…and on a related topic, an excellent “SL for business newbs” presentation which does a fairly nice, simple job of outlining the challenges and opportunities.
Similarly the following….although I’d recommend removing the, um, slide showing what a genital attachment attachment looks like, maybe don’t give such a zoom in view? Although I understand the point (ugh! I can’t even say THAT without sounding coy!)
Interesting slide show albeit with an embedded “sell”….and I’m not convinced that measuring ‘traffic’ no matter how refined is really the most valid way to understand success in SL or other virtual worlds. However, at the very least this somewhat refutes the idea that it’s not possible to measure impact in a multiplicity of ways in SL.
I’ve written at length on how we deal with death in virtual worlds, and the implications of the technology for the future, where the question of who will “own” an avatar will become increasingly complex.
An interesting post and discussion at Massively as to whether avatars should live on once the real person behind them has passed on, picking up previous discussions and postings of my own that speak to how strange the issues of identity will truly become, especially as avatars themselves increasingly become repositories of deeper value.
Once an avatar’s typist is gone, the avatar should be removed after a certain period of time. In Jesse’s case, I felt pain every time he was logged in from the afterlife, but in Ginny’s case, I feel anger that the name/image is allowed to continue on hawking products. That brings me to my question - Should these avatars live on even though their creators haven’t?
As I said in my post:
Many of us equate the avatar with a user, a one-to-one relationship. But what happens when one avatar is run by more than one person? What happens when one person has more than one avatar? Does an avatar’s death merit grieving when we can’t be sure of a one-to-one relationship?
Death, when we see it in a simple one-to-one situation in a virtual world opens up the strange sensation that there are circles within circles of meaning. Not only do we grieve a real person who has died. We can also grieve the avatar as a separate individual. The two circles may overlap, or they may not, and we may increasingly start to feel that it may not make much of a difference - what matters is how well we know the person who is gone.
When someone dies, virtual worlds remind us that the person who is gone was many things to many people. To some he was a son. To some a lover. To some a friend. Avatars remind us of the multiplicities of our identities - and the death of the person behind an avatar reminds us that all these roles are just that - roles, for behind our masks, illusions, and ways of relating to the world we are fully human, and with hope we are whole.
I previously posted on a seminar on persistent social learning.
An archive of the session is available here.
Further indication of the huge pipeline of virtual worlds on the horizon is SocioTown. And this is also a further indication of the challenges that virtual world developers will face - providing purpose, and building out worlds that are more than social chat sites or shopping malls.
Virtual worlds built on the idea that we want to buy virtual furniture and clothes, chat, dance in a virtual club and, well, be virtual is a bit of a thin premise - SocioTown seems to offer an additional platform for games and amusements - basically, as the name implies, a place to hang out and play some puzzles and challenges with friends. Hard to know how this will compete with Metaplace - if Metaplace puts the power of the environment development itself in the hands of users and then allows users to move from one world to another, then mini portals like SocioTown will need either a specific community of interests or a sufficient hook.
Further evidence of how the lines between the virtual and the real continue to blur and dissolve, clinicians in Texas are using virtual worlds to treat Asperger’s Syndrome.
A technology associated with fantasy worlds is helping young adults with autism in the hard reality of life.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas Center for BrainHealth are working with patients diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome using virtual reality training.
It will be interesting to see how much quantifiable research comes out of this project. In conjunction with corporate, emergency and other simulations as training, virtual worlds as augmentation to the “real” or safe training grounds extend their capibilities from games into deeper terrain.
Vancouver police are using Second Life as a training ground, recruitment tool, and testbed for exploring future law enforcement issues in virtual worlds.
While much of what they’re doing is basic “been there” stuff (although first report I’ve seen of a police department), what’s interesting are the following comments, as they get to the heart of future police and government jurisdiction issues:
Beyond just recruiting, he sees a lot of potential for using a virtual, Second Life police force in other capacities — especially since there seems to be exponential growth online.
“It’s going to be interesting when we start to receive crime reports — you know, harassment cases or things like that — in the virtual world,” he says. “How are we going to deal with them?”
The jurisdictional implications of policing avatars, who are controlled by people from around the world, will need to be ironed out eventually, he says.
“There are jurisdictional issues. Where does the crime occur? Where is the suspect? Where is the victim?” McQuiggin says. “We want accountability but if it’s spread all over the world like that it makes it very difficult for us.”
It was heartening to hear Philip Linden paint a picture of the work underway to improve and enhance Second Life - I’ve recently blogged about the sense that there was a lack of vision or concrete plan, and it seems like Philip is taking steps to correct that. The recent level of communication about SL technical troubles combined with a lengthy post by Philip at least point in the right right direction.
Philip also admits in his first paragraphs that his mission has changed….a change that he says “isn’t huge”. You tell me:
Old vision:“Create an online world having the exceptional property that it advances the capabilities of the many people that use it, and by doing so affects and transforms them in a positive way.”
New vision:“To connect everyone to an online world that improves the human condition.”
