Project Good Luck

Second Skin: MMORPG documentary

2008-04-28T16:41:00.002-04:00

Creepy but insightful. Good machinima

Second Skin premiered at the Boston IFF , linked with Rofl con, shows U.S. MMORPGers in their native element: middle America, working middle class, primarily white American men in front of screens doing their thing. The doc focuses on WoW and EverQuest, locking into the depth of play and the competitiveness that create strong links online and that translates to friendship circles offline (for many).

Again and again, players give testimonial that the meaningfulness of life online as an Blood Elf or knight translates into power in the real world: the presence of one’s virtual posse wherever they go.

We are legion.

Addiction and duplicity is where things continue to get stuck in what happens in MMOs and how it’s reported to the world.

1. Not growing up and getting on with real life (Andy one of the gamers has twin in course of doc).
2. Losing your health, teeth, job because your’re playing and depressed…

Scot Osterweil pointed me to a report from Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health that suggests it is not the most avid gamers but the most maladjusted who get stuck in the game spin cycle of doom. Makes instinctive sense, but here is the report

Edward Castronova is the leading “expert” in the doc and he makes the defense of synthetic worlds that he has in print: so many people play here because the real world is not so good; synthetic worlds provide a critique of our culture. Over-weight girl in small town can be an angel fairy in EQ.

This line of reasoning is like a painkiller or sedative. I am not keen on it. Does not address root problem of why the girl bummed out to start with. Ender’s Game got the perils of real life meeting the perils of virtual ones on target. It seems to hurt all over.

Director Juan Carlos Pineiro Escoriaza gave a lucid post-screening. He said that MMOs will no more bring down Western civilization than television did. Each new popular medium brings its own change. This is totally reasonable, but it’s not what he shows. The movie errs on the side of the dramatic and extreme….because it’s boring I supposed to show a well adjusted gamer just going about daily life. The fairly explicit point of the movie is that there no “well adjusted” hardcore gamers.

IMHO, MMOs, five years into it, are already morphing into different kinds of animals: more of them and more diverse…and mostly more casual. I felt claustrophobic and creeped out by a lot of the movie. Maybe that was the point.

They did some very nice non-permissional WoW machinima. The game animation in general looked great.

Blimp film

2008-04-15T00:37:00.005-04:00

Excerpt from Blimp, Beth Coleman and Howard Goldkrand. Shot Marfa Texas, 2004. Stills from Parkett insert, 2006.

Vernacular, associative data software project

2008-04-15T00:22:00.004-04:00

Vernacular, associative data software project, Beth Coleman and Howard Goldkrand, Electronic Arts Intermix/Rockefeller Foundation, 2003. This software we designed was an early investigation of meta-data tagging, which we used subsequently as the "motor" for the Music Box installation (Waag, 2004).

Vernacular%20.zip

source code is available––email if you want it

2008-04-14T22:16:00.008-04:00

Waken, multi-media installation, Beth Coleman and Howard Goldkrand. New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, New York 2005. The still here is from the digital animation.

For stills of installation, sculpture, and sound design Max patches go to Soundlab Waken

BDO Cute robot character sketch

2008-04-14T01:19:00.007-04:00

This is a character sketch of Cute Robot, head of Cute Robot Army. Made and shot in Second Life engine.

Boba Fett “descent”: tulum test

2008-04-09T16:51:00.005-04:00

This video is test shot of BF's arrival into rw dimension, in the body of a 6-year-old boy. shot in Tulum mexico.

Boba Fett's Day Off, a networked film (MIT talk 4/8)

2008-04-07T12:07:00.006-04:00

For any of you in Cambridge area, I will give a talk on Boba Fett's Day Off, a networked film, Tuesday April 8.

Topic includes:

Machinima production
Geolocative arts
Participatory media models: korsakowSystemOSX

MIT Trope Tank, 14N-233
April 8, 2008 (Tuesday) 6pm-7pm,
Purple Blurb

MIT Trope Tank, 14N-233
April 8, 2008 (Tuesday) 6pm-7pm,
Purple Blurb

Fast Company: Brand Obama

2008-03-26T21:04:00.003-04:00

I suppose it is a compliment for a publication like Fast Company to do a cover story calling Democratic party presidential nominee frontrunner Barack Obama a “brand.” The article smushes the language of politics into business speak.

It’s primarily point is to underline the ways in which Obama’s “adaptive-leadership” technique has won with a millennial generation's embedded ethos of social Internet and shared knowledge committees.

The Web 2.0 homilies abound.

From the article: “Yet giving up control online, in the right way, unleashes its own power.

"The campaign's secret weapon, Chris Hughes...brought with him a mastery of the human side of social networking.”

“They've also taken advantage of messages created by others. The 'Yes We Can' mashup by the Black Eyed Peas' will.i.am, starring a handful of his famous friends, cost the campaign nothing and became a viral hit.”

The article does nothing for Obama (he did not participate in the article), and it sounds like canned news for Fast Company. "Yes, we canned," I suppose…Nice cover shot though. Makes me feel sorry for poor ole Al Gore.

Three events March 14: Weizenbaum, Virtual World AI, Second Life shift

2008-03-15T11:35:00.007-04:00

Three events reported March 14, 2008

News of the death of Joseph Weizenbaum, the computer scientist who invented the ELIZA program, is broadcast around the world.

Eddie , an AI living ins Second Life of “child-like” intelligence (developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) is announced.

Philip Rosedale, creator of Second Life, the virtual world, steps down as CEO.

….disparate events, but it’s feeling like a changing of the guard in mediated communication. One cycle of is innovation over and now we invent the next.

Joseph Weizenbaum RIP

24/7 DIY the super hero panel II: Benkler, Seeley-Brown, Mimi Ito

2008-03-12T15:02:00.004-04:00

The social life of media objects

Second installment of plenary notes from the exceptional 24/7 DIY video conference.

The plenary session: Yochai Benkler, John Seeley Brown, Joi Ito, Henry Jenkins, and moderator Howard Rheingold. With additional comments from conference organizer Mimi Ito. Go here for first post.

John Seely Brown: The social life around objects. As we look at this movement, we look at Youtube clips think of it as an object. What makes it gain significance is it’s social life. The things we create have a rich social life. Understand the consequences of this. Everyone here recognizes it should bet do-it-with-others [not “do it yourself,” DIY]. These are collaborative frameworks. What are the social goods that can be produced? This may turn out to be a phenomenal platform to facilitate much richer cross-cultural expression. We do not understand each other well enough or enough about videos about our culture done collectively. Where the action is around WoW [World of Warcraft] is the edge––the social life around guilds. The notion of how to bring that social life to the fore is the literacy of change. Agency is enabled through institutions. What kind of institutional models? I need to innovate a new kind of institution. The current video movement started where we had a multiplicity of distribution. The architecture for that network was built in an era when the power was scare. Supposed my cell phone has a terabyte of memory. What about trickle-powering information into the cell phone, the architecture of the networks would be built very differently.

Yochai Benkler: My roll is rinse and repeat [laughter]. You asked us about best-case scenario, utopianisms. In best-case scenario, I see a deep change in two things. A sense of personal efficacy––the way people understand themselves capable of doing in a world alone or in loose association with others instead of railing against the world. The past 200 years we have seen the rationalization of structuring and harnessing of human action in into well designed and collectively effective outcomes. Fordism, AT&T, rise of administrative state in benign and malign versions mid-century. The practice of being able to speak was remote and expert, for example the encyclopedia. You, me, the vast majority of people were disabled from participating in it. Together with new practices of loose collaboration people can come to believe that it is possible to achieve something. Move from the periphery counter-cultural movement to the center. Small-dog owners meet up and create dog runs. The Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan organize to counter media images between Taliban and Muhjadeen. We teach textural literary without the expectation that people become Tolstoy or Hemmingway, and we don’t have anything like this in media. We need this in combination with the other layers of social practice. I don’t need union, party, etc. to pull together a particular collective of people. That is the utopian view. The blockages between here and there are enormous. Partly they are about belief and skepticism, strong historical technical architectures, business, degrees of ability. It is a challenging task to build openness in technical systems, standards of accreditation, to make systems more efficient not just generative.

Mimi Ito: This is what is at stake: the fate of our common culture. We’ve always done it [DIY production], its just never circulated in the same world as professional media. I don’t think it has to be adversarial. What we’re deciding now is what we will be living with for a hell of a long time. Binaries are being disrupted, and what will determine common culture is being established. A lot of different voices are at stake in the space. My perspective is to find a respectful relationship between professional and amateur. All of these things are being renegotiated. A tremendous amount of time is being spent on the legal aspect. What do we think is right? How do we start developing best practice?

Online marketing

2008-03-06T09:31:00.003-05:00

Online marketing is definitely a prospering industry today. A few years ago, web advertisement is still in its enfancy. Nowadays once you log on internet, you can hardly ignore its existence. It could be a blatant banner on your homepage or a celebrity's blog, delivering to you the message unconsciouly, like "which shampoo is your thing?" What's more, compared to traditional marketing campaign, online marketing are efficient, cheap and easy to measure. But if we take a close look at what kinds of products are engaged with doing online marketing? We see that most of them are products of food and clothes, those Fast Moving Consumer Goods.

I just joined a company doing online marketing campaign. I am now doing a project for the car brand Octavia. I tried to search on-line for projects of those big brands like BMW, Benz, and to see how they do their on-line campaigns. But I almost found nothing. I learned later that those big brands would still cling to off-line events. For example, they will organize a golf clud, or invite all their customer to a party at a travel resort.

As I mentioned in the last blog, internet is a venue for young people, those who are still in the process of growing in the society. To put it direct, young people do not have as much money as their seniors. One of the main reason why internet appeals to young people is its low cost of communication. Internet also cater to young people's needs, interest and style of life.

Then, could I make such a conclusion: internet is a place for both young people and people with low income of a society?
By Shen Wei

Loving Phun

2008-03-03T17:07:00.002-05:00

check out this cute 2d physics engine routed to me via marc schiller's blog.
Phun. it comes from Umea. I've been to Umea, funny.

24/7 DIY The Superhero Panel: Rheingold , Jenkins, Ito, Seeley Brown, Benkler

2008-02-28T21:12:00.001-05:00

The 24/7 DIY video conference was exceptional. Really. It should be the new standard for what conference should be––particularly those humanists discussion media. The premise for media use was do-it-your-self, which meant all the participants on stage and in the audience were media activists of one shade or another. And that was rad. Dynamically, it created so many opportunities for rich conversation across the room. Not just shouting up at the big dogs. Now I am going to fly in the face of all the collective good will and blog the plenary session with the big dogs, Yochai Benkler, John Seeley Brown, Joi Ito, Henry Jenkins, and moderator Howard Rheingold. The subject as Rheingold put it to the panel was utopian visions of how a media public might be formulated in the next decade. Here are their opening remarks as best taken down by me on the fly.

I post comments in the order they were made, leading with HR, HJ, JI followed by post on JSB, JB & comments from Mimi Ito.

Next Gen Media Literacy: how to feel at home and know what you are doing

Caring comes from culture. It does not come from economics and not politics.
––Joi Ito

HR: How should we think about what to do to influence democratic governance? How should we imagine institutions of governance thinking in future? I would like you to participate in some magical thinking, as the outcome is not decided yet. What is your best vision of the best scenario by which we might be able to influence the outcome.

HJ: Media has a much longer history than history of youtube. Remember when media distribution was much more difficult. For example, look at kids using toy printing presses in mid 19th century, amateur radio, early SF [science fiction] fans of 1920s. Think of African American filmmakers responding to Birth of a Nation with their own films or the viding movement begun 30 years ago. What were they involved in fighting for. Patty Zimmerman in Reel Families describes amateur cinema as something transformative because it would bring about diversity, a larger public sphere, and a larger market place. But home movies were stuck in the home––no distribution system. My vision is for a future where everyone has the power to participate and diversity is central to that universe. Not we will build it and they will come. Education, law, politics––turn them loose in the streets. Make the connections between communities to make sure they learn form each other, so majoritarian principles don’t drown out the voice of the minority. We’re not there yet. Moved beyond technical issues to a lens that focuses on cultural and social change.

JI: I think about big problems like the environment. Economic and political interests that corrupt the system. We can’t solve it from top down. It’s too complex and there is too much corruption for it to happen top down. Human beings have a strong survival instinct. Revolution is not about force its about information, more about voice and less about votes. Global Voices. Providing everybody with a voice is the most powerful thing we can do. You can’t when we think about media politics, economics, and entertainment as seaprate. They all connect. Napoleon said something like, “I would rather control the country’s songs than laws.” We need to influence the hearts and minds of people. Stuart Brand’s diaries at Stanford, half of it is about girls and drugs. At some point there is a trigger that gets pulled. I fight for the open Internet and now mobile Internet. We don’t give up anonymity and free speech just because we are looking at the First World. Caring comes form culture. It does not come from economics and not politics.

Gecko-Inspired Material

2008-02-24T11:47:00.003-05:00

File under insanely cool. This from MIT news, the development of patch for internal injuries inspired by gecko lizard. How’s that for biomimicry.

Drawing on some of the principles that make gecko feet unique, the surface of the bandage has the same kind of nanoscale hills and valleys that allow the lizards to cling to walls and ceilings. Layered over this landscape is a thin coating of glue that helps the bandage stick in wet environments, such as to heart, bladder or lung tissue. And because the bandage is biodegradable, it dissolves over time and does not have to be removed.

Stanford Metaverse U: SUMMIT virtual medicine with real impact

2008-02-23T18:11:00.003-05:00

I participated in the Stanford Metaverse U conference organized by the excellent Henrik Bennetsen of the Stanford Humanities Lab. Interoperability, platform standards, and open-source servers were all part of the heated conversation during the Metaverse Roadmap meeting that preceded the conference and the conference itself.

The fight right now is for platform dominance. The field is wide open for entertainment platforms. WoW is reaching a plateau in user numbers (still a whoppingly large subscription base of 10 million). Second Life with it’s 7 million some visitors, residents, or however you want to call them is perceived by many to be among the walking wounded. Imagine a very large moose with gunshots to back thighs, but still making its way through the VWs forest. Many of the first-gen users are disgruntled––more details on that later––but there is nowhere to go that provides the same affordances of UGC. Don’t count the Lindens out yet. They are trolling for the multi-million VC round.

My favorite talk at the conference was doctors Parvati Dev and Wm. LeRoy Heinrichs, who represent the SUMMIT research laboratory for learning technologies at Stanford. They showed simulations of VW training of medical students, the modes of evaluation of this computer-simulated interactive training, and the perspective, particularly from Dr. Dev, that these tools enable long-distance teaching and aid in poorer nations’ knowledge acquisition. She believes so deeply in the importance of the distribution of know-how and in developing the tools to manifest the knowledge that she is leaving her directorship at the Stanford lab to work in emerging nations. Hard not to respond passionately to IT used in smart ways to help people learn critical information.

Here is some of the ways the Stanford team is working. They have promotional video and research papers available.

––The photographic and video images are made available on Internet for educational purposes. The open sourcing of material is already in effect.

––Collaborative nature of the research. The Stanford labs collaborate with several universities including ones in Wisconsin, Michigan, Sweden, Australia, and India. Department of Defense (Homeland Security), National Institute of Health, foundations around the world and dean of Stanford medical school are funders of the program. The iAnatomy pilot is the first project with shared images and teaching tools.

––HAVnet surgical simulator and surgical simulation training are part of the investigation. This includes high-resolution images and real-time interaction. They are telemedicine to a new level. Live surgery over the Internet. “High resolution stereoscopic images phases link Stanford, Michigan, multiple cities.

––Patient education and empowerment. For examples, the Advanced Immunization Program (AIM) vaccination program

––Triage drills for bio-warfare and other kinds of massive-scale attacks.

–– Cross-disciplinary evaluation framework of media-rich/simulation teaching and training

––The experience of life and death for medical students, even if it is simulated

The examination and diagnosis of the virtual patient is often done with real players playing the sick person, not AI. Watching it is frightening, like a SIMs session gone terribly wrong. The verbal exchange between emergency medics talking to each other over headset puts one’s heart racing. The simulation tips into the adrenaline of role-playing. It feels very real. Dev says, “Simulation-based training allows students to work in a safe environment. They can make mistakes, they can do things they could never do with real patients.” She stresses that the students experience the direct impact of life-or-death decisions.

The Stanford SUMMIT project has tested over 4,000 students with these new training methods. The results show in interview and looking at examinations that the students learn as well if not better using the simulations. These are some very serious games toward the learning environments of the future.

Links to conference live-blogging archive below

conference notes
VWN live blogging

Beijing Olympics and mobile media

2008-02-18T17:13:00.004-05:00

In our previous post, Olympics are in your pocket: Part One, we began to study how 2008 Olympics affects mobile media and new strategy of Wireless Service Providers (WSPs) in Beijing Olympics. With the approaching of Beijing Olympics, we will keep a closer look at the intersection between Olympics and mobile media.

According to the most updated data , in 2007, China Mobile has gain 369,339 thousands subscribers. As the biggest WSP in the China, China Mobile, has strong effluences on China's wireless communication market. Also their strategies and the services they provide will definitely affect the behaviors and consumption of China's mobile phone users. What services will China Mobile provide for the Beijing Olympics are interesting topics for media analysts to study the role of mobile media in Olympics.

According to the report from IT168.com, China mobile has planed to provide a series of services during Beijing Olympics. First, text message, they will provide a set of special services concerning Olympics via text message, an communication channel which is extremely popular in China. Second, WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) services, with the cooperation of Beijing Organizing Committee for the 2008 Olympic Games (BOCOG), China Mobile has built the 2008 Beijing Olympics official WAP website. Subscribers will get the most resent information regarding Olympics from this official WAP website. Third, China Mobile will provide new services which require the support of new technologies to highlight one of the slogans of Beijing Olympics, high-tech Olympics. These services include mobile TV, mobile map, mobile bank, Olympics Special Channels and so on.

Will Chinese mobile phone users buy these services? Which services will attract more consumers? Will international users have interests to these services? These are the questions we will discuss in the next half year.

Also, we are looking forward to hearing your ideas about these topics.

Obama Super Tuesday: feeling history

2008-02-05T22:36:00.000-05:00

My friends and I did the due diligence of standing on line for 3.5 hours then standing inside the Boston World Trade Center for 2 hours to see Barack Obama and John Kerry and Ted and Caroline Kennedy + Governor Deval Patrick and Fitchburg mayor Lisa Wong speak that the ultimate rally before super Tuesday. According to the governor’s site 10,000 people came out.
Having spent a lot of time in virtual worlds and wonking about on copresence¬¬¬¬––mediated real-time exchange––I thought it would be very nice to see face-to-face what I am used to seeing almost exclusively on television and Internet: participatory democracy in action. (I am an Obama supporter. I do what to see the possibilities of the change he envisions.)
Hearing all the politicians speak at length and without commercial interruption or Youtube attention span was gratifying. I like that Obama loves to talk with people. The direct address, the energy, and the good sense are…exciting as hell. But the most electrifying aspect of the gathering was the crowd.

On TV you don’t get the intensity of the range of people or the individual face. You only get the crowd. It felt historic to stand side-by-side with such an electrified group of people. The racial diversity, the signs of class divergence, the different generations all focused on making a moment come true. That said, this does feel like a generational battle. Fired up. Yep. Regardless of the results, this love fest will have done the assembled good. People looked not just at the stage but at each other. If Obama has helped with something it is at the very least calling the assembly––reminding people that we are at our best as a community.

When I went to vote in Somerville today, midmorning, my fellow Americans were comprised primarily of the over 70 crowd. They represented for me classic blue collar New England Democrats. Have to say, they were fired up too. Come on, they were there in bad weather and voting on a race that hardly addresses them. Would they have liked Monday night’s rally. I say why not. Mutual respect, governor. If the collective fandom makes Obama into a demagogue then that’s missing the point. This is the time for conversation¬¬¬¬ and the more perspectives the better. Hilary Clinton won the Massachusetts primary despite all youthful enthusiasm for Obama.

The Times bloggers seem to favor Obama too, as all they could say about the Clinton win was $$$$.

9:27 p.m. | Money, Money, Money Here’s a hint about Mrs. Clinton’s strong showing in Mass. She way outspent Mr. Obama on television. Per the Campaign Media Analysis Group: She ran 309 spots, costing $65,000, compared with 120 spots by Mr. Obama, who spent $27,000. That spending in Massachusetts is from Jan. 2007 through Feb. 3, 2008.

Happy Chinese New Year

2008-02-05T19:06:00.001-05:00

Today is the Chinese New Year.
We would like say special thank you to our participants, guests and visitors from China. Thank you for your interest to our programs and thank you for your participation.

Happy Chinese New Year!
Project Good Luck

Back to Shanghai

2008-02-03T22:03:00.001-05:00

I have been back to Shanghai for about two months. Just as I adapted quickly to the quasi-enclosed (only in the actual world, not on the internet for sure) life in Warwick one year ago. It took me no time to tune back to the rhythem of Shanghai. It is a bit strange. As I have mentioned in my first blog, Warwick is a place where you meet more dogs than real people in an afternoon stroll. I remembered the terrible experience of walking (in a Warwickian speed)in the Victorian metro station in London one day, trying hard not to bump into other people walking-or more precisely running-all around you. And Shanghai metros is even worse. It has more people. And not many people take too seriously the traffic rules both written and unwritten.

But I did not suffer any change-of-environment syndrome like many returned students do. I have picked up my old habit of waiting for the bus to pass first in the pavement even the green light is on, walking to the right, not to the left; getting ready to be stuffed into an already packed bus physically and mentally. Sometimes I even doubt if I really have been away for 12 months as everything here is so familiar to me.

But something is different.
1. The Party Secretary of Shanghai (in some respects like the major of Shanghai) has changed twice.
2. A skyscraper, which will be the tallest building in China upon completion, is under construction along with several metro lines.
3. Prices increased overnight ranging from pork to housing, with the only exception of employees' salary.
......
Maybe this is the so-called "Shanghai speed".

By ShenWei

Research as Platform Specific: Avatar-Based Marketing

2008-02-02T20:00:00.002-05:00

Part two of three-part Interview with Market Truths’ Mary Ellen Gordon, managing director of the award-winning VW marketing research group. For summary and part one, click here.

PGL: Is there any clear or significant difference between this kind of research in real life (RL) and Second Life (SL)?

G: Yes. We’ve thought a lot about what works in world and what doesn’t. Clients ask, Why not do the surveys in world? The answer is because surveys are not a good format for live interaction. For examples, I cannot show up at Second Fest [an in-world music festival] to ask them a bunch of questions. From a technical standpoint, computing resources are limited. Also, you don’t want to disrupt the experience. Go out for quantitative and in for qualitative. We had to change the way we approached it from a traditional market research perspective. We had to be more approachable and fun and informal. If you did a lot of the traditional method people would think you are odd. “You sound like a recording.” You need to keep the same standards or rigor and reliability, yet not sound stilted in-world. When we end SL focus groups people often say, “That was fun.”

I should have mentioned that another factor in our decision to go out to the Web for most quantitative research is confidentiality. For in-world qualitative stuff, we close down the area within 100 meters of where we are collecting data so we are out of (voice or text) hearing range of anyone who might be in the area and don’t allow other people to run scripts to prevent spy scripts. Even so the Linden Labs Terms of Service agreement (TOS) mean that technically speaking they can access any information they like, so going out to the Web when we’re collecting quantitative information just makes it that much more secure.

In focus groups, the real difference is that in RL you want to keep one conversation going. What we found about SL focus groups, of which we conduct 90% in text [as opposed to VOIP], is that you have a whole bunch of conversations going on at once. One tool we use a lot to give some order is a scripted object that is essentially a ‘raise hand’ indicator that gives feed back about who said what. Then the moderator might start with the three people out the group who said ‘no’ to the questions rather than the seven who said ‘yes.’ [In this example people are using their whole body to talk.] You need to practice in changing your expectation of being in control of everything going on. Also, you can read the transcript in a case you did not catch everything. Or have them fill in note card so you have several different kinds of communication happening at once.

The SL focus groups are strangely self-policing. In a RL focus group or a class for instance you often have one person dominating conversation and the moderator or professor needs to intervene somehow. What happens in SL is that the other participants will moderate. For example, we had one participant in a focus groups on in-world entertainment for whom the answer to every question was ‘Beyoncé.’ After a while, it was the other participants who said, ‘OK, enough with Beyoncé.’

PGL: The SL population seems more keyed in, more active?

G: Pretty much, yes. The SL population is extremely engaged as participants in the research, which makes their responses so much more useful. As a group they are smart and switched on. Who ever is still there are 30 days has gotten past the clunky initiation process. They are more outspoken. When they are engaged they will give thoughtful answers. I have found the most thoughtful responses to open-ended survey questions.

The other thing about this is that they [participants] are really engaged in SL, so if the topic is at all SL related (or we can at least create some sort of SL link), then they really have a lot of things they want to say.

PGL: For Market Truths as a company, do you see yourselves as survey avatars or their RL users? I ask this question in light of Paul Hemp’s article in Harvard Business Review, “Avatar-Based Marketing.”

G: There is way less separation between the two. [Hemp’s article is] speculation. All the empirical evidence that we have points in the other different direction.

PGL: What happens when critics say, ‘You’re not even talking to real people.’

G: What we’ve done is ask questions about both [avatars and players]. It is important to be really clear about whom we are talking about and even among avatars, since many have alts, which avatar.

One of out first MT projects was on the women’s clothing market in SL. We looked at personal style in RL and personal style in SL. What we found it that if you see an avatar dressing conservatively in SL, then 2:1 that person dresses conservatively in RL. The same for avatars who dress hippy or arty, it’s a 2:1 SL to RL. The third category where there was that strong correspondence was casual clothing– people who dress casually in RL also tend to in SL and vice versa. There is a correspondence with risqué clothing too, but it is not as strong. The aspects of dress and appearance that tend to be skewed are things such as size and ages. In general, dressing in SL tends more toward the risqué side of spectrum in general in comparison to real life. When we first when in (2006), you could only find ball gowns or mini skirts. We did observational research from hundreds of clothing stores with thousands of items. When we did the fashion report, we found that what many people wanted to wear were business suits. While business suits were the most common answer to a question about types of clothing respondents wanted but had been unable to find, there were also lots of requests for other more conservative and professional clothing.

Just to clarify, those ratios are in relation to chance – so you’re twice as likely to be able to correctly predict if someone dresses a particular way in RL by knowing how they dress in SL than you would be if you just guessed based on the overall proportion of the population that dresses that way.

I should have also mentioned that we’ve also found links between RL and SL behavior in entertainment (e.g., people drawn to more social forms of entertainment in RL tend to be in SL too; same for people who are drawn to more solitary and discovery-oriented forms of entertainment), real estate (RL real estate experiences influence in world real estate preferences), and brands (different attitudes toward brand activities in world depending on RL brand attitudes). We find the same sorts of patterns in our proprietary customer research.

PGL: What indicates to MT that virtual worlds (or is it only SL) merit their own market survey?

G: We are interested in virtual worlds [VWs] generally. I see this as the way that media is going. It feels like the Web did in early ‘90s––who is using VWs, the penetration. When I first heard about SL from David Rowe, the other MT director who is a technical guy, I spent the whole weekend there. The first time I saw a Web browser it was Mosaic, same experience. Everything is going to go this way. If virtual worlds are going to be where the Web is now in ten years, then a group like ours can potentially help determine how things will work. Early on, MT did Web surveys and we did not like the way it was done and did not trust results.

The other thing I should mention here is that VWs are also just a really useful venue for collecting information. As described in the discussion of focus groups, people tend to give very thoughtful answers, and VWs are also a very good way of reaching particular types of customers. For example, we have done research for a high tech company that wanted to use SL to collect data because it was a good way to tap into ideas from tech savvy people. We can also have focus groups with people from different countries, different states, etc. and manipulate things in 3D. That’s much better than face-to-face focus groups (which are limited to people in a single location) or online focus groups that don’t offer the same degree of immersion and ability to manipulate objects in real time in 3D.

We still do “regular” Web surveys, and do trust them when we have something like a customer list to work from so we’re surveying a list of people we know care about whatever it is we’re asking about, but it’s those surveys that rely on sampling from online panels that I’m much more cautious about for the reasons described previously.

In terms of the psychographic profiles of users, SL is over represented in creative, marketing, and technical fields. We hope to investigate during 2008 the profiles of users on other platforms, such as There.com and Kaneva.

Avatar-Based Marketing Revisited: Market Truths methods

2008-01-24T20:19:00.000-05:00

Three Part Interview with Market Truths’ Mary Ellen Gordon

In June 2006 Harvard Business Review Senior Editor Paul Hemp goosed the very curious business world with a think piece called “Avatar-Based Marketing.” His opening salvo: Companies spend large sums trying to segment, reach, and influence potential customers. They should think about targeting those customers’ online alter egos, as well.

Two years and many millions of virtual world user and VC dollars later, PGL revisits the subject with Mary Ellen Gordon Managing Director of the award-winning VW marketing research group Market Truths. Their Q1 (2007) survey on the VW Second Life made a big splash and help set precedent for researchers and marketers finding their way in this strange new land.

Quantitative and qualitative network analysis

Mary Ellen Gordon: We [MT] had come into this when Web analytics were developing and did not agree with how click throughs or even measuring time spent on a page were being valued. You can’t tell if someone is on a page for a long time because they are interest or because they can’t find the contact information they are looking for. I don’t mean to imply that traditional Web analytics have no value, but rather that I don’t think they’re sufficient on their own. They’re still useful for looking at trends, etc., but provide the most insight when combined with data collected directly from the user. So, to pick up on that example above, if you surveyed visitors to the page in question, you could find out whether those who stayed longest were more engaged or most confused or if time on the site had no correlation at all with engagement with the site, purchase intentions, etc.”

Also, what I am really thinking of is how Web surveys have evolved online. In the very early days, there were traditional research companies trying to do Web surveys without really understanding the technology (so not making use of the ability of the Web to generate dynamic content) and technology companies trying to do Web surveys without really understanding research (and so asking poorly worded questions, not providing any in depth analysis, etc.). Then a lot of DIY survey software came out either as off the shelf packages or as online applications, and that made the situation even worse because then everyone felt that they could do their own survey even if they didn’t really understand technology or research very well (enter surveys with spelling mistakes, messed up skip patterns, etc.). To facilitate that a bunch of online panel companies emerged (they send people through to do surveys in exchange for incentives). The upshot of all of that has been that people’s inboxes are flooded with poorly thought out surveys, and so response rates have gone down. The people on those online panels make up a huge proportion of online survey respondents even though they are only a small proportion of the population overall. There are obviously questions as to their representativeness of the population overall, and there is a lot of concern about cross-panel duplication (people being on multiple panels), professional respondents (people who take so many surveys they become atypical even if they were not in the first place), and people doing surveys just for the incentives without paying much attention to the actual questions or their responses (there are even automated programs for filling in surveys to facilitate this).

Our positioning has always been at the intersection of marketing, research, and technology and doing quality, in depth research. That made virtual worlds a logical target for us. By being first, we hoped we might be able to avoid the whole negative spiral that online surveys have experienced, as described above, as we could be part of shaping the environment and expectations about research. It was also a way for us to stand out more from the whole pack of companies offering online surveys.

Method and Process

PGL: What were the methods and procure of running this study? MT established a Second Life (SL) research panel comprised of SL residents.

G: The first stage it is self-selecting. We advertise in SL and associated media. You decide if you want to take part in panel. We want people who want to express themselves. We want the expression to be part of the motivation not just Linden dollars [panelists are compensated for their time in virtual world money]. They come to our office [in SL] and click on kiosk to be part of the panel. Just to expand on this, in addition to real life (RL) brands and customer reports geared toward RL businesses, we also do reports more aimed at SL only businesses and SL specific issues that we know SL residents often have strong opinions about.

PGL: What are the criteria for participation?

G: They need to be in SL for 30 days and have a verifiable account. The 30-day standard means that the participant is beyond the introductory stage of being in-world, and the verified account reduce chances of griefers [a player whose goal is only to harass others]. The participant clicks “yes” to be part of the panel, the fills out the preferences form, which is a multiple choice on Web questionnaire with a unique URL for each participant. By taking the questionnaire out of world we insure that the avatar and user are the same. The questionnaire looks like a Web survey. We ask the following:

RL age
Rl gender
Sl age––We capture this automatically from their universally unique identifier (UUID)
Sl gender
Frequency of us––The frequency question is about how often they want to be invited to participate in research.
What are the participant’s interests
What is participant’s RL country of residence
SL profession is not part of the profiling questionnaire, but it is something we have asked about as part of specific projects.
RL profession is not part of the profiling questionnaire, but it is something we have asked about as part of specific projects.

190 participants were part of the Q1 (2007) survey; 201 in Q3 (2007) survey.

The form of participation in the study was threefold:

1. Surveys
2. Focus groups in-world, text procedure 90% request
3. Interviews in-world, text procedure 90% request

Gordon says of her research experience in-world, “People are more open in SL focus groups because there is more anonymity.”

Jesper Juul’s Casual Games: a case study in juiciness

2008-01-23T19:15:00.000-05:00

Game theorist Jesper Juul gave a talk in his new position at MIT Gambit, January 17. His organizing point was that casual games, as the game industry knows, are not casual in use. They are games that users spend a lot of time playing, which often translates into money or ads viewed. His research looks at how (design) and why (users) casual games can produce two kinds of anomalies in the last decade of very complex, non-newbie-centric immersive video game design.

1. The hardcore casual gamer
2. The person who “does not play video games” but plays casual games

As you might guess #1 reflects addictive design, which has been a principle sincec Tetris, with some interesting twists. A general difference between traditional arcade games and casual games (aside form the environment––one is an arcade the other is usually your office computer): causal games are designed for even greater levels of users satisfaction.

The three design traits of CG versus arcade play

a) the easy interruption of level play: this means when you restart the game you do not have to reboot it from level 1.
b) easy-into the game and easy-out to make it even more attractive….but you never want to leave you just want to level.
c) the other is “Juiciness”

Juiciness: the player is always rewarded for playing

Juiciness in video games is extra-play feedback. The game gives you all kinds of *love* for nearly everything you do. It is full-on-flavor feedback where each action is rewarded with positive feedback with many !!!!! This can be sound effects, colors, fireworks, rollovers, explosions, animations…all of the above.

In a sense, Juiciness fits into the design category ease-of-use, which is a trait that is modulated differently for each game genre and mechanics: the extensive feedback lets the user know she is playing the game right. That may be important when it is unclear what the game is. See Affordances of the Familiar (J.D.Norman). Or if may detract from game play is discovery the game is part of the fun.

Check out Peggle, the CG game Juul used as a case study in juiciness.

Check Juul’s postingson CG nouveau and classic, like solitaire.

Caution: making a game easy or without consequences may not be the way to create the most fun. Mistakes without loss, death without dying, and unlimited economy in a game can just make it boring. Juul’s mini-survey suggests (as others have) that games where players are responsible for their actions, i.e. there are consequences, engage players at a greater level than those without.

Interview with the Virtual Cannibal 3/3

2008-01-19T19:28:00.001-05:00

Part three of three: Dolcett

Gy Harrop is the avatar of a white, male, French adult whose profession is writer, translator, and artist. PGL, your friendly author, met Gy through mutual friends. Gy has participated in a gynophagia (eating woman) sex-play group that simulates sexual engagement that includes rape, other forms of violent assault, asphyxiation, and ultimately the death and consumption of the victim.

Here is part three of the Excerpts from interview. You can link to part one and two.

1. Dolcett

[6:57] Gy Harrop: so
[6:58] Gy Harrop: you go with someone in a special brothel
[6:58] Gy Harrop: and there
[6:58] Gy Harrop: there is a room called Dolcett
[6:58] Gy Harrop: for example
[6:58] Gy Harrop: and there, after the staging of a relation thru chat
[6:58] Gy Harrop: you ask your partner to be cooked
[6:58] Gy Harrop: selecting this ball or that one
[6:58] Gy Harrop: and then
[6:59] Gy Harrop: the partner can select another ball to be the meal on the table
[6:59] Gy Harrop: the "master" selecting the one where he "eat" an avatar
[6:59] Gy Harrop: lol
[6:59] Gy Harrop: far from the abstract interest of it
[7:00] Gy Harrop: I was pretty amazed when I asked the meaning of "dolcett"
[7:00] Gy Harrop: and then
[7:00] Gy Harrop: I said to myself
[7:00] Gy Harrop: of course !
[7:01] Gy Harrop: cannibalism !
[7:01] Gy Harrop: as an evidence of
[7:01] Gy Harrop is typing...
[7:01] Gy Harrop: the cruelest thing when no more experience is possible

Dolcett originally referred to the signature on a series of Internet circulated pornographic drawings that depicted submissive women being hanged, cooked, and variously penetrated as part of a sexual act. Dolcett or gynophagia roleplay now extends to not only that set of illustrations but an entire subset of BDSM activity. One can find Dolcett fan fiction on the Internet with titles such as “First Bite” and “How to Cook Women’s Breasts.” There are also chat groups, Web sites, and, with the emergence of MMO forums avatar-based animation and tableau (still shots of avatars) enacting Dolcett play. One virtual world blogger described her adventures in Dolcett play in the following manner:

"It's kinda weird. I don't like pain. Being whipped, paddled, or tortured really just turns me off. And the idea of snuff play just seems so....final. But the thought of being prepped, stuffed, basted, roasted and eaten...that appeals to me. I guess it goes back to my objectification fetish. Being turned into food is just as good as any other type of object. So, one of the many groups I joined the Dolcett Girls group."

The blogger describes the trying the spit, saying, “The machine was very interesting, giving a play by play.” This meant the roasting pit would narrate to the user the progress of her being cooked. The blogger’s comment, “The flames then started and I slowly began to rotate. At this point I really was really getting more turned on then I expected.”

The Dolcett scenario is often medieval, borrowing from the fairytale structure of a young peasant girl scooped up by the prince to become the “queen for the day.” Her rule ends in her public execution that is constructed for greatest erotic charge for the crowd. Writer A. N. Roquelaure’s (Anne Rice) popular Sleeping Beauty soft BDSM series played out for her massive audience the basic stratagems of this role play. In the case of Rice’s Beauty, it is a role reversal, where the princess is forced to submit to machinations of this sexual dominance order.

2. The most common and easiest thing to do here is sex

Gy explains that after the Dolcett play, his next interesting on the SL platform was building furniture. He felt that designing things was at the core of the experience of a VW. He explained why it was not a disconnect to go from simulating cooking someone to working with geometric primitives to construct virtual furniture.

[7:02] Gy Harrop is typing...
[7:02] Gy Harrop: again, the most interesting here
[7:03] Gy Harrop: is that it's SL which invents that
[7:03] Gy Harrop: there's no identified will behind
[7:03] Gy Harrop: it's structural
[7:03] Gy Harrop: lol
[7:03] Hapi Sleeper: what about furniture? not as interesting ;-)
[7:03] Gy Harrop: yes it is !
[7:03] Gy Harrop: it comes when you mourned sex
[7:03] Gy Harrop: lol
[7:03] Gy Harrop: then there is furniture
[7:04] Hapi Sleeper: architecture, the actual structures build. same as the language-based play
[7:04] Gy Harrop: it's just like getting involved in the technical secrets of sl
[7:04] Hapi Sleeper: yes,that's right. the technical secrets
[7:04] Gy Harrop: much more serious and interesting than sex here
[7:05] Gy Harrop: there is a hard selection on that basis
[7:05] Gy Harrop: everybody CANT script or make buildings or whatever
[7:05] Gy Harrop: I tried scripting
[7:05] Gy Harrop: it's a hell
[7:05] Hapi Sleeper: yes. that's right, but that sex chat, on whatever level, is the thing people can all participate in
[7:05] Gy Harrop: the maddest people here are the ones who works in that matter [building].
[7:06] Gy Harrop: lol
[7:06] Gy Harrop: yeah
[7:06] Gy Harrop: the most common and easiest thing to do here is sex

Postscript

A short history of pornography as accelerated media vehicle

The biggest change between historical instantiations of fetish cults and variations of BDSM is that particularly on the Internet it is easily searchable. What used to be essentially secret societies, dungeons in sex clubs, and marginal activity folded into the edge zones of a city is now, like a giant Amsterdam Red Light district, findable for players and tourist alike. Because things and people and actions and places are more searchable (and with the meta-tags and RFID systems more findable) the idea of secure boundary between public versus private is pressed.

Pornography, as pornographers large or local, slick or homebrewed will tell you, helped to innovate rich media content on the Internet. In the same that that the video camera and VHS tape (home shoot & home viewing) changed the nature of the porn industry––early adoption of a new technology in the 1970s and the creation of home video markets…Porn as a genre was an Internet early adopter. Following fast upon the heels of university research papers, nudie pictures circulated across the Nets, just a trade in pornographic post cards (carte de visite) was an early popular use of photography during the Civil War.

This is neither apologia nor endorsement; the pornographic is simply part of the history and pattern of new media adoption. What is considered pornographic shifts right along side with the changing of technology. The Civil War black market pornographic post cards of yore are in general less salacious than Christina Aguilera naked and pregnant on the cover of a women’s magazine today (Marie Claire, January 2008). Nor is pornography, despite some of its more interactive features, the same thing as participating in a sex act––virtual of no.

Acts of violent submission, masochistic domination, and sexual torture are not foreign to our collective history. A cursory glance at the history of the Americas alone gives us genocide, slavery, child abuse and so on. In very recent times, we do not lack for horrible events and media effluvia that bring them to us. In the case of the Iraqi prisoners held in Abu Ghraib by American military, the images of their sexual humiliation were floated out on the Internet, ending with the court marshal of several and the fury of many internationally. One has witnessed a resurgence of systematic rape as a tool of war, domination, and terrorism in countries such as Rwanda and Kosovo. In light of the hyperviolence of the real world, the role-playing of extreme sexual violence and the representation of cannibalism may seem perverse, at the very least. Nonetheless, these acts narrated above are acts of simulation and, additionally but very importantly, are consensual.

Gy Harrop narrates VW sex play in an extreme form, cannibalism. It may be a symbolic cannibalism, but it stages something outside the boundaries of decent society. In the tradition of the Marquis de Sade, one of Western cultures most famous perverts––and a literary pervert at that––it is hard to imagine that part of the erotic attraction is not located beyond the particular sexual acts themselves and in the thrill of transgression itself.

Interview with the Virtual Cannibal 2/3

2008-01-16T16:57:00.001-05:00

Part two of three: “WE DONT WANT NO BODIES !!!”

back story: Gy Harrop is the avatar of a white, male, French adult whose profession is writer, translator, and artist. PGL, your friendly author, met Gy through mutual friends. Gy has participated in a gynophagia (eating woman) sex-play group that simulates sexual engagement that includes rape, other forms of violent assault, asphyxiation, and ultimately the death and consumption of the victim.

Here is part two of the Excerpts from interview. Link to part one.

1. Make a picture through sexual intercourse

[6:44] Hapi Sleeper: there has been rt [real time] online sex for a long time before 3d spaces
[6:44] Gy Harrop: yeah
[6:44] Gy Harrop: right
[6:44] Gy Harrop: but here
[6:44] Gy Harrop is typing...
[6:45] Gy Harrop: and sadistic sex
[6:45] Gy Harrop: it's Sadian
[6:45] Gy Harrop: which means
[6:45] Gy Harrop: (and [Roland] Barthes talked about that I think)
[6:45] Gy Harrop: which means
[6:45] Gy Harrop: mise en scène
[6:45] Gy Harrop: what's the word
[6:45] Gy Harrop: ..
[6:45] Gy Harrop: to make a picture through sexual intercourse
[6:45] Gy Harrop: you know?
[6:46] Hapi Sleeper: yes, that works, mise en scene

Sadian as in the Marquis de Sade; the term "sadism" is derived from his name.
Mise en scène: Stemming from the theater, the French term mise en scène literally means "putting on stage (Wikipedia).

[6:46] Hapi Sleeper: so what happened when you were invited for the snuff film? what do you do and how do you die?
[6:46] Gy Harrop: lol
[6:46] Gy Harrop: I didn’t die
[6:46] Gy Harrop: cos
[6:46] Gy Harrop: thx god
[6:47] Gy Harrop: these kind of projects are never realized here
[6:47] Gy Harrop: lol
[6:47] Gy Harrop: it's a sort of intent
[6:47] Gy Harrop: but just to meet people
[6:47] Gy Harrop: thru a shared interest
[6:47] Gy Harrop: I met plenty of submissive women
[6:47] Gy Harrop: sadistic boys
[6:47] Gy Harrop: and
[6:47] Gy Harrop: that's it
[6:47] Gy Harrop: the project was forgotten
[6:47] Gy Harrop: lol
[6:48] Hapi Sleeper: ...you 'talk' to each other?
[6:48] Gy Harrop: yeah

2.You can truly MEET someone here

[6:48] Hapi Sleeper: better than such talk in rl. or this does not happen 4 u in rl?
[6:48] Gy Harrop: well
[6:48] Gy Harrop: not better
[6:48] Gy Harrop: certainly not
[6:48] Gy Harrop: but
[6:49] Gy Harrop: as "important" as in rl
[6:49] Gy Harrop: i mean
[6:49] Gy Harrop: you can truly MEET someone here
[6:49] Gy Harrop: make the experiments of meeting someone
[6:49] Gy Harrop: which is mainly to understand a singularity
[6:49] Gy Harrop: :)
[6:49] Gy Harrop: I did that
[6:49] Gy Harrop: many times
[6:50] Hapi Sleeper: how do you mean 'understand a singularity'?
[6:50] Gy Harrop: considering there is no proper body [in SL]
[6:50] Gy Harrop: the only thing remaining
[6:50] Gy Harrop is typing...
[6:50] Gy Harrop: is language to share the experiences you did here or in rl
[6:50] Hapi Sleeper: oh, ok
[6:50] Gy Harrop: this sharing is what constitutes a singularity to me
[6:51] Gy Harrop: again
[6:51] Gy Harrop: that's the same RL
[6:51] Gy Harrop: except that RL you have the illusion of the importance of physical embodiment

3. WE DONT WANT NO BODIES !!!

[6:51] Hapi Sleeper: ah, but you still need to meet them in rl to validate the relationship, to authenticate somehow? it's hard to leave soma entirely behind
[6:52] Gy Harrop: no
[6:52] Hapi Sleeper: seems a mistake to. phantasm
[6:52] Gy Harrop: RL is gone
[6:52] Gy Harrop: lol
[6:52] Hapi Sleeper: lol.
[6:52] Gy Harrop: when you fall in love, I guess you can imagine meeting someone RL
[6:52] Gy Harrop: but that's not the point here
[6:52] Gy Harrop: it would be a mistake
[6:53] Gy Harrop: a misunderstanding of what SL is structurally
[6:53] Gy Harrop: :)
[6:53] Gy Harrop: WE DONT WANT NO BODIES !!!
[6:53] Hapi Sleeper: go ahead. Structurally…
[6:53] Gy Harrop: lol
[6:53] Gy Harrop: yeah
[6:53] Gy Harrop: in this clean space
[6:53] Hapi Sleeper: just language
[6:53] Gy Harrop: where there's no hair, no odor, no sensations
[6:54] Gy Harrop: you have to thrill yourself as much as you can thru language only
[6:54] Gy Harrop: to make a simulacra of experience
[6:54] Gy Harrop: for example
[6:54] Gy Harrop: dolcett
[6:54] Gy Harrop: it's the last possible thing to mourn the sexual experience here
[6:55] Gy Harrop: and it's..
[6:55] Gy Harrop: cannibalism
[6:55] Gy Harrop: !!
[6:55] Gy Harrop: excellent !
[6:55] Gy Harrop: and that's not something invented in his room cos he was a perv
[6:55] Gy Harrop: it's SL that has invented that
[6:55] Hapi Sleeper: sorry, what's dolcett? cannibalism w/out bodies. Artaudian [as in Anotonin Artaud].
[6:55] Gy Harrop: yeah
[6:56] Gy Harrop: it's just the staging (that's it)
[6:56] Gy Harrop: the staging of cannibalism
[6:56] Gy Harrop: as a sexual relation
[6:56] Gy Harrop: I master you, I have sex with you, you're my slave, I eat you
[6:56] Hapi Sleeper: please give me a scenerio. how does it play when there is nothing to eat. symbolic death? christian allegory?
[6:56] Gy Harrop: ..
[6:56] Gy Harrop: lol
[6:56] Gy Harrop: incredible
[6:56] Gy Harrop: well
[6:57] Gy Harrop: again "the strings"
[6:57] Gy Harrop: you just have to select appropriate balls [scripting balls that place an avatar in a particular position or run an animation]
[6:57] Gy Harrop: in appropriate places
[6:57] Gy Harrop: you go ..
[6:57] Gy Harrop: but maybe you could visit one once
[6:57] Gy Harrop: if you have time enough i could lead there

Simulacra: Modern French social theorist Jean Baudrillard argues that a simulacrum is not a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right: the hyperreal (Wikipedia).