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…
Last week PS3 Home finally went live. I say finally because it was originally schedule to be released over a year ago. So what exactly is PS3 Home?
PlayStation Home , also called just Home, is a community-based service for the PlayStation Network which has been in development since early 2005. Home allows you to create an avatar for your PS3. You will also get your own virtual apartment, which you can decorate yourself. In the future the service will also expand, allowing players to have more sorts of clothing or bigger apartments.
And what happens in PS3 Home when it launches, and there’s not a whole lot to do for the users?
That’s right, the good ‘ol gag where dudes create attractive female avatars and fool other dudes into thinking it’s an actual female on the other side of the controller. Don’t get me wrong, I think Home has a lot of potential (as do a lot of the Sony executives). But this illustrates what I find to be a comical (and interesting) phenomon; the typical noobie experience in virtual worlds.
In Second Life, first-time users often strip down naked and wander around noobie island.
In ProtoSphere, first-time users open up the emote system and rapidly click multiple emotes which makes your avatar look like it’s having a seizure.
Apparently in PS3 Home, it’s pretending to be a female (something that often happens in Second Life as well).
When will a virtual world find the right balance between game-like, goal-directed activities and an open, sandbox world? There’s a lot of money to be made if someone finds the happy medium.
My first attempts at a PhD study provided great learning experiences, but ultimately did not work out. Why? Well, in proposal 1 I wanted to study motivation and engagement as it pertains to educational simulations. Not the easiest stuff to measure quantitatively. Next up was a study using the same simulation, but trying to measure user Flow (Csíkszentmihályi). This was even MORE challenging to measure. I’m still very interested in these three variables (motivation, engagement and flow), how games foster these mental states, and how we can try to mimic some of this in education.
As part of our research activities at EmSense, a San Francisco-based company that uses proprietary brain monitoring EEG and bio-sensing technology to measure engagement and emotional and cognitive responses to content, we set out to understand exactly what defined the successful modern, next-gen shooter title.
Where does it engage, and where doesn’t it?
Too bad I don’t have access to brain monitoring EEG equipment, or maybe I would be Dr. Pursel already! The games they used: Battlefield 2142, Call of Duty 3, F.E.A.R., Gears of War, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, Resistance: Fall of Man, Halo 2, Half-Life 2.
You can hit the article for the entire read (I highly recommend it, when do you actually see scientific, bio-sensory data measuring engagement?), but some items worth pointing out:
Cut scenes are not always a bad thing. They do not work very well if you’re just providing basic information that players could find elsewhere in the game, but if you are using scenes for new plot twists or other emotional elements of the game, players react positively.
Tutorials need to be integrated into the combat. I think this is something that games are finally doing well, but other disciplines still do a horrific job. When I turn a game on (or start a piece of software for the first time), I DO NOT want to be forced to read a 100+ page manual, or walk through an hour of tutorials. I want to try and USE the software out of the box, and I hope it’s smart enough to guide me along with the basics when I begin. This somewhat relates to what I call ‘phased interfaces‘, where the designers purposefully start the user with a basic UI to master, and open additional features and functionality as users master the basics. Other great examples include iPhone setup and registration out-of-the-box and newer television that walk you through basic setup the first time you turn the TV on.
There is no formula for the creation of engaging media, only trends. It takes a mix of incorporating positive trends,a bit of creativity and attention to detail to create engaging media…and even then, there’s no guarantee.
Brian pointed this out today via Twitter: David Wiley of Brigham Young University is structuring his course similar to a role playing game, where students take on the role of an artisan, a bard, a merchant, or a monk (typical character classes in RPGs). If he follows the conventional RPG model, these students will form teams, each consisting of a combination of specific character classes. Professor Wiley succinctly points out why this is a worthy experiment:
Although he’s using a game metaphor, Mr. Wiley says that dividing students up into teams and asking them to work on group projects are time-tested teaching techniques — ones that the best video games happen to make use of. “If you reverse-engineer a popular multiplayer game, they’ve somehow encoded all these things about what good learning ought to look like,” he argues. “Instead of just learning how to kill orcs, we can use these really effective techniques for honest-to-goodness educational content.”
