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Virtual Worlds: more than a game
By Richard Sandford, Learning Researcher, Futurelab |
Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) are a well-established gaming genre, with titles such as Everquest, Lineage, Star Wars Galaxies and World of Warcraft regularly appearing in national media and topping the sales charts. In particular, World of Warcraft, with over 2 million subscribers, has been a phenomenal success.
These large-scale online games, set in immersive 3D virtual worlds, have received interest from the learning community due to their inherently social nature and the strength of the communities that exist within and around them. Most of the genre have an established set of goals and techniques for success, giving players tasks to complete, normally as a member of a group, which contribute to their 'levelling up' - rewarding their hard work though granting their avatar experience points and useful items. This process is often called 'grinding' by experienced MMOG players and is frequently treated as a necessary evil - dull, but part of the game. Most MMOG publishers have rules in place to prevent this grinding being contracted out to other players or computer programs - if you want to take part, you have to put the hours in yourself.
But what if you don't fancy the sound of a virtual job? What if you just want to explore and experience an immersive virtual world, without being told what you can and can't do? What, in short, if you just want to play?
Linden Lab's Second Life and There are two virtual worlds with an emphasis on exploration and play over grinding. Their open-ended nature has given thousands of inhabitants room to invent and create anything they can imagine. In June 2003, There changed focus to concentrate on their immersive gaming platform (although you can still join their virtual world at there.com), and is concentrating on modelling real-life Earth for the US military - hard to imagine a better endorsement for the realism of their virtual world. Second Life creator Philip Rosedale, in an interview with the Guardian newspaper, said, "We like to think of Second Life as ostensibly as real as a developing nation." These are environments that go beyond the traditional limitations of 3D social games - to their inhabitants, they're better thought of as places.
These spaces are non-competitive, giving more room for play, a point made by Andy Donkin of There, in an interview with Gamespot: "It was the members who told us they didn't view There as a 'game'. They viewed it as: a place to go, a place to relax, a place to hang out. The idea of hanging out was critical because that is what we do in real life. We hang out with our friends and talk, play, and have fun". There's plenty of room for both reality and fantasy - some residents take the opportunity to model parts of the real world they'd never see in real life, while others jump at the chance to own dragons as pets. In Second Life, using tools provided by Linden Lab, users have created flying jetpacks and paintball guns, shopping malls and teddybear armies, even computer games - one of which, Tringo, is now being licenced in the real world for use on mobile phones.
Tringo isn't the only point where Second Life crosses over into the real world. You can keep up with your in-world chat via your real-world e-mail. And entrepreneurs, such as Nephilaine Protagonist, creator and owner of the Pixel Dolls fashion house, can convert their Linden dollars, the in-game unit of currency, into US dollars using services provided by companies such as IGE. This is a job, it's true (for Nephiliaine Protagonist, it's a full-time job), but it's a world away from the traditional MMOG grind. You're free to create your own job, but there's nothing that says you have to.
But it's not just about escapism or being a virtual entrepreneur. The spirit of exploration and creativity encouraged by Linden Lab has led to several groups using Second Life in more meaningful ways than just shopping and flying. The Virtual Hallucinations building gives people a chance to better understand the world as experienced by sufferers of schizophrenia, containing a carefully researched simulation of visual and aural hallucinations, based on accounts from real-world sufferers. Brigadoon is an island that provides people with autism or Asperger's Syndrome with an environment where they can interact with each and learn to communicate in new ways, taking advantage of Second Life's halfway-house kind of existence - it's closer to reality than the messageboards and chatrooms many autistic people are comfortable with, enabling them to practise socialisation skills in a 'consequence-free' place. Live2Give is a similar environment supporting a community of severely physically disabled people.
In addition to this kind of support, Second Life has attracted huge interest within the academic community. While this kind of virtual space is fascinating to anthropologists in its own right (so much so that Linden Lab has a code of conduct aimed at residents who are studying the other residents), it's also been used by various institutions as a venue for other forms of learning, with the University of Texas and the University of Buffalo, among others, finding it an ideal laboratory for design, architecture and media students to collaborate and try out their ideas in real time, using the 3D modelling and scripting tools available within Second Life. Students have explored ideas about public space and put their theories about digital media into practice, actively participating in the shared virtual experience they helped to create. This kind of use has been successful and popular enough for Linden Lab to introduce the Campus: Second Life program, donating an acre of virtual land and free accounts to university groups willing to engage with this novel approach to learning.
For the moment, this kind of learning is restricted to university students, as Second Life operates a strict 'over-18s only' policy, a reflection of the kind of content that can arise when people are given a free hand to create whatever they like. The different learning communities taking advantage of this freedom, however, might well be pointing the way forward for other immersive learning experiences; perhaps the day when a classroom is the size of an island, yet fits inside your monitor, is not so far off? Whatever the future holds, it's clear that the learning potential of this kind of virtual community has only just begun to reveal itself.
Links
Second Life: secondlife.com
There: www.there.com
Philip Rosedale's interview with the Guardian newspaper:
blogs.guardian.co.uk/games/archives/2005/06/14/
second_life_and_the_virtual_property_boom.html
Andy Donkin's interview with Gamespot: www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/there/news_6077346.html
IGE: www.ige.com
Virtual Hallucinations: www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/psychiatry/research/virtual.html
Brigadoon: braintalk.blogs.com/brigadoon
Live2Give: braintalk.blogs.com/live2give
Campus: Second Life: lindenlab.com/press_story_17.php
August 2005
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