The Metaverse Blog

Boing Boing: The girl with the DVD face brings to mind previous discussions about the Uncanny Valley. An excerpt about the DVD girl:

The life-size, made-to-order (...) mannequin [has] a face that is an empty screen until turned on to play DVD images from inside the body. If one is in the mood for conversation, sound can come from a separate speaker. "It is a device that can show a person's face, looks and mouth movements," said the developer, Ishikawa Optics and Arts Corp. of Tokyo. "It forms realistic images as if he or she were really talking to you."

leadership for games, games for leadership

Education Leadership and Policy Analysis - games as a potential for learning environments to teach expertise. Practical wisdom cf Aristotle. Expertise is particular, moral, and acquired over long periods of time. How can you learn wisdom. Can we design learning environments which give us access to "general rules of expertise".

Computer and console games are our generational rorschach test. To traditional school leadership, games are the devil. How can we bring games into the places where we've already invested sums = schools. Public schools isn't broken overall.. but it has problems. Better at quality than at equity (?). Innovation happens, but spread of innovation is very limited. Systemic changes are resisted by school leaders, especially with gaming.

problems with gaming are: (1) games are the new porn (2) NCLB represents quality control through standardization, which means loss of innovation.

Rewarding curricular innovation
Games are Social and technical transfer systems - how much of the game is learning to play the game. Games have a vocabulary and a commitment that is impossible to adapt without a whole community built around it. They don't "fit" right now into the leadership in schools - there is no experience with these school leadership with games, and no way to discuss the game as a normal part of daily life.

Can you use a game to capture the model of implementing expert -level change, for example in a school? This would be more interesting than a report that outlines the details of how the change happened.

Gaming for instructional leadership. Design goal - what is the correct representation for teaching school leaders how to implement systemic change. It is difficult for them to focus on improvement. How do you manage your time so you can do this.

Need a sandbox for school leaders to practice theories. Learn leadership practice from a game. How to communicate achieved wisdom and strategies. (sounds like that DAR from Civ talk earlier) - an assessment. Make sure the model really models accurately the things that really would help a school (verisimilitude).

Goes through game design and some of the factors that go into planning a game like this. What are the strategies, resources (i.e "hire new teacher"), goals (i.e. "focus on reading").

battery low, logging out.

Civ 3, Apolyton University. Getting beyong the factory model. Factory model imeans ushering students through & dump as many facts on the students, Divide content up, organizing content, exposeure to content. Hypothesis: this isn't a great model for education.

Skills in the workplace require something different than factory model. Apolyton U is compelling model. Particpatory, self-organizing, international.

Sim City - culture simulation. Using game as teaching tool is missing the point. (Paul Starr 1995)

enculturation

models, simulations - examples: social security modelling, weather prediction. This is how we make arguments today, so it's important that people have a good idea about how to argue/think using models.

rabbits and foxes model is an "idea simulation" - emergent phenomena that you can't nec. see with predictions.

civ3 as a geo-political simulation. compare to Guns Germs and Steel.

Emerging paradox-? games are learning machines, but there are certain contexts for games, so we need to study HOW game communities function, how do players use the games, rather than just the mechanics of the games themselves.

apolyton.net - site for making better civ3 players. Community of assessment and formative evalutaion?? School of strategy, sharpen civ3 skills. Sharing is encouraged. Message board format. Strategy comparisons. Experts judge work.

(sidenote: as with open source development, it can be intimidating to share your work and get feedback on it.)

collective intelligence centered around a war college and boot camp.

shows timeline of AU growth: AU 101 first course. Committee structure & community organization. Creation of Dean. Do we still need a dean. (creating a history, documenting)

Description of the "During Action Report":
The reporting and reflection that takes place in describing their play is useful. Ask questions, get responses from experts. Experts describe the process of thinking through. Critical thinking.

emergence of technical terms (side note: same with spoiler community, or any other tight culture/subculture) Terms have an idea history with them, a whole culture to them.

Example: Alex's archer rush (sidenote: reminds me of the Schwartzian transform in perl coding?? etc)

This is basically a structure for evaluating learning in a game -- an assessment mechanism in a particular medium (a game)

Focus on design knowledge that is gained by using an experience like AU, or by experiencing the DAR and the community of mentors.

interview question: do you ever draw comparisons between current events and a civ game. Shows some examples of people who play this game talking about current events and translating to current cultures.

What got you interested in history?

AU functions as a site ushering participants from users to designers.

similar to spoiler sites, the AI designers will come to the AU and participate, leave clues, etc.

Civ4 came out, so this changed the community fundamentally. Mods from the community have been implemented in Civ4. Also, their version of the "fetid inner core" (cf Second Life) has happened - the creme de la creme of AU has been courted into Civ4.

There is a competing university called Civilation Fanatics Center. Own courses, own strategies. But you can trace some ideas from one university to another.

Other games that employ this model: Madden (maddenwars2005). Elaborate anti-cheat rules. This indicates design expertise. Which is another example of transfer from user to designer.

4 gamers for every golfer (based on game co statistic that 50% of americans play video games - find this stat)

Star Wars 3 movie - $50m on 5/22/2005
Spiderman 2 - $116m June 30-July 2 2004
Halo 2 - $125m on 11/4/2004 opening day

People prefer active entertainment. Types of active entertainment games:

Synthetic world players: 10 m
Real money trade: $100m - $1b (selling things between players, sometimes for real money, either black/grey market on ebay or on sites like slexchange)
GDP per capita of Norrath: $2000
GDP per capita of China: $500

Mentions Julian's study of making money in Ultima OnlinePlay Money

Thesis: synthetic world literacy is an important life skill. In 20 years, the ability to make things and participate in a synthetic world will be mandatory.

We're in an era of mandatory change. But these changes are unlikely to come from the large-scale private sector.

"If Rousseau and Marx had had synthetic worlds to experiment in, they might have paused before making policy recommendations".

"How do you construct incentives so that interactive software arrives on campus?"

Social Science Supercolliders

Where do you get the money to build a social science supercolliding superconductor? Donations, appropriations, tuition, grants. Who are the decisionmakers: professors, agencies, foundations. Deans and presidents, legislature (note: state schools), patrons, benefactors, trustees (angel investors).

This is a continuation of the livebloggin of the GLS conference. I'm in Session 3 on Thursday, which is called Innovation in Game Design. First up is Brian Green.

Death of games. What is going right with games. Sales are up, compared to other media (movies).

Games are expressive medium. Need balance between need to express and need to make money. Innovation is dying. Losing our history (hardware issues) - hard to play classic games.

Hard to sell an independent game now. Too expensive.

Budgets are expensive for creating a high-end game. $5m. Hardware concerns. Large companies are risk-averse. Fickle market. Distribution and publication rules and deal-making is very hard.

Can independent developers bring back innovation and revitalize the expressive side of gaming. Independent is someone who is divorced from the publication game.

Independents can't ignore money (side note: what about the open source model why can open source independent developers build an OS or a word processor or whatever but can't build a game? UPDATE: He answers this below...)

Marketing is hard.

PC gamers are becoming console gamers, and console dev kits are expensive.

Internet distribution has difficulties

2d games are old-fashioned, but 3d games are expensive.

"Open source doesn't work for games." Art is too expensive. Need strong central vision. Lack of creativity - clones are not creative.

IP issues: loading screen games (tiny games that play while the game loads).

Games as "expression" is a difficult proposition if commercial concerns stifle art, stifle creativity.

URLs Mentioned: Garage Games Gamers Info

James Paul Gee's talk.

Begins describing two crises:

(1)4th grade slump - reading crisis

(2) college slump: standardized jobs go overseas. Value-add in our economy comes from doing job w/ innovation, creativity, rather than straight standardization. Education system crisis in producing non-creative, non-innovative citizens. Public school system = skill-and-drill, memorization, "the basics".

(1) is the old crisis. (2) is the new crisis, this is the one we'll be facing in 20 yrs. Most focus will be on #2.

A few words about the 4th grade slump. Must prepare children early for the very complex demands on language that the subject matter will make. shows YuGiOh cards. Pop culture can require complex language skills. 7-year old kids will fight over the rules and read these complex cards. How will we take to school the complicated language that students get in their own YGO cards.

College slump problem.

Testing regime. Stupid tests. Assessment is important. But it better be the right assessment. Imagine a game that scored you with a MC test. Ha.

Shows Rise of Nations Assessment. Fun assessment. Statistical assessment of performance. Creates numeracy, as a side-note. Formative assessment - meant to help you get better. If you were to use this for evaluative assessment, it would work as well. Ideal assessment tool. Evaluating people and getting them help. Did you get a better strategy for winning after looking at these graphs?

Age of Mythology example. Community organized around affinity group (game is the common endeavor, not age, sex, race, etc). Share common space b/t players. Contributing content, not just consuming. This leads to more reading, more intensive and extensive knowledge. (interesting)

--Organization in game space is very different than organization in traditional classroom.

--No one wants to play a game where there is no learning.

How do we learn in a game?
Produce (!)
Customize (!)
Identify - feeling like a scientist, feeling like a ___ (creating identity). Schools don't give an identity other than the one you already have. Or, in a best-case scenario, a student will want to become a teacher. That is the only model.
Interact
Well-ordered problems
Pleasantly frustrating
Challenge and consolidation (cycle of expertise)
On demand, and just in time
Do, not just talk
Systematic thinking
Encourage risk
Explore, think laterally, rethink goals - new view of intelligence (not fast, but efficiency in a new way, laterally thinking, strategic thinking)

Can you transfer the knowledge and the thinking skills. With standardized education, we're teaching standardized skills that can't be transferred.

I'm here at the Games, Learning and Society conference in Madison, WI. I'm live-blogging the conference, as best as I can.

So far, some observations: lots of Mac laptops here. Conference is sold out. Wifi access in hotel is expensive, flaky, but ultimately necessary and useful.

First session: Henry Jenkins & James Paul Gee on Pop Culture and Life as We Know it.

A very nice introduction by David Shaffer. First part of first session is "Pop Cosmopolitanism", a title which takes me like 20 seconds to type :) and that's the abbreviated title.

Story begins in Japan, Yoyogi Park. They have a "fan district". Flow of asian media into American pop culture. Pop culture reciprocity is strong b/t these 2 countries. Anime. Hip Hop (body modification via sunlamps in Japan to become more 'african-american'). Cosplay - "costume play" - japanese girls dressing like manga characters. A type of performance art? (shows video) Process of constructing identities. Shows clip of 17-yr old talking about fascination with Japanese culture, costuming, language. (sidenote: note importance of crafting by participants in this genre). He notes connection between play and learning. Bootstrap pop culture. "Biggest thrill in cosplay con is getting appreciation from others who recognize who you're dressed as and like it" (paraphrase)

Another "imaginary environment" ("yankees") - perform Japanese version of American rockabilly in a tribal community, elvis garb. This community has symbolic rank and hierarchy (red jacket). Strong melding of American and Japanese pop cultures.

Another segregated area of park is a sort of "boy band land" where they practice dance moves. Tapping American pop culture for fantasies that feed back into Japanese pop culture. Hybridity.

Animatrix. Re-enactments of the Matrix. Manga LOTR.

Consuming the culture of another society. Hunger to escape parochialism of own culture. How is media literacy related.

mentions Steven Johnson's book "Everything Bad is Good for You". Complexity in media and pop culture: visual style, simultaneity, narrative complexity, paradigmatic complexity (pokemon), cognitive complexity (games), cultural complexity (mixing and matching of cultures - Tears of the Black Tiger). How have we reached a point where we can feel inferior to pop culture. Not "getting" the matrix. Why. Are we getting smarter?

possibilities:
--Distributing our cognition to devices helps us manage our information better
--Collected intelligence - wikipedia, etc - projects like this allow us to arrive at consensus and appear "smarter" than we would if we were on our own trying to solve the matrix.

example: survivor spoiling. (sidenote: Refers to spoilers as a single group. There are actually dozens of these groups.)

example: i love bees. collaborative problem solving. Collaboration competency.

Independent media will need to change to the grassroots. New media production. (sidenote: bittorrent) alternatives to mainstream Hollywood. Many examples of (young esp) people taking advantage of hybridity and collaboration, distributed, multi-channel modes of communication, appropriation (remixing), apprenticeship in preparation for original authorship.

-->push pull b/t high tech and low-fi. Sense of authenticity coming from creating by hand. Crafting(!)

poor school performance in traditional schools. Lots in homeschools. Use of digital tech in homeschools is strengthening. Central to process.

Kaiser family study on children's use of different media. (under 6 years old)

Media literacy is still based on receiver-based model, rather than participatory model (creator-model). Can we focus on shaping the message. (sidenote: this reminds me of the difference between learning the skills of "reading comprehension" and "debate". Debating is a participatory and constructive skill, reading comprehension is a receiver-oriented skill.)

Concludes with recommendations for media literacy, focuses on distribution, choice, assessment, appropriateness, participation.

Participation gap.

I created a handout to accompany the presentation (PDF | HTML) at Games, Learning, and Society 1.0 conference next week.

This document will be updated on occasion (note version in upper-right corner of the first page), and I've also added links to the right-hand side of this page.

It's released under Creative Commons license.

O'Reilly's Make News (Make magazine) tipped me off to this neat blog posting by Ulla-Maaria Mutanen, a Finnish crafter. As Make says... "[she] has written a crafter's manifesto, a blend of entrepreneurship and the Enlightenment. We couldn't have better expressed some of joys we get from making things..." (Make magazine is, of course, about building cool geek toys and such.)

1. People get satisfaction for being able to create/craft things because they can see themselves in the objects they make. This is not possible in purchased products.

2. The things that people have made themselves have magic powers. They have hidden meanings that other people can't see.

3. The things people make they usually want to keep and update. Crafting is not against consumption. It is against throwing things away.

4. People seek recognition for the things they have made. Primarily it comes from their friends and family. This manifests as an economy of gifts.

5. People who believe they are producing genuinely cool things seek broader exposure for their products. This creates opportunities for alternative publishing channels.

6. Work inspires work. Seeing what other people have made generates new ideas and designs.

7. Essential for crafting are tools, which are accessible, portable, and easy to learn.

8. Materials become important. Knowledge of what they are made of and where to get them becomes essential.

9. Recipes become important. The ability to create and distribute interesting recipes becomes valuable.

10. Learning techniques brings people together. This creates online and offline communities of practice.

11. Craft-oriented people seek opportunities to discover interesting things and meet their makers. This creates marketplaces.

12. At the bottom, crafting is a form of play.

What does this have to do with the Metaverse, you ask? Well, (1) Second Life is all about user-created content, and one of the reasons we study Second Life is because of all the great "studiable" things that happen in a user-centric creation environment. (2) Similarly to Democratizing Innovation by Eric Von Hippel [also an amazon link], I'm thinking about the positive economic impacts that come about by users "crafting" or "innovating" or whatever you want to call it... especially using technology to do so, and especially-especially doing it in virtual communities.

From Second Life to Skype to Rheingold & virtual communities, this Business Week article (!!) pretty well sums up what the entire GST 364 course was/is about. YAY! A great intro article! Next, go to the wiki.

This is brilliant and covers exactly where we want to go with this course in the future. TheFeature :: Technologies of Cooperation: A Map To a Toolkit - click on the "visual map" to see the whole thing. It's simple and covers pretty much everything from the GST 364 course. Thank you Howard Rheingold & IFTF (Institute for the Future).

The value and peril of negative feedback is discussed here. Many-to-Many: Ebay Neg Tool: Cat-Mouse Reputation Problems

IFTF's Future Now: Gaming economies going legit - this is a nice summary of the salient issues from the NYT article on the same. There is also a comparison with The Sims online, a competitor to Second Life.

Boing Boing: Creepy cat robot from Japan - uncanny valley mentioned.

I know this posting is a little late, but I've been catching up!

User generated content reaches Half-Life. Residents have fun making stuff. Surprise, surprise. Boing Boing: "Falling dominoes" in Half-Life Second Life mentioned.

New World Notes: BUSINESS MODEL PROTOTYPE is an article about a very interesting new gadget/business in Second Life:

First, what is the gadget?
Timeless Prototype’s Multi Gadget, a kind of nuclear-powered PDA utility that clips onto your ear, and comes with over 60 unique commands-- sort of an in-world Swiss army knife for just about every experiential aspect of Second Life. For futuristic combat roleplay, say, there’s a tear gas canister that knocks everyone in the vicinity in all directions, and an instant jail that materializes around the owner; for builders, there's several varieties of insta-bridge which appear at your feet, at a single-word request; for scripters, an “I’m busy scripting” thought bubble that appears above your head, so you can work in peace; for general fun, a giant lightshow that materializes in a single-word command. And so on.

Why is this so interesting?
But what really impressed me was Timeless’ business plan for the Multi Gadget, the end result of a year researching the market, and what worked within it.

“Basically I've been exploring various business models in SL since I joined,” he explains. In the beginning, “I actually paid people to bring knowledge to me… it was a general request for information. When it came back to me, I would assess the usefulness of it and tip accordingly.” So when someone clued him in on a new club, for example, he spotted them with an L$ kicker.

The author (Hamlet Linden) is saying that this is interesting from a business start-up point of view. True, but what was more interesting to ME, as an academic researcher and someone who assigned Snow Crash last winter was the statement in bold above. To me, this strategy for aggregating and spreading information sounds a lot like Hiro's job of "CIC Stringer".

The article goes on to discuss other business models within Second Life. This is a very good overview article on starting a SL business.