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Die a hundred deaths, Pet Rock. And Furby could kill itself, for a change. Move over Tamagotchi, Aigo, and all Giga puppies. Haptek's virtual friends are for no-life losers. Half-Life and Counterstrike are so very obsolete, or perhaps naff would describe them better. Sega's --- just wait a minute --- Sega, who?
Everything a human being does in his or her lifetime revolves around entertainment. Ask yourself: why do you like your job so much? What do you do in your spare time? Read? Watch television? Surf the Internet? Hang out with friends? Listen to music? Think back to one enjoyable thing in your life that didn't, or doesn't involve you being entertained: whether by yourself, an electric medium, another person, or even a pet dog, cat, chameleon, whatever.
Have you come up with something yet? No? We didn't think you would.
We are today living in the age of QAEATA (Quick And Easy Access To Anything) and it seems like only the things epitomising two very diverse qualities will stand the test of time these days --- those two qualities being timelessness and constant evolvement. Timelessness; a tricky word that one. They thought that of the LP in the 30s, or whichever era it was 'in' in; they thought the same with audiocassettes --- even when the CD first came out --- and remember that little fad called the Mini Disc player? We all thought they'd be timeless; we all thought they were evolved. We all talk about the iPod being just too evolved, 'with-the-times-of-the-future', and would like to believe our great grandchildren will know of no other medium of listening to music but that. But come on, who're we kidding? Two years from now, Apple (most likely, by the way things seem to be flowing in) will bring out something far more sophisticated and the iPod will be to our great grandchildren, what the type writer or telex machine are to the teens of today: old, obsolete, and something they've never --- and most likely never will --- see in real live working condition. Perhaps timelessness is but the ability to evolve with the time, climate, and people; for reasons unfathomable, Coco Chanel comes to mind here.
Look at Archie comics versus Asterix and Calvin and Hobbes; or My-Little-Pony and Care Bears versus Barbie. Which of these was cuter? Which of these were cuddlier? Which of these survived the ruthless test of time? Exactly.
Take one of the longest running, still infant, entertainment fascinations in the world (so far): The Internet. In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee bestowed on us the World Wide Web. Those, who knew anything about it at all, dubbed it as the greatest invention of all time. Angel Investors and what have yous emerged out of thin air, and every single Bill Gates wannabe gave birth to a web site --- most were forgettable, as history proved --- and the Internet boom hit its peak. An inexplicably short time later, it deflated. The industry was bust; and millions --- nay --- billions vanished into thin air overnight; and all the Angel Investors headed high into the heavens to lick their scarred wings amidst the comfort of big fluffy white clouds.
Only that which interested, excited, and evolved with the times survived; the rest died silent, mostly un-mourned deaths. That the Internet is truly a communications, marketing, information, entertainment, buying, selling, transactions, broadcasting, educational wonder today is phenomenal. For the common man, it started off with basic e-mail, and from there, it moved on to everything. As a matter of fact, can you think of a single thing that can't be done over or through the Internet today? People have wizened up to respect the Internet for the super-power it is; we've moved away from using it for the small, silly, trivial little things. Today, the Internet is only thought of in tandem with something mega-huge.
Look at eBay, for example; it changed the retail industry forever. Or Google, which at worst, presumably put the Encyclopaedia Britannica out of business forever and ever. Amen! And need we mention a certain unbound less sea of knowledge known as Wikipedia? Blogging --- what started off as a personal attempt at vanity publishing, has proven to become what is considered by many to be one of the most wondrous marketing marvels unearthed. As a matter of fact, it was on several of these marvels that we came across the abbreviation 'MMORPG'. On the strictly Indian blogs --- more often than not --- it was accompanied by the suspiciously Muppet-era term 'Ragnarok'. We looked hard for names like Boober, Mokey and Cantus, but ended up with even more suspicious sounding ones like 'Izlude', 'Prontera' and 'Acolyte'.
Flummoxed, we turned to the 18-year-old son of Impact's editor --- a known Internet junkie --- who gave us some gyan on the more-and-more-suspicious-by-the-day subject at hand. MMORPG stood for Massively Multimedia Online Role Playing Game. Naturally, we hadn't an idea in hell what it meant, so --- to steal the headline of an article written by a certain lady who is one of the doyens of Indian advertising --- we went Wiki Wiki Bang Bang. And this is what was revealed to us: MMORPG is a multiplayer computer role-playing game that enables thousands of players to play in an ever-evolving virtual world at the same time, over the Internet. And Ragnarok was one such game. It took but a slight scratch on the surface to find out that Ragnarok had a strong presence in India and was hosted by a company aptly called Level Up! The firm had its head office in Mumbai. We'd sure as hell hit the jackpot. We visited the website; got a slight idea of what it was all about and immediately arranged to meet with Level Up! Managing Director, Venkat Mallik, for a de-baffling session.
"There are many genres of gaming. The games known in India --- typically Yahoo! kind of games for example --- which are generally hosted by servers out of the US --- which anybody around the world can access; those are typically board-games, trivia games and stuff like that (those are classically called casual games). Now those kinds of casual games obviously get hosted and very often the strategy of the portal drives traffic and gives them marginal amounts of entertainment while they're around.
The business of online gaming is actually constructed, the model that typically works is where you manage a community of people and get them to play regularly and meet with each other on and off-line. That is what is monetise-able, but then that will become a web-site kind of model, which will become an advertiser, sponsor based revenue model. So you use the casual games to actually drive in traffic," he explains.
So Ragnarok, we assumed, was like Counterstrike and Half-Life; how wrong we were. Mallik put a few things into proper perspective
To read the entire story, buy a copy of Impact Advertising and Marketing magazine dated October 17-23