Comcast Town

So, the commercials definitely caught my eye; vibrant colors, isometric artwork done in pencil lines but apparently inspired by those awesome eBoy posters,that chirpy soundtrack. It was clearly a videogame aesthetic. But they were also terrible at marketing what they were actually marketing… half the time I couldn’t remember what company they were for.

Much less did I even notice that what the actual product Comcast was attempting to market was a virtual apartment builder and virtual interface to their services!

That isn’t the only time that Comcast Town suffers from an excess of art and lack of functionality, either. The aesthetic carries through all the way — super awesome visuals, with slooow popup boxes. Watch video on the menu — but it opens the tab of another site altogether. Cute apartment building, with some nice usability — and no actual town, or even directory of places to go see. Facebook integration — that tries to post a story every time I buy an item.

Basically, this is a version of MyMiniLife that is heavily branded for Comcast. There isn’t any multiplayer to it, and there don’t appear to be avatars.

Purchasing the first TV, phone, and computer serves as a way to give you ads about Comcast’s services for each, while also adding a tab with some additional functionality to your interface. The TV opens a partner for video streaming, the phone lets you invite friends and message them, and the computer… I don’t remember what it does. 🙂

There’s a virtual currency, furniture to buy, the promise of limited edition digital objects, and even a community spotlight for a cool room. User-generated content is limited to being able to attach annotations to the objects you place — sort of as a “user profile” of sorts. Essentially, it’s simple SNS as virtual apartment building — which took CyWorld pretty far in South Korea.

It’s worth checking out if only to get a glimpse of one way to “virtualize” a company’s website.