprising sub-cultures taking over your community.

These sessions all seemed to focus on knowing your audience, but did not talk a lot about interactive sense making.

I had to leave early for a client meeting, so I only made it to one more session.

It started off with Jesse Cleverly of Connective Media talking about Narration And Engagement In Virtual Worlds: The Future Of Narrative. It was a fascinating talk. He spoke about the importance of narrative, especially as we move into a post-television era. He said the speech he was giving was very similar to one he had delivered eight years ago at MIT and that things really haven’t changed all that much. He touched on his days at the BBC working on storytelling after television.

He talked about the importance of the story and maintained that if you get caught up in the technology, or the RPUs, you are not going to be engaging. He talked about good story tellers not changing the outcomes of their stories based on what people in the audience asked for, and those same story tellers not asking the audience to make up the rest of the story.

He talked about how film had started off focusing on the base emotions in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and only over a hundred years getting to the higher levels and suggested that perhaps it may take a long time for virtual worlds to make the same progression.

He touched on the idea of the universal stories and how stories help us make sense out of the gossip. He talked about the importance of developing the characters and choices that a character makes under pressure. Then he told a story and questioned how that story could be told in new media.

As I listened to him, I thought of Neil Postman and building a bridge to the eighteenth century. If the technology isn’t helping us grapple with the fundamental issues of life, what good is it? He was a great speaker and I appreciated much of what he said, but something didn’t seem right to me.

Mr. Cleverly was followed by Philippe Moitroux, CEO of TAATU. Mr. Moitroux spoke quickly and far from the mic. He was hard to understand, and was in the unenviable position of speaking after Mr. Cleverly. He asked the question, “Can old media be the pain-killer for new media?” It is a good question and one that I want to write more about. I think it applies very well to what is going on with newspapers. Blogs, Twitter and other online tools can provide ways to increase engagement in newspapers. It also started to crystallize my reaction to Mr. Cleverly.

Mr. Moitroux was followed by Daniel Buelhoff, Head of Business Development and Community Management for sMeet. Like Mr. Moitroux, Mr. Buelhoff spoke about people gathering in community to interactively make sense of what they were encountering in the traditional media. This is where things started taking more shape. Mr. Cleverly was talking about interactive narrative and how it was failing in virtual worlds. Yet perhaps it isn’t interactive narrative that matters but the interactive sense making, which includes reacting to narrative, that matters in virtual worlds.

I asked him what he thought about this idea and he responded that virtual worlds currently have no stories in them to make sense out of. He compared them to fancy movie theatres with no movies in them. Instead, he believes virtual worlds should have stories that can be explored, perhaps like Brave New MOO so many years ago.

A key concern for him was to have the story teller control the story. Yet when I tried to look at this from a larger perspective, it raised the underlying question. Do we believe that we control our own stories, or are we simply the victims of fate? As I thought more about it, I thought of the anthropologists trying to capture stories in the wild. Their presence and efforts to gather the stories, change the stories. Perhaps this fits to stories told in virtual worlds. Perhaps, by telling the stories, we change them. Perhaps this is part of what motivates political activism, the hope that one can change the stories.

There is much more to explore about this, but for now, I want to end with a final thought. Perhaps virtual worlds should be nothing more than great theatres with no stories. Sure, they can provide a stage, costumes, props and the like, but the people themselves come and act out the stories, just as we act out the stories in our daily lives.

Perhaps, Mr. Cleverly’s desire for the storyteller to maintain control over his own story is little different than the desire that we all feel in trying to control the stories of our lives.

How do we interactively make sense out of all of this? I’m not sure. Writing this blog post is part of the process, as will be responding to any comments or emails I receive. The discussions on Twitter and in the press room are all part of this same interactive sense making and by focusing on interactive sense making, that might even change the stories, perhaps we can come up with a better response to the engaged existentialist.