Empire Avenue's Sentimental Currency In The Social Age

The AAA gaming space has traditionally dealt in escapism, building immersive worlds for players to explore. But the infrastructures of social networks and mobile have made it possible to look at gaming from another angle: as a natural dovetail to the real world, with game elements built around the activities people already do and enjoy. Empire Avenue co-founder Duleepa "Dups" Wijayawardhana is fascinated by these existing infrastructures, and he founded his company with the goal of creating a fun virtual economy around people's networking activities. But before he took a leap into what was at the time a relatively unproven space, Dups and "almost all" of the twelve colleagues he has at present worked at BioWare. Following his work with BioWare, Dups managed community relations for MySQL until it was purchased by Oracle. "My background is in building out big stuff and developing databases," he tells Gamasutra. After leaving Oracle, he sat down with two friends from university -- Niall Brown, who would become Empire Avenue's product development VP and Michael Mannion, who would head research and analytics -- and began kicking around ideas. "We were chatting about the idea of what the value of people was online, and how everything that we do has some sort of value," says Dups. "We looked at all sorts of tools out there... and we went, it's really not a lot of fun. Wouldn't it be fun if we could create a virtual economy, and build a game around it?" Among all the ideas the old friends had for a business, this was by far the craziest. According to Dups, that's what told them they should go for it. He reached out to a "whole pile of ex-BioWare and MySQL friends and said, 'we're doing this thing, it's completely crazy, anyone want to help?'" The initial idea for Empire Avenue, which saw its first friends-and-family prototype launch in late 2009, revolved around giving individuals a virtual economic valuation based on the depth of their network and their social media reach, and a corresponding share price that would drive interactions. Friends could buy "shares" in one another based on that valuation. And it evolved from there, adding an item market and a range of activities that applied within the complex virtual economy. "We're still iterating on it," Dups explains, "trying to get it to the final product that we want it to be." That's a fairly standard experience these days in the social gaming space at large, a constant learning curve that requires new tweaks and new content be rolled out regularly. "We've built the virtual economy, and we've really started understanding the psychology around ... how people react to a metagame, and how they get even more engaged with social networks through a game," Dups explains. "These are things that nobody had tried before, and now we have the luck of looking back upon a year of our data." Like many working in the emerging field of metagaming, gamification and gamified apps, Dups believes new initiatives benefit from an audience that has grown up speaking the language of game. "Games aren't a distraction of real life, they're a reflection of real life," he says, adding that even people who don't play traditional console games have developed an intrinsic understanding of game mechanics. It begins integrating with real life, rather than being disparate from it. And for those who perceive a disconnect -- say, check-in apps that pull a user's focus actually away from an experience and into an application, thereby defeating such a service's stated intention -- Dups says it's important to note that there are a number of platform-specific conversations occurring constantly in the current space. Twitter drives, shapes and often itself dominates the conversations that take place on that platform, and the same is true for services like LinkedIn, Facebook -- and Empire Avenue, Dups notes. "For those people who are involved, they do not see a disconnect," he says. On the other side, he understands the ambiguous view of games designed to encourage people to undertake real world activities they wouldn't normally undertake, or to do them in a fashion that wouldn't otherwise be natural. Yet "a lot of times it makes you have a new experience," he notes. "In the strange world that we live in, these networks, these games allow us to connect with people. We're both inherently lonely and inherently social," he adds. "You finish games most often not to finish it and to get that satisfaction, but to be able to go and have a conversation about it. If there's anything out there that creates that social atmosphere, I think it's a good thing." And in many ways, Dups believes there's nothing all that strange or unusual about Empire Avenue -- it creates a currency that's determined by personal sentiment, but in many ways, the value of all currency is determined that way. "The U.S. dollar... is actually set by the sentiment of the market. In a lot of ways, none of this is very different from anything else we do," he says. "It's just that this generation is starting to embrace the idea of online games being part of life."