Virtual Lemonade Stands Earn Real Money

Training for the epic flying mount skill in World of Warcraft costs 5000 gold. As I pursued this amount, mainly through cornering the auction house market on various primal cloths (at one brief point I was commanding prices of 95 gold each), I remarked to my wife how nice it would be to make money this easy in the real world.

So it was with interest I read that rather than toiling in RL this summer, some high school and college students are translating their virtual labor into real cash. The Wall Street Journal generated buzz with this article by Alexandra Alter about kids pursuing money making opportunities in games and online worlds rather than flipping burgers or some other typical summer job.

The key site for raking in the bucks, according to Alter, is Entropia Universe, where one teen profiled in the article claims to have earned $35,000 over four years, or about $730/month. Not bad coin.

In the real world, summer jobs are in short supply. Only about a third of teenagers are expected to work this summer, the lowest levels in 60 years, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. Summer youth employment has fallen from about 45% of teens in 2000, a downward trend made worse this year by the faltering economy.

But money-making opportunities in virtual worlds have grown as such sites go mainstream. Research firm Gartner Media estimates that by 2011, 80% of Internet users worldwide will have an avatar, making animated online personas as common as screen names. Such companies as IBM and Adidas have moved into Second Life, helping to drive employment.

The differences between Second Life and Entropia Universe appear to revolve around the need for heavier programming skills in SL. Skilled programmers can design virtual clothing or architecture in SL, for instance. In Entropia Universe, “crafted” items are in demand that involve time on the part of players to develop. These can then be sold to other players, much like “crafted” items in traditional MMORPGs. Activities like hunting, mining, and tailoring are offered in EU.

So, essentially, EU offers many of the activities a traditional MMORPG offers, with the possibility of earning real money from time and effort spent in the world. Users can add or withdraw real money, converting it into or from virtual funds through an ATM card.

Most of the research around the SL and EU economies seem to stem from marketing firms, although SL also has a strong history of academic interest.

References:

Alter, A. (2008, May 16). My virtual summer job. The Wall Street Journal. [Online.] Available: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121088619095596515.html

A New Chapter Book on Virtual Learning

I opened the mail the other day and found a new book I’ve been expecting: Virtual Reality: Concepts and Applications, edited by Pramod Rao and Sameer A. Zodgekar. Way back in July last year, I noted that the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India University Press picked up an article of mine, “The (Virtual) Classroom of Tomorrow” that originally ran in TechEdge. The article focuses on the educational aspects of Active Worlds, Second Life and Dr. Greg Jones’ Created Reality Group classrooms.

The book is divided into two sections, Concepts and Applications. My article leads off the applications section, which also has several other fine chapters. Find the complete table of contents here. If you’re in the states, and you don’t mind waiting for overseas delivery, the book is only $16.50.

Neural Interfaces Hyped at GDC

I blogged about brain computer interfaces (BCIs) back in October. At that time, researchers were starting to demonstrate some interesting applications, such as using them to control avatars in Second Life. Now that GDC is upon us, neural interfaces are causing quite a stir. Robert Rice (no relation), writes in his excellent VW/MMORPG blog about the warm reception BCIs are receiving at GDC. And yet, notes Rice, they are really neither new nor revolutionary. The only thing different about them now is they are cheap to produce. He also notes Emotive System’s unit doesn’t really read emotions at all; it’s simply an inexpensive EEG unit.

The technology doesn’t read your mind. Do I need to repeat that? It doesn’t read your mind. It doesn’t connect to your brain, and it has no idea what you are thinking or feeling … What it does do, is measure electric signals, of which there are different types, locations, and strengths, that can be assigned (think key binding in your favorite FPS) to particular inputs.

 

So yes, it is absolutely possible to use this tech to do basic control of a game, but not much beyond that. You have to learn basic biofeedback techniques (breathing, concentration, temperature, and brainwave *type* generation) which is fairly easy to do with a decent feedback loop and sensitive equipment.

It’s a good read, and provides a realistic take on what might be a future wave of interface options for gaming systems. That said, it’s a cool concept, and perhaps an incremental step toward a more refined, sophisticated, yet inexpensive BCI. As I pointed out in October, the really exciting thing about this is the potential for inexpensive assistive technology for the physically disabled. We’ll see where it all leads.

Different ways to control videogames, beyond the traditional joystick, are riding a wave started by the Nintendo Wii’s controller. There were earlier efforts like force-feedback products and virtual gloves, but none attained the popularity of the Wii input devices.

Talking about the Wii is a good excuse to run another LOL cat:

CFP: Apply Serious Games 2008, London

Martine Parry, CEO of ANGILS.org in the UK, noted on the Serious Games listserv recently that Apply Serious Games 2008 is open for “presentations, live demos, speakers, sponsors and more.”

Here are the tag lines from their website describing what the conference is all about:

Premier Conference & Expo Now in the Third Year Leading the Debate About Innovation & Key Issues Around the Real-World Use of Serious Games

Europe’s leading conference continues to focus on the key issues for the serious games community, show-casing the best in the market. ASG 07 was the first conference in Europe to focus on virtual worlds and include a shoot-out between Second Life ™ and OLIVE virtual world platforms. Our key themes include: Web 2.0 , 3D Web, Tools & Techniques, Social Networking, Virtual Worlds – all with a twist

Speaker submissions now open. Keynotes to be announced soon.

Apply Serious Games is now in its third year, following on from the success of ASG 2007 and the linked masterclasses that had around 250 attending in total, representing the serious games community from across the world (see delegate break-down figures and feedback below).

Once again this year we are focused on the issues that make a statement of where the community is when we talk about serious games – what’s the latest buzz, where’s the reality of the application? There are also plenty of opportunities for networking over lunch and breaks throughout the day – and we are expanding out with even more activities. Stay tuned for those. We are adding more of the activities to this page and the programme and schedule.

The conference runs July 9-10, and Martine notes the Wimbledon finals are on July 6, so it would be easy to mix business with pleasure in a single trip. Here is the official CFP:

Call for Papers – Now Open

Please make contact with us if you would like to:

• Speak at ASG08. If so, then please send us a synopsis of no more than 100 words with your contact details and what the audience ‘take-away’ is from your session.
• Join the conference committee. If so, then please send us your bio and a short note about what you can bring to our programme and agenda.
• Sponsor the conference or take part in the expo

Don’t hold back – if you have a great presentation please send synopsis to:

martine <at> applygroup < dot> com

Many thanks.

A Run on Virtual Banks in SL

The Wall Street Journal has taken note of the run on virtual banks in Second Life. In the old days, SL allowed free reign for most anything. Folks could set up virtual casinos. Banks could be operated by anyone, and deposits could earn interest. It was play money, but the play money was bought with real money.

Then came draconian American online gambling laws and the lawyers for SL corporate parent Linden Lab said it would be best to shut down the casinos. You see, even though it was play money, users spent real money buying the play money, and American law would likely not lend a kind ear to such arguments.

The banks struggled on for a while. There were fears of money laundering. Say a bad guy opened up a bank in SL and deposited ill gotten gain in the form of Linden dollars. Then his accomplice withdrew the play money and turned it into real money in another country. So now, Linden Lab has deemed that only banks in the real world can open a bank in SL. And so, folks who deposited money in the virtual banks want their money back, and some have closed.

Robert Bloomfield, a management prof over at Cornell gets a nice quote (“There is not a whole lot that is fake about this”). So does grad student Joshua Zarwel over at NYU, who actually runs, uh, ran, a virtual bank in SL. His bank, aptly named SL Bank, offered 24-30% interest on deposits, with about $25,000 deposited.

What’s fascinating is the opportunity for studying the simulations of real world behavior that can take place in virtual worlds. Researchers can follow the effects of mass virus outbreaks on populations, economic scares, and market theory. Human behavior remains the same, whether in a virtual world or the real world.

References:
Sidel, R. (2008, January 23). Cheer up, Ben: Your economy isn’t as bad as this one. The Wall Street Journal, p. A1.

Peer Review a Gaming Text Via Blog; Read a Classic for Free

Noah Waldrip-Fruin is embarking upon a grand experiment this week by having his latest book peer-reviewed via blog. Waldrip-Fruin, over at UC San Diego, is well known in academic gaming circles for co-editing with Pat Harrigan First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game and Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media.

As first widely reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education today by Jeff Young, Waldrip-Fruin discussed peer review of his newest book with his editor at MIT Press: Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. What better place than Grand Text Auto, the far-reaching academic blog that Waldrip-Fruin runs along with Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Andrew Stern? And so it is the book will be made available on the blog, in modified format, entered as blog entries to be available for comment by readers. The first excerpt slash blog entry is here.

In related news, Julian Dibbell wrote a book some time back about a text-based online world that predated Second Life, World of Warcraft, EverQuest, Ultima Online, etc. etc. These text-based multi-user dungeons/domains remained popular into the 1990s. I recall messing around in them on mainframes back in the day (though I was more enamored with the graphical stuff Richard Garriott was producing, I must say). Rumor has it, there remains a small contingent of passionate devotees who sneer at graphical worlds in contempt. Hm.

My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World covers the world of LambdaMOO in the early 1990s. Without getting too technical, a MOO is sort of an advanced MUD, that allowed users opportunities to program the environment. Dibbell’s book delves into topics SL is now grappling with years later in more graphical environs.

This month marks the 9th anniversary of My Tiny Life’s publication. Dibbell recounts his noble idea of placing the work under creative commons licensing, since the publisher let it go out of print. Although the arrangement would mean no royalties for the author, the text might well have enjoyed a renaissance and gained a wider audience.

I was going to announce today that MY TINY LIFE had been liberated — not merely launched anew but born again under a Creative Commons “copyleft” license and thus set loose for any passing amateur to upload, remix, mashup, and otherwise repurpose in all the many fruitful ways that copyright, precisely, fails to permit.

Alas, quirks in copyright law have prevented that, so Dibbell has offered the text as a free download from Lulu.com.

So read an old gaming text for free, and help review a new one. All is possible through the power of the Internet.

Universities Turn to Gaming and Entertainment to Enhance E-Learning

US News & World Report has a nice trio of articles on online learning this week, including one about Dr. Walter Lewin over at MIT, who has created the world’s best online video lecture series on college physics; the increased use of Web 2.0 and gaming apps in online courses; and the increased use of Second Life for educational purposes.

While Dr. Lewin doesn’t use educational videogames per se, he does engage viewers with online lectures that actively illustrate the concepts covered in the lecture. The series ran about $100,000 to produce, and cover Physics 1, 2, and 3 at MIT. All are free to watch by anyone, and Dr. Lewin has garnered international praise for his work. Other professors now use his lectures in their own courses as well.

The SL article is by Lucia Graves, who wrote an article I discussed in October 2007 on dissecting virtual frogs. Graves interviews Jeremy Kemp over at San Jose State’s SLIS, opening the story with an anecdote of students showing up for class in SL as avatars resembling Jell-O or butterflies (no mention was made of the infamous flying phalli SL is sometimes known for).

SL is becoming something of a phenomenon in college online education. Harvard Law opened a course to SL netizens; Princeton owns an island there; and the state of Louisiana is funding a 5 island initiative studying the value of 3-D virtual interactive environments (VIEs) for education. Merrill Johnson over U. New Orleans asserts that even if the hurricane-prone state loses classrooms to disaster, virtual conference rooms can allow classes to continue.

The remainder of the article is devoted to pros and cons of using SL for education. On the pro side:

Educators say Second Life is an effective teaching tool in part because it provides a social laboratory where role-playing, simulations, exploration, and experimentation can be tried out in a relatively risk-free environment. But perhaps the most touted benefit of Second Life is the opportunity it gives students to interact with people around the world—there are users registered from more than 100 countries. It also allows students to visit places that no longer exist, like a townscape reconstructed to look like Elizabethan England in the late 16th century.

On the con side: behavior issues, including griefing, have resulted in Ohio U. shutting its island down after a virtual gunman shot the place up and Woodbury U. permanently closed its island following unabated student misbehavior. Robert Vernon, over at Indiana, is quoted as indicating SL requires a certain level of proficiency to navigate. Peter Ludlow at U. Toronto notes the lack of affordances in the environment negatively impact teaching. This is a point I made in a paper published last year, BTW.

Finally, Kim Clark writes a nice article entitled “New Answers for E-Learning.”

Some professors and schools are redesigning their courses to take advantage of the Web’s interactive and visual possibilities, adopting some bleeding-edge technologies such as gamelike simulations and digital avatars to make online courses more exciting and more effective than traditional classrooms … A growing number of online courses are requiring students to participate in blogs, wikis, or gamelike simulations.

Clark includes a list of university initiatives that focus on these “gamelike simulations”:

Barbara Christe, who teaches biomedical engineering technology at Indiana University-Purdue University- Indianapolis, uses simulations that allow students to scroll over circuit diagrams to see how changes in current affect resistance, for example. Michigan State University has developed a Jeopardy!-like website, packed with quiz questions that science and math students can answer to see how well they’ve mastered key concepts. The University of Maryland-University College has developed a gamelike simulation of a crime scene for students in its criminalistics class. And a growing number of teachers are experimenting with presenting lectures and information as avatars in Second Life.

Although the quiz show study format is an old way to review multiple choice test items, the simulations seem well suited for online format since students aren’t traveling to a physical lab. Open source simulations may be a good way to incorporate these across a wide spectrum of college classes since it seems that good ones would be rather expensive for each university to create. If not open source, perhaps a version developed elsewhere that prevents each university from re-inventing the wheel, something along the lines of the K-12 simulation-type software for math found at the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives over at Utah State. Finally, the crime scene simulation sounds like something that might be able to delve into higher order thinking, if done right.

References:
Clark, K. (2008, January 21). A new Physics superstar. US News & World Report, p. 48.

Clark, K. (2008, January 21). New answers for e-learning. US News & World Report, pp. 46-49.

Graves, L. (2008, January 21). A second life for higher ed. US News & World Report, pp. 49-50. 

GSU Train the Trainers Island Coming to SL

eSchoolNews.com reports that Georgia State University is opening up an island in Second Life for training professors to lead classes in SL. Here’s the key quote: 

“By teaching in Second Life, you’re able to give your students an experience that might be too expensive or dangerous in the real world,” said Paula Christopher, a technology project manager at Georgia State.

The university’s island is in the development stage and should be open by summer, Christopher said.

Make Your Own Online Educational World with VastPark

Educators love to appropriate existing technologies for pedagogical purposes. And so we have educational radio programs, TV programs, videogames … and instructional applications in virtual worlds (VWs) such as Second Life and Active Worlds. However, there is an unfortunate lack of control in VW environments, as griefers manifest themselves with online terrorism, and students may potentially wander into explicit adult areas.

What educators really need are VWs they control completely, regulating who has access as well as the pedagogy that is covered. Dr. Greg Jones over at UNT is a pioneer of this idea. Now, the potential for teachers to easily create their own online education worlds is proffered with a new service from VastPark, which bills itself as a “distributed virtual worlds platform.” Essentially, you design your VW using VastPark’s tools, invite users to stroll your virtual realm with their avatars, and achieve your online objectives whether that be making money or teaching students at a distance.

VastPark is in closed beta, but is available by invitation. For those who’ve seen the tools in beta, such as Jason Stoddard over at Centric, the worlds are amazingly detailed, and remarkably easy to work with. I’ve taken a look at CEO Bruce Joy’s video of VastPark’s Creator Tool, and can attest that it looks fantastic. Its feature list is also impressive.

If VastPark can help teachers easily make their own VWs, we may see a surfeit of online worlds dedicated to educational purposes.

Where the MacArthur Foundation Grant Money has Gone, So Far

Education Week has a nice article (registration required) on the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s $50 million initiative funding digital media and learning (including educational gaming research). A little less than half, about $23 million, has been funded so far to 36 grantees. Article author Andrew Trotter breaks down the expenditures:

• Examining how young people are changing as a result of digital media AMOUNTS AWARDED TO DATE: $6.2 million

• Exploring the development of new learning environments AMOUNTS AWARDED TO DATE: $8 million

• Studying how social and civic institutions could change in the future AMOUNTS AWARDED TO DATE: $4.8 million

• Helping build the field of research and development in youth and digital media AMOUNTS AWARDED TO DATE: $4 million

Constance Yowell, director of education for the MacArthur Foundation, is quoted extensively. Other prominent mentions include Sasha Barab over at Indiana (Quest Atlantis); Nichole Pinkard, director of technology, Center for Urban School Improvement, University of Chicago (Chicago charter schools and Remix World); Barry Joseph, director of the non-profit after school organization Global Kids (efforts in Teen Second Life); Katie Salen, director of the Institute of Play (New York City Game School); and Mizuko “Mimi” Ito, over at USC (ethnographic studies of digital media consumers).

Trotter mentions another project Salen is involved in:

Katie A. Salen, the director of the Institute of Play, in New York City, is a partner in two projects supported by MacArthur grants. One, led by game researcher Jim Ghee and involving a commercial game company, is creating an online, narrative game in which teenagers are game mechanics who learn to fix and modify broken games in a game-driven world.

I’m wondering if “Jim Ghee” is a reference to James Paul Gee?

Regardless, it’s a good article and well worth the read. The $50 million in grant funding from the MacArthur Foundation will no doubt continue to yield important findings on educational videogames and other components of digital media for years to come.

References:
Trotter, A. (2007, December 5). Projects probe new media’s role in changing the face of learning. Education Week, (27)14. 10.