Wimbledon goes virtual. IBM is again showcasing the concept of bring live sports data into virtual environments, this time with Wimbledon. As IBM provides all the technology for scoring, content presentation etc for the real version of Wimbledon, it makes sense in this context to bring it into Second Life.
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Saturday, 30 June 2007
Wimbledon goes virtual
Munich City In Second Life
Munich City. The trend of using Second Life to re-create real world destinations shows no signs of slowing down.
The latest project comes from Germany and is Virtual Munich. The centre of the city is being built and matched against a 2D street plan. Adopting similiar business models to Dublin and Galveston Island, the plan behind this project is to rent out space on the island commercially and possibly residentially.
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Friday, 29 June 2007
Serious Virtual Worlds ‘07 Conference - New website with draft programme
Serious Virtual Worlds ‘07
First International Conference on the Professional Applications of Virtual Worlds.
13 – 14 September 2007
The Serious Games Institute
Coventry TechnoCentre,
Coventry, UK
http://www.seriousvirtualworlds.net/
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Money and banking in online games
Anyone who’s ever played a roleplaying game for any amount of time will tell you stories about their money. Maybe it’s how they had to grind 500 sewer rats to pay for their new wooden sword, or maybe they were up for 9 days solid in some obscure part of the world where “no one’s ever been” collecting a rare harvested material to price gouge in the marketplace to fund that new mount. Whatever the details are, it becomes very obvious that people treat their in-game money just as defensively (or even more defensively for the younger age groups who don’t have as much experience with earned “real”-life currency) as they treat the money they earn in their real jobs. Many players don’t even realize that they’re actively contributing to an economy that lives, breaths, and behaves just as one would expect under “real”-world conditions; they just want that new piece of gear, or to repair the gear that they’ve been fighting in for the last 12 hours solid.
Virtual money, just like the currencies used to fund nations in the “real” world, can be explained using extremely rudimentary economic concepts. The models of markets, of supply and demand shocks, of counterfeiters and others can all be used with some accuracy to predict (with varying accuracy) fluctuations in the economic conditions of a game world. However, there are several things which are markedly missing from today’s role-playing environments that any real, sustainable, thriving economy should have, and this does much to undermine the day-to-day reality of the game itself.
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Oakland: Video Game Aims to Revive Community
The past is always with us. For the city of Oakland, CA, it's about to come alive online in a way that could enrich public discussions of today's local development concerns.
UC Berkeley journalism professor Paul Grabowicz recently won a $60,000 Knight News Challenge grant to fund the development of an online video game, Remembering 7th Street, that recreates Oakland's jazz and blues club scene from the 1940s and 50s.
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http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/jazzclubs/
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Welcome to Fatworld! Experience Refreshing Moral Discomfort!
Ian Bogost likes to play with failure. The 30-year-old Georgia Tech professor designs popular Web games powered by sarcasm and social commentary. In his latest, Fatworld, players navigate a consumer paradise (A), rule their own empire of restaurants and convenience stores (B), and enjoy food allergies, diabetes, heart disease, and death (C).
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Thursday, 28 June 2007
"Gaming Literacy" Wave of the Future?
The MacArthur Foundation is putting $1.1 million behind the idea that “normal” literacy is old hat—dynamic “gaming literacy” is the wave of the future.
An NPR report by games journo Heather Chaplin yesterday said that The MacArthur Foundation would be putting the funding towards a brand new middle and high school in New York. The curriculum would be based on videogames.
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Operation: Pedopriest
Molleindustria, the Italian group that makes political online games and had previously produced a blistering game critique of the ecology and economy of McDonald's, has a new offering available.
Operation: Pedopriest is a game that satirizes the cover-ups of the Catholic Church of child sexual abuse by clergy. Since Molleindustria has produced games with titles such as "Orgasm Simulator" and "Queer Power," it's clearly not their first game about sexual politics, although Pedopriest is very different from previous depictions of sexuality by the company that focus on consensual couplings between relative equals. In the game, players can deploy red-garbed "Silencers" to intimidate and distract potential witnesses while molesting priests evade arrest.
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Wednesday, 27 June 2007
World of Borecraft - Never play a video game that's trying to teach you something.
Ever since video games were invented, parents and teachers have been trying to make them boring. Any child of the 1980s and 1990s will remember Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and Math Blaster Mystery: The Great Brain Robbery, games that promised to make skills acquisition fun. They'll also remember ditching Mavis Beacon for something with guns as soon as their parents' backs were turned. Making games educational is like dumping Velveeta on broccoli. Liberal deployment of the word blaster can't hide the fact that you're choking down something that's supposed to be good for you.
With video games starting to eclipse movies in revenues and popularity, the educational-gaming movement has gone into overdrive. Industry bigwigs and civic-minded intellectuals are increasingly peddling the idea that video games can cure society's ills. There's a booming subgenre of games, like the Nintendo DS title Brain Age, that claim to stave off senility via simple puzzles and arithmetic problems. A Harper's cover story last year asked whether video games were the best way to teach kids to read. (Short answer: maybe.) There's even a D.C.-based group called the Serious Games Initiative that advocates for "a new series of policy education, exploration, and management tools utilizing state of the art computer game designs." Take that, Reader Rabbit!
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Tuesday, 26 June 2007
The future of the web and media
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Monday, 25 June 2007
Today’s tutorial will take place on the virtual beach
The real thing may be a pasty-faced, greasy-haired science student but on a virtual campus he could be an Adonis.
Increasing numbers of British universities are setting up shop in Second Life, the virtual world where users can design exactly how they look – and where the educational establishments say that there are boundless new opportunities for teaching and research.
At Edinburgh University, one of the first in Britain to build its own island there, students from all around the world take part in tutorial groups sitting on a virtual beach around a campfire.
Andy Powell, of the research foundation Eduserv, which has commissioned a £300,000 research project on education in new virtual worlds, said that online universes were emerging as a cutting-edge teaching tool, using virtual classrooms to do things that may be dangerous, expensive or simply impossible in the real world.
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Games technology for historical visualization and archeological modeling
http://musematic.net/?p=194
http://www.romereborn.virginia.edu/
http://www.londoncharter.org/
http://www.cvrlab.org/
http://polo.services.brown.edu:8080/exist/monarch/index.html
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"Real Lives": Learning about world cultures, one life at a time
My name is Manal. I am a six year old girl in Syria. I have an older brother and three older sisters. My mother and father are salespeople. We are sunni muslims. Tomorrow I begin school...
So begins the life of my new character in the game "Real Lives" put out by Educational Simulations. A turn-based single-player game that uses real world statistics, the goal is simply to live the life of someone from birth to death. Bob Runyon of Ed Sim was kind enough to let me try out a copy of the game, after meeting him at Games for Change last week.
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serious games
Sunday, 24 June 2007
A Job Interview You Don't Have to Show Up For
It's now possible to meet with recruiters without actually showing up for a job interview.
Some employers are experimenting with Second Life, the online virtual community owned by San Francisco-based Linden Lab, to screen prospective hires. The program allows job seekers to create a computer-generated image to represent themselves -- known as an "avatar" -- and communicate with executives of prospective employers as though they were instant-messaging.
A number of big companies put the new medium to a test last month, when recruitment-advertising firm TMP Worldwide Advertising & Communications LLC hosted a virtual job fair with employers such as Hewlett-Packard Co., Microsoft Corp., Verizon Communications Inc. and Sodexho Alliance SA, a food and facilities-management services company. TMP says it will host another virtual job fair in August.
The use of Second Life for recruiting marks yet another way that employers are incorporating popular Web sites into their talent searches. Employers have already set up pages for prospective hires on Facebook, the popular social-networking site, and have posted recruitment videos on Google Inc.'s YouTube, the video-sharing site. Some companies troll for prospective job candidates on News Corp.'s MySpace social-networking site.
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Saturday, 23 June 2007
Playing Well With Others
Cambridge, Mass. -- Martin T. Koszewski, 44, one of International Business Machines Corp.'s top salesmen, is wearing a navy-blue suit, burgundy tie and white shirt for his daily meetings with top computer buyers at mutual-fund giant Fidelity Investments.
But on his computer he is a master of the social-networking tools that are increasingly popular with a less staid set. When he flips open his laptop, he instant-messages with the fervor of a teenage girl. He has an avatar in the virtual community Second Life, which he has used to help with a sales pitch. He has a personal page in IBM's BluePages -- a kind of corporate equivalent of MySpace.com.
To its supporters, social software is a simple-to-use solution to many of the troubles plaguing office workers in an information-saturated age. Time Inc.'s Ann Moore on People.com: "I know the smaller gossip sites think they're big and powerful, but get out of the way.
Big Blue is big on social networking. Some 26,000 IBM workers have registered blogs on the company's internal computer network where they opine on technology and their work. Employees starting a new project routinely create information-storing Web sites called wikis for sharing memos as they build their teams. Thousands of IBM workers swap lists of useful Web sites and corporate resources, using an IBM-developed program for "social bookmarking" called DogEar. Similarly, when an employee calls an IBM expert for assistance with something, he or she may be invited to rate the value of the help. Bosses see those ratings at review time.
While all modern businesses communicate electronically, few have adopted the Web's leading-edge techniques for socializing. Some are skeptical that such tools are useful; others fear they will be abused. IBM has jumped in with both feet. It says the tools foster teamwork among employees who work in IBM offices from Boston to Bangalore. Social networking is especially important for the 42% of IBM employees who regularly work from their homes or client locations rather than IBM facilities.
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Friday, 22 June 2007
vMTV
MTV has a Second Life style virtual world called vMTV. It is built on the 'There' MMO platform:
http://content.vmtv.com/vMTV_MAX/
http://www.there.com/
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The Virtual Venture Competition: McKinsey
Be part of the first truly global business-building contest ever held in the virtual world! The Virtual Venture Competition is your chance to turn your innovative ideas into successful business operations in Second Life.
For the first time your business plan will not be assessed by a jury, but proven by real customers, make real turnover, and present your results to a real audience!
Team up with other young talents from around the world. Use your creativity to attract seed capital for your virtual ventures and realize your potential as a virtual entrepreneur. Bring your ideas to life!
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Student Postmortem: Carnegie Mellon's Northrop Grumman Recruitment Game
With game schools cropping up all over the world and more traditional industries looking towards video games as a new and powerful tool for training, marketing or even alternate of revenue sources I thought it might be an appropriate time to discuss a project we did for Northrop Grumman.
Northrop Grumman approached Carnegie Mellon with a dilemma: they couldn't hire enough qualified engineers because most college grads wanted to work for Microsoft, Google, or Activision. They needed something to make them ‘cooler'. Clearly, our answer was a game.
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Black sun rising
Universities are racing to create virtual campuses on the web, providing mind-boggling opportunities for teaching, research and simulations. Stephen Phillips reports.
Bryan Carter's undergraduate classes on cyberculture and literature at the University of Central Missouri are convening at the Black Sun this semester, but the associate professor of literature has not repaired to the pub in search of a suitably offbeat location. With a dark Blade Runner-style aesthetic culled from the pages of seminal cyberpunk novel Snowcrash, the venue offers a futuristic setting in keeping with the subject matter. Carter (or "Bryan Mnemonic", as he is called in the Black Sun) and many of his students wear cyberpunk or "Goth" attire.
In fact, Carter and his students do not meet physically at all. The thrice-weekly hour-long classes take place in Second Life, the online parallel universe that has in four years gone from cult hit to mainstream phenomenon, capturing the attention of many educators along the way.
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Professors add life to courses through Second Life
Ames, Ia. - He's a stud with a ponytail, his name is Gut, and he's your professor.
At least that's who he is online. In real life, he's a bald white guy named Brian Mennecke whose wife won't let him grow a ponytail.
This summer, he will hold discussion sessions for Iowa State University students studying e-commerce led by his beefier online self (Gut), a cartoon character who can fly. The classes will be held in Second Life.
Second Life is a 3-D, online world that is increasingly attracting the attention of professors nationally and in Iowa who are using the virtual landscape to hold classes, create simulations of what they are studying, and hold online experiments. Professors at ISU, the University of Iowa, and the University of Northern Iowa are all exploring ways to incorporate the game into classes this summer and in the fall semester.
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Kapor: 3D Internet is on the brink of mainstream
Cambridge, Mass.--The industry around virtual worlds, also referred to as the 3-D Internet, is chaotic and messy but on the brink of mainstream adoption, said Mitch Kapor, chairman of the Linden Labs and PC industry pioneer.
Kapor spoke here on Friday in an event organized by IBM and the MIT media Lab on virtual worlds. Linden Labs is the maker of Second Life, a popular virtual world environment.
During his talk, Kapor drew many parallels between the early days of the PC and virtual worlds: there are many people who are skeptical of virtual worlds and the product is not suitable for many tasks.
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Thursday, 21 June 2007
K Zero launches UK virtual business parks
K Zero launches UK virtual business parks. As interest from UK-based businesses continues to grow in Second Life, K Zero has recently launched the virtual business park concept.
The new service has been developed to meet demand for a faster, more manageable virtual world presence in Second Life.
Companies wanting a Second Life presence are now able to have the benefits of a dedicated island without the requirement to own an entire 16 hectare virtual space. This brings the following benefits:
Lower cost
Faster entrance strategy
Additional traffic/visitors/exposure from being based on a business park with other (non-competing) UK companies
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Outsourcing 2.0 -- into the Virtual World
Steve Ranger over at Silicon.com wrote an interesting piece on Second Life as the outsourcing's next frontier. "When PA Consulting wanted to build an extra wing for its offices, it hired the best man for the job.
Unusually, perhaps, it turned out that the best man for the job was an enormous rabbit, and one which wanted to be paid in an electronic currency that didn't exist a few years ago.
But then again, the office extension PA wanted was a virtual one, built in the rapidly growing Second Life online world.
As well as finding a rabbit to build the extra wing for its Second Life HQ, PA Consulting also found in-world 'residents' willing to work as greeters in its office in exchange for the in-world currency, Linden dollars.
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Denver Police Test Racial Bias with Videogame
The Denver Police recently conducted a study of racial bias using a videogame. The idea was to determine if officers were more likely to fire on assailants with firearms if they were black or white. The game itself is rudimentary and somewhat disturbing.
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Second Earth ?
The World Wide Web will soon be absorbed into the World Wide Sim: an environment combining elements of Second Life and Google Earth.
The map I am standing on belongs to NOAA, and it covers a 12-by-20-meter square of lawn on a large virtual island sustained entirely by servers and software at San Francisco-based Linden Lab, which launched Second Life in 2003. (On the map's scale, my avatar is about 500 kilometers tall, which makes Illinois about three paces across.) Corbin, who's on a personal mission to incorporate 3-D tools like this one into the science curriculum at Denver, paid Linden Lab for the island so that he could assemble exhibits demonstrating to the faculty how such tools might be used pedagogically. "Every student at DU is required to have a laptop," he says. "But how many of them are just messaging one another in class?" A few more science students might learn something if they could walk inside a weather map, he reasons.
Corbin's got plenty to show off: just west of the map is a virtual planetarium, a giant glass box housing a giant white sphere that in turn houses a giant orrery illustrating the geometry of solar eclipses. And he's not the only one to offer such attractions. Just to the south, on an adjoining island, is the International Spaceflight Museum [video] [SLurl], where visitors can fly alongside life-size rockets, from the huge Apollo-era Saturn V to a prototype of the Ares V, one of the launch vehicles NASA hopes to use to send Americans back to the moon.
Second Life, which started out four years ago as a 1-square-kilometer patch with 500
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Wednesday, 20 June 2007
An Explorative Study about Second Life
Our report assesses the user acceptance of Virtual Worlds, specifically Second Life. By means of a survey with almost 250 respondents this report provides first empirical results of the user acceptance of Second Life. The data has been gathered during spring 2007. Our results show that 90% of respondents have less than a year experience, 70% access Second Life from home and 54% with a desktop. There are 67% of respondents who are not afraid of giving personal information. Almost 60% are very likely to buy virtual goods from Second Life, and 42% are willing to use their credit card to purchase on Second Life. About 70% perceive Second Life improves collaboration and communication, and more than 60% perceive that it improves cooperation between people. 56% of respondents perceive Second life as easy to use. Finally, our results indicate that people are using Second Life not to change their identity, but rather to explore and visit new places and meet people.
If users accept Virtual Worlds as a new way and channel to communicate, collaborate, and cooperation and if institutions arrive to provide value to users, Virtual Worlds might become then next generation platform for Internet users. However, in order to become mainstream, Virtual Worlds like Second Life have many challenges to overcome and where user acceptance is probably the most important one.
http://www.fetscherin.com/2007-06-05-SecondLifeReport1.swf?POPUP_ENABLED=true
http://www.fetscherin.com/UserAcceptanceVirtualWorlds.htm
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Tuesday, 19 June 2007
IBM: Virtual World Research Papers
http://wadatripp.wordpress.com/2007/06/19/games-and-learning-getting-serious/
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IBM's Management Games
No fooling around: Big Blue is promoting a video game that could change the way companies develop leaders and manage projects
Thunder crashes, lightning flashes, and a camera zooms in on a shadowy, futuristic-looking, gray-and-black office. The camera follows a female avatar in slacks and a button-down shirt as she jogs from one cubicle to the next, up a spiral staircase, and across a high gangplank as dramatic classical music plays in the background. This YouTube trailer could easily be a plug for a new shoot-'em-up video game, or a slasher flick. Instead, it's promoting a video game called Innov8, which IBM will start selling in September.
Yes, IBM. The computer giant says it received dozens of calls from potential customers after showing the video clip at a recent conference for clients. Designed to help tech managers better understand the roles of businesspeople, and vice versa, players go into a virtual business unit to test their hand at ventures such as redesigning a call center, opening a brokerage account, or processing an insurance claim.
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IBM: Like the Web, virtual worlds will be become business friendly
To IBM, today's virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft are simply a glimpse of the future Web, with the same potential to transform business and society as the first waves of the Web.
IBM hosted an event at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab on Friday, where experts offered insights into how virtual worlds can be applied to make businesses more effective and address societal problems.
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Torrent Raiders - A Game about Intellectual Property
This game appears to have been released last month, but I've just recently come across it via Infosthetics. The game, Torrent Raiders is Aaron Meyers' MFA project at USC's Division of Interactive Media, and it's a space-themed shooter based on the real-time content of a torrent. In it, you play as a copyright mercenary, flying among the packets of a torrent and shooting them to gather evidence about the IP addresses it moves through. Ultimately, when you gain enough evidence targeting a specific IP address, you can fire a bomb that collects a bounty -- apparently this signifies something like a lawsuit.
The game is fascinating for its visualization of torrent information, and I really appreciate how smoothly the whole thing works, but the fact that you play as a bounty hunter (working, essentially, for those whom many would consider to be the bad guys) reflects an interesting design choice that reveals the game's rhetorical content.
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Monday, 18 June 2007
Ian Bogost has a new website, blog and book
Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames
http://www.bogost.com/
http://www.bogost.com/blog/
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