Some notes from Dmitri Williams‘ brief presentation on data extracted from EQ2 and Second Life. My laptop crashed in the middle, but here’s what I remember from it:

• People who use voice-over-IP make stronger interpersonal connections in virtual worlds, but also tend to be more insular and meet less strangers. People who use text make somewhat weaker connections but talk more to strangers.

• The older you are, the more hours you spend per week in the world. That’s right — it’s not college students who spend the most time. The graph shows a nearly linear relationship between age and hours spent per week.

• Core roleplayers: 4% of the population; 15% more with occasional roleplayers. And they tend to have more psychological problems and physical disabilities. (Don’t kill the messenger on this one, folks!)

It’s worth pointing out that these are results from very large samples; SOE generously shared terabytes worth of metrics data, and worked with him to do extensive user surveys.

Virtual environments and the future of work (I missed the intro, so don;t know the actual title here… rapid notes, forgive the typos!)

Christian Renaud – Cisco
Byron Reeves – Seriosity & Stanford
Reuben Steiger – founder & CEO of Millions of Us

Byron: We need a shoe metaphor for this session. Reuben’s shoes (very colorful sneakers) represent how much fun it is, emotional arousal, meet new people, go new places. Enthusiasm. These others (Christian’s) are work: sophisticated, sleek, serious. And mine… well.

I think the potential, opportunity, for these environments to be important in work is huge. The potential in entertainment, etc, pales in comparison to their potential for use in work. If we can figure out how to entertain a few thousand call center representatives as they worked, and got them to stay longer than the average 9 month tenure in that job, we would have a $100m dollar business.

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