Virtual Learning Worlds

I had the opportunity to listen to a talk by James Portnow yesterday here at Penn State. I was running a bit late, so I only caught the tail-end of the talk then a good Q&A session. Jame’s talk dealt mostly with audio and AI in video games, but the Q&A session covered all aspects of games, from working in the industry to writing various types of code. A quick look back on the notes I captured on my iPhone:

What are you looking forward to in the next few years?

• Starcraft II in terms of balance. Blizzard always does an amazing job balancing various classes within all their games, and it will be interesting to see how the races of SC2 counter one another.
• Wii 2. This could be anything from a new iteration of the Wii occurring during this console cycle, or some sort of Wii-like functionality for the Xbox and PS3 that would allow developers to port console games quickly and easily to a Wii system and vice-versa.
• Digital Distribution and the indie market. Steam is a good start, but something better needs to come along. Particularly, something that will provide better accessibility to the casual and indie game markets.

How do you feel about the secondary market of MMOs?

• Fascinating stuff. WoW alone has a $120 million a year secondary market, and Blizzard is spending $20 million a year fighting it (else it would be much larger). We have yet to see the magic formula on how to integrate secondary markets into an MMO.
• Habbo Hotel had an interesting example case study on a secondary market. HH is all about micro-transactions, where users can buy things like a couch to place inside their virtual home for, say, a dollar. The creators had the brilliant idea of re-skinning a couch to look like a dragon, calling it a “limited edition” (even though it is just bits on a screen and can be copied x infinity), and sell these for $10. They sold all 200,000 in the first day. Then the users of HH were re-selling the items at $50 a pop.

How do you feel about user-generated content? Are you worried that this will impact gaming professionals in terms of jobs?

• Anytime users want to do my job for me, GREAT! I’m more than happy to sit on the couch and collect my royalty checks.
• Some companies are already capitalizing on this, like EA with the Sims. Great case study: EA ran a contest for Sims 2, where users created various bits of content and submitted to EA as part of a contest. Part of the agreement users’ signed basically gave EA full control over all user-created assets. EA announced the winners and published a handful of new content into Sims 2, but then ONE producer and ONE engineer took all the other content users submitted and created an expansion pack for Sims 2 that sold for ~$30. The xpac sold 7 million copies. Best ROI for EA ever.

How do you feel about the MMO scene right now and WoW’s dominance?

• In a lot of ways, WoW is a step backwards for the genre. They aren’t doing anything new, there’s no innovation here. They simply perfected the formula that others have been using since the mid 90s.
• Eve, on the other hand, is very innovative. Eve is the gamer’s game, WoW is for everyone else. The reason WoW is so successful is that EVERYONE wins. EVERYONE will get to 70 eventually. With something like Eve, this just isn’t the case. It’s a very fierce competition to get to the stop, and even more difficult to stay there in Eve.
• Age of Conan MMO could be interesting. The publisher has actually come out and said “We want a small player base.” How in the world is this going to work? Smaller player base = less revenue. This seems backwards, but they must have something up their sleeve that will make this work

The spring semester is winding down, which means things here in Academia are getting busy down the home stretch. I recently had the chance to speak with John S. from the electric sheep company regarding some of the projects they are working on as well as the tools they are using. Our discussion ranged from virtual world technology to social networking trends. A few things I found interesting during our talk:

John’s breakdown of virtual worlds:

• Collaborative spaces (Qwak, Croquet)
• Simulation (OLIVE)
• Entertainment (WoW, MMOs)

I’ve been spinning my own categories in presentations for about a year now, which are somewhat similar:

• Children’s worlds (Whyville, Toon Town)
• Entertainment worlds (MMO’s)
• Social worlds (Second Life, There)
• Education, training, and collaboration worlds (ProtoSphere)

Based on John’s talk, I might need to do a bit of revision, but I do feel that Children’s worlds deserve their own classification. Even though many are entertainment-driven (Whyville for example), the amount of learning-centered activities taking place is immense.

John also talked about the convergence of gaming, social networking, and virtual worlds. The game piece is all about goal-oriented activity and micro-objectives. The social networking aspect brings the social capital and collaboration into the fold. Finally the virtual worlds have the potential to tie it all together with the concept of presence.

We also talked about fidelity. Some argue that worlds need to be lush, 3D environments with a high level of realism in order to attract and maintain users. John and I both disagree with this, and he had a very interesting point regarding the metaphor game designers use when creating virtual environments. If the player can understand the environment and begin to predict things in the environment, chances are the player will stick around. Also of vital importance is the UI: the player needs to be able to predict the UI and how it will behave during use. If the designer can create a recognizable metaphor for these aspects of an environment, it’s a winning formula.

Some other random things we touched on:
Icarus, Hero Engine, BigWorld Technology, Unity 3D - all platforms John’s company is working with at the moment.

Metaplace - of specific interest, John mentioned this is the best technology for quick conceptualization and prototyping of ideas.

OLIVE - the platform from Forterra Inc, which is heavily used in the military. Seems to be a synergy here for a possible PSU and Electric Sheep collaboration around high-level, decision-making simulations.

PMOG - a passively multiplayer online game based around MMORPG mechanics but actually played through basic web browsing. Can’t wait to see this in action.

Jaiku - lifelogging, social service recently bought by Google. Expect some big things here once Google has a chance to dig into this.

A colleague of mine, Dr. Dave Hall of the College of Information Sciences and Technology, asked me if I’d be interested in collaborating on a paper for a conference on Data Fusion a few months back. We just got the news that the paper has been accepted! I do my share of presentations at conferences, but this is the first refereed piece of work I’ve been a part of. I’ll post the PDF here (if allowed), but for now here’s the abstract:

Rapid advances in visualization technology and virtual world tools provide opportunities for improvements in multisensor data fusion. These technologies can re-engage the human user in the fusion process, improving multi-analyst collaboration, enhancing data understanding by engaging the analyst’s visual pattern recognition capabilities, and providing new mechanisms for hypothesis generation and understanding. The virtual world environments can leverage gaming concepts to provide rich story-telling capabilities. Much like the traditional use of cases or logical templates for target identification or event/activity detection, gaming concepts involving characterization of characters and world views can assist the formulation and evaluation of hypotheses for non-traditional targets. As new requirements emerge for fusion systems to support asymmetric warfare and non-traditional operations, these technologies become increasingly important. This paper provides a perspective on these concepts and argues for a systematic theory-driven approach to explore these enhancements to data fusion, grounded in human-in-the-loop experiments.

C. M. Hall, D. L. Hall, S. A. H. McMullen, M. J. McMullen and B. K. Pursel, “Perspectives on visualization and virtual world technologies for multi-sensor data fusion,” in Proceedings of FUSION 2008: the 11th International Conference on Information Fusion, Cologne, Germany, June 30 – July 03, 2008.

Not exactly the typical content for around here, but something I hope to continue.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a seemingly simple, 3-letter word:
Fun

Fun seems like something so simple on the surface, but the deeper I look and think about this concept of fun and how it ties to my professional and personal life, this basic concept becomes very complex. I’ve tried to put together a post around my thinking several times already, but I can’t seem to get my thoughts down in text to illustrate the complexity. I’ll hopefully have something together soon around Fun and it’s relationship to things like engagement, play, and learning.

So in the meantime, I had a great conversation with Ron B., CEO of Proton Media, ceators of ProtoSphere. I’ve been exploring ProtoSphere for several months now, and hope to use it as a platform for my PhD research. Ron made a comment yesterday regarding the idealogy behind ProtoSphere I found very interesting:

Learning is the size of your social network.

The cool thing about ProtoSphere is that it’s the only virtual world I know of that was designed from the ground up with education and training in mind. One of the powerful features of this virtual world is an integrated suite of blogging, wiki, and profile-based tools that allow users deep search functionality and methods for finding and collaborating with like-minded people. Ron stresses that the 3D piece of this is just a small piece of the overall vision for collaboration and learning. Application sharing, whiteboards, VoIP, and the social tools are all aligned to help teams of people collaborate with ease and allow people with similar interests to find one another and have the tools at their fingertips to collaborate. Now if we can only bring this platform to Penn State…