Archives for October 2008

Linden Lab instigate price rises: backlash plus

In a move that’s already garnered some heavy criticism, Linden Lab today announced some significant prices on a type of land called Openspaces. It’s the type of land meant for ‘light’ use. Over the past seven months that Openspaces has been available, some have exceeded any sane definition of ‘light use’.

That’s not a bone of contention – but Linden Lab’s response to it is. Instead of warning or banning the offenders, all Openspaces owners are being slugged with an extra US$50 per month (from $75 to $125), effective 1st january 2009. In addition to that, the previously available educator discount is being removed. From an Australian perspective, our current exchange rate woes mean that the cost hit is even higher.

To use a real-world example, this decision is the equivalent of a local council informing all ratepayers in a particular zoning area that they have to pay much higher rates each year because someone in their street has ignored zoning regulations. Add to that the real world economic situation and you can imagine the push back from Second Life residents. It’s actually one of the more nonsensical decisions I’ve seen Linden Lab make and aside from some short term revenue gains it seems the end result will be an even greater momentum for OpenSim grids who provide more competitive pricing. The educator discount hit is particularly significant – they’re a key demographic driving innovation and interest in virtual worlds and treatment like this is far from deserved.

No-one can fully blame a private company from seeking to increase revenue, but when the rationale doesn’t match a community’s expectations of fair play, only dissent and an impact on the Second Life economy are the likely outcomes.

What are your thoughts? Is this decision going to affect your current land holdings or influence your future purchasing decisions?

Update: There’s an excellent roundup of the coverage and protest options on Vint Falken’s blog.

Update 2: Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon has communicated a backdown on the pricing policy.

Letter to bank

Dear Sirs,

In view of current developments in the banking market and financial shock, if one of my cheques is returned marked ‘insufficient funds’, does that refer to me or to you?

Yours Faithfully

XXX

Educators: students of experience

Ninja Bunny, one of the examples of the pets created by Judy Robertson's class.

As students, even when we come to education wanting to learn, and therefore are supposedly mentally prepared to take new ideas on board, we all have a tendency to balk at new and unexplored things, whether that be the course material or the tools that we are given to learn with.

But does this always have to be the case? With proper management of expectations and knowledge about our tools and material, can we not reduce the rate of rejection?

“Iggy’s Syllabus: A Student’s Take on Second Life and Education”

Joe Essid’s (Ignatius Onomatopoeia, or Iggy) last round of students benefited greatly from the experiences of the students who came through his classes previously: the most recent students engaged with Second Life rapidly and positively, having had the benefit of one-on-one orientations,  assignments that combined Second Life skill-building tasks with course content, and information about Second Life‘s uses as a creative learning platform. The earlier students were provided with far less in the way of introductions to Second Life; they were prone to wonder what the point of learning with Second Life was, and tended to finding it boring.

Back in August of this year, AJ Tan, a Cornell student working for Metanomics over his summer break, published his opinions about Second Life, and why he found it boring. The upshot of his argument seems to be that he wants to be entertained and led, perhaps even pushed, at all times and under all circumstances. He does not expect to have to ‘make his own fun’. “I do not wish to go out and find something to do, I have to do enough searching in the real world. I want to be entertained. Virtual worlds are supposed to be an escape from reality – Second Life is too close a parallel to the real thing.”

Educators will be relieved to know that while there are plenty of students out there with opinions similar to or the same as this, it’s not the only opinion out there. Generation Y may require a little coaxing, but Second Life can allow enriching and interesting learning experiences for them, if only they are taught to give it a chance.

One of Essid’s students, Bridget K,  wrote a piece in her writing journal about the educational uses of Second Life, with a decidedly positive bent. It is apparent that she was inducted effectively in the uses of Second Life, and has found the experience beneficial and engaging. All this, despite having acknowledged that her generation “sees education as ‘ineffective, irrelevant, and unproductive’ (Houck).”

Bridget notes that “Second Life provides a unique educational setting for students.  Learners become immersed in their own education and in the environment he or she is in (“National Education Technology Plan”). Second Life provides the educational tool of role-playing.” From the way this reads, she has found plenty of ‘fun’ experiences within digital environments, along with educational value.

Additionally, Bridget notes that “Second Life will benefit our educational system if used correctly.  There should be a balance between real world educational tools and virtual world educational tools,” which sounds completely reasonable. At the end of the day, Second Life is a tool that can assist us in living our lives, but is not something that should take the place of them. Therefore, it should not take over in an educational setting either.

“The snowmen armies: reflections on teaching first year computer science in Second Life.”

Judy Robertson recounts her tale of teaching using Second Life; specifically, teaching Linden Scripting Language (LSL) to her first year computer science students.

She too has come up against the boredom factor when teaching with Second Life – perhaps more students from gaming backgrounds not used to making their own fun? The class is made up of students of various ages with different academic backgrounds, and yet this attitude seems to pop up a lot. As Iggy found, those first few hours in which a student is exposed to a new idea, a new platform on which to learn, are precious and crucial to that student’s concept of how the idea or platform can be used, and their worth.

When confronted with the notion that Second Life is boring, Judy says, “In my view, this is like being given a big box of plasticine and whining “but there’s nothing to play with”. The point is – you’re meant to make it yourself!” Even more so than in other courses, perhaps – the computer science students are expected to design and implement their own creations in Second Life, so they are using a great deal of the functionality of the digital environment, being required to both build and script.

“It’s a lot of fun for me to teach, and based on the learning logs from last year, a lot of fun for the students to learn with.” Despite complaints of boredom during the term, it seems that students can and do come to appreciate and enjoy Second Life in the long run. Some of the students have found learning LSL to be easier than learning Java, which they are doing in a concurrent course. Judy speculates that this is because more rigour is expected in the design and implementation of Java applications. I speculate that despite the lack of documentation and features, that the scripting community, in addition to the course helpers, also improves the ease with which the language can be learned and used.

Iggy managed his students expectations and experiences; he took his experiences with his first groups, learned what did and didn’t work, and made changes.

It sounds like Judy’s class could have done with a little more management in the first few hours. Due to the excessively large number of students (138!) in the one class, she could not have had one-on-one orientations. However, some of the other methods Iggy used, such as distributing articles about Second Life showing it in a positive light and highlighting its creative potentials for his writing students, could have decreased the number of students complaining about Second Life boredom and vastly improved the overall learning outcomes.

Giving up wine

I was walking down the street when I was accosted by a particularly dirty and shabby-looking homeless woman who asked me for a couple of dollars for dinner.

I took out my wallet, got out ten dollars and asked, ‘If I give you this money, will you buy wine with it instead of dinner?’

‘No, I had to stop drinking years ago’, the homeless woman told me.

‘Will you use it to go shopping instead of buying food?’ I asked.

‘No, I don’t waste time shopping,’ the homeless woman said. ‘I need to spend all my time trying to stay alive.’

‘Will you spend this on a beauty salon instead of food?’ I asked.

‘Are you NUTS!’ replied the homeless woman. I haven’t had my hair done in 20 years!’

‘Well, I said, ‘I’m not going to give you the money. Instead, I’m going to take you out for dinner with my husband and me tonight.’

The homeless Woman was shocked. ‘Won’t your husband be furious with you for doing that? I know I’m dirty, and I probably smell pretty disgusting.’

I said, ‘That’s okay. It’s important for him to see what a woman looks like after she has given up shopping, hair appointments, and wine.’

World of Warcraft demographics: no big surprises

Over at GamerDNA they’ve crunched some numbers on some key demographics of World of Warcraft players – the sample group are GamerDNA members combined with Armory data, so the sample is representative to say the least.

The results aren’t surprising but still interesting. The key points:

1. There remains a preference to sign up an Alliance character than a Horde one, particularly if the player is female.

2. The Hunter class is the most popular across both factions.

3. Men tend toward the more ‘manly’ classes such as Warrior.

As Sanya Weathers, the data cruncher says:

The most popular class, the Hunter, is slightly preferred by female players by the same margin in both factions. Same for Mages. Priests skew heavily female in both factions, again by roughly the same margin. Rogues and Paladins have the same stair step proportion across the factions, but with men outnumbering women. More men play Warriors than women across the board, but the difference is more pronounced on the Horde side thanks to the whole “women don’t do Orcs” thing.

The only flaw I can see in the gender analysis applies across all virtual worlds: there’s arguably a lot of avatars out there that are the opposite in gender to their real-world counterpart.

Aside from the obvious interest of such stats to WoW players, there’s a much wider application. Don’t imagine that marketers, game developers and educators aren’t looking at data like this intensively. There’s a thousand PhD theses in this sort of information and a few hundred of them are likely well underway.

If you’re a WoW player, do the statistics match your impressions?

The Watch – virtual worlds in the news

1. CNET (USA) – Metaplace secures funding for its virtual world. “Metaplace, a company that plans on letting users build a virtual world and use social networking conventions to allow groups to enjoy them, announced today that it raised $6.7 million of funding in a round that was led by Charles River Ventures and Crescendo Ventures, as well as independent investors, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.”

2. Salon (USA) – Muxlim Pal to be world’s first Muslim-themed virtual world. “For the last couple of years in Second Life, there have been reproductions of Islamic holy sites, including a virtual Mecca (with a virtual Kabaa), and a small handful of virtual mosques, including replicas of the Hassan II mosque in Morocco, the Chebi mosque (a replica of the Mezquita mosque in Cordoba, Spain), Istanbul’s Blue mosque and a few others.”

3. Times Online (UK) – Jilted Japanese woman questioned by police after ‘murdering’ her virtual husband. “It was a classic crime of passion: a bored husband walking out on his marriage, his spurned wife so enraged by the desertion that she was driven to kill him. The murder, in May, was swift and cold-blooded but justice is inexorable. The perpetrator, a piano teacher from the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, sits in police custody awaiting charges that could send her to jail for years. One thing sets this apart from the standard crime passionel, however: it happened in a virtual world to online characters in an interactive game. But the legal consequences for the “killer” are being played out in the real world.”

(The mainstream media have loved this story in the past few days – nearly 600 publications have run the story so far)

4. The Canadian Press (Canada) – Compulsive gamers build strong emotional attachments to online world. “When 15-year-old Brandon Crisp occasionally got out of line, his parents would discipline him with the method they believed worked best: take away his prized Microsoft Xbox. Steve and Angelika Crisp would eventually return the gaming console to the Barrie, Ont., teen, who would resume playing his favourite game, “Call of Duty 4,” late into the night.”

5. Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) – Reality bites? A second life is virtually yours. “Ricardo Malveira has a simple piece of advice for those faced with the grim reality of the slowing global economy: avoid it. While the Australian dollar and the All Ordinaries shed huge chunks of their value in recent months, Mr Malveira’s business has been booming; where other businesses in the retail sector have seen a downturn in demand, he has a long list of clients. The business Mr Malveira created with his wife, Maria, exists in the virtual world Second Life, though his profits and business prospects are more stable than those of the outside world.”

6. iReport (USA) – Virtually Very Angry. “n real life you have to deal with all sorts of emotions, joy, sadness, love and anger. CNN have asked the members in their Second Life group of ireporters to tell them about how people deal with anger in the virtual world and what makes them angry. Well, real life is stressful enough, as most people know, and sometimes anger is a hard emotion to cope with. I have seen people angry in Second Life when personalities clash and they argue, resulting to name calling and even using the limited power of SL weapons to pay their enemy back.”

7. Wired (USA) – Dutch youths convicted of virtual theft. “A Dutch court has convicted two youths of theft for stealing virtual items in a computer game and sentenced them to community service. Only a handful of such cases have been heard in the world, and they have reached varying conclusions about the legal status of “virtual goods.”

8. Globe and Mail (Canada) – U.S. campaign heats up in Second Life. “It’s not just Earthbound voters who are intensely following the U.S. presidential campaign: The race also is a hot topic in the virtual world of Second Life. John McCain supporters and Barack Obama supporters – more accurately, the personas they have created – meet regularly in Second Life, described on its website as “an online, 3D virtual world imagined and created by its residents.” They watch the presidential debates together. They make T-shirts, banners and yard signs. They hold voter registration drives and rally on Capitol Hill.”

9. PSFK (UK) – Augmented Reality, Virtual Insanity. “There is an old curse that goes like this: “May you live in interesting times” It doesn’t get any more interesting than two recent strange news stories about digital worlds sparking irrational behavior in the real world. These two items illustrate the weird problems we could be encountering on a regular basis as bleed-through increases across the border of the real and virtual worlds.”

At last, a smart blonde

‘Last year I replaced all the windows in my house with those expensive double-pane energy efficient kind. Yesterday, I got a call from the contractor who installed them. He was complaining that the windows had been installed a whole year ago and I hadn’t paid for them yet.

Now just because I’m blonde doesn’t mean that I am automatically stupid. So I told him just exactly what his fast-talking sales guy had told ME last year: namely that in just ONE YEAR these windows would pay for themselves!

‘Hel-looooo!!’ (I told him). ‘It’s been a year!’

There was only silence at the other end of the line, so I finally just hung up… he hasn’t called back.
Probably too embarrassed about forgetting the guarantee they made me. Bet he won’t underestimate MY intelligence again!’

Second Life servers to hit Singapore?

According to the Straits Times, Singapore-based Second Life servers are on their way to Singapore within six months. This is potentially good news for Australian users, although the news would be a lot better if it were Australian servers being announced.

Given the growing focus on Twinity in Singapore, Linden Lab need to be making some strategic moves in South-East Asia. Japan and Australia are the only two countries in the region that make the top twenty for active Second Life users, so there’s plenty of ground to be made up.

Of course, the story could be based on information with a level of veracity matching the ‘real soon now’ claim made by Linden Lab nearly 18 months ago in regard to Australian servers.

Connecting a Nintendo Wii to an Airport network

For those of you that own an Apple Airport or Airport Extreme, you may find the Wii’s interface a little obtuse as far as connecting to that network.

If you just want your Wii to connect directly to your AirPort, here’s how:

1. Ensure you know your Airport’s ‘name’ – if you go to the Airport icon at the top right of your screen you’ll see the name of the Airport network you’re connected to. This is what the Nintendo Wii calls your SSID.

2. Turn on your Wii and navigate to the Wii settings (icon is on bottom left of the screen).

3. Go to the second page of settings and click on ‘Internet’, then ‘Connection Settings’. There you’ll enter your Airport network’s name. Then click on the blue arrow to the right of where you’ve entered the name and you’ll be presented with password options.

4. I had set a WPA2 password for my network so that’s the button I clicked and then entered my password. You may need to launch the Airport Admin utility (Applications -> Utilities) to confirm which type of password you’ve set.

5. Click ‘Ok’ then let the Wii do it’s connection test. It’ll tell you if it’s successful and if it’s the first time you’ve connected the Wii it’s likely to download an update, which may take a while.

6. That’s it!

Be Strong Honey, I Love You

Nicholas escapes from a prison where he’s been locked up for 15 years. He breaks into a house to look for money and guns. Inside, he finds a young couple in bed. He orders the guy out of bed and ties him to a chair. While tying the homeowner’s wife to the bed, the Convict gets on top of her, kisses her neck, then gets up and goes into the bathroom. While he’s in there, the husband whispers over to his wife:

‘Listen, This guy is an escaped convict. Look at his clothes! He’s probably spent a lot of time in jail and hasn’t seen a woman in years. I saw how he kissed your neck. If he wants sex, don’t resist, don’t complain…do whatever he tells you. Satisfy him no matter how much he nauseates you. This guy is obviously very dangerous. If he gets angry, he’ll kill us both. Be strong, honey. I love you!’

His wife responds: ‘He wasn’t kissing my neck. He was whispering in my ear. He told me that he’s gay, thinks you’re cute, and asked if we had any vaseline. I told him it was in the bathroom. Be strong honey. I love you too.’

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