Ten Ton Hamster

Questions by Cody “Micajah” Bye, Managing Editor
Answers by David Wisotzky, President/CEO of Xivio


While at ION, Ten Ton Hammer's Managing Editor, Cody "Micajah" Bye, was able to steal away some time for us to interview David Wisotzky, President/CEO of Xivio. Read below to hear all about it!

1. What should players expect in Xivio? Is it a game?

We try to take everything and make it simple. We have added so many features into the program from where we started initially. At first it was just a virtual world, then we added music, then video, then the homepages, pictures, and much more!

For a long time I think Xivio wasn’t a game, but people kept on trying to explain to me that we were. While our focus is more on economy and social skills, it dawned on me that players were going out and grabbing rare items for their avatars.

2. How did Xivio originally start?

My Chief Technical Officer originally started as a developer on V-Zones. When we first started out we wanted to simply begin as a virtual world. We didn’t want to throw in all of these mini-games at first; we wanted to keep it true to what we say we are.

In order to get the client to as many people as possible, we opted to make the entire game in Flash. A week after we launched, we were just staring at a computer screen waiting for the game to crash. And it didn’t! Then a user walks up and tells us that he’s sitting in his science class playing the game. How cool is that?

3. When did you launch?

We launched April 15, 2006. The first seven months were pretty rough. But since then we’ve obviously taken off.

Now we do the social networking stuff and use that as a launching point for the entire platform. All of the information is in one place. We put everything that they would want to see on the community page.

4. What have you done since you launched the game?

After about two months of live operation, the Chief Technical Officer comes up to me and tells me that I should “go check out this media player” that he devised. He’s a genius – after about three or fours hours of work he had a working media player installed in our game.

Next we gave players their own home page, which we call a “Hompy” (pronounced Home-pee). That’s actually a Japanese slang for a home page, which fits into our graphical theme. It’s really a cross between Bomberman, Rayman, and Hello Kitty.

5. What was the hardest part of designing Xivio?

The hardest part of the whole project was naming things. Everything was done, and we all went up to New York for the weekend. We were walking past a Sony store and someone saw a Vio and thought that we should name the game Xivio! All of our credits are called Vio (pronounced Vee-Oh) and they are earned by the hour (along with being able to purchase them with a premium subscription).

6. How important is safety to the Xivio developers?

The virtual world is the center of our business, but along with that virtual world we developed four main features. The first on the list is safety. We’re very big on safety and we actually have live moderators that are online all the time and watch the players.

Even if a player starts to step out of line, the community self-polices very well. Our players will get on other players for using inappropriate language or innuendos. I’ve had programmers go into the game, and the players will jump on him for using bad language.

6. What kind of safety filters are in Xivio?

What we did when we had a big social network with media, we realized that we needed to put some sort filter on the content because we couldn’t have our staff sit all day and go through everything. To solve this problem, we made a democratic rating system that we have a patent on. Basically, it’s very similar to the TV system, so it’s easy for parents to understand. If a parent sets up a master account that restricts content to TV-Y, you can only see a total of 28 words; just enough to communicate. It goes up to G, PG, 14, and MA, and what happens is that the kids get to vote on the content, along with the parents and game management. All of these groups are on different tiers, so different sorts of content can be viewed by different groups of players.

What we’re going to do down the road is offer up licenses for our patent. Why not make it a cross platform tool, make it simple for the parents? Maybe allow them to judge things on Gaia along with Xivio. Parents can even go so far as to disable social networking tools altogether and the children only see a virtual world.

The best thing about the safety system is that as the community grows, the ratings system keeps getting tighter and tighter. It takes a lot of work off of our staff.

7. Does it cost money to upload music?

Just to upload music to play is totally free. However, the players can’t upload music anywhere but to their private rooms, so they can listen to it there. We generally try to keep things free and simply let the users purchase smaller upgrades.

8. Did you ever think about letting people get their money back out of the game?

We thought about it at the beginning, but we decided it would get way too complicated in the book keeping. When you get into millions of users, you can’t go around cutting people checks for $0.30.

9. Have you had problem with third party gold sellers?

No. Not at all. Most people can get it for free.

10. What kind of interface do you use in Xivio? Is it easy to learn?

We try to be very minimalist as much as possible. Even if a player can’t read the words, they know from the symbols that a particular icon might be a way to view videos or listen to music.

11. What do Xivio premium subscribers get?

Premium members get a badge on their Hompy. They can upload backgrounds – anything that is HTML they can put up their. Even JPEGs. They find all of the stuff to put up. They’re amazing.

The users can rate each other’s Hompy and then comment on the Hompys.

12. Has everyone heard of the game through word of mouth?

Yes. We just went over a million users and it’s all been through word of mouth.

Click here to go to the official Xivio site