Game talk

This is the catch-all category for stuff about games and game design. It easily makes up the vast majority of the site’s content. If you are looking for something specific, I highly recommend looking into the tags used on the site instead. They can narrow down the hunt immensely.

  • Avatar body language

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 15 Comments

    Regular blog reader mrseb has a blog post up on emotional avatars in virtual worlds inspired by this NYTimes.com article (it’s behind a reg wall).

    In short, the research is about how important blushing is as a social lubricant, as evincing embarrassment or shame serves to reinforce the social rules held in common by groups of people. It’s a sign that the person knows they are transgressing to some degree and is sorry for it, and people judging them tend to treat them less harshly.

    Which leads Sebastian to ask (emphasis mine!),

    Why are we still running around in virtual worlds with emotionless, gormless avatars?

    It’s not that the question hasn’t been asked before. For example, back in 2005 Bob Moore, Nic Ducheneaut, and Eric Nickell of PARC gave a talk at what was then AGC (you can grab the PDF here)., which I summarized here with

    The presentation by the guys from PARC on key things that would improve social contact in MMOs was very useful and interesting. Eye contact, torso torque, looking where people are pointing, not staring, anims for interface actions so you can tell when someone is checking inventory, display of typed characters in real-time rather than when ENTER is hit, emphatic gestures automatically, pointing gestures and other emotes that you can hold, exaggerated faces anime super-deformed style or zoomed in inset displays of faces, so that the facial anims can be seen at a distance… the list was long, and all of it would make the worlds seem more real.

    I was at that talk, and in the Q&A section, which was really more of a roundtable discussion, the key thing that came up was cost.

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  • Metaplace event: poetry/writing open mic

    Hours Categories Game talk, Reading, Writing
    Comments 1 Comment

    Lots of events have been happening in Metaplace lately, but this one, you might guess, is near and dear to my heart: a poetry open mic. 🙂 It is happening in WritersForumWorld in about half an hour (1pm Pacific time).

    The WritersForum guys have been working to try to get a virtual workshop going as well.

    We’re gearing up soon for even more events, so it’s worth following along with the events calendar. In the meantime, stop by for this one!

  • State of Play VI

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 2 Comments

    State of Play VI is coming up June 19th and 20th, and I will be keynoting there and doing lots of Metaplace demoing.

    I’m looking forward to this one — I haven’t made it to a State of Play conference since the first one, and it was incredibly stimulating. A great group of folks is gathering there this year, and the topics are nice and meaty: kids’ worlds, whether virtual worlds have reached a plateau, recent policy developments, and even government worries about terrorism. There’s also a Graduate Student Symposium where students will present their research.

    Here’s the press release:

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  • RezEd Podcast: Metaplace, Quest Atlantis

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 1 Comment

    I’m on the MediaSnackers Rezed Podcast#33 today, for maybe five minutes worth of talk about Metaplace, particularly uses for education. The bulk of the podcast though, is about the fascinating project Quest Atlantis out of the Indiana University School of Education.

    For example, after students have begun to learn about potential causes of the fish demise in Taiga Park, they are asked to make a recommendation about how to resolve the issue. In making this decision, students have to consider their conceptual tools (i.e. understanding eutrophication, erosion, and overfishing) in order to make a recommendation about what to do (i.e. stop the indigenous people from farming, tell the loggers they can no longer cut trees in the park, or shut down the game fishing company). In making these decisions, students engage in projective consequentiality: they have to consider what their use of particular tools tells them about the context that they are working with. After making a recommendation, students travel 20 years forward in game time, and see the results of their recommendations (experiential consequentiality). At that point students are asked to reflect on the implications of their disciplinary recommendations on the context, thus serving to re-couple content with context.

  • Worlds.com patent update

    Hours Categories Game talk

    Virtual Worlds News has a report that tomorrow may see some developments in the Worlds.com patent case; apparently Article One Partners, the folks who were crowdsourcing finding prior art, will be posting something…

    …announcing the outcome of a Patent Validity Study it conducted on the Worlds.com complaint.

    “With verification of outside counsel, Article One Partners has identified prior art that can show the Worlds.com patent to be invalid,” the organization said in a statement. The group said it would post the prior art on its web site, although at press time the art had yet to be posted.