Terra Nova

Studying Real-World Business in Virtual Worlds

Hello, Terra Novans!

I am delighted to have this opportunity to post some of my thoughts on TN, and look forward to reading your responses.

Let me start with a little self-promotion:  download Worlds For Study—Invitation, subtitled “Virtual Worlds for the Study of Real-World Business (and Law, and Politics, and Sociology, and…)”.  In that paper, I spell out my vision to create a platform on which researchers and educators can create serious games for studying real-world business and related topics.

                                    

That vision might sound familiar (at least to those who have followed academic discussions of how virtual worlds can be used).   But my goal seems to differ from what others are proposing.  So this first post will place relatively heavy emphasis on what I am not trying to do. Let me know if you think my impressions are correct, and what my apparently unusual focus might mean for structure and success of WFS.  (read more….) 

I want study the real world, not virtual worlds

The founders of Terra Nova (Ted, Julian, Dan and Greg) have written fascinating articles about how to think about economics, crime, intellectual property rights, and freedom in virtual worlds.  But my goal is not to study virtual worlds in their own right.  Instead, I want to use virtual worlds as a laboratory in which to examine the law and economics of the real world.  Is this impossible?  I don’t think so.  Virtual worlds are not so different that we can’t draw clear lessons from them to the real world.  I agree that it is hard to study the airline industry in Second Life, where everyone is teleporting or flying as they please….but if we had our own platform, we could give avatars and goods both mass and size, so that transportation is expensive. 

I am an experimentalist, not an econometrician

In his hugely popular article on the economy of Everquest, Ted Castronova approaches virtual worlds as a traditional empirical economist, observing what occurs “naturally” in the virtual world and drawing conclusions.  In contrast, I want to create new worlds for controlled experimentation. To me, this is a tremendous advantage of virtual worlds.  After all, it is hard to experiment in the real world.  (The SEC is unlikely to settle the dispute over insider trading rules by saying “insider trading is legal for these randomly selected firms, but not for the others.”)  But it would be possible to create one world in which insider trading is legal, and another in which it is not.

I am primarily interested in the suits, not the talent.

In many industries, people distinguish between “the suits” and “the talent.”  The talent are the artists, architects, engineers, programmers and musicians who design and create the stuff that the suits invest in, package, market, distribute and compete over.   My impression is that the vast majority of educators in Second Life (and there are lots of them) focus on the talent.  Then there are a lot of suits, but they are not particularly interested in education—they are too busy making trying to make money.

But virtual worlds are ideal for studying suits, because they have robust economies, even when game developers don’t want them, and because you can capture all of the data on how the suits interact to allocate capital, make decisions, etc. 

Are there really so few business educators in SL, or have I just not found them?

                                                                                                                  

I want structured RPGs, not unstructured ones.

Although you never hear the term “serious games” in academic circles, experimental economists are essentially serious game designers.  (Vernon Smith earned the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for “for having established laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of alternative market mechanisms.”  Would he have gotten the Nobel Prize if he said he was designing games for people to play?)

But it doesn’t look like there are many people in the virtual world community who want to create a platform that would support serious games. As I look through the landscape of virtual worlds and middleware platforms, I see

• Worlds (like World of Warcraft) that are highly structured RPGs, in the sense that there is code to impose attributes upon players and goods, pre-programmed production functions, enforcement of property rights, and so on.  These worlds rarely support much user-created content, because it would interfere too much with the game design.

• Worlds that are devoted to user-created content, but which appear poorly suited to supporting role-playing games.  Most role-playing games on Second Life simply involve agreements to speak and act like characters from Tolkien or Marquis de Sade. (Often, they remind me of the time a three-year old suggested “Let’s play ‘Lion.’”  When I asked for details, he clarified: “you be a lion and I hit you.”)  I think of such games as “unstructured” RPGs, because there is no code to impose attributes upon players or goods, or restrict types of behavior.

Neither model will work with academics, because academics want control, and lots of it, whether they want to conduct games for education or research. I would argue that Smith won the Nobel in large part because he thought so carefully about how academics could impose controls to test economic theory more carefully. Experimental economists have basically created( very) tiny structured RPGs for research and teaching.  So the unstructured games ‘Lion’ games aren’t going to be very popular among those who are closest to bring current research and teaching practice into virtual worlds.

Structured RPGs allow lots of control.  But there really isn’t a way to get large numbers of academics to play someone else’s game.  Everyone is going to want to create their own, to address their specific research question, to teach a favorite topic their way, or to meld the details of the game to their textbook.  So what is needed is a platform that makes it relatively easy for academics to create their own RPGs within virtual worlds.  Think “World of Bizquest” where any academic can set up their own quests and dungeons (instances).  The academics would be demi-gods who could create content, but the students/subjects would be players with only limited ability to do so.  Something like this (described in WFS-Invitation):

• The

  island

  of

  Tamaroon

  has two farms, one on each hillside, while a population of bots lives in a central valley.  Your team will manage one farm, while another team will manage the other.  Each team must decide which products to produce, and how much to charge, and deliver those products cheaply and quickly to your customers.

Now, maybe they would earn inworld currency for their performance in the dungeon (which they could use as they pleased in the larger persistent world), but experimental economists would simply pay participants cash.  Since players are not coming out of the dungeon with an all-powerful Vorpal Sword of Ludemia, I don’t see much interference with the economy of the larger world.

Is this simply impossible?  Do Active Worlds or Multiverse provide an answer? 

Tying it together

OK, I have come right out and said it: I am limit limiting my interest in virtual worlds to what they can tell us about the real world, rather than emphasizing how interesting they are in their own right; I want to control those worlds to run experiments, rather than letting people do as they please and observingt the results; I want to focus on the suits instead of the talent; and I want to create structure in RPGs. 

So some final questions for Terra Novans:  am I just too Luddite, conservative and unimaginative for virtual worlds?  Am I describing a valuable niche product that will blend well with all of the other far more outré directions being taken by those with broader vision?  Do others share my interests?

Bragg and IGE cases

Many many legal happenings on virtual property and assets. First off, the judge in the Bragg v Linden case has dismissed Linden's Motion to Dismiss for Lack of Jurisdiction and Motion to Compel Arbitration. Lots to say about this Order, but I need some time to digest it. Also, a South Florida law firm has brought a consumer class action on behalf of US WoW subscribers against IGE for their gold farming activities. Much to be said here in a bit.

The highpoint of my brief reading to date is the opening paragraph of the Order in the Bragg case:

This case is about virtual property maintained on a virtual world on the Internet. Plaintiff, March Bragg, Esq., claims an ownership interest in such virtual property. Bragg contends that Defendants, the operators of the virtual world, unlawfully confiscated his virtual property and denied him access to their virtual world. Ultimately at issue in this case are the novel questions of what rights and obligations grow out of the relationship between the owner and creator of a virtual world and its resident-customers. While the property and the world where it is found are "virtual," the dispute is real.

Hey, Who Filled My Ivory Tower With Carbon Monoxide?

Sorry, kids, but I just really needed a post with this title.  Did you all read this beauty (scroll down to 'Terrifying Teachers') buried in comments?  Freaking awesome.  They have no idea just how terrifying we are.  Muahhaha!

Design From Soup to Nuts

The discussion of Nate Combs' recent post about the current hubbub over at EVE Online made me think a bit about the process of design in virtual worlds. Many scholars with an interest in synthetic worlds  have studied some aspect or another of design, and some of us have done design work at some level or another. There are also a number of articulate designers who provide a window of some kind into problems, issues and processes in design. There are entire curricula devoted to design, and books written to accompany those curricula.

But do we have a lengthy, detailed narrative account of the design process  from initial concept to live management of a single major existing commercial synthetic world, basically an insider's history of an existing world? I can't really think of anything that comes close, just fan-dancer glimpses of the underlying flesh and bone behind existing games. There are  studies of Second Life underway that might address this, but I think the kind of sub-creation and user participation that is a basic part of Second Life, not to mention the much more consciously introspective attitude of Linden,  makes it very different than the other synthetic worlds out there in processual terms.

Why does this matter? Partly because I think players and scholars alike have very little grasp on the conceptual vocabulary involved in design, and I think that often makes for complicated antagonisms between developers and those with an interest in the products they develop. When live management teams have to deal with a crisis in a given synthetic world, they're often not trusted by players precisely because players have almost no ability to conceptualize what's going on inside the design process.

Most film scholars and even film audiences  can tell you about the division of labor involved in making film, from best boy to director. Moreover, a lot of film scholars can even match aspects of the finished product with particular kinds of craftwork, both technical and aesthetic. There are many films where we have extremely good narratives, some of them from the filmmakers, some from other writers, about the entire production process that created and circulated the film. Scholars who study film also often have at least a rudimentary understanding of the business of film-making. I'm not saying that film theorists and scholars make use of all this knowledge. In fact, many go out of their way to deny that this kind of information is relevant to the interpretation of film, in the same manner that some literary critics would argue that the intention of authors or the historical conditions of book production are not important to the interpretation of a literary work. Even when this knowledge is not put to direct use, it makes film and literature familiar and comprehensible to both critics and audiences.

The labor and managerial processes involved in game design, particularly for major commercial synthetic worlds, are considerably more opaque to outsiders. Sometimes I think they're  even opaque to insiders, that the scale and complexity of these projects makes it difficult for top-level creative and technical directors to have a good grasp on the day-to-day fundamentals of a game's design, while the coders responsible for particular features don't have a good sense of what is happening in other aspects of the design.

It seems to me that everyone interested in this field would benefit if a future synthetic world project included from its initial stages some kind of process of introspective, narrativized documentation of its own development. Who did what kinds of work, when did they do it, how were decisions made, what kinds of directions were considered and rejected, how did the organizational chart of the project get elaborated over time, what kinds of creative and technical input did the team wish they had but couldn't find, how was feedback from testers actually evaluated, and so on. This kind of information isn't that hard to generate if it's made a formal part of someone's daily work process, part of normal best practices. Game Developer's postmortems  would be a good basic model, if they were fleshed out in a much longer and more diaristic fashion. Looking at the concept art for Half-Life 2 also gives you some sense of how rich a more fully realized and introspective account of synthetic world design could be.

June Guest Robert Bloomfield

We're very happy to have Robert Bloomfield guest-blogging with us on Terra Nova this June. Robert is a Professor of Accounting at Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, where he directs both the Business Simulation Laboratory and the Doctoral Program.  Trained as a behavioral game theorist, he has published the results of laboratory games and markets in journals representing most areas of business, from accounting and finance to organizational behavior, psychology, marketing and operations.

Rob became interested in virtual worlds when he was chosen to lead an academic research initiative for the Financial Accounting Standards Board, which sets accounting standards for US businesses.  Realizing that traditional laboratory settings would not be able to capture the vast complexity of the US economy—with many people making difficult decisions as they interact with complex institutions and with each other—Rob searched for an alternative.  The result of that search was the Worlds For Study project, which seeks to create a platform in which people can create serious games for business research and education. Rob describes the goals of the WFS project here.

Rob is also a resident of Kingsfield Island in Second Life, where he goes by the name Beyers Sellers, and is currently working with The Vandiver Group on a short movie, filmed in Second Life, that will introduce business academics to virtual worlds and WFS.

We'd like to thank Rob for joining us -- we look forward to the discussion!

June Guest Peder Burgaard

We're happy to welcome Peder Burgaard as a guest blogger on TN this June.  We asked Peder to introduce himself to the readers.  Here you go:

The last six months I have been on sabbatical from my day job at Innovation Lab, a Danish based think tank on emerging technologies & trends, to study business strategies and virtual world potentials, and have been fortunate to work with IBM’s Metaverse Evangelists in the UK and key personal from the 3D Internet & Virtual Business Opportunity group in the states and various IBMer’s in Second Life, for my masters degree in Information Science at the university of Aarhus, Denmark.

When I am not immersed in the metaverse or working the day job, I am surrounded by context aware audio games on audio augmented children’s playgrounds and is the co-founder and CTO of a startup (stealth mode still) working on a prototype due Q3/Q4 this year (and looking for investments! :-)).

Past experiences have been a very inspirational six months stop at Institute for the Future, Palo Alto, also a think tank on emerging technologies & trends, were I accumulated knowledge on forecasting methodologies and client implementation of future foresights to present insights. I have also had a short period as a contributor at We-Make-Money-Not-Art.com and was guest blogger for the official SuperNova2006 conference blog.

I’ll finish off with a promotion of Innovation Lab’s virtual world conference LifeLike – Virtual Worlds September 26, 2007 where I am program co-Chair. Speakers are still to be announced. Those unable to attend LifeLike in person will not be neglected and can tap into the live webcast from all the conference sessions during the day.

Thanks for joining us, Peder!  We're looking forward to some interesting discussions!

June Guest Bob McGinley

We're happy to have Bob McGinley joining us this month as a guest on Terra Nova. Bob is an Executive IT Architect for IBM working in Global Middleware Services. As an Application Architect with a background in software design and development, he has a knack for delivering large complex systems. Bob has developed several large scale government industry applications using a variety of development methodologies, coding languages, and system platforms. His career is now focused on simplifying and teaching web development to enhance development efficiency.

When he isn't teaching, Bob works on developing new artificial intelligence technologies using the principles of evolutionary systems. J2Evolution.com is a blog site dedicated to Bob's passion for using evolution to teach machines to learn and then use these machines to benefit society. He is designing an Evolutionary Container, a Java environment built to evolve virtual organisms and eventually virtual life. His current research is in the area of neural network design and probability inference engines.

Bob and his family live in Olympia, Washington where they frequent the surrounding mountain ranges enjoying backpacking, skiing and snowboarding. Bob is always open for a thought provoking discussions and brainstorming, so feel free to visit his blogsite at http://www.j2evolution.com or email him at mcginle AT us.ibm.com.

Thanks for joining us this month, Bob!

Structuration, Synthetic Worlds-Style: LOTRO and Emotes

Anthony Giddens' theory of structuration maybe gets less frequent use than it deserves in part because it is ultimately rather commonsensical. Agency and structure are a loop, in his view; we can only understand why things happen in human societies by combining an attention to the microscale of individual practice and action and the macroscale of social structure across broad expanses of time and space.

A fairly large percentage of my interests in synthetic worlds ultimately come back to structuration as Giddens describes it. In fact, I think synthetic worlds are the ideal focal point for a study of structuration in action. Try to apply it to the unmanageable complexity of a given human society in motion, and the kinds of practical limits that have to be placed on the analysis can feel arbitrary. But synthetic worlds come with manageable boundaries that are intrinsic to them: the rules or structures governing social and economic activity are knowable, the cultural histories behind and within the players are specific, the economics of the industry that produces them are specifiable, and you can study the evolution of a synthetic world from an initial condition in a way that is never possible in the ongoing history of real-world societies.

So with this prologue in mind, a sketchy report from the field, in this case, Lord of the Rings Online.

I'll probably have more to say about LOTRO over the next month or so here at TN, but for the moment, a narrow point. Turbine has invested considerable effort trying to get the feel of their gameworld to match the mood and feel of Tolkien's world. Hardcore devotees of the lore aren't likely to be satisfied, but I'm much more impressed than I expected to be, particularly with the way that the gameplay interweaves with the storyline of the first book of the LOTR trilogy.

One consequence of this commitment is that the available emotes in the game are much more visually and expressively restrained than those in World of Warcraft. Yes, you can do a handstand and a few other mildly silly things, but /dance makes your avatar do nothing more than clap and tap his feet. No elf pole-dances. There are some nice combinatorial emotes that involve inventory items, primarily smoking pipe-weed and playing instruments.

This is completely appropriate, given that LOTR is not a particularly whimsical fiction (with the exception of some of the hobbit-material, and LOTRO has plenty of hobbit hijinks in its quests), whereas Warcraft has a long history of whimsical and silly threads running through it.

I'm interested in the consequences for player behavior, however, and how that might be an interesting illustration of structuration in action. In my experience so far, when in groups doing quests, you see very little of some of the behavior that is common in WoW. In WoW, when players are bored for various reasons, the use of emotes tends to rise, as do what I would call "nervous action" (such as rogues jumping around and around a group of players who are waiting for another party member to arrive). In LOTRO, from what I can see, a group of players who are bored waiting for a party member to arrive rarely use emotes except for smoking pipeweed. If there is "nervous action", it tends to be moving out from the instance entrance to kill nearby mobs.

Now assuming that this is in fact an accurate observation on my part--and I fully expect that some commenters may report that they see huge groups of champions jumping around and doing handstands outside of the Great Barrow--here's a case where we could probably talk intelligibly about specific kinds of explanations that would variably emphasize the prior structure of the gameworld, the contingent agency of players, or the contingent intersection of the two over historical time.

To wit:

1. Maybe the emotes ("structure") intrinsically direct themselves to more naturalistic uses consistent with the "magic circle" of the fiction because of how they look and relate to the gameworld's overall aesthetic. Maybe they contain within themselves a clear message from the designers about their use, and make clear that doing handstands in front of barrow-wights while you wait for a lore-master is, well, not really the right thing to be doing.

2. Maybe the players have a prior cultural understanding of the aesthetic of Tolkien that informs their sense of what appropriate expressive action within a Tolkienesque world ought to be. They therefore know that hobbits and dwarves can be silly, but that warriors from Gondor and high elves rarely are.

3. Maybe the intersection of the structure of the emotes and the orientation of players is producing a culture of gameplay over time in LOTRO, that the more you go to instances and don't see a lot of silly emoting, the less you're inclined to do silly emoting yourself or get a sense that it's not on.

4. Maybe LOTRO is drawing players because of the core mythos who have little experience with the conventions of synthetic worlds and therefore don't know what an emote is. (Last night in the Great Barrows, I ran into several players who didn't know that they had emotes, so anecdotally this seems possible to me.)

5. Maybe players aren't bored yet, and therefore aren't exploring the small paratextual or secondary systems of play available within the gameworld, and therefore the culture of emote-usage in LOTRO is still very much in flux.

Potpourri

Topic A.  Personally speaking.  My view is to to err on the side of regulation and back it with enforcement.  Reason:  people have a sad habit of cheating.  I guess the FDA is in the thick of it.  Claim: the pathologies of online gameplay can be seen as a lesson of the foibles of under-constrained folks  (/edited nc).

Update 6/2/2007   Links capping Topic-A from comments below:

• Steven Davis ""Unpopular Post #2 - Just Say "No" to Developers playing their own MMOs.""
• CCP's official response.
• Raph:  "...a frame job?"
• Scott Jennings: "CCP Strikes back."
• And as close to this chapter, Nate: "In praise of eve."

Topic B. I cite a few short essays and wonder the meta-question:  is online gaming a profoundly geek activity?

Topic A. 

Endie has posted a story on yet more conflict-of-interest in Eve-Online.   This is a follow-on to an earlier discussion about how "mixing it up" might slip into dubious antics.  See TN:  "It's so easy, Gamemasters."

While this story is new to me, I do respect Endie.  Straighten me out on the record if need be.

Topic B.

I recently posted on my personal board several geeky pieces on the relationship of software to beauty and games (fn1.).  The gist of which might be summarized for here, thusly:  creation in software is a creative process, it might even be a game, it is at least art.

The meta question for here is this.  Do MMORPGs have a profoundly deep affinity with its software, are they kindred spirts of sorts.   In other words do the famously claimed "geek ghetto" and user-created content and all its flavors in MMORPGs suffer a deep relationship to the process of software?  Geeks, not by accident.

I'll leave that to you to decide.

---------------------------------------------------------

fn1.

• "Squeaking into art, content, and the future."  (dynamism in programming languages: the future?)
• "Code as art, as game, and not engineering."  (software as a multiplayer game)
• "The problem of software, 2"  (the philosophy of software)

 

Virtual reality and higher education: Another perspective

A few weeks ago, I posted an interview on Terra Nova with Rebecca Nesson, who is using Second Life as a platform for distance education at the Harvard Extension School. While SL has been adopted by Harvard and more than 100 other schools worldwide, it is not the only online virtual reality environment that is used for educational purposes. There are other virtual world/virtual reality technologies that can support instruction and classroom activities, and this week we will get a perspective from someone who is using these alternate technologies to teach. The interview is with Aaron Walsh, a programmer and instructor who has used modding software and other tools to create VR classrooms for courses at the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College (the inset photo is from one of his experiments, and depicts "students gathering in the virtual Egyptian environment"). His VR classes are part of a larger effort that he is leading to develop a standards-based educational platform called Immersive Education.

I first met Walsh in 2000, when I took two of his programming classes at Boston College. He subsequently invited me to participate in some early development and planning work surrounding his Media Grid initiative, and as part of these efforts I was able to take part in several Internet-based VR classroom demos in 2003 and 2004. However, Walsh noted in an email that he has been involved in VR development since the early '90s:

I began my work in virtual reality and immersive 3D environments while running the Advanced Technology Center (ATC) at Boston College. Around 1991 or so Paul Dupuis, my manager, and I built a personal VR system using stereo goggles, a Macintosh computer and a Nintendo Power Glove. This was back in the days when 3D on personal computers was practically unheard of, and texture mapping wasn't even an option. Crude, flat-shaded shaded polygons and wireframes ruled the roost. Striving for realism I began researching the potential for viewing digital video in stereo by splitting Quicktime movies into stereo pairs, one for each eyepiece. Around this time I became obsessed with the potential of realistic virtual reality, and developed digital media caching techniques for virtual reality and 3D that I contributed to the Web3D standards community in the late 1990s. From that point on I spent the majority of my time developing international standards for 3D and virtual reality as chairman of related Web3D Consortium and Moving Picture Expert Group (MPEG) working groups, and now with the Media Grid and Immersive Education.

In the interview, Walsh talks about some of the specific technologies he uses for his classes, as well as some of the benefits and challenges of conducting online classes in virtual reality. He confirms Nesson's observation that some students who have a tough time expressing themselves in the real world can really blossom in virtual environments, but notes that other students much prefer the traditional, face-to-face classroom experience. He also has a lot to say about the growing problem of addiction to virtual reality, which he classifies as "immersive illness."

Below is the full transcript of the interview, which was conducted via email earlier this week:

Ian Lamont: You've been teaching a course called Discovering 3D Graphics and Virtual Reality at the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College. Some of the class is spent in a virtual world. What is the world or VR environment, and what are the types of activities that students take part in there?

Aaron Walsh: I teach three graphics courses at Boston College, all of which involve meeting with students online in virtual reality. Two of these classes (Discovering 3D Graphics and Virtual Reality, and Advanced 3D/VR) take place almost entirely online in virtual reality. I spend the first few classes working with the students in person, ensuring that their computers are setup properly and are ready to go, and after that we transition into virtual reality for the rest of the semester.

In these classes students learn the fundamentals of 3D computer graphics, virtual reality, and video game technology. They learn how to build 3D objects and virtual worlds, and how the combination of 3D/VR and rich digital media technologies are fundamentally re-shaping computer-based entertainment, education, and socialization.

We use the term "Immersive Education" to refer to the combination of 3D/VR and digital media specifically for learning. We started Immersive Education many years ago using the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) standard, and in 2003 transitioned to the commercial Unreal 2 game engine which has been our 2nd generation technology until today (which we use in combination with VRML, Extensible 3D (X3D), Flash and QuickTime). The current platform has served us very well, but it's at the end of its life and we're now in the process of selecting a new 3D/VR platform as part of the open Immersive Education standardization process. Educators and students who have taken courses using virtual environment technology, regardless of the specific 3D/VR technology they're familiar with, are encouraged to participate in the open standards process through ImmersiveEducation.org.

Lamont: Why not use Second Life?

Walsh: Second Life is a candidate for the new Immersive Education platform that we're defining today, but it wasn't a viable option for the previous generation which we selected in 2003. Some of our requirements at that time included: a stable cross-platform (Windows and Mac) platform; integrated text and voice chat; the ability to host the environments and server-side runtime on our own servers; content ownership; support for industry-standard authoring tools (such as Maya); the ability to modify (mod) the environment to support custom behaviors, and so forth. These and other criteria are being applied as we select and standardize the next generation of Immersive Education, and today Second Life is a leading candidate whereas in 2003 it wasn't even close.

Lamont: What have been some of the challenges and advantages to using virtual reality as a platform for education?

Walsh: There are many, on both sides. A major challenge has been related to student hardware, as it's extremely difficult to ensure that every student's computer setup is up to snuff. This has become much easier now that the majority of students have relatively new computers that sport modern graphics cards, but in the early days of Immersive Education we were dealing with students who had computers that rolled off the assembly line in the late 1990s. For the first few years we simply could not have the majority of our class meetings in virtual reality since too many of the students had sub-par computer systems, but that's mostly a non-issue today. Spotty network connections are also a challenge, especially when it comes to voice chat, but that's also becoming less of an issue since most of our students are participating either from dorms (which have high-speed networks) or from home where they have DSL or cable. The bandwidth issue is practically a non-issue today.

Another major challenge is in the presentation of learning materials inside of (through) the virtual environment itself, such as pumping videos or interactive Flash content through an object in the environment. Initially we wanted everything to be "in world" meaning we wanted all learning materials to be presented inside of the environment itself, thinking that a single seamless environment would be best. And while that may be the case for the entertainment industry, where you usually don't want to take the player out of the game or environment, it's not necessarily the case for education. For education there's no reason why all content has to be delivered inside of the virtual environment. In fact, it can be quite restricting to do so. Why not simply open a browser window when necessary, allowing students to use a wide variety of learning content that can't (and probably shouldn't) be shoehorned into the virtual environment? Doing this allowed us to incorporate Web pages, interactive Flash content, Quicktime VR and videos, and a wide assortment of rich learning materials into our online classes that wouldn't have been possible otherwise. And the students don't mind or care; they're learning, using a mixture of digital media. The virtual environment is merely the foundation that we build around, but it's just one part of a much larger picture.

Aside from these technical challenges there are a host of human-oriented challenges, not the least of which is the issue of taking real-world human-to-human personal contact out of the equation. For the most part students and teachers are used to meeting in person in a real classroom. Removing the classroom and the personal contact that comes with it can be a real challenge for some students, and while most don't take very long to adjust some never get completely comfortable with the virtual alternative. But for every student that would prefer a real-world classroom there are just as many, perhaps more, who love meeting in virtual environments. We often see cases where shy students who are quiet in person become very verbal and fully participant in the virtual environment, so there can be some real advantages in this respect as well.

A challenge that concerns me the most is lurking on the horizon, one we don't yet understand the full scope of. As Immersive Education and other forms of personal virtual reality become more realistic and compelling we're going to see "immersive illness" become more common and more difficult to deal with. Although this is an issue today we're somewhat protected by the limitations of today's personal computers and game consoles (they just aren't powerful enough...yet), but in another decade or more it'll be a different story altogether. Nobody knows exactly what impact insanely realistic, media-rich virtual reality will have on society. We're already dealing with early forms of immersive illness, such as addiction, alienation, mental schisms, and more, but today it's not a problem that affects a large percentage of users. We don't see massive problems today for a number of reasons, including rather low-quality virtual environments and limitations on how much time we spend in these environments. But what happens when the visual and audio quality becomes indistinguishable from reality, the technology becomes truly mainstream, and a substantial portion of education takes place in such environments and not in a real classroom? With massive power comes massive problems. Last week I was asked how big this problem will be, and I responded that nobody knows for sure but I'd estimate that the at-risk population can be calculate by adding the percentage of people with addiction problems to the percentage of society that suffer some form of mental illness. That's a big chunk of society. Is it all gloom and doom? Certainly not, but it's a grand challenge we're not even remotely prepared for today. As with other disruptions society will eventually adapt, but I think we're in for a very rough ride.

Other advantages include the time saved in traveling to and from class, which can be significant for students who live off campus. I've had some non-traditional students live over an hour away from Boston College, meaning they waste more than two hours traveling ever time we have class in person (on campus).

It's also worth noting that the "fun" factor can't be denied. Most of the students I've spoken with about their experience with these classes say they're the most fun they've had, and that they look forward to being in virtual reality each week. We're dealing with a generation of students weaned on video games, so it should come as no surprise that they enjoy learning in what amounts to a game-based learning environment. Giving students a educational experience that they not only enjoy but are very enthusiastic about is definitely an advantage.

Lamont: You recently received an award for promoting "Immersive Education" at BC, and are now trying to spread these concepts to other institutions. What does Immersive Education entail, and what does it offer other instructors and educational institutions?

Walsh: Yes, that's true. Students at Boston College nominated me for a Teaching with New Media (TWIN), which I was awarded last year, for my work with Immersive Education. Although I've been working in virtual reality for over 15 years it's only been over the past few years that we could teach classes online using this technology. Outside of playing video games this was the first time that most students really had a chance to dig in and learn about interactive 3D and virtual reality, and the response has been outstanding and very encouraging. But it's just the start. If Immersive Education were a human I'd argue that it's barely crawling, and there's a lot of work still to be done until it reaches its full potential.

Immersive Education is an application of the Media Grid (http://MediaGrid.org) that combines 3D/VR technology with digital media to bring distance learning and self-directed learning to a new level. Unlike traditional distance learning, Immersive Education is designed to immerse and engage students in the same way that today's best video games grab and keep the attention of players. Immersive Education combines interactive virtual reality and sophisticated digital media (voice chat, game-based learning modules, audio/video, and so forth) with collaborative online course environments and classrooms. Immersive Education gives students a sense of "being there" even when attending class in person isn't possible, practical, or desirable, which in turn provides faculty and remote students with the ability to connect and communicate in a way that greatly enhances the learning experience.

We're now in the process of selecting the next generation platform for Immersive Education, around which international standards are being established. Making Immersive Education open, extensible, freely available and fully documented will make it possible for any organization or individual to use it. This goes beyond the technology platform itself, and includes best-practices for teachers and institutions to follow as well as student-faculty ecosystems that organizations can employ. I'd encourage teachers and students to participate directly in the Immersive Education standardization process by visiting ImmersiveEducation.org and sharing their virtual learning experiences with the group (be it with Second Life or any other virtual environments).

Lamont: Do schools really have the technology resources, staff expertise, and funding to get involved in Immersive Education?

Walsh: The vast majority don't, at least not today, which is why we're focused on making Immersive Education an open standard that's easy to use, well documented and free. But that alone won't do it; best practices and student-faculty ecosystems are necessary as well, and so are communities of support. The vast majority of educators simply don't have the time, funding, or expertise to create and use virtual learning environments today. This probably won't change, which is why it's necessary to eliminate the cost and reduce the complexity.

The syllabus for Walsh's Discovering 3D Graphics and Virtual Reality course can be found here. Feel free to leave comments or questions below.

UO RIP? Not So Much

The demise of Ultima Online -- now nearing its tenth anniversary -- has been widely predicted, even here on Terra Nova over two years ago.  Multiple abortive attempts at revamping the game have been made within Electronic Arts (heck, I was on the second one and that was nearly five years ago).  It has long seemed to many industry watchers that UO would eventually ride off into the MMO sunset, carrying its still respectable playerbase with it. 

Well, apparently not.  UO is a Kingdom Reborn. Spiffy new 3D graphics, same top-down viewpoint.

So, apart from celebrating the refurbishing of this venerable title, what does this say about the useful lifespan of an MMO?  Clearly if a successful virtual world can last for even five years, much less ten, it's an amazing entertainment property from a business/investment perspective.  But from a gameplay and community perspective, is UO still viable for those who are not already die-hard fans? 

Can MMOs effectively live forever (with enough facelifts), or should they at some point gracefully retire? 

MODs for MMOs for the Hearing Impaired

The other day, Samantha LeCraft posted a reply to one of my posts

Get involved in the WoW modding community. Learn how to create add-ons for WoW, and see if there are others within the existing WoW mod community who would be interested in collaborating on a mod. Personally, I would start with a mod that translates sounds from combat to directional visual cues, as that is something that isn't already included in WoW and is, from what I know, one of the few barriers to the deaf playing WoW (since nearly all communication in WoW is text based already). Don't bill it as a "special interest mod". Mention the applicability to deaf players, but also point out that it would be useful to hearing players who don't have headphones or a sound card, or who have to turn off their sound due to roommates or children, or even just for that added edge in combat. Once you've created the mod, put it up for download at a place that will show the number of times it's been downloaded. Then come back here and tell us of your progress. You never know, Blizzard might be listening.

This is an excellent suggestion, although one that requires quite a bit of people power. As of right now, we have only one member that has the experience with creating MODs for the hearing impaired: Reid Kimball who created an amazing MOD for Doom3 (yes, I realize that is not a MMO) that allowed for not only verbal closed captioning but also ambient sound closed captioning (it was also nominated for a MOD award at the IGF).

Reid tried the other day to post a suggestion on the WoW forums to try and see if there would be some support in helping him create a MOD for WoW but because he is not a player of WoW (and, therefore, does not pay for the online service), he was not allowed to post. We're writing Blizzard to see if they can make an exception in this case, as it makes the case that there are people WILLING to work on MODS or at least share their expertise that could make the game more enticing for those 3 million people in the United States alone who are unable to hear. But in the meantime I thought that I would introduce you to Reid as a resource for those interested in learning more about accessibility for the hearing impaired in MMOGs here at TN.

Reid also suggested a design exercise for MMO devs and users:

Play your favorite MMO one of two ways and report back their results. 1) with all sounds off for 10 minutes or 2) close their eyes for 10 minutes and listen to the sounds trying to recognize what they are hearing. I'm curious to know what they learn.

So there's your game accessibility summer homework assignment. :)

{Addendum from Reid: I spent zero money developing Doom3[CC]. It only took time on nights and weekends while I worked a full time job. It has been downloaded over 19,000 times since release. If I had charged $5 dollars for it I could have profited $95,000 dollars. That's a one year salary for a talented programmer in some parts of the US, who could make huge impacts at a company.}

Is it really so bad to be bad?

Colleen 'momgamer' Hannon's rant about the 'hate-filled miasma' that clouds player vs. player interactions has me thinking... While I understand her point - maybe people want to be able to engage in a little friendly PvP without being subjected to a continuum of crap that begins with infantile lewdness and extends to potentially damaging attacks characterized by bigotry, misanthropy and vitriolic abuse - I can't help but wonder if there is a larger phenomenon that we're missing.

Most of us are pretty comfortable with the idea that videogames can provide arenas for transgressive play that allows people to explore taboos and societal no-no's with impunity.  I can mow down pedestrians in GTA, get the delicious thrill of doing something I would never, ever do in real life and then go back to my usual existence of not even being able to kill ants in my kitchen without feeling guilty about it.  There are even those that suggest that these types of activities fill an important psychological need:  in most animals play is preparation for real life.  I even wrote a paper about this recently - I summarize some thinking on play and its role in human development:

To overlook play as a critical component of the human experience is to miss an opportunity to leverage an inherent human capability for learning that is also a drive rooted in basic survival strategies. Play, as a state, is simply an opportunity for unfocused, open-ended experimentation, often in an environment that has been designed to allow for a range of experiences, some prescribed, but some almost entirely emergent... With respect to this alternative framing, rather than to say that one is 'at play'€™ it would be more descriptive to say that one is 'in play', that is, one is carving out a space in which experimentation is safe and possible -€“ this state is non-linear, unfocused on a particular end result, and allows for creative thinking, innovative problem solving, and shifts in perspective... Play also serves as a motivating force, but it is most powerfully an apparatus for allowing experimentation outside of limitations of physical practicality or other opportunity barriers, e.g. the difficulty of training for natural disasters, that arise from needing to develop competency in an area that is highly dependent on experiences that are not frequently encountered.

Okay, so here's an opportunity barrier:  how often do we get to see what happens when we are jerks to others?  One of my hypotheses is that there is not so much a griefer archetype, so much as there are people who play at griefing just to see what happens when they do.  Wreaking havoc in the real world just carries too high a cost.  For some people, the temptation to be a little bit evil is overshadowed by a more pragmatic drive to conform to societal norms.  But games let us play at being evil!  And that means a lot more than picking the bad faction.  For many there is a larger game of general obnoxiousness and seeing how people respond to our barbs... distasteful to be sure, but maybe there is more to it than first meets the eye...

We can argue all day long about whether there are people who are inherently evil, but the truth is that most people aren't.  It doesn't make evolutionary sense to be mean to others when our survival is so often rooted in the fitness of the group.  But (warning: I'm going all post-modern here) this sort of play is just as integral to the development of identity in a complex society as play-fighting is for lion cubs.  How do people respond if I do something?  What can I get away with?  What behaviors subject me to a penalty of some sort?  This is especially important for young people who are in the process of identity formation.  There are billions of options for how to be.  Which ways work best, make one feel the best, allow for maximum success?  Which contribute to Shirky's advantages of youth?  Is it good for the doormat to learn a thing or two about steamrolling?

Or maybe there is a cathartic effect at work?  Isn't it better to take out my aggressions in some PvP rather than beating my wife or kids, or pulling someone out of their car and beating the bejeezus out of them when they cut me off in traffic?  The world is a horrible, frustrating place.  Where else is that anger going to go?  In Killing Monsters, Gerard Jones notes  that catharsis comes from the Greek word 'katharsis', meaning 'a release of dangerous emotions' (Artistotle was apparently a  fan; Karl Lorenz made it a theory), and requires that 'emotions be stimulated before they can be released'.  And yes, this thinking has been generally applied as a justification (controversially, to say the least) that violent videogames aren't so bad after all.  So let's say there's something to it.  Could it also be applied to these nasty social interactions?  Or does allowing them to happen perpetuate more of the same, a game of hateful, desensitizing one-upsmanship?  Is there any rationale for applying what Jones says about violence to social transgression as well?

Anthropologists and psychologists who study play, however, have shown that there are many other functions, as well -- one of which is to enable children to be just what they know they will never be...  Playing with rage is a valuable way to reduce its power.  Being evil and destructive in imagination is a vital compensation for the wildness we all have to surrender on the way to being good people. (p. 11)

I agree with momgamer that it sucks that well-meaning people get driven away from environments overrun by nasty people who have no qualms about ruining everyone's fun.   A new sheriff (and lots of deputies) might be just the thing.  Cultures are mutable.  They are a collective creation of the individuals who contribute to them: their beliefs and other patterns that emerge over time.  Change can be effected, but to do so requires speaking up.  You want a voice of non-bigoted reason in the Barrens chat?  Then speak up.  Find facing the Warthog repulsive?  Go ahead and say so.  Silence is sanction to continue.  Model some positive behavior.  But let's also accept that every game culture doesn't need to be palatable to everyone.  I'm sure that none of us really think that stealing police cars and running over innocent people is okay, but is there perhaps a place for it in certain digital spaces?  Instead of knee-jerk reactions to transgression, how about asking why we do it?  That's much more interesting.

What? What do one button games have to do with MMOs?

So right now I'm mainly talking about gamers with mobility limitations (could include a whole range of things) but a lot of these controllers can help those with severe learning disabilities depending on the level of the game and the type of learning disability.

Yes. I am advertising a service but at the same time I'm letting you know about a resource called One Switch by London game enthusiast and SIG member, Barrie Ellis. Not only does he sell accessible gaming solutions in his shop, Barrie has helped the DIY (Do-It Yourself) hobbiest with a DIY page with detailed information and also a blog. But something you really need to look over is his excellent page on physical barriers in video gaming: problems and solutions.

But let's back up. I know. What's all this switch stuff? And why should anyone at TN care about it? I see it as a complement to sites like AbleGamers, places where gamers with mobility disabilities in particular can find out more about accessible gaming peripherals. Many people with mobility disabilities can type using assistive technologies and many more can have a friend remap controls to work with, for example, head gear that controls the cursor and button clicking. For those creating user created content in Second Life, creating a one-switch arcade might attract a large number of mobility disabled SL-ers.

To quote Barrie:

Inaccessible controllers and inaccessible games are the bane of many disabled peoples lives. Many games have too many buttons to remember, are too fast, and have very little help to offer the player at all. Many games won’t allow people to use their favourite controllers, nor change the layout of their controls in a useful way. These barriers cause frustration for many. Games a person might desperately want to play, frequently prove to be an unrewarding, uncomfortable, or impossible challenge in reality. Disabled people regularly facing these barriers are novice gamers, physically disabled gamers, learning disabled gamers and many children up to the age of eight." [Note: Michelle's note -- Club Penguin that Mike Sellers posted about at TN could be a gold mine for children with some disabilities as some switch gaming and motion sensor controllers could work well with such sites]

One-switch games have been the "great new discovery" by the mobile phone game folks as "one-button" games (because really...do you like playing mobile games that use even more than two or three buttons?). Imagine a time in which MMOGs find their way in some capacity (perhaps they do already) to mobile phones -- wouldn't an easier input design be a plus?

Barrie also has links to one-switch accessible games including the excellent Strange Attractors by Ominous Development that was awarded a nomination for Most Innovative by the Independent Games Festival at GDC 2006)

Eric Walker of Ominous Development has this to say about the idea of one switch meaning "easy":

"Strange Attractors was created for a 'One Switch' competition. Just because the only button used by the game is the space bar (and Esc to exit) doesn't mean the gameplay isn't complex and unique. Remember, not everything that is simple is easy!

By pressing the spacebar, you activate the gravity drive of your craft and create an attractive force between yourself and the other objects in the game. Your goal is to sling and bounce yourself from the bottom of the level through the portal at the top.

I have never personally seen anyone play this game and not laugh out loud."

Word on the street? Strange Attractors 2 is on the way!

Welcome to AbleGamers

In an effort to increase the face value of my game accessibility posts for the MMOG community, I've asked for some additional assistance from the game accessibility community and was reminded of AbleGamers, a fairly new site run by Mark Barlet,  a Disabled Veteran and avid gamer, primarily as a host for reviews of the accessibility of MMOGs.

Mark includes accessibility reviews of several MMOGs -- more are coming. I'm trying to get him access to a few for review purposes. But for now, we have these:

• Auto Assault
• Dungeons & Dragons Online
• Everquest II
• The Lord of the Rings Online

There's also an interesting editorial on some recent efforts by Blizzard that incidentally closed off accessibility for many gamers with mobility disabilities called Wanted Adventurers: Disabled Need Not Apply and talks about a decision from Blizzard to disable the ability for gamers to use  "add on features" that many mobility impaired gamers needed to play. And the disturbance to a community of gamers who now find them locked out of the game that had originally provided them with the ability -- through community created add ons -- to access the game. I have no news as to whether this feature has been added back but I've been told that it hasn't (please correct me if I'm wrong!)

A few of us took a TN commenters suggestion of going to the WoW forums to see if we can find people interested in joining us in an accessible mod. The trouble is...none of us have accounts because we don't play WoW so we couldn't even post the request on the forum. Sure, I understand that they want to have a community for, well, the community of players. But what about the community of would be gamers that are a little leery of spending money for the game and then then monthly fees only to find out that they can't do anything? Perhaps we've missed something and there is a forum for people who would play but can't to post -- anyone around here know about a back door somewhere?

Must See PVP

I've never been a sports nut.  But last week, as I found myself obsessing over frame-captured video of the World of Warcraft Arena semifinals, I realized -- MMORPGs may plausibly give us the basis for the next set of semi-participatory sports.  Here's an example of two top-level players going toe-to-toe (I've skipped most of the videos because they are grainy and accompanied by very angry music.)  Let me explain.

My basic thought is that we watch what we play.  And if one tenet of this community is that people are playing interesting new games, we might see a shift in what we watch.

That said, what really drove the point home was my own interest in watching "sports."  I've never had the slightest interest in watching other people play games.  It seemed odd -- why watch, if you're not playing?  And yet I find myself watching these grainy, music-wracked clips with enormous interest, straining my eyes for pointers, watching how they move (mouselook? WASD?), watching the combinations, the keyboard setups, you name it.

I think that Blizzard is not unaware of this, and is attempting to turn Arena into something with a heavy footprint beyond the bounds of the game.  Can't play? Tune in to the EU qualifying round, courtesy of Art of War.  And, according to Ming, the upcoming World Finals between Grammar Police and The Fighting Mongooses will be must-see-PVP.

There's Gold in them thar... Penguins

Club Penguin is, as you probably (or really should) know by now, a great example of a true second-generation MMOG.   It's cute, cuddly, great for kids, and plays right in the browser (no dynamically mapped shadows in sight).  It uses a combination of free play, subscription ($6/month), and item-based sales to generate revenue.  Oh and there's no download, no retail, no spattered blood, blue elves, or female cat things overflowing their strangely armored bustiers. 

Supposedly, New Horizon Interactive, the company that developed and runs Club Penguin from sunny Kelowna, BC, Canada, has turned down investment funding thus far -- with their approximately 50% gross margin, they just don't need the money.  And, according to Paid Content, the company spurned an acquisition offer by News Corp for $200M.  According to that site, they're now being courted by none other than Sony for (reportedly) $450M. 

That's a lot of penguins.   

As PaidContent points out, $450M is about 7.5x CP's projected 2007 revenues of $60M, so it's not a stratospheric price from that point of view.  But, if this is at all accurate, it's a clear indication that the true commercial legitimacy and monetary value of MMOGs and virtual worlds -- those that make money anyway -- is beginning to be understood. 

What does this mean for the future of MMOGs?  Are behemoth 3D role-playing games going the way of the brontosaurus or is Club Penguin itself an anomaly? 

Personally, I think it's extremely heartening to see a game like this so clearly rewarded.  The market is changing, and this is primary evidence for it:  The audience demographic is broadening; the gameplay is breaking out of "kill monster, get gold;" graphics are moving beyond ponderous if ever-more realistic 3D; and development methods are finally moving beyond mis-applied rough extensions of what's (sort of) worked in single-player games.   I don't think mainline/first-generation MMOGs are dead, but I do think this sort of value-recognition in Club Penguin is more of a bellwether than an anomaly.   The dinosaurs aren't gone, but the small mammals (or well-dressed flightless birds, as the case may be) are starting to claim their due.

Teaching in Second Life: One instructor's perspective

Earlier this month on Terra Nova, a thread started by Aaron Delwiche discussed aspects of teaching and learning in Second Life. He is not the only academic who has realized the potential of Second Life to serve as a platform for instruction. The virtual world is already being used at 125 colleges, universities, and schools worldwide, according to the Second Life Educators Wiki (thanks to Barbara Z. Johnson for the link).

The thread and the wiki prompted me to look at how Second Life is being used at the Harvard Extension School, where I am currently a graduate student. In 2006, the Extension School and the Harvard Law School launched CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion. This course in "persuasive, empathic argument in the Internet space" included weekly sessions and assignments in Second Life. I did not participate in the class, but had wondered about the virtual classroom experience, which I believe was the first of its kind at Harvard. Last Friday (May 11, 2007) I was able to interview Rebecca Nesson, one of the course instructors for CyberOne, to find out more about the challenges, tools, and interactions she observed while teaching in SL. I transcribed the entire interview, but in this Terra Nova post, I am only including the sections that relate specifically to teaching in Second Life (the full unedited interview, which also includes several Harvard-specific questions and answers, is available here).

It was interesting to see how she led the classroom sessions, and handled some of the challenges that arose using the SL interface. The CyberOne experiment was apparently successful -- in the spring 2007 semester, the Berkman Center and the Extension School held another class in Second Life, Internet and Society: Technologies and Politics of Control, and this fall Nesson will teach Virtual Worlds at the Extension School.

Without further ado, here are the questions I asked, and Nesson's answers. I have included a brief version of Nesson's bio at the end of the post. Feel free to add your own observations about teaching/learning in Second Life (or other virtual worlds) to the comments.

Ian Lamont: Aside from [connectivity] issues, what was the feedback [you heard] from people about the Second Life interface?

Rebecca Nesson: Overall it was very positive. I would say that there was a definite arc to it. At the beginning, there was a certain amount of Second Life culture shock, where people try to get acclimated about how to use the interface. The first impression that a lot of people had about it was that it was a very chaotic environment in which to have a class discussion because everyone talks at once and there's no threading in the discussions. When you read the transcripts of the discussions, they can seem fairly disjointed and that felt a little disorienting to people right at the beginning.

We all got used to it over the course of the semester, and also got much better at it. One of the things that we brought to the class with us are years of built-up experience of how one is supposed to act in a class as a student and an instructor. And a lot of those norms — like, raising your hand and waiting for someone to stop speaking before you begin speaking — they just dont make sense in the Second Life environment because it would just take way too long to have a discussion.

And as a result we were basically faced with the challenge of having to develop a whole new set of classroom norms that worked in this environment. Once we got that going, everyone got much more comfortable with the environment. By the end of the semester, people were really enjoying it.

There were some people who had a much easier time expressing themselves in the Second Life environment, than in the more formal writing [assignments] and turning it in on our courseware website. So for those people, it really opened up the distance education experience to have this other method of being able to express themselves and interact with the instructor and other students.

And there were some students on the other side of things who were very comfortable writing traditional response papers and had a harder time in the spontaneous, more interactive discussions that we were having in the classroom environment in Second Life. So all in all, that's a major improvement. I would prefer for my classes to be available to a wider range of learning and styles of expression.

Lamont: You just said that some people found it easier to interact in Second Life. Why do you suppose that is? Does it relate to their personalities, or the fact that they're used to typing IMs?

Nesson: Let me be clear. I don't necessarily mean it would be easier for them than acting in real life. This is just opposed to them acting in their normal way in a distance education class, interacting mainly through a website and through email with their instructors.

I think that the Second Life had quite a lot of advantages for people. One of the main things is that Second Life really allowed us to create a sense of class community — something that develops fairly naturally in a face-to-face class. So students appeared at class and had that chance to meet each other, something that rarely, if ever, happens in distance education classes [using] previous technologies. And that helped keep students engaged in the class.

And having a physical representation of their "selves" through their avatars, whether it looked like them or looked like something completely different, was quite important in having them establish relationships with each other. Because it gave people a way to express something of their personality that wasn't necessarily directly related to what we were doing in the class. And it just was the icebreaker for people beginning to relate to each other and make comments about somebody's cool dress or something like that and get a little conversation going.

So having the class have a sense of a community, and being a little bit social for most students really adds to the experience. It certainly added to the experience for me. I think that probably helped to draw in some students.

Also, we tend to think of Second Life as a less expressive environment than face-to-face environments because at the moment we don't have the ability to easily do gestures and facial expressions or even to really direct our gaze really well.

It does in other senses offer people a wider range of ways that they can express themselves, and that was something I was excited about. Early on, when I was writing on the blog, just finding that some students just really seemed to take to the creative aspects of the environment and really try to use the unrestrained environment and really try to violate the laws of physics as part of their way of existing in the world, and it just gave them a range of expression that doesn't really exist when you are typing out a response paper and turning it in.

Lamont: What surprised you in terms of the creative aspects and the things that they did in the classroom sessions?

Nesson: I guess what surprised me was that I had sort of a typical narrow view of what Second Life was going to be like. I was thinking of it as a big improvement over a chatroom but I hadn't really considered as something that had potentials that really went beyond what I had experienced with other technologies. I think that it's not until you spend some time in there that you start to get a sense of the way in which it's different, because it's kind of hard to pinpoint, to put into words, what exactly is making the difference.

So I would say the biggest surprise for me wasn't the way that some people were expressing themselves, but the experience of all of us running our classes in a text-based environment. I expected that to be only a hindrance, and at the beginning it did seem like a hindrance, it seemed a little chaotic, and it was something that we had to get used to. But as we progressed in the class, it became clear that running the class in a text-based environment has a whole lot of advantages over the face-to-face environment that I just hadn't anticipated.

The first one that was really striking, was that in all my years of teaching classes, there are always some students in the class who are very hard to get to speak up. You can ask them a direct question, but basically, unless they are put on the spot, these students will not volunteer their own opinions in class, and I think that there are various reasons why people are reticent and don't want to do that. Sometimes I think people are shy and don't want to be put on the spot — all the conversation stops, and everyone turns to look at them. In some cases, students for whom English is not their first language, it really can be an intimidating thing to have to extemporaneously put together English sentences like that in a classroom environment.

In Second Life, that problem of students not participating in class discussions just totally disappeared. And when I thought about it, these reasons, these challenges of speaking up in a regular class went away in this environment. In Second Life, when you want to contribute something to the class discussion, you just go ahead and start typing it in your chat box, and nobody turns to look at you, even if they do notice that your avatar is doing the typing motions, the