Dumbledore for a Day: The Things You Can Do in Second Life
A while back, I shared with readers of my blog my experiences in Teen Second Life, thanks to an organization called Global Kids. I recently wrote a follow-up post that I wanted to share with C3 blog readers.
I've gotten a chance to work more closely with Barry Joseph, Rafi Santos, and others from the Global Kids organization over the past year or so and each encounter has left me even more impressed with their respect for their young participants and their imaginative use of virtual worlds to focus young people on issues impacting the real world.
Around CMS: Jesper Juul, Beth Coleman, and Market Truths
I wanted to start out this morning by passing along a few interesting stories that readers and colleagues have passed my way of late. The first comes from a few games-related stories here at MIT.
Producing the CSI:NY/Second Life Crossover: An Interview with Electric Sheep's Taylor and Krueger (4 of 4)
This is the final section of a four-part series featuring an interview with Damon Taylor and Daniel Krueger from Electric Sheep, who helped produce tonight's launch of the CSI:NY television series crossover into Second Life.
Sam Ford: Electric Sheep is using this collaboration for the launch of OnRez, your viewer of the Second Life universe. What is it about the CSI:NY/Second Life collaboration you all are producing that made this the best opportunity to launch OnRez?
Daniel Krueger: I can't speak for our software development team, but I think that it's always been something that Electric Sheep wanted to do, as far as making an easier interface for navigating Second Life. It's not traditionally a very intuitive space for new users, so we wanted to make something simple for new users to come in with. We launched it with this project because we wanted to provide the easiest way for CSI:NY viewers who have never used Second Life to be able to come into the virtual world. It's really a perfect opportunity to launch OnRez.
Producing the CSI:NY/Second Life Crossover: An Interview with Electric Sheep's Taylor and Krueger (3 of 4)
The following is the third part of an interview series being published today regarding tonight's launch of the CSI:NY television series crossover into Second Life. This interview, with Damon Taylor and Daniel Krueger from Electric Sheep, looks at the motivations, implementation, and plans for extending the popular crime drama series into a virtual world.
Sam Ford: What is Electric Sheep Company's involvement in this project?
Damon Taylor: We are the vendor working with CBS to develop this, and it all started out as a relationship between Electric Sheep and CBS, working with Anthony E. Zuiker, who has become convinced that virtual worlds provide an opportunity for television companies or entertainment companies in general to create and provide content in ways that has never been done before. This has been a six-month planning process, culminating today. Our contract with CBS is to do this for six months, so we will be operating this experience for the next half-year. With content being updated every four weeks, we will be moving this story forward, along with a second television show next year that will tie back into the whole storyline.
Producing the CSI:NY/Second Life Crossover: An Interview with Electric Sheep's Taylor and Krueger (2 of 4)
What follows is an interview with Electric Sheep Company producers Daniel Krueger and Damon Taylor about their involvement in the CSI:NY/Second Life collaboration that launches with tonight's episode of the crime scene investigation drama on CBS. For a background on the crossover, look at this post from earlier today.
Sam Ford: To start off with, what do the two of you believe are some of the most compelling aspects of the CSI:NY/Second Life crossover that's taking place tonight, and what are the benefits for CBS and CSI:NY, on the one hand, and for Second Life other other?
Damon Taylor: This experience is compelling for users from two different perspectives. One of those perspectives is new users of Second Life, who are new to virtual worlds in general. The other perspective is for existing Second Life users. Potential new users who are fans of CSI:NY will care about this crossover because it will give them the opportunity to wrestle with CSI content in a way that has never been made available to them before. We have endeavored and achieved a true cross-platform experience where these fans can watch the television show, see the storyline that began on the TV show continued in-world, and then see the storyline jump back to the TV show next February when there is a sequel show that wraps up the storyline that starts tonight.
Producing the CSI:NY/Second Life Crossover: An Interview with Electric Sheep's Taylor and Krueger (1 of 4)
For those who haven't heard, tonight is the launch of a particularly compelling transmedia experience, the first time a major television franchise has driven its viewers into a virtual world to fill in the gap of a cliffhanger mystery that will not be resolved until next February.
CSI:NY, the New York version of the Anthony E. Zuiker television franchise, will feature an episode tonight in which a murder mystery takes the crime scene investigation team deep into Linden Lab's Second Life, with the mystery not being resolved until the concluding episode next year. The activities that take place in SL will build off what happens on the show and are planned to give fans the opportunity to get acquainted with a virtual world and also to have a new place to interact with and around the television franchise.
A lot of discussion focused on Second Life of late has been about the overhype--how the economic and cultural implications of late have exaggerated the impact that this space is having. I, however, take the same approach that Henry Jenkins has at times, noting that Second Life is interesting inasmuch as it is a testing ground for interesting behaviors. In short, it's an interesting place to study, even if it is not necessarily a major piece of the economic puzzle for the mainstream.
The latest example of interesting things happening in Second Life? See this post from Wagner James Au, who reports from Second Life, about labor union protests spilling over from the first life into this world. Workers who are part of the RSU Italian labor union are in a struggle with IBM, and the picketing and other protest behaviors have made their way into the virtual world.
Second Life and the Dangers of the Expectations of Immediate Profitability
For those of you who have been following discussions here at the Convergence Culture Consortium for some time, you know that we've been thinking about Second Life in one way or another for a while. In fact, folks throughout MIT have been. Our recent conference Media in Transition 5 took place in Second Life, for instance. And then there was the three-way Second Life between Henry Jenkins, Beth Coleman, and Clay Shirky. Clay brings up some of the questions about the validity of Second Life that have been raised more broadly in the press recently, while the CMSers look at the use of Second Life through all the "overhype."
Be sure to read this piece from Paul Hemp at Harvard. Paul has spoken at our internal retreat here before and is a very keen thinker in this space.
Followups on Coverage of Gambling, Viacom, Decency, and Fairness
I wanted to spend a few minutes this afternoon going through some recent news that provides updates for issues I have written about continually here on the blog. These include the Second Life gambling issues, the Viacom/YouTube case, and the indecency and Fairness Doctrine bills currently making their way through Congress.
1.) Gambling in Second Life. Word has officially been released that Second Life has shut down gambling inside the virtual world. I found out about it from Raph Koster's blog, as the new policy was released through the Second Life blog. The blog's Robin Linden writes that, even though there is no official gambling service in Second Life, they are still required to operate under governmental laws that regulate online gambling.
Users on Raph's blog debate issues such as whether poker is a game of chance, whether Second Life is better off or not with the gambling gone, and what this might mean for SL longterm, especially if the door for government intrusion stays open.
Several of the researchers in C3 have just finished or are in the process of finishing their Master's thesis projects, which means many of us now have the prospect of graduation staring us in the face. Here at C3, we have had the great opportunity to not only work academically as researchers while graduate students but also to interact with the media industry and work with folks at our corporate partners on a variety of initiatives, meaning that a majority of the people coming out of C3 are interested in maintaining a relationship to both academia and the media industry moving forward.
But, as job hunts loom on the horizons and as colleagues start to land jobs elsewhere, we all have to consider what it means, in both the industry and academia, to come away with expertise in issues such as understanding fan communities, transmedia storytelling, new advertising models, and the variety of other focuses that C3 research has taken.
C3 Affiliated Researcher Shenja van der Graaf is currently conducting an academic study on Second Life, focusing on " the innovation-related practices of Second Life members so we can study the composition and structure of the Second Life community and the extent to which members receive resources and support from Linden Lab and other members."
For those interested, she is looking for people interested in taking a survey, available here.
Endemol and Electronic Arts Team Up for Virtual Me
An interesting deal has been struck between a major television producer and a major video games producer with the intent to create a project that will create gaming versions of various game shows and reality television products, in an attempt to create more interactive gaming experiences for extant media properties.
Endemol will be partnering with Electronic Arts to create gaming situations through which players can create avatars to participate in virtual versions of popular Endemol shows, such as Deal or No Deal and Fame Academy and will launch through one of Endemol's biggest hits, Big Brother.
The collaborative project has been initially titled Virtual Me. As Mark Hefflinger succinctly reports it on the Digital Media Wire, "The companies will form an integrated team to create entertainment for TV, online and other platforms."
The press release touts that the concept "bridges the divide between traditional TV and videogames." It goes on to say that "the two companies will create an integrated team to share expertise in their respective fields and develop entertainment formats and experiences for a wide range of platforms, including TV and online."
Gambling Inside Second Life: What Are the Legal Issues?
Debate continues to be raised about the nature of Linden Labs' Second Life versus the real world, as the Federal Bureau of Investigation attempts to decide whether casinos inside the virtual world are as illegal as unsanctioned gambling operations in "first life."
According to Adam Reuters' story, hundreds of casinos exist in Second Life, and the three largest casinos "are earning profits of US$1,500 each per month, according to casino owners and industry watchers. Growth is estimated to be about 30 percent a month."
The question right now is the culpability of Linden Labs if the government is to crack down on these gambling sites. At issue is the fact that the Linden dollars can be exchanged to and from U.S. dollars, as evidenced by the daily measurement of the exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and the Linden dollar measured on the Reuters Second Life Web site.
Three-Way Second Life, Virtual World Debate from C3's Jenkins, Coleman, and Clay Shirky
An interesting conversation has been happening all around me on virtual worlds and Second Life featuring C3 Director Henry Jenkins, C3 Principal Investigator Beth Coleman, and Clay Shirky at NYU. The conversation is part of a 3x3 posting in which each of the three wrote an independent piece on their respective blogs the first week with their own thoughts about the current states of Virtual Worlds, and Second Life in particular, followed by a round just completed yesterday that consists of each responding to the points the other two made in the initial rounds of posts.
It may sound confusing, but we've ended up with quite an insightful conversation about virtual worlds. Given C3's dedication to covering virtual worlds and facilitating a discussion about the present and futures of companies like Second Life (see the Not the Real World Anymore panel from our November Futures of Entertainment conference) and the involvement of two C3 members, I wanted to highlight the conversation and direct everyone to this series of posts.
The number of brands extending into Second Life in one form or another continues, with AOL launching its major foray into the virtual world.
AOL's site within Second Life, an island "for fun engagement and interaction around AOL content," features movie trivia, interactive competition areas for Second Life avatars to play lone games or in groups to win Linden dollars, and even skateboarding, according to the beta for the site.
AOL Pointe launched as a beta in late January and then launched as a full site at the beginning of February.
Reports from Tateru Nino on Wagner James Au's New World Notes site, providing first-hand coverage of Second Life, covers the beta test run at the time of AOL Pointe's launch.
For Tataru, the the AOL Pointe island gets a strong review. Tataru writes, "I was expecting a big business branding-exercise that would leave me with a bit of a foul taste in my mouth, and in that respect I was a bit disappointed-- within a few minutes I was entertained and engaged. There's no mistaking that it's AOL, but this doesn't seem to be basic push-marketing or marketing at all, in the conventional sense. Could this be someone 'getting it?'"
Tataru hypes the site as a theme park, feeling that it's providing for a niche that is missing in Second Life with that themed atmosphere and a wide variety of theaters and other public screens for media content to play on-demand in the virtual world, as well as traditional linear channels playing within AOL Pointe.
CC activist, IP lawyer and Internet scholar Larry Lessig will make an in-game appearance on Second Life next week. He has had a customized avatar kitted out for him and there will be virtual books for him to sign.
Date: Wednesday, January 18, 2006
Time: 5:30PM - 7:30PM Pacific Standard/Second Life Time
Place: Borrowdale/41/56 (the Pooley Auditorium)
http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2006/01/lawrence_lessig.html...for cute avatar pix and more details.
