Cory Ondrejka (Second Life developer): Brace for Impact: How User Creation Changes Everything

MMORPGs: a consistent and persistent place that allows many simultaneous users to interact

10 million people playing these games right now; $1 billion market

why Second Life is different than other mmorpgs and why it’s suitable for education:

user-creation: atomistic construction
this is a big transition – to let users create
example of guy who created the best gun available in the game right now – sells them to other players for $8 each
users added alien abductions into the game and would go around abducting characters every couple of weeks
users figured out you could stack multiple things to make something look like a piano because they wanted one; but it just looks like a piano, it doesn’t do music
users added skateboarding – no code in the game for “skateboard”

game relies on broadband because of the rendering

today is the game’s 2nd birthday
now at 1,000 CPUs

user-creation: collaboration
interaction and creation are synchronous and collaborative
people stand next to each other and do things together or for each other

community: demographics
SL community is older and more gender balanced than most games

see a lot of amateur-to-amateur learning and helping

economics: model
it’s a virtual real-estate model, not a subscription one
buy only what you need to do what you want to do

economics: market
in the last month:
20,000 customers
50,000 distinct items were sold
1 million p2p transactions (player to player)
$2 millions in internal economy

30,000 user hours per day
30% of time each day is spent creating
9,000 user hours per day spent creating = 4.5 user years per day
becomes a team of 1600 creators — a $175 million rate

economics: property rights
residents retain their intellectual property rights to their creations
residents can license their property in the real world

innovation and inevitability:
transportation and communication
real world connections (encouraged) – users create external web sites to sell stuff
property rights
capital – can exploit real world sources like real credit cards
marginal costs in the online world
gameplay – no required RPG elements; so is it a “game?”

games are being built within Second Life

amateur-to-amateur:
a basic building class in the game; they teach each other how to script, how to run events, etc.
knowledge spreads out to the web
abbott’s aerodrome – users added skydiving; started giving away parachutes (you can pay for better ones); they teach skydiving in the game
vertu – people are very free with their virtual currency; evangelizing in the virtual world to donate money in the real world to charity organizations

advertising has appeared in the game

tringo: over christmas break, this australian built a game that mixed tetris and bingo; has a betting component, no twitch responses, can taunt each other while playing, very social; just licensed the game to a real world company for mucho [real] money to put it on cell phones

shared learning environment for AI

James Cook on motivated users; James is a doctor

don’t have to be a programmer to create in the game

virtual hallucinations:
Peter Yellowlees simulated hallucinations in SL of a real schizophrenic
did it to show other people what it’s like – medical students, families and caregivers
did an in-world survey tool; paid 75 cents to get listed as an “interesting place”
asked for spontaneous feedback
whole experiment cost about $100; no transaction cost

wilde cunningham
9 physically disabled people sharing an account with the help of June-Marie Mahay
they decide what they want to do - go skydive, etc.

brigadoon island:
John Lester, founder of Brain Talk Communities, migrated Aspergers patients and families to Second Life
bought an island in SL for them to talk to each other; it’s consequence-free, text-based, they set up the space however they like; designed their own meeting spaces; had to decide how far apart the benches would be

live2give
an island where these wilde cunninham and brigadoon players meet

Megan Conklin on research

sociology research
business experimentation
collaboration experimentation

she doesn’t lecture very much at Elon University; use other multimodal methods
taught a technology and society class using Second Life

at the session, she provided a handout for how to create a “safe lab” environment and research ethics

when the class started, she immediately got questions about identity – great for anthro, socio, philosophy studies
can rate other players and there are economic benefits for doing that
can have students compete to come up with a business idea
in-world marketing and advertising; intersection with the real world
intellectual property issues
the business of gaming - how do you make money
there have been some sweatshop issues that came up

social sciences:
class and status issues
subcultures
religion, marriage, health issues, evangelization, how do you treat death
race, gender, criminal justice issues – how is punishment doled out in this kind of a world
terrorist groups
avatar and identity
nascent democracies
legal and ethnographic studies

Linden Labs is adding foreign languages to SL
politics, public policy

the gap comes in applying this to your classroom - the practical issues

Cory: Linden offers a campus second life
college classes can utilize SL to augment their curriculum - tend to have 5–6 classes running per semester

life drawing:
can upload audio clips, animations, and textures; the textures allow users to hold life drawing classes in the game
MST3K - users stream public domain videos into the game and sit around and watch them together, MST3K-style

building with bits:
what happens when there are no limits on creativity?

leverage:
you don’t have to build the technology
you don’t have to build the content - can pay someone else in the game to create content
don’t reinvent the wheel - there are worlds and communities waiting to help
developers are working with a bank to create an area where they’ll teach kids about money
take advantage of these communities - don’t have to create your own in order to add this to a curriculum

where to go slide includes 4 blogs!

Questions:

is there a way to guarantee that a class wouldn’t be exposed to adult content
Cory: technically no, because they can’t control what those students will say and do
Megan: tips for managing this are in the handout; in her class, she walked around and saw where the students were; instituted rules
Cory: social conventions for what can be created in the PG worlds; can restrict users to them; the communities police themselves

lab/equipment issues trying to run the software?
Megan: can definitely encounter issues; have to check for this ahead of time; not all students could run the game on their laptops; students wanted to stay and play the game in the lab after class ended; you’ll need most modern graphics card and as much memory as you can afford

are there tools to build 3D wireframes:
all of the modeling is done real-time, in-world; not uploaded from the outside; it’s all done server-side; Linden brings as many tools as possible into SL, but they don’t duplicate PhotoShop; textures tend to be done outside and brought in

noted that patches require admin level access on Windows computers; how do I get my students through the first week of “what the hell is this?”
Megan: watched The Matrix and read “Snow Crash” first; tried other virtual communities first; didn’t do it on the first day; the fact Megan is a woman helped the females in the class

Cory: SL is increasingly becoming a final question for law students because of the legal issues, particularly intellectual property

how long and can SL avoid the commercialization and centralization we’ve seen on the web?
James: first web browser (before Mosaic) was an authoring tool AND a browser, but Mosaic left out the authoring tool; SL’s focus is on providing the tools to create
Cory: major difference is the collaborative aspects; get a lot of ad-hoc amateurism because it’s all live; reduction in costs to do things normalizes and levels the playing field; developers are trying very hard to make good decisions that avoid this scenario

what’s to prevent Coke from dropping $250,000 and taking over SL?
Cory: the community would back out of the world pretty quickly, would create compromising images of Coke that would appear on the web; could set Coke Island on fire; they wouldn’t tolerate this and it would end up hurting Coke in the end

request to centralize info about SL classes for academics in one place
hook up academics who want to do this, coordinate efforts, get away from the idea of isolated teaching
Megan: has a wiki where she’s trying to do this

James: SL has mature regions; communities police themselves

are there any kids in this game?
James: theoretically, no because have to confirm you are 18 and have a credit card; creating a second world for younger users (14–17); it will be interesting when the two worlds begin interacting - Linden has to decide how and what will go between worlds (goods, services, etc.)