In a Strange Land

A Good Idea for Writing Centers in Second Life, A Little Late

2012-01-30T14:37:00.000-08:00

Location: Writing Lab Newsletter

Image credit: Flickr image by Marriott Library, University of Utah

I read this monthly journal about the theory and practice of peer tutoring, and I've not given a lot of thought to how virtual worlds might help. After all, my campus is residential and small. We do not have a widely dispersed student body living off campus, and the interest in virtual worlds hovers between "nil" and "huh?"

But not all schools work that way, and I was surprised to see Russell Carpenter's and Megan Griffin's "Exploring Second Life" in the March 2010 issue. I was slow getting to it; you can pick up a free PDF copy of the issue online but it's not easy. Click and then find volume 34, number 7.

Their piece came long after the hype cycle for SL had tumbled into Gartner's "Valley of Disillusionment." As I will explain in a forthcoming post, at a recent VWER meeting my assertion went unchallenged when I called SL a "legacy application" in education.

In spite of that, Carpenter's and Griffin's piece was enough to make me reconsider the beneficial effects of virtual worlds for writing practice, something I'd dismissed here some time ago. It won't change my own campus practice, yet. It might, at some future time, change how I interact with other directors and peer tutors. Notably, the authors claim that:

SL provides a more "personable" space for interaction with writers than does a 2D conferencing application.
Using SL was easy for staff and writers, but building "requires scripting and programming experience along with a great deal of patience."
The presence of white boards to display video and other materials offers a unique and immersive experience.
The ability to share real estate with other schools lets writing tutors share best practices cheaply.

And that last application of SL is the "killer app" to me. It is expensive to get tutors together between schools to share ideas. It also takes a great deal of planning, arranging vans, and coordinating schedules. There's no way to just "go hang out" with peer-tutors elsewhere, and I would love to find a way to get our Writing Consultants more engaged in seeing what occurs at other schools, even observing tutorials within the privacy regulations of FERPA and university-specific policies.

At present, I have no clear idea how many writing centers maintain an SL location. A Google search turns up centers for Michigan State , the University of Missouri St. Louis , The University of Central Florida centers. Bowling Green State's center comes up in search, but in reality it closed after a new director, with little interest in SL, took over. The spot not far from our VWER Roundtable venue now houses another project.

There may be more. I only hear anecdotes. Writing Centers have long been experimenters, but given our lack of professional time and funds, Second Life may be one of those experiments that never quite reached a conclusion.

Creating Claustrophobia in a Build

2012-01-24T07:03:00.000-08:00

Location: Attic, Virtual House of Usher

I'm close to finishing the SL build, at least to the point where I'll open the doors for visitors. Later, we will schedule a few events with our Usher actors. I wanted, first, to address some concerns that my last group of students had in the OpenSim build.

See the chest to the left of my avatar? It's way too big, and I cannot resize it.

Normally, I'd build something or do without, but here, I decided to "leave it big" (also letting me pull out an old inventory item we liked before).

Students noted that the House in Jokaydia Grid was not cluttered and crowded enough, and in both OpenSim and SL builds run bigger, with taller ceilings, than most real-life spaces. That's the fault of 8' tall avatars and the clumsy way the camera follows us when we move.

To create claustrophobia in wide-open spaces, I have tried a few methods to "trick the eye." These reverse the process I wrote about for creating the illusion of vast distance. Notably:
adding low-prim partitions and obstacles in rooms

splitting some Jokaydia-Grid rooms into two rooms in SL
living with the jumbo-sized SL items, or making some things a little larger than to-scale. That way, space gets crowded!
tinting distant items slightly darker to add complexity to the space. This also keeps the build from being too bright, a complaint by a few of my students last term.
adding prims, such as rafters in the attic, that lower the ceiling without making the camera bounce around when an avatar walks.

In doing these things--and I am sure I will find more techniques!--I continue to be amazed at the low-cost affordances of building in SL or OpenSim. While some educators are tempted by Minecraft or Unity 3D, I would ask them to consider the outcome desired.

For now, at least, for low-volume simulations SL and OpenSim suit my needs perfectly. I've been back to the Trident Main Store again and again for items I cannot or do not wish to build. Unlike some of the mesh items from Turbosquid that John Lester showed me for building, the costs have been trivial, a few thousand Linden Dollars total.

Kodak, iBooks, and a Day We Should Recall

2012-01-20T07:42:00.000-08:00

Location: Crux of history

Yesterday's technology news featured two events worthy of an annual commemoration: the Eastman-Kodak bankruptcy filing and Apple's announcement of its iBook initiative.

Both show how corporations can prepare for changing times...or not. Kodak, inventor of the first digital camera, did not market it because the impact would be disastrous to their film-based model. It provides yet more evidence why Tim Wu's model of "disruptive technologies" often get suppressed in the name of profits. Fuji and other companies adapted to changing times and Kodak proved late to the game.

Apple, the champion of technological comebacks, took a different route ever since Steve Jobs' return to the firm. Every iOS device released was lambasted, at first, by mainstream reporters. Jokes about the iPad in particular were sharp and pretty darned funny, to this observer.

Unlike Kodak, however, Apple took a long view of how the devices might disrupt their sales of traditional computers, always far behind those running Microsoft's OS. Yet with less to lose, perhaps, Apple could gamble big on the future of digital content. I got angry at Apple, not long ago, over the iPad. It seemed to be Jobs' "up yours" moment to Mac loyalists. Now, the post-Jobs Apple plays the two computers as one system: create content on the Mac, show it on the iPad. Apple still won't put Flash on the iPad, but so far I'm happy with their device.

And with the textbook announcement, they realized something I had said for years: the printed textbook is obsolete. Publishers rush to release new and expensive editions that students must lug about and then resell at a loss. These paper texts lack multimedia. My analogy for this is a botany text I own and love: the printed and $100 version can have color plates from a cloud-forest in Costa Rica or the Great Barrier Reef. The online version would have live video-streams from Webcams and embedded video demos. It would cost $20 and not be able to be resold.

Kodak wanted to sell you a roll of film. Apple wants to sell school systems an ecosystem: cheap iPad with publisher-vetted content that cannot be resold. Brilliant.

Why did publishers wait so long? Apple took the systemic and long view, while Eastman Kodak sat on innovation.

And thus empires rise and fall.

Personal PS: we disconnected our land-line phone yesterday, for good. Of all days! I do have a dumb phone, while my more social wife got the iPhone. Call, and I may get back to you. Eventually.

“Possible, Probable, and Preferable Future of Education in Virtual Worlds”

2012-01-17T17:38:00.000-08:00

Location: VWER Meeting

Every year, I look forward to this event. In 2009, it is where I first met AJ Kelton and many of the folks to whom I later became close colleagues. The full transcript of the meeting can be found here. It's full of good advice and links for educators.

Now that Iggy, my avatar, has turned five years old (500 years in SL time) it's informative for me to compare the notes by our panel of experts who met on January 5 with my own youthful enthusiasm from 2007. This year our panelists were not grim, but they advised diversity and moving past a focus solely upon Second Life. Sarah Smith-Robbins, who could not attend our meeting but has been a regular in years past, has a worthwhile and detailed assessment of the situation, "Are Virtual Worlds (Still) Relevant in Education?"

Our answers will differ. For me, "yes, when I again teach a course using 3D simulations, probably in two years."

As readers ponder their own uses of the technology, consider these predictions and observations:

All of the panelists felt it had been a hard year for educators in Second Life, and that the sector has diminished as faculty look to alternatives that are cheaper and more autonomous of one company's control.
Interest in other virtual worlds has not necessarily spiked at the universities represented by the panelists; budgetary issues and the rise of mobile technology have worked against the expansion of faculty and student use of virtual worlds.
Jokay Wollongong noted that more of her attention has gone to Minecraft, and that the SL presence for Jokaydia has diminished. In particular, the interaction of parents and their children in Minecraft has been transformative for her work in education
Ken Hubble, of the Canadian Border Crossing Project, will move his work from Second Life to Unity 3D. He prefers the interface and learning curve for Unity 3D, when designing simulations.
Anthony Fontana was more upbeat about technology, giving us three words: “gamification, mobile, and Web”
Wainbrave Bernal (Jonathon Richter) notes "I am seeing more researching into practice – applied research. . . . check out the ARVEL wiki for growing body of research in virtual worlds, augmented reality, and games – as well as emerging technology."

Despite a rough year behind us, none of the VWER guests were pessimistic. As Fleep Tuque (Chris Collins) notes about the year to come, "the focus will be less on a specific platform than on how we can bring together various technologies. My focus more on helping faculty and students learn."

And that sounds right to this blogger and educator.

US Citizens: Time to Act on SOPA and PIPA Legislation

2012-01-13T08:38:00.000-08:00

Location: Real State of Concern

If you think the Digital Millennium Copyright Act hurt the Internet as we know it, I urge you to look at what the Electronic Frontier Foundation has to say about two bills currently before Congress: PIPA and SOPA.

Read more and write your legislators through the EFF here. This is sad and serious business: user-generated content, as we all know it, could just vanish.

2012 Survey: Education, Nonprofits, and Virtual Worlds

2012-01-10T15:51:00.000-08:00

Last year, in the wake of the decision by Linden Lab, I posted a poll of educators and those in the non-profit sector. The results can be found here.

One more year on, I'm repeating the survey. It is open until Feb. 1.

Update: Jan. 12: Hamlet Au reports Tyche Shepherd's figures on the number of private regions lost in SL in 2011: 879. I presume that most of these would not be educational sims.

Online Surveys & Market Research

Students and Academic Roleplay: Some Responses

2012-01-10T08:31:00.000-08:00

Location: Virtual House of Usher, Second Life

The work in Jokaydia Grid last semester gave my students the chance to sound off about roleplay. I was pleasantly surprised how many of them slipped into character. In a post last month, I looked at ideas students had for improving future expeditions to the House of Usher: new settings, characters, effects, and props. In this post, I share some reflections about what students felt they did well to make the improvisational roleplay work, or not.

My student Elon, who is drafting an academic article about the nature of story in the game Mass Effect, replied a great deal with useful information. Like a good academic, he's drafting ideas for the later project.

Logan: students were required to think critically and put effort into the simulation if they expected to gain a better understanding of the story, and quite possibly change the story altogether within the simulation.
Elon: In order to be a proper role-playing character, the user has to continuously maintain the world’s setting and authenticity. To do this, I had to first find out about the House of Usher by reading the story, and then I had to carefully maintain who I was within the simulation.
Emily: A character must be created and maintained, usually conforming to some specific guidelines but otherwise left up to the player. For example, my character was given a motive of holding a grudge against the Ushers due to the fact that they had denied her a loan.
Elon: I decided to tell Roderick I admired his paintings and wanted to wander around a bit. I still couldn’t find the family papers. I was panicking by the time Roderick called for us to see our quarters, but luckily Mark drew Roderick away to explore the island with him. This gave me the opportunity to find the papers, detailing his family history and more information about the nature of the land.
Emily: If my character had not chased Roderick out into the swamp, then [a major clue] would not have been found. Since my partners were convinced at the time that Roderick was evil, it is likely that the ending of the story would have played out altogether differently if I had not possessed that proof of his innocence.
Elon: The interactive experience isn’t purely just with the game engine, but also with other users . . . .The result is an experience where everyone has their share of invested time, choices, and manipulations of the plot.

John Norman Meets Edgar Allan Poe

2012-01-04T19:01:00.000-08:00

Location: Trident Main Store

When building in Jokaydia Grid, I really missed the availability of good sculpted content for a few hundred Linden Dollars.

Now that the build is going up at Glasgow Caledonian's campus, I ventured out again to find some Medieval and Gothic decor. That's how I happened upon Laufey Markstein's Trident Main Store. Now I have a blacksmith's kit for the crypt of the new Usher build. More to come!

While I'm not fond of Norman's books or his philosophy, some of the builders serving the Gorean-roleplay community produce amazing wares. I'm less interested in slave-silks than I am in the impedimenta of daily life: blacksmith's tools, kitchen items, gardening hardware. These things did not change much over the centuries, so for a build set in the year 1847, lots of Gorean accessories would do just fine.

I have long lamented that Morris Mertel's shop has vanished form SL, but Laufey's offers me a good deal of merchandise to finish the new build. And the cheesecake shots made the trip fun, too:

No, I did not buy the Bath Girl from Trident. It was only a costume, anyhow...Bath Girl not included...I don't think Poe ever went that far.

Miss, Mr. Usher needs a towel!

2011: The Year for Virtual Worlds Arts

2012-01-02T12:54:00.000-08:00

Location: VWER meeting

It was a pleasure, back on December 15, to interview artists Wizard Gynoid, Soror Nishi, and Miso Susanowa for our Roundtable meeting. The year for the virtual arts ended badly, as Bryn Oh's work at Immersiva became unavailable for reasons still not clear as I publish this post.

In our meeting, we talked about work by our three artists in SL, their moves back and forth from OpenSim, and the nature of art itself in virtual and physical spaces. A full transcript of our chat can be found here, but I'll tip in some highlights.

On the "medium" in VWs:

Wizzy Gynoid (wizard.gynoid): i belong to a group called NPIRL Not Possible in Real Life. most of what i do is not possible in RL. . . .due to the scale landscaping as an art form is almost impossible in RL.
Miso Susanowa: but there’s also the exploration of what is native to this environment that is ONLY possible in this environment, like… say… AM Radio’s The Far Away.
Wizzy: if someone can see the beauty in a mathematical object, then i have succeeded.

On Second Life and OpenSim

soror Nishi: I have a sim in InWorldz, it’s far cheaper, less restrictions on building sizes and better support.
Wizzy Gynoid (wizard.gynoid): the open sims allow me to build bigger and link bigger stuff.
Miso Susanowa: also… the chance to build and not be overwhelmed with socializing.
Wizzy Gynoid (wizard.gynoid): there is no clear driving direction that Linden Lab has. where are they going? 3D prim versions of PacMan?

That remains to be seen...as does SL's growth under the Electronic Arts alumni Rod Humble and Will Wright. All three guests believe that 2012 will be a year when more VW-native art becomes tangible, as more galleries recognize the promise of the online spaces and 3D printing matures to enable more items to be exported to physical space.

Happy 2012, all!

Iggy & Pappy Swap Recipes

2011-12-24T07:33:00.000-08:00

Location: Watching the Meat Thermometer

Well, it's that time again...for country ham. The real thing, Yankees: not some water-and-smoke-juice-injected mild ham but a smoked-in-the-smokehouse-by-rugged-and-somewhat-tipsy-Virginians ham.

Rule one for all-day cooking, such as that required for perfect ham: keep the drinks handy.

At the recent VWER holiday party, both Iggy and his ol' pal Pappy Enoch showed up to cut the rug and do some ice skating. Pappy tried to give out Iggy's recipe for a perfect Martini, but Iggy needs to restate it here for those who could not attend. If you visit Richmond, you'll have to go to Thai Diner Too with us, so Yoko and her husband Jack can mix you one of Richmond's finest drinks (and best-kept secrets). Iggy's recipe is a pale shadow of theirs.

Ignatius' Almost-As-Good-As Yoko and Jack's Martini

It's best to begin with liquor, shaker, and glasses that have been in the freezer or at least in the refrigerator. Cracked ice is better so, after shaking, one gets little icebergs in the mix...yum.
Do not cheap out on the olives. They lose their savor fast, so look for gourmet ones with pimentos...do not get yuppie with Kalamatas, please. Spanish olives such as those from Serapis have been Jack's secret for a while.The company has an olive museum: 'nuff said.
Per drunk: 2 oz top-shelf Gin (Tanqueray and Hendricks are Iggy's faves). Heretics may substitute top-shelf vodka (and if so, use more pearl onion than olive on the skewers. Martinis are not meant to be sweet).
I rarely make a "dirty" Martini, but if so, I tip in some of the olive brine in the next step. Do not add more than a splash.
Add liquor to shaker, where about 8 cubes of ice made from filtered water lie in ambush.
Allow Gin and ice to become acquainted for 30 seconds or so, while gently agitating the open shaker.
For very dry Martini, pour in a splash (perhaps a teaspoon) of dry Vermouth. My version of "dry" is about a tablespoon, but some tipplers add even more. I prefer merely tipping the Vermouth bottle in homage to the Gin and ice.
Install the shaker top and check for leaks. They can be a heartbreak. Then shake it like it's a '72 Chevy Vega driven at 70 mph on a washboard road.
In your glasses, add a skewer with at least 3 olives or, for Iggy's favorite, two olives with a pickled cocktail onion in the middle.
Pour the martinis. Repeat at own risk.

"Well, that am some rite good city-boy White Lightnin'," Pappy notes, "But a natural-born human bein' man gots to eat too. Write 'er up, boy."

You will find these smoked hams, ones that can store without refrigeration until sliced, in country markets and gourmet shops (they do exist!) throughout the South. Yankees and other unfortunates can order them and when prepared properly, as the chef at Edwards shows us in the video, the results are dramatic and delicious.

Our chef does not consider how to soak the ham. Doing this loses much of the salt but keeps in the smoky flavor. It may still be too salty if you slice it thickly, so practice thin-slicing on some lesser meats, then proceed.

Here's my advice for this year for getting yonder ham ready:

After scrubbing any mold from the ham and rinsing, store it in a cooler. Cover with water and close.
For at least two days, but no more than three, change the water twice daily. Flip the ham over when you do.
For the last turning, add 2 liters of Doctor Pepper to the water. This is the Pappy Enoch way, y'all. Then you are ready to follow this gent's advice:

Pappy: "Whee Hoo! Let's eat!"
Iggy: "What he said. Where are the olives?"

The only ham I've had that I prefer to real country ham is Jamon Iberico de Bellota, and that costs $30 per pound, if it can even be found in the US. Jamon Serrano is close, and vies for my love of ham, but I digress. Must be that Martini!

Boxing Day Update: the ham was astounding, the best in years despite overcooking to 165 degrees. Several pounds have been hoovered up by hungry Southerners. Note to self--new meat thermometer, then recheck near end of cooking time with my digital one.

Awry in a Manger: Merry Christmas, Y'all

2011-12-23T10:17:00.000-08:00

Location: Checking Baby Jesus' Head

It is time for Rebar Jesus again. Welcome to a journey not to Second Life or OpenSim, but just down my street.

I will not name the local church, but they set out a series of stick-figures, apparently made of welded metal rods, drape them in Biblical costume, and poke their pointy bits into the ground. The entire ensemble of Wise Men, shepherds, and proud parents flutter in the breeze to show the lines of the metal skeletons beneath. The manger, such as it is, looks like a soccer goal with a few 1x6” boards strapped across.

It is not Scroogey of me to deplore this Yuletide atrocity to one of the world’s great monotheistic religions. My disdain comes not from a lack of Christmas Spirit: our house features window-lights that go up on Solstice night, the longest of the year, to remind us that the light will return. I pick a cedar and we cut ourselves each year, with my grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s ornaments placed lovingly there. put it up on Christmas Eve, the old-timey date for putting up a tree, and take it down on King’s Day, January 6, when the Melchoir, Balthazar, and Caspar laid their gifts before the baby Jesus.

I am fond of the old customs, some from times before Christianity: we even walk outside to wassail our fig tree, then come inside by the fireplace to watch the Charlie-Brown Christmas special, as we drink egg-nog and wish for peace. But there is no peace to be had from Richmond’s bad Nativity scenes. At one time, the cultural doyens of our city could rein in our excesses, so that homes, under the Spartan rigor of Williamsburg’s simplicity, featured only white lights, one to a window, and any excesses, such as real pineapples, were placed in the wreath on the front door or kept entirely out of sight. Has the reader ever spotted a dancing Santa or string of red “tube lights” along Duke of Gloucester Street? No. If such a thing were to rear its ugly head, some matron whose family went back to Jamestown would rip it down and have a man in Colonial garb burn it up in a cresset.

Now, in these fallen and consumerist times, the Misses Propriety and Prudence Decorums of Richmond are long gone, and look what has happened. Just down the street from the Rebar Holy Family who could not find shelter at Home Depot, there is “Flatland Jesus” jig-sawed rather artfully from half-inch plywood and painted well. I almost like this one, until pass it in the car. At a ninety-degree angle, the parents of the Christians’ Savior of the World vanish. The church should have sprung for one-inch plywood, I guess.

The phenomenon of terrible Nativity scenes has spawned a Web site, as all things awful do, featuring Star-Wars-Lego nativities, Peeps crèches, and Elvis mangers. My favorite, pictured: all-meat Nativity with Jesus as a Vienna sausage.

Click and you'll find that the rest are there, glittering in their foulness like the tree-lot full of abominations that Charlie and Linus navigate until they find a little green tree, still made out of wood, making Charlie realize “I think it needs me.” Christmas needs you, Richmonders of taste and restraint, to save it from your fellow citizens on the tacky-light tour. Slow down from your shopping and manic preparations, like Snoopy on Crack, to watch that TV classic again. Then act accordingly. Trust me. I know Christmas. I trod the boards in the role of Scrooge for our sixth-grade holiday play.* Other cities manage this. New York, that place of craziness at all seasons, puts on the dog, rather than looking like one, at Christmas. The nativities of Midtown, not to mention the live one in Radio City’s Christmas Spectacular this year, were magnificent in 2011. There was not a bobble-headed goat to be seen. And as for the long-legged Rockettes angels? Well, I’ll be good so I can go right to Heaven.

Yet there’s one more tacky manger story to tell: my own.

Under that big cedar we cut, I lay out my remnants of my parents’ Nativity scene. It was once nice, or should I say, they once were. The set consists of about ten different ensembles from several decades and in all sorts of scales. My late mother was rough on Christmas ornaments, including a clay Holy Family I picked up for her in Madrid. One of the Castilian shepherds is now missing his left hand, and when I went to adjust Jesus’ crooked halo last year, his neck cracked and his head fell right off. Thank God, in all His or Her names, for teaching humans how to make Gorilla Glue. The baby now rests peacefully in his little bed of Spanish straw, surrounded by old Woolworth’s plaster magi, a handmade sheep that I think comes from the late 1800s, plus a Major-Matt-Mason Astronaut and plastic Santa.

Christ’s halo rolled under the corner of a large bookcase and I’ve yet to fish it out. But that child’s smile is still as divine, as if the little baby is laughing at our follies and our scurrying rush at Christmas. Someone far older and wiser is looking through those infant eyes. Come, and adore Him.

So if a pink flamingo or cement lawn-gorilla ends up in you neighborhood’s Nativity scene, don't blame this Unitarian-Universalist. I have an alibi ready.

*Scary Factoid: Novelist James Howard Kunstler was also a sixth-grade Scrooge. I wrote Jim about this, and he assures me I'm no Scrooge. But I'd bury every tacky-light contestant with a stake of holly through their hearts! Humbug!

Usher Returns to Second Life: Adding What Students Want

2011-12-17T18:27:00.000-08:00

Location: Glasgow Caledonian University

Thanks to the kindness of Evelyn McElhinney and her colleagues at GCU, I have a large and tier-paid parcel and many prims to use. A Version of the House of Usher from the Jokaydia Grid build, plus the Visitor Center from Richmond Island, is now returning to Second Life.

Though I won't be teaching Poe for some time, starting this Spring I will have the House open for others' classes if they wish to explore on their own. With some warning, I can gather the Ushers and some new characters for improvisational acting in the simulation.

I am delighted to be back on the Lindens' grid, because SL offers affordances that OpenSim does not, yet. That said, I'm a two-house educator now. I will maintain and continue to improve the Jokaydia Grid simulation, but I can bring in some features that SL offers to address a few student concerns. In this post, I'll focus on what students said about the physical nature of simulation and its setting, rather than the preparation or execution of the tasks facing the actors and their guests. That merits its own later post.

More interactive content for more immersion. Students wanted easier navigation in places, and more confusion/claustrophobia in others. In the earlier SL sim, I'd learned that the House's Crypt was too straightforward, but even with the OpenSim build, some students noted that the rooms were too large and the layout too easy. Only one asked for a map. I will also add more moving walls, trap doors, and cul-de-sacs. Students wanted more of a sense of danger, too. As Jake said, "Adding more animated noises and trap doors would add to the whole enveloping experience."
Simpler movement: One problem singled out were the spiral stairs to Madeline's chamber. I was quite proud of them at one time, but once put inside a tower these proved hard to climb for non-gamers, now replaced by Enktan Gully's 1L Elizabethan staircase (shown below).
More gloom: Others noted that lighting was too bright, and rooms too large to match the oppressive feeling of Poe's tale. That's easy to remedy, with some new walls, doors, and dead-ends. Griffin, who regularly plays games, enjoyed the sandbox nature of the simulation but suggested that the island did not seem dark enough. The SL build will be inside a huge, starry bubble and the lighting will be as dim as possible.

We need to die, Prof. Poe's characters are often in mortal danger, and at least half of the 15 respondents said in their final exam: give us a combat system. Elon claimed that "giving Rodericktrue ways to threaten his guests would make the experience exponentially morefascinating. What should be done, ultimately, is that the user should feel thatthey might 'game over' or that their avatars can die."
HUD time: I am looking at purchasing some content to provide a HUD and, in one or two places around the house, a scripted ancient weapon or two for the avatars to use if the simulation demands it. SL's many roleplaying HUDs provide opportunities to be drowned, burned to a crisp, shot full of holes, or impaled on pointy things. Something like the Spellfire system would be perfect.
Fashion! Three of fifteen respondents mentioned that they wanted to be able to customize their avatars more.
Quote the Raven (but just in text chat). Tucker stated what he and at least three other classmates felt about text-chat, noting "As practical as the chat system was, I believe that it would createa greater sense of immersion if we had headsets on and were able to privatechat through typing instead."
More special effects: A lack of sound was lamented by five participants. Other than creaking doors, I did not have time to record the variety of sounds I had planned for the Jokaydia Grid simulation. In SL and OpenSim I will add them, plus some stock sounds for the SL build that we used in 2009 and 2010. As Lauren put it, "lightning, rain, thunder, screams, ghoulish noises, creepy pianomusic would have been a nice addition to the setting the virtual realities ofthe Ushers."

OpenSim Exam: Cautionary Tale, Happy Ending

2011-12-09T05:57:00.000-08:00

Location: Jokaydia Grid, Virtual House of Usher

With some glitches along the way, six groups of students completed their final exams, or at least the immersive experience upon which they'll base a take-home essay exam.

It all began very poorly, and that's a warning to those working in OpenSim for classroom work critical to students' grades. The first day, the grid would not load, but I was in luck: the one student in the lab happily delayed his journey to the House of Usher and joined a group later in the week. Jokay Wollongong, our grid manager, was thenceforth online for every exam: thank God. We had a serious crash later in the week, but Jokay restarted the region and we all relogged. In fact, we roleplayed the disorientation within the scope of Poe's story, and odd things do happen to Poe's characters.

The culprit for our crash may be the old server software that runs Jokaydia Grid. Jokay cannot fix that, but the owners of the servers at Reaction Grid can. The good news is that Reaction Grid plans an upgrade next week. I'll hold them to this...I want to restore hypergrid availability to our build.

A word about the talented folks at Reaction Gird: the company has switched emphasis in recent months to Jibe virtual world technology. Jibe is promising for ease of use and the ability to run inside any Web browser. On the other hand, it's not for those who wish to build collaboratively in-world and in real time with students. That's a killer app for my use of virtual worlds. Jibe's protocols for 3D object design, like those of SL's recently introduced Mesh technology, are beyond my and my students' skills; Richmond lacks enough advanced arts students who might wield Maya or Blender. And there is no incentive for faculty here to learn.

On the other other hand, prim-work in OpenSim or Second Life are within my skills set and those of the student-builders I train, often in teams working together, so that's where I'll stay.

As for getting hypergridding back? It offers special affordances for educators. That, after all, is how edutech works: we share and link to each other. Even Blackboard, the course-management behemoth, is now moving to a more open model with the arrival of a "share" button.

The closed-grid model, on any platform, is that of the video-game world. It protects IP and functions for gamers and socializers, but it's not best for many of my colleagues in education. I give my own content away with Creative-Commons licensing or in the Public Domain. We are even considering whether we have tech support, locally, to host an OpenSim grid on our campus, as schools such as the University of Bristol are doing as they pull their work out of Second Life.

As we move forward to new engagements in an OpenSim grid or Second Life, I still need more data. From my students' essays, I plan to gather data for an article about effective educational roleplay and types of student roles. But I've already learned one lesson: without Jokay Wollongong's hands-on help, I'd never have trusted Reaction Grid's old version of OpenSim for something as crucial as a final exam.

Next up, I'll finish the Usher series from Jokaydia Grid with reflections by the students, from their exam essays. And a surprise twist right out of Poe: Usher is coming back to Second Life!

Virtual Worlds A Distraction? A Reply to Jon Himoff

2011-12-07T07:51:00.001-08:00

Location: Reading Jon Himoff's Blog From The Ivory Tower

It has been a while since I've written about Rezzable's work, but I came across a post by Jon Himoff, the CEO, in which Jon asks,

"In the age of Facebook, do avatars add value or are they time-consuming distractions?"

I replied at length at his blog, but I'd like to repeat what I said here.

I'd argue that Facebook is more likely the distraction...students rarely, on my campus, use social networking for course-work. Avatar-based virtual worlds, on the other hand, provide an unparalleled ability to build simulations, Jon. Ask the US Army about MOSES, for instance.

Having just finished a final exam project in an OpenSim grid, my class loved the exerience because they were helping to shape what future classes will do. 15 of my 17 students opted for the OpenSim exam/improv session, and they had fun and learned more about the subject matter by seeing it, and more importantly, interacting with it, in 3D. A number of observers have noted how users don't mind less-than-photographic verity in online games. We don't need "serious game" level graphics if Millennial students understand how the experience links to goals and outcomes in courses. Every demographic study of that age-cohort showed exactly this finding.

That was always the promise of something like Rezzable's Virtual King Tut experience. It saddens me that you moved on from a great bit of work that never got the marketing it merited.

Virtual worlds are a niche technology, not one for corporations to fatten the profit line. But that's not the mission for institutions of higher ed. We are in the business of helping students develop critical-thinking and content skills so they'll be better citizens and employees (in that order). I'd agree that the technology was over-hyped mid-decade, and many educators rushed in themselves, without clear pedagogical goals.

As the decade continued, and Internet use meant students using mobile devices, the niche continued to be ruled by firms with gaming and I.T. experience. Educators in the niche, however, began gaining skills to develop and deploy virtual worlds locally or in hosted settings. The emphasis could then shift to how to apply best practices to teaching, instead of how to make the tech stable. Truth be told, as with Web 1.0 and 2.0 sites, in a few years we won't need corporations to help or even host the content.

But then, many specialized apps on campuses work that way. Virtual worlds will be but another of them. They may never be mainstream, but that's not important. Mathematica and GIS software are not mainstream, either.

More on Motives & Missions

2011-12-02T13:16:00.001-08:00

Location: Peeking Behind the Stage Curtain

I recently wrote of a change to this iteration of the Usher experience: my students all received a motive and a mission before they began their "expedition" to meet Roderick and Madeline.

Students liked this, as we had discussed the literary idea of "backstory" in class. We considered how, for popular fantasy series such as the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter novels, readers come to realize that a fictional world existed long before the events and it has influenced current events mightily. Thus Aragorn's Numenorean blood has a history, as does the Ring itself. In the case of really strong television series like Mad Men or The Sopranos, backstory helps flesh out the actions by major and minor characters on screen.

Poe adhered to his own rules for short stories: he had the right, as he invented the genre. "Usher" is a self-contained world, with references to other texts, real and invented for the story. The Ushers and their problems, however, exist in a sort of vacuum. We have hints of ancient family history, some of it dark, but unlike Tolkien's world, we don't get to hear any "stories within the story," though the poem "The Haunted Palace" appears in its entirety inside "Usher."

That's because a short story, like a one-off sitcom episode, has little backstory: we get a set piece that can stand independently of any world revealed in little bits. The short nature of the narratives prevent such complexity. All we need to know is that William Shatner's character sees a gremlin on the wing of an airliner in the classic Twilight Zone episode, "Nightmare at 20,000 feet," and off we go with Shatner's over-the-top performance.

Lacking Rod Serling's voice or a television studio's resources, I decided to employ these motives and missions. Note that neither I nor the actress playing Madeline knew who got what, and Madeline was partly aware of one motive (I sent part of it to all of the folks in her role).

Here they are, as chosen randomly by students:

Motive: A man was drunk in Whitby’s pub, the Three Tuns. You saw him pay for his tab with a gold coin. The publican (pub owner) let you look at it, after the man stumbled out. It was a newly minted gold sovereign, enough to cover pub-bills for a month. The publican said “The Ushers have a lot of gold. That’s their man-servant, Jenkins.”

Motive: Madeline was once engaged to your brother. It was a secret between her and him, until he told you. She broke the engagement off without any explanation. Your brother, heartbroken, went off to serve as a Colonial officer in Africa and died of malaria. You’ve always been curious.

Motive: You hold a grudge against the Ushers. Their father, Sir Howard Usher, refused to loan your family money, despite their being old friends. The last of the family fortune is long gone. You have kept up a correspondence with Roderick, and from hints in it you learned, over a year ago, that Roderick too is facing financial ruin.

Motive: You had a sister who began to fall asleep at midday. Eventually, she began sleepwalking. She died when a doctor’s medicines went awry and she never awoke. You suspect that your sister might have had her body stolen by ghouls who sell such to the medical colleges in London. From Roderick’s letter, you fear something might befall your old friends…the men who steal bodies have been very active in Yorkshire.

Motive: You are from Cornwall, in the Southwest of England. You knew the Ushers years ago, and have kept up correspondence with them sporadically. A local family, the Ennis family, lost a son, Colin. He was a sailor killed late last year when his ship ran aground…on the island where Roderick and Madeline Usher live.

Mission: Find a way into Roderick’s room and look for family papers.

Mission: Explore the island. You all took ship to the island from Whitby, Yorkshire. A man also staying at your lodging and hearing of your destination, said “there are spirits and secrets outside that old house, and riches too from…pirates in the olden days.”

Mission: You are interested in shipwrecks. You heard about the wreck of the Grampus on this island late last year.

Mission: Explore the Ushers’ book collections. You know that the Ushers own many rare books, and you collect old books yourself and make a tidy sum trading and selling them.

Mission: Find what you can about the medicines Madeline is taking for her illness.
Special thanks to my students and the actors in the role of Madeline! Back to grading...

House of Usher: Motives & Missions for Online Roleplay

2011-11-27T06:27:00.001-08:00

Location: Ready for Final Exam

When you play a traditional MMO, there's killing stuff, roleplay, and "leveling up." So in educational roleplay, with only the middle element, how to motivate participants?

I would love to have the time to commission a HUD for Nevermore Island in Jokaydia Grid, but it was enough to get a House of Usher "up from the ashes" of the Second Life build in 10 months time. Students in my "Invented Worlds" course opting to do the take-home final begin exploring and interacting with Roderick and Madeline tomorrow.

When I last tried this with one of my classes in Second Life, I chose to give each student character a roleplaying goal, such as "find out if Roderick is giving Madeline any medicine" and a beta-test goal of evaluating some element of the 3D build.

This time, that last goal gets moved to the exam essay, due some days after trip to Nevermore. Meanwhile, I came up with an appropriately gamelike metaphor for each student: a motive, either benevolent or even hostile to the Ushers, as well as a mission to discover or recover something from Nevermore.

This approach will be fun for me, in the role of Roderick, because I will assign said motives and missions randomly from two hats passed at the start of each session. Neither the actress playing Madeline nor I will know what each student gets, and I will not comment on them if asked. Moreover, I will encourage each student not to tell the one or two other students present in the lab, where all of us save Madeline will be for the expedition.

Were Linden Lab to cut tier drastically, and let me bring in an OAR file (my requisites for returning this work to Second Life) I could merge this pedagogical approach with one of the combat-system HUDs available in SL. Some include effects for drowning, fire, or falling.

I don't want the experience to turn into a violent game, but having a working pistol or sword about could add to the fun considerably. After all, folks die in Poe stories all the time, and student mistakes could then become fatal. I'd also want to add some scripted non-player characters such as a hermit, a ghost, and perhaps a couple of hostile wolves in a remote corner of Nevermore Island. Those will wait for OpenSim to catch up with SL's technology. I'm excited by the promises Rod Humble has made about gaming feature coming to SL's default interface, but the cost for a robust sim-wide build are too steep.

After April 2012, I may have to decide again about grids. Reaction Grid has not updated its OpenSim software, and I want features available on newer grids such as reliable hypergridding. I'm hoping that Jokay and her customers can put some gentle pressure on Reaction Grid to make the move, as they seem more intent on support Jibe, a lovely 3D technology but beyond my coding-and-design skills at present. Please don't suggest I move to Jibe: given the weight this work gets in my annual evaluation, I'm not going to take time to learn new 3D apps. I get more credit for an article or new course than for any immersive 3D work, and that's unlikely to change.

Wherever the build goes, after this semester Nevermore will be open, by appointment, for groups or individuals who want to RP in Poe's setting.

James Howard Kunstler Talks Back to My Class

2011-11-18T13:55:00.001-08:00

This week, in Duncan Crary's and James Howard Kunstler's weekly Kunstlercast, Jim responded to questions from my Eng. 216 "Invented Worlds" students about his novel World Made by Hand.

Jim Kunstler

Set in Washington County, New York several years after an economic collapse in America, the novel upended my students' notions of continual technological progress.

They cannot imagine a world where the screens go dark and stay dark, where chatting to friends involves talking over a fence, and where getting a meal means a trip to the garden or root-cellar. While I tend to agree with them that Jim might underestimate human ingenuity in the face of a prolonged energy crisis or economic downturn, I likewise think my Millennial students and their Boomer and Xer parents are a bit naive about progress. They don't see clearly, or often enough, how every technological innovation brings with it unintended consequences, even as it fails to deliver every miracle we might expect (I'll shine your flying car if I'm wrong).

World Made By Hand and its sequel, The Witch of Hebron, are bracing speculative fiction, and I'm glad Jim found time, between gigs as far afield as Sweden and Australia, to be a gracious and receptive respondent.

The podcast can be found at iTunes podcast listing (search for "Kunstlercast") or from the Kunstlercast site.

Now, if the reader will excuse me, it's time to get some wood I split and fire up the wood-stove. I'm not kidding. For now, at least, blogging and wood-splitting exist side by side. In 20 years, I suspect our world is going to look more like Kunstler's and less like William Gibson's or even the banal utopia of the sofa-bound YouTube addict.

Jokaydia Grid Orientations for Nevermore

2011-11-16T11:45:00.001-08:00

Location: Virtual House of Usher, Nevermore Island

Of seventeen students in my "Invented Worlds" course, fifteen opted for the "take-home exam," consisting of a one-hour orientation to OpenSim and then a ninety-minute "expedition" to the House of Usher on Nevermore Island.

Officially, it's my fifth time in a virtual world with a class, and only my second with an OpenSim derivative. Time required to set this up? Twelve hours for setting up avatars and orientation, sixty for building and scripting in Jokaydia Grid since we left Second Life.

I'll just post a few pictures today, since no one was in-character as a participant in an 1847 adventure based on Poe's story. I was surprised, and pleasantly so, by the students' adeptness with level-one VW skills. Moving, finding and opening notecards, IMing and chatting were no barriers. I also showed them how to capture chat and take snapshots.

The orientation sessions also helped me add immersive elements to the simulation, such as invisible prims under the Tarn so avatars could not go diving in over their heads. I also got ideas, watching over students' shoulders, where I should hide more clues and more atmospheric elements to the build.

Many thanks to Jokay Wollongong, who did a quick sim-restart and provided advice for this large group...not to mention a quick list of account names and passwords! She's even working on a few accounts, individually, where student avatars would not rezz for other participants.

Though I kept wishing for some of Second Life's bells and whistles, I did at least see that in either virtual world, small-group orientations accomplish a great deal in one hour.

Hamlet's List: The Case for Stratifying It

2011-11-04T08:04:00.000-07:00

Location: Head on Desk

Every month, Hamlet Au publicizes a list of Second Life's fifty most popular places. Here's the current one. The data come from Louis Platini's Metaverse Business site.

A commenter at Au's blog noted that segregating the list by maturity rating might give current and potential SLers a better idea of the platform's uses. I agree...it's not censorship to sort the thing by rating or at least purpose.

Adult content, on the Zindra Continent and private estates, could be assessed with a click. So could education and arts (even if it's erotic art). So could roleplaying sims.

Concurrency at social sites of any rating tends to trump sites used sporadically by a group of avatars for, say, a business or academic meeting. Bowling Green State's virtual campus hosts up to 50 of us for a big meeting of VWER; the rest of the week, concurrency is probably far lower there.

Hamlet's list distorts what can be done in SL. Last month we did have Gerontology Ed Island among the dance-clubs and more salacious sites....now it seems to be all fun and games, of one sort or another. I've not been to #7, "London City," so it may be a virtual version of the real thing.

As it is, the list hurts those new educators who might enter SL and embarrasses the rest of us. Au is the best known writer about Linden Lab's metaverse, so I'd hope he might change matters next month.

I imagined this scenario in a comment to Au. Here is is again.

Dean Wormwood: Thank you for coming in today, Professor Lag. I wanted to ask you about this Second World thing you use with classes.

Lag: Life, sir. Second Life.

Dean: Yes. Well, it's a lively life!

Dean shows Lag Hamlet's list
Lag raises trembling hand to forehead

Lag: Oh.

Dean: So, do you know what "bukkake" is?

Lag: Um...new type of Sushi....um...region in Second Life dedicated to Japanese culture.

Dean: Nice try. I Googled it...now don't tell me "Gor" is a poorly designed site about the former Vice President.

Update, 8 October: Hat-tip to Hamlet for publishing a new post with PG-rated regions. Of course, many educational sims have Mature ratings because of disturbing content or museums that feature nudity. But this is a good step!

Grid Hop for EDU: Fake Cthulhu Threatened by Fake Dog

2011-10-28T17:20:00.000-07:00

Location: Many Places, Including Vassar University in Second Life

I was extremely excited to do the otherwise hum-drum work of checking links for a recent VWER transcript. We had a great session on 20 October, where more than 30 educators' avatars posted Web and SLURL links to good resources for educators new to virtual worlds.

The entire transcript can be read here. Because of the proximity to Halloween, I was in my "Loremaster" outfit by Tekelili Tantalus (plus top hat).

I arrived at the Sistine Chapel at the same time as a group of what I suppose were undergrads doing a SL field-trip. All of the avatars were from the latest bunch of Linden Lab starters.

Immediately, a German Shepherd told me "Ignatius, I could beat you up."

What was I to say in reply? "You and what dog-sled team?" or "I will suck your aura, canine primitive creature, until you are a withered mindless husk, one with Azathoth as he howls at the center of all matter, where shapeless horrors dance to the music of eldritch flutes held in nameless paws?"

No. I settled for "Go ahead. I'm a pacifist."

And very tired, after all of that grid-hopping. But there is still a lot to see out there in Second Life. Read about it and click those links here.

Students! I'm glad someone is still bringing classes into SL. Mine are off to OpenSim in a few weeks. No dogs allowed. For that matter, no dark gods who walk between the dimensions, serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen, allowed.

October Roadtrip: Epic Fail for Billy Badass

2011-10-26T18:53:00.000-07:00

Location: Gnashing Teeth on Wellington Road
Soundtrack: Dire Straits (oh, of friggin' course)

Thanks to the kind help of SeVeN VanDouser, I acquired not only a '67 GTO, but a Goat in the best color of all: Billy-badass black.

And, not surprisingly, Second Life's roads are not up to the talent of vehicle creators.On my last roadtrip, in my Mini Cooper S, I at least got through a dozen or more sims before it became ludicrous.

This time, I got through half as many. Ban-lines and regular sim-crossings made simple navigation into a hellish experience. I had to detach the car, run on foot to the next rezz-zone, and try again.I'm sorry, scenes like this one are beyond retarded. I know how to drive a SL car.
Simply put: cars are decor in SL. Nothing more.

Perhaps Will Wright's presence on Linden Lab's board can fix this. Or perhaps it's simply unfixable. Pity. That Goat would be the perfect ride.

Linden Lab, you spent a lot of time making these roads. Now fix them so we can enjoy them at more than a crawl.

PS to owners of real classics: urinal-deodorant blocks are keeping mice out of the badass '68 truck that my wife owns as well as a '65 Mustang ragtop we'll have on the road by Spring. Hope springs eternal, just not on SL's roadways :(

Why Doesn't Linden Lab Send Out E-Mail Like This?

2011-10-21T18:58:00.000-07:00

Location: Basking in Glory

Received from Tiny Speck, the creators of Glitch. Rod Humble, you should pay attention to these stoned madmen:

If knowledge is power, then, having just finished learning Animal Kinship II, you are filled with power. Tingling with power. Knowledge-infused power is radiating from you, like the smell of freshly roasted chicken radiates from, well, a freshly roasted chicken. Look at you! The Freshly Roasted Chicken of Knowledge-Power!

Here’s what you just learned, chook:

Advancing on the path of Animal Kinship introduces some additional rewards for the basic animal interactions, such as increasing the amount of meat piggies give when nibbled and the amount of milk butterflies give when milked.

Glitch: I'm Inside Their Thoughts

2011-10-20T19:07:00.000-07:00

Location: Petting Trees

And learning to jump, put things in my backpack, and pet piggies who give me a steak--not pork, I presume--for being kind to them. I'm getting advice from something that looks like a floating potato emitting rays of light. It keeps reminding me it's my "familiar."

Glitch as to be the strangest little casual game I've ever found. It seems a creation of people who took a lot of mind-altering drugs while reading the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. The look and feel reminds me of late, lamented Metaplace, but with more content ready made and a urge to explore.

Hmm...sounds like the promise of Second Life. It's a 2D game, but it runs in my browser smoother than silk. All you need is Flash (sorry, iPad users).

The metaphors are clearly going to keep me playing Glitch. It is an invented world focused on inventing a world so the inventors will grow. Yes, that makes about as much sense to me, too.

But it's not about sex or shooting things. I rather like the idea of massaging a butterfly and getting repaid with "butterfly milk" that has magical properties. The best soundtrack since that for Harry the Handsome Executive accompanies me as I trundle along.

Not much to report on this initial dispatch from Glitch, except I was laughing out loud as I finished the quick tutorial and began to explore my first destination. The world seems to be made like Metaplace's; it's not contiguous like SL or an Open Sim grid, but regions light up when an avatar enters.

The game just went live on September 27. I followed Hamlet Au's breadcrumbs to the site, watched the trailer, and just had to give it a whirl.

There's something about being inside the thoughts of one of 11 "giants" who made this universe...ahem, cannot call them "gods" without offending those touchy about religion. So giants they are, right out of Lovecraft's fevered brain.

So far I've not done much. I'm closing in, after 15 minutes of play, on Level 2, when I hope my little green man, Smoky Messerschmidt (I know, another hard-to-type avatar name) will begin to accrue enough in-world swag to trade it for a custom appearance.

Just like that other virtual world I've shed so much typing on over the years.

Update: It's not a grey potato. It's a pet rock. And the trailer is so addictive I'm going to embed it right here from YouTube:

This thing must involve Metaplace alums.

Road Trip Attempt: Linden Lab, I Hate You

2011-10-19T19:13:00.000-07:00

Location: Sim Crossing

You reek, LL. The perfect car, and at the first sim-border, I get this. Fix the damned physics.

Road Trip?

2011-10-17T19:02:00.000-07:00

Location: Looking at a car I would kill you to own

Pontiac GTO, 1967: the power and glory of a nation on a rocket sled. Men like young gods steer their street monsters into telephone poles, spewing testosterone and hubris. They want to be astronauts, but instead of Saturn V rockets they have Pontiacs.

My god, an SLer named SeVeN VanDouser made a '67 Goat that is worth my notice. IRL, I care for one classic vehicle (a hot-rod racing truck with some mice living in it) and I'd not want a real GTO until I had a better garage with climate control.

But in SL? Hell, yes. The '67 is The Machine That Must Be Worshipped.

Bring on the toys of the young gods.

So I guess I need to take roadtrip again, eh? Anyone care to visit the shop and get a car to race me?

Hint to classics owners: Urinal blocks keep the mice out, but your car smells like...a clean urinal. This, too, will never happen in SL.

Update: Next post will feature a road trip in the Goat. I also found out that, IRL, my Mini-Cooper S does a 0-60 time of 6.6 seconds, the same estimate as a stock '67 GTO with the 400 cubic-inch V8. As much as I love the Mini....the Goat still wins.

Burn 2: A Fool and His Spleen

2011-10-08T18:17:00.000-07:00

<a href="http://www.koinup.com">Koinup</a>
Location: The Playa

Given Miso Susanowa's recommendation and nice machinma about this installation, I started with Grail Quest by Trill Zapatero.

I clicked a face-down tarot card. As The Fool appeared, I read the following:

"If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise." -William Blake

Well, with that intro, how could I resist? Blake and being foolish are two of my favorite pastimes.

The installation is more introspective than I'd thought it might be, and certainly more interactive than many of the other installations I walked through after. It's worth a long look, if only to meditate upon the abundant follies that surround us and that we contain.

As I bumbled about, I came upon The Insolence of Nature, entered through a gate labeled "Where I dragged my weakness." The artwork focuses on a giant prostrate figure, collapsed into nature. Say, perhaps I have found the political messages of past Burns, after all.

At Mystical Tree (Black Rock sim, next to Grail Quest) I was back into introspection. I followed the journey up from my root chakra through to the seventh and final one, the crown Chakra, where I flew. I had to stop and meditate, however, at my spleen; I've been told I'm full of it.

The heart chakra was a bit intense, with the deep breathing and the heartbeat. But I rather like that.

It may be my mood, given the turning of the year in this hemisphere to fall. Or it may be the times, where the most vital form of performance art is on Wall Street and other places where the other 99 per cent have given voice to some long-overdue rage.

This year, Burn2 seems smaller, less populated. But I cannot be certain. After all, it may just be my foolishness, and Blake reminds us that "a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees."

Burn2, 2011: Arrival

2011-10-07T17:35:00.000-07:00

Location: Hither and Thither on the Playa

A nasty allergy attack has limited my Burn2 time this week--only so much energy for grading a big stack of papers and other things. But today I got by for a get-acquainted look on my free blue bicycle.

I'll do a proper storyboard later in the weekend, after I really get around to see some art.

Social messages seemed a little muted this year, but I've hardly begun my explorations. I do like a sign that reads "that humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with artificial paradises seems very unlikely."

So I settled in for some fun. I met avatar Eleyn Zlatkes, and we wondered if an exhibit of prims were a type of memorial, now that mesh is on the scene.

Message, smessage! We decided it would be more fun to get dizzy on the big spiral in the display.

Goodbye Steve

2011-10-05T19:07:00.000-07:00

Location: Mac keyboard

You were my favorite megalomaniac.

Robert X. Cringely said it best: If Bill Gates were George H.W. Bush, Steve was Saddam Hussein. He didn't want to be a rich country-club boy: he wanted to rule the f'ing world.

That I can respect.

They'll pull my Mac out of my cold, dead fingers. I'd give up my Springfield M1911A1 .45 caliber first. The Mac is far more dangerous.

God had better watch out. Or Satan. Either way, inside of six months, Steve, you will be running the place.

Don't forget all the PeeCee weenies I converted to use a superior OS, Steve, after your Second Coming. Be it heaven or hell, I want a job in the hereafter.

You were insanely great--love you or hate you, or both--you changed the world.

While The World Burns, I Buy a Fedora

2011-10-02T18:30:00.000-07:00

Location: Not at Burn 2

I know, I know. I need to go. I will go this week, if only as a break from grading papers and midterms.

Perhaps had I gotten my press pass I'd have been more anxious to go. I was all ready to put a little "press" ticket into my new hat.

Speaking of, I got in touch with my mesh self and wore a new mesh fedora to VWER, where we discussed the possible impact of SL's new technology on educators.

Several of us came by with mesh avatars or accessories. No one with an older viewer complained about my mesh hat. Maybe it was a sculpty and the guy just claimed it was mesh?

A log-in with Imprudence 1.23 confirms I got mesh. Perhaps my friends with other non-mesh viewers thought I was French and was wearing a boule instead of a hat.

Looks like I'll wear my old hat to Burn 2. See you on the Playa!

Evolution of a Bald-Headed Freak

2011-09-26T17:43:00.000-07:00

Location: Flickr

I just could not resist this challenge by Harper Beresford to show what we've done to ourselves since rezzing way back when on Orientation Island. You can see the Flickr photostream of all the entries.

Fake me is the worst fashionista in the lot and was put to shame. Yay, me!

Mesh & Educators

2011-09-22T16:09:00.000-07:00

Location: SL with Mesh, OpenSim Without

The new meshes for SL, in some quarters, get depicted as the savior of the virtual world.

Um, okay. That's worth its own post...I don't know that Linden Lab will see tens of thousands of new and tier-paying users just because their world looks better. But educators, busy with so many other things related to their teaching, may not even know what the fuss is all about.

So here are a few premises for those new to Mesh, before I moderate next week's VWER meeting, entitled "Mesh In SL & Education: Boon? Bomb? No Big Deal?":

We've always had a mesh system in SL. The new one simply provides more realism such as clothes that move with the avatar better and, mostly, fit well
The new system requires a new viewer and, for developers, new out-of-world tools for making 3D content
Gradually, viewers based on the 1.23 code will not be worth using, as Mesh content will be invisible. I saw this last week at VWER, where an early-adopter's mesh cat avatar remained invisible, except for her sculpted head and tail
Prims, sculpted or Euclidean, won't vanish. Nor will our clothing layers, unless there's another nekkid-avatar bug like those in the early SL Viewer 2 code
SL Viewer 3 is not the only option. Thank God. I'm biased against the Linden product after the lag-fest I've had with Viewer 2. I downloaded the Firestorm Viewer 3 Beta, and it permits seeing the new meshes
Overall lag with the new viewers remain to be seen; I need to test Firestorm against the crowd we get at VWER.

Now for a short editorial. I just finished more building in Jokaydia Grid, using in-world tools and Photoshop. With Mesh, however, I cannot do collaborative builds in-world with a team, and acquiring the skills-set for the new content isn't worth my professional time. In this pic, I used a cylindrical prim to put a rotten corpse into a tomb, the sort of thing that could look downright terrifying with the new meshes.

But I doubt that my students will spend more than 30 seconds at this particular spot. What price in time and energy to take the next step to more immersion?

My evaluators could care less about mesh, and to be fair, why should they? For assessing educational outcomes, they don't need to know a sculpted prim from a Slim Jim. My colleagues working in virtual worlds will need to ask themselves some hard questions, unless they work at a school where students have the skills to create items using the new meshes.

Another Usher Ghost

2011-09-13T12:14:00.000-07:00

Location: Nevermore Sim, Wandering

I hope that by the time I'm done, this island and House will feature about a dozen apparitions. I've yet to figure out what the couple of malicious ones might do. Ideas are welcome!

Mostly, the helpful spirits will provide a clue or a warning. Here's the latest one, just after Roderick rezzed her for the first time.

Good Educational Sites In SL, 2011 Roundup

2011-09-07T07:51:00.000-07:00

Location: VWER meeting

image at Flickr by Grizzla

Readers new to virtual worlds for education, or perhaps looking for new places to go alone or with students, should have a look at the transcript posted from a large group of educators at the VWER meeting of August 25.

It's doubly useful in how I aggregated recommended sites, by academic field, at the start of the transcript.

My sense is that while schools are generally downsizing their SL presence and educators are moving some work to OpenSim, much great SL content remains. In fact, I'd hazard a guess about why the Reaction Grid region for the 1939 World's Fair appeared. It's one of the few well known quality builds outside SL for educators.

I'm hoping that in comments to this post (and the post at VWER) readers can suggest other sites, particularly those outside SL. Ener Hax will, I hope, discuss what is going on at I Live in Science Land, and we'll get other non-SL updates useful for "back to school" planning for sites such as Heritage Key, where I've not been in some time.

New Pair of Shoes

2011-09-02T08:49:00.000-07:00

Location: Jeepers Shoe Store

Surrounded by well dressed female avatars at the recent VWER meeting, I realized that my shoes are SO 2007. All of the guys were getting some much-needed ribbing about our lack of fashion sense.

Educators--especially we guys--are not known in-world as fashion plates. So after a scolding by the ladies, for whom shoe-shopping is apparently a big deal in SL, I used the revised (and useful) search feature in Firestorm, my choice for a Viewer-2 compatible SL experience. I'm making an effort IRL to dress up more on campus, so why not in SL? Baby needs a pair of shoes!

Pretty close to a favorite RL pair of Sketchers boots I love

Without turning this blog into the skid-row version of Iris Ophelia's dispatches, I'll add that I enjoyed the experience of buying shoes in world. I love shoes IRL and buy nice ones, so I'm not a typical male shopper. I look for certain European-style dress shoes or tough-guy boots, in both SL and RL. In those regards, Jeepers Shoes (teleport link) does not disappoint.

I was particularly amused by the unique way the shop handles demos...a rock chained to the shoe.

Given that my suit worn in these shots, a "Madison Avenue" discussed in an earlier post, comes from a creator who has left SL, I felt that I was doing my bit to support the in-world economy by laying down 500L for two nicely made pairs of shoes.

Now if I can only get the shoe-saleswoman-bot to give me a foot massage!

My shopping won't save SL, but it saves my pride.

An Illusion of Distance For Immersive Learning

2011-08-27T09:00:00.000-07:00

Location: Nevermore Island, Jokaydia Grid

Immersion in a roleplaying setting means that, while exploring a doomed family's mansion and grounds in the year 1847, one should not glimpse Tesla Coils and trees the side of skyscrapers. When I did, I realized that raising some mountains would be in order.

My neighbors in Jokaydia Grid have some well conceived builds. I just don't want my students to see them, as they take on the role of Poe's narrator in "The Fall of the House of Usher." Unlike what I did in Second Life, here I'm not interested in having them experience a world: I want them to experience a closed simulation. So I began to raise the borders of the sim; gradually the Mountains of Nevermore got very steep.

When my geomancy was finished, the result amazed me. The borders of the sim now seem very far away. This too will become part of our roleplay.

Parts of the island are now very hard to navigate, and the difficulty increases as an avatar walks toward the mountains that ring all of the island except near rocks where the shipwreck of Grampus rests. That hulk contains some important clues about the dark history of the Usher family.

I've been playing with the idea of having several ghosts near the ship and on the land, instead of simply in the house; most of these spirits will help the students by giving them hints and clues. I may have one or two who are malicious. I've also hidden clues in the swamps and woods near the mountains.

When we run the simulation, I will turn flying off on the island. In the end, I hope we have a place where avatars who leave the House will get lost in a space that seems larger than it really is.

When I ran the Poe build in Second Life, in theory anyone could come by the site. My fears were that some exotic-dancer avatar, in pasties and g-string, would burst in using IM-doofus text chat during a crucial moment of the roleplay. I suppose we'd have pretended she was the ghost of some mad Victorian harlot.

Second Life users are mesmerized by the coming of more advanced mesh items to that grid. I am curious on several levels, but in particular I wonder if the added complexity won't slow to a crawl any systems save for high-end desktop computers. That would be a terrible outcome for educators who remain there. In leaving SL for my work, I've given up many things--namely, the loss of great inventory available at very low prices. But going back, at Linden Lab's rates for tier, is simply not an option.

And, gradually, as the Jokaydia Grid sim comes to life, with content mentioned in my prior post, I think we'll have ourselves a wickedly immersive time in our new home, even without the bells and whistles SL can provide to those with very fast computers.

Mr. Wild Frontier Man, Roderick Usher

2011-08-22T19:03:00.000-07:00

Location: Jokaydia Grid, Nevermore Sim

Okay. I get it now. It only took a friggin' hour to make my AO work. I now know how an AO script works.

But I am giving away barrels, darn it. This is the joy and frustration of working in an OpenSim grid. In Second Life, I'd run to some store or the Marketplace. Here, if you want something, you either turn to the wisdom of the community or you learn to DIY.

In my case, being a somewhat experienced builder but the worst scripter in history, at OpenSim Creations I found what I needed for some interior bits for The House of Usher.

Then I gave Vanish and his buddies a copy of my House of Usher barrel.

Admittedly, this frontier trading-post is rough and ready. It's a place where we belly up to the virtual bar and slap down our coon-skins in exchange for local knowledge and a bottle of rot-gut. Even a guy like me, who never got better than a C+ in a computer-science class, can at least offer a few objects and some witty descriptions...if you cannot blind them with brilliance...and so on.

I was telling my literature students in my Invented Worlds class that some peoples define themselves by the presence of a frontier. That's the lore of Americans, Aussies, and perhaps the Russians who brave Siberia to make a life for themselves. For lots of other folks, however, a physical frontier is not as necessary. They find that thrilling encounter with the new online, making things.

I suppose that, as a greenhorn, I'd have "died" out on the OpenSim frontier already, without the experience of the other pioneers. But so far, with two months to go before the students rezz in Jokaydia Grid, I'm thinking that the frontier may be opening up at last.

Back to School: Good EDU Sites in Second Life? Other Worlds?

2011-08-20T17:46:00.000-07:00

Location: Planning VWER meeting

I'm going to crowd-source these tips before Thursday's meeting of the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable. It's a back-to-school special, and I want to compile must-see sites in SL or outside it for education.

In the comments, list the site, the grid (and Web link to its site). If it's in SL, please supply a SLURL. For any grid's content, please type a few lines about why the content seems worthwhile.

I don't mind content on the 2D Web, but it should in some way be helpful to teachers in planning to teach in immersive 3D environments. I've given an example below.

I'm interested in the arts, in science, in information resources such as libraries or coding help, even builds in virtual worlds that merit a visit simply for their exemplary content. Flag anything that might be adult, just so our educators don't get into too much trouble :)

I'll stir the pot with two sites:

OpenSim Creations: Tip of the tophat to Vanish, who showed me the way to this archive of open-source files that can be downloaded as .zip archives and then uploaded for use in OpenSim worlds (and I suppose SL as well). Proper attribution should be given to the creators of content, and the creators should be informed when a member gives away the content again.

Svarga: As close to a living museum as one will find in SL. It showed many of us what is possible in a 3D world. Though technology and design have passed it by in some respects, Svarga has a place in many hearts as capturing the unique ethos of Second Life as it began. http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Svarga/128/128/28

Educator/Avatars: How to Dress?

2011-08-17T14:11:00.000-07:00

Location: VWER Meeting

Last week, the weekly meeting focused on this topic, and I'd like to share the full transcript.

As one might imagine, the topic proved rather contentious. Some felt that self-expression trumps other concerns.

I'm not convinced, at all. My own position boils down to this:

Human avatars in professional clothing work best for introducing a virtual world to those who don't know it but may have a stake in one's career, evaluation, or funding (such as a demo to admins or colleagues)
The same approach works best with students new to these worlds. Since I'm at a school filled with non-gamers, I dress conservatively at first as Iggy. Later on, I might "Steampunk out" or appear as a robot. Not at first, however. As students got more comfortable in-world, I found they too wanted to wear flaming tophats or become cardboard-box people.
Even when one looks more or less convention, I feel that details can send the wrong message. In the picture below, Iggy is wearing an "Uncle Gabby" T from my favorite, and very politically incorrect, cartoon, Maakies. Gabby is drinking and driving. Yeah, I'd wear that IRL to work.

What do you readers think? Are forms of appearance rhetorical stances, when you can be anything you want in a 3D world? If you are a nonhuman all the time in SL, are you obligated to change that to impress a skeptical audience you wish to woo?

Grandpa's Box: My Thoughts on the Future of Our Computers

2011-08-12T18:21:00.000-07:00

Location: Using Obsolescent Computing Tool

I don't know how many of my friends among Second Life's digerati are in contact with young people on a daily basis. I am, and I am stunned by how fast they are abandoning the personal computer.

The other day, I got a briefing from a Writing Consultant who works for me. She reviewed our Writing Center Web site and, while polite and praising the content, noted that the organization is all wrong for a student audience. "I no longer use my laptop," she admitted. "The iPad is my primary computer."

Much of our content, developed over many years and going through a vetting process with several bureaucratic levels, is all wrong.

It has happened with hyperdrive speed, this shift. We are not an engineering or arts school: our students reflect typical affluent users.

Should I cheer at this funeral?

Iggy in the Confessional Booth, Before St. Steve

As a Mac-OS fanatic, I take no comfort in Apple's victory with portable devices. Windows-users, we are in the same boat, because the iPad is no Mac. Or Windows PC.

It's the anti-Mac, or better still, the final realization of Steve Jobs' dream of 1984: a sleek and closed-down platform with an elegant interface, but where one pays a price: Apple controls every damned thing. The iPhones and iPads are also hip examples of industrial design, just as the Mac of 1984 was no bulky (and sturdy) IBM PC of the sort I then owned. The IBM was for office-clones who had reluctantly given up their Selectric typewriters. The Mac was for artists and freaks.

It was a machine with a personality. Over time, it acquired a soul after Jobs' hammer-lock on hardware design was yanked away. Except for Extensions conflicts before OS X. But we won't go there...Jobs' "second coming" swept away the Old Order.

Jobs is a man with Olympian ambition and an insanely great idea or two: his ideal factory would take trucks of sand in one end and ship out computers at the other end. He wants to own the whole system. Henry Ford was smiling from plutocrat-heaven when he looked down at St. Steve. Tim Wu understands this well in his book The Master Switch. Wu takes some well aimed swipes at Jobs.

Sorry, Steve. I really adore your OS, but I'm thinking of backing Google with an Android purchase. And--horrors--I think I'll be playing Mass Effect on an Xbox 360.

Confession #2: I'm going to buy that in several months, mostly to play the latest Mass Effect. Let's give the Devil his due; Microsoft kept their corporate wet-blanket culture off the gaming division, and out of that we got the Kinect.

Trouble for Granda's Box

My "Nerd-Night" tabletop RPG group consists of one Mac-guy (me) and a bunch of Windows-based gamers who get away from their MMOs to go "old school" and roll some d20s. Some of them own console games, but not a one uses a smart phone or tablet.

They are dinosaurs as surely as I am. They don't get why the next generation of computer users are eschewing desktop systems for portable devices. I, on the other hand, get it.

Millennials want to always be in touch with their hive. They need self assurance and confirmation of their choices, and they do their social planning on the fly. That's impossible from a tethered desktop or even a laptop. I've yet to see more than a scattering of students use a laptop outside, as university promotional photos often show. Instead, they compute as they walk across campus. Give them data glasses that look just like sunglasses, and they'd use them too. Just don't make them stop, even for a nanosecond.

I recently had an epiphany that the wider culture is also getting it when I saw this Scott Adams' cartoon.

My buddies and I are Dilbert. My students, the young fella.

I don't know how Apple's closed system will fare against the Android OS from Google. Poorly, I secretly hope. But as a Microsoft-hater, I am also pleased that Windows will be the biggest loser of all. The company, except for its Kinect, has been no innovator in recent years. Was it ever? Steve Balmer has the cool-factor of Dilbert.

Whatever our desktop OS, I think we old timers with our grandpa boxes will look back at the System Wars of the 1980s and 90s with nostalgia. Like many other hobbies I embrace, from model-building to boardgames about World War II, the rest of society has moved on and I'm in this eddy of forgotten time.

I see a future in which content creators will use powerful computers in some form. The rest of the public--the consumers--will want to be close to the Machine. Machines as easy to use that they are ubiquitous, a part of our bodies.

It's what Sherry Turkle of MIT has called "always on, always on you" technology. Get ready for it.

But I still don't own a cell phone...my "dumb phone," a pay-as-you-go model, expired in April. It won't be missed.

Iggy's Rules for Moderating Virtual-Worlds Meetings

2011-08-03T06:53:00.000-07:00

Location: Um...virtual-worlds meeting, perhaps?

Photo credit: Sheila Webber

The good folks at the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable are training new people to host our meetings, and AJ Brooks has asked us veterans to share our ideas. I will run this post here and at the VWER site. I'll focus on interviewing guests in another post.

Iggy's rules are not the same as Ann's or Ev's or AJ's. But these principles have worked fairly well for me over the past few years.

Open Forums are not completely open: When I host one of these, I let the crowd set the flow of the conversation, but I begin with a question such as "so, what news, ideas, or issues about virtual worlds would the group like to discuss?" I have a fall-back topic if everyone is sitting on their virtual hands. This week I'd say "So could virtual pets be of any use in education?" and let the crowd take it from there.
Expect some chaos, but rein in the digressions: I don't mind a bit of off-topic talk, given the nature of synchronous text chat. It tends to be multi-threaded. But if a digression starts to become the dominant topic, I'll come back with something like "let's get back to XYZ's question about lag in the latest SL Viewer." I'll even IM those digressing, if it gets bad enough and someone complains to me in IM.
Topical forums need a "pump primer": I learned this in the 90s with Daedalus Interchange in my writing classes. The moderator will start the group with an initial issue or question, then let them run with it. In this transcript, about machinima, I began with " how many of you have made machinima? Answer yes or no." That's great for establishing a knowledge base, but it's not enough. I followed up with "To those who answered “yes”: What is the one resource (aside from SL) that you like best when making machinima? Add URLs if you have them." This really gives the transcript some "meat" for those who are not present or who wish to consult it later when making their next machinima.
You can send one or two questions out in advance. I don't often do this, but on occasion I will send a note in-world and to the e-lists with advice such as "Come prepared to share your favorite site for education in virtual worlds and to tell us why."
Get the crowd to keep the talk flowing. In both sorts of meetings, I either ask a follow-up question such as "so XYZ, how did your students like entering Second Life through the New Media Consortium's portal?" or one that gets everyone to reply, such as "can we share one tip for making effective machinima?" These tactics make participants feel acknowledged and lets them do some of the moderator's work. As much as possible, I want everyone at the meeting to chat. I'm a big-mouth and a fast typist. This tactic helps shut me up.
Recap. Early on in the meeting, I often will sum up the points made. As with #2, I learned this from AJ. I might say "So far, people are saying they prefer chocolate, vanilla, and butter-pecan. What flavors did I miss?"
Watch the time. Several moderators remind the group when we have 30 minutes left, 15, and then 5. These points are great for forming up an unruly herd of cats. At the 15 and 5 minute points, I often ask "so what issues have we not covered yet?"
Go easy on ban and eject. I've done it but rarely. Instead, a temperate IM to someone causing grief can work. I might say "Do you really mean that? It could greatly offend some here" or (black hat on my head) "That remark really offended some of the folks here. Please be a little more temperate."

I am thrilled that we have a new group of moderators. Running a virtual meeting is a specialized craft. I wish our new moderators luck!

A Political Post

2011-08-01T14:46:00.000-07:00

Location: Waiting for a Vote

This began as a reply at Tateru Nino's blog. I'll share my thoughts again on this debt debacle.

The USA is a plutocracy with its paid politicos in both parties; the GOP is merely more naked about its ambitions. Many Democrats kowtow to old Counterculture ideas, but that part of our culture never had a unified agenda beyond ending the war in Vietnam, whatever the right claims about Socialism etc.: the US Counterculture was a coalition of utopian dreams (many of which I cherish, foolishly perhaps).

Our plutocracy was only under serious threat in the years between Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive movement and the end of the Vietnam War. Then, starting with Eastwood's and Bronson's pop-culture vigilantes acting out against coddled criminals, the pendulum began to swing back to the right.

Finally, Ronald Reagan set us back on track to let the plutocrats rule again from behind the scenes. Now the rich rule more openly. Corporations are people by Supreme Court fiat and can make unlimited donations in complete anonymity.

Given this brutal set of truths, it's best to stay quiet and live a productive life, then retire.

Marcus Aurelius was correct: "What is even eternal fame? A mere nothing. What then is there for which we ought to take serious pains? Only this: to have thoughts just, acts social, words which never lie, and a disposition which gladly accepts whatever happens, as necessary, as usual, as flowing from a principle and source of a familiar kind."

Few men other than Aurelius, in his era, knew something was deeply wrong with the Empire. Just as then, history will remember US libertarians, liberals, and fundamentalists, even as the sands of time bury them all.

Our time will pass.

Breaking the String: Why Improv Acting Bridges Game and Story

2011-07-22T07:06:00.000-07:00

Location: Grabbing the Polyhedra Dice for Nerd-Night

I've had a good time skimming the 2007 anthology Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. I often start reading seriously in the middle of such works, then skipping backward or forward, but when I saw that Greg Costikyan penned the first essay, I waded in and learned a great deal about why I enjoy the House of Usher project so much.

In Fall, I'll run 20 students in a 200-level literature class through our simulation. The essays in the Second Person collection are giving shape, and theoretical grounding, to some of this 3D work.

Games are Not Stories, Are They?

Costikyan, like me, came along in the era of Avalon Hill's classic board games, bound by rules and not exactly the fodder for stories, and TSR's original Dungeons and Dragons, rife for storytelling if a good Game Master (GM) was posing problems for players. Unlike me, however, Costikyan got to design and publish some excellent games, including one of my all-time favorites, Bug-Eyed Monsters.

So when he wrote of the essential differences between narratives that cannot change quickly (MMOs and MMORPGs) and those that can (tabletop and free-form RPGs), then differentiated them from how stories work, I spotted something I'd not yet been able to put into words:

It's hard to see how the lessons from narrativist RPGs and free-forms can be brought into digital media since they depend so heavily upon a gamemaster and player creativity--and 'player creativity' doesn't generally work well in tandem with 'limited pregenerated digital assets.'

"Yabba Dabbo Doo!" I heard myself saying, Thursday being my gaming night, after all. It's a time when such dorky exclamations fill the air whenever a d20 lands on "critical hit."

OpenSim grids, where I'm building the Usher simulation, and Second Life are essentially big sandboxes where amateurs and professionals make pregenerated digital assets. The game may change (or just end) for amateurs with the arrival of mesh in SL, but that is another tale and rather beyond my interest, as I'm done teaching in that particular virtual world.

Unlike a game, in improvisational RP using an acting team (Roderick and Madeline Usher for our build) plays the part of GMs in tabletop RPGs. A crucial element of story remains, one Costikyan identifies as "a single, linear, driving narrative arc." The actors in the role of the Ushers determine this before the simulation, when they pick, among several predetermined options, what has caused the trouble for the family. Then, during the simulation, they decide when several key plot points occur, such as when Madeline will enter a coma or when Roderick's fragile sanity will begin to further slip.

Meanwhile, the students playing the role of Poe's narrator have a quest, not unlike those sometimes given in D&D: save the Ushers from themselves and a family curse.

Traditional games online cannot permit such latitude with narrative. Virtual worlds can.

How Virtual Worlds Break The String

Costikyan makes a clever point, something obvious but never so well stated to me before, when he notes that "a game is a system of constraints." Thus even the somewhat open-ended "adventure games" can come to resemble "beads on a string," where at each stage of the adventure, or "bead," players have some control over choices until they reach a critical point. Then the players move on to the next part of the game.

I found, in earlier iterations of the Usher project, that we broke this string. The students, wandering in the confines of the House of Usher, really can move from any one setting or group of clues to another. The world they explore, being continuous and persistent, allows them discovery at any point. They need not find a particular clue in order to find another. The only exception are a few locked doors that require a password.

How the students fulfill their quest, as well as discovering clues and subplots they encounter along the way, depend upon several factors that they very much control. This is very much like what players do in good tabletop RPGs, when their decisions shape the course of gameplay.

Deciding how much choice students can have at Usher is maddening work, I'll admit. Already I see the development of the simulation as giving me and the students so many choices that they may become overwhelmed in the two hours planned for live simulation with actors.

So now I find myself as constraining certain choices by making more clues point in only a few directions.

That said, in even the loosest form of roleplay a player cannot declare "I'll grow a set of wings and fly away from danger," unless the player's character possesses that ability or finds a magical item that enables flying. I've turned off flying in Nevermore region and students must cope with what they have in their avatars' inventories (we use premade avatars) or can find during the simulation. But choosing which sorts of improvisation to limit is harder than that.

Players will draw upon knowledge their characters could not have, and in tabletop RPGs, the GM can call foul. In the Second Life version of the Usher simulation, my avatar would roleplay the family doctor and provide clues and advice in back-channel IM for the students. Sometimes they'd ask something along the lines of "would my character know anything about medicine?" or "does anesthesia exist in 1847?" and I would chime in with an answer, saving the Ushers from breaking the flow of roleplay by having to step out of character.

We may be able to repeat this in the Fall, though I think we'll be short of actors! If not, I will simultaneously be Roderick and the teacher. GMs can do that well, stepping out of character as a nonplayer character and answering a question about rules or backstory.

Getting Ready to Play and Make a Story

This type of improvisation simply does not--really, cannot--exist in MMORPGs where the game-engine might generate a new monster or peril automatically, depending upon the actions of players. The game company cannot alter the world or even the arc of an adventure on the fly. When an out-of-character question arises about the game-world or system, the players usually rely on a Web site or they ask other players in-game. Even so, players cannot really go very far "off script." As Costikyan points out:

Only with the final game style, the tabletop, do we escape the demands of linearity--and we do so, ultimately, only by relying on the creativity of a live gamemaster.

Physics and graphics in a user-generated virtual world will always lag far behind most games. But story is the strong point of well designed simulations in virtual worlds. Thus a well designed simulation with actor/GMs in a virtual world comes closest, in digital form, to capturing the tabletop RPG experience in all its narrative richness. It's the potential "killer app" of virtual worlds for educators. I've heard machinima called that; it is wonderful for promoting work done in-worlds to those without accounts, or to a group of fans. It is not, however, an interactive form of art.

One week, as we waited for the crew to arrive for Nerd Night, I watched our host finish a "bead on the string" in Mass Effect. He was playing in single-player mode, and the graphics and action were cinematic. The game has deep backstory, and the space to explore is vast. That said, my friend could not do anything he wished. He also could not ask a GM for advice, in or out of character.

In Usher, however, short of leaving the island or making new items, the students have a great deal of agency in the scenario. Even making things, or perhaps assembling them would be possible if, say, the students wished to build a raft to escape a crazed Roderick.

I do not know if the big commercial virtual worlds can make money by encouraging an online analogue to free-form RPGs with live GMs. Yet they may wish to consider it, as no other 3D technology usuable by amateurs has this potential.

Mini Me, Redux

2011-07-18T11:48:00.000-07:00

Location: Becoming my car

I love my RL ride, a chili-red Mini Cooper S. It's crazy-fast and a little silly, like a small dog who thinks he's big...and somehow manages to beat the bigger dogs.

When I saw the new "vehitars" from Linden Lab, available in the latest update of Second Life's viewer, I knew I'd have to be "Casey," a tip of the bonnet to my reborn Mini Cooper.

The SL design is toylike, so I hope that BMW won't bring suit. If anything, it's more evidence that the Mini, as a toy or a RL car, is just what a New York Times reviewer called it, "a BMW with a sense of humor."

As for Casey's performance, well....it's an avatar, not a vehicle. He won't win any races, but his rendering cost is only 442. It's my lowest ever. Say, how about an Olds 442 vehitar!

Whatever the results when I drive to the next educators' meeting, Casey and his kin among the new avatars proves that Linden Lab, like BMW, does indeed have a sense of humor.

Compared to my vehicular Mini in SL, which proved so disastrous on my last and very laggy road trip, Casey won't have problems with sim crossings. I can now explore SL's road networks...as fast as the vehitar can run.

Now all I'll need is a Fiat 500 named Luigi and I'll feel that I'm in a sequel to Pixar's Cars.

Rebranding A Troubled Name

2011-07-10T11:10:00.000-07:00

Now that the news is out that Linden Lab wants to rebrand their signature product, I'll toss my tophat in the ring along with other more famous pundits. Who knows? Lindens may glance at this blog for chuckles…not long after I mentioned Savage Worlds game system's motto of "Fast! Furious! Fun!" in a post, Linden Lab rolled out their "Fast, Easy, Fun" campaign.

Okay Lindens, here are some names and metaphors for Second Life's rebranding:

Serious Ideas: Back to Our Roots:

Linden World: It began there, so let's get back to basics. It is YOUR server cluster, after all. I'll take my mesh version of a Primitar now, please.

Your World: This gives residents a sense of autonomy even though you still own the servers. I'd like a name of this sort best, along with "Your World, Your Imagination" as a revived Motto. It would appeal to educators.

Metaverse / Utopia: Try a name that merges your origin with the idea that SL is better, in some regards, to the world of flesh. Neal Stephenson won't sue you guys. You could call it "Lindenverse" or "Lindtopia" if you wish. Or give Philip Rosedale his due and call it "Philtopia." Most of us have a little utopian streak; even my old nemesis Microsoft made good with me and other Mac OS users with their Mactopia site, a useful spot for MS Office software updates and tips.

Frontier: I'm fond of the metaphor. We've been denied the "final frontier" of space, unless one means cyberspace. Facebook, which I'm coming to accept as a way to stay in touch with a few RL friends, is decidedly not a frontier. It's a virtual pub, at best. A virtual world with user-generated content certainly is a frontier.

Dubious if Accurate:

Sandbox: This is what SL is, after all. Even some hard-core gamers who would otherwise sneer at SL's graphics and lag admit that the platform is a place to make things. The problem with this theme would be how it sounds to an audience beyond gamers. I think of kids with plastic pails and shovels when I hear "sandbox."

Names / Metaphors to Avoid Like the Plague:

Eighteen Again, Forever: I saw this motto once in an SL shop. Nothing suggests flabby 50-somethings like it. Okay, I'm a trim and outdoorsy 50-something, but I don't want to pretend either. While "Dress Up for Grown Ups" seems to work for IMVU, would it for SL? Why just be a fancy chat room full of fashionistas?

Otherworld: SL is a world apart from the one of matter, but to make folks see it as an extension of their lives, much as any other hobby might be, avoid the idea that we are in an "other" place.

Second Life: I've written how toxic the rhetorical implications of the name can be. Ditch it ASAP.

Facebook's UI and Second Life

2011-06-30T08:51:00.000-07:00

Location: Facebook Account

The user interface is laggy at peak times, even on a fast connection. The ability to customize it is so limited that several Facebook users have recommended third-party products to improve my social networking experience.

This all sounds very familiar, doesn't it?

A couple of months in with Facebook, I can only say that I like it because it let me re-introduce myself to a few old friends with whom I've lost touch. I'm going to have a beer with one of them as soon as we can agree on a day and time.

On the other hand, I get a lot of spam from folks who know me and think I actually care about the little happenings of their daily lives. So other than the "stay in touch with old friends" business, what is the appeal?

Now that Google has launched Google+, its latest attempt at a social networking tool, one wonders how much traction it will get. Facebook enjoys the sort of reputation that Second Life had...in 2006. That can, of course, change quickly, as the former owners of MySpace discovered.

We'll see how Google does...ah, yes. Just blocked the FB apps "smiles" and "causes." I can smile in person and am involved in several environmental causes already.

Treasures of an Arcane and Monastic Craft: Scholarly Editing

2011-06-26T19:34:00.000-07:00

image credit: Encyclopedia Virginia site, University of Virginia. Fredson Bowers, standing, works with Matthew Bruccoli at a Hinman Collator.

This entry began as a reply to a recent post by Tateru Nino about the preference for physical or e-texts.

Somehow, I stupidly fumbled my posting and it vanished into pixeldust. That is, frankly, an apt beginning for this post, where I state my preference for reading physical text. Now, with a few days behind me, I've had more time to think about why.

For a brief time in graduate school, I considered heeding the siren-song of textual editing, a small but valued part of academic publishing. My mentor and PhD advisor at Indiana, Professor Don Cook, was a noted scholar in this field. Along with a band of similar-minded editors from universities, Don worked on editions of the works of William Dean Howells and other American authors. Sanctioned by the Modern Language Association's Committee on Scholarly Editions, the CSE imprimatur of "an approved edition" meant that these books were felt to represent the best possible edition available. By comparing a proposed edition to an author's corrected manuscript or perhaps a first edition, the new text would embody, as closely as possible, the words and arrangement an author wanted.

Debates raged about what to do when someone like Scott Fitzgerald rearranged Tender is the Night completely, making a new version that many readers detest. Which text do we follow? Scribner's first edition or Fitzgerald's rewriting? When new editions appeared and an author assisted, how to tell which changes reflect an author's work, and which that of a lazy typesetter?

A Life Defined by Books and Bookishness

In the end, I chose another path. I am an awful and easily bored proofreader, racing on to the next paragraph and, only later, coming back to tidy up the mess I have made. Yet the crystalline purity of a CSE edition has always been a strong lure as I've built my personal library over the years. I'm also the sort to hunt down a good hardback copy of a book I love and then donate the paperback I used for teaching or that was my first encounter with a life-altering text. Let's see what those might be...pressed to answer right now, I'd cite Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Adams' The Education of Henry Adams, Abbey's Desert Solitaire, Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, Eco's The Name of the Rose, Wharton's The House of Mirth, Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, O'Connor's Wise Blood, Faulkner's The Hamlet, and anything by Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom.

Not a one, except Nooteboom's shorter travel essays, would feel right on a screen. I like my "reader's" copies with my marginalia, as well as my second copies which I return to reread for pure pleasure. Most of the latter are hardbound. Blame this fetish on my work with scholarly editions.

Perhaps we can enter a world in which a fine printed edition can coexist, as a luxury item, alongside a reasonably correct e-text. Don Cook predicted that book collecting would become ever more of a niche activity but it would be enriched by computers. He envisioned luxury editions printed to order, for under $100, on great paper and perhaps with a choice of illustrations.

Monks in The Alderman Library

The work of scholarly editors continues electronically and without the bulky collator, but there was still a wonderfully Medieval feeling to the craft in the 1980s. Before tablets and dedicated e-readers become mass market consumer items, I had the sense that this arcane craft was already waning, though its practitioners remained tenacious, rather like the monks in Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz. Once in the Alderman I peered over the shoulders of a foreign ambassador and his wife as a curator of rare books showed them Faulkner's carefully typed and corrected (his handwriting was very precise) manuscript for The Sound and The Fury. I love Faulkner's work for two reasons, first because he invented an entire fictional world; hence the relevance to this blog--Faulkner was a consummate world-maker. Second, he was the first writer who challenged me to read and read again, each encounter taking me deeper into a landscape that, while Southern, was nothing I knew. Yoknapatawpha County might as well have been Burroughs' Barsoom.

So seeing a Faulkner manuscript was like being shown the Shroud of Turin.

There's a romantic idea that the types of projects with such treasures transcend the "and now this!" culture of online communities. Neil Postman coined the term for the culture of television, but in fact it's more true than ever for the torrent of Tweets or Facebook status updates. In fact, the meditative work of comparing editions and manuscripts to remove errors that creep in is an act of passive aggression against the very spaces such as the one I use to compose this text.

It's with a bit of a shiver that I look at the photo of Bowers, a senior colleague of Don's, and Matthew Bruccoli, a contemporary of Don's for whom, many years ago, I wrote a few short bibliographic entries for a scholarly reference work. I know exactly the section in the Alderman where they are working.

I studied there as an undergrad, more than 30 years ago, and in 2002 went back to that part of the library to work on my own editing project of Antebellum Southern Humor, The Spirit of the Southern Frontier (have a look, but it's a bit of a ghost town). I was able to teach with the site twice, so I think the grant money was well spent, and the student who helped went on to her own PhD. There is a great feeling of "standing on the shoulders" of, if not giants, one's intellectual ancestors when working in such a place.

For a while at least, this aspect of monastic life continues. As our culture, the part that cares about serious reading anyway, passes from difficulty to difficulty, I think that we'll end up thankful to men and women who spent many quiet hours preparing good editions.

Luring Back Educators: A Different Revenue Model for Second Life

2011-06-23T07:25:00.000-07:00

Location: Prognosticating

I see a very different shadow from the dynamic ones in the new viewer. Some weeks, every other post by Hamlet Au is a "Deathwatch." Recently we have lost, or are about to lose, The Virtual Globe Theatre, the Minoan Empire, The Lost Gardens of Apollo, and the Numbakulla quest-game region. All of these have been long-promoted landmarks in the history of Second Life, as were Rezzable's famous creations.

In each case, the tier structure of Linden Lab's world became an issue, if not the sole issue leading to the loss of content of note. Linden Lab cannot give its world away if it wishes to keep the servers running, but they are losing good content, and I have no idea yet--though it merits a follow-up to my earlier survey--how many educators have left the world or at least reduced land holding substantially. I've a hunch, from our VWER membership, that land ownership continues to decline.

Other worlds survive on a subscription model, and I cannot comment on an appropriate model for other users, something Senban Babii essayed in a reply to Au's post about the end of the Minoan region. I'll consider a model that that might be educator-friendly and emerge to replace tier for that population of users:

Free 30-day trial with an avatar of decent design, a working if basic animation override, and some inventory good enough for a professional meeting.
Education-only orientation and welcome areas, with a mentor program, on a new education continent zoned for General and Moderate regions. On the continent it would be "invitation only" to those not affiliated with education, as it is on our campuses.
Lower regional pricing than is currently the case, yet higher than OpenSim (in consideration of the excellent content SL can provide).
A monthly subscription after the free trial ends, $10US for educators and $5 for students. The student price should not amount to more than a cheap textbook, to avoid too many complaints that would discourage use by education. If the student decided to stay after the end of the term, that would be fine. I could see giving educators one alt account with their memberships fee, students none. Adding more alts to either would cost more.
A small plot on an educational continent with building rights, that might be merged with other plots so faculty and students could design simulations. Plots could be traded to make land adjacent but they could not be sold. Abandoned land would revert quickly to the pool for new accounts.
Movement toward becoming the de facto standard for all grids, by first leveraging the Linden Dollar and SL Marketplace for use across approved grids.
More work on the abandoned interoperability initiative: Perhaps for an extra monthly fee, selected inventory might reside outside the avatar and be downloadable as an IAR file on grids approved by Linden Lab and a consortium of grid-owners.

The educational continent, something that was a dream of ours for a while and a rumor just before the massive and unfortunate layoffs at Linden Lab, would be a powerful incentive to get educators like me more involved. Many of us pay nothing beyond a premium account fee.

The new CEO has wisely tried to get more "buzz" for SL with virtual pets and other flashy innovations. Will Linden Lab find enough revenue there to stay in business, as its older creators and creations vanish? And will the CEO renew any efforts to woo back educators, who do make financial commitments likely to persist longer than the latest crazy for cute pets?

Me and My Shadows

2011-06-20T11:35:00.000-07:00

Location: Second Life, Side of Road

Not much to report here except that the latest version of the 2.x client, on a newish MacBook Pro, produces dynamic shadows. The effect is laggy and worked only under "high" or "ultra" graphics settings.

I had to dial the graphics back right away before attending the VWER meeting last Thursday.

Still, for all of the grief I have given Linden Lab since the end of education and non-profit discounts (and before, over other matters) I like seeing them keep promises about features of their virtual world.

Poe Flies a Kite in Kitely

2011-06-15T12:54:00.000-07:00

Location: Writing Annual Report (grrrr)

AJ Kelton has planned a field-trip to the on-demand virtual worlds host Kitely, and to test how it works we uploaded an OAR file from Jokaydia Grid. Not everything has rezzed yet, but that Kitely can support OAR uploads from other grids is a game-changer.

The picture is of AJ's avatar on Kitely.

What a timely application for educators. For a very low cost for a few avatars, we can run simulations when needed. Most of the work I do now does not require a persistent world that is empty when no one logs on. And I don't plan to send students into large social worlds since my current assignments do not envision that sort of engagement. I do, however, want them to use premade avatars for literary work in an immersive setting.

Special thanks to AJ Kelton for experimenting with this. I will provide a full report on my work in Kitely next month.

Annual Report Time

2011-06-13T11:16:00.000-07:00

Location: Microsoft Word

How do you capture the coolness of working with virtual worlds while using the most boring piece of software imaginable?

For the past four years, that has been my challenge, just in time for my 1 July deadline.

This year, the Usher Project in Jokaydia Grid has some of the same committee members excited about the grant and the potentials for literary study.

I'd be curious to see how other faculty with annual evaluations, rather than tenure, report their work in virtual worlds. I hope that all of my evaluators will take time to look at a simple wiki with Viv Trafalgar's video of the Usher project that existed in Second Life, to give some sense of what will happen in a different virtual world where I'll have more creative freedom.

Without incentives and rewards, this work will never move forward in academia. It has long been that way for other technologies that are easier to master.

One day, we'll have smart paper with working videos embedded, or my committee will read e-texts on tablets. That's one day, not today.

Maria Korolov to Speak at Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable

2011-06-07T06:42:00.000-07:00

Maria Korolov, editor of Hypergrid Business, will speak to VWER members this Thursday, starting at 2:30 Second Life Time. AJ Brooks will interview Maria in voice, and yours truly will transcribe voice-to-text.

Maria has strong opinions and lots of contacts in the world of non-SL grids, and I look forward to her discussing the state of the metaverse beyond Second Life. She's pictured at VWBPE 2011, where she gave an interesting talk on this topic.

Join us for Thursday's event, and put questions to Maria in a Q&A following the interview, at VWER's new home at Bowling Green University's virtual campus in Second Life. We meet 2:30-3:30 SL time at this SLURL:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/BGSU%20Community/54/85/25

See you at the Roundtable!

Machinima Novices, Take Note: Pile o' Resources

2011-06-02T08:25:00.000-07:00

Location: VWER meeting

We had a very productive session last week, and many veteran machinima-makers offered advice for free or cheap resources, screen-capture technology, machinima-friendly locations, and examples of best practices and inspiring work.

Have a look at the full transcript; I aggregated the links at the start for your reading pleasure. Then get out and make some movies!

Some Shakespeare Quotations for Linden Lab

2011-05-31T14:21:00.000-07:00

Location: Virtual Globe Theater

The Lab will have an even harder time winning back disaffected educators and non-profits if they let The Virtual Globe Theater close.

Here's hoping that the CEO will let Ina Centaur have access to her account again. As "nexus burbclave" pointed out at New World Notes, the treatment of debtors by the Lab is Kafkaesque. Centaur does owe the Lab a great deal of money, but one wonders about the PR value of magnanimity from the godlike powers in-world? Even one month's extension of the death penalty?

Be wary of portents, otherwise, Linden Lab. You'll get all the academics hauling out their Riverside Shakespeares for appropriate quotations. Here are a few about those who dwell overmuch on money:

Nay, take my life and all; pardon not that; You take my house, when you do take the prop That doth sustain my house; you take my life, When you do take the means whereby I live. Shylock, Act IV, scene i, The Merchant of Venice.
Thus do I ever make my fool my purse. Iago, Act I, scene iii, Othello.

And of the foolish decisions by those in power:

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me. King Richard, Act V, scene v, Richard II.
Men’s judgments are a parcel of their fortunes; and things outward do draw the inward quality after them, to suffer all alike. Enobarbus, Act III, scene xiii, Antony & Cleopatra.
As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, — They kill us for their sport. Gloucester, Act IV, scene i, King Lear.

Of course, Mr. Humble and Linden Lab, Ms. Centaur owes you money. She needs to pay it. But wouldn't it be better to work out a deal and give her a reprieve for a few weeks, before deleting her avatar's accounts? Shakespeare's plays contain a great deal of forgiveness and mercy. And remember:

All's well that ends well; still the fine's the crown; Whate'er the course, the end is the renown. Helena, Act IV, scene iv, All's Well that Ends Well.

Get Thee to Spivey's Corner, NC: Hollerin' Contest

2011-05-30T17:23:00.000-07:00

Location: Hoarse from Hollerin'

Just in case you find yo'self in the Tarheel State next month.

Occasional "In a Strange Land correspondent" Pappy Enoch, expert on all things backwoods, says "git on down, y'all. Hoo whee! Here am the site on the tubes that am the Internet."

I wish I could go, but I'm sure Pappy will provide a full review someplace or another.

And you damn Yankees think we Southerners make this stuff up. Hah. And hoo-whee.

Cloudy Day, Fixed

2011-05-26T05:52:00.000-07:00

Location: Hiding in My Fake Office

I was ready to wear Miso Susanowa's head as my avatar, I became so frustrated at being stuck as a cloud.

With both the 1.23 and 2.6 viewers, as well as Imprudence, the forecast remained "mostly cloudy."

My colleague from VWER and moderator-in-training, Grizzla Pixelmaid, gave me a surfer-dude starter avatar. Putting on "Craig" saved me for a moment, even if his smiley gesture messed with my "no perky people" rule.

Soon all was right again with the fake world and I reassembled my usual persona.

Many thanks, Grizzla!

Peak Oil: Should I Be Glad?

2011-05-25T08:57:00.000-07:00

One of the most interesting of invented worlds is that of America's auto-utopia of continuous driving. We redesigned...well, ruined...our cities to make them safer for driving and parking cars. What would we do if it cost hundreds of dollars to fill up? Already, filling up my full-sized pickup truck runs $100, the first time I have ever spent that much on fuel. A tank of gas will last over a month, however, given how infrequently I use the vehicle for farm work. I purchased a locking gas-cap, too.

Others drive similar vehicles daily, and they are suffering, often casting about for easy targets to blame. What if geology were the culprit?

It seems that even Exxon-Mobil has come around to seeing that the days of cheap oil are over permanently. I follow Bloomberg's energy-price listing fanatically, given my belief that the data about Peak Oil are correct and we're a year or two from this issue becoming part of the popular lexicon.

As with Climate Change, the transition to public consciousness took a while to realize. There are a few doubters who believe in an infinitely renewable supply of "abiotic" oil, but the science is just not there.

The next time some guy wishing for $1.00 gasoline to fill the fat tank in his Chevy Suburban blames the President or even OPEC for high gas prices, try this. Hand out a little card with this URL from Energy & Captial:

http://www.energyandcapital.com/aqx_p/26311

When investors start recommending Peak-Oil portfolios, one realizes that the transition to a "new normal" is well underway. I've know "it's over" for a long time, and my proof came in a Guardian story based on a Wikileaks report. Though the Saudi official who warned US diplomats later denied making alarming remarks about his nation's supply of oil, everything said seconded Matthew Simmons geological evidence for a permanent decline in the Saudi oil reserves.

Meanwhile, Jim Kunstler keeps up his own litany of doom about an America unable "to make other arrangements" than what his loves to call "happy motoring." Jim's prognosis is gloomier than mine, but neither of us know the timing of the disruptions that a permanent decline in the global supply of oil might cause. I suspect, unlike Kunstler, that many Americans will still own cars, but they won't define our lives and places of living as they have done.

Gas prices are dipping, for now. I doubt that will last, given global demand for oil. And whether global supply permanently peaked in 2006 or whether it will in 2016 (my bet is somewhere in that range) we'll enter a new era of human history. The automobile age, barely a century old, will become a short aberration in a longer story, as driving returns to being an expensive luxury.

Turning an OpenSim Bug Into a Feature

2011-05-23T11:06:00.000-07:00

Location: Falling Into an Abyss

One side-effect of "lifting the skirt" of Nevermore island to make mountains has been to reveal an OpenSim bug. I have not encountered this in Second Life for a LONG time: falling off the edge of the earth. I've asked Jokay Wollongong for a history of this fascinating bug. If you know more, share in comments.

The avatar steps or falls into a space that is no space, a void that gradually darkens as the Z coordinate races into the negative. Soon, the screen grows black and still the avatar falls into infinity. A teleport or logout solves the problem. But why waste such a delicious doom?

With the flaw in mind, I have found a way to kill unwary student-explorers who venture too far in search of hidden knowledge. If a student falls into the abyss, we will assume that the simulation has ended for that participant, and the team must venture on without that person's help. Roderick may even wish to lure one or two meddlers to their deaths.

Of course, hints and clues abound, as do stone markers near the verges of the island, inspired by an actual warning sign I saw, a decade ago and more, in rural Wales:

While a quotation from Poe himself might be best for this situation, something from "Manuscript Found in a Bottle" or "Descent into the Maelstrom," I think I'll leave the evocation of mood to Poe's literary descendant, H.P. Lovecraft:

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. from "The Call of Cthulhu."

Just remember on your journey: mind that gap. You have been warned.

Waitin' For the End of the World

2011-05-20T12:07:00.000-07:00

Location: Unpenitent

I'll take a break from invented worlds on screen to one that is happening in the flesh now: the myth of The Rapture. A Unitarian-Universalist like me, who disbelieves in Hell or Satan, who feels all faiths lead to the same destination though along different error-strewn paths, scratches his head at the invented world of The Rapture.

But some folks believe 100,000 (or so) souls will be taken up tomorrow, and Twitter is abuzz with jokes. I asked William Gibson if he is "taken up," could I have the typewriter he used to compose Neuromancer? Pranksters in large cities are going to leave empty suits of clothing here and there on the sidewalks.

My one Rapture Tweet: "You got Raptured and all I got was a lousy 1983 Chevy Cavalier."

Even when I was a Catholic, I learned that this notion of Rapture is not only a Protestant "heresy" but also a recent one not based upon biblical ideas. The notion started in America.

I won't belabor the point or even allow comments on this post. I'll just editorialize one point: whatever holy books (inspired by God, edited by humans) say, any god who would create a hell and then cast people into it is not worth worshiping. I do believe in a God of love, not an angry old man on a throne who would cherry-pick a few humans. Perhaps oblivion awaits the evil: that's a mystery to me. Enough Catholic teaching remains with me to be comfortable with the idea of Sacred Mystery.

I believe that we were given this good Earth as a gift and it won't go up in fire and Tribulations unless we bring them down ourselves through poor stewardship. And if that occurs, I feel that God would be the first one to weep.

So see you all on May 22, while the End-Times calculations get reset yet again. And we can get back to the cheerful nonsense of our daily lives.

Update May 22, 2011: The sky did not roll back like a scroll as farmer Iggy (real Farmville, not the game) mowed a field and worked on the backhoe yesterday. The earth did not open beneath my wicked feet as I sipped a beer and listened to the whippoorwills at nightfall. No final trumpets sounded as I filled an old briar with "And Now to Bed" pipe tobacco, blended on the Isle of Jersey. I plan to go there one day.

Midnight came and went, and those awaiting the Rapture had to recalibrate their Doomsday clocks.

As my pipe smoke wafted up to the stars, so perfect beyond the light pollution of the cities, I gave quiet thanks, which is about all a Deist can do before a Creator who put matters into our hands. I gave thanks for this life, this world, and human ingenuity.

As for human foolishness and the desire to live in special times? As for a not-so-subterranean wish to see others not like oneself suffer?

I did not dwell on those things.

And in the Vault...

2011-05-20T07:48:00.000-07:00

Location: Usher Boneyard

When you Google "headless skeleton," you never know what you'll find.

Now that the Mountains of Nevermore are nearly done, I'm returning my attention to the Island's interior and the crypts beneath The House of Usher.

As Madeline Usher grows ill, her brother refuses to place her body in the family graveyard, to avoid "certain obtrusive and eager inquiries on the part of her medical men, and of the remote and exposed situation of the burial-ground of the family."

Well, what might have happened to other Ushers in that forlorn graveyard? Of such voyeuristic horrors are Poe's tales woven.

The tomb was easy to build, and I found a very nice stone-on-stone sound at freesound.org. The lid image is a modified photograph, as is the headless skeleton inside. The mystery, noted in the tomb, would be how a recently buried person (the Ushers' mother, in fact) became so weathered and lost her head. Seek in the cemetery and you may find out!

Nevermore, The Wiki!

2011-05-17T17:35:00.000-07:00

Location: Google Sites

I'm pleased that a grant from my university permits faster work this summer on the Virtual House of Usher's rebirth (or perhaps "return from the crypt," to be Poesque). The project will be ready in Jokaydia Grid by summer's end, with some finer touches added during the fall term. In late fall, 20 or so students will explore the simulation as they read Poe.

A first step involves setting up a better wiki than the one used previously, so student assistants and actors can collaborate to add clues and other materials to the site. We could, of course, design some brooding Gothic masterpiece of a Web site, but my preference is a piece with multiple authors and an easy-to-master interface. If any dropping to HTML code is needed, I'll shoulder that tedious burden.

Have a peek at the new Google site. Potential actors, as Fall approaches, let me know if you'd like to step into Roderick's or Madeline's shoes.

Case Studies, Project Links, and More at VWER

2011-05-11T18:54:00.000-07:00

Location: Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable

Some time ago, Hamlet Au pondered if there were any case studies, with empirical evidence, demonstrating learning in Second Life as compared to other methods of instruction.

I took him up on his challenge, offering the success of the U Texas system's venture. He was not impressed, though we both agreed that Ken Hudson's Canadian Border-Crossing Project did demonstrate the validity of immersive learning.

With this in mind I did a short literature review, a useful "twofer" since I was also doing research for a forthcoming article written with Viv Trafalgar. We have not found any case studies of the use of SL or OpenSim in a literary-studies setting, the focus of our article.

Two studies surfaced. One showed some benefits, but with a small sample size and no control group, and another showed no benefit in an engineering program where, the authors note, they had not provided a good orientation for their students.

With these articles under my virtual arm, I put a question to the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable in a session called "Making the Case for Avatars": What are the Advantages over Teleconferencing?

I was impressed by the responses, and you can read a transcript of our talk here. Note that for those not wanting to wade through a HUGE text transcript, I aggregated all links at the start.

Bringing Back the Second Life Helpers, Officially

2011-05-07T18:17:00.000-07:00

Location: Linden Lab Blog

I am not quite ready to break out the "happy dance," but good news deserves notice.

I never quite understood why Linden Lab abruptly ended its sanctioned mentor program. Now, in a different form, the company looks to be bringing it back and even acknowledging the volunteer work of several groups that attempted to ease the "first hour" problem new SL logins face.

In a blog post, CEO/Avatar Rodvik Linden noted of the Resident Help Network:

The program has been in a bit of a holding pattern on the Linden side, while each of these groups continued to do their good work. I’m happy to report that we’re officially bringing back the RHN network and look forward to partnering with these communities and integrating them more tightly into our new user experience.

This is welcome news from a company that has a reputation for not listening to residents. I continue to be impressed by Mr. Humble's efforts, since he took over as CEO. The newest viewer is not bad at all; I've used it in advanced mode with Roderick Reanimator for a while. Soon, of course, I'll have to switch for my main avatar as well.

Linden Lab has a lot to do to regain residents' trust. Helping mentor groups help new accounts is a good start.

Now fix search and we'll be talking. My other big wish, off-world backups such as I enjoy in OpenSim, are, for some well understood IP reasons, presently beyond the reach of the Lab.

The Mountains of Nevermore

2011-05-06T08:29:00.000-07:00

Location: Doing Geomancy

"So I can move your island," Jokay Wollongong began.

"No, let it stay as-is," I replied.

It's not as though I dislike the idea of a giant Tesla coil visible from my land. Not at all. At the same time, that's not very 1847. It also blunts the immersion I want on this space.

So I decided, from right behind the Usher family cemetery Poe briefly mentions in his tale, to raise some mountains. The Mountains of Nevermore: sounds like a lost Yes recording from 1972.

The OpenSim terrain-edit tools, just like those in Second Life, remind me of the good old days in Sim City 2000, right down to the bulldozer icon. They lack subtlety at the strongest settings, hurling needles into the sky much like a Lovecraftian landscape where mad gods flop about to the discordant music of eldritch flutes held in nameless paws.

There. I got to use "eldritch" for the first time since college, when in my D&D game we had an artifact called "The Eldritch Cleaver." My snark has a long history...

So to make the island of Nevermore more immersive and interesting, I massaged the land ever upward, then put a line of dark pines into the passes between the hills and at the shore's edge. Soon the sparkling coil could not be seen, even by an avatar who wanders into the water at the shoreline. When I'm done, there may be NO shoreline beyond a few rocky inlets. I want that Poesque feeling of claustrophobia and depression to haunt my visitors. I've enough prims to make things difficult for them by providing no long vistas of the space.

With luck, I'll hide some clues on those eldritch slopes for my fall class that will use Nevermore.

Avination: This Calls for The Grip, Kungfu

2011-05-03T18:48:00.000-07:00

Location: Avination Grid

In the June issue of Prim Perfect, I'll run a review of this fast-growing grid derived from OpenSim. I am still working on the piece, so I will just note a few highlights now:

There's an active user-base that recruits new residents by word of mouth in SL.
Concurrency runs about 300 and active logins per month run over 4500.
The grid offers gambling and adult content without age verification (ouch).
Avination has a working currency and easy conversions from Linden Dollars or Paypal (I bought 1000 credits to kit out my avatar, freebies being very scarce, and uploaded some clothing textures).
Many well known content creators from Second Life have added stores in Avination, as they have done in InWorldz. Reasons? No hypergrid, strong IP protection, very restrictive freebie policies. Not a place for educators, but I can see the lure for RPers and social users.

I found the grid's residents eager to have me tour around, something that offset my disappointment that this grid is primarily for socializing, roleplay, shopping, and gambling. Perhaps all of these closed grids will trend that way, as we educators seek something different.

Given that the grid restricts name-choices in much the same way that SL has done, I picked a last name from a list. Seeing "Kungfu" and being reminded of my favorite GI Joe, the African-American Adventurer, I knew what I had to do: Grip Kungfu was born.

The default dark-skinned avatar was nice. I purchased some good hair with a long queue in back, bought an AO called "Danger Man," and I was ready for whatever Avination tossed my way. I can take it. Before I had avatars, a long time before, my bud Gary and I made up tons of stories with our GI Joes.

You can guess who the coolest GI Joe was.

Digital Story: Stop Cyberbullying

2011-05-02T10:47:00.000-07:00

Maddie's story was the people's choice in last week's competition.

I'd not followed this story and, despite a lifetime of being jaded, am amazed at human cruelty. There's some cold comfort that the perpetrators could get prison time for doing what they did, though even there the penalty may be less if a proposed settlement of the case becomes reality.

Whatever happens, on a day when some very different justice was done in Pakistan, I'm reminded that most of the time, evil gets its comeuppance.

Digital Story: "Transhumanism"

2011-04-30T10:51:00.000-07:00

Take this Ray Kurzweil!

Carly is a techie, like her teacher, but as with many in the class she sees how technology can "bite back."

This one is a stunner...hope you enjoy her techniques with digital audio. Do not have your audio on full-blast, however!

Digital Story: "Cogita"

2011-04-28T11:18:00.000-07:00

Brett really dug in his heels, and coding skills, near midterm to explain why it would be so difficult for a computer to become an AI. I lack his mathematical skills, so I'll take him at his word about Ackerman's Function.

For the digital story, he returned to this theme and provides a twist on an old warhorse of the SF canon.

Digital Story: "Dirty Internet"

2011-04-27T11:36:00.000-07:00

Minds out of the gutter, please. Mike's runner-up entry in the competition talks about how dependent we all are upon these "always on, always on you" technologies (the term is Sherry Turkle's).

We use the Net as we do air. And what would happen were the service to be interrupted? That, readers, is perhaps the one aspect of the technology that frightens Mike--and me--more than does our addictive usage. On to the story!

Mike got no extra credit for pandering to my Clint Eastwood obsessions.

Digital Story: "I Facebook, Therefore I Am"

2011-04-26T14:54:00.000-07:00

I want to congratulate my student Tyler, one of the runners-up in my digital-story competition.

As a reluctant and recent Facebooker, I found myself drawn into a narrative by a student who really enjoys her social networking with friends and, notably, family.

Small irony: for a guy who really does not bother much with social networking, I'll note this post at not only Twitter but on my Facebook Wall.

But for Tyler and many of my other students, social networking is like breathing, and her story provides eloquent testimony to the power of those connections. And now...roll the film!

A Week of Digital Stories Starts With "The Last Text"

2011-04-25T07:02:00.000-07:00

Location: On the virtual set

My students have a pizza-and-film-festival event tonight, showing their digital stories that were the final project for my course on the history and culture of cyberspace.

All week I'll feature student stories, but today I'll begin with my own, done to test the technology I expected students to use. Speak shout outs to Ken Warren of Richmond's Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology and my Writing Consultant, Korine.

As one might expect if you know me, some student-composers explored dystopian, Neo-Luddite, and cyberpunk themes. I hope they were not being so dark to pander to the professor, since this project gives them freedom to create anything as long as it relates to our course themes.

Doing a story with iMovie or Windows Movie Maker is a laborious process. I decided to do one myself; it took 10 hours to gather or take the photos, more to put them with a narrative. I did record it in one take, the only part of the process that was quick.

Here's my piece, inspired by the utter addiction to constant contact I see around me. Perhaps we should pay more attention to events beyond the horizon of the self, before that is the only horizon we have remaining.

Meta7 Virtual World to Close

2011-04-22T11:50:00.000-07:00

Location: IP Pondering

Reading a response by Ann O'Toole to a New World Notes post, I visited a forum notice for the Meta7 virtual world. I'd heard enough good press about it that I'd planned a short visit for a future issue of my "Gridnaut's Journey" column at Prim Perfect.

After April 30, however, Meta7 will be no more. Despite the somewhat snarky graphic I chose, I'm sorry to see an OpenSim world that had good press close.

It seems that an IP conflict lies at the heart of the legal proceedings that led to the shutdown:

Another company, that has trademark rights to the use of a similar logo used by us and the name 'Meta7' is forcing the company behind Meta7 to stop using the trademark commercially. . .Meta7 has been opposing this until recently, but does not have the resources in time, people and money to battle this action against it.

Content creators have a grace period to back up their items but no region-wide OAR file can be provided, "as we can not verify the ownership of all the items in the region."

Nike Japan seems to be the other company noted. I found this about an advertising campaign:

Illustrator Paul Huang, creator of Nanospore, teamed up with animators Chris Riehl and Sean Starkweather to create this playfully original, yet oddly familiar spot for part of Nike’s new viral campaign to promote the Nike Free Trainer 7.0, which gives you the power of flight and exempts you from noodle-bowl lines.

We have the power of flight without special shoes in virtual worlds, but the reach of lawyers is long, like the arm of Sauron in Lord of the Rings.

The lesson is, I suppose, know your small-grid provider well. I never thought I'd have to do a Google search before choosing a provider, but I think Jokay Wollongong, no stranger to cease-and-desist orders, chose her grid's name well.

Literary Hypertext Rediscovered: A Different "Virtual World"

2011-04-19T15:34:00.000-07:00

Location: Lost in a world made of letters

Michael Joyce's nonlinear, elusive narrative Afternoon, A Story was a delight to postmodern literati and literary scholars in the early 90s. It ushered in a long list of titles from Eastgate Systems, and at the time I tried--without too much success--to bring them into a few of my classes.

I'm delighted to see that W.W. Norton has released a partial edition of the hypertext for the Web. I come late to even this party: the site talks about Windows NT, Netscape, and other artifacts of an earlier time.

The Gen-Xers of the day were as resistant to hypertext as are my current Millennials to virtual worlds. I don't know that this is a "University of Richmond thing," because then, as now, I heard from colleagues elsewhere about resistance and anger: Gen-Xers wanted closure and linearity in their stories.

Have a look at Joyce's text, if you don't know it, and see how your reading experience morphs in the equivalent of Borges' Garden of Forking Paths. One enters not a story with good hypertext, but a world with many meanings. No two visitor/readers come away with exactly the same impression.

Why did literary hypertext not thrive, to blossom in the era of e-readers that would have been a delight to the 90s authors and enthusiasts of hypertext? That is for others to answer. I moved on from what I considered then to be a fading "niche" technology, even though I published a poetic hypertext at Carolyn Guyer's Vassar site, Mother Millennia. My research into the subgenre of literature ended after I published an article about using film to help students understand strategies for reading hypertext.

One wonders if the sort of utopian virtual world that Second Life once promised to be might morph into another future, more corporate, less risky....in rather the way hypertext fiction was eclipsed by HTML-based hypertexts, literary, linear or not, that never quite matched the subtle linkages afforded by Eastgate's StorySpace technology.

I once heard author and scholar Nancy Kaplan argue for the essential differences between Web and "native" hypertext, in a conference where, glumly, Michael Joyce told us that the number of .com sites had finally surpassed .edu sites. A groan came from us in the room: the future was at hand, not one we wanted. The marketers and hucksters had found the world of the artist/coders of hypertext.

It may be hard for the readers of this blog to even recall a time when it was otherwise.

"There is no simple way to say this," Joyce says in an early textual moment in Afternoon.

True. It seems like yesterday. It seems like it was in another galaxy.

So go back and have a peek at a might-have-been in literary and technological history.

No Exodus to Virtual Worlds for These Millennials

2011-04-17T13:46:00.000-07:00

Location: Glued to Keyboard, Working (not Gaming!) on a Fine Spring Day

On reading Edward Castronova’s Exodus to the Virtual World, once again the types of Millennial I teach are nearly uniform in their disdain for a cultural migration to use avatars in our lives and work. I think my students represent a majority view of career-driven and affluent US college students. I’m told that our campus is not that unique.

Dare I claim a surprising Neo-Luddite response in this rejection of virtual worlds? Irony of ironies: as a decided Neo-Luddite, I see occasional use of virtual worlds as an environmentally sustainable alternative to academic conferences, expensive brick-and-mortar training, and even some forms of cultural tourism. Our driving is wrecking our planet's ecosystem. The less we do, the better, and I welcome all forms of telepresence as alternatives to "commuting to the office." We're more likely to power our grid with alternative technology, or at least clean the point sources at power plants than we are to tidy up billions of tail-pipes emitting poisons.

But enough of my fears; there are plenty from the students for one post. The finest negative response came from this writer; it is nuanced in a way many others are not and I think it shows what I’ve intuited among the Facebook: Yes, Games: No mainstream of Richmond students.

I don’t ever see myself using a virtual world, but that could just be because of my current situation. In college, I am constantly surrounded by my friends and love talking to them and spending time with them face to face. I don’t picture myself wanting to spend ten hours a day online in a virtual world, instead of laughing out loud and talking to my real life friends. In addition, my opportunity cost of spending more than two hours a day online is too great. I would be failing all my classes because I would be giving up time to study to be in a virtual world. I cannot afford to essentially waste my time not being productive. I also do not like the idea of anonymity online. People can create avatars that don’t look anything like them and pretend to be someone completely different. While people can be misleading on Facebook, I know I only communicate with my friends, people that I know in the real world. Virtual worlds can be very private and people do not meet the people in real life with whom they are making alliances and friends with.

Here are a few other voices from their class blogs, almost all negative:

“I do understand that there are many people today who are already deeply involved in virtual worlds. I am not one of these people. Perhaps, because of this, I am biased against such worlds. I would much rather spend my time talking with my friends or furthering my education (getting my parents' money's worth).”

“In my experience, games (even MMOs) are something that is outgrown. I know many of my friends (myself included) who played consistently throughout middle and some of high school and then left due to lack of extra time or lack of interest.”

“An overwhelming majority of college-aged kids view virtual worlds as time wasting, unproductive, and nerdy addictions reserved for the socially inept.”

“I’m sorry, but I will never spend hours interacting in cyberspace, nor will I allow my children or my children’s children to join the exodus to the virtual world.”

“The current generation (The Millennials) is almost entirely preoccupied with social networking. ‘Facebookers’ as we are sometimes called, we would rather use virtual realities to connect with old friends from back home, not to escape the confines of daily life. So instead of being active users, we may participate maybe once or twice a week, giving us no reason to participate in the exodus.”

“What he describes is something so artificial and unnatural. There are many gamers out in cyberspace right now who want to escape their lives and transform into something they are not, however I am not one of them. The main issue is of avoidance and denial. When you assume these fake identities then you are essentially in denial of your own life. I don’t think its healthy not to deal with the issues present and escape to a virtual world.”

One contrarian voice notes “I think that our bias as successful college individuals also blinds us from other populations that use games to escape from their circumstance.”

This is my opinion as well. My students cannot imagine the modern version of Emerson’s “quiet desperation” of many individuals who seek escape, or those who see themselves empowered to do things not possible in real life. Those may be artists working in a new medium, explorers of simulations not possible here (to one blogger, I cited Ancient Egypt or the interior of the human heart as examples).

Another student was kinder to Castronova’s ideas:

We all want to be challenged and overcome obstacles in order to feel good about ourselves. Additionally, we want to have fun, to simply enjoy our existence and be happy. As Castronova puts it “helping people find happiness may involve something other than giving them the things they currently seek” (88). This is what these online games promise.

One student who feels good about virtual worlds stands apart from the rest and says a great deal about what they don’t see:

I could jump into a virtual world right now.

No, really. All I'd need is a secure income. I could be there 24/7, easy.

As I looked around the classroom when this question was asked, I had the feeling I was the only one who felt this way. Some of you are probably shaking you're heads right now, thinking "You're crazy," but I'll tell you why I can do it.

For one, I'm used to it. Sitting in front of a screen for hours is easy to me. When I'm not at class or with my friends, I'm plopped in front of the screen. Furthermore, I'm used to synthetic worlds. Being in a fake world with filled with real people who don't look like themselves is normal to me. I don't find it weird.

Secondly, just about everyone is already engaged in a digital world, whether they realize it or not. We've really already migrated over in Facebook. My best friend once told me, "The more friends you have on Facebook, the fewer you have in real life." And as someone who has over 400 Facebook friends, but less than 10 real friends she can actually trust, she would know. She's in her own world where she has lots of friends that are easily accessible no matter where they live, where she thinks other people care about what her status is, where all her photos are of her looking perfect, and where she only has to care about what she wants to.

Here’s how I answered a different student, and my response could have been to them all:

Your comments echo many in the class. I understand your disdain, but the number of generalizations is enormous here. I applaud you for admitting your bias.

Before we judge these individuals, we might try better to understand them. As noted in class, Richmond students are, in many cases, from sheltered and loving families who provide support and care.

It is very different beyond the campus gates, even for many in your age-group; in fifteen years, as a virtual worlds researcher, I will be most curious to see how the Millennial generation regards escapist entertainment online.

I disagree with Castronova's thesis; I think virtual-world use will increase among all age groups, but there will be no exodus. Usage will be as a casual and occasional escape or for limited professional purposes such as simulations for technical or military training and meetings.

Reality will instead become more and more difficult, under the strains of environmental damage, political gridlock, resource scarcity, and economic stress, and we'll learn to take better care of the real again as we strive to fix the things generations before yours broke.

My biggest hope for you Millennials is that the researchers who wrote Millennials Rising are correct: yours is the next "Great Generation" able to collaborate, remain cheerful, and solve problems without the slack and cynicism of my Gen-X peers or the narcissism and greed of the Baby Boomers.

Maybe if your peers stay in Reality instead of making the exodus, you can accomplish great things. Maybe you'll even use Facebook to organize your efforts!

Collateral Damage: Dusan Writer on Military Use of SL Enterprise

2011-04-14T12:08:00.000-07:00

Location: VWER meeting

image courtesy of Lolly's photostream

Last week, our special guest Dusan Writer covered a great deal of territory in his interview with AJ Brooks. They spoke in voice, and we transcribed this to text chat.

Among his many topics, Dusan noted that when Linden Lab ended its Second Life Enterprise product, the US military was hit particularly hard. At least two dozen military groups were "heavily involved" with SL Enterprise, and suddenly they had a dead-end product on their hands for training.

This prompted a "risk averse" attitude toward virtual worlds in general, though now these military organizations are pursuing a mixed-bag of virtual-world solutions for training: 8-10 different platforms including OpenSim, Forterra Systems' Olive, and their remaining SL Enterprise servers.

Dusan implied strongly that Linden Lab missed a great opportunity by ending their Enterprise product as they did. Now heavyweights like Lockheed Martin have begun "using web GL to deliver VW in browser at a massive scale."

You can read the transcript of the entire meeting here.

Empirical Evidence For Benefits of 3D Immersive Learning?

2011-04-13T13:37:00.000-07:00

Location: Reading Desk
ActiveWorlds image courtesy of =IcaruS=

My contributor's copy of Teaching and Learning in 3D Immersive Worlds recently landed in my mail box. I look forward to reading the anthology this summer, but I paged ahead with a quest in mind: to find studies that provide empirical evidence that virtual worlds improve learning, when compared to similar tasks done in traditional settings.

For at least three Singaporean youngsters struggling to master Mandarin, the answer was "quite an improvement." In a 100-point assessments at the start and end of the academic year, these students' "scores improved by 20-30 points compared to peers who, on average, improved by 9 points." The account appears in Chapter 12, "Learning Language Through Immersive Story Telling in a 3D Virtual Environment."

The authors, Shen-Chee Tan and Yin-Mei Wong of Nanyang Technological University, admit that theirs is an "exploratory study" that could be repeated easily. They employed the ActiveWorlds virtual-world platform to create a virtual environment called "The Kingdoms," simulating a turbulent period in Chinese history "comparable to the tales of King Arthur" that "provides a context for introducing Chinese cultural artifacts and a storyline that is engaging."

A much larger study would be needed to falsify or corroborate these findings, but such small pilot projects are a start to test the efficacy of virtual worlds for learning in many disciplines. We will see more and larger studies as time goes on.

This is NOT the Future

2011-04-12T12:00:00.000-07:00

Location: Holding Sides, Laughing

Hamlet Au ran a reference to a New York Times piece about virtual meetings. We've been talking a little about the concept in my current class, as we read Exodus to the Virtual World, by Edward Castronova.

Other than making me sing "The Time Warp" from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, I saw little use in the graphic that accompanied a story about a groundbreaking (to the Times staff, anyhow) development. We are a long way from selling that particular technology to any serious business.

There's also a drop-dead hilarious video of a "business meeting" with this clumsy technology. I'm no graphics maven but I could not get through the demo without breaking down in gales of laughter. The avatars make Second Life's look wonderful.

Granted, as I noted over at New World Notes, using an avatar seems to spur more participation in a meeting than I have seen in teleconferences or Elluminate meetings. This merits formal study by academic psychologists: I have no idea why the avatar is more empowering than a teleconferencing window.

That said, I do prefer those technologies or Skype for small-group conferences, but they fail to enable really good work for large groups. In some cases, one may as well watch a television seminar with one or two active participants.

Second Life does pretty well for large-group meetings, but it suffers in professional circles from its rep for cybersex and nonhuman avatars. My colleagues not in virtual worlds, like many business folks and even many of my Millennial students, are wary--very wary--of identity shifting online.

For that crowd--and it's one I suspect to be the majority of potential conference users--to make the Castronova "exodus" they'll need something like the virtual meetings shown in the Times story.

But with necks.

Downward Spiral?

2011-04-11T12:54:00.000-07:00

Location: Not Shopping Anywhere

I have been critical of Linden Lab here, but I'm a bit blind-sided by the slew of blog posts about the gradual decline of Second Life. Tateru Nino's charts, showing concurrency dropping faster than new residents can replace those who leave, are depressing. Just last week she was optimistic about the future of SL!

Everyone reading her numbers will point a finger here or there, but let's consider the entire virtual world as an complex system of linked parts. Here's just one of the downward cycles at play:

Lag forces us to shop less in-world (those pesky textures never load).
Meanwhile, Linden Lab sets up Marketplace to head off competition and rake in a % of each transaction.
We buy something at Marketplace instead of in-world.
Merchant in-world sees little point in keeping a shop to pay tier for a empty store.
Merchant closes in-world shop, puts land up for sale.
Land does not sell; merchant abandons land. Tier income now zero for Linden Lab.
Linden Lab must keep server running to support remaining plots in region.
Visitors to SL (the few who make it past their first log in) see more empty and lonely sims, decide to leave.
Fewer residents to support Marketplace, Linden Lab loses their cut of those transactions.
Linden Lab has less cash on hand to hire staff to address problems of lag and cannot lower tier.

We can second guess the Lab until Doomsday, but had the Lab worked on a reducing lag or setting up an economic model that would have permitted lower tiers, well...it might be different.

There are many other cycles at play, but for now they point in the same direction.

Second Life Browser 2.6 & Other Viewers

2011-04-07T11:21:00.000-07:00

Location: Two Grids at Once!

Today, I tested both the SL viewer 1.23 and the latest version of Imprudence Viewer on the machine where I installed the new SL 2.6 viewer. Both worked.

There was a moment of concern on the SLED list that the new viewer might disable access to other viewers on one's computer. Clearly that has not been the case for me.

I logged on again, with SL 2.6 and Imprudence simultaneously. This was the acid test, shown: at right, Imprudence running for Jokaydia Grid; at left, SL 2.6 for SL's grid. I did have to wait for the viewer to auto-download an update. I also noticed that point-and-click movement has stopped working after the update--or is it just me?

So far, I've really enjoyed the SL viewer and think Linden Lab addressed issues that bothered me about earlier versions of Viewer 2, namely, that I could not build as easily using the new viewer.

Over the summer, time will tell as I use the new Viewer on my primary machine and with my primary avatar.

Under a Virtual Moon: Shamanic Drum Journeying

2011-04-05T13:05:00.000-07:00

Location: In a cave on Clear Bear Ridge, Gaia Rising
When I found the journey cave, I was surprised, frightened and thrilled. I had heard about hokey Shamanic drumming but had never tried it. So, I plonked my avatar down on the blanket and started up the drumming. A lot of my fears disappeared even though I didn't understand the purpose of the drumming. Years later I found a book with CD of drumming, followed the book's instructions, and had my first Shamanic journey. And then I found a local first-life Shaman who offers monthly journeys. It wasn't anywhere near as scary as I thought.

The most scenic (and peaceful) way to arrive at the cave is to take a canoe from the dock across from the library and head around to the right. Once you get to the cave, you'll have to fly up or right click and "sit" on the blanket, as the water is a few meters below the lip. You can also try walking into the cave from the Native American ritual area on the other side, but to do that you'll have to walk through black-prim-total-darkness.

The blanket offers journeys from 10 minutes to unlimited. I suggest you do a little research on how to journey before using the blanket. On the other hand, you might enjoy the journey more by simply going with the flow.

In Other News
There's a tiny rash of Machinima videos being recorded in the pagan community. Anam Turas and others were included in a recently published video about Beltane. The same video group recorded the United Healer's of Second Life healing meditation this past Saturday. I'll let you know when the video comes out.

There was a Totem Animal celebration dance last week, which happened on very short notice. If you're interested in keeping up with the Totem Animal events, contact Shambala Kimono. Apparently she doesn't have a schedule yet.

Poll Results: Educators & Virtual Land Ownership

2011-04-04T09:10:00.000-07:00

Location: Surprise

In March, I asked educators on the SLED and EDUCAUSE Virtual Worlds lists to tell me how their ownership of land in virtual worlds compares to their holdings a year ago.

Here are the results.

Analysis: No Mass Exodus

I had expected a larger exodus from Second Life, but the survey design made it hard, without biasing its design, to factor in the two-year pricing Linden Lab offered nonprofits and educational institutions.

The two-year reduced tier may have swayed many colleagues with ongoing projects that are hard to transplant to stay in SL.

With 15.4% noting that they would own more land in SL, and 23.1% noting that they would own less, there's hardly a mass migration out of SL to OpenSim or anywhere else. There may be a slow erosion of the user base among educators, but more data are needed for such a claim.

A difference of 8% between contraction and expansion might sound alarming to a company in other contexts. I could imagine executives losing sleep if their aggregate sales figures showed a similar change: more companies in the prior calendar year expanding their trucking fleets with more Chevy trucks than Fords, or more firms supplying their employees with Windows 7 rather than Blackberry smart phones.

For virtual-world users, however, the choices are not either/or: it is quite possible to rent server space from several providers to enable different projects. The survey respondents could, for example, have cut land holdings a little in SL, while renting server space for an OpenSim installation (or hosting it on campus). My own response would include "own less land in SL" (our campus presence has gone from a full island to my office, on a 512m mainland plot for which I pay no tier) and "own more land in non-SL grids" (I rent a sim in Jokaydia Grid).

With 27.9% noting more ownership of non-SL real estate than a had been the case a year ago, versus 1.9% saying less, educators are clearly trying other grids, perhaps as secondary experiments alongside work done in Second Life.

Faculty may simply be hedging their bets in case further changes from Linden Lab prove unsuitable to their needs, or they may be staking an early claim if OpenSim grids evolve in ways that make them match or exceed SL's stability and quality of content.

One telling statistic: nearly a third of respondents pay out of pocket for their work in virtual worlds. That makes any further increases to tier difficult. For those paying the non-discounted tier in SL, it will be interesting to look again in a year, to see how many educators have changed their plans or stayed with Linden Lab's grid.

Public knowledge of OpenSim has certainly grown; a year ago at the VWER meetings, we had to explain when OS is. Now folks know, even if they have not spent much time on a non-SL grid. In time, more will travel, and their experiences with grids not quite as evolved as SL's may influence future survey results.

Room for More Data

A different survey might ask respondents if they pay more, less, or the same tier as a year ago, or the size of their SL and other holdings.

Moreover, another survey might break out the sorts of non-SL worlds that educators frequent. InWorldz, for instance, offers stability and the presence of many content creators; it is very different from smaller OpenSim grids with Hypergrid access and mostly DIY content.

I hope, however, to administer the same survey a year from now. These numbers could be very different, and one survey cannot reveal a trend.

Second Life's Beta Viewer: Advanced Mode

2011-03-31T16:28:00.000-07:00

Location: On My Way to Svarga

As my time permits, I'll be doing multiple posts about my impression of the Beta viewer. I'm liking what I see so far.

In this installment of "Adventures With a New Viewer," Roderick Reanimator had to find his inventory, met a pretty woman riding her horse, teleported to Svarga, and conducted a few experiments without making too much of a fool of himself.

Roderick rezzed, on the same machine that I'd used for testing the basic version of the Beta, but he appeared as the premade avatar he'd switched using Basic Mode's pick-a-look options. I had, after that, put him back into his usual outfit from another computer, but those changes did not "take" when I logged on today.

I'm happy to say that nothing in his inventory has vanished, but then I'm still using the Beta Viewer on a different machine from my usual SL rig.

The Client AS a Web Browser

I can see myself liking this client a lot. Linden Lab turned the call for a browser-based client into a client that looks a lot like a browser, back buttons and all.

The interface is as clean, in advanced mode, as the lean, mean Firefox 4 broswer. The annoying sidebar from Viewer 2 can be clicked closed or open, so that would enable a builder to have enough real-estate on the screen for useful work. My objections to it vanished when I saw that. I have since come to understand that Viewer 2 has the same open/close feature.

A right-click on the ground evokes a "build" option. There's also a "build" menu on the top of the screen.

On my Mac, Cntrl + ALT + D brought up the familiar advanced menu. I selected quiet snapshots and elected not to play the typing anim (I leave it on only in big meetings, where it helps identify a "speaker").

I also found the environment editor with its advanced settings quickly, under the "world" menu's sun option. That was very helpful for taking snapshots.

A Beta for Immersion? Augmentation?

The integration of real-life and virtual identities does not go as far as Facebook proponents might wish, but immersionists may not like how quickly the Beta client pushes you to use voice. It is enabled by default (though easily turned off). The "me" menu has a "my voice" option that includes--if one subscribes--a morphing option for roleplay and gender-switching.

Web profiles opened very slowly for me. I've not used them, so at this point I cannot comment beyond "that was slow."

Features I Use a Lot: Pretty Good So Far

I take many snapshots, so I find one aspect of the Beta a bit annoying. When one clicks the "view" button, a very nice camera control appears. It's intuitive until you click off, then it vanishes. This means more clicks every time a photographer changes the angle for a shot.

I do like the ability to toggle between presets for the camera--front, side, or rear. These make moving a bit odd, but they add a function that I've never used in another viewer, though perhaps I was not aware of it.

Snapshots are easily done, from a camera icon at the bottom of the screen. Just as I was fiddling with the settings, Alecto Vella showed up on horseback. She notes that like Iggy, she goes out on the roads of SL exploring. I guess the horse does not cause the sim-crossing lag that my cars do, because she looked realistic trotting along the Linden highways. She agreed to pose for some snaps as Roderick learned the controls--pretty quickly in fact.

Given Iggy's work to transcribe all of the VWER meetings and publish the chat as a public record, I needed to find if logging worked. It does, from a "privacy" tab under the preferences. That is the first option of the "me" menu.

Perhaps using the word "privacy" is not only more intuitive but also a nod to those who seek to avoid giving too much first-life data away. We'll see how Linden Lab strikes that balance, but for me, it's soon back to Svarga to explore while using the new viewer.

First Forays for the Beta Viewer

2011-03-26T13:31:00.000-07:00

Location: Stonehenge!

Reading about the Linden Lab Beta Viewer for SL, I gave it a spin on a secondary machine (an older Intel-based iMac with lots of RAM). Respondents to a thread at the SLED list noted that they had real troubles with Mac-OS installs on their primary machines. After a log in with the Beta Viewer, they were unable to relog with the Viewer 2.

On my first trip in-world, armed with this knowledge, I used Roderick Reanimator, the primary male avatar for our House of Usher simulation. He's a Poe character so we can take whatever fate throws his way. I only used Basic Mode, given time constraints but I'll try Advanced Mode next week.

Findings & Reactions:

The lack of landmarks or notecards in Basic Mode would hamper first-hour experiences for students, according to several SLED participants. Hiro Pendragon disagreed, but he had a useful bit of advice about landmarks: "I wish Linden Lab would start treating them like we treat it in a browser - with a down-pointing arrow next to the back/forward buttons that pulls down history, and another pull-down menu treating landmarks like bookmarks."

I found that the Beta Viewer does have a back button like a Web browser, so Roderick was able to return home after his adventures with the Destinations at the bottom of the viewer's window. He made a visit to Stonehenge but was unable to get the landmark provided. With a back-button click, he returned to his home location in SL.
Hiro also took issue with the idea that users need money or inventory in the first hour. A few SLED members felt that the inventory and economy would be a good incentive for students to move beyond Basic Mode.
For my orientations with students, I'd need inventory but not money for the first hour, though as Eloise Pasteur notes, "you could get people used to chatting, IMing, moving around. With the destination bar you can get them to some places to let them see tping and rezzing in a new location. With the appearance bar you can move towards ideas about how you represent yourself in world."
When Roderick rezzed, he was in the old outfit he wore for our work with The House of Usher. I changed his appearance during his hour with the Beta Viewer, using the presets at the bottom of the screen, then logged out and switched back to my primary machine. I logged in with a standard SL client and found his inventory intact. He did, of course, have to reset himself to his old garb, hair, shape, and skin.
I used screen capture for my pictures, given the lack of snapshots.
The buttons for options are clean and uncluttered, and I found them to be intuitive.

I have not had enough experience with the new browser to provide a verdict. I don't plan to use any version of the Beta on my primary machine until I have a few more questions answered:

Does it prevent all third-party viewers from being used on the same machine? If so, is this a bug or a design feature?
Can the landmark feature be added? Can notecards? This little warning will not be of much use to noobs, who might decide not to log in again:

That's a short but important list. I'll share more about Advanced Mode next week.

A World That Dares Not Speak Its Name?

2011-03-23T13:23:00.000-07:00

Location: New York Times Web Site

image courtesy of the Language Lab site

My departmental chair sent me this story about the use of the Virtual Globe Theater in a class at Bryn Mawr. I read it with great interest, seeing in it the sort of nuanced story about virtual worlds that too rarely appears in mainstream media outlets.

Not once, despite the clear image of the Second Life client on the screen of a laptop, was the Linden Lab product mentioned by the reporter.

I have an idea that, as noted in an earlier post here, that the name "Second Life" is so tainted by sensational stories from a few years ago, or tainted by the "once was big" reputation among technologists, that the brand name simply got dropped. As Hamlet Au noted for the Language Lab project, its site does not mention Second Life on its first pages. The video they provide flashes the name "Second Life" on screen for a brief instant, when the woman demonstrating how to get started downloads the client. The product name also appears on the Language Lab FAQ page about job opportunities. It is refreshing to see that SL knowledge is a prerequisite for a job.

There's no mystery here for me: the Second Life brand-name is toxic enough, but the product good enough, to create this discomfort. How can Rod Humble rebrand his product? If Linden Lab had taken a different route with the enterprise version and licensed it under a different name and with a lower price than they did, they might have achieved more uptake.

Language Lab students do not need a larger world than English City and the cluster of other restricted-access sims, the Language Lab sim, to attend classes. The other "LL" in this story might have taken a different route to offering its product to just such potential customers. Doing so under a different name ("NewWorld," "Metaverse," "MatrixLand," even the old standard "Linden World") would have helped make many projects like Language Lab's viable. We might be talking about hundreds of thousands more regular users in various SL shards.

Part of me is proud to see increasing evidence that the use of virtual worlds can go "mainstream," as we all hoped in the glory-days of hyperbole and utopianism before 2009. Part of me is sad, however, that when I do say "Second Life," in any group of colleagues, the grins come out still, because every negative (and usually exaggerated) stereotype about slave-girls of Gor, virtual sex, and more from 2007-8 rushes to mind. Now that CNN plans to close its bureau there, the last of the big-media holdouts is gone.

What next? That is Linden Lab's decision.

Under a Virtual Moon: Animals

2011-03-22T08:25:00.000-07:00

Totem Animal Journeying Area: Gaia Rising

Location: Gaia Rising
There's a new activity on Gaia Rising: Animal Totem Journeys with Shambala Kimono. According to her profile, Shambala is "certified in clinical hypnotherapy & energy balancing artist, writer & workshop facilitator." (By the way, I hate the new profiles. They're ugly white basic pages and you can't see Picks or Groups.)

There have been two in-world guided journeys with Shambala and I've missed them both. They happened on Sundays at 10 am and I'm hoping there will be another this Sunday. In the meantime, there is the Animal Totem (or Power Animal) Journey area on Gaia Rising. I tried it out this morning. It's a two-parter: sit in SL and listen over the internet.

I already have two power animals as friends and was not joined by a third on this journey. It was a good journey and I enjoyed visiting with my animals. I don't know if I'm supposed to tell you what or who they are. I've never asked them. Apparently, I'd rather not say.

During the journey I also visited my teacher and was greeted by a second. Gifts were exchanged. At the moment I'm working on a Tarot layout given to me by my first teacher which he named "The Spreading Oak." Each time I see this teacher I get another piece of instruction on how the layout works.

The first teacher I address as "Shaman" and the second one, new to me today, looks like a Hermit from the Tarot deck. However, I recognized him as an energy that has been with me for a very long time indeed. I followed Shambala's promptings to ask certain questions and received excellent answers from "The Hermit."

In my next posts, I plan to show you more of the self-guided areas of Gaia Rising. There's quite a few of them and they focus on assorted neo-pagan topics. Those of you who are time-challenged (like I am) will be able to participate on your time.

Group Events
Coming up tonight is the United Healers of Second Life Full Moon/Ostara ritual at 6 PM in Ravenhart (contact ConnieJean Maven) and the Anam Turas Healing Circle at 7 PM on Clear Bear Ridge (Gaia Rising - contact Enchantress Sao). Aoife Lorefeld will be leading a discussion on the April new moon on March 31st at 6PM at Poet's Rock (Gaia Rising).

Day Three at VWBPE

2011-03-19T15:05:00.000-07:00

Location: Central Auditorium

The conference ended early for me today, as I have RL commitments that keep me from attending other sessions. I want to thank the organizers this year for a great event. I admit to having been dubious about whether everything would come together, until the schedule appeared. In the end, everything came together beautifully. Moreso than in prior years, VWBPE seemed like a flesh-and-blood conference.

John Lester's talk was a great way to end my participation. He's the soul of patience and has an optimistic side about the future developments of these spaces that inspires us all. His presentation, on Web-based interfaces, revealed the potential for Unity-based worlds such as Jibe from Reaction Grid. I did not, before today, know that Jibe worlds can be linked by something like OpenSim's hypergrid, nor did I know that OS worlds and Jibe worlds can, in theory, be linked as well.

Amazing stuff as we begin building a network of linked grids that, for education at least, will be the future of virtual worlds.

Day Two At VWBPE 2011

2011-03-18T08:12:00.000-07:00

Location: Conference Venue

I'm enjoying hearing Maria Korolov speak about the use of Hypergrid and the maturing of the OpenSim constellation.

It's a happy and accurate counterpart to Hamlet Au's misinformed comments today about OpenSim. He needs to get out more often; though InWorldz is a closed grid, it's no desert, nor are the linked grids we educators use.

The VWBPE organizers have done a good job of including denizens of other grids this year, and the addition of field-trips really makes the event worthwhile.

VWBPE 2011 Begins Tomorrow

2011-03-16T08:17:00.000-07:00

Location: Central sims, VWBPE

For those seeking the schedule, check here.

Lots of cool Steampunk decor; I hope no noobs get ground up in the exposed clockwork.

See you at the conference.

Requiem for a Suit

2011-03-14T10:15:00.000-07:00

Location: 5th and Oxford Main Store

With this week's conference, Virtual Worlds: Best Practices in Education looming, I felt an overwhelming need to look professional.

I like supporting Second Life's merchants, who have had a tough time during a real-world economic recession. My hunt this year for a good suit was a short one, given my reading of the hilariously tongue-in-cheek fashion blog, Look at These F*ucking SLipsters. The blog highlighted the Madison Avenue suits from a firm called 5th and Oxford.

Menswear is hard to find in Second Life, and it is harder to love. I don't want my avatar to be a tattooed love-boy fresh off his motorcycle. That's ludicrous. But a good suit? A suit that Don Draper might wear in Mad Men? Now you are talking.

Arriving at the store, I found every item reduced to 50 Linden Dollars. They are closing. I snapped up all three shades of the suit and an all-black outfit with turtleneck that might have been worn by Andy Warhol. Shops in virtual world close for many reasons, but this is final: the items will vanish from the grid soon. What happened? I've asked the shop owner in-world and at her blog. Copybotting? Anger at Linden Lab? A new venue outside SL?

Come what may at the conference, my virtual self will have a good suit on thanks to 5th & Oxford. Sorry to see you go; I hardly got to know you. So gents, if you want a good suit, get over to the store now.

Across the Great Divide: Four Months in Jokaydia Grid

2011-03-10T07:53:00.000-08:00

Location: A Foot in at Least Two Virtual Worlds

I realized an anniversary had just passed, from a post here in late October 2010 that marked my first prim rezzed in Jokdaydia Grid.

Now I am preparing my presentation, "Lessons Hard and Wonderful From A Faculty Member Pioneering in OpenSim," for the upcoming VWBPE conference. This post also lets me organize notes for tonight's VWER meeting, where my colleague Kali Pizzaro will lead us in a the discussion "Across The Great Divide: Sharing Across Grids."

What have I learned as an OpenSim pioneer that can apply across grids?

Travel before deciding. I made a mistake of rushing a class into Second Life in 2007 without enough time spent exploring, attending events, meeting other educators. This time, I avoided the mistake by visiting a few education-friendly grids before signing a lease.
Friends can make a grid. I opted for Jokaydia Grid because some friends and colleagues were already there, and that made sharing content very easy.
Hair and skin do not make a grid vital. I love the inexpensive content in SL that makes educational work go faster, but let's not blind ourselves to what makes a grid vital. SL was vital, after all, and perhaps more inventive in the days of Linden World and Primitars.
Study how different OpenSim grids are from Second Life. Here a post at the VWER site may be useful. In it I share the lessons as a new builder on a new grid.
Build to share. I want my content to be free. That means making everything myself in a way that can convey across grids for our emerging constellation of hypergrid-linked educational spaces. It means releasing any scripts I manage to make, or photos I take, or assignments I write, to the community under Creative-Commons licensing.
Read all of a grid's fine-print. I love the (for now) closed Third Rock Grid, InWorldz, and what I recently found in OpenLife, and I'd considered opening the Usher simulation in one of these grids until I found out hypergridding to be a fast-maturing technology. Then I limited my search for a post-SL home to grids that are not closed. You will need to make a basic decision: closed grid with vendors, such as Inworldz? Open grid with mostly other educators and limited content, such as my home? Other fine-print items will include the tier fees. Are they fixed or an introductory rate for a grid's beta-test era? Can you lock in a good tier as a pioneer?
Backup is key. Here I mean literal backup of files and regions. Not all grids allow OAR backups, something I insisted upon for my new virtual home. Most, including SL, will permit Imprudence to export items made by an educator. That was important as I began exporting content I made from SL for Jokaydia Grid.
Share outside your new grid. I am planning to open Usher for tours soon, and part of that will involve a Web site were source files may be downloaded for importing into other compatible grids. It's easier to download from a colleague's site than to travel to a grid to look for content. I'll issue all of it under a Creative-Commons noncommercial license.
Burn no bridges. "Iggy said that?" you may well ask. I've been venomous about Linden Lab's treatment of educators, and I regret that (a little). Now that the lab has a new CEO, I'll follow his actions but also very much remain part of SL. It's still the best place to meet educators in large groups. That may well change, and SL will be "the old country," to use a term Lalo Telling. (mostly of InWorldz) mentioned some time back.

Wherever we travel, and whatever direction this technology takes us, the lessons of our old grids should convey. Good luck as a pioneer, settler, or happily settled resident!

Escape Plus: Secondlife.com's Need to Turn a Page

2011-03-07T08:31:00.000-08:00

Location: Linden Lab's Public Face

Before we ever create that first avatar, we visit a Web page. Think for a moment about how Linden Lab presents its product.

This post rehashes a complaint that AJ Kelton made, who gave me permission to use his name. The issue shows why LL is chasing a certain type of customer at the expense of others. That is certainly a reasonable business proposition, but as Lindy McKeown replied at the SLED list discussion begun by Hiro Pendragon, Linden Lab has an excellent alternative to beginning the SL experience as they do.

My post to SLED:

A damning moment came up in our weekly VWER meeting. AJ Brooks had a few colleagues wanting to try SL. They did not get further than the SL Web site. One look at the Valentine's Day video on display, however, ended their interest.

Sorry, Mr. Humble; tattooed love-boys with their Celtic ladies-fair might work for grown ups who want The Sims Plus, but whatever actually goes on in-world, you'll lose your remaining educators with marketing like that.

So perhaps LL can have a less romance-and-escape-oriented front page with a page that manages to promote the service with prominent links to "What sort of second life do YOU want? Gaming? Education? Roleplay?"

Show a video with some shopping, but then show visitors getting into the Titan II / Gemini Stack at the Spaceflight Museum. Show visitors in the virtual Sistine Chapel, then show them racing cars.

Lindy's reply is brilliant:

I have to say the messages on the front page of http://secondlife.com seem pitched at a single (and maybe extremely profitable?) market. People who want to make social connections that may lead to "relationships" (of one kind or another).

Sadly business decisions by non education-specific vendors of products and services impacts education use of those services. Comparing it to Blackboard is like comparing not just apples to oranges, more like candy bars to oranges. Blackboard is designed as a learning management tool. Second Life is designed as a social tool that has been adapted for use in education and after that happened, Linden Labs made some mileage off that.

I am left wondering how the education community might influence the "front door" policy to be more inclusive *nudges the business educators in the ribs for ideas* so that it isn't a turn off for newcomers from other potential markets like education? What a shame this page isn't the front page! http://secondlife.com/community/?lang=en
That video includes education.

I like Lindy's idea, and that community page a lot. Without too much difficulty, LL should pitch SL's amazing content at a broader audience. The "kiss on the fake Eiffel Tower" began before the new CEO arrived, and it's up to him to change it. There's nothing wrong with a kiss or a Valentine in a virtual world. As for adult content, Linden Lab has done a fine job of zoning and moving it to age-verified regions or behind closed doors on private land. Too many SLED respondents took my complaint to mean "oh, that sex is wrecking education in SL." Nonsense.

Sex is elsewhere on the Internet, and these Web pages about SL are not about sex. They are, however, about a narrow perception of a virtual world--an "escape" to use the Lindens' own words--that could be marketed far better to a broad audience.

So Linden Lab, change that front page to something more inclusive than "escape": perhaps learn, explore, play, connect, invent, love, build, and (most importantly) return?

Update 3/7/11: Hat-tip to Sheila for noticing the Freudian Slip in my original "location." Corrected after many guffaws.

Poll For Educators

2011-03-01T05:39:00.000-08:00

Time to take another look at what educators have been doing this year in virtual worlds. I'll leave the poll open for at least a month.

I realize that the words "own land" are, in practice, metaphorical. Here they mean "rent from a grid host" or "host on our own hardware."

Online Surveys & Market Research

Flipping Scenes, Back to Openlife

2011-03-01T05:31:00.000-08:00

Location: Openlife Grid

I have covered Openlife, briefly, in this blog. I had found performance and stability to be increasing there, but last month I spent several hours in-world there, writing a review for Prim Perfect, and discovered a passionate and small community of builders at work.

My Prim Perfect columns do include advocacy of a grid's best features, and Openlife has something I'd not encountered in a another virtual world: scene flip. This permits a region manager to set up five different "scenes" for a region and, with the push of a button, reload everything. Thus a roleplaying community in a space-opera setting might have ready, with just a flip, a massive starship interior, an alien world, and an empty-space starfield for space combat.

Openlife's founder, Sakai Openlife, has persevered through a difficult update and the issues with performance that stymied my trips there in 2008 and 2009. This grid is worth another look, and several residents responded to my requests for advice with great enthusiasm.

Pantaiputih Korobase came to the grid in November 2008, after he "escaped" Second Life for a new base of operations. Like the other Openlife residents I met, he notes that the new grid "made me personally turn into a much more active user, OL made me create, decorate regions with my own buildings and made me learn all the time. More over and most importantly, I made some really good friends in OL."

His thoughts were echoed by Shai Khalifa and Cheops Forlife, who talked to me in-world and, in Shai's case, met me at the Over the Rainbow region to discuss the work of builder Surreal Numbers. The build quality of several sims was as good as anything I have seen in SL.

My Prim Perfect column will cover more details soon. But for builders and social users who want a small and closed grid with good prices, Openlife remains an attractive alternative. Educators needing hypergrid access might not find the grid to their liking, but scene-flip alone makes handling OAR files of regions very simple work for changes to simulations "on the fly."

Questions for Rod Humble from the Educators

2011-02-25T17:13:00.000-08:00

Location: Virtual Worlds Roundtable

Recently I posed four questions that I will send to Rod Humble, Linden Lab's CEO. I then put the issue to members of the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable at our weekly meeting in Second Life. Here are some of the questions, edited for parallel structure and brevity. You can read the entire transcript of our meeting, including additional questions, here.

Is he having fun yet? (Birdie Newcomb)
Will he be able to make it to a future meeting? (Grizzla Pixelmaid)
What is Linden Lab doing to make support more useful and reliable? (Hour Destiny)
Are the recent rate changes and loss of Concierge support, etc. a path/process leading LL into mobile/social networking community areas? (Gwenette Writer)
Is it true that there is only one database for all inventory? (Hour Destiny)
Will Linden Lab resume work on interoperability with OpenSim grids? (Gwenette Writer and Ignatius Onomatopoeia)
How effective does he find the search in finding events? (Profdan Netizen)
When can we expect the advertising focus and promotion to STOP being all about escaping real life and finding love and focus more attention on some of the more serious endeavors like education, research, and activism? (Olivia Hotshot)
If 40 or 60$ a month for a full sim (= server partition) is a sustainable price on open sim grids, wouldn't there be a little room sooner or later for LL to lower theirs? (Xon Emoto)

Got a polite question for Mr. Humble, about education in SL, that you'd like me to add? Post it in comments! Keep in mind that several questions I did not include were excellent, but since they focus on Linden Lab's past decisions, some VWER members concluded that he'd likely not answer them.

And we want a short list! So have at it.

Under a Virtual Moon: Spring Break

2011-02-25T06:32:00.000-08:00

Pink!

Location: Second Life
I missed the Saturday morning circle with the United Healers, the Sunday morning discussion with Anam Turas and the Tuesday evening healing. I had a few first life commitments that got in the way. A really good excuse, yes?

It was, anyway, a quiet pagan week in SL. No Rising Moon meetings nor any Esbats, major or minor. I had hoped to focus on the pagan music concerts held Wednesday mornings at the Blue Moon Tavern on Gaia Rising but no one was there. The Wednesday evening United Healers "All Things Spiritual" discussion also did not happen. So, I went for a motorcycle ride with my buddy Nick.

Below is a shot of us on NIck's sim-wide sky track with motorcycle rezzer. My first choice was the pink cycle (above). After a few laps, Nick insisted that I ride a "real" bike. I have no idea of the model name but it has a serious chrome attitude.

Which doesn't matter, because I suck at driving no matter what the vehicle. I can't even make a flying carpet fly right. Nick made two laps around the track in the time it took me to make one. When I finally got up to speed on the chrome attitude, I plowed through the only loophole in the barrier and drove off into space.

The chrome attitude.

Mixing Fact and Fancy in The House of Usher

2011-02-24T10:24:00.000-08:00

Location: Usher Graveyard

In building the simulation for Fall 2011 and my group of students in the English course "Invented Worlds," I decided that I'd use both Poe's story and the history of North Yorkshire as templates to expand the House of Usher tale.

After all, Poe's own works are full of intertextuality.

Playing off my knowledge of North Yorkshire, from a prolonged stay in 2009, I have begun adding local color.

I only wish that the village of Ravenscar, near Dracula-haunted Whitby, had that name in 1847, when we decided to set our simulation. That date lets us bring onto the scene a few new anesthetics that might explain Madeline Usher's malady.

Or might not. One goal of the simulation, as in a good Poe tale, is to keep characters guessing at motives and forces at work behind the scenes--human and, perhaps, supernatural. When, in setting out free content, I discovered several standing stones, I had a new subplot not available to us in the Second Life simulation, where the House was everything and any grounds beyond it were merely suppositions. Thus students may run across this letter to Roderick in the course of their visit:

My Dear Lord Usher,

I really do think that you have been overwrought by the decline in Madeline's health. It would be terrible to fall prey to ancient superstitions about the righteous souls who pulled down the heathen stone ring to build the Usher graveyard.

The stones are, of course, of great antiquity and any cultists who may have celebrated dark rites in their precinct have long vanished before the light of true wisdom and the power of our Lord and Redeemer, Jesus Christ.

I have, however, endeavoured to look through our parish records, as you requested. The stones, it seems, were somewhat dispersed as early as the 15th century, and during the time of the Godly Protectorate your ancestor Mandrake Usher, who had fought alongside Cromwell, was noted by my predecessor as "scattering to the four winds the bits of Satanic filth and other such from the grounds of the ancestral castle."

Thus we have an answer. At some time in the early 17th century, any remaining ring of stones was taken down, and rightly so, by your family.

I remain, Sir, your humble and obedient servant,

Giles Rammage, Minister, St. Stephen's Chapel, Robin Hood's Bay

VWER Grid: A New Start For Educators

2011-02-23T08:06:00.000-08:00

Location: VWER Grid

AJ Kelton worked very hard to get 15 of us onto the new grid, hosted by Reaction Grid, to hear guest speakers John "Pathfinder" Lester and Jokay Wollongong. The transcript will be a lively one.

We broke our old record of attendees, and the grid proved stable for "native" accounts and Hypergrid visitors.

This is looking more and more like the future for educators. For those who call OpenSim a desert, I'd add "I think we have an oasis."

And for those who claim the avatars and gear don't match SL, I'd say "give it time. A lot of clever folks are building and sharing their content, just as we do at our K-12 schools, colleges, and universities."

With Jokaydia Grid ramping up past 80 sims now, with over 1000 educators involved, more oases are on the horizon, not mirages.

Hamlet, AOL, Facebook, and SL

2011-02-22T08:59:00.000-08:00

Location: New World Notes

It must be a slow news-day for fake worlds, or I'd have something fresh to say. Yet I was caught by the change in tone in Hamlet Au's reporting at New World Notes. He's long been viewed as an SL advocate, even after his gig reporting on the Blue Mars virtual world (now in the process of withering into something like IMVU for mobile devices). Now Hamlet is claiming that SL must change fast or fade away.

For a few years, my colleague at VWER, AJ Kelton, has been calling SL the virtual-worlds equivalent of AOL , in its older incarnation as a wall-garden network. AOL remade itself into a starting point for viewing the rest of the Internet, something Linden Lab began with some early interoperability experiments but gave up.

Hamlet is correct, in a reply to a comment, that the comparison is fair:

"The comparison isn't in the services each company provides. The comparison is with their main revenue streams -- both of them are out of date and cannot be replenished."

I've written this at NWN and I'll say it here; if Linden Lab wants a new revenue stream, they need to renew work on interoperability...and more than teleporting to or from the Hypergrid as "Ruth." LL could use its clout to devise licensing for IP so it can deliver Marketplace content to other grids and make the Linden Dollar the default intergrid currency.

That would bring in some revenue from the OpenSim universe. I've a hundred bucks worth of shopping I'd have done for my simulation in Jokaydia Grid, and I bet others would spend that much and more, all with revenues going to LL from commissions.

It's sad to see the best known virtual world miss this opportunity. I'm seeing it clearly in SL for my own use. I will soon pay my annual fee for Premium, but as for tier, I'm happy with my free 512 square-meter sandbox. Now my serious work goes on in OpenSim, where costs are far lower. Anything I want to import from that side I can build there and import to SL for a measly 10L fee. But some content will be beyond my ability or the time I'd allot to learn more. So I'd just as soon pay some Linden Dollars to the Marketplace to have the content delivered to Jokaydia Grid.

As for other ways to bring in more money? New accounts would help, but I disagree with Hamlet's push for Facebook integration. I recently was dragged, kicking and screaming, to Facebook by my student employees, and I've set up a modest profile so I can manage one of our campus' corporate FB accounts. I just don't see what the fuss is over, by the way. FB is clunky in its interface (no support I could find for HTML tags, for instance) and the page layout is boring. I'm sure that templates exist, or that I'm missing some bigger point.

Facebook does a great job of connecting real people. Second Life enables immersion in something one cannot do in real life or even immersion as someone else.

SL and FB are oil and water. So whatever direction the Lindens choose for their product to escape AOL's irrelevant role in the modern Internet, Facebook is not what I'd choose.

Update 2/22/11:

Nice reply to Hamlet's post by Ananda: c'mon, LL, this could be your goldmine!

I still hope for the day when SL is not such a walled garden, where LL is a central certification and clearinghouse for avatars that can roam (with their stuff!) from place to place in the 3D version of the Web. Perhaps getting a "certified hypergrid identity" or "certified hypergrid host" could provide a new revenue source? LL's biggest asset is not so much the land, but the community network effect and, frankly, the built-up inventories. If LL can find a way to certify alternate land hosts as trustworthy (i.e. you can trust them to host content and assets with privacy and not immediately turn around and resell them) and to provide a content or avatar registry service, so copybot items are automatically flagged, and avatars are free to use duly purchased and licensed content on other grids, something like that might be a better way to go than to depend on continuing to host land in what seems like the most inefficient, inflexible manner possible.

A Look Ahead: Virtual Worlds in Aerospace & Defense

2011-02-18T09:23:00.000-08:00

Location: VWER Meeting

image courtesy of Sheila Webber's flickr photostream

Back on Feb. 3, were pleased to host two Greg Moxness & Charles O’Connell, technologists from a major US defense contractor, who spoke at some length about their predictions for virtual worlds entering the mainstream. They were not speaking in their role of company employees, but they spoke knowledgeably about how technological advances might reshape 3D immersive environments.

I'll summarize some of their points below. You can read the entire transcript here.

Charles, on convincing coworkers of the value of virtual worlds, “Seed the young with ideas, soon become the decision makers or at least influencers–took about 4 years.”
Charles on developments to come “not sure military or defense is leading in this case. [Advances] more from commercial spaces, gaming and entertainment.”
Greg, on near-term advances: “the whole idea of gesture recognition and 3d worlds this could be this year or next”
Greg suspects we’ll see “full body haptics,” and Charles notes “Haptics–likely to be involved because it has such high value. [It's] never all or nothing. 2D and 3D will exist together….documents and spreadsheets along with 3D objects”
Greg on neural interfaces like those in Gibson’s Neuromancer: “[M]aybe a step too far. . .maybe 20-30 years but will the human become less and will the machines evolve?” Charles: “a key thing that might happen, if it can be done noninvasively, something outside the body that can monitor brain waves, nerve impulses.” (Iggy’s note to any student readers: from Anderson’s novel Feed, that is the early version of the Feed interface).
Greg agreed with the following remark by Charles, about the relative merits of 2D and 3D environments for training: “3D has immense possibilities, not an either/or question. Use 2D when better suited, or good enough. 3D [is for] experimentation or experiencing things not possible for some reason in RL.”
Greg on an advantage of virtual worlds, the need online for something approximating face-to-face contact. Charles notes his belief that “relationships are much stronger in VW.”
Charles also came out in favor of transparency in avatar identities (if not appearance) noting, “Treat people with respect, it’s a real place. One life, not two. It’s probably best to be yourself when dealing with others in VW.”

I look forward to their returning to the Roundtable in 2012.

Nevermore and the Hypergrid

2011-02-16T13:15:00.000-08:00

Location: Usher Burial Ground

Madeline Usher gets laid to rest in the family crypt, a Medieval location, instead of the more modern graveyard because her brother Roderick fears grave-robbers.

The reader of "The Fall of The House of Usher" gets robbed of something else: the chance to have Poe write about a burial ground. On the other hand, it gave me free play to design the first of the buildings, a structure I pattern after columbariums I've seen in old cemeteries such as Richmond's Hollywood.

Instead of ashes, however, the structure will hold a hypergate so visitors to the grid can appear in just the right spooky locale. I hope the results are Poesque enough. Now I need to figure out how to embed the codes and get the gate working.

Roderick will figure it out, with lots of help from Jokay.

Hat-tip to V, of TGIB, for the free portal.

Mr. Humble, the Interviews, and Educators

2011-02-15T08:29:00.000-08:00

Location: Blog-Crawls

It's gratifying to see that Rod Humble, Linden Lab's new CEO, has stepped up to talk to several bloggers about his goals and hopes for Second Life. Here are a few interviews I've found:

At this week's Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable, I'm going to focus our Open Forum discussion on a few issues: what would educators most like to know about Humble's plans? What issues pertaining to virtual-worlds education would they most like him to address during his first year?

My questions to Rod Humble:

How do you feel about renewing work on interoperability with OpenSim grids?
Could you clarify Linden Lab's vision for educational use of its grid?
How likely are some sort of out-of-world backups similar to those in much of OpenSim?
Would you come to a VWER meeting?

Educators, what would you like to ask the CEO?