Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking with Chris Brewer from Northern Kentucky University on WVXU’s Impact Cincinnati show with host Maryann Zeleznik. Our topic was how new communication tools are impacting our lives and we discussed all the usual suspects like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc. in addition to the changes iPhones and Android smart phones have brought to the scene since our last show back in July 2009.
Topic: How new communications tools are affecting our lives
Millions of people each day now access Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and other social networking sites, using home computers as well as a rapidly growing array of sophisticated mobile devices that allow anywhere, anytime internet connections.
Guests include:
University of Cincinnati Instructional & Research Computing department IT Analyst Chris Collins
Chris Brewer, a social media consultant for clients such as Apple and the New Media Consortium, Director of Online Technology for NKU’s College of Informatics, and the developer of GrooveRiver.com, a niche social network for Cincinnati musicians.
It’s always fun to get a behind the scenes look at our local NPR station studio and I hope we encourage Cincinnati listeners to try out some of the social media offerings that can help expand your personal and professional networks. Check out the recording here and many thanks to Chris and Maryann for a great conversation about social media!
Back on April 15th, I was a guest on Tonight Live with Paisley Beebe to speak about governance in virtual worlds and the Chilbo Community that I help run in Second Life. Paisley is a wonderful host and it was terrific meeting the other guests, thought I’d post the video since it’s up on Treet.tv now.
Virtual worlds and online games are used by millions of people around the world for recreation, corporate and academic conferencing, formal education, research, training and charitable work. These worlds have given rise to public-policy issues, both ancient and cutting edge. Governance in Virtual Worlds will provide an exploration of these issues by professors, journalists, corporate managers and community activists. Learn what it means to be an active citizen, a creative producer, and a savvy customer, and meet the people shaping policy for the worlds of the future.
Now, I’ve attended a LOT of conferences, conversations, symposia, discussions, and other such things revolving around virtual worlds, but I must commend John Carter McKnight, Adjunct Professor of Law at Arizona State University for putting together a truly excellent group of panels. (And I’m not just saying that because I was on two of them!) Though the conference was plagued with technical issues at the beginning, which happens sometimes, the panels sparked good conversations (and sometimes heated debate) and it was the first time in a while I heard some new ideas that made me stop in my tracks and think, “Oh, yeah. Why aren’t we talking about that?”
John Lester (formerly Pathfinder Linden) Gives Keynote Opening Address
For long time SL peeps, one of the highlights of the conference was John Lester’s keynote opening address. Formerly known as Pathfinder Linden, who did much to promote the education and health care communities in world, John appeared as his original avatar from the SL beta (the first one!) days, Count Zeeman. John’s keynote was unfortunately one of the ones marred by the technical challenges, but he talked about the biological responses that humans have to our virtual experiences. He gave an example of a teacher who brings her students in world and right off the bat has them jump off a mountain. The students feel fear, vertigo, and all these physical reactions, they don’t know if they’re (their avatar) is going to die, they don’t know what to expect. The physical reactions we experience in virtual spaces are due to our brains having evolved to think in, navigate in, and respond to 3D data, we have entirely natural responses to 3D cues, it activates our lymbic system just as if we were standing on a physical mountain. Ok maybe to a lesser degree, still.
Of course, we’re missing key components of physicality in virtual worlds, particularly the non-verbal cues of body language, posture, etc. John reminded us Snow Crash fans that in Stephenson’s novel, the thing that made the metaverse take off was when it incorporated the natural body language of those who were jacked in, so we’re not yet at a point where I yawn in real life and my avatar yawns as well, but that’s where we’re headed.
I’m not sure if this was just my take or John’s, but there was some conversation that augmented reality is likely to top into the mainstream before virtual worlds, since handheld devices are already ubiquitous and the super-smart-phone genre like Droids and iPhones are becoming more commonplace and affordable. John mentioned the augmented reality windshield GM prototyped that I tweeted about the other day (woe the day our windshields get hacked!) and we talked about a future where our HUDs were not just on the screen but in our contact lenses. Good stuff!
In terms of governance of virtual spaces, the issue is that our current system of laws and courts are processes that move so exquisitely slowly, and yet the pace of technological change is accelerating at an ever faster pace. How are we to govern spaces that our current systems are not even remotely equipped to understand, let alone arbitrate? And that, of course, was the key question of the conference. It was great to see John and despite the audio glitches, it was great to see him in world again.
Keynote Panel: The Politics of Virtual Engagement
Next up was the keynote panel, which also had a rocky start on the technical end (again, not the fault of the conference organizers!) and I didn’t get to show my slides so I’ll embed them here:
I’d hoped to talk about how we can look at the small scale governance issues already cropping up at the institutional level, like in higher education, and then extrapolate how those issues will affect the larger ecosystem of institutions participating in virtual world spaces, but the tech issues got our timing and things off to a rocky start, so I’m not sure how much came through. In any case, the “Politics of Virtual Engagement” at my university are just one example of many, but I think there are lessons to be learned. For example, virtual world evangelists and people like me trying to introduce the concept of virtual worlds to academia have to have a deep knowledge of our institutional culture. The needs of our student population are different than the needs of faculty, which are again different from the needs of administrators and staff. The trick is trying to weave those needs together into virtual spaces and experiences that tap into what can only be done in virtual worlds or that virtual worlds do better than other platforms. People have to see how this technology meets their needs before it can scale up. This is as much true for every other domain – business, non-profits, online communities – as it is for higher education.
And the questions and issues raised by the students, faculty, and staff at the University of Cincinnati are likely to be echoed across the spectrum of institutions who move into virtual worlds. This technology forces us to renegotiate long standing and entrenched boundaries that DO exist in the physical world, but are highly permeable in the virtual world. What can we learn from early adopters who are already negotiating these shifting boundaries to make it easier for the early majority?
I also think virtual worlds expose the limits of our creativity and imagination in ways that are.. somehow less obvious in the physical world. Give a teacher the freedom to work in any kind of learning environment they can imagine rather than a traditional classroom, and you’re bound to get some blank stares. And who can blame them! They aren’t accustomed to having that kind of freedom and flexibility, and conceptualizing the actual SPACE in which learning takes place is not in their knowledge domain because in the physical world, someone else designs the classrooms. And it isn’t just teachers, students, staff – it’s also me! The plasticity of virtual worlds gives us tremendous freedom to create settings and experiences that can’t be replicated in the real world, but our imaginations are not yet caught up to the possibilities this technology makes possible.
I feel that way even after participating in virtual environments for over 15 years at this point. Every day something new shakes my world and hints at possibilities I hadn’t even considered. It’s fascinating stuff. And I think in the long term, all the other issues – who owns your data, privacy issues, conflicts over copyright and IP – these issues don’t have simple black and white answers, the inter-relationships forming between individuals and individuals, and individuals with institutions, and institutions with institutions, and scaling all the way up to encompass the global digital community and ecosystem, these things are so complex, and emerging and evolving so quickly, I just can’t imagine that our existing institutions will survive in anything resembling their current forms. I guess we’ll see!
Real Laws in Virtual Space
There were two speakers in the next panel who made a lasting impression on my overwhelmed brain. Joshua Fairfield, Associate Prof of Law at Washington and Lee School of Law, and Gregory Lastowka, Professor at Rutgers School of Law. This post is already getting long, so I’ll sum up quickly. Joshua’s main point was that we are spending an awful lot of brain cycles worrying about how RL law is going to impact virtual worlds, and not enough time thinking about how the rules of virtual worlds would be horrific if implemented in RL. Good point! From my quickly jotted notes as he was speaking:
Imagine IP licenses embedded in our toaster, our clothing, our cars, as we do have constraints on our use of virtual property. What then? On privacy, we all know from the Bragg case sued Linden Lab, LL has ALL communications from people in world, all IMs, they were able to pull up IMs from years before.. All of those convos can be sometimes must be made available without a search warrant, no probably cause required. The essential irony – we go to escape and are under constant surveillance. Cell phoen tracks you through GPS whereever you go. So the question is, are we losing our personhood? Personhood, once property and privacy are in trouble, personhood will follow. We are a social network in our selves, the social networks we use are coming to OWN that tangle of connections that we are. We will hand over our personhood when all aspects of our behavior, posessions, creations, and communications are owned by .. someone else.
Gregory Lastowska’s talk was also good, again my raw notes:
Virtual Worlds as a separate jurisdiction.. virtual law as separate rules of physical jurisdiction. Play spaces are governed by a separate set of rules, we can look at different human societies, say the rules pertaining to education, religion, or family, they are sort of “special spheres” of human interaction, so there may be some precedent for game worlds, but that isn’t the trend we’re seeing, the courts are treating them just like web sites, so not seen as separate sites of jurisdiction which may not always be the right way. David Post, Jefferson’s Moose, hypothesize different laws for cyberspace. If we were to look at the internet and copyright law, we never would have developed our copyright law as we did because much of it doesn’t WORK as applied to the internet, the net is constant copying, every microsecond there are violations, and when it comes to financial importance, lawsuits, Napster etc. you see the general trend is to limit the growth of the technology in order to serve the copyright law, and that seems ,.. not good.
SO – if this were a separate space, what kind of law would we have?
Second the point on augmented reality, separate from VW issues? We will see some issues from VW will also be issues with augmented reality, primarily the difference between the customer/client and the owner/server operators, as we move towards cloud computing, balance between tech and law, Lessig’s Code..
Got interrupted, work phone call. Then a meeting and I missed some of the next panels. Bummer.
Virtual Self Governance
The last panel was about how communities existing in virtual worlds govern themselves, and I was really excited to talk about my own virtual community, Chilbo, in this setting. Here are my slides from that presentation:
Now strangely, it seemed that one of the other panelists was upset that I had slides, that I talked specifically about how the Chilbo Community formed and was governed, and especially that my last slide invited people to visit and explore our town. Frankly, I thought that’s what everyone on the panel was going to do, per the instructions I received from the conference organizers, so I’m not sure exactly where the miscommunication occurred. If I wasn’t supposed to talk specifically about Chilbo, then I’m not sure what the point of the panel was! Further, the other panelist also seemed to disbelieve my statements about our experience. I didn’t expect any of the content I presented to be .. inflammatory or controversial, rather I thought the point of the discussion was to talk about some of the specifics of how different in world communities form, govern themselves, and use the tools and platforms to self-organize.
Perhaps I misread the tone of the other panelist, but I felt distinctly defensive after a bit. As hard as it may be to believe, yes, we do actually mostly govern by consensus and no, acrimony, arguments, and strife are not very common – in fact, it’s quite rare. That isn’t to say there are never any disagreements, just that differences of opinion or conflicting interests seem to be resolved with little fanfare and few fireworks. I confess, I know very little about the inner-workings of CDS. I’ve very pointedly made an effort to let the structure and processes of governing Chilbo evolve out of our specific culture, community, and needs, rather than trying to emulate or model it after something else – because in some sense, though human communities are obviously not new, the thing that IS new is the who’s, why’s, and how’s of how we have all come to be together in this particular virtual world, in this particular region, at this particular time. Though as Rose Springvale said, we don’t want to reinvent the wheel (a good point!), I think we also have to give ourselves the freedom to imagine new ways of self-governing to break out of systems of governance that were developed in a pre-digital age.
In any case, I’m not suggesting that the Chilbo model is perfect for everyone and maybe wouldn’t work for any community but our own, and it isn’t even as if I understand exactly how or why it seems to be as successful as it is at constraining the discord that often appears in online communities, but for whatever reason, it seems to be working for us on a lot of levels, and so my goal was to share about our experience. That really shouldn’t have offended anyone’s sensibilities, I don’t think.
Overall, I felt it was a great conference and I was sorry to have missed a couple of the panels, but I hope everyone else enjoyed it as much as I did and many thanks to all the folks who organized, attended, and participated.
It’s been four months now since I bought a Motorola Droid super-smart-phone, and I’ve come to love my little pocket PC in a way I’ve never loved another phone/gadget. I was worried at first that I’d be annoyed by not being able to type on it one-handed, or that the larger form factor would feel heavy and clunky. Neither of those initial concerns causes me a moment’s pause after a few months of use, and the interface issues that confused me at first aren’t an issue today. It is without a doubt the best gadget purchase I’ve made to date.
In the interest of keeping a good log of the apps I’m using, I figured I should update my original post to remove the apps I ended up never using and adding the ones I’ve found since early December. So here’s the updated list.
Use Daily/Very Frequently:
Advanced Task Manager
Handy for seeing what’s running on the phone and killing it if necessary
AP mobile
News n stuff, pretty self explanatory.
Astrid
A To Do list that synchs with Remember the Milk which synchs with Gmail. nice!
BettrFlickr Synchs pix from Droid to my Flickr account, lets me know when someone favorites or comments on a pic on Flickr. Great app.
ConnectBot
SSH/telnet client on yer phone.
Evernote Synchs with my Evernote account on the web, best notemaking software I’ve found on mobile OR web.
Foursquare
Fun to see who else frequents the RL locations you visit. I’m the mayor of my favorite breakfast place.
Google Voice
Synchs your Google Voice account with your phone, can make outgoing calls from your GVoice # or just get messages/vmails
Layar Augmented reality here at last! Point your camera in any direction and choose the layer of data you want to appear on top – everything from who’s tweeting near you to local pizza joints to.. whatever. Very fun.
Linda File Manager
Manage/view/use files on the SD card in your phone or local memory though that sounds like you can hose things if you don’t know what you’re doing.
NPR News
I hardly listen to NPR on the actual radio anymore, I can catch all my fave shows every day right on Droid. I have such a crush on Ira Glass’ voice. *swoon*
Pandora
Plays a radio station based on your music tastes. LOVE this app.
Qik
Instant live vide streaming to the intarnetz. V.cool! Will also auto publish to YouTube and alert your friends on Twitter when you start a live stream if you set it up that way.
Seesmic
Twitter client that works really well. I check this wayyyy too frequently
Talk
GoogleTalk, all your gmail contacts available for IM
Wikitude Premium Sort of like Layar but includes different data sets – layer data on top of your reality, including flickr, youtube, wikipedia entries, and lots of other stuff. Funny though, it shows my Flickr pix taken here at home as being 3km away. Hmmmm. Still, if you’re interested in augmented reality, it’s an alternative to Layar and they’ve been adding more data sets over time.
Use Less Frequently But Good To Have
Aldiko and Aldiko premium
Books! Lots o books! I can actually read on this thing. Who needs Kindle?
Amazon and Amazon MP3
I was browsing for holiday gifts..
AndroZip
Another file manager that lets you work with zip, rar, tar, gzip and other compressed files.
Beam Reader PDF Reader for Droid
Barcode Scanner
Snap a pic of a bardcode on any product, searches google for product description and price comparisons
Compass
It’s a compass.
FTPServer
FTP files to/from your phone.
GDocs
Viewing google docs on the phone.
GMote
Turns your phone into a remote for the PC, play music, videos, etc.
HiAIM
AOL IM client, not too pleased with this one but I haven’t found a good alternative yet.
Mother TED
TED Talks on your Droid. yay, I’m a big fan.
NYTimes
News headlines
Photoshop Mobile
Edit, crop, touch up photos right on your phone
VoiceRecorder
Record your voice, send the files to Gmail.
Where
Find stuff around you, weather, news, movies, gas stations, coupons, traffic, etc.
WiFinder
Scans for wireless networks, occasionally finds networks the phone doesn’t seem to find by default.
WPTogo
Post to your Wordpress blog from your phone.
This study investigates whether residents within the City of Cincinnati, Ohio have equal food access. For the purpose of this project, literature was reviewed from the following disciplines: international development, sociology, environmental science, urban policy, geography, planning, health, nutrition, and economics. For the purpose of this study, food access evaluates both geographic and social character. The research project establishes whether food deserts exist within Cincinnati neighborhoods, and whether a correlation exists between neighborhood social character and food insecurity.
From the paper’s first couple of chapters, I learned more about the definitions of phrases like “food security” “food deserts” “grocery gap” and other terms defined by international as well as US organizations. This helped me to better understand the research. I also learned some interesting facts about food production and security in the US:
In the US, just 10 companies supply more than half of the food and drink consumed in this country.
Farmers account for less than 1% of the US population.
Food travels 2,000 miles on average from farm to plate in the US.
Inner-city shoppers sometimes pay as much as 40% more for basic grocery items than suburban shoppers.
Food production and delivery systems are often not considered or accounted for in urban planning models.
While I was aware that food production and distribution chains have consolidated tremendously in the last few decades, I didn’t realize just how much! And it was disturbing to discover how vulnerable inner-city populations are to food insecurity, and that urban planning often fails to address food system needs at all. Food is so basic to community sustainability (obviously!), it is shocking to realize that city planners don’t even take it into account!
After the introductory information about the topic and laying out the terms and definitions to be used for the study, the paper continued with its primary objectives, to identify all the grocery facilities in the Cincinnati metro area, defined as fifty-two Cincinnati neighborhoods, and to identify if there were “food deserts” in Cincinnati. A grocery store was considered to have a service area of 1/2 mile radius around the store, since that is the distance a healthy person could walk within 15 minutes to reach the store.
Based on McQueary’s survey of grocery stores in the Cincinnati area, I learned:
Cincinnati is home to 165 grocery stores – 91 supermarkets, and 74 convenience stores.
Of the 52 neighborhoods in Cincinnati, not one is completely food secure.
31 neighborhoods do not have a single grocery store within their boundaries.
And significant portions of the Cincinnati metro area could be defined as a “food desert” as indicated in this graphic (all areas outside the circles):
Based on this research, it appears that Cincinnati is not nearly as “food secure” as I would have thought, for being such a large metropolitan area surrounded by extensive farmland in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. These findings are quite disturbing!
My mom and I have talked about finding out if a community garden exists in our neighborhood, and if not, maybe we should start one, and this research just reminds me that we need to get moving on that. Mom, are you reading this? Call me!
The concept of “Life as a Game” is certainly not a new one, when I was a kid, the game of Life was my favorite board game of all time. I still remember the thrill of filling up my little car with boy and girl babies I imagined I’d have at some point in the far off future, or the crushing defeat of bankruptcy, a term I didn’t really understand, but in that context basically meant “Game Over.” Spin the dial – what does the game of Life bring you next?
And it’s not as if I’m not a big fan of video and online games – I cut my teeth on the Atari 2600/5200, hand drew maps in colored pencil to find Princess Zelda, played Ultima on a Commodore 64, still have an account on the Medievia MUD that goes back to 1994, have an 80 level holy spec priest on WoW (they nerfed holy spec, don’t get me started), and most recently celebrated the completion of my horse stable on Farmville.
I grew up on games – the first generation to grow up playing video games – I was a “Girl Gamer” back when we were a pretty rare breed and I’m still playing now that “gaming” in its various forms is so common that the Pew Research Center reports that, “Game playing is ubiquitous among Americans teenagers. Fully 99% of boys and 94% of girls report playing video games.” They also report, “More than half – 53% – of all American adults play video games of some kind.”
We are increasingly (already?) a nation of gamers.
And yet, despite the fact that virtually all young people game, and over half the adults in the US game, there still appears to be a very finite line between “gaming” and .. everything else. We still delineate “real life” (RL) as separate from game spaces – even when the space isn’t actually a game space, as in Second Life. The skepticism and often openly hostile reaction of scorn/pity that Second Life residents get from non-SL peeps is almost remarkable considering that the very people delivering that heaping dish of disdain turn right around and log in to WoW or EVE or Farmville.
Just yesterday, in a debate about a topic wholly unrelated to gaming, someone I was arguing with bolstered his point with the concluding line:
“I think of you as less of a person for using Second Life, and for no other reason.”
Now, to be fair, we were engaged in a sort of theatrical debate where the low blow is not only acceptable but expected, and it was all said in good fun and humor, but.. like with many kinds of humor, it was funny because it had the faint ring of truth. Many people actually DO think less of me as a person for using Second Life, just as a decade ago they thought less of me as a person for playing EverQuest, just as a decade before that they thought I was not only insane but maybe dangerously insane for talking to strangers on the internet through those weird BBSs and MUDs full of D&D playing soon-to-be-axe-murderers.
Ahhhh how times have changed. The internet, she vindicated me. And ahhh how times of changed, now half the adults in the US play WoW or some other game and it’s not so crazy anymore. Alas, I’m still waiting for virtual worlds to vindicate me, but having gone through this combo-pity-scorn routine a few times, I’m not shaken by the current state of attitudes about virtual worlds, augmented reality (why would you want to look at DATA on top of the REAL WORLD on your PHONE, what’s wrong with you?!), or most of the other technologies I use that cause people to look at me askance and with wary eyes. (Twitter???? Whaaa???)
What DOES cause me great concern, however, is that these Ludic Luddites have no clue about what’s coming.
Barry Joseph delivers the SLEDcc 2008 keynote address.
His keynote talk, Living La Vida Ludic: Why Second Life Can’t Tip, is worth watching, and it’s one of those talks that sticks in your mind like a burr, at the time it didn’t quite penetrate (I was one of the conference organizers, so my brain was on 50,000 other things) but it stuck with me, and in the years since, the message he delivered only resonates more strongly with time.
Loosely translated, it’s about living a playful life. It’s about combining the adventurousness, fun, openness, exploration, and all of the other joyful aspects of our game play into our “real life”. The central thesis of his keynote was that virtual worlds and other platforms like Second Life can’t and won’t tip, until the broader culture of “living la vida ludic” tips. One must come before the other, and back in 2008, he made it clear that the title of his talk could be taken in two ways – first, that virtual worlds like Second Life would NEVER tip – or that something was holding Second Life back from tipping into the mainstream. He left the question about which interpretation was right for the audience to decide, but I thought then as I do now that the answer was the latter. There are forces at work holding back virtual worlds, Second Life, AND the ability for us to live a ludic life as openly and as joyously as we wish we could.
Those who don’t understand not only feel scorn and pity, they feel fear.
Yes Virginia, NASA scientists say the earthquake in Chile may actually have knocked the earth's axis. It's not just your perception, the world has actually shifted.
As I said to a good friend of mine the other day, I’m struggling with this.. feeling I have, that all of the meta-narrative that stood at the very foundation of my understanding of the world – how the world works, where it’s going, where I fit into it, what I’m supposed to be doing – the meta-narrative from my childhood seems to not make much sense anymore.
The world seems off kilter. It’s changing so quickly, I don’t know anyone who feels like they can keep up with the pace of change. And so many major systems that underpin our society and culture appear to be, frankly, broken. On the rocks. Our government. Our banking and finance system. Our ecosystems. Our healthcare system. Our system of education. None of these systems and institutions appear to be meeting the needs of our society as we experience it TODAY. They all seem to be failing us.
Why? It’s a no brainer, of course, and not an original thought at all. It’s simple – the systems and institutions built to address the needs of a pre-digital-society don’t work to address the needs of a society that can get, transmit, and transform information as quickly as we can today.
And boy is that causing a lot of fear.
I feel it, don’t you?
Fortunately, the nation’s best teachers have some advice
(well, mostly the nation’s best male teachers, but that topic is for another post)
Chris Lehman at TEDxNYED explaining that changing education necessarily means changing the world. Photo credit WayneKLin.
Perhaps most importantly, the subtext of the conference was that the issues teachers and educators are facing aren’t just confined to the “educational system” – as if it’s some discrete thing disconnected from the society and culture at large – and indeed, as George Siemens said, considering that society dumps every ill and issue at the doorstep of education to solve, it’s amazing the system functions as well as it does. But take out the word “education” from these TEDxNYED Talks, and they are talking about what society at large needs to do to adapt to our changing circumstances. (The videos aren’t up yet, but they’ll be available on YouTube soon.)
At least for the purposes of this post, I think the first important piece of advice came from Michael Wesch. Which is simply this:
When a game changing technology enters a society or culture, you don’t have the option to opt-out. It changes everything.
All those Ludic Luddites, who fear the technology, avoid the technology, feel that the current systems of getting things done would work just fine if only they could better regulate, standardize, and enforce them, are just plain wrong. The world has shifted and there’s no turning back now.
What does this have to do with gaming?
Slide from Dan Meyers' talk at TEDxNYED - quests anyone? Photo credit kjarrett.
Well, I’m getting round to that.
As I watched these presentations and suggestions from teachers about ways to improve (society) education, I couldn’t help but see game elements – and the ludic life – infused throughout their talks.
When Dan Meyer talked about changing math curriculum to stop asking kids to give the answers, but instead help them figure out what the important questions are, itlooked like creating good game quests to me.
When Lessig and Jenkins talked about mashup culture and how destructive it is to limit the creativity unleashed when you put tools in the hands of individuals, it reminded me an awful lot of how content gets created in virtual worlds like Second Life and OpenSim.
George Siemens at TEDxNYED. Image credit WayneKLin.
The solutions we need to address societies biggest problems – (global) warming, population growth, poverty – will be found through serendipity, through chaotic connections, through unexpected connections. Complex networks with mesh-like cross-disciplinary interactions provide the needed cognitive capacity to address these problems.
Sounds like the serendipitous, chaotic, and unexpected connections you form in WoW, or EVE, or any other game world, and “mesh-like cross-disciplinary interactions” is just fancy talk for good class balance. Can’t have too many tanks and not enough healers or the whole thing comes crashing down.
Ok. And one more, also from George:
The big battles of history around democracy, individual rights, fairness, and equality are now being fought in the digital world. Technology is philosophy. Technology is ideology. The choices programmers make in software, or legislators make in copyright, give boundaries to permissible connection.
This is, of course, the perennial battle between the game players and the game gods. Except wait, what? The whole story of the birth of the US is all about us being our own game gods. Hm.
In any case, the point here is, I think the Ludic Life is starting to tip.
We haven’t hit it just quite yet, but the elements of game play that Barry talked about in 2008 are starting to show up in the oddest of places. The World Bank is funding an Alternative/Augmented Reality Game called EVOKE that has thousands of people, from school kids to adults, and from all over the world, playing a “game” that promises to teach us how to address major global issues and respond to global crisis. Oh, and you might win scholarships, grants, or seed funding from the World Bank if you have a good idea. Put that on your resume!
While Facebook and other social networks like Twitter have been the talk of the town, a recent NPR story cited research showing that more people play Farmville than use Twitter. And it isn’t your kid playing, it’s your mom. The average Farmville player is a 43 year old woman, and there are 80 million people playing. 80 MILLION.
So, what’s bad about that? Isn’t this a GOOD thing?
Well, yes and no.
Many thanks to my good friend and neighbor in Chilbo, Roland Legrand (SL: Olando7 Decosta), for the post on his Mixed Realities blog that brought the video below to my attention. Check this out:
What happens when game devs (working for corporations?) become our primary social engineers instead of the nominally elected politicians?
Naturally, I’m interested in the ways that game mechanics, game culture, game concepts, and game design filter out and influence RL. And though I work in higher education, my undergrad degree is in Political Science and my not-so-secret passion is sort of the nexus where the emerging metaverse and game culture is changing “real life” society and culture, which of course includes education but goes beyond edu, too.
I know I’m not the first guild master to think that herding this bunch of cats is way more complicated than many RL jobs, or to realize the skills I learned adventuring with my guildies often had applicability to real life situations. I’d like to think I learned something about teamwork, diplomacy, compromise, and all sorts of organizational, strategic, tactical, and political skills through my journeys in worlds that only exist in bits and bytes.
Generally speaking, my career, my work, this blog, everything I’ve been doing for the last 10 years is about bringing this technology to people who don’t have it/know about it/use it yet.
But watching that video gives me the willies.
First, because I don’t think it is as far off in time as some think it might be. Second, because I don’t think it’s that far fetched in terms of what could actually come to pass. And third, because I’ve been a lowly peon player in the game god universes/metaverses for a really really long time. On an old BBS I’m still using, I’m one of the “moderators”. And you know what we say? This ain’t a democracy. Don’t like our rules, don’t play.
Furthermore, my post the other day about Stickybits demonstrates just how quickly the barriers to privacy are falling. I posted that barcode just to figure out how the service worked, and before I knew it, I was collecting the home addresses of my blog readers without even realizing what I’d done.
Want me to know your home address? Go ahead, download the app to your smartphone and scan that barcode. I’ll get an email within a minute or so letting me know you scanned it, and where you were on the planet when you did, right down to the address and a lovely Google Map pinpointing your exact geo-location.
And I guess I should award you 5 points if you scan it. Redeemable for.. I don’t know what yet. An hour long private tour of Second Life, I guess.
And now I’ve broken the #1 rule of the 140 character metaverse, which is to make a really really long post and get to the end and not have any answers.
I don’t know exactly what train we’re on here, but the train seems to be moving ever faster and faster. And I worry more and more about who’s driving the train, and I have a sort of sick feeling that about half of the passengers have no clue that they are even on THIS train – I think they think they’re on a different train entirely, and that they’re driving it. But they aren’t.
I dunno.
As much as I love gaming, and I do love it, I’m not so sure I want Crest giving me points for brushing my teeth. I think I’ll have to come back to this.
Thanks for reading if you made it this far, and if you have any thoughts, I’m all ears.
If you have an iPhone or Android phone, download the free Stickybits app and scan the bar code above. Do you see the digital content I’ve attached? If you click on “Add a bit” button, I THINK you can even leave me a comment.. weird!
Stickybits appears to have debuted at SXSW and it lets you download barcodes or buy barcode stickers that you can then attach digital content to – pictures, files, comments, videos. When someone scans the barcode with the Stickybits app, they can see your content and leave comments.
The person who created the barcode can then see how many times the barcode was scanned, get email notifications, and.. in a creepy angle, even see if the barcode has moved and to where. Cheap RFID? Hmmmm!
Not sure about the privacy implications of this, but definitely a technology/app worth checking out! (And scan that barcode above so I can see how it works!) :)
Update: Several folks have scanned the barcode and I’m getting email notices each time with an approximate location of where the scan took place. It also has a google map populated with the location of all the scans. Very interesting! Can’t figure out how to get a link to the map to publish it though hm..
For my friend Misquoted, my attempt at Benihana’s Rocky’s Choice which turned out amazingly well:
2-3 round tip steaks (cap off) salted and peppered both sides (probably anything that’s super tender and works well for stir fry will do. I did NOT buy the pre-cut up stir fry though because I like my steak rare and that stuff cooks too quickly.)
2-3 boneless chicken breasts, rinsed and patted dry. Dice one chicken breast for use in the fried rice.
Cook 1 cup SUSHI rice according to instructions, should have about 3 cups when done. I used Kokuho Rose brand sushi rice.
Toast about 3 tbsp sesame seeds, I used a 400 degree oven for about 10 mins maybe, shaking the pie pan every 2-3 minutes or so.
One large white and pretty onion, large dice
One bunch green onions, sliced on the bias, green parts only
2-3 carrots, small or fine diced to preference
1-2 cloves garlic, minced
1 medium zucchini, sliced (I like the skin, you can peel it too)
2 eggs
butter, 1/2 a stick softened
safflower oil, few tablespoons
salt and pepper to taste
soy sauce to taste, I like lots
I left out mushrooms because I don’t like em in this dish
I used two large skillets but if you’re more awesome than me could maybe do it all in one
1. Heat a couple tablespoons safflower oil over medium high heat, when it’s ready, dump in the onion, green onion, carrots, and garlic, cook till onions begin to be translucent, then add the diced chicken breast. Stir frequently to keep from sticking or getting over done on one side.
2. When chix looks like it’s getting close to being cooked through, add a tad more safflower oil if needed, dump in all three cups of the cooked sushi rice, mix it all up with the chix and veggies, then add soy sauce (I dunno how much I used, 1/4 cup?) and let it all get good and fried up.
3. Clear out a spot in sort of the center of the fried rice and crack two eggs and plop in the hole there. Let it set a bit, mix the eggs with the spatchula before it gets to scrambled eggs chunks though, and then mix it in with the rest of the rice. Add sesame seeds. The fried rice is pretty much done.
4. In the other skillet, heat the skillet on medium high heat until it’s good and hot, no oil or anything yet. Add 1/3 – 1/2 of the half stick of softened butter and toss in the steak before the butter burns. I like my steak rare so I just like the sides browned, adjust to your own preference, and feel all awesome by cutting the steak up right there in the pan with your knife! Pop those out, do the zucchini with some more butter as needed, again I like mine lightly cooked, so cook according to preference, and cut em up and pop em out and ditto the remaining chicken breast, though cook that all the way through so you don’t die of cooties. ;)
Scoop out some rice, plop the steak, chix, and zucchini on your plate, and voila!
I think the most important thing is the sushi rice. I had some basmati rice on hand the last time I tried this, but the texture was ALL WRONG. The sushi rice seems perfect.
PS I’ve never taken any kind of lessons or anything so I probably did something all wrong, but it really turned out well, so. Sorry if I offended any of the chefs in the audience. :)
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irtual worlds, and not enough time thinking about how the rules of virtual worlds would be horrific if implemented in RL. Good point! From my quickly jotted notes as he was speaking:
“I think of you as less of a person for using Second Life, and for no other reason.”
