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Points to ponder

November 19, 2008 by Leave a Comment

(and yes we know this list has missing numbers – we’ve posted it exactly as received, our guess is someone did some censoring at some stage)

Ponder on these imponderables for a minute:-
 
1. If you take an Oriental person and spin him around several times, does he become disoriented?
 
2. If people from Poland are called Poles, why aren’t people from Holland called Holes?
 
3. Do infants enjoy infancy as much as adults enjoy adultery?
 
4. If a pig loses its voice, is it disgruntled?
 
6. Why is the man who invests all your money called a broker?
 
8. Why is a person who plays the piano called a pianist but a person who drives a racing car not called a racist?
 
11. Why isn’t the number 11 pronounced onety one?

12. “I am” is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that “I do” is the longest sentence?
 
13. If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn’t it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed, tree surgeons debarked,
and dry cleaners depressed?
 
15. I thought about how mothers feed their babies with tiny little spoons and forks so I wondered what do Chinese mothers use? Toothpicks?
 
16. Why do they put pictures of criminals up in the Post Office? What are we supposed to do, write to them? Why don’t they just put their pictures on the postage stamps so the postmen can look for them while they deliver the mail?
 
17. You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive.
 
18. No one ever says, “It’s only a game” when their team is winning.
 
19. Ever wonder about those people who spend $2.00 apiece on those little bottles of Evian water? Try spelling Evian backwards: NAIVE
 
 20. Isn’t making a smoking section in a restaurant like making a peeing section in a swimming pool?
 
 24. Why if you send something by road it is called a shipment, but when you send it by sea it is called cargo?
 
 25. If a convenience store is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, why are there locks on the door?

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 

 
 

Filed Under: Email Joke Graveyard, General humor

Out of consumer error – insert more consumers

November 19, 2008 by Leave a Comment

Source: Journal Of Virtual Worlds Research Vol. 1. No. 2. ISSN: 1941-8477  November 2008

“Consumer Behaviour in Virtual Worlds”

The “New” Virtual Consumer: Exploring the Experiences of New Users

By Lyle R. Wetsch, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Faculty of Business Administration, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada.

In essence, Lyle Wetsch’s idea is that there are insufficient numbers of people already participating in virtual worlds, so businesses need to attract new users into these worlds, to “effectively recruit real world consumers into the virtual world and retain them through positive interactions.” Whether or not this should be the goal, or whether the goal should be to study the existing populations of virtual worlds and make the advertising and other offerings more attractive to them, is somewhat of a moot point. What is more important here is that there are new users entering these digital environments, and that we need to understand their grievances and positive experiences, in order to know how best to tailor consumer experiences for them.

40 undergraduate business students and 10 MBA graduate students spent 12 weeks in Second Life becoming acclimatised to that environment, all having entered as first-time users. Through blog entries, online discussion groups and interviews of these students, information about new user experiences was gleaned. Wetsch feels that this information is able to “guide suggestions for improving the experience of new virtual consumers in order to create long-term consumer relationships with an organization’s virtual presence.”

Second Life is one of the prime candidates being considered as a potential advertising base for real world consumers. It is one of few virtual worlds with the capabilities required for business endeavours – user-created content and user-to-user transactions.

In summary: section by section

Research Problem: We need to reduce churn – this is where users register, but fail to continue to use the product – by coming to understand the new user experience better.

Theoretical Framework: Research done on text-based chat environments. This seems inadequate – users interact with other users, but are more likely to interact with their environment, unless a business has provided a staff member to interact with at their build.

Methodology: “Student comments and discussions provided insight into the mind of the new entrant to the virtual world in real-time as they experienced it, commenting on their blogs at the time the incidents occurred to enhance the
accurate recall of events.”

Findings:

  • Technical Requirements: Many students were disappointed with the lack of capability to run Second Life that their computers demonstrated. Both the students and the researchers compared Second Life graphics and overall quality of response to other “gaming” environments, not taking into account that those other environments, using game-like graphics, can store much of their data locally, rather than having to make continual updates, as happens with Second Life.
  • Graphics: Those students able to access the digital environment easily were for the most part impressed with the graphical quality of Second Life.
  • Avatar control: Interestingly, this group of students seems to have had quite a lot of difficulty with avatar control, particularly those with prior gaming experience, who found the different controls to be disorienting. Time and practice seemed to fix the problem.
  • Griefers: “Griefing was experienced by less than 10% of the students.” However, those affected by it seemed most upset and put out by it.
  • Variety of experiences: Many of the students expressed great disappointment with the Search function, especially when comparing it with Google’s performance.
  • Lack of people/interactions: The students had quite a lot of trouble finding other users to interact with. Even when they were able to find groups of users conversing, often the other people would not talk to them. This brought about feelings of isolation and loneliness.
  • Building is not enough: A lack of effort is recognised by users, and will have a decidedly negative impact on them as consumers.

Conclusions and Implications

“The key is the INTERACTION. Without the interaction, there are better channels to present the information.”

  • Expectation Management: Users are more likely to be forgiving if you let them know what they are getting and why they are getting it – if you have a good, rational explanation for, for example, the technical requirements for your product being so steep, people tend to be more forgiving.
  • Ease of use: Improve the new user experience by making the environment easier to interact with. Provide useful tools and expectation management.
  • Interaction: Make it interactive. If there are no users to interact with, consumers need some other sort of interaction to keep them engaged.
Filed Under: Business

OJ Simpson in Hell

November 18, 2008 by Leave a Comment

One day in the future, OJ Simpson has a heart-attack and dies.

He immediately goes to hell, where the devil is waiting for him.

“I don’t know what to do here,” says the devil. “You are on my list, but I have no room for you. You definitely have to stay here, so I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’ve got a couple of folks here who weren’t quite as bad as you. I’ll let one of them go, but you have to take their place. I’ll even let YOU decide who leaves.”

OJ thought that sounded pretty good, so the devil opened the door to the first room. In it was Ted Kennedy and a large pool of water. Ted kept diving in, and surfacing, empty handed. Over, and over, and over he dove in and surfaced with nothing. Such was his fate in hell.

“No,” OJ said. “I don’t think so. I’m not a good swimmer, and I don’t think I could do that all day long.”

The devil led him to the door of the next room. In it was Al Gore with a sledgehammer and a room full of rocks. All he did was swing that hammer, time after time after time.

“No, this is no good; I’ve got this problem with my shoulder. I would be in constant agony if all I could do was break rocks all day,” commented OJ.

The devil opened a third door. Through it, OJ saw Bill Clinton, lying on the bed, his arms tied over his head, and his legs restrained in a spread-eagle pose. Bent over him was Monica Lewinsky, doing what she does best.

OJ looked at this in shocked disbelief, and finally said, “Yeah man, I can handle this.”

The devil smiled and said . . . . . . .

“OK, Monica, you’re free to go.”

Filed Under: Email Joke Graveyard, General humor, Political

Virtual sex brings ’em in

November 17, 2008 by 5 Comments

Over the past few days Second Life has reached a new peak concurrency of more than 76 thousand.

The reason being cited is recent stories on a divorce resulting from virtual adultery. It’s not suprising and it’s backed up by an Australian Second Life resident who spends a significant amount of time mentoring new users. In a brief discussion with him this afternoon he confirmed a surge in new users needing help and that the UK-driven story seems to be the catalyst.

Mainstream media rightly get pilloried at times for their sometimes uninformed coverage of the full gamut of the virtual world experience. There is an upside though: growth for the virtual worlds themselves. How ‘sticky’ these users will be in always uncertain. Wagner James Au sums it up nicely:

How many of these new users are interested in committing virtual adultery… and how many of them are real life partners of now-suspicious SL users, looking to catch them in the act?

A lot of people on their first glimpse of virtual sex will tend to react along the lines of ‘why would you bother?’. The reality is a significant proportion of these people go on to engage in virtual sex regularly and in forms arguably more varied than real-life.

What are your thoughts – are we about to see droves of new people looking for virtual options for sexual expression, followed closely by another group seeking to catch them out? I think it’s a little too simplistic an assumption but sometimes the simplest explanation comes in closest to the truth.

Filed Under: Australian News, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: ,

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – second issue

November 17, 2008 by Leave a Comment

The latest issue of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research has been released and this time consumer behaviour is the focus.

There’s eight research papers, of which five are peer-reviewed, plus there’s six ‘think pieces’ on related topics.

The full contents:

Peer Reviewed Research Papers

– Consuming Code: Use-Value, Exchange-Value, and the Role of Virtual Goods in Second Life (Jennifer Martin)
– Virtual World Affordances: Enhancing Brand Value (So Ra Park, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, David DeWester, Brenda Eschenbrenner, Sunran Jeon)
– On the Relationship between My Avatar and Myself (Paul R Messinger, Xin Ge, Eleni Stroulia, Kelly Lyons, Kristen Smirnov, Michael Bone)
– The Social Construction of Virtual Reality and the Stigmatized Identity of the Newbie (Robert E. Boostrom, Jr.)
– The “New” Virtual Consumer: Exploring the Experiences of New Users (Lyle R Wetsch)

Research Papers

– Ugly Duckling by Day, Super Model by Night: The Influence of Body Image on the Use of Virtual Worlds (Enrique Becerra, Mary Ann Stutts)
– Symbolic and Experiential Consumption of Body in Virtual Worlds: from (Dis)Embodiment to Symembodiment (Handan Vicdan, Ebru Ulusoy)
– Demographics of Virtual Worlds (Jeremiah Spence)

“Think pieces”

– Surveillance, Consumers, and Virtual Worlds (Douglas R Dechow)
– Second Life and Hyperreality (Michel Maffesoli)
– Having But Not Holding: Consumerism & Commodification in Second Life (Lori Landay)
– Metaverse: A New Dimension? (Yohan Launay, Nicolas Mas)
– Virtual Worlds Research: Global X Local Agendas (Gilson Schwartz)
– Real Virtual Worlds SOS (State of Standards) Q3-2008 (Yesha Sivan)

There’s some serious reading time in it all and if virtual goods, branding, avatar identification, new user experience or demographics are of interest, this is one must-read issue from a journal hitting the ground well and truly running. Well researched quantitative and qualitative studies will be key as virtual worlds expand in scope and popularity – this Journal deserves kudos as one of the pioneers of empirical observation of virtual worlds.

Filed Under: Education, General News, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: ,

We really can’t win

November 17, 2008 by Leave a Comment

A woman was shaking out a rug on the balcony of her 17th floor condominium when a sudden gust of wind blew her over the railing. “Damn, that was stupid,” she thought as she fell. “What a way to die.”

As she passed the 14th floor, a man standing at his railing caught her in his arms.

While she looked at him in disbelieving gratitude, he asked, “Do you suck?”

“No!” she shrieked, aghast.

So, he dropped her.

As she passed the 12th floor, another man reached out and caught her. “Do you screw?” he asked.

“Of course not!” she exclaimed before she could stop herself.

He dropped her, too.

The poor woman prayed to God for one more chance. As luck would have it, she was caught a third time, by a man on the eighth floor. “I suck! I screw!” she screamed in panic.

“Slut!” he said, and dropped her.

Filed Under: Email Joke Graveyard, Sex

The Watch – virtual worlds in the news

November 17, 2008 by 1 Comment

1. Sky News (UK) – Woman Divorces Over Virtual Lover. “Amy Taylor, 28, cited unreasonable behaviour in the court papers, describing how their three-year marriage came to an end when she twice walked in on her husband pretending to have sex in an online game. Her estranged husband is now engaged to one of the women he had an ‘affair’ with on Second Life – even though they have never actually met in real life.”

(more than 500 publications have run this story in the past week)

2. China Digital Times (China) – China: Too Much Time Online? You’ve Got Psychosis. “On a update of an earlier post on CDT, China has become the first country to list internet addiction as a mental disorder as stated by the Ministry of Health. According to one of the definitions in a manual by Chinese psychologists, anyone who spends over 6 hours on the computer with a mouse has the disorder, and a guideline is expected to head to hospitals soon.”

3. The Times (UK) – Open Minds: Caught in the Net. “The medium is the message, Marshall McLuhan famously said. And by changing the message we change ourselves. Never has this observation been so relevant as it is today, when many people spend their days at the computer, conducting friendships through Facebook and MySpace, posting videos on their websites, going into real society shielded by an iPod, or simply sending their avatar across the Grid in Second Life, looking for virtual relationships, virtual excitement and even virtual sex. Some welcome this, as a form of liberation. Shy people used to go trembling into society, hand in mouth; now they can go boldly into virtual society, hand on mouse.”

4. i09 (USA) – What Happens in Virtual Reality … Probably Won’t Stay There. “Cross Reality, Dual Reality, X-Reality: all of these terms describe the recent work of an MIT Media Lab team to bring the virtual into the real and vice versa. So far, the X-Reality group has focused their attentions on Second Life; last year, its Shadow Lab project allowed the game’s users to virtually check out real-life activity inside the Media Lab building in Cambridge. Later this month, the next X-Reality project goes live — and they’ve got big, wormhole-tunneling, reality-crossing plans for it.”

5. The Guardian (UK) – Art, music, gossip – it’s (virtually) all there in my parallel universe. “It has been quite a week for virtual worlds, the three-dimensional sector of the internet where people can live a parallel existence with their own avatar or alter ego. The world’s most profitable virtual game, World of Warcraft, which has more than 11 million paying participants, released a long-awaited expansion that generated midnight queues as enthusiasts vied with each other to steal a march in the new version. The Chinese government, realising that virtual worlds are an unstoppable phenomenon, announced it was planning to impose a 20 per cent tax on profits earned within them rather than, as hitherto, banning such virtual transactions. And a British couple who got married after meeting in Second Life are divorcing after the wife caught her husband chatting up another woman in the virtual world.”

6. Gearlog (USA) – Hands On: Disney’s Pixie Hollow Clickables. “If your daughter is one of the many girls obsessed with Pixie Hollow, then this year’s gift list will probably feature Techno Source and Disney Consumer Products’ new Clickables Fairy Collection featuring Disney Fairies. Pixie Hollow is Disney’s newest virtual world, and over 7.5 million Disney Fairies avatars have already been created. Girls can escape into Tinker Bell’s world to help bring about the change of seasons by meeting friends, playing games, and collecting items in nature.”

7. The Telegraph (UK) – Second Life infidelity is no less real. “A man and a woman fall in love and get married. The man’s head is turned by another woman. The marriage breaks up, and the man becomes engaged to the new woman, while his wife goes on to find a new partner. Nobody’s a villain here. It’s a sad story, the break-up of any marriage. There’s betrayal, sure – but there may also be the beginning of two separate love stories, and the end of something that was causing neither partner happiness. It’s the second-oldest story in the world: the one that comes right after “boy meets girl.”

8. The Herald (UK) – Sinister reality of fantasy game. “At 4pm on a Thursday in central Edinburgh, Aaron Campbell is beating the traffic with an armoured wolf. The shaggy creature leaps across a wooden bridge and through a market-place unimpeded by the assortment of gnomes, dwarves and orcs milling around. No, it’s not Lothian Road on a fancy dress club night, but the virtual world of Northrend, a newly released continent in the hugely popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft. Aaron, 20, and several other members of his playing “guild” have met up at the Ministry of Gaming cafe on Bread Street to try out WoW’s hotly anticipated expansion set, Wrath of the Lich King, which was released at midnight on Thursday. Three of them went as the clock struck 12 to pick up their pre-ordered copies at Gamestation on Princes Street. The shop sold out the same night.”

9. Eurogamer (UK) – Blue Mars gets beta, launch dates. “Avatar Reality has let Eurogamer know that its massively multiplayer virtual world Blue Mars will enter beta testing at the turn of the year, in January 2009. The first-time developer expects this to last for around three months, before the full game launches in April. And perhaps there will be time for some tea and biscuits if all goes well.”

10. Ars Technica (USA) – Snowy game, VR goggles take burn victims’ minds off of pain. “You’d think being seriously wounded on the battlefield would be the most painful thing a soldier could go through, but the recovery from burns can take months of agonizing physical therapy that prolongs the suffering. In some cases, healing can be more painful than the original trauma. What if you could take patients away from their immediate surroundings when cleaning their burns or stretching the skin during physical therapy? A virtual reality game created to help patients deal with pain hopes to do just that.”

Filed Under: General News, Virtual Worlds, Virtual worlds in the media Tagged With:

Shadows on the wall, mimes in the street

November 16, 2008 by 4 Comments

Feldspar - at my command?

“… their avatars were less coy. While flesh and blood reporters and photographers banged on the door of the couple’s homes, virtual ones were trying to doorstep …”

” … one of the South West staff who “controlled” Meggy, ” … our characters started chatting and it was different. … Amy’s character was much more confident in the game than she was in real life.””

” … his character got the run around from Barmy because he was a novice in the ways of Second Life, … “It was difficult sometimes because there was a blurring between reality and Second Life.”

All quotes above from How South West News got its divorce scoop in Second Life.

The above article is from the Guardian, Friday November 14 2008. Giving the impression that ‘characters’ (perhaps they mean ‘avatars’) have independent action, and perhaps a life separate from their creators, this article demonstrates a common fallacious idea. An avatar, whether as a component of a gaming or non-gaming digital environment, cannot be said to be controlled by a person, nor can it have its own actions.

An avatar, in digital terms, is a visual representation of the person behind the screen. As the person behind the screen, you do not have direct access to you avatar – as many a person has bemoaned on the Second Life development lists, there is no way even for programmers without access to the servers for a digital environment to move or otherwise interact with an avatar.

Instead, what we have access to is an ‘agent’. The agent – defined either as an entity capable of action, or as something that acts on behalf of a[nother] person – is the thing that acts on your behalf. When you create input through your keyboard or mouse, those instructions run through your agent to the server. When ‘you’ move, you are changing the location stored in your agent. Effectively, the agent is an invisible point in a virtual space which moves by proxy. The avatar then, is a visual representation of changes you have made, or actions you have taken, through your agent.

In a digital environment, the things you can typically do involve moving, communicating, and interacting with or editing objects. In each case, your input is sent from your input device to the servers via your client and through your agent. Some manner of response to that input is then sent back to your client. This response might lead to text being displayed on your screen, or you hearing some audio output, if you are communicating; if you moved, the response will involve visual output – you will see your avatar ‘walking’ or perhaps ‘flying’, moving with respect to the background. If you are interacting with an object, you may receive visual output or text-based output, depending on the type of interaction. In each case, the agent acts on your behalf – moves, communicates, or interacts – and you then receive a response based on your actions.

Your agent is not the only entity that can cause a reaction in your avatar. If in Second Life another person starts to type, your avatar will turn their head in the direction of their agent, independently of any action you might take, unless your camera is locked. The servers may also cause your avatar to react. You can send an action request to your avatar through your agent to allow your avatar to be animated, but your agent is still doing the work on your behalf. Your ability to get an avatar to do anything that does not reflect an action you took at the input level, then passed through an agent, is very, very limited indeed.

Finally, an avatar most certainly has no life of its own. It cannot do anything the agent has not done, since it is a visual representation of what the agent is doing. Avatars do not communicate; people communicate through their agents. A somewhat inadequate analogy might be this: think of your computer hardware as if it were your phone – would you say that phones talk to each other? Think of your agent as a person taking dictation and typing out Teletext for a deaf person – would you say that you are communicating with the person you called, or the person taking dictation? Think of your avatar as an annoying street mime, following you and reacting only to your actions. Better yet, think of your avatar as a shadow thrown against a cave wall – would you say that the shadows had a life of their own, and could wander off and communicate with other shadows?

It may seem like a purely semantic issue – does it matter whether avatars can do these things or not, or which terms are used to couch these ideas? Well, it matters very much to the people who design and code digital environments and it matters in legal terms. It should be of importance to you, whether you are a user of these environments, or a reporter of these environments, or an outsider. Why?  It means that many of these amazing and outlandish stories never even become an issue, and that people have a better understanding about how these things work, legally and socially. There’s less cause for confusion and less wiggle room for those gaming the system.

Wouldn’t you rather know where you stood on this issue concerning digital environments?

Filed Under: General News, Op-ed, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: ,

Bread is dangerous

November 16, 2008 by Leave a Comment

1. More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread users.
2. Fully HALF of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests.
3. In the 18th century, when virtually all bread was baked in the home, the average life expectancy was less than 50 years; infant mortality rates were unacceptably high; many women died in childbirth; and diseases such as typhoid, yellow fever, and influenza ravaged whole nations
4. More than 90 percent of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of eating bread.
5. Bread is made from a substance called “dough.” It has been proven that as little as one pound of dough can be used to suffocate a mouse. The average North American eats more bread than that in one month!
6. Primitive tribal societies that have no bread exhibit a low incidence of cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, and osteoporosis.
7. Bread has been proven to be addictive. Subjects deprived of bread and given only water to eat begged for bread after as little as two days.
8. Bread is often a “gateway” food item, leading the user to “harder” items such as butter, jelly, peanut butter, and even cold cuts.
9. Bread has been proven to absorb water. Since the human body is more than 90 percent water, it follows that eating bread could lead to your body being taken over by this absorptive food product, turning you into a soggy, gooey bread-pudding person.
10. Newborn babies can choke on bread.
11. Bread is baked at temperatures as high as 240 degrees Celsius! That kind of heat can kill an adult in less than one minute.
12. Most bread eaters are utterly unable to distinguish between significant scientific fact and meaningless statistical babbling.

In light of these frightening statistics, we propose the following bread restrictions:

1. No sale of bread to minors
2. A nationwide “Just Say No To Toast” campaign, complete celebrity TV spots and bumper stickers.
3. A 300 percent federal tax on all bread to pay for all the societal ills we might associate with bread.
4. No animal or human images, nor any primary colors (which may appeal to children) may be used to promote bread usage.
5. The establishment of “Bread-free” zones around schools.

Filed Under: Email Joke Graveyard, General humor

Wrath of the Lich King – has it been popular?

November 15, 2008 by Leave a Comment

Its been a couple of days since Wrath of the Lich King was released, and its been difficult to get a grasp on how popular the expansion has been. Until this afternoon when I attempted to log in:

This is the first time I’ve ever seen that message in the year I’ve been playing World of Warcraft – and the realm I play on (Draka) is a low population one.

I then took a look at the Oceanic realm list:

It’s fair to assume queuing will be a regular feature of the game over coming weeks – what will you do to while away the wait?

Filed Under: General News, Virtual Worlds Tagged With:

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