I vaguely remember other large media organizations trying to spice up their online presence with games, but this one really stands out. It’s your typical Breakout style gameplay, but it’s interesting how NBC weaves headlines into the actualy gameplay. I played a round, and found myself checking out two stories after I completed the first level. I could see this being an interesting little distraction for people who have 10-15 minutes to kill. You get to play a tried-and-true game (Breakout) and also get to catch some of the latest news headlines, with an opportunity to jump directly into the story.
Some things, from a design standpoint, that would make this a better experience:
- I noticed in the beginning the flash game was accessing stories from different news categories (politics, technology, sports, etc). I don’t think it’d be a big step to let the player do his/her own sorting before starting, so people could focus the headlines around specific interests.
- My favorite power-up in Breakout were the laseres, where you could shoot down blocks. More power-ups that are active (rather than the passive ones currently in the beta) would be nice.
This is one worth revisiting…
I’m learning a lot of about designing 3D spaces in Second Life as we move through the learning stages of building within Second Life. I thought I’d share some of these here, maybe some of the lessons I learn will help others avoid these pitfalls. (I’ve also started a Second Life category here to better organize future Second Life Design Notebook posts).
Design Lesson 1
The “I can FLY!!!” factor. In Second Life, most residents travel by either teleporting via the map, or flying from the UI button or a hotkey. People rarely WALK or RUN. This really hit home for me when I visited Ohio Universities Second Life space and found myself in this building:
It’s a good looking building, right? I actually found some decent things to explore within the building. But when I wanted to leave the building and go back outside to explore the space, I couldn’t find an exit! There I was, stuck inside a 3-story, multi-winged building, with no way to get out. I ended up teleporting off the sim, extremely frustrated that I spent 3 minutes walking through the building trying to find an open window or an exit.
Design Lesson 2
Due to latency, or it might just be the mechanics of walking/running, it is very difficult to navigate accurately through the 3D environment. If you’re a gamer, and play FPS games, you will understand what I’m talking about here. Those games are designed around precision of movement and a very responsive style of play. I realize SL doesn’t need to be designed around this, but moving is still clunkier than it needs to be. So when you design structures that have ramps, stairs, walkways, or hallways, ALWAYS make them nice and wide. You might even want to think about putting guard rails along your walkways. Case in point:
I hate to use this as a bad example, because this giant computer on Dell’s space is awesome from a teaching and learning perspective. But the walkways and stairs that guide the user through the computer are awful. One wrong step, and you fall off the walkway, fall through the bottom of the computer, and into the water. Then it takes you another 5 minutes just to get yourself back to the spot you fell off the stairs. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve fallen out of this thing during demonstrations of Second Life. A similar lesson can be taken from the Ohio building in terms of hallway width. The halls are so narrow, I end up walking into a lot of walls and corners, and I also need to zoom my camera in tight behind my avatar in order to even see where I’m going when indoors.
Make sure you keep these things in mind when you start designing in Second Life. The flight mechanics allows you to design things in a much more OPEN sense, which makes the user experience much more satisfying. The IBM campus is a great example of what I’d call Open Design.
I’ve been immersed in our Second Life project for a couple months now, and it’s getting close to the point of spiraling out of control. I think we have some plans to keep it organized, but it’s going to get ugly before things settle down. Anyway, if you find the Second Life stuff interesting, I’ve been posting things over at our Second Life site. One of several reasons I haven’t been able to share more thoughts here lately.
Since I’m here at my VLW admin…why not share some quick Second Life thoughts from the perspective of an instructional technologist trying to implement a Second Life initiative at a college level? So I present the Top 5 challenges you could face if you embark on a similar project:
- Second Life is not a game. It does not present the user with any objectives, goals, or any sort of structure after a new user ‘graduates’ from orientation island. This is throwing off both students and faculty. To counter this, we’re building what I call ‘hooks’ on our island to guide the SL newbie experience.
- There is NO GOOD ROADMAP for administering your land once you receive it from Linden. I’ve had to struggle through the land parceling, permissions, group access, and other adminstration (or land owner) tools to get things how I want them. I’m still not sure I have it setup correctly.
- Some people don’t get it. I could supply a long list of examples here, but that’d take too long. Soooo much activity goes on within Second Life in so many different domains…it’s hard for people who aren’t gamers or digital natives to wrap their head around.
- Once you have the land, and you start talking to people within your college, EVERYONE will want access to the land. Even if they don’t know what it is or what they can do within the environment, they will want access. Actually, this might be unique to my college, but something to be aware of. This leads into the #1 challenge…
- The three Ps: Policies, Processes, and Procedures. How will you go about giving people access to the land for various projects? You only have a finite amount of realestate. How will you prioritize incoming projects from student organizations, the development office, the admissions office, faculty, graduate students, etc? What about a code of conduct, particularly if your avatars are showing their group name with YOUR college in it? Who decides when its time to delete certain projects/structures for fresh content? The list goes on…
That final challenge is where I’m at right now. Our first step is putting together a committee with faculty, students, and staff to help priortize projects and create policies for use. We’ll see where it goes…
I saw an early demo of this game a while back, recently read about it in Edge, and saw this post today. If you’re a fan of geometry wars, or a parent of a child with an Xbox, BBR is worth looking into. Inexpensive, non-violent, and fun by the looks of it. Bizzarre Creations is worth keeping an eye on. They seem to be trying new methods of gameplay and experimenting with non-traditional gametypes…and unlike other studios who try this, they are succeeding.
Be warned, their games are color intensive!
So I’ve had my browser window open and URLs pasted here to remind me to write a blog entry for about 3 days now. So here it is, before I head out to get my first 18 holes of the season in.
The New Media Consortium (NMC) just announced they have opened up three new sims in Second Life for educators to lease. The price point is a bit less than what Linden charges. But wait, there’s more! NMC is offering a bundle of:
- A piece of the Second Life Pie (land lease)
- Annual membership to NMC
- A conference ticket
Along with assorted other packaged deals. By the way, if you’re alread an NMC member, you can utilize certain sections of their SL space for free, or at a reduced rate. They’ve put a lot of thinking into this, and I’m really hoping all of us at PSU that are looking into SL can model some of our SL efforts after the NMC. A list of NMC Second Life Services can be found here.
Getting off the SL hype machine for a moment, a new issue of Innovate just came out (free via the web, registration required I believe) focusing entirely on the Net Generation. I feel as if I’ve been on the Net Gen soap box since I read Marc Prensky’s first book in 2002, so I’m always looking for ways to plug this idea!
