Sherry Turkle and Virtual Worlds

Location: Prognosticator's Chair

My students are in the midst of Alone Together, Sherry Turkle's jeremiad about the dangers of technology that throughout her book she calls "always on" and "always on you."

Though few Second Life or World of Warcraft users carry these imagined worlds around in their palm, given the beefy nature of the client software, many do spend lots of time in-world. Turkle's subjects mostly find escape there, and she freely admits that one can use these imagined spaces for "embarking on a potentially 'therapeutic' exercise" (212).  Mostly, however, she focuses on gamers like Adam, on the verge of losing his job, or Pete, who cheats on his wife with in SL, having a relationship with an avatar named Jade.  My students had their worst stereotypes of these immersive environments supported by Turkle's book, which otherwise does such a fine job of critiquing the other from of addiction to online activities, the augmented self of texts, apps, and phones glued to the users' palms.

It would be been interesting to see what she'd make of Fran, the 85-year-old Parkinson's patient, who with her daughter created SL avatars. As Wagner James Au reports, Fran was able to visualize herself standing again unaided, while watching her avatar Fran Seranade do Tai Chi or dance. Soon enough, Fran recovered some mobility.

Tom Boellstorff, author of Growing Up in Second Life, has met Fran and her daughter. He and other researchers are studying what has occurred. It's a heart-warming story of the sort rare in Turkle's book.

I will speculate a bit here, something I warn my students against since for them, the art of extrapolation from solid data may be safer for their grades.  I'll let you readers grade me.

Alone Together began as Turkle's "letter" to her daughter Rebecca. In Paris, Rebecca had spent her time texting and on Facebook, instead of taking in the city's many delights. Turkle was disappointed and has crafted one of the best critiques I've encountered of our relationship with our machines and the loss of such things as "the rewards of solitude" (3).

I hope that my class will remember Joel, Turkle's research subject who is an SL builder, both of content and community. Yet I fear Pete or Adam will stay in their minds instead. I do not possess the professional expertise to question how Turkle's bias might have influenced her writing about virtual worlds, but as a reader, I would have liked more Joels, and maybe a Fran, to balance the negative and all-too-common stereotypes of gamers as addicted, soon-to-be-unemployed, social castoffs.

In fact, I'd go so far, an an educator who has used Second Life and OpenSim grids and SimCity 2000 in class settings, to make another claim. Whatever the validity of Turkle's data, her method of presentation about gamers weakens for this reader her critique of social media, texting, and other potentially addictive behaviors.

That may be my bias, given the ease with which users of those apps can get a regular fix.

Work Cited:

Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other. New York, Basic: 2011.

Cory Ondrejka's Vision, 8 Years On

Location: Reading Desk

I have had a great deal of academic fun reading Ondrejka's 2004 article "Escaping the Gilded Cage: User Created Content and Building the Metaverse" (get a copy here). I'll provide a few page references below, but not a works-cited list (this ain't no formal article, yet!).

Hamlet Au mentioned it over at New World Notes recently, and I decided to have a look at the creative fire from an era when the investor-utopians, and not the CEOs and bean-counters, planned to build something akin to Neal Stephenson's metaverse from Snow Crash:

This article will argue that creating a defensibly real, online world is now possible if its users are given the power to collaboratively create the content within it, if those users receive broad rights to their creations, and are able to convert those creations into real world capital and wealth.  This would be the Metaverse of Stephenson’s imagination. (Ondrejka 4).

Ondrejka, a supporter of Cloud Party, is still at it, and I like the way that new virtual world has seized the creative fire that Second Life, with its balky interface and legacy code, may never achieve. Cloud Party already has an avatar building kit, and while the results do not match what we have in 2012 SL, they are impressive for a world so young. As I get ready to play Patterns for the first time, however, I also wonder if it's too early to count Linden Lab out of the game.

What did Ondrejka want in 2004? Here are a few claims he makes that excite me still. I won't focus on the author's economic musings. They are fascinating, but I'm more concerned with his arguments about engagement and immersion.

User-Generated Content: Give Me Sandbox AND Arena

As Marcello DellaCarpini, my Vodacce character from the game 7th Sea, would say, "Two famous Vodacce sayings apply to such matters. First 'When in doubt, just make something up and say it with a straight face.' Second, 'It is never really fun until someone is caught on fire, run through with swords, made into an pincushion for archers, or eaten by monsters. Preferably someone you cannot stand.' "  Marcello made those both up, of course, on the spot for good RP. Creation, both verbal and physical, are essential:

People want to be perceived as creative by customizing their surroundings. People want to have their moments on the stage. In many cases, it seems that users are just waiting for access to the right tools (Ondrejka 9).

Due to the in-world tools and lack of a submission process, Second Life’s users have been able to create an amazing amount of content. At the end of May 2004, users had created more than one million objects, over 300,000 objects with scripted behaviors, and over 300,000 pieces of clothing (Ondrejka 10). 

I have long argued that UGC is the "special sauce" keeping me interested. I can destroy things in a thousand games, but in how many can I make them?

Eventually, both sorts of play will co-exist. What we call on my weekly Nerd Night "the minimum daily requirement of violence" in games will only take us so far.

If game designers want to attract my sort of relatively well-heeled customer and hobbyist, they need to consider two sorts of sandy spots where a type of "play" occurs: the sandbox and the arena.

Emergent and Predictable Behavior:

Ondrejka notes that when one drops and object, one expects it to fall. To fall back on a favorite expression of mine from Snow Crash, designers must not "break the metaphor" by, say, letting folks "beam in" to any location. Though many sims in Second Life support that type of movement, it's more predictable that one would walk or drive from a fixed point to the destination; this is what the original Linden Lab "telehubs" wanted to do.

Not breaking metaphors, whether gravitational or spatial, is predictable behavior.  Ondrejka contends that successful metaverse must support behavior that only emerges with creative play (15-16). In my OpenSim House of Usher simulation, for instance, I had no way to injure other characters when I was in the role of Roderick. I found that, however, I could rid myself of over-inquisitive guests by pushing them off the edge of the virtual region I rent at Jokaydia Grid. This was a software bug in OpenSim, but it served my purpose: through emergent behavior, I'd found a way to drown nosy and suspicious visitors to The House of Usher.

So When Do We Get our Metaverse?

Emily Short, working with Linden Lab on a new and non-SL narrative game, notes in a Gamasutra interview that the sort of game Ondrejka calls for would be lovely but it is not currently available:

Something that I tended to think was unfortunate about certain MMO storytelling... you get these narratives where the NPCs have lots of really emotive things to say to you, and they want to throw you into this narrative. Then on the other hand, your interaction with the characters played by humans -- even if they're inclined to play it in a very role-playing way and they're not running around shouting trollish remarks and that sort of thing, even if they've entered into playing that role, because of the way it's structured, none of the conversations you ever have with them are ever going to be acknowledged by the story as meaningful pieces of the story.

I have no time for childish players who type in text abbreviations or talk in voice like extras from The Jersey Shore. I am a snob. I would not even consider RPing in the local game shop; my preferred groups are guys I've known for 30+ years or a bunch of fellow PhDs who were with me during graduate study. Neither group is trollish but both can be a bit silly, to add humor to a gamemaster's crafting of a scenario. Neither group is childish.

So how can a game engine ever let players into the story as co-creators, as can happen in an SL roleplay sim or tabletop RP? One of Short's commenters noted that we'd need AI that could serve as a "dungeon master."  When will that occur?

Quantum computing, a gleam in the eye of many of us, recently got a public boost by the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics. With processor speeds that fast, we may see something like the magic of Stephenson's vision realized.  Until I have that sort of power in my palm or my laptop, I will read the dreams of Ondrejka, Rosedale, Short, and Stephenson and keep hoping.

Top hat tip to Hamlet Au, for covering both Ondrejka's and Short's ideas.

Who IS a Virtual Worlds Educator?

Location: SLED List

It may be easier to say who is most assuredly not.

A few weeks back, a colleague in VWER asked me "who is an educator" in a private IM.  I replied "well, if you teach at an accredited school..." but then I realized that some folks provide education to others in informal circumstances.

A story about Saj, one of my best students ever, came back to me. Saj is an Indian national who graduated to become a well known economist. He credited his considerable talent in mathematics to informal tutoring done, at a dining room table, by a retired professor who would work out equations by hand for a dozen Indian boys.  The teacher used recycled "green bar" computer paper for the teaching, and one by one he would write down equations and solve them for a horde of pupils who watched and memorized. They had a hunger to learn: Saj learned his "maths" by this method, and he had to watch the professor's work upside down, since Saj was the newest pupil and could not get close enough at the table to see the equations in their proper orientation.

So an accredited position does not an educator make, the material or virtual worlds.

But what makes  you NOT a educator? In the recent SLED-list discussion of Linden Lab's decision to offer SL through Steam, many participants fretted about rising graphics requirements for the virtual-world client. Then one soul chimed in:

"Game gfx have always been scalable. Just for the few that plop down a couple  hundred dollars on a new GeForce will gain the full experience.  Best $200 I ever spent!"

Easy for him to say! Imagine an educator telling students, "to take the course you must own a desktop PC and have this graphic card, or buy one, for something you will never, ever do again while enrolled here."

I have begun to reply to this SLED participant several times by e-mail, but I don't think I could do so politely.

Clearly, this person has not recently taught at a college, where nearly all students employ laptops of various, and usually middling, sorts. Nor has this person taught at any K-12 schools, where budgets are strained and computer replacement cycles run in the five-year range. While volunteering at one middle school in our city, I found that to order a replacement USB mouse from Central Office took six weeks.

Sure. Drop in a new graphics card, class! While a professional might spend that amount for a desktop upgrade...let's be serious. This is not the voice of any educator I know.

So let's try this an a definition: an educator is someone who not only works in an educational setting, be it a lecture hall or a dining-room table. An educator also understands the facts on the ground in these settings: what students need, what they can or cannot do, their level of motivation.

I am sure that a student like Saj would find the money to buy a new graphics card, if that were what he needed to excel in his studies. But most of my charges? It would mean dropping the class at best, grumpily slogging along and slamming me in my evaluations, at worst.

Now here, from the same discussion, in the voice of an educator:

"Interestingly the lowest res graphics game ...Minecraft...is incredibly popular...I don't think kids expect good graphics as much as they expect engaging learning, challenges that are relevant to their lives and acceptance that the world today (Google and the information repository it can search in your pocket) is different from the world 50 years ago (where you had to remember a lot of stuff). "

A new graphics card is a pain in the butt; engaged learning will pull the learner alone to all sorts of challenges, including those posed by rapid technological change.

Why We Keep Inventing the Apocalypse

Location: Perfect June Day, Not a Zombie in Sight

What follows are a few reflections culled from a longer non-fiction piece I hope to publish in Richmond's alternative weekly, Style. Lately, I've been thinking of our nearly pornographic interest in the End Times. I've noticed over the years in Second Life how popular post-apocalyptic settings have been. They are also very popular in games. And while I've not read scholarship on this subject, I wonder about the continuing popularity among college kids of Cormac McCarthy's The Road in both book and film (see image above) versions.

I tend to prefer stories of rebuilding and survival, such as James Howard Kunstler's "World Made By Hand" novels or the second Mad Max film The Road Warrior. These sorts of invented worlds are a minority: of contemporary doomsday TV series, it seems that only "Revolution" is about the urge to remake the world after it falls apart.

So what makes these bleak futures the current staple of Hollywood, computer gaming, and so much of printed science fiction?  With series such as "The Walking Dead" a sub-genre of SF has gone mainstream. It's a recent phenomenon, too. In my copy of Brave New Worlds: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, editor Jeff Prucher finds that decade gave us the earliest coinages of the terms “post-apocalyptic,” “post-catastrophe,” and “post holocaust.” Not by accident do those neologisms parallel perceptions that America had entered a gradual decline. As the Rust Belt shed jobs until Detroit very much resembled a set from “The Walking Dead,” I find it curious that instead of the positive escapism that something like “Star Trek” offers, we went dark and largely have stayed there. Even George Lucas got bleak in its trilogy of prequels, a story bleaker than even the acting of Hayden Christensen as the young Darth Vader.

That's as far as I've gotten. Do post-apocalyptic settings give us freedom we lack in day-to-day life? Let us imagine a clean slate and a new start? Or are they just fun as hell, McCarthy's jet-black work excepted?

When a World-Builder Dies

Location: Marooned in a Campaign that Ended

Last week, Gary, a dear friend of 40+ years, passed away. He was a gamer of the old-school sort, and he'd been running RPG campaigns since the late 70s.  I'd never really joined him for MMO play, so my encounters were weekly "Nerd Nights" with dice, character sheets, rule books, and a great deal of unhip humor. Gary was a consummate world-builder, as all good game masters should be.

As Gary's health declined in recent years, his "runs" became a bit more formulaic, based upon TV shows, films, or even the online game Mass Effect, and they all got a lot darker. To be honest, much of the fun was gone at times, and non-player characters often rushed in for a deus-ex-machina finish.

Without Gary's presence, what becomes of the characters we players have nurtured over the years? And what of his voluminous notes and maps for various settings, from a vampire-haunted New Orleans to a bleak fantasy setting where, a millennium before, a Sauron-style figure won the final war between good and evil?

As the population of paper-and-dice gamers ages, the questions of "what to do with their invented worlds?" will arise more frequently. There's an academic point to be made here, but I'm in no mood to theorize. In Gary's case, we others in the gaming group have decided to honor his memory by keeping his worlds alive, at least for a time.

We will work to finish current story lines for a few campaigns and, in the bleak fantasy world noted, to finish the setting off by seeing how the characters fare, all rebels against "The Graven One" who has oppressed an entire continent for 1,000  years. Then there is a sprawling project called "Spaceship," in which Gary and I developed a science-fiction campaign of epic scope, spanning two galaxies with 5,000 years of backstory and focusing on the fates of the twin galaxies' alternate Earths. My half of that epic will continue, though without Gary, it will be a somewhat lonely venture.

In spite of the challenges, I'm looking forward to it. And somewhere beyond the veils of reality and illusion that separate this world from whatever else exists, I suspect that Gary is mightily pleased with us.

Breaking the String: Why Improv Acting Bridges Game and Story

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.

A Look Ahead: Virtual Worlds in Aerospace & Defense

 
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.

Do My Students Need a 3D Web?

 
Location: Certainty

image credit: Raph Koster, of Ultima Online, Metaplace, and more, via Cory Doctorow's Flickr Photstream

"No," seems to be the uniform answer. The reasons say a great deal about the directions in which virtual worlds may not evolve. I put the question of "why haven't we gotten something like Gibson's immersive Matrix?" to my first-year seminar class.

I'll paraphrase the answers the came back:

• Immersive engagement is best saved for when it is worth the extra work / software / time
• Students prefer easy applications done "on the fly." In other words, they don't need an avatar to check the weather or send a short text to a friend or a relative
• The less hardware needed, the better. Any rig like Case's would be tedious to use and hard to carry. An iPhone or similar fits into a pocket.

Would my students use a 3D experience? The answers here are complex. Yes, this group argued, for immersive gaming.  I don't know that current levels of virtual-world technology, with so much user-generated content, will ever enable that level of immersion. At best, they might make work for a class more fun.

We should look to other types of game-environments if we want something akin to Simstim or Case's rig. As I'll report soon, two technologists from a major defense contractor who spoke to VWER recently argued exactly that.

Will those emergent forms of 3D engagement replace our 2D Web? If my students are correct, no. It would, however, open worlds for gaming and for meetings, an ironic realization of Castronova's thesis that work and play will merge in the decades ahead. 

Some Martian Musings: Why I'm Not Visiting Blue Mars Yet

Location: New World Notes

image: "Arcadia's Boneyard," from BlueMarsOnline's Photostream

What a drama-fest Hamlet Au's decision to start a Blue-Mars blog has caused, with one grump calling him a "traitor." Au is just looking out for his career. If Blue Mars is an up-and-coming virtual world, and the maker, Avatar Reality, is willing to pay him for his reports, he needs to be over there.

Disclaimer: Prim Perfect pays me to report on OpenSim and other non-SL grids, so I may be kinder to Hamlet than are some of his regular readers. As for Blue Mars, I'll just have to take a look. Eventually. There are a few concerns I have about it, and if they are correct, this virtual world will never be good for educators.

Cross Platform Failure:

I suspect other OSes will come to Blue Mars, and while I won't visit or recommend any world to colleagues until I can do so without Bootcamp on my Mac, I'm not as harsh about it as some Mac-users. Avatar Reality picked a Windows-only game engine for their own reasons (their CEO is a Microsoft alum, one; they wanted a certain level of graphics performance, two). I'd prefer a cloud-based service for my students, anyhow; we have high-speed access everywhere on campus, and the kids want to do their projects on portable devices, not desktop PCs.

No In-World Content Creation:

The lack of content made in-world by end users has been more a detriment to me than the lack of a native Mac client. But I want to look to be sure. Builds like Usher, for all its warts, began with a team on computers together in SL, making the simulation together. I've spent over 200 hours on the project, and at least 50 of them were collaborative in our Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology with one or more students present.

I cannot imagine that sort of live building going on with me using a 3D tool, a student nearby using another to make objects, then having to log on to the world to see our work. As clumsy as it is in Second Life, building in-world has some amazing potential for collaboration, and collaboration trumps slick design for me every time.

My students shown here, for all their lack of building skills, stayed up until midnight with me to finish our builds in Fall 2008. They reported having a blast doing this, too.

Second Life and OpenSim permit amateurs in classes not dedicated to design to try their hand at building. That's a killer application of these platforms, and it would be impossible in Blue Mars.

Little Interest in Educators by Avatar Reality and Little Interest in Virtual Worlds by Evaluators:

Nowhere in the Avatar Reality's early materials did they court educators. Now I'm seeing a few nods to us in their FAQs. I'm pleased they have changed that.

Yet it appears, from the barriers to content creation alone, that Blue Mars is not going to be the platform for most of the educators I know, whose skill sets tend to be stretched even for prim-based work. Perhaps those of my colleagues at institutions with architecture, engineering, or large computer-science departments can find student assistants to make good content for Blue Mars. My local CS faculty grin about virtual worlds, and to be honest, the students think these worlds provide lame alternatives to gaming.

We faculty could hire Maya-skilled builders, or learn it, Sketchup, or Blender for builds in Blue Mars, if the interface is all that compelling. I may well begin learning Sketchup or Blender, even though the time required will be detrimental to professional development more readily accepted by my evaluators.

I'll see when Avatar Reality launches a Mac client or opens a cloud-based portal to their world. But like many colleagues, I'm not rewarded annually for learning new software unless it's directly related to teaching or scholarship. I can make the case just as well for having my students blog as for learning Maya, and the learning curve for blogging is infinitely shallower.

OpenSim as a Better Bet:

For now, and with grids like Reaction and Third Rock Grids courting educators, we could figure out how to host our simulations in OpenSim. We can keep meeting in SL and holding conferences there, given its proven ability to host events and conferences.

While the "Second Life" moniker has its own troubles, our colleagues and evaluators don't like the term "game" as it is, and that's how Avatar Reality markets its world.

So while I'm eager to see how stunning this SL competitor is, I don't think too many educators will be investing time or energy there. If you have experience in Blue Mars and an opinion on it for education, I'd love to know how it has gone for you.

September Roadtrip: Mini Me, Broken Road

Location: Rock-->me<--Hard Place

When I'm not on my bicycle, a Mini Cooper S is my favorite ride, a wicked-fast but economical rascal of a car. A scamp but not a cad. It has more personality than would be legal if boring people ran the world. Well, they do run it. . .but they've yet to ban this sort of frugal fun.

So I had to get a Mini in SL, eventually. Thanks to ALV Rau, I found a Cooper a lot like my RL car, though it's not an S model and lacks the black bonnet stripes and top that sold me on the actual vehicle. Caveat: I dislike red cars, but black is always in style and Mini Me is at least as much black as red. Visit AL Motors in-world to have a look at the typical (but well done) SL Supercars and other unique items, like a Seat 600 (Spanish version of one of my faves, a Fiat 500).

With high expectations, I set out. How did Rau's virtual Mini hold up in SL?

Well, size matters a lot. Compared to the '59 Caddy or the Dominus Shadow I often use for road trips, the Mini can turn on a virtual dime, a virtue that commended my RL car to me as well.

I began my journey at Yadni's Junkyard. I had high hopes of making this circumferential journey back to the same spot.



Rau's driving HUD was a welcome companion on this trip. I could shift, monitor my speed, and do other tricks without losing sight of my driving. It's not nearly as good as using a wheel and pedal that a dedicated game could have, but I'm fast-fingered and can manage a keypad and a mouse for this sort of experience.



The car's interior is also well done, and though not a perfect match for my actual Cooper it shows a lot of care on the builder's part.


Normally, that level of detail would making driving a virtual car an immersive experience, but the Department of Public Works was on lunch break, I reckon. The upgrade to Server 1.42 did not improve sim-crossing much. A few sims, at first, loaded so smoothly I had great hope. But then I came to it: world's end at the Calisto/Atlas sim crossing.



Stuck there, I did something I'd never dream of doing in my real car: I texted. Yes, I got on IM and began to rage against the stupidity of a company that could not get such a basic service to work, especially after spending untold hours of staff time building a highway network in a world where we can fly and teleport.

What can Linden Lab do? Well, fixing it would be a modest suggestion. Hamlet Au reports that Linden Lab has just hired a Kim Salzer, an "an alumnus [sic] of Activision/Blizzard and Electronic Arts" as the Lab's VP of Marketing. Good news, if the Lab wants to "game up" SL, but Ms. Salzer will need to get the coders working hard on fixing the physics of sim-crossings. Otherwise, even a single vehicle cannot make a short run through nearly empty sims.

Otherwise, don't market SL with images of racing vehicles. It won't happen without some major changes, and SL's fleet of cool vehicles will remain simply eye-candy for dream homes and RP sims.

I'll attempt the same route next month and see how it goes!

Bloodlines Silliness

Location: Shopping for Grave-Robber & Evil Doctor Tools

I was doing a bit of accessorizing for our university's House of Usher simulation when I stumbled into a Bloodlines' roleplaying region:

Vampire 1: What clan are you a part of

Vampire 2: santuary of darkness?

Ignatius Onomatopoeia: Academia...the undead. I'm here to shop

Vampire 1: Cool

Second Life...where the socializers and roleplayers rub shoulders with the shambling corpses from The Academy. Those vamps are lucky I didn't make an avatar out of my utterly evil Voodun cultist, Okonkwo Richelieu. I once ran him in Vampire the Masquerade and it was wicked fun.

Effective vampires do not say "cool." They say things like "it is going to be fun to see this city bleed on Mardi Gras."

Well, my next post will be about why contact with that social and RP aspect of SL may not be needed. Can faculty building a simulation simply do it without SL?

Two Ways to Play & Virtual Worlds

Location: Just Starting a New 1/72 Kit

Lately the blogs I follow have focused on ways to "save" Second Life. Tateru Nino riffed on Philip Rosedale's notion of "Fast, Easy, Fun" as the mantra for improving SL. I found a few lessons about retaining one's customer-base (albeit an aging one!) from my 40+ years building scale models.

So what does "fun" mean?

"Fun" comes in all forms. For online environments, the fun can be goal-oriented and rules-bound, as in games. It captures one of the two sorts of play academics talk about most often: the ludic. The latin word ludus fit both school and play, since schools were places where creative play prepared Roman youth for citizenship, war, and scholarly life.

On the other hand,the fun can be playful for its own sake, which often marks what happens in virtual worlds. Academics call that type of play, one that sparks improvisation and vision, paedeia.

There's a blurry line here, because a friend playing Lord of the Rings Online has greatly customized his avatar and often uses his in-world home for ad-hoc social gatherings unrelated to a current quest or battle. Likewise, areas of Second Life that emphasize roleplay can be very ordered and competitive.

A Lifelong Hobby

Virtual worlds with 3D content are young online environments. Their big challenge appears to be capturing and keeping customers. I got this reference, to a "two-year effect," care of Lalo Telling's blog. Do that many hobbies really hold a typical person's interest for only a year or so?

That's laughable to me, since many of the hobbyists I know have lifelong interests in restoring old cars, collecting farm equipment, or making organic gardens. In my case, it's a little of all of the above, plus building model kits and running face-to-face roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons.

Something about these activities holds the hobbyist a long time. Thus, virtual-world purveyors might think like Airfix, Tamiya, Revell, or Italieri, companies with a track record of immersing this customer and retaining his interest for so many years.

I've probably spent a good 1000 hours--more than 41 days of my life--making models since I first spilled glue all over a Jaguar E-Type, then sprayed enamel in my eyes on the night of the riots that followed Martin Luther King's murder. I recall that an actual doctor talked my mom over the phone, pro-bono, from the busy hospital as she rinsed my eyes out to the sound of glass breaking in the distance.

What a start to a hobby I never put away! I'll never win a contest, but my kits are good enough to "wow" non-modelers. In my undergraduate years the pastime became sporadic. In grad school I started building kits again, in part to forget the woes of living in a town I never loved, amid theory-spewing sycophants spouting Poststructuralist nonsense in the English department.

When I built a kit then, the banality of Bloomington, IN fell away. I was lost completely in a task, one requiring the type of focus that a Zen Master would recognize. Yet immersion in the task was only part of the fun for me.

Paideia & Ludus in 1/72 Scale

Modeling is rules-bound (fail to follow the instructions or mask before painting and you are usually doomed), so it predicates ludic play. Building models also involves the spontaneous and imaginative activities of paideia, when I scratch-build a part that the maker omitted, weather armor and ships so they look worn, and decide on modifications to capture a vehicle from my library of WW II books but not intended by the kit. This takes a type of artistic temperament to see analogues in real life and mix paints and apply materials that might include bits of actual mud or soot.

One key to keeping the kit-builder immersed in the hobby is the variety of subject. Experienced model-makers might have four P-51 Mustangs or Spitfires in the collection, but each of them is different. The range of subjects and challenges for a complex kit make the act of cementing polystyrene and painting it an ever-changing and often challenging task to one's mind and manual dexterity. I spent over two years, on and off, with a B-52D I figured I'd never see done. Now I'm ready for the next Mount Everest: a B-70 Valkyrie.

Beyond the craft of the kit itself lies the history of the subject. On my short-list of builds is the Airfix kit of the twin-engined Westland Whirlwind (one of the most graceful and least-known combat planes of the Second World War). Sadly, no Whirlwinds survived the scrap-metal drives of Postwar England, so when my kit of that subject gets done, I'll have created something that does not exist in nature.

Say, that should sound familiar to anyone who has spent enough time making, or marveling at, content in a virtual world.

Getting New Residents to Stay

Perhaps it's the lack of a ludic environment that leads newcomers to Second Life to say, so often, "so what do you DO here?" and then leave. If Linden Lab can focus on finding out what new users want in a virtual environment and then getting them immersed, they'll retain them for a while. Adding variety will retain them long-term.

The only problem of making the analogy to modeling or other "old-time" hobbies is that "old" bit. The irony is not lost on me that in many regards, model-making seems a dying hobby, unlikely to outlast Boomers and Xers again taking it up as they rediscover a few idle hours.

And so what? The companies can plan for another 30-40 years of sales and lay plans for whatever will attract a new generation, meanwhile. I probably spend $100 a year on models and supplies.

I'm guessing Linden Lab would just love that sort of assured revenue stream.

Update 8/3/10: I did some looking at Linden Lab's Destination Guide. See the next post for why I like it as a potential way to give SLers something to do in-world.

Thoughts about "Gaming Up" Second Life

Location: Making Stuff

What's the biggest difference between MMORPGs and virtual worlds? Making stuff. You can level up and buy things in a typical MMORPG, but you cannot make the world around you. That for me keeps me out of online gaming (though I'm considering buying an Xbox for driving and WW II air-combat games). My main games are face-to-face RPGs, often as the designer and GM for a campaign. I don't design too many game mechanics, but I do my own "sourcebooks." Essentially, that's been my calling in SL.

Of course, most of my fellow SLers are not builders or game masters. What will attract more of them? I want to riff off Scott Jennings' post on this topic (found via New World Notes). I fear that while I like most of his points (lower systems requirements, make the UI simpler) he misses the social aspect that keeps the demographic I know best--affluent 18-22 year olds--away from both virtual worlds and MMORPGs:

Serious games are for losers: that is the vibe on my campus and those of my colleagues. Gamer-kids make up at best 5% of my campus. I'm betting that outside of Computer Sci. and similar programs at larger schools, that's also the percentage. They've also been warned by adults for years some version of "game a lot and you'll never work a real job. You'll fail out of college, live in a basement, and clerk in a convenience store, if you are lucky."

I'm betting that, given the oft-reported plateau in World of Warcraft registrations, that they've reached geek-saturation. Mainstreamers on this campus will play console games, casual games, but not MMORPGs or, for that matter, play in virtual worlds. They lack time and the stigma of being "too into it" is too strong.

College kids already have avatars: themselves. The mainstream kids I know--this is an affluent campus--live avatarian lives already, thanks to parent-granted credit cards, nice cars, and weekend social scenes that rival Cancun's. The time required for serious gaming takes away from that and FaceBook, a time-hog if ever there were one, facilitates real-life contacts and rewards that bolster their social lives. No magical sword or cyber-hookup can compare. I'm betting that at larger and more economically diverse campuses, students have other distractions, such as jobs off campus, but also put real-life socializing, augmented by social networking, ahead of games or anything like them.

In addition to those two observations, Scott also skips a few key aspects that make SL hard to "game up":
Virtual women are not (all) fat guys. I'd argue that a key demographic for Second Life consists of women who do not want to shoot stuff. Linden Lab will have to depend on its users to make games, since they don't do that sort of in-world content; the Lab makes infrastructure. Games to emerge need to involve puzzles and adventure more than hack-and-slash, and I base that claim on statements by actual women, academic and otherwise, who use the world socially.

I love the meme of "fat naked man in basement" as much as the next geek, but it's a stereotype of SLers and, for that matter, for many gamers. We need to lose it when we speak seriously about attracting and retaining an audience.

Sex sells, but only for a while. Sex is already a big in-world game, even though college kids seem bored or frightened of that aspect of SL. So I'm betting that the wistful (or cloying: you choose) promo for SL with the starry-eyed couple on the Eiffel Tower was aimed squarely at "the bored housewife," another demographic often used as a meme about SL.


I bet that, in a year, that guy will forget to put the seat down at night, too.

While such residents exist, does the allure of cyber-romance have enough staying power to keep a hobbyist occupied for more than a year or two? The only SLers I know from this demographic have left it because of boredom, what Richard Bartle calls "drift" in his book Designing Virtual Worlds. So while sex sells, the world has to offer more than that. Bartle says it well; to be really popular such venues need "content so potent that people can be quite willing--indeed, positively enthusiastic--to repeat an experience over and over again."

Game it up the right way. Linden Lab has flailed around this issue, trying to promote SL by linking it to Avatar, then to the Twilight books and films. With a grid this big, if the Lab put some energy into themed gaming region where tier and lag were low, then invited the best content creators to build the initial infrastructure, they might have a hit on their hands. And get the physics to work, too: driving in Second Life is laughable. Why build those Linden roads if one cannot use them smoothly?

When Linden Lab has an intuitive UI, preferably Web-based, they need some splash. Perhaps some real cash prizes, in the $5-$25K range (chump change for a company like theirs), for a "SL Idol" contest? They could promote this in more mainstream venues; right now their ads only reach a niche audience.

The way it is, but better? Linden Lab has a product that cannot easily--as currently construed--become Left for Dead, World of Warcraft, or Eve Online. The Mainland continents could become a sort of "Lifestyles of the Virtually Glamorous," which has been enough to keep The Sims franchise going strong. Caveat there: my students look at The Sims as a game for teenage girls.

That is not the demographic that "Ancient1," who replied to Scott Jennings' original post, sees This SLer runs a business serving "tens of thousands" of SL residents:

My experience has been that I am predominantly meeting working class family people over 35 years old who pay for land and services in Second Life because its their part time hobby to be in a virtual world. You could say its an escape for folks who work hard, have life and family stress like we all do, and login to Second Life to just “drift off” for awhile in another world.

I agree. Most of my social interactions outside academia have been with folks who have good computers but not always the right educations to wield power and influence in the ever-more-stratified US meritocracy. They use social media often as much as my students, but they do not have the casual social lives that college kids experience, often into their late 20s. The older users who typify the SL base are smart and well spoken, but cannot own Harleys and go on exotic vacations. Maybe they want to play a warrior or a vampire for a while.

SL could then be their "game." How Linden Lab keeps that audience coming is beyond me. Perhaps the mass audience will never exist, as it does for Facebook. Erik Sass' post on the continuing existence of SL among a niche audience takes a contrary view :

In this arena a small, highly-engaged niche audience may be more valuable than a large, apparently indifferent one (Facebook, I'm looking in your direction).

Right now we cannot even keep the educators in SL, as we realize lower costs and more freedom to host and back up content exist on OpenSim grids.

Why Second Life Cannot be a Game: Fast? Furious? Fun?

Location: Reading Savage Worlds Rulebook

image: Heroes Over Europe Console/PC Game

I'm an old-school paper-and-dice gamer, and there's a move afoot in the world of such games to make playing and game-mastering simpler tasks. There's a lesson in here for virtual worlds, if they ever aspire to become gamelike.

Savage Worlds from Pinnacle Games is a result of that impetus, and I'm pleased with how the rules flow. It's the first game book I've bought in several years (the low price helps) but mostly I picked it up because I wanted to see how, in detail, the rules work. With the one exception of how to spend experience points, I found all I needed very quickly. In fact, the entire book could be read through in a few casual sittings, because the emphasis of Savage Worlds is, to quote them "Fast! Furious! Fun!"

The old saws that games must have goals and rewards, winners and losers, and set rules are not quite enough. Those parameters can be forced on a virtual world. But will the result be fast, furious, and fun?

Fast: Fail

If Linden Lab or others running virtual worlds derived from Second Life want gamers, either my sort or those playing MMORPGs, "fast" is going to be a chore. Hamlet Au recently declared that "SL is a primarily a game and entertainment platform," and if so, it's not a good one for the sort of games I would wish to play.

Consider the recent snafu in SL combat sims caused by Linden Lab's server upgrade. The Alphaville Herald covered it in detail, but the comments are worth reading. Players of "real games" note the the lag of fighting in SL makes it ridiculous. One should not have to roleplay around an arrow stuck in mid-air by lag.

Furious: Fail

It may have been possible before Linden Lab's policies over OpenSpace pricing led to the closure of all water sims that were perfect for naval or air combat. I'd read that the combatants from Caledon took their air battles to Crimson Skies and retained SL for its roleplaying strengths.

Mass battles, then, are no longer possible. So Linden Lab is stuck with a roleplaying platform that is lousy for combat. Even I have played enough first-person shooters to know how lousy SL's mouseview is for that sort of play.

I should go back to Deadwood or Tombstone and have a few gunfights again, just to test whether any improvement have taken place since I last tried. But the quality of the graphics and the squeaky-clean results of being shot deterred me from continuing.

As for larger fights, unless the Lab is willing to recreated a few Outlands sims that are essentially water or desert so the Goreans, the Steampunks, and the WW II roleplayers can have mass battles (if they could, even in a desert) I don't see how SL will ever compete with dedicated games for combat. So SL fails the "furious" test that Savage Worlds and most online games pass so well.

Fun: Good for Now

Roleplay demands more than fighting, of course, and here SL's user-generated content comes in handy; games generally do not offer that. That remains the "fun" for gaming in SL, but if a competitor can reduce lag and permit UGC to a degree that game masters and builders like, Linden Lab's cash-cow, the roleplaying community, may leave.

I'm done trying to tell folks "Second Life is not a game." I'll instead say, it's a place you can build games, but don't expect the games to be very good if you want more than a few players involved. It's fine for roleplay, and if you want to add sex to your roleplay you'll find a lot of options."

Do Educators Need Games?

Gaming has gradually gained respect in K-12 and higher education. I attended two panels at the 2010 Conference on College Composition and Communication dedicated to gaming, much of it World of Warcraft. Today's serious interest in ludology can be traced to the work of a few scholars such as James Paul Gee (see his What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy). PhD dissertations on gaming are in the works, and small interdisciplinary programs are dedicated to the academic study of gaming and gamer-culture.

We academics do need simulations, and we can use roleplay in creative ways.

Yet even for a simulation, SL does not permit historians to use interactive learning for my favorite topic, military history.

We cannot, say, have 200 participants to recreate one of Stonewall Jackson's small-unit battles from the Shenandoah Valley, or simulate a "box" of Schweinfurt-bound B-17s attacked by a squadron of Focke-Wulf 190s.

Luckily for humanity, not all of our history involves battle. One can easily use SL for an immersive roleplay of the trial of Socrates, with some students doing research to build an approximation of the building where Athens' Assembly met. Others could design clothing and props.

We could build Independence Hall and reenact the debate over the Declaration of Independence. We could do many more thinks, and good work, such as the WWI Poetry simulation, are there to guide us.

But these simulations are not exactly "games." And that accounts for one reason college students don't return to SL after classes end. They have rich social lives; they don't need roleplay and for most of the ones I teach, gaming provides a break from their grind of academic work and heavy responsibility (God, is it heavy) to fit in and be social. Except for the dedicated gamers, they are not playing World of Warcraft or other MMORPGs.

SL does not, and may not be able, to provide the sort of gaming experience my students enjoy outside of class. You'll find those games in our Commons and in their dorm rooms, a Wii or XBox 360 console.

Hmm...how about that Blazing Angels: Squadrons of World War Two? Now that might get me to pick up a console. I'm sure not going to fly a Mustang or Corsair in SL anytime soon.