Virtual Worlds Apart

Before I came to India I was interviewing with Second Life to work in Silicon Valley, having met and been inspired by Philip Rosedale (Linden Lab's founder) with my MIT class. I've been involved in new media since my Cybertheatre days in 1997 when I tried out a virtual reality headset and wings and flew to a mountain where I chatted to another girl in cyberspace. It blew my mind then and I felt like today, where bandwidth, Net familiarity and mass Internet enthusiasm have converged it’s time to revisit virtual worlds. 3D is one way the web will develop, towards a visual interface rather than a text-heavy web experience.

When I found out that Godrej, one of India's largest FMCG companies, was revitalizing its brand, I was very excited! I had been lucky enough to meet one of the family a couple of years ago. Then I heard a new virtual world was to be developed by them...I ended up coming to consult on this project.

Before I arrived, I thought India is not ready for a virtual world – low bandwidth and low numbers of people online. I thought I'd try to persuade them to do something innovative for mobile phones instead. However after I had arrived and been part of many consumer focus groups, I realized that I could be wrong- broadband is the norm at 87% of Net subscribers and there were 54m active internet users in 2009. Also people seem incredibly open to and excited by new possibilities. So it could work! But it would still be risky...


Many months were spent refining the concept and functionality. The idea was to create a space for the Godrej brand to communicate to its younger audiences and give them something akin to the brand's concept of Brighter Living. A place where the world is fun and exciting and ever-changing, where you can experience new things with friends and meet new people online. A kind of virtual Disney Land. Can virtual worlds give a large, diverse brand cohesion through a branded environment? What I liked was it wasn't gonna be too heavily in-your-face branding, as no one would want to be there then. This would be a place where other brands could also exist. And where cool events would happen.

We settled on the name:
Go Jiyo means Go Live (live as in 'to live' and not as in 'watch it on TV,
live'). We decided GoJiyo must be dynamic and so its 6 Regions would refresh continually- we’d have a moon colony after the Chandraayan probe discovered water; Rejanm- where you can be reborn; a recreation of the ancient Mauryan empire; an urban environment; an underwater region and an arcticland. GoJiyo would also try to bring together gaming and social networks and 3D environments. So there’d be lots of mini-games as well as larger quests.


Working in India has had its trials and tribulations for me, but I have been impressed by the scale of the project. Our development team are truly global, from Bombay to London to Shanghai to Auckland to Texas...with many interesting characters such as a World of Warcraft addict who is married to someone in Second Life and earned a living building virtual castles; the reputed child genius Adam Frisby, who was hired by IBM at age 12, and went on to co-invent Open Sim, which is of course based on Second Life's platform; and a 3D specialist who heads up the largest virtual goods vendor.


We launched on 22 March and had a pretty astounding number of people signed up-
50,000 in 10 days. I was very worried about launching and there’s still tonnes to do! We launched with only the urban region and are now slowly releasing other regions. But now I do think sometimes it’s better to launch and then fix problems as they come up. You simply cannot simulate problems and properly load test either. And GoJiyo is in public beta, so we’re going to the public with cap in hand and a joint effort to develop it over the next months together, with feedback from users. Of course there are technical issues, every website and especially every 3D environment is always beleaguered by many. Our servers haven’t crashed yet though, which I am thankful for. Famous last words….
I hope not!