Games
Games
#EngageExpo Day 1 Recap
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 03/11/2009 - 08:28During rough economic times, conferences are often hit particularly hard. People don’t have the funds to travel, vendors cut back on their displays, yet the information at conferences remain as valuable as ever, if not more so. Engage! Expo is no different. I’ve run into some old friends at the conference and I’ve established new relationships. I’ve picked up my small amount of swag and taken copious notes.
The first keynote was a talk by David Luner, SVP of Interactive and Consumer Products for FreemantleMedia Enterprises and Teemu Huuhtanen, EVP of marketing and business development for Sulake. They talked about the deal between their companies to bring American Idol into Habbo. There was the standard discussions about other co-marketing efforts, such as American Idol’s deals with Barbie, Dreyer’s Ice Cream, McDonalds, iTunes and Disney. There were discussions of the demographics of Habbo; heavily teen, with a strong influence in Europe and Latin America.
Yet for me, the most interesting part, and one that brought a question was about why American Idol chose to co-brand with an existing virtual world instead of building their own. There were comments about American Idol wanting best in class for virtual worlds and their belief that they were unlikely to do a better job than Habbo had already done, and the risk to the brand of a failed virtual world launch was greater than any upside opportunity that having their own virtual world might have produced. They noted that by using an existing platform, they could launch more quickly.
I view this as a good sign in the movement away from siloed virtual worlds towards a more common virtual space. At the end of the session, Ted Tagami, VP of Business Development for SmallWorlds spoke briefly about their world. They are moving even further towards better interoperability as they connect with Facebook and Bebo and prepare to support OpenID authentication.
The first panel that I attended was Virtual Worlds By The Numbers: A Look at the Market Research. Barry Gilbert, VP and Research Director for Strategy Analytics and Michael Cai, VP of Research in Video Games for Interpret also focused on the move towards interoperability. WeeMee’s integration with Skype and AIM were noted. Mr. Gilbert said they were expecting continued interaction with social networks, some consolidation in the virtual world space as venture capital is reduced during the recession, increased avatar portability, and the emergence of standardized metrics. He noted that the typical user that he was studying was in around four virtual worlds, but they are typically only active in one or two as virtual worlds seek stickiness. The number of virtual worlds the average user is in is trending down, a trend he expects to see continue.
Michael Cai’s presentation provided other interesting information. He spoke about the virtual world space as still being dominated by early adopters, whereas the gaming space has spread across much of the technology adoption curve. He spoke about research into brand preferences of virtual world participants. As I think about the current financial problems, I was struck by a screen about views on automobiles. Virtual world residents currently own cars made by Ford, Toyota and Honda, in that order. Dodge came in fourth. GM barely made the list. For cars that virtual world residents hope to own in the future, Toyota and Honda both remained in the top three, and Ford, the top American brand dropped to fifth.
Another interesting tidbit about virtual world residents is that they have a tendency to be more physically active, exercising at home or at the gym and participating in cycling, basketball, track, football and soccer. They also tended to be more socially active than the population of general Internet users.
After lunch, a different panel took up the metrics issue talking about Virtual World Metric = Measuring Engagement. This area is still emerging and most frequently people look at this in terms of time spent on a site and number of click-throughs. One person suggested that the average time on the typical website is around fifteen seconds, whereas the average time spent in a virtual world was more like ten minutes. He claimed that click-throughs averaged 1-5% in virtual worlds and only fractions of a percent on traditional websites.
Yet Dr. James M. Bower, Founder, Chairman and CVO of Numedeon, which runs Whyville, had a very different perspective. He spoke about how virtual worlds makes marketing about the product and no longer just about the brand. He spoke about information that he could provide to companies about how people interacted on a product by product basis. He had an interesting comment about twelve year-olds interacting with a product in Whyville and ending up knowing more about the product than the salespeople selling the product. He suggested that the metrics used for education are probably going to be the best metrics for virtual worlds. He noted the old adage, “All marketing is really education.”
Here, he wasn’t talking about the sort of metrics that are too often looked at in education, scores on standardized tests about material learned. Instead he was talking about metrics measuring student retention, engagement, contextualization and related ways of measuring how involved the students really are.
He suggested that as we move away from a focus on eyeballs, to a focus on eyeballs connected to brains, everything changes and that it will put more pressure on companies to produce better products. He also spoke about how whenever a new technology comes along, people tend to try and do things they knew how to do with older technology with the new technology, instead of rethinking the way the approach the underlying issues.
The final panel I attended was Parallel Virtual Worlds and the Transformation of Browsing the Web. This discussion was moderated by Benjamin Duranske of Pillsbury, and included Steven Hoffman, CEO of RocketOn. Jan Andressen, CEO of Weblin was also supposed to participate but did not make it. Keith McCurdy of Vivaty also joined the panel.
I asked about interoperability at this panel, and one of the panelists really went off on how we won’t see interoperability for a long time and how it is a bad thing for all of the virtual world providers. It turns out that by interoperability, he was thinking about seamlessly moving avatars and assets from one world to another. Instead, he suggested that we might see ‘interchangability’, the ability to import and export some information from one virtual world to another. Interchangability, he suggested, seemed much more reasonable and likely, but still not in the near term. This led to some confusion, since no one had heard the term interchangability before and it sure sounded a lot like what I meant, and I suspect many others mean by interoperability. One of the other panelists spoke about his project already supporting some sorts of interoperability, by, for example, basing text communications on Jabber. This is a topic that deserves much more discussion, and I hope to write a longer blog post about this when the dust settles.
As I wrapped up the first day at Engage Expo, I had the opportunity to speak with Thom Kidrin, President and CEO of Worlds.com. Worlds.com is about to DMC World as a hip-hop and music lovers virtual world. Like the discussion of interoperability, this is a topic that deserves a blog post of its own.
After the conference, people gathered at various bars around town. I went down to the Half King Pub and chatted with folks there. One discussion that needs follow up is one that I had with Carol Altarescu of Privo. How does their effort fit with portable contacts and other issues of ‘privacy, permission and trust’? I don’t know the answer yet, so that will have to wait for another day as well.
So, while Engage Expo seemed smaller this year in terms of participants, at least the first day seemed very full of important information. Now, on to day two.
Engage the Existentialist
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 03/10/2009 - 09:02And what about the best minds of our generation? They aren’t doing anything as romantic as Ginsburg’s friends, searching the angry gutter for a fix. No, some have been searching for ways to use technology to engage people in politics or non-profits. Others ride the subways joining blank faces beneath the pictures of smiling models. At the end of the day, they get cynical and drunk and boring someone in some sad café, or maybe these days some sad virtual world.
At their jobs, they try to find ways of separating their fellow human beings from their hard earned wages, perhaps by trying to come up with an engaging advertisement in one of these virtual worlds. It almost feels like Freeport in Neuromancer. Yet, perhaps, the joy that some people see as their hard earned wages get stripped from them in some virtual world is not unlike the joy that Sisyphus saw as the bolder rolled back down the hill.
Today, I am at Engage! Expo, a show about how advertisers and marketers can engage their audiences in virtual worlds. How engaging will the speakers be? What new insights will I come away with? Come back later and find out.
What do Digital Aborigines Teach Their Young?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 02/03/2009 - 12:33Over on a mailing list of Second Life educators, there is another long discussion about Digital Natives. It actually started off with a great discussion, asking for ‘OLD digital natives’ to come forward and identify themselves. The discussion has been fascinating as digital natives older than myself have come forward and talked about their work on the IBM 7070 years ago and their work today on iPhones.
This illustrates a very important idea about Digital Natives. I read various people complaining about the whole idea Digital Natives and their complaints are mostly that they run into youth who are not digitally savvy while they themselves are digitally savvy. My understanding of the discussion of Digital Natives is that it has nothing to do with age, and everything to do with whether or not a person has ‘grown up digitally’.
While I’m way too old to be considered a Digital Native by those who somehow think that being a digital native means being born after a certain arbitrary date, I ‘grew up digitally’, and consider myself a Digital Native. Beyond that, as being one of the older Digital Natives, I like to call myself a Digital Aborigine.
This raises an interesting question. What do Digital Aborigines teach their young? I should note that I’ve read some literature on education, but I’m more of a programmer than a professional educator. I believe that much of my pedagogical style can probably be traced back to ideas like resource based learning, constructivism, and other educational ideas, that’s not especially how I think about things.
So, what do I teach my kids? I always told my two older daughters, they were free to play any computer game that they could write. They started working in Logo. Wrote programs in MOOs and even did a little with Basic. I never held it as a hard and fast rule, but it did give them a much different perspective on games, and perhaps, on the way they put their thoughts together.
As technology changes, so do the approaches. At one point, I started my youngest daughter, Fiona using Google SketchUp. She created some three-dimensional objects and made them pretty colors. I’ve been encouraging her to do a little bit of work with photographs and visual editing tools. So far, it has been pretty simple stuff, red-eye removal, cropping, scaling, and related ideas. We’ll get into more interesting stuff later on.
Today, she is home from school with a cold. After the morning quota of PBSKids, Fiona went to the computer. She started playing some Dora the Explorer game on the computer, so I presented her with the rule I had told her older sisters. Then, I set her down in front of MSWLogo, a windows version of the Logo programming language.
I showed her the simple aspects. To make the turtle go forward, you type FD and some number for the number of steps. To make the turtle turn, you type RT and how far you want the turtle to turn. We made a few shapes together. Then, I introduced REPEAT.
She was very happy running commands like REPEAT 7596 [ FD 9438 RT 7539 ]. These commands produced Jackson Pollock like images which she found very interesting. I could now return to my other work.
I sent out a message about her starting to work in Logo, and I received a response from another online friend. While I don’t know the early history of this friend, I suspect that, he too, is a digital aborigine. He asked the question, “Do you have any particular strategies for teaching kids programming?” He went on to talk about the difficulty we digital aborigines have when we show our kids programming.
Programming is so interesting and exciting; it is hard not to push. It is hard not to push. It is hard not to present too much information all at once.
So, I presented her Fiona very small bits of what she could do, until she was hooked and was saying things like, “Oh, cool” or “Awesome”. Then, I handed over the keyboard to her at let her run with it. Every so often, she would come back and ask me questions. Some, I deferred for a later day. Others I answered and gave her enough to keep her interested.
As a general rule, and I suspect that all of the educational theorists will talk about this in terms of resource based learning, I like to give her the tools to play with and see what she creates. However, at some points, it is useful to have a goal. So, following an example I saw from some logo programming book years ago, I drew a simple pattern and asked her to get the turtle to draw it. It is actually a big challenge for her, and she has been working on it for a while. She comes back to me every so often with questions, but she has almost completed the task.
Mixing this together with things like doing an Internet based Radio show, Fiona is building a groundwork to create some very interesting things in something like OpenSim, and I look forward to seeing what she might create sometime.
However, I haven’t been doing this as part of a conscious plan to build up right selection of tools. Instead, I present tools to her based on whatever I think she might find interesting in the moment.
I don’t know if I’m a typical digital aboriginal parent, and I would love to hear thoughts from other digital aboriginal parents about what they are teaching their younger children.
The Great Dance
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 02/01/2009 - 12:39Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit. I start the first blog post of every month with the phrase “Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit” harkening back to a hope of childhood that saying those words first thing in the morning of the first day of the month would some how bring luck for the month. The beginning of a new month can be like the beginning of a new year, in whatever calendar, or a new administration, a chance to hope again.
Yet hope can be a fleeting thing. I’ve been a bit out of sorts over the past week. My wife, Kim, has commented on it and I’ve been wondering what it has all been about. Have the incessant winter storms been finally worn me down? Am I struggling from season affective disorders? Is it a “Blue Monday” sort of effect? Are there other factors, new twist in our difficult financial situation? Could it be related to health, the endless coughs, headaches and other symptoms of the winter cold season? Could it be my continued struggle to find the right combination of medications to keep my blood pressure and cholesterol under control? Might it be concerns about residual affects of Kim’s battle with Lyme disease?
All of these seam reasonable explanations. However, most of these have been ongoing struggles. Was there something particular about last week? As I think about what is going on in the nation and the world, I see reasons for hope. Yes, President Obama has a rough road ahead of him as he tries to deal with the issues our country faces. Yes, wars continue overseas. Yes, the end of economic woes does not appear to be around the corner, but all in all, things in the world seem like they are starting to head in a better direction.
I remember years ago when Star Wars came out. I seem to recall a scene where the Death Star destroys a planet, and Obi-Wan feels and comments upon this disturbance in the force. Yeah, it’s science fiction, but I’ve often felt that we can sense something wrong, a long ways away. I’ve often had these feelings right before getting a phone call from my mother about some death or serious illness in the family. Perhaps, there was a disturbance in the force this past week that has somehow affected me.
I’ve often written about a mailing list of Group Psychotherapists that I’m on. Several years ago, I had the opportunity to meet one of the members face to face. Danielle Fraenkel is a dance/movement therapist from Rochester, NY. She was in New York City to care for her aging mother so my wife and I trekked into the city to have dinner with her.
It was a wonderful dinner. At the time, my eldest daughter, Mairead, was studying the holocaust, and Dani’s mother had lots of stories that would have helped make Mairead’s studies much more real and immediate. Unfortunately, Dani’s mother was too weak to speak with Mairead. However, Dani did give us a copy of a book, Samuel Mendelsson: A Man Who Must Not Be Forgotten. It was written by H. Alexander Fraenkel, who, if I remember properly was Dani’s father.
In the introduction, Mr. Fraenkel writes,
It may be that some of the many are still alive and will remember; it may be that others will learn about this Jewish gentleman, and – it may be wishful thinking – that someone may begin to think, and no more to hate.
Over the years, I’ve met others from the mailing list, and last year I went to the American Group Psychotherapy Association (AGPA) annual conference in Washington DC. There, I had the chance to have dinner with Carol Lark.
Carol is an art therapist in St. Louis. I had been talking about the possible uses of Second Life as a therapeutic environment on the mailing list. Carol had joined Second Life and was looking around. Over a wonderful dinner we talked about many things, including the potential for Second Life.
What had gotten me interested in the therapeutic potential of Second Life was a chance encounter I had had sometime earlier in Second Life.
I had been invited to a pajama party. May people in Second Life spend a lot of money on clothes there and had very nice pajamas. I had nothing notable. However, I did have the shape of a cat that I had received when I covered an art opening in Second Life.
So, I changed shape into a cat and ran around the pajama party, dragging a pillow behind me and tripping up even the most agile avatars. Everyone cursed that damn cat, but it seemed as if that was all part of the fun for everyone, so I only redoubled my efforts.
Afterwards, a woman named Gentle Heron, who appeared to be an agile and attractive twenty-something approached me and wanted to make sure that my feelings had not been hurt by all the curses and that it was, for me, as much part of the game, as it was for her and others.
I reassured her that I had a good time and enjoyed the role I was in. She then proceeded to thank me. You see, she is the head of the Heron Society, a group of people in Second Life dedicated to helping others with disabilities. People in the Heron society were going through the difficult task of processing grief over the suicide of a friend, and Gentle really needed a chance to just relax and run around like everyone else.
Gentle and I became good friends and I later learned more about her. In real life, she has advanced multiple sclerosis. She gets around with the use of crutches or a wheelchair and doesn’t get out that much. Second Life is a great tool to connect with others for her and through her, I have learned a lot about people with various disabilities. So, when Carol entered Second Life I made sure the two of them connected.
At the same AGPA annual conference, I attended one of Dani’s workshops. It is hard to find words for what a powerful experience it was, and I encourage everyone to try to get to one of her workshops if you can. With my thoughts about the disabled community in the forefront of my mind, I was very pleased to hear Dani talk about how she used dance and movement therapy for people of all levels of ability and dreamed of ways of bringing her expertise, through Second Life, to those who are very limited in their physical abilities, except when they are in Second Life.
Then, yesterday, it became all so much more complicated, as life is wont to do. The ripple in the force arrived. I received an email that Carol has acute leukemia. Carol, the ever loving kind and artistic therapist, has written a little bit about this part of her journey at CareBridge. CareBridge is a wonderful “nonprofit web service that connects family and friends during a critical illness, treatment or recovery.”
The unit she is in “has a grant to offer complementary/holistic medicine procedures to the patients on demand for free.” Carol describes “a guided imagery session” she sees “a distant horizon of women dancing with bare feet, all kinds of women, young and old form all over the world.”
Through the magic of Second Life, the physically disabled can dance, men can become cats or even women dancing with bare feet. We can join in the guided imagery and dance a dance of healing for Carol. Whatever your tradition or beliefs, please send prayers, kind thoughts, positive energy, or whatever you can in Carol’s direction.
With all of this in mind, I had an interesting discussion with my seven-year-old daughter Fiona. We were sitting in the car while Kim was trying to get some prescriptions filled. We were listening to the band Red Molly. It is a trio that we’ve often heard at Falcon Ridge Folk Festival and it is one of Fiona’s favorite bands.
Fiona really likes their upbeat tunes, like their rendition of “Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning.” When the slower, more contemplative songs come on, she wants me to skip over them.
Yet I like some of their slower more contemplative songs, so we listened to “May I Suggest” which I suggested to Fiona was a very important song. She wanted to know why I thought it was so important, so we listened to the lyrics and talked about them a little bit, in terms of Carol’s battle.
May I suggest, may I suggest to you, may I suggest this is the best part of your life.
May I suggest, this time is blest for you
This time is blest in shining almost blinding bright.
Now amidst all the fear, pain and confusion that I imagine Carol must be facing right now, I suggested that this moment, now, just might be the best part of her life. It is a moment where her she will use all her skills to battle a horrible disease. It is a time that the words she gets a chance to write are an important gift to anyone that reads them.
More importantly, for each one of us, this is, or at least can be, the best part of our lives. This moment. Now. Simply by being in the moment and seeing the beauty around us, this can be the best part of our lives.
'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,
'Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain'd,
To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come round right.
So, I worry about finances, health and just getting by from day to day. Yet I also join in the Great Dance, with Carol, and Gentle, and Dani, and Alexander and Samuel and anyone else who will join in. I hold on to the hope of a new month, a new year, a new administration, or simply a new day and a new moment, and I say “Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit”.
Apples to Apples via Twitter
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 11/28/2008 - 22:09This evening, I played Apples to Apples with my family. For those who aren’t acquainted with the game, people draw a hand of seven red cards. Whoever’s turn it is draws a green card and everyone else places one of their red cards on the table; the card they think the person who drew the green card is most likely to associate with the green card.
Whoever’s card gets picked wins the turn. So, let’s say that I drew the green card “Weird”. One person might have the words “Spam”, “Steve Martin”, “Falling Down”, “Bagpipes”, “Fast Food”, “Toasters” and “Summer Camp”. They might know that I used to play bagpipes and find nothing weird about falling down, spam or Steve Martin. They might choose “Summer Camp”, knowing that I had some weird experiences at summer camp.
Another person might have “Toasted Marshmallows”, “The FBI”, “Construction Workers”, “The End of the World”, “Global Warming”, “Crazy Horse”, and “The Titanic”. They might think that I would be unlikely to find any of these weird, but would choose “The Titanic”.
Finding “Summer Camp” weirder than “The Titanic”, I would choose “Summer Camp” and the first person would win the round.
So, could we play this online? It might be fun on Twitter or a similar microblog. The simplest way would be if everyone just used their Apples to Apples cards and had a middle person act as an Apples to Apples moderator. The play, with the example above might look something like this:
ahynes1: @a2amod Weird
khynes2000: dm a2amod Summer Camp
fehynes: dm a2amod The Titanic
a2amod: @ahynes1 The Titanic or Summer Camp
ahynes1: @a2amod Summer Camp
Then, whomever’s turn is next would draw a green card and send a message to the Apples to Apples moderator.
Anyone want to play?
Beyond that, it could probably be set up as a good Web 2.0 application where you are dealt the cards by the server automatically, and the server would gather responses, keep score, etc. That would take some programming to set up, but seems doable. The problem would be to get the rights to do this from Mattel, or to create a game that is substantially different enough to not run into infringement issues. Considering that Mattel already has a website up to promote Apples to Apples, which has a simple hand of the game played against a computer, instead of against other people and microblogged, that might be a challenge. However, a smart marketing person at Mattel might job on this.
Instead of using words from existing Apples to Apples decks, using popular hashtags in Twitter might be an interesting variation.
