Dove Lane

Age of Conan was touted to me by gaming friends as a wonderful and rich 3D multiplayer online gaming experience that I had to try. I did for three months, and today I’m going to delete it. Goodbye Conan! RIP. I’m taking back my 250 megs to get ready for the Lich King!

UK virtual world consultants KZero develop marketing and brand-driven campaigns for companies and brands seeking to maximize opportunities in the virtual worlds space. They have some novel research that’s worth checking out.

One thing is sure. Mobile devices and virtual worlds have a future together. Like most relationships, though, there will be a lot of talking and disagreements before they successfully arrive at the altar. More takeaways from the vBusiness Expo sponsored by Clever Zebra.

Today I participated in Clever Zebra’s second vBusiness Expo virtual conference. Nice people running the show and a very good list of topics and presenters. Unlike their first conference, which was conducted in Second Life, this one was held in a specially created 3D space using Forterra’s OLIVE platform. The 3D environment added nothing to the experience, and in fact, detracted from it, since it was a big distraction from the content of the speakers’ presentations. However, that said, here is some very useful and interesting information I took away from the presentations.

A few weeks ago, I had an interesting discussion with a Gen Y person about his cell phone. Being a baby boomer myself, I am more than a little fascinated by the intuitive way that generation absorbs technologies into their routine lives. So will Generation Y be the first 3D generation? I think it still depends on many things, as these conversation excerpts from several young people show.

Yesterday I attended a virtual presentation in Second Life hosted by Metanomics. It was one of those bizarre, amazing and wonderful experiences that sometimes just happen. I was sitting in my real life office, watching my avatar in Second Life sitting in an audience of about 50 avatars watching the Emory attendees in real time watch us watching them! It was an amazing and relevant experience.

Do we really need deep interpretations of games? I don’t debate that many game developers are well educated and are aware of myths, legends, and the literature and competitors relevant to their work. I simply don’t think it’s meaningful in any way for academics to ascribe deep meanings to stories and characters that, for the most part, are based on earlier myths and legends that were meaningful to people. This article gave me a good laugh.

There are an increasing number of organizations that lobby developers or provide a product to help the disabled or those with limiting conditions to participate in a variety of games and learning simulations. Some new ones are referenced.

Educators who are experienced with simulations know that learners engage the content of a course or lesson in different ways, but adults universally want to participate in their education. Adults learn by doing. Clicking a “next” button between screens of text is not the same as “doing”. Adults want their brains to be challenged. That is one reason why the concept of questing has so much potential for virtual learning scenarios. Virtual quests let the user take control and think about their own learning experience.

A lively cheer or clapping, a broad laugh, a back flip or spontaneous dancing can be effective and expressive social interactions in virtual worlds, if timed right. Avatars, however, are sadly lacking in the kind of social development that could make immersive worlds even more realistic and expressive.

In some virtual worlds, for some specific applications (like raiding in WoW), voice chat works. For purely conversational socializing in 3D, the jury is still out. We are still learning how to use the tools that can make a 3D conversation as informative as a face-to-face chat. We seem to have mastered the sound quality issues. Now we just need to make it more intuitive to use. That won’t be a quick fix.

Do video games lack some of the spectrum of human emotions? Perhaps soothing or inspiring play will make the gaming experience more satisfying all around in the way movies do. Sony’s willing to gamble on it.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past two years, you have no doubt read an article or seen an interview with someone talking about some sociological phenomena or other that occurs in virtual worlds. The line between games and real life is blurring. Research on the Internet raises a host of novel ethical challenges, and only Linden Lab’s Second Life seems to have addressed the ethics of research using virtual world avatars. I find this interesting.

The return of Uru Live, the multiplayer version of the popular box game Myst, is largely the result of the passion of its fanbase, who have kept the game’s memory and magic alive for several years using a freeware version of the game. This is an interesting trend that may provide a new ground for smaller developers to take over niche titles with a good player base and use player developed content or expansions to existing content to sustain the franchise or give it a second life with new players on an economically sustainable scale.

Ads in games are inevitable, and truthfully, as long as the game developers pay great attention to maintaining the game ambience and environment, players are not likely to object. Game development costs rise with each generation of games, and for game developers, alternatives to help offset that cost and keep the price to consumers low are desirable. Gamers, of course, are concerned that advertising will bog down game play and alter the game environment so that they will no longer be “games”…just another merchandising venue. Here are some possible advertising scenarios.

I could subtitle this “Or Why My Freaking Staff Cost 400 Gold”. Months ago, when my current favorite MMORPG was new, everyone was friendly. A quiet gnome named Perber sneaked up on us and started buying low and selling high — exerting upward price pressure, and creating a storm of hostility. What a great lesson in economics and human nature!

For adults who have never played multiplayer online games (especially role-playing games or RPGs), it can be baffling when co-workers, neighbors or otherwise “respectable” adults confess to having an alter-ego named Hawkslayer or Aeria who is a night elf priest or hunter with a play date to go finish a quest for a rare dagger. It can be even more baffling to discover that 70% of the female characters in the game are actually played by males. And that the average gamer is an 18-year-old male when you are a mature female (cough) years older than them! MMOGs today are highly sophisticated worlds containing a microcosm of human nature, and as a result, they are fascinating to observe (and to play).

Did you have trouble solving Rubix Cubes? This 4-D Magic Cube goes to a whole new extreme. Try it out online. It’s a geeky thing, but totally mindblowing. I don’t think it’s solvable!

A lot of people, especially mathematicians, probably know all about su doku, but I just discovered it. Just when I had gotten blase about games, I’m having a lot of fun discovering that I can do it! If you haven’t seen it before, it’s 9 squares in a 3×3 arrangement, each square of […]