Posted by Richard at March 6th, 2008
This nice article on implicature (from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) the basics of the Gricean implicature is forcing me to rethink some of the more naive examples I gave in class last night. Interesting to think about the assumption of cooperativeness in interfaces and instruction versus the assumption of cooperation in testing/assessment and games.
Blogged with Flock
Posted by Richard at December 13th, 2007
Just in time for tonight’s presentation, here are copies of my:
Posted by Richard at December 8th, 2007
Given my interest in online learning, it’s surprising that it took me a year to get around to engaging an article I’d bookmarked almost a year ago: Learners’ Perspectives on What is Missing from Online Learning.
The co-authors, from major Canadian research universities, noted several areas where learners (apparently mostly adult learners) found their online learning environments wanting for a vairety of reasons:
The question, of course, is whether a virtual world or game environment classroom would aid and abet the learners or enhance the learners problems.
Blogged with Flock
Posted by Richard at December 8th, 2007
I Have No Words & I Must Design is Greg Costikyan’s classic article on what makes a game a game and what makes a great game great.
I got this article via email several years ago from a former colleague. The email came with the provocative title “is instructional design like game design?” At that time, four of us on the instructional design team were former pen-and-paper game designers and another was a former video game journalist. I loved the article not only because it wonderfully articulated a beef I’d had for years (that most online role-playing games weren’t role-playing games), but that his components of a strong game (including diplomacy, color, simulation, etc.) also struck me as the components of a strong teaching-learning encounter.
Blogged with Flock
Posted by Richard at October 24th, 2007
Howard Rheingold published Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier in 1993, wrapping up a good portion of his research in 1992 or earlier. At this time the World Wide Web was still nascent, and those of us who were finding our way onto the Internet via commercial access providers were still using Gopher to do our exploring. Like the WELL, on which Rheingold focuses, many online communities were formed on commercial online services (such as GEnie, Delphi, AOL, and Prodigy), with only limited access to the net at large. William Gibson and Neal Stephenson were still envisioning an Internet dominated by virtual reality and three-dimensional avatars.
It the ensuing 14 years, many things have changed. Commercial online services are almost extinct (or have converted themselves to ISPs), replaced by membership or subscription-driven communities accessed via the Web browser. Gopher has vanished, and in the minds of most people, the Web and the Internet are synonymous, since the Web browser now grants access to almost everything. The Internet has been deregulated, and e-commerce dominates discussions. Where MUDs and online services gave the general populace a taste of online multi-player games in 1993, now MMORPGs dominate the gaming industry. Virtual communities rose and fell, and coalesced, most recently, around blog comment sections and social networking sites, the earliest of which began growing in popularity in 2003. About that same time, Second Life appeared.
The phenomenon of Second Life and other virtual worlds has raised important challenges to the way we think about digital culture, challenges that send us back to consider the themes, divergences, and convergences that emerged even in the early online community days of Rheingold’s book. To understand the challenge that Second Life presents as a new virtual community tool (or virtual community environment), it would help to look at the way the Internet has changed since Rheingold’s original publication and how Second Life breaks with many of those trends.
If communities are formed of relationships, it makes sense to take a look at the types of relationships Rheingold describes and how those types of online relationships have evolved in the past decade and a half. The WELL, a subscription-based, for-profit virtual community that dominates the early chapters of Rheingold’s book arose as a way of connecting people across a relatively proximate space: the San Francisco Bay area of California. With just a few hundred subscribers when Rheingold joined in the 1980s, the WELL community sponsored picnics, parties, and dinners that most members could drive to. Its focus was to introduce people and serve as a communication channel that supplemented other available channels. But Rheingold notes that as the WELL grew, so did the user base: it came to include members from the East Coast and across the country. People developed virtual relationships with others they had little hope of meeting. As the WELL and other, similar networks gave way to commercial access to the Internet in throughout the 1990s, with Usenet newsgroups, MUDs, and IRC channels, distance communication rose in importance. These new, global relationships were not people who would necessarily have regular meet-ups — or even know who the others really were. Simultaneously, the Web gave birth to numerous sites that fostered proximate relationships. If one wanted to meet one’s neighbors, one went to a local chat site, personals site, or message-posting site (depending on what one wanted to meet one’s neighbors for). These sites rose in prominence as more and more Americans began to accept the Internet into their daily lives. As one wit of the late ’90s quipped: most people were using a powerful network built to foster global communication to hook-up with people who lived down the street.
Second Life represents a radical departure from this increasingly proximate nature of the Internet. Linden doesn’t build many local groups or networks and not many have formed inside Second Life. The focus is in-world relationships and in-world communication. Relationships formed there are meant to build and grow within the context of the Second Life world. This focus on global, non-proximate relationships has foregrounded another, almost forgotten dimension of virtual life that Rheingold discusses: its lack of social acceptance.
Rheingold also discusses the respectability of the ‘net communications at great length, including those who disdain Internet-gained credibility, fear and misunderstand MUDs, and wonder why anyone would find the network enjoyable. He vividly describes an exchange with his wife who describes the WELL as a bunch of misfits finding each other. As the Internet grew, however, so did its respectability. It is now a standard part of professional collaboration, personal and professional shopping, billing and payment, and travel planning.
In many ways Second Life represents a break with the ‘Net’s increasing respectability. Second Life foregrounds cybersexual behavior, online-only relationships, and alternative identity formation. While these are all well known in the MMORPG world, MMORPGs (over and against virtual worlds) represent a specific, goal-oriented ludic activity. Games are, after all, something mature adults are allowed to participate in. Pure make-believe (and most people regard virtual relationships as make-believe relationships), on the other hand, seems to be generally regarded as a child’s activity. The Nerdnet, over against the real net, is based on two components that were central to the early virtual communities Rheingold describes: alternative identity formation and alternative economic models.
Much like the WELL, which even today requires that users share their own real-life names, much of today’s Internet demands that some RL personal identifier be presented and made available. Since the goal is developing proximate relationships (or maintaining existing relationships), this is understandable. If one is using the ‘Net to search for a mate, a running buddy, or a Monday-night bridge partner, one’s own “real” identity must be revealed, at least eventually (even if in stages: with a personal ad, one might get pictures, a first name, contact information, and a last name in that particular order). If one is using email and project-planning sites to collaborate with colleagues, then most of this information is already known. The stress is on representation of the “real” self to other “real” selves, some of whom already know the “real” you.
This stands in sharp contrast to Rheingold’s explorations of MUDs and IRC. There the stress was on the alternate self - the self that was other than the one that was generally presented to the public. Since the relationships were distant and largely solely online, the “real” self was irrelevant, what mattered was the consistent, believable presentation of an alternate identity.
Second Life represents a large-scale return to the Internet of the alternate identity, though it offers a unique twist on the MUD or IRC. Where these communication channels allowed users to create and recreate themselves, Second Life encourages the formation of one consistently named “avatar,” whose appearance, gender, and ethnicity may change radically from moment to moment. This allows the avatar to shift to the environment or the whims of the user while still be recognizable to friends. For instance, my avatar, Ru, generally wanders around as a short man with a lemur’s tail. But he’s visited a sex club as a pink-haired, overweight, knobby-kneed, gnome in leather shorts and a tank top. He also appears in the Toxia City online game (hosted within Second Life) as a black-clad, normal-sized man with red hair and a lip piercing. When he visits professional locations, with people I might one day meet in real life, he pumps up his height, narrows his shoulders, and puts on cargo pants and a button-up shirt. He’s even appeared briefly as a woman with giant, webbed ears (and oddly, he was propositioned).
Since the mid 1990s, ecommerce has gained attention from a variety of quarters, creating an Internet bubble (and the subsequent burst) and still fostering new business ventures. Rheingold called the WELL, on the other hand, a “gift economy” and discussed knowledge, communication skills, verbal eloquence, and quick wit as the “coin” of MUDs and IRC (along with programming skills and a willingness to share). Rheingold also notes the significance of “Mastery,” especially in terms of mastering the environment and its coding standards.
Such an economy also emerges in Second Life, even though it comes alongside a more traditional e-commerce version. While users must pay money for certain privileges (such as access to games that use a combat system), almost all other items can be constructed, which means they can also be given away in exchange for friendship, favors, or simply to foster generosity. The eloquence that makes the items valuable is in the visual and interaction design rather than the language, though quick wit and linguistic eloquence continue to play a role. In “Toxian City,” a Second Life-based RPG that my avatar Ru Weatherwax has been exploring, characters try to foster the image of a gritty, urban, noirish fantasy environment. Since nonverbal communication must be scripted, most avatars still make extensive use of non-visual, text-based emoting to describe the fine details of their actions. (While scripts can be created to mimic these non-verbals, even simple scripts, when unnecessary can slow the response of the server). In the excerpted following exchange, Ru interacts with two other avatars who are also playing characters in Toxian City, combining emoting with dialog rather than trying to finely manipulate avatar movement:
[21:12] Serena Razor laughs. “Consider it a token of gratitude.”
[21:14] Taina Vollmar turns to Ru, “Keep an eye out for that one, friend…she is more cunning than any Daemon.”
[21:14] Ru Weatherwax grins “Yes, I’m picking up on that”
By making use of the emoting features of the Second Life chat interface, players enrich the game play for other users in ways that might be missed if only those who could script movement were allowed to participate. Likewise, the gift economy is fostered when Second Lifers freely share information, give virtual object and scripted gifts, and allow public access to their virtual geographic locations.
Moreso than any one trend, much modern development of the Internet has sought to build networked applications that made the Internet ubiquitous and virtualinvisible - imminent. This newer Internet travels alongside our lives and supplements the relationships and activities that we already have in the physical space. Second Life represents, in some senses, a movement backward to the types of virtual communities Rheingold described: those that were outside of our everyday experience. For Rheingold and his contemporaries, going online meant that your eyes (and attentions) were leaving to real world and moving to the virtual world. For them the Internet did not pervade every element of their universe, it transcended it.
Second Life, and other virtual reality applications, likewise don’t seek to supplement existing relationships or help us build relationships that will then primarily move to real time. While they can be used for such, numerous other tools seem to better serve these ends. Instead, Second Life intends to help us create just that. A life other than, and outside of, the one we currently lead. Where the Hindu gods created avatars in order to touch the world of humans, humans create avatars in Second Life in order to escape that world - though whether it’s the world of the gods that they aspire to may depend on the user.
Posted by Richard at October 23rd, 2007
Update: I’ve moved this post to make room on the main page. Click here for the originally posted rough draft.
Posted by Richard at October 18th, 2007
Ru Weatherwax is a newbie avatar in Second Life, and rarely has more than a few Lindens to his name. He’s prone to changing clothes (and body) a lot.
Ru started out life like most other Avatars, navigating Orientation Island (where he had to retake several of the tutorials because he’s not good at following rules). And then spending a couple of hours running around, trying to get off of Help Island. He found most other newbies rather non-communicative, but he survived and got out into the world at large.
Ru eventually figured out that to get off Help Island, you had to teleport, and the only way he knew to teleport was to search. So, he started off treating Second Life like a brand new city and went to search for the Gay & Lesbian Community Center. Typing “gay” into the search box produced the sort of results you would have suspected from Infoseek back in 1996: lots and lots of porn. Ru tried a couple of the tamer-sounding locations but found them deserted. Slowly climbing the ladder of potential skeeviness in search of other people, he eventually ended up at a sex shop called “Bad@zz.”
Bad@zz, which it turned out was also some sort of sex club, drew a mixed crowd: people of both genders and a variety of orientations, all with the avatar bodies of porn stars (many of them anatomically accurate). None of them really wanted to talk either, or at least not to a shabbily dressed guy who looked like a cross between a gnome, a goth, and a ring-tailed lemur. Ru figured he could change shape, but why deny his gnome-lemur heritage just to fit in?
Ru gave up on socializing and came back the next day, ran the same search for “gay” again, and discovered a nice little virtual lesbian bar called Moody’s. The nice women there, who didn’t look very generic (most of them looked like the stepped out of an anime festival) showed Ru how to join their synchronized dance animation, though Ru was having bandwidth troubles and couldn’t hear the music feed.
However, several of the good folks at Moody’s seemed to want to converse privately about personal life issues, which can make any newbie feel like a bit of a third wheel. So Ru, who was broke, decided to try his hand at shopping at one of the free stores.
The free stores had a fairly nice variety of swag, though almost all of it was pretty heavily branded. Ru changed into his more comfy, chubby shape and tried on a good bit of what he found, much the understandable discomfort of some other shoppers. He eventually came away with a Ramones shirt, some leather pants, and a great lip piercing.
Ru wandered around, chatted with folks at bars (who seemed primarily interested in seeing their avatars dance and listen to music). He got a few leads on places that were beautifully designed. He relaxed for a bit in a beautiful treehouse in a perpetual state of dusk. He flew around a giant lava flow and explored a Jade cavern behind a waterfall. He looked for a few communities of interest: Thais Sapeur gave him a lead on an island where a number of non-profits maintained virtual offices, but there was no one there when he arrived. The same with the (very lovely and highly promoted) island of the New Media Consortium. From time to time, he’d even find his beloved Moody’s completely empty. The Second Life world seemed dominated by tall, slender, well-muscled folks with hair and expensive clothes, and outside of a Yiffy club (note: look up “yiffy” before you venture in), no one seemed to have a lemur tail (and even at the Yiffy club, lemurs were in short supply). What was with this place, where almost anything is possible, where more and more people lined up to look less and less like individuals?
Blogged with Flock
Posted by Richard at October 5th, 2007
Flock and I may have hit the first bump in our otherwise all-honeymoon of a relationship. (You’ll notice there’s no “blogged with Flock” below.)
Okay, I admit it: I’m a convert to the notion of structural markup, and that means I’m probably more fanatical than other, saner people who have real things to worry about. But let’s reality check this a bit:
Really, there’s no excuse for a product, especially a product that is supposedly hip to the whole 2.0 thing, using deprecated, non-standard, presentational HTML. But when I was constructing my (absolutely brilliant) post on Buzzword just moments ago, I flipped over to code view and instead of giving me headings, Flock had used the font tag to resize my text. I did a doubletake. My sweety had betrayed me. It’s like dating someone for a year and finding out they voted for George W. Bush in 2004.
Of course, Flock isn’t the only offender. Check out this code snip from hip 2.0 darling Texty:
<font face="arial black,avant garde" size="4">This is a test of the Texty <strong>WYSIWYG</strong> editor. </font>
I mean, they did replace the awful, bad, nasty, and presentational markup tag <b> with the correct, good, and lovely structural markup tag <strong>. But then they reverted to using the font tag.
In the era of Ajax and RSS and A List Apart, don’t these kids know better?
Yes, I need a life. I’ll return to blogging after my ensuing weekend visits to Mark, the only bartender in Baltimore who understands me. (No really - the others thought Jack Daniels was a bourbon - idgits.)
Posted by Richard at October 5th, 2007
True Confessions and Full Disclosure: I am a pathetic geek for online office apps.
Theoretically, they fascinated me when I first heard of them, but that was back when pretty much everyone who wasn’t making six figures was stuck with dial-up. I mean, if you were in the office on a high-speed LAN, why would you need online office apps, and how in the world would they ever be viable for anyone else?
The 1998-99 drop in DSL and cable prices changed that. When I got my first freelancer-hiring powers in 2002, all my work-from-home contractors had ready access to broadband-speeds. The problem was they didn’t all have ready access to Word (or know how to use track changes). Some of them just hated Microsoft Office, some of them (admirably) wouldn’t pirate Microsoft Office, and others were using Linux. (And in 2002, if you wanted to make my heart skip a beat, all you had to do was say the word Linux.) When we started having to turn down interesting, capable freelancers because they didn’t have a copy of Word, I started looking for options, and started wishing that we could just go ahead and get online word processing software and fulfill the wild dream of collaborative writing/editing and development.
I was a late but enthusiastic adopter of Google Docs, and I enjoyed playing with Zoho (the international underdog with erratic features but a better interface). However, neither ever matched Word for sheer functionality, so I still had to do final preparations on a document in Word or another program. Additionally, the interfaces (even on Zoho) were a little too minimal and clunky. The online word processors had their strengths, though: Not even Apple’s Pages (which never kicked Word’s ass the way Keynote mopped up on PowerPoint) made cleaner, more usable HTML, which made both programs great places to start anything Web-destined (and GoogleDocs had the Publish-to-Blog feature, which was pretty dreamy). To my thinking, while the other players in the online office apps game went after the the enterprise market, other consumer-oriented online word processors were going to have to simply fight it out for third place against these two early entries.
Then Virtual Ubiquity quietly put Buzzword into beta. I discovered them this week while, still in beta, they cut a deal and were bought by Adobe, who snuck into the online apps marketplace. I got my beta invitation yesterday (apparently they mistook me for someone important) and took some time to play with their features.
My thoughts:
All in all, a nice entry for the Buzzword creators and I’m looking forward to playing more with it as the feature-set develops. If they play their cards right, they could easily knock Zoho down to the “also ran” position and horn in on Google’s share of the market. If you’re thinking about an online app that might do some real damage to the desktop market, this could be it, but it’s got a way to go.
Check out Buzzword to apply for a beta invitation.
Blogged with Flock
Posted by Richard at October 5th, 2007
So, uhm, they’ve got China Meiville, Cory Doctorow, and the Booker Prize. And now they’ve got an apparently viable plan for urban WiFi, too?
Wi-fi sharing plan launched in UK
Blogged with Flock
