Something that has been active internally with Blizzard for a long time now has just gone into Beta: Remote Auction House access via the web or an iPhone, iTouch or iPad.
For those few soles that never experienced World of Warcraft, the Auction House is just what you would expect: a central place for players to buy and sell goods between one another. The catch: many people play ‘the auction house game‘, buying low and selling high, following supply-and-demand trends. Some players that get very good at this then take their in-game gold, and sell it for actual real world dollars on sites like eBay and other game exchange services.
The magic circle of gaming has been broken around the edges for several years now, but it seemed to be on the fringe, something that was actively frowned upon and many times banned by publishers. While Blizzard still maintains that buying and selling of virtual goods for real money is against their Terms of Service, this move will increase the level of real money transactions for a time. Besides, allowing people to access the virtual world from outside the virtual world kind of breaks the magic circle anyway, right?
No expectations going into this one, but it’s nice to see Castronova and Dibbell on the panel…have read their work but never heard them talk yet.
Dibbell - was trying to make a living in mid-90s selling Ultima Online items.
IGE - crazy that an organization emerged to monetize this. Business cards, kids in suits, big titles…very crazy to really think about this. In addition to IGE, we have SL and how they handled virtual economies. These are two examples of people trying to break the magic circle.
IGE failed to legitimize itself from the gaming industry, it is still very much a black market. Game companies are now figuring out there might be a place to break the magic circle, where they can manage to do real money transactions (rmt) that make sense and don’t hinder the game…much.
Rebel monkey CEO - Camp Fu is their flagship VW. Built a platform called monkey wrench to quickly design, develop and deploy games. Primarily casual games, aimed at a wide audience.
Schneider, CEO of Live Gamer in NYC.
When people were selling gold/items in games, through ecosystem out of wack. Game EULAs and ToS were being violated, customers were losing credit card info and getting screwed by the black market folks, then on the flip side game companies were incurring huge customer service costs dealing with black market deals gone wrong, which they then had to kill accounts and piss customers off even more.
Live gamer works with companies (sony, funcom, etc) to create RMT in current games. Work with comapnies to put this system inside of games, items are actually escrowed (hah!) Basically player-to-player sales with a cut taken out.
Most sales 90% are instance (buy now vs. bid) most sales are also on Fridays, because people want to play on the weekends.
Castranova - fusion of work and the virtual is inevitable…it’s here already even though some don’t see it. Virtual work has been normalized.
The dissertation was successfully defended last week and edits are underway for the submission to the graduate school for final approval. So the question that has been on my mind regarding life after the PhD:
“What to do now?”
I’m not too concerned about jobs at this time because I enjoy what I’m doing at PSU. I’m focusing more on what projects to undertake in both my personal and professional time. All the projects on my mind I plan on writing about here (and more writing will definitely be in the works for this blog over the summer). The short list:
virtual learning worlds site redesign - needs to be done. The big decision is whether to move away from Word Press or not.
Once a week creation - some colleagues experimented with the “once-a-day” blog post over the last year. I want to put a twist on this and create a video once a week. The video would be footage from a specific video game with narration by yours truly on potential educational value. I already have five examples mapped out for this.
The OCHO - this is an idea we started to pursue in the Solutions Institute a couple years ago before the unit was dissolved. Most people have heard of open courseware initiatives. This is similar, but focused predominantly on faculty, instructors and teachers. At the lowest level, the OCHO is a personal CMS for a teacher trying to keep track of his or her materials (syllabi, labs, media, etc). At the highest level, it is a massive repository for sharing, mixing, connecting and rating a wide variety of educational content. The framework would look like a mix of YouTube and WoW Head. I could write several posts on this topic alone.
Classroom experiments - ever wonder what would happen if you took 1/2 your students and used something like Facebook as the primary CMS, while the other 1/2 used the university-provided CMS? I wonder about this a lot and would like to run this experiment at the end of the summer. I’m also considering using YouTube as the primary instructional tool for my Fall 2009 course. I’m finding YouTube to be the unequivocal BEST platform for just-in-time learning; from video tutorials on software to conceptual talks from some of today’s brightest individuals. It’s foolish not to bring this into the classroom and help students realize the benefit of YouTube outside entertainment and send them into the workforce with an understanding of how to get the most out of the site.
I’ll be posting a lot more around here in the coming months around the topics above and many other things that have been floating in grey matter for the last year.
I’m still in dissertation land (which merits a very long series of posts this summer around the research project dealing with virtual worlds), but thought I’d post a few quick pointers to interesting finds.
Gaming Television - Over the past three years, I’ve put together a few posts on game-related television opportunities. I found another great example today of a weekly webisode themed after ESPN’s Sportscenter Top 10; enter the weekly Team Fortress 2 Top Ten. My time is extremely short this semester, so I’ve shifted a lot of time away from World of Warcraft in favor of TF2 and Left 4 Dead (both Valve games). The TF2 Top Ten is another great example of where we might see gaming TV go in the future.
Browser-based Gaming - I talked to my IST 110 class this week about possible futures of the web, and of course the Metaverse came up. I tend to agree with Raph Koster, who once said something along the lines of “Why are we trying to make virtual worlds the next web? Why not just put virtual worlds ON the web?”. Although not a virtual world in the traditional sense, id’s Quake Live has demonstrated that you CAN do some amazing multi-player, 3D gaming experiences all within a web browser (sorry Mac users…I had to use my PC desktop to get this running unfortunately).
Jeff Kaplan at GDC - The theme of Jeff’s talk was around quest design primarily, but extracted all the points he made led to interesting insights on directed gameplay (which has a direct correlation to directed learning, something I’m very interested). Jeff mentions a few Valve examples of how they direct gameplay in Team Fortress 2 and Half Life 2 without taking control away from the player. Overall a great read, and from a learning standpoint you can pull a LOT of relevant information from Jeff’s talk that can be extracted out of Warcraft and fit within a learning design experience.
And Jeff, if you’re ever Googling your name and find this, drop me an email (bartonpursel [at] gmail [dot] com) about maybe giving a talk at Penn State. I’m currently tangled up in Blizzard’s PR department trying to get someone from Blizzard to give a talk here about design lessons from WoW for students, faculty and staff. We take good care of our guests here @ PSU
I finally had a chance to checkout the PS Home virtual environment yesterday at a friend’s house. The service has gone through a few hiccups since launch, but appears to be stable now.
Initial impressions? It looks visually appealing. That’s the only positive thing I can really say about it after playing around for an hour.
I’m going to be a bit critical here, but these things really jumped out at me:
Downloads. In order to ‘visit’ various locations in Home, you need to download them. Want to check out the mall? Must download it to your hard drive first. This really takes away from the feeling of being in a virtual world if you are required to stop whatever you’re doing and download different areas when you want to visit them. At least you only have to download once.
The bowling alley and arcade. Ok, neat idea here with lots of mini-games, but they were ALL FULL. I hear this is usually the case. Sony, you know what’s cool about virtual worlds? They are virtual, so when things reach capacity, you can spawn more. When an area reaches capacity, why not spawn a mirror image of the area so others can also tryout the activities?
There’s not much to do. Bowling alley is always full, theater just runs trailers for Sony games, you have to spend real money in the mall to get virtual stuff, and your virtual apartment doesn’t really have much of anything in it aside from furniture you can push around.
I still think Home offers HUGE potential, but so far this is rather unimpressive. It seems like a lot of Second Lifers have shown up in home, so all I see in the common area are people dancing. It was rather comical when I got my friend’s female avatar dancing and within seconds a bunch of male avatars came over and started whispering me if I wanted to chat. My friend said that’s the same thing she experienced when she created her account and spent a few hours exploring. It creeped her out.
Welcome to online, social virtual worlds. Le sigh…
After reading a bit of the research behind scientific method application in World of Warcraft, I’m looking at some of the things I (and others) do in a different light. I used to raid a lot in the original Warcraft as well as the Burning Crusade, and have reached the level cap (80) in Wrath of the Lich King and begun gearing up for raids. Of course, I now visit sites like Elitest Jerks and others where people “theorycraft”, or theorize what talent specializations and items provide the maximum benefit to the player.
Notice as you roll your mouse over each item, it provides several statistics. In addition to analyzing and prioritizing gear based on the statistics that best suite my playstyle, there’s also a link to how I’ve specialized my character. A friend of mine who also plays a mage recently created an Excel spreadsheet to help ‘automate’ some of these decisions, calculating each potential piece of gear and how good of an upgrade it is for you.
The main artifact of data crunching I wanted to point out is this breakdown in google code from a 10-man raid of a dungeon called Naxxaramus. Now, if you’ve never played WoW, this will make your head spin. But if you do play WoW, especially at a high level, this is a gold mine of data! I’d be very interested to hear what people think of this that never played WoW (aside from “you guys are crazy!”).
I’ve been playing Guitar Hero since GH2, and actually attended a midnight release for Rock Band that resulted in a World Tour running to the wee hours of the morning with some friends. Due to the massive amount of plastic instruments already strewn around my living room, I opted to pick up Rock Band 2 the day of release and will likely pass on Guitar Hero World Tour in October (it requires a new drum set).
But the major reason I opted for RB2? It’s all about the music, man. Not just the setlist for RB2, but the fact that I can import ALL of my downloaded songs from Rock Band 1 into Rock Band 2. Also, I was able to import nearly all the songs from the original Rock Band 1 CD into Rock Band 2 yesterday (see video below). It cost a measly 5 bucs due to licensing constraints, but most fans don’t mind. So my Rock Band library is now over 200 songs, something that is impossible with the current incarnations of Guitar Hero due to incompatibilities with downloaded content from one version to another. If I was a true Rock Band junky and downloaded ALL the content released, I would have OVER 500 songs to choose from. I’ve blogged in the past about wanting to play MY OWN music. We’re inching closer to that day, where I’ll be able to load up my favorite disco biscuits song and shred or drum to my heart’s content.
When your rock band library starts to look more like iTunes vs. the traditional setlist these games started with…that’s a good thing!
Sid Meier, creator of the Civilization game series, recently keynoted the Innovation in elearning conference. The title of his talk, Help, I can’t stop learning!, deals with how kids are learning from games. Wendy has a great writeup on her blog, but two of the bullets I found interesting:
“Always try to create a sense of anticipation.”
Kids always want to know what will happen next. It keeps then engaged and motivated to play for long stretches of time. Interesting that this kind of goes opposite of instructional design, where you’re supposed to tell the student what will be covered (objectives + preview), tell them, then tell them what you told them (review objectives + wrap-up)
“Never let the player think they are being educated.”
This is difficult in a formal education setting like a university or school, but I can understand where Sid is going with this. As my colleague, Brian, frequently points out, we’re only in a formal school setting for a tiny percent of our lives, it’s all about informal learning. Sounds like Sid has some great pointers for integrating informal learning into interactive media.
I finally kicked the WoW habit due to a lot of other commitments throughout the summer which has led to a resurgence in my Xbox playtime. I’ve played Mass Effect ~6 hours a couple weeks back, started plugging through Gears of War, and also picked up GTA 4 last week. None of these games have jumped out at me like WoW, but then again I don’t need to schedule my evenings around raid time anymore either.
I stumbled upon a google maps application for Liberty City, the NYC look-alike landscape where this GTA story unfolds. Kind of ironic in a way that someone used Google Maps to generate a map of a place that doesn’t even exist, but by the looks of it I’ll be using this map during my experiences with GTA because it makes more sense than looking at the giant poster-sized map that ships with the game. Besides, this map seems to have all the necessary information I’ll need during my debauchery in Liberty City.
Tomorrow is the release of Boom Blox, the first of three games EA has contracted Steven Spielberg to produce for the Nintendo Wii. Looks like it should be a lot of run.
I’ve been following a couple blogs lately regarding the role of instructional designers, more specifically, how individuals come to call themselves instructional designers. It all started with Cammy’s post, “Who Gets to Be Called an Instructional Designer?”. I then followed some jumps to Karl’s response and Clark’s response, which stressed the importance of formal degrees and/or a wide range of background knowledge necessary to successfully practice instructional design. While I agree with both posts…there’s still elements of instructional design I find lacking (and this is coming from someone with a Master’s degree in the field).
After practicing ID for nearly 10 years now after my degree, I rarely call myself an instructional designer, but simply a “designer”. Why? I think part of it was my Masters experience at Bloomsburg, which was coupled with a lot of elearning design, which continues here at Penn State. Instructional design provides a great viewpoint into certain aspects of learning, but seems to lack emphasis on things like:
HCI and user interfaces - create the best learning experience, but put a poor interface on top of it, and you lose the majority of your audience.
Motivation - some models take this into account, but it’s almost never emphasized enough. Both from the standpoint of what the learner’s initial motivations might be, plus how I can build on these motivations or create new motivations.
Engagement - instructional design seems to place little emphasis on how to actually engage the learner with the materials at hand. Objectives, examples, scaffolding, and other elements that often guide the design process do a very poor job of creating an engaging learning experience.
Cognitive psychology - as Clark points out, a the foundations of ID are partially built on early psychology work related to learning. A colleague of mine with a PhD in learning sciences points this out as THE pitfall of most ID programs. We do a poor job of understanding the psychology of learning, particularly the context of the learning environment.
I still believe ID is extremely valuable on any project related to learning. But I’ve dealt with instructional designers who have Masters or PhDs and want to follow some ID model to a “T” for every project, and if we don’t follow the models to a “T”, it’s not good instructional design. I think this is at the heart of the point Cammy wanted to make: we need a much better balance between theory and practice in the field.
I could bend this into a game-related post, but that would take up another 5 paragraphs. Marc Prensky often muses that “game designers make better instructional designers than someone with an instructional design degree”. I don’t agree with Marc, but on some fronts, I find this very true.
