Second Life, Games, and Experience Design
The Second Life saga continues. For some reason I’ve been very pessimistic this week, but for the record I DO appreciate what Second Life has to offer, and how people are attempting to leverage SL for teaching, learning, and research. But I still struggle with it, for a variety of reasons. After months of creating IST’s SL presence, Istania, I’ve observed and come across some interesting things:
1. Second Life is NOT a game. I knew this from the start, but many do not.
2. I’ve found that the ‘typical’ SL experiences goes something like this:
Create Account >
Login >
Orientation Island >
Graduate to mainland >
I have no idea what to do with myself, this is boring >
Close SL
This is coming from about 50% of the faculty I talk to, but MANY of our students tell me this is their first (and often last) SL experience.
3. Personally, if I want students and faculty to use Istania, I need to craft some interesting experiences for them. This is both in the form of things to do on the island, as well as classroom and lab activities that faculty can use to engage students around a specific topic or concept. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about experience design, and how I can bend my knowledge of games, instructional design, and experience design to bring people into the IST Second Life space, engage them, and give them something to do for their first X hours.
4. Second Life IS NOT user friendly, and support materials to solve your specific problems are hard to find. Solutions are out there, but finding them can be extremely difficult.
5. A small % of people I introduce to SL get hooked. It’s their thing, just like World of Warcraft is my thing, Linux is someone else’s thing, DeskTop Tower defense is…well, a lot of peoples’ thing.
Lately, I’ve been very curious about demographics of the Second Life user base (specifically the academic/learning folks). Are there trends there? Even basic mean, median, mode data would be interesting. One theory I recently dreamt up is that the majority of the Second Life crowd (at least the SL academic crowd) comprise of mostly people who MISSED the gaming phenomena. Or at least, people who don’t regularly play popular games. The Serious Games conferences I attend rarely delve into Second Life…and that crowd consists of very knowledgeable gamers. Almost all the students I expose to Second Life who are gamers tell me “I log on for 5 minutes, get frustrated, then want to go play a real game.” I barked up the social tree with a few of them, and they laughed and just said “World of Warcraft” or “Xbox Live”.
Are there regular gamers out there who find themselves really engaged with Second Life? Is it as engaging as WoW, Guitar Hero, Gears of War, Wii Sports, or other popular games for those that experiment with all this stuff?
