Week 15 reflections

From CTIN482

An issue that came up for the Censorship Project: virtual ownership and shopping. Our project required some run-of-the-mill props such as a desk/sandbags/etc, and some props and code that you would expect to be straightforward/run-of-the-mill, such as an NPC/mannequin, or a password-protected door.

Of course, the straightforward was anything but. I'll recount my experience with the nicknamed "bananaphone," which is essentially an eavesdropping guest book that will save everything it "hears" and display it as dialogue for our angry "pro-censorship" mom. There were plenty of purchasable guest books out there, but they were non-modifiable--and since a regular guest book is not exactly what we wanted, and we couldn't cannibalize...I ended up cobbling it together from snippets of open code available from the SL scripting forum.

While I understand the merchants are trying to protect their merchandise, I found it frustrating--I would have gladly purchased a modifiable guest book to tinker with and build from. It's interesting and frustrating at how these virtual objects are treated more like intellectual property or media. And yet, there's a tendency to want these virtual objects to act like real objects, to be items that we can own and manipulate and use in new ways without this frustrating restriction. I know we encountered similar frustrations with our NPC and video screen. There is often a limit to which people can build from and improve/modify existing objects--always starting from the ground up seems highly inefficient unless you are creating something wholly new (like Erik's censorship stamp). --Melissa

Second Life bank crash foretold financial crisis

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27846252/

So I ran across this article regarding 2nd Life being used as a predictive tool. A 2nd Life bank ran unregulated and promised a 40% interest rate while loaning out linden dollars at a very high interest rate. Eventually it hit the fan people began withdrawing cash like crazy and the virtual bank went under. This article introduced a title I’ve never heard, a virtual economist.

The whole event made me think of our discussions on learning theory early in the semester. One of the worst classes I’ve ever taken in my entire life was an economics course at USC. The professor was brilliant but couldn’t lecture or teach to save his life. He would stand up in the front and scroll through a word document at a snails pace (he didn’t understand PowerPoint). I spent an entire semester in that class and I didn’t learn a single thing (I think I un-learned some stuff too). But games likes Second Life and EVE Online have “working” virtual economies. So I think back to all those wasted hours in class, painfully trying to stay awake and understand what this guy was trying to tell me and cant help but think I would of learned a lot more about economics if I were to “experience” many of the concepts he was trying to teach. If I were to “experience” the lead up to the great depression, witness the panic withdrawals from the bank or just watch a virtual balance sheet over a week I would have a deeper understanding of the subject. I don't think it would be too far-fetched to see orchestrated teaching events in 2nd Life.

~ John

It's interesting to note that very few decisions, regarding visual design, were formally made. Everything that we designed, including all the items that weren't used, were created in a style much akin to stream of consciousness. In fact, I think the only decision we all made was that the instruments had to be quite large in order to accomodate learning conditions which would include more than one person; everything else just sort of followed from that. It's quite odd that stream of consciousness would have produced any kind of positive results for our project because the entire Secondlife interface just seems so counterintuitive and contrary to a process which is based around flow. On the other hand, the unending problems that the Secondlife building aspect caused almost forced a stream of consciousness problem-solving attitude which forced designers to think of solutions to visual problems extraordinarily quickly or face hours of difficultes for something as simple as attaching and detaching objects from each other. I think this led to many solutions which definitely could have been thought out better, yet it lent itself a uniqueness to certain aspects of the design which would be impossible to reproduce. For example, when trying to create assets in Secondlife, the objects size cannot exceed 10 units in the x, y, or z value which denotes length, width, and height. However, the guitar I produced was over 70 units long, meaning the neck alone would have to be 30 units. The simple solution was to attach 3 of the 10 unit squares to make it look like a 30 unit square. Yet the real question was, since the strings stretch nearly the entire length of the guitar (lets say 60 units), how hould we create the strings? Well, since we didn't have prim docker and could see no other alternative, we had to manually align 36 long cylinders in 6 groups to create 6 identical strings which probably took the most amount of time on the guitar...until we had to delete them because we needed to put the frets in!

This was the first game project I've ever worked on and I have never been in any sort of animation or graphic design courses. In fact, my family laughed at me when I told them I would be working in 3d visual design on a project (I'm known to be "artistically challenged"). However, I'm starting to realize the enormous differences and creative possibilities between the visual arts, like movies, paintings, and games. I don't think I've become noticeably more artistic or creative in this last semester, but I think I've learned that visual design in games, especially educational games, serves an entirely different purpose than design on a set for example. Design in games whose goal is to teach should focus primarily on practicality. An object should be created to serve its purpose relative to the experience. This does not mean it may not have alternative applications or stimulations, but it should fundamentally represent its primary function. For example, in order to better educate our users on how to play a guitar, we decided that a large hand should press the strings after a player clicks on them. In this way, the hand would be showing users the correct ways to play certain guitar notes and chords, which would be its primary function. However, when we realized that there was really no possible way that we would be able to program the hand to accurately press strings and play chords, we decided to completely trash the hand even though it looked visually stimulating.

Jonathan Carmel

Second Life vs. Sony Home

There’s a lot of fuss being made over Sony’s new ‘Home’ application for the Playstation. Dubbed the “Console Equivalent to Second Life” by the Christian Science Monitor, ‘Home’ (now out in Beta form on the PS3) is indeed a virtual world, but lacks the user-created content element of Second Life. It does however have much better graphics and animations than Second Life does, which is a big plus in my book. ‘Home’ has been dubbed everything from the long-awaited Playstation-saver to a train-wreck in the making, but ultimately it seems to me just like one more entry into the field of realistic virtual worlds (where realistic means sort-of kind-of being similar to real life – no EVE: Online abstraction here.) Unfortunately, it looks like Home is replicating Second Life in more ways than one. These Youtube videos should give you an inkling of what I mean.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--KAq8V4phY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEQwzpVI5WQ

I’m beginning to think that trying to naturalistic MMOs are only good for making people do everything they wouldn’t do in real life. If people were in weird, alien environments and had weird, alien avatars, would this type of dumb game-killing behavior happen? I’m not sure that it would. Without a real-looking world for people to project their real-world frustrations on, people would probably find it easier to interact with each other in a way approaching normalcy. I, for one, would not be particularly motivated to hit on anyone with a tentacled Cthulu-like avatar. Besides, if the real world is so great, why would we play MMOs?

-Akshai