FOE: Not the Real World Anymore is the transcript of the last panel of the Futures of Entertainment Conference. The panelists were John Lester from SecondLife's Linden Labss, Ron Meiners from Multiverse Online, and Todd Cunningham from MTV Networks, who was accompanied by producer Eric Ferber, who ran Cunningham's demo of Virtual Laguna Beach.
The panel gives some interesting insights into the minds of people involved in shaping virtual worlds. Consider this statement by John Lester:
Challenges can lead to increased sense of competency and confidence. People are willing to work for mastery. There's a connection between our experience in the world and what we seek out online. People respond to virtual worlds as passionately as they do because of the way our brains are wired.
This is, of course, true. Consider how Bartle described users motivations in 'Designing Virtual Worlds
1. Explorers: People who come to see what is there and to map it for others. They are happiest with challenges that involve the gradual revelation of the world. They want the world to be very big, and filled with hidden beauty that can only be unlocked through persistence and creativity.
2. Socializers: People who come to be with others. They are happiest with challenges that involve forming groups with others to accomplish shared objectives. They want the world to have extensive social infrastructure and shared activities: towns, clubs, arenas, weddings and hunting parties.
3. Achievers: People who come to build. They are happiest with challenges that involve the gradual accumulation of things worthy of social respect. They want the world that allows all kinds of capital accumulation and reputation-building. They want the ability to increase the power of their avatar, to build new structures, to hoard wealth, and to change the world itself.
4. Controllers: People who come to dominate other people. They are happiest with challenges that involve competing with others and defeating them. Also described as "griefers," they want worlds that allow users to intervene in the activities of other users, so that a record of domination and control can be established. To them, it is all sport.
A user's motives can be a mix of all of these, of course - the link between worlds (virtual and world) helps define what a user's motives may be though it is yet to be proven that there is causality - for example, it makes sense that a bully (physical or intellectual) in the real world would lean heavily toward 'Controller', but they could very well end up being dominant in other areas instead. Maybe the squeaky person next door is the dominant controller type - all bets are off. Still, the motivations do work toward 'mastery. But mastery of what? The beauty of player-killer servers is that it's pretty clear cut why everyone is there.
Moving back to the panel:
Todd Cunningham: We're in a media-obsessed society. These worlds enable people to become more immersed than ever before.
Joshua Green (MIT, moderator): Are these global spaces?
John Lester: we've lost our third places, the bar where everyone knows your name, the places where social capital is bridged. The opportunity here is to have a global audience. Our brains can only deal with knowing about 200 people, but now we have the opportunity to find the best matches for those 200 people. We now have the tech for 'weak ties' as well, which is very important.
While poor Joshua didn't get his question answered, Todd Cunningham and John Lester raised some interesting points. The globe has become media-obsessed to a point never achieved before - personally, I'm entertained by tracking stories from their origin as they echo around the planet1.
And Lester's point of '200 people' is something that I have long considered to be a problem in the blogosphere; if someone reads 10 blogs a day they're avid blog readers. This also explains why core groups of popular people bubble up to become synergistically more popular; if you read one blog it will most often quote the blogs that the author reads. What the author reads is, for all intents and purposes, what the author writes.
Even the digital divide came up within the panel:
Todd Cunningham: The question about the digital divide is a touchy one. There are people in our organization like Bryan Searing, who is looking at new digital manifestations for us that are not all predicated on someone having cable television. As a policy, we're well aware of the digital divide, but some data says it's collapsing and some data says it's widening.
Of course, in the context of virtual worlds the digital divide revolves around broadband.
Altogether, this was an interesting panel that (aside from a few shameless plugs now and then) created a transcript worth taking a look at. It's too bad [t:FOE] only came across my radar after it ended, but I'll catch up on my reading in my 'spare time'.
1 Expect me to start mapping that sometime in the future. I think the mappings will be interesting...
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correction
the MTV producers name (doing the VLB demo) was Eric Gruber.
OK -
Well, I have to go with what the verifiable source says...
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