 | MetaverseU: my panel with Cory Ondrejka, Howard RheingoldFebruary 18th, 2008 |
Metaverse U conversation: Raph Koster, Cory Ondrejka, Howard Rheingold – Massively
Edit: also at MPOGD.
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This is just tooo much fun…
Raph: To some degree too much variety can undermine ritual and trust. Something in our limbic system wants to spot our tribe.
Howard: The likelihood they’ll cooperate with you is higher if they’re in your tribe. It’s been important to identify who is in your camp.
Man with the Stick : Everybody has a plan – but they all fail.
Number Six: Why?
Man with the Stick: It’s like the game. You have to learn to distinguish between the blacks and the whites.
So a virtual world IS the Village? Or is it the case that a virtual world wants to become the Village? I think the latter and that is what distinguishes virtual worlds most starkly from games. Virtual worlds evolve into games. How often is the reverse true? Is the force coming from within the world or is the virtual world pressured by the real world to become a village?
I will not make any deals with you. I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own!
Raph: Communities that stay only asynchronous stop existing after a while. That’s just what happens.
Howard: They can exist if they need to exist.
Both, but as Goethe said, it is the anvil that breaks the hammer.
Raph, this seemed like an important conversation with important people but…I’m not getting that you said anything, do forgive me. It seemed to me that you were all giving set pieces and talking past each other. I felt as if you needed to, oh, perhaps drop into a virtual world, you know, tune in, turn on, that sort of thing, have that deepness of virtual world grokking or whatever. Or maybe it’s just not easy to understand your connectivity seeing only a live blog, although it appeared to be a very good live blog on massively.com
Of all people, I wouldn’t have suspected Howard Rheingold to speak up on behalf of telehubs. Of course, he isn’t in Second Life that much and may not have realized that what he was calling for in forcing sub-communities to meet in welcome areas is in fact the telehub theory of the Lindens (retired in 2005, despite protests of sum, like me). The tekkies wanted p2p and didn’t want to have to fly one extra meter over a thing, or be forced to ever have to land or walk in some kind of big community area, because they thought they should just be free to pick a point on the map and just “be there” (the latter-day version of this is the obsessiveness about interoperability and avatars walking between worlds, or the idea that you need lots of opening windows on a virtual world parcel that lead you instantly to another space or zone rather than having the metaphor of flight or teleportation that has a black bar and a rest period between spaces).
Howard said another point, “I think one of the questions is whether these worlds can translate and come to a mobile environment” that is all the ne plus ultra now as you know with a company saying they’ve put SL on a mobile phone.
I feel about this as I do about “walking between worlds”. Why? It’s bad enough you have everything else on your mobile phone, competing for your attention. Sure, you can get a rinky-dink Internet going and get SL going in some dinky interface, too, and you’ll accomplish…what? If you wanted to talk to those people, using Skype or IMs would be far faster, why insert the VW in the way?
Mobile is big, and is the biggest thing now, and bigger than VWs, all you have to do is open your eyes as you walk down the street and see everybody on their cells, but they’re talking and taking pictures of real life, and occasionally looking at a video or TV, I just don’t think the device lends itself to also a session in virtuality that I think most people would prefer sitting down.
From Prokofy:
Mobile is big, and is the biggest thing now, and bigger than VWs, all you have to do is open your eyes as you walk down the street and see everybody on their cells, but they’re talking and taking pictures of real life, and occasionally looking at a video or TV, I just don’t think the device lends itself to also a session in virtuality that I think most people would prefer sitting down.
On this thought, take a look at how people behave at home, though. We’ve been staring at screens for over a generation, and maybe all we’re doing is adding more and more social potential to an activity we’re already quite used to. It only makes sense, from this, to make the screens portable and attach them to an otherwise independant device we’ve also had for over a generation and have also recently made (affordably) portable.
Meaning, there’s more similarity around than you might at first think.
I just don’t think the device lends itself to also a session in virtuality that I think most people would prefer sitting down.
Mobiles are ideal for ARGs, though.
Virtual worlds evolve into games.
That’s an odd claim; it seems to suppose that a particular piece of software (sucky neutral term, but it works) is either one or the other.
Some people treat virtual worlds as games; others treat games as virtual worlds; everyone treats everything in different ways.
One key in design is for your virtual world to have more than one village; then war becomes a game, and you get EVE Online. Or Iraq.
Virtual worlds evolve into games because where people are building the content to communicate, they will build the game into the virtual world. They don’t need a dungeon master; they are fully capable of arranging their own, thank you. That isn’t a focus on the software, per se. Software is the hammer. It is a focus on the message, their expressions, that which is between the hammer and the anvil.
Everyone doesn’t treat everything in different ways. Think logically or at least in terms of identification (are URIs actually the URLs of resource servers?). They treat them in statistically similar ways that have aspect of Markovian series (past influences future to some degree of coupling strength). Take any flat virtual world server farm as SL did I am told and early VRMLers did, and pretty soon you will discover villages everywhere.
As to the games they play there, well that is the nut of the real argument. Will virtual worlds or games cause any real change? What will be learned or practiced there that will lead to a change in the humans themselves because again, hammer and anvil: if the human expression is between them, it is the human that changes. If not, then all that happens is the same expressions are recycled in slightly different forms.
The humans are the emergent controls of their own self-selected evolution. The software is just stuff. The change of significance is the speed with which expression can move, choices can be made and villages can be created and destroyed. What is unknown at this time but has been being speculated about in hypermedia circles for decades now is if speed alters fundamental understanding, or if feedback at this rate simply shakes the infrastructure apart. We don’t know the answer to that.
Len, it seems to me to be a deep illusion to imagine that software that people are soaking in, living and moving and having their being, is somehow separated merely a hammer, that the hammer — the software — isn’t amalgamated with the interaction, uses, valuation, etc. that occurs from the PICNIC.
When you make a synthetic world, with things like a synthetic market that is only partly open, but controlled by the software manufacturers, when you haev various constrainsts built in, i.e. no gravity and flying, but no need to grow and eat food, either, you get a game. Inevitably. In fact, the success of the virtual enterprise depends on keeping people suspending belief that it isnt’ a game, but toward the end, you’d have to club them over the head through the megaphone of mass media to get them to think it’s not a game when it is so patently a game of the “game of life” type (oh, and that’s what happened with SL).
I’m really skeptical that virtuality changes human beings — although I think it can effect or influence them. The idea that it can “change them for the better” belongs to a school of thought that says human beings are changeable and fixable, and all it takes is a group of tekkies to code that change and all will be well. False.
Religious believers in evolution — and they *are* as zealous (and these days, more zealous! than believers in creationism) imagine that evolution proceeds on some pattern that they can recognize — and control. That by analogy, they can force evolutionary changes on people with their own coded controls. That’s what silly (if not evil) about their rigid, orthodox belief system. I’ve always thought evolution was God’s plan for the planet, myself : )
I’m hugely skeptical of all this emergent behaviour stuff — most of what emerges, like griefing and better ways of griefing isn’t interesting, but banal.
I don’t think the infrastructure is so shakeable, and maybe that’s a good thing. The speed and acceleration and change is always being arranged by one set of people on another, they rarely think that it will apply to them. And that’s what we can hope for: that it will apply to them, too, so they are shaken, and not just “the infrastucture”.
We have to agree to disagree, but we aren’t that far apart, Prok. Some changes are subtle, but I agree, changing the humans is a long trek. OTOH, the weight of science is on my side. Some reading in the work of B.F. Skinner might be illuminating. The fact of games being used for training systems is relevant.
But as I said, you can’t cheat an honest man. For these worlds and games to create change, there has to be a strongly coupled reward. That is why the cases most cited tend to be edge cases where not much push is required. Neither the games nor the worlds can change any statistically significant population that much that fast. What will happen is someone will write a game or build a world with a life-changing story, and the story will affect the culture. Then the culture will make deeper changes.
People will march for the most banal of reasons: boredom.
Updated with s different bit of coverage.
Recently found out something about those mobile devices and the market they represent. Jamster (a company that made a lot of money selling ringtone subscriptions) did some research to try and find the right price point for games on cel phones. What they found was that of people who played games on their phone only one person in nine would be willing to pay anything at all. I’ll repeat that. Of all of those phones, only some people play even the games that come for free on the handset. Of those people, eight out of nine would not pay even a penny for a new game.
Now, that doesn’t mean to give up on that market, Jamster didn’t. Instead they are testing out some adware.
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MetaverseU: my panel with Cory Ondrejka, Howard RheingoldPosted on February 18, 2008 by Raph