Archive for July, 2007

I can’t count the times I’ve found Second Life either uninhabited or so busy to be unusable, and wondered if it would ever deliver on its promise. Frank Rose’ Wired article, “How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life” cuts to the point:

“Ever since BusinessWeek ran a breathless cover story titled “My Virtual Life” more than a year ago, reporters have been heralding Second Life as the here-and-now incarnation of the fictional Metaverse that Neal Stephenson conjured up 15 years ago in Snow Crash. (Wired created a 12-page “Travel Guide” last fall.) Unfortunately, the reality doesn’t justify the excitement.”

“Second Life partisans claim meteoric growth, with the number of “residents,” or avatars created, surpassing 7 million in June. There’s no question that more and more people are trying Second Life, but that figure turns out to be wildly misleading. For starters, many people make more than one avatar. According to Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, the number of avatars created by distinct individuals was closer to 4 million. Of those, only about 1 million had logged on in the previous 30 days (the standard measure of Internet traffic), and barely a third of that total had bothered to drop by in the previous week. Most of those who did were from Europe or Asia, leaving a little more than 100,000 Americans per week to be targeted by US marketers.”

Frank Rose’ article continues here…

WASHINGTON, D.C., July 25 - Fifty-seven percent of online adults have used the internet to watch or download video, and 19% do so on a typical day.

The growing adoption of broadband combined with a dramatic push by content providers to promote online video has helped to pave the way for mainstream audiences to embrace online video viewing. Three-quarters of broadband users (74%) who enjoy high-speed connections at both home and work watch or download video online.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project’s first major report on online video also shows how many video viewers have contributed to the viral and social nature of online video. More than half of online video viewers (57%) share links to the video they find with others, and three in four (75%) say they receive links to watch video that others have sent to them.

Read the full report here: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/219/report_display.asp

With thanks to Scott Traylor for bringing this to my attention: MTV, Nickelodeon and Microsoft have released findings from a survey of 18,000 kids and youth from 16 countries that looked at how technology is used across cultures. Here are some highlights of the PRNewswire release:

NEW YORK and LONDON, July 24 /PRNewswire/ — The average Chinese young person has 37 online friends he or she has never met, Indian youth are most likely to see mobile phones as a status symbol, while one in three UK and US teenagers say they can’t live without their games console.

Globally, the average young person connected to digital technology has 94 phone numbers in his or her mobile phone, 78 people on a messenger buddy list and 86 people in his or her social networking community. Yet despite their technological immersion, digi-kids are not geeks — 59% of 8-14 year-old kids still prefer their TV to their PCs and only 20% of 14-24 year-old young people globally admitted to being “interested” in technology. They are, however, expert multi-taskers and able to filter different channels of information.

These are just some of the findings from the largest-ever global study undertaken by MTV and Nickelodeon, in association with Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions, into how kids and young people interact with digital technology. The Circuits of Cool/Digital Playground technology and lifestyle study challenges traditional assumptions about their relationships with digital technology, and examines the impact of culture, age and gender on technology use.

The report found:
– Technology has enabled young people to have more and closer
friendships thanks to constant connectivity.
– Friends influence each other as much as marketers do. Friends are as
important as brands.
– Kids and young people don’t love the technology itself — they just
love how it enables them to communicate all the time, express
themselves and be entertained.
– Digital communications such as IM, email, social networking sites and
mobile/sms are complementary to, not competitive with, TV. TV is part
of young peoples’ digital conversation.
– Despite the remarkable advances in communication technology, kid and
youth culture looks surprisingly familiar, with almost all young
people using technology to enhance rather than replace face-to-face
interaction.
– Globally, the number of friends that young males have more than
doubles between the ages of 13-14 and 14-17 — it jumps from 24 to 69.
– The age group and gender that claims the largest number of friends are
not girls aged 14-17, but boys aged 18-21, who have on average 70
friends.

Read the complete PRNewswire release here http://tinyurl.com/2zxe8g and let me know if you have a source for the whole report

The first Metaverse Roadmap (MVR) is now complete and available in both web and PDF formats at http://metaverseroadmap.org/overview. The MVR has been a year-long, a cross-industry effort to vision the near term convergence of Web 2.0, simulation and video games into an integrated metaverse. It considers factors like the growth in network density, bandwidth and storage capacity to predict typical usage of metaverse technologies in the next ten years. The MVR project report continues:

In recent years, the term (metaverse) has grown beyond Stephenson’s 1992 vision of an immersive 3D virtual world, to include aspects of the physical world objects, actors, interfaces, and networks that construct and interact with virtual environments. We have collected several definitions in the Glossary (Sec. 20) of the MVR Inputs. Here is one that seems as good a starting point as any: The Metaverse is the convergence of 1) virtually-enhanced physical reality and 2) physically persistent virtual space. It is a fusion of both, while allowing users to experience it as either.

There is no single, unified entity called the Metaverse—rather, there are multiple mutually-reinforcing ways in which virtualization and 3D web tools and objects are being embedded everywhere in our environment and becoming persistent features of our lives. These technologies will emerge contingent upon potential benefits, investments, and customer interest, and will be subject to drawbacks and unintended consequences.

In time, many of the Internet activities we now associate with the 2D Web will migrate to the 3D spaces of the Metaverse. This does not mean all or even most of our web pages will become 3D, or even that we’ll typically read web content in 3D spaces. It means that as new tools develop, we’ll be able to intelligently mesh 2D and 3D to gain the unique advantages of each, in the appropriate context.

In an extensive article this month MIT’s Technology Review calls this coming persistent virtual environment 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.

When you consider the Metaverse Roadmap and MIT Second Earth reports with the previously noted work that IBM has been doing, you’ve got good a foundation for imagining where information, communications, educational and entertainment technology is headed.

In his opening keynote at the Game, Learning & Society 3.0 conference in Madison, WI last week, Professor James Gee set the stage for the year’s most substantive conference on learning games and simulations. Among other points made in his opening remarks, Gee observed that:

> Pop culture — the game business in particular — has managed to profit from selling products that present extremely challenging learning experiences which players willingly master, stuff that’s extremely difficult to get kids to do in school.

> When it comes to reading highly technical game documentation there are no differences in achievement between advantaged and disadvantaged kids. The motivation of _fun_ is so powerful.

> In MMORPGs success demands leading or participating in cross-functional teams and gamers willingly join them, while in business settings just the thought of participating in these kinds of project teams can be a major cause of stress.

> Games situates meaning to words and symbols in game texts, encouraging performance before competency. This is the opposite of the dominant pedagogy in today’s schools that stress the ability to recite facts to pass the test, before actually demonstrating competence in a particular domain.

> The gamers attitude to failure is “fail early, fail often” if it is in the service of learning something critical to success.

> Games are problem-solving spaces that cultivate a culture of learning, and learning complexity is an altogether legal drug that humans can’t get enough of.

> Games are “rule systems” and gamers seek ways to game the system, to leverage the rules of the game to their advantage. Game developers should design for this.

> Gamers learn to look past the eye candy to solve the underlying puzzle of the quest or mission that they’re on — just the kind of discriminatory abilities that are core 21 Century skills.

> Games, particularly MMOGs, are highly social systems where players are driven by a common passion or agenda, just as they must be on the cross-functional teams that are cornerstones of today’s globalized businesses.

So many other points were made in presentations and conversations during the week it was like drinking from a fire hose of ideas.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn how many school librarians, like Jenny Levine and Meg Canada, are supporting virtual worlds. Could libraries be the gateway for getting these powerful learning environments into the K-12 curriculum?

UCLA’s Yasmin Kafai asserted that cheating in video games is the opposite of cheating in other academic environments. Other participants in Yasmin’s session included Eric Zimmerman who wrote a chapter on this topic in Rules of Play, and Mia Consalvo, who has quite literally written the book on cheating in  games.

I’ll add more notes and links from other sessions as time allows. In the meantime visit these game sites, blog posts, slides and research from some of the other GLS presenters and participants for additional coverage of this excellent conference:

Lee Wilson - The Education Business Blog

Sasha Barab - Quest Atlantis

David Squire - DoomEd

David Warlick - 2 Cents Worth

Lisa Galarneau - Social Studies Games

Mark Danger Chen - blog

Dan White - Filament Games

Jenny Levine - The Shifted Librarian

Research Quest

GLS photo stream on Flickr

IBM has hit my radar a few times during the past months, most recently around their decision to move from Second Life to using Garage Games’ Torque engine to build out virtual training environments. I felt it was worth noting since it represented the first significant defection from Second Life I’d heard of, but thought little more of it. Then, while conducting research on metaverse business metrics for a book I’m working on Big Blue came up again, this time with a handful of white papers that really help size the market for serious games and learning simulations. Their Virtual, Worlds Real Leaders website and white paper (PDF) provide an excellent introduction and overview:

Management fads and business leadership books come and go. But the Internet, and the changes it is forcing upon business managers of all stripes, is here to stay. The days of closely knit teams working on long-term strategy in close quarters are gone, replaced by virtual teams that constantly reinvent the business in multiple time zones the world over. And the business world is in desperate need of a new model for leadership befitting the Internet Age.

Fortunately there is already a window into this rapidly changing world. In the realm of online games, specifically massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs), leaders emerge that deftly navigate the motivational, emotional and social needs of their direct reports in a highly competitive, distributed, virtual environment. And there are many lessons to be learned (continues here).

They have also posted a more in-depth report detailing some of their experience using online simulations in another report Leadership in a Distributed World: Lessons from Online Gaming:

Globalization is placing new demands on today’s corporate leaders. As organizations continue to expand and operate in a more virtual environment, executives are being asked to provide guidance and direction to teams working across time zones and distances. In addition, the competitive environment is requiring leaders to make sense of increasingly disparate sources of information and make decisions more rapidly. In this changing environment, where can organizations turn to see the future of leadership? How can they determine the skills and tools that leaders will need to be successful? We believe that online gaming provides a window into the future of organizations and the leadership capabilities necessary to guide enterprises to success (download the complete white paper here).

All three white papers — particularly this last — are highly recommended background reading to get a handle on the corporate/enterprise segment of the rapidly developing serious games market.