Online Games

Singapore.
The next presenter in this session at ICA 2010 is CarrieLynn Reinhard, whose interest is in human sensemaking when engaging in virtual worlds. Lab-based experimental approaches to this are sometimes criticised for stressing internal over external validity, and for being unable to prove causality without the black box of the experimental setup - they rely on holding a number of variables constant in order to observe the effects of a predetermined, measurable variable in order to determine causality.

Krems.
The final speaker in this EDEM 2010 session is Marko Skoric, who shifts our focus to Singapore and away from explicitly political spaces: rather, his interest is in investigating emerging platforms for online sociability and entertainment - like Facebook and (online) games. Such spaces constitute a third place for their users to gather.

Facebook has a substantial civic potential, and several studies have documented that potential, focussing both on everyday generic use of Facebook and on specific political pages within it. Similarly, various civic activities are happening in online games and immersive 3D environments; such games can also act as labs for practicing civic skills - through deliberately serious games but also through others.

Cardiff.
It's second and last day of Future of Journalism 2009 - and after Transforming Audiences in London and e-Democracy in Vienna, the last day in a long week of conferencing for me. Of the three, FoJ is the most multi-tracked conference, so I'll be able to see only a fraction of all papers here - but many of them will be available online as well. We start this morning with a paper on journalism in Second Life, presented by Bonnie Brennen. She begins by noting the current concerns about the future of journalism and views that facts and truth are losing their importance in the postmodern world. Still, there is good journalism being done, if not always in conventional formats, and this journalism is helping people understand key issues in their lives.

Leuven.
The next presenter at EuroITV 2009 is An Jacobs, whose interest is in the potential role of television in gaming. A combination and convergence between television and gaming is complicated by the existing routines of using each medium, which need to be altered in order to arrive at new models. The television set remains mainly in a shared space, usually in the living room, and in recent time, gaming has traditionally taken place elsewhere - playing on a PC, for example, also makes it less likely that the player is interrupted by other household members. Even the arrival of new media forms in the households doesn't tend to change such routines.

Singapore.
Up next in this Second Life session at ISEA 2008 is Bjarke Liboriussen, whose interest is especially in the process of building structures in SL. How does this process reflect users' understanding of their (physical as well as online) worlds? Bjarke points to Annette Markham's idea that online technologies are seen by users generally as either tools, places, or ways of being - and historically, initially perhaps as tools, more recently as ways of being, and even more recently as actual places. This latter view asserts that places have important features that affect social interaction.

Singapore.
The day four morning session at ISEA 2008 starts with Martha Carrer Cruz Gabriel. Her focus, and the focus of all other papers in this session, is on virtual worlds and Second Life. She begins by noting the evolution of virtual worlds from Dungeons and Dragons offline roleplaying games to MUDS and other basic computer and online computer games, through to modern MMPORGs such as Ultima Online, Everquest, and World of Warcraft. More recently, games such as The Sims, ActiveWorlds, and Second Life have acted more broadly as life simulations rather than games. (Giga OM research provides some useful statistics on the population of such worlds.)

Singapore.
The day three morning session at ISEA 2008 continues with Kate Southworth, who begins by noting the material impact of the network and its logic on everyday life. Some artists are now devising relational frameworks within which participative activities take place - governed by protocol and rules of engagement. Protocol is synonymous with the network itself, and there is no escape from it. Protocol has no interest in the content of the network, on the rules of exchange.

Montréal.
There are about eight powerpoints in this auditorium, and this time I've come in early enough to plug into one - towards the end of the previous keynote here at OOPSLA I had to switch to taking notes on my PDA as my laptop ran out of steam. The second shared keynote between OOPSLA and WikiSym 2007 today is by Jim Purbrick and Mark Lentczner (or, Babbage Linden and Zero Linden), and we're going to hear about Second Life as a programming environment. Of course we also heard a lot about Second Life at AoIR last week, and I'm quite enjoying these presentations - if nothing else, they certainly have great visuals.

Vancouver.
In the post-lunch session at AoIR 2007, I'm in a session on Second Life, which starts off with Slava Kozlov and Nicole Reinhold from Philips Design (the design division of Dutch electronics giant Philips) in the Netherlands. The begin with an introduction to the many spaces of Web 2.0, and note that many users have existences, identities, experiences in a number of these spaces, engaging with them in a playful manner which includes experimentation and exploration, role-playing, active and imaginary work, and a focus on experience and process rather than efficiency and results. How playful, in this context, is Second Life?

Vancouver.
The first keynote at AoIR 2007 is by John Lester, the Boston Operations Director of Linden Lab, who run Second Life (John's SL avatar name is Pathfinder Linden). He notes the fact that each avatar in Second Life represents one human user as a key feature of this online world (which is different from some multi-player online games), and also points out again that Second Life is not a game, but a virtual world. As a result, too, Second Life is extremely dynamic in its content, and there's no way to cache or pre-load much of the world; the SL software in essence works much like a Web browser, as a generic interface to whatever exists at any one place in the virtual world.