Earlier this year I set out to jump through the latest hoop on the path to the PhD. The Field Exam gave me an excuse to step back from some of the stuff I’d been doing since starting the program. Blogging here and at Musematic slowed to a trickle, while Twittering went up dramatically.

Another casualty of my retrenchment was Second Life. All along one of my annoyances with SL has been its “heaviness.” For me, the barrier between “in-world” and this world has been non-porous. At least it felt like alot of effort to fire up my SL client, get in, and interact with other people. Whenever I did so, I didn’t feel like I could accomplish much else besides being in-world. I never felt as though I could just leave my SL client running in the background- even on my Mac Book Pro it sucked up most of my system resources and slowed everything else down to a crawl. Switching my attention from that document I was writing to “being embodied” in SL carried to much of a load to be useful for me. On the other hand, Twitter, Facebook and other web2.0 apps neatly slip into the cracks of my attention.

On one level I feel as though this is some sort of personal failing. There are plenty of examples of other people who have successfully created interesting resources and projects in SL while juggling busy lives and careers. But this..heaviness..always seems to have slowed me down from being more ambitious in organizing my Second Life. Making the things I wanted to happen in SL seemed like it would take the time away from other real-world activities and commitments like MCN. In the end I just wasn’t ready to make that kind of commitment of time and effort to something where the payoff was unclear.

After I finished my exams, it was time to start making hard decisions about where I was going to go with the dissertation. This time last year, I was seriously considering making Second Life a significant part of my work, but even then I was concerned that SL would be a one-trick pony and wanted to broaden my research to other virtual worlds. As I started talking to friends and faculty about the range of possible dissertation topics, one piece of advice kept coming up: “Do what you are passionate about.” The more and more I thought about this suggestion, the less and less Second Life was the answer to the question “what are you passionate about.”

I took a few steps down the path towards a dissertation that included Second Life, but in the end I’ve decided that this is not where I wanted to make a contribution. For the moment, I’ve decided to put Second Life aside as a concentrated research area.

Now, for all of you in the back row sniggering “I-told-you-so’s,” I’m not done with Second Life, or more broadly virtual worlds, yet. While I do plan on shifting the focus of my research efforts towards other areas, I do plan on keeping a sideways glance at ongoing development of virtual cultural heritage.
Virtual heritage projects are increasingly creating a presence in open worlds, rather than proprietary systems; several real-world museums have taken the plunge into SL (most notably the Tech Museum); and colleges and universities are continuing to explore the use of virtual worlds for distance education. I expect that this will continue to be an interesting area to follow over the next few years. Once the dissertation is signed, sealed and delivered I’ll take another look at how I can contribute to understanding what their role is in the cultural heritage landscape.

Oddly, I find this decision liberating. I have a sneaky suspicion that it might mean that I’m spending more time playing in the GSLIS sandbox..because, now it’s just for fun.

This is just too funny not to re-blog. Originally appeared on Metafilter and found during my the daily Boing Boing break that I’m allowing myself.

Anxiously awaiting their review of the Outside extension pack, Universe.

originally posted by aeschenkarnos
I’ve been outside. It’s overrrated.

Traditionally Outside receives extremely high ratings by those who like to see others play it, and these people are in many cases comfortably ensconced Inside themselves. Outside was released many years ago, it was in fact the first massively multiplayer game, and yet it has always managed to avoid the double-edged Retro tag. In its favor, continual user updates have kept Outside current; there are always new things to see and do Outside. Participants are permitted, to some extent, to modify their own areas of Outside, which is a large part of the fun of the game. However it seems that in the end one is modifying Outside largely for the sake of it, and having done it, there is a distinct feeling of “now what?”

In terms of the traditional target age content metrics, Outside is remarkably high in sex, violence and challenges to traditional values, despite the strong child-focussed marketing it receives. Many would go so far as to say that for a child to develop the ability to cope with Outside is essential, as long as the harm incurred is not too debilitating. Children injured playing Outside are usually comforted by parents, and soon encouraged to go Outside again; this leads to the conclusion that somehow Outside has escaped any and all of the usual moralizing that surrounds the videogaming industry. One might say that Outside gets a free pass from the Jack Thompsons of this world.

That aside, how does Outside actually rate? The physics system is note-perfect (often at the expense of playability), the graphics are beyond comparison, the rendering of objects is absolutely beautiful at any distance, and the player’s ability to interact with objects is really limited only by other players’ tolerance. The real fundamental problem with the game is that there is nothing to do.

In terms of game play the game sets few, if any, goals: the major one is merely “survive”. What goals a player sets, are often astonishingly tedious to actually achieve, and power-ups and gear upgrades, let alone extra weapons, are few and far between. Some players choose accumulation of money, one of the many point systems in the game, as a goal, but distribution of this is often randomized and it can be hard to tell what activities will lead to gaining points in advance, and what the risks will be.

Other players choose to focus on accumulation of personal abilities, the variety of which greatly exceeds the capacity of any individual to accumulate; again, the game requires players to engage in years of grinding to achieve any notable standard with a skill or ability. Players are issued abilities and characteristics largely at random, and it is entirely possible for a player to be nerfed beyond any reasonable expectation of being able to play the game, or to be buffed to the point where anything he or she does is markedly easier. Unfortunately over time, player abilities tend to degrade, unless significant effort is made to keep skills up. This reviewer cannot emphasise this enough: Outside requires a huge time investment to build up player abilities, exceeding any other massively multiplayer game on the market by some three orders of magnitude.

Players are encouraged to focus on social interaction, which can be engaged in in a variety of ways. In fact it’s extraordinarily difficult to solo anything whatsoever in Outside, apart from basic skill and knowledge accumulation quests. One of the major forms of social interaction in the game is based largely around the addition of new players to Outside, and is both complex and, in comparison to the storyline-driven romance quests of, say, Baldur’s Gate or Mass Effect, they are immensely difficult. Dedicated players of Outside, however, report that the romance quests are among the most rewarding the game has to offer.

The game world is immense, perhaps unfeasibly so. The sheer amount of resources that went into development of the Outside environment is staggering to consider. Outside is a world of tremendous size, containing examples of every known real-world terrain type and inhabited by every known real-world animal. On the other hand it is somewhat lacking in the traditionally expected, more interesting, zones where the developers would be given the opportunity to show off their skills in varying the physics and graphics of the game. There are, for instance, no zones where gravity varies to any significant degree.

The respawn rate of objects and players is ridiculously slow. A dead player can expect to wait for years to respawn, and will be set back to zero assets and a tiny, nearly helpless form. Death is hardcore, and resurrection all but impossible. Outside is not a game for the QQers out there!

In terms of the social environment, almost anything goes. Outside has a vast network of guilds, many of its players are active participants in designing the game’s social environment, and almost any player will be able to find company to undertake their desired group quests. On the other hand, gold-buying is rife, the outskirts of virtually every city zone in the game are completely overrun by farmers, and the developers have so far proven themselves reluctant to answer petitions, intervene in inter-player disputes, or nerf broken skills and abilities. Indeed this reviewer will go so far as to say that the developers are absent from the game entirely, and have left it to its own devices. Fortunately, server uptime has been 100% from day 1, despite there being only one server for literally billions of players.

On the whole, Outside is overrated, and many gamers will find themselves forced by friends and family to play it against their will, but it still deserves a high rating. I give it 7/10, and look forward to improvements in future patches.

Hot off the Presses

Urban, Richard. (2007) Second Life, Serious Leisure and LIS. ASIS&T Bulletin. http://www.asist.org/Bulletin/Aug-07/urban.html

Aethalides

Originally uploaded by Musebrarian

I’m off this weekend to the Second Life Community Convention (http://slcc2007.wordpress.com)

Looking forward to the sessions lined up for the Education Track (http://slcc2007.wordpress.com/education-track/).

Sounds like there won’t be free wi-fi from the hotel, but I’ll try to blog what I can in the evenings.
Update: 

NMC has published all the papers for the track here.

Library [and Information Science] School to lead team that will preserve virtual worlds. 

With help from the Library of Congress, and in partnership with three other institutions of higher education and one commercial game lab, a team from Illinois’ Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) will lead a two-year project to preserve virtual worlds – early video games, electronic literature and “Second Life,” an interactive multiplayer game.

The project, titled “Preserving Virtual Worlds,” is thought to be the first effort to explore methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction, and it comes not a moment too soon given that interactive media are “at high risk for loss as technologies rapidly become obsolete,” said Jerome McDonough, the GSLIS faculty member who will serve as lead investigator of the project. Janet Eke, also of GSLIS, is the project coordinator.

Illinois will coordinate the partners’ work on the project. Partners are the Rochester Institute of Technology, Stanford University and the University of Maryland, and Linden Lab, creator of “Second Life.” The Illinois team’s focus primarily will be technical.

(whoops, must have forgot to hit publish on this one…)

I’m spending the week at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, participating in the SC07 Summer Workshop Series.

I’ll be speaking tomorrow (Thurs, Aug. 2) at 10:30 PST. The sessions are being broadcast live archived online if you’d like to follow along (I’m certainly looking forward to listening to Tracey Fullerton before my talk). The presentation generally follows along others I’ve given about Second Life and museums, but this adds a little twist of what it might mean for the HASS community (I’ll also post a copy to Slideshare tomorrow morning).

Me (in the form of Aethalides Kukulcan) will be leading a group around in-world during our open lab session later in the day (provided the grid is up and working).

Full summary by Seb Chan available here.

After [Seb Chan's] presentation Michael Twidale from the University of Illinois reprised the joint presentation about museums making tentative steps into SecondLife that his colleague and co-author Richard Urban had presented at MW07 in San Francisco. Michael (like Richard before) certainly peaked the interest of some in the room who I had the feeling had barely thought about Second Life before – although I notice that the extremely minimally staffed Design Museum in London has just been doing an architecture event and competition in Second Life (see Stephen Doesinger’s ‘Bastard Spaces’).

Also covered byJonSun and Electronic Museum.

Shawn Graham posted a digital version of the talk he recently gave at the Immersive Worlds Conference. A very nice appraisal, keep it up!

Via Artsplace