Five weeks ago, approximately two dozen anti-war protestors marched on Ubisoft’s offices in San Francisco. Organized by the group Direct Action to Stop the War (DASW), the demonstration targeted the French game developer for “porting” the game America’s Army from the PC to the Xbox 360 home gaming console. Activists objected to the game’s sanitized representations of warfare, and criticized its developers for deliberately “toning down the gore” in order to secure a “teen” ESRB rating, making it possible to market the game to thirteen-year olds.

Disturbed by the game’s seamless integration with virtual army recruiting centers, demonstrators urged Ubisoft to package the game with consumer safety labels stating:

“Warning: The video game America’s Army has been developed by the United States Army to recruit children under the age of 17 in violation of the U.N. Optional Protocol and international law. Combat service has been known to cause death, irreparable injuries, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and lifelong feelings of overwhelming guilt.”

In targeting America’s Army, the DASW chose a “brand” that has been actively reaching out to high school students, gamers and games researchers for most of this decade. Developed for the US Army by the Modeling, Simulation and Virtual Environments Institute (MOVES) at the Naval Postgraduate School, America’s Army is a free, downloadable game that leverages the conventions of the first-person shooter game genre to recruit young Americans into military service. Boasting more than 9 million registered users as of September 2008, it has been described as “the most successful game launch in history” (O’ Hagan, 2004).1 During the past five years, America’s Army and other game designers affiliated with the military have also played a vital role in building a “serious games movement” that leverages the power of video-games for education, corporate training, public policy, and (of course) combat training.

Although many in the gaming industry are quick to renounce critics of militaristic and violent video-games, senior Ubisoft representatives met with activists and listened to their concerns. According to one unverified account, representatives acknowledged that the thinly veiled recruitment tool had generated “internal conflict” within the company. In a statement subsequently e-mailed to Wired Magazine’s Chris Kohler (2008),2 Ubisoft representatives stated that “we respect DASW’s First Amendment rights, and would hope they also respect and recognize ours.”

Ubisoft’s reference to the importance of free speech might strike some as a predictable corporate response, but the company’s representatives make a crucial point. Warning labels are not the answer.

The use of video-games for youth-oriented military recruitment propaganda is a deeply troubling trend, and more Americans should be paying attention to these developments. The Iraq War is increasingly perceived – domestically and internationally – as a tragic military intervention that was sold to the public with a web of unsubstantiated claims and half-truths. The DASW is right to draw attention to the blatant propaganda themes in America’s Army, but the organization’s call for game censorship is seriously misguided. Warning labels are just as unpalatable when promoted by anti-war activists seeking to regulate video-games as they were in the mid-1980s when the Parents Music Resource Center attempted to label Prince and Madonna albums that contained “offensive sexual content.”

In addition to the free-speech issues, it is naïve to think that the US Army is the only entity that actively uses video-games to persuade and propagandize consumers. The market for video-game advertising currently exceeds $1 billion, and this figure is expected to reach $2.3 billion within the next four years. A portion of this money is spent on traditional product placement in franchises such as Guitar Hero and Need for Speed, but advertisers have woken up to the fact that interactive media can deliver entertainment experiences that are essentially playable commercials. America’s Army may have been among the first to integrate narrative and game-play mechanics with political and commercial objectives, but it is just the tip of the iceberg. Rather than sticking labels on games like America’s Army, we should be teaching students to think critically about the messages embedded in all video-games.

Rather than censoring existing games, media literacy activists and games researchers should work together to design an analytical framework that can help students to think more critically about the medium of video-games. Unfortunately, the media literacy movement’s existing tools are insufficient.

Educators regularly criticize titles like Grand Theft Auto and Fat Princess for violent, racist and sexist representations, but there has been little sustained attention to the underlying characteristics of video-games that make them such powerful persuasive tools. As Steven Poole (2003)3 points out, “videogames are an increasingly pervasive part of the modern cultural landscape, but we have no way of speaking critically about them” (12).

At the interpretive level, a robust video game literacy framework would help students articulate a basic understanding of such essential video-game characteristics as immersion, intense engagement, identification and interactivity (Delwiche, 2007).4 These interpretive efforts could be supplemented by activities that encourage students to engage in the creative aspects of game design. As Renee Hobbs (2005)5 notes, “producing media messages has long been understood as one of the most valuable methods to gain insight on how messages are constructed” (20).

In many educational settings, hands-on computer access for each student in the classroom is not possible. The good news is that one can involve students in game design without complex computer programming courses, intensive tutorials in 3D modeling, or access to cutting edge computer equipment. Conceptual design exercises, cheat codes, and mod authoring tool-kits are just a few ways in which students can modify existing games or create entirely new ones.

For example, in 2002, Anne-Marie Schleiner created a mod called Velvet Strike that subverted the ideological messages embedded within the game Counter Strike. Schleiner’s mod made it possible for politically minded users to create and disseminate “spray-paint skins” that would quietly insert anti-war graffiti into multiplayer battlefield terrains. With this relatively straight-forward mod, which was covered by newspapers around the world, she managed to ignite a thoughtful discussion of video-game militarism (King, 2002).6

Velvet Strike is demonstrates the creative potential of mods and other tools that foster user-generated game content. Above all else, Velvet Strike reminds us that spreading our own messages is one of the most effective ways of countering ideas that we find objectionable.

Across all forms of media, the best remedy for offensive speech is more speech, not censorship. As Justice Potter Stewart observed in the context of the 1966 Ginsberg decision, “censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is the hallmark of an authoritarian regime.”

Image Credits:

1. America’s Army: Official video game of the United States Army
2. In August 2008, approximately two dozen protesters congregated on the headquarters of the company that is porting America’s Army to the Xbox 360. In the image above, an Iraq War veteran, Ryan Lockwood, peers into the Ubisoft offices.
3. Even when one agrees with the underlying sentiments, warning labels are a bad idea. It is possible to bolster young people’s defenses against noxious propaganda with educational methods that are more effective and less intrusive. Label created with DSAW text and the on-line warning label generator at http://www.warninglabelgenerator.com.
4. These spray-paint skins for Velvet Strike can be found on the mod’s primary site: Velvet-Strike: Counter-military graffiti for CS.

Please feel free to comment.

1. O’ Hagan, S. (2004) “Recruitment hard drive: The US Army is the world’s biggest games developer, pumping billions into new software,” The Guardian (London), June 19.
2. Kohler, C. (2008) “Activists protest America’s Army game with songs and stickers,” Wired Blog Network, August 6th. Accessed on August 29, 2008 at http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/08/ubisoft-protest.html
3. Poole, S. (2000). Trigger happy: videogames and the entertainment revolution. New York: Arcade Pub.
4. Delwiche, A. (2007) “From Green Berets to America’s Army: Videogames as a vehicle for political propaganda” in Williams, J. P. and Heide-Smith, J. (Eds.), The Player’s Realm: Studies on the culture of video-games and gaming. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
5. Hobbs, R. (2005, March). Strengthening Media Education in the Twenty-first Century: Opportunities for the State of Pennsylvania. Arts Education Policy Review, 106(4), 13-23.
6. King, B. (2002) “Make love, not war games,” Wired Magazine, June 8th. Accessed on August 29, 2008 at http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/news/2002/06/52894.

For months, the blogosphere was buzzing with rumors that Google was designing a virtual world. Speculation ran rampant among metaverse developers. Some suggested that Google would create a world even more powerful than Second Life. Others predicted the technology giant would join IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Linden Lab in their efforts to improve security, usability, and stability of the Second Life grid.

Hopes that Google would take the industry to the next level were dashed when the company’s new virtual space was unveiled earlier this month. Dubbed Lively, Google’s platform is a browser-based three dimensional chat room that has more in common with IMVU and Habbo Hotel than with Second Life. Lively users can select one of ten preset avatars, they can decorate their personal spaces with pre-created furniture, and they can choose from a limited range of avatar animations. However, the new environment does not permit users to create three dimensional objects, it lacks a scripting language, and there is no in-world economy. Google says it might eventually open things up, but Lively content is currently limited to items created by “a small number of trusted testers, vendors and creative agencies.”

To virtual world users accustomed to the creative freedom found in Second Life, the narrowness of Google’s platform was an enormous letdown. The decision to limit content creation, however, should not have been a surprise. Ever since Second Life first began grabbing headlines in Business Week, Fortune and The Economist, entrepreneurs have attempted to leverage the power of virtual worlds for marketing and internal corporate communication. Yet, enthusiasm for Second Life’s potential has been dampened by concerns about copyright violations and “obscene” content. Lively is just one of many virtual environments that dodge copyright and obscenity concerns by removing content creation tools from the hands of users.

Indeed, with a handful of laudable exceptions such as Metaplace, the current wave of virtual environments is all about shifting control away from users and back into the hands of technologists and advertisers. Consider the Web Flock platform that Electric Sheep Company launched a few days after Google Lively. For approximately $100,000 per year, the digital agency promises a customized, stand-alone virtual environment that will “improve monetization capabilities” through deployment of “brand-owned user experiences.” Web Flock eliminates the potential risks of user-generated content, and it further sweetens the deal by giving publishers complete access to user registration data.

From the standpoint of many virtual world entrepreneurs, this strategy makes perfect sense. Advertisers and other corporate users have legitimate concerns, and locked-down worlds are one possible solution. Sanitized virtual environments make it easier for advertisers to protect their brands. It is also easier to sell these “walled gardens” as insurance policies to corporations looking for conferencing and collaboration tools that can protect proprietary information. As an added bonus, because so many functions have been stripped out, these platforms are much easier to use.

At this critical juncture in the maturation of the virtual world industry, we need to remember that there are less Draconian ways of addressing the concerns of brand managers and other corporate users. Working closely with Linden Lab, IBM has demonstrated that it’s possible to host sections of the Second Life grid behind a corporate firewall. The firewall solution improves security and allows tighter control, but it preserves connections to the broader grid and retains Second Life’s creative tools. Philosphically, the approach is similar to the firewall solution used by institutions around the world who want to maintain a secure internal Intranet while also allowing some connections to the broader Internet via their employees’ web browsers.

Many analysts believe that firewalled connections to a broader virtual world grid is vastly preferable to locked down platforms that reduce the virtual world medium to a three-dimensional chat room that supports streaming video. This firewall strategy retains two essential dimensions of the virtual world medium: (a) the potential for users to create original, sometimes brilliant, content and (b) the shared connections that make it possible to describe these digital spaces as “worlds” in the first place.

Why it is important to preserve user-generated content

From the very beginning, the personal computer industry has been fueled by the desire to empower users, and it is disheartening when virtual world entrepreneurs overlook this bedrock principle. For example, in a recent interview with Virtual Worlds News, the CEO of a leading digital agency dismissed concerns about the lack of user-generated content in Google Lively. “I think you’re going to see a lot of blowback at first from people that don’t matter. The Second Life cognoscenti,” he said. “They’ll be pissed because they can’t build stuff and blah, blah, blah.”

One has to wonder who these people are that “don’t matter.”

Are they the psychology researchers who use Second Life to simulate the experience of schizophrenia? Are they the architecture students who can now design their own immersive creations with pixels instead of gluing together pieces of balsam wood? What about the math instructor who devotes several weekends to building an open-source tool that demonstrates the visual beauty of calculus by translating mathematical equations into compelling 3D sculptures?

Are these the people who “don’t matter?”

What about the international cadre of volunteers who make sure that the Second Life Library on Info Island is staffed around the clock with reference librarians? Or the global teenagers who combine their creative energies to organize symposia and create multimedia presentations about transnational political issues? Or the stay-at-home parents who work a second shift in the middle of the night as well-regarded builders, avatar designers, and texture artists? Or the virtual nightclub owners who regularly organize in-world musical performances? Or the musicians who have found a global audience by performing in these nightclubs?

These people matter. They are the individuals who create and generate excitement in the real world and the virtual world. They matter.

World-like virtual environments

User-generated content is only part of the story. It is also important to safeguard elements that make virtual environments feel like actual worlds. A truly “world-like” virtual environment brings together a diverse range of users and, in so doing, opens up possibilities for serendipitous interaction between individuals who are very different. For example, among Second Life’s active users, one might theoretically encounter musicians, entrepreneurs, anthropomorphic animals, fantasy role-players, Hare Krishna practitioners, Evangelical Christians, left-wing activists, members of France’s right-wing National Front, patriarchal cults, matriarchal cults, transnational corporations, and government agencies ranging from the Center for Disease Control and NASA to the State Department and NOAA.

The world-like nature of virtual environments is enhanced by the existence of common strands that connect people across geographical and cultural boundaries. In game spaces like World of Warcraft, these world-building strands emerge from such factors as:

• a complex game economy that intersects with real-world auction sites,
• competition for virtual loot,
• shared gaming objectives,
• intricate guild structures,
• chatter in general chat channels, and
• web-based user forums.

In social virtual worlds like Second Life these world-building strands emerge from:

• an in-world economy that intersects with real-world banks and auction sites,
• the events calendar,
• an active network of bloggers and citizen journalists,
• reliance on a shared set of tools for content creation, and
• a vested interest in the continued health of the grid.

Despite holding widely different orientations in the “real world,” people who spend a significant amount of time in these environments really do share a common connection to other residents of their virtual community. Newcomers are often surprised by how deeply meaningful these bonds can become.

Some readers might be tempted to dismiss this column as a sectarian ode to Second Life, but this would be a misreading of my central argument. After all, Second Life’s flaws have been widely documented. For the time being, by incubating and aiding a broadly diverse range of people, viewpoints, and user-created content, Second Life hints at much better things to come.

Google Lively and Web Flock are not virtual worlds, but they are sure to find an audience. They will be popular with people who are looking for a three-dimensional chat room that can be accessed within a web browser, and many users will be perfectly satisfied with their limited content creation capabilities. These platforms might even serve as gateway spaces that inspire newcomers to move on to deeper and more open-ended virtual worlds.

However, even when packaged with Web 2.0 buzzwords, these locked down platforms are a disturbing reminder of the days when the big three networks delivered “brand-owned” experiences by locking down the content available on our radios and television sets.

Virtual worlds can, and should, be much more.

Image Credits:
1. Avatars chat in Google Lively as YouTube videos stream in the background.
2. WebFlock’sdeveloper, Electric Sheep Company, notes that a one-year basic implementation “is available for under $100,000.”
3. According to the promotional brochure for WebFlock, the product is “private labeled for maximum publisher control and advertiser receptivity.”
4. The Svarga island is scripted to behave as a fully functioning ecosystem. Rain clouds, bees, pollen, and flowers are just a few of the variables that interact with one another. This was created by a Second Life resident named Laukosargas Svarog.

Please feel free to comment.

At one time, video-game researchers confronted an extraordinarily difficult climate within the academy. Like their predecessors who studied such “low-brow” topics as film, television, and radio, games scholars found themselves forced to defend the legitimacy of a controversial medium that was associated with prurient content and juvenile delinquency. Even today, academic treatises on video-games usually begin with a familiar lament about how this emerging medium “gets no respect.”

After many years of hard work, things are changing. This is an exciting time for researchers who specialize in the study of video-games and other forms of interactive media.

Though the threat of censorship continues to lurk on the periphery of American politics, there are signs that policymakers are starting to be more open-minded about the civic potential of video-games. Two years ago, Congress held hearings devoted to the regulation of offensive content on video-games. By April of this year, members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet were open-minded enough to hold a hearing in the virtual world of Second Life.

Even in the midst of a recession, there is a significant amount of private and public financial support for games-related projects. Eighteen months ago, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced a $50 million initiative to fund research related to Digital Media & Learning. In April, the Federal Consortium of Virtual Worlds organized a conference bringing together government employees, educators, and the nascent virtual world industry. NASA, NOAA, the National Institute of Health, and the US Air Force are just a few of the American agencies that have announced substantial funding for innovative proposals related to virtual worlds and video-games.

In part, this changing climate can be credited to ground-breaking works such as Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen, James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, and Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good for You. Aimed at general audiences, these books helped administrators, policymakers, educators, and activists realize that video-games have far reaching potential. Meanwhile, the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) and the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) – along with the annual State of Play and Games, Learning and Society conferences – have connected a far-flung global network of researchers and designers who share a mutual passion for video-games and virtual worlds.

In the face of these developments, games researchers may soon be able to set aside the claim that others are too critical of video-games. As we encounter greater cultural understanding of this medium, we should relax our defensive posture and voice our own criticisms of games without worrying about giving ammunition to would-be censors. In particular, we should turn our attention to the phenomenon of video-games that are consciously intended to alter to the real-life attitudes and behaviors of young gamers.

One way in which this can happen is by turning up the critical heat in the emerging conversation between games researchers, new media scholars, and media literacy activists. The new media literacy movement is an exciting development, but there are grounds for wondering if our field’s historic need to defend video-games is depleting some of the movement’s critical energy.

For example, consider the MacArthur Foundation’s first-rate report Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.1 In this document, the authors argue that participatory media force us to reconsider many of the assumptions that underpinned the media literacy movement of the late 20th Century. Rejecting the tendency to perceive media messages as externally manipulated, the authors urge media literacy educators to prioritize the ways that audiences use digital tools to modify and redistribute media content.

This emphasis on the significance of participatory message production parallels the theoretical insights of Stuart Hall and other cultural studies theorists who argued that audiences approach media messages with a wide variety of negotiated readings. Though this shift is both logical and compelling, it carries some risks.

Just as some scholars have relied on negotiated readings as a rationale for avoiding discussions of manipulative and psychically intense content, there is a risk that “participatory media” will be deemed worthy of less critical scrutiny than traditional media.

It is dangerous to assume that the audience’s active participation in the construction of a media text is somehow less manipulative than one-way communication. In fact, communication researchers have long known that actively involving the audience is one of the most effective ways of changing their behavior.

During World War II, propaganda scholars investigated two very different strategies for convincing female homemakers to consume organ meat. A series of studies compared the effectiveness of one-way lectures to interactive strategies that asked participants to talk with one another about the advantages of eating organ meat. The participation method was almost five times more successful than the traditional lecture format.2

Research on participation and self-persuasion reminds us that participatory media are not intrinsically liberating. Whether we are analyzing a television commercial, a print advertisement, a user-generated content contest on YouTube, or a massively multiplayer game, we still need to ask questions about the persuasive intent and structural motivations of the content’s primary creators.

For this reason, as media literacy educators develop a framework for understanding games and other interactive media, we can benefit deeply from the critical-minded perspective that is often embodied in Wacky Packages and Mad Magazine.

Originally produced by the Topps Company in 1967, Wacky Packages were trading card stickers that parodied leading consumer brands by melding gross-out humor with wry criticisms of consumer culture. These subversive trading cards were the brain-child of the noted comic artist Art Spiegelman who eventually received a Pulitzer Prize for his ground-breaking work Maus.

When I was nine years old, the Wacky Packages struck me as unbelievably hilarious. Appropriating the familiar Band-Aid logo, the Band-Ache Strips sticker matched graphic visuals to the slogan “Strips off Skin!” Putrid Cat Chow highlighted the nasty smell and disturbing canning practices of contemporary cat food, and Crakola Crayons promised “160 crumbled pieces” and “broken, bland colors made from Beeswax.”

Admittedly, the jokes in these trading cards were not the height of sophisticated humor. However, they effectively appealed to a nine-year-old sensibility while also communicating the fundamental insight that advertisers and large corporations do not have the best interests of consumers at heart.

The “usual gang of idiots” at Mad Magazine has performed a similar task for more than fifty years, combining gross-out humor with such consciousness-raising articles as:

• “The typical summer resort advertisement and the actual resort,”
• “The truth about secret ingredients,”
• “Behind the scenes at an ad agency,”
• “What to look forward to as a middle-aged mall rat,” and
• “What would happen to Disney characters in the real world?”

It is worth noting that Mad Magazine has continued to keep pace with cultural and technological changes over the years, and they were among the first publications to speak about video-games in a language that made sense to young people.

As we revamp the media literacy curriculum for the 21st century, Mad Magazine and Wacky Packages have something to teach us about the importance of humor, the value of simplicity, and — above all else — the importance of questioning the man behind the curtain.

Image Credits:

1. Aimed at a general audience, Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy has helped administrators, teachers, policymakers, and activists recognize the pro-social and educational potential of video-games.
2. America’s Army is an extraordinarily effective and well-designed persuasive video-game that encourages young people to consider enlisting in the army. Games theorists should ask themselves which they would prefer: internal critiques penned by researchers who understand the medium or external critiques authored by people who don’t really “like” games?
3. During World War II, propaganda researchers recognized that participatory, discussion-based messaging was the most effective way to transform consumer behavior. Heavy-handed lectures were much less successful.
4. The Wacky Packages trading stickers hinted that advertisers and manufacturers did not necessarily have the best interests of consumers at heart (”Band-Aches”).
5. The Wacky Packages trading stickers hinted that advertisers and manufacturers did not necessarily have the best interests of consumers at heart (”Clammy Sauce”).
6. Mad Magazine has kept pace with technological and cultural change for more than fifty years (No. 129, 1969).
7. Mad Magazine has kept pace with technological and cultural change for more than fifty years (No. 482, 2007).

Please feel free to comment.

1. Jenkins, H., Purushotma, R., Clinton, K., Wiegel, M. and Robison, A. (2006). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Chicago: MacArthur Foundation.
2. Lewin, K. (1943). “Forces Behind Food Habits and Methods of Change,” in The Problem of Changing Food Habits: Bulletin of The National Research Council, 108 (October). Washington, DC: National Research Council and National Academy of Sciences, 35-65.; Wansink, B. (2002). “Changing Eating Habits on the Home Front: Lost Lessons From World War II Research,” Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, 21(1) 90-101.

Earlier this year, in their 2008 Internet Investment Guide, analysts at JP Morgan declared that they were “bullish” on virtual worlds for children because such spaces allow kids to play in safe, closed, and branded spaces. Referencing research conducted by eMarketer, the report predicted that more than half of American children would regularly visit virtual worlds by 2011.

Club Penguin, which Walt Disney recently purchased for $700 million, is the most well-known of these branded worlds, but the arctic-themed playground is merely the tip of the iceberg. BarbieGirls, StarDolls, Lego Universe, Bella Sara, and Whyville are just a few of the virtual worlds that actively court children. According to the industry association Virtual Worlds Management, there are now more than 100 virtual worlds focusing on kids, tweens, and teens.

However, before you call your stock broker and rearrange your portfolio, you should be warned that the most important thing about youth-oriented virtual worlds is not the number of children immersed in these synthetic spaces. Nor, for that matter, is it the amount of money that advertisers and toy companies have poured into this sector. The truly amazing thing — the trend that deserves the most attention from industry analysts, scholars and parents alike — is the utter lack of imagination displayed in almost all of these on-line spaces.

For the most part, so-called “virtual worlds” aimed at youth are little more than paper-doll worlds in which players are encouraged to spend virtual money on their on-line avatars. In almost all of these spaces, the pattern is mind-numbingly familiar: Create avatar. Play games. Earn money. Shop for your avatar. Earn money. Shop for your avatar’s house. Earn money. Shop for your avatar. Earn money. Shop. Work. Shop. Work. Shop. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. The only thing that really differentiates each of these worlds from one another is the quality of the art direction and the intellectual property rights secured by the world’s creators.

Ideological links between youth-oriented entertainment and global consumer culture are nothing new. Indeed, most people over the age of 30 can remember playing board games that inculcated hegemonic attitudes related to consumption (The Game of Life), acquisition (Monopoly and Pay Day), labor (Careers) and imperial expansion (Risk, Battle Ship, Stratego). But those were board games. At least in theory, virtual worlds are capable of offering more. So much is possible in these youth-oriented worlds, but so little is accomplished.

Consider the world of the Barbie Girls. At first glance, it might seem that a “paper doll world” would be the perfect way of translating the toy’s appeal to the on-line world. “After all,” one might ask, “isn’t Barbie just about dressing up dolls? Why not dress up dolls on-line?”

The answer, as any Barbie-savvy parent can attest, is that the dolls and the clothes are far less important than the stories that children develop around their toys. “Playing Barbies” is not about wrapping a piece of sweatshop-produced cloth around a piece of sweatshop-produced plastic. It is about children exercising the power of their imagination.

The virtual world Second Life may not be appropriate for children, but the platform makes it possible for beginning users to create their own three-dimensional content. As a result, residents have been able to create a far-flung, idea-rich world characterized by jaw-dropping, user-generated content. The platform also incorporates an accessible scripting language that makes it possible for users to assign actions and behaviors to the objects that they’ve created. In kid-oriented worlds, this degree of creative power is nowhere to be found.

Why not?

Youth marketers defend their anemic offerings by arguing that worlds like Second Life pose serious problems in terms of content moderation. As soon as open-ended content generation tools are folded into the environment, even a constrained chat window can be used to generate offensive content or to express potentially dangerous questions (e.g. “How old are you?” and “Where do you live?”). According to many platform operators, the creativity lockdown is necessary in order to protect users.

This is an easy excuse. Too easy. It does not hold up under further scrutiny. As Makena has demonstrated with their teen-oriented world There.Com, the threat of objectionable content can be minimized by developing a system for moderating all user-generated objects before they are instantiated in the virtual world. In a similar manner, the possibility of inappropriate solicitations can be addressed by deploying a team of human beings and bots who would scan the chat channels for dangerous interactions.

The myth that “branded virtual worlds” are a safe environment for children is particularly frustrating. We can all agree that on-line pedophiles are a tangible risk, but we have developed strategies to protect kids from the reach of such dangerous individuals. Parents and Internet service providers have spent more than a decade developing strategies for identifying such threats.

When one contemplates the explicit rationale that underpins youth-oriented virtual worlds, one has to wonder “Who is the real predator here? What about the companies who want to deliver my child’s ‘eyeballs’ to advertisers?” At a recent industry gathering, one panel un-ironically expressed the dominant mindset with the tag-line: “Kids and Tweens: Why virtual worlds are the new Saturday morning television.”

The thing is this: virtual worlds offer so much more than Saturday morning television. Even in these early days, when the technology is in its infancy, these tools are capable of unleashing the human imagination.

Within the next few years, someone will figure out how to weave multiple layers of user safety around a youth-oriented platform that offers the creative power of Second Life. When this happens, Club Penguin’s igloos will melt. When children are allowed to create their own “Never Never Land” rather than just playing in branded sandboxes created by boring adults, there will be massive defections from the worlds of Barbies, Webkinz, and StarDolls. The shackles will be empty, and the children will be free.

I can hardly wait.

Image Credits:
1. Club Penguin
2. StarDoll
3. Barbie Girls(tm)

Please feel free to comment.

“What a bunch of pathetic losers. Don’t they have anything better to do on a Friday night?”

These harsh words caught me by surprise. They came from a colleague. An open-minded, thoughtful, and very intelligent colleague. A colleague who just three days earlier had heard about a high-profile mixed reality event in the virtual world of Second Life where dozens of avatars from around the globe gathered in an immersive, three-dimensional space for an evening of music, dancing, and conversation.

“I mean, really. It’s just sad,” he continued. “There’s nothing real about virtual experiences. These nerds are just wasting their time when they could be interacting with real people.”

Rolling my eyes, I told my colleague that he had missed the point entirely. On-line interactions are just as meaningful as face-to-face conversations, and the boundaries between virtual reality and the physical world are highly porous. Though virtual worlds are simulated by computers, the avatars that populate those worlds are controlled by actual human beings.

Students milled past us in the hallway, and we debated the issue for almost thirty minutes. Deeply frustrated by my colleague’s unwillingness to concede the social significance of virtual worlds, I trotted out the usual examples of ways that virtual communities improve the well-being of individuals and societies. From the quadriplegic computer user who emerges as the leader of her guild in Everquest II, to the gay Hong Kong teenager who finds solace in web-based chat rooms, the ability to form bonds with like-minded people around the globe is a liberating characteristic of digital networks.

Virtual worlds can be very liberating for people with disabilities. These photos of Jason Rowe and his avatar, Rurouni Kenshin, who rides Imperial speeder bikes in Star Wars Galaxies were created by Robbie Cooper as part of the Alter Ego exhbition.

Eventually, the clock tower chimes reminded us that we were late to class. As we dashed off in separate directions, I realized that our passionate dispute was hardly breaking new ground. From Socrates and Phaedrus to Marx, Lippmann and Leary, social philosophers have debated the implications of mediated reality for more than two millennia. The emerging medium of virtual worlds is simply the most recent chapter in a very old story.This realization should have provided some solace, but my frustration persisted. Like many researchers who study virtual worlds and on-line games, I am frequently perplexed by those who fail to grasp the socially complex textures of virtual worlds.

Activists gathered in the virtual world of Second Life in October 2007 to express their solidarity with the people of Burma

At a recent gathering of researchers and game developers, Professor Doug Thomas (USC Annenberg) recounted a memorable story about a high-school student engaged in a complex raid with his guild-mates in the game World of Warcraft. Two hours into the raid, after repeatedly seeking her son’s attention, the student’s mother unplugged his machine and disconnected the cable modem. Mystified by the emotional melt-down that followed, she telephoned Thomas and asked him why her son was so upset. “At that very moment,” explained Thomas, “your son was engaged in a complex, distributed activity that required the carefully timed cooperation of forty human beings around the world. They had carefully rehearsed the raid for days, and every single person in the guild was performing a crucial role. When you disconnected your son’s computer, you effectively ended the game for the other thirty-nine people in his guild who depended on him to cast healing spells. They had rehearsed the raid for days, and pulling the plug ruined it for everyone.”1

When Thomas shared this anecdote with other games researchers, a condescending chuckle rippled throughout the conference hall. Our philosophical assumptions fortified by the presence of so many like-minded scholars, we smugly pitied the uninformed woman who failed to grasp the social complexity of her son’s on-line relationships. Someday, when synthetic worlds are as ubiquitous as television, the unenlightened materialists will recognize the error of their ways.Or will they?The dirty little secret of virtual worlds is the fact that they are profoundly anti-social.Virtual worlds enable the formation of vibrant, distributed communities, but they accomplish this by subtracting human beings from their immediate surroundings. As virtual worlds become increasingly immersive, and as their interfaces become more complex, these anti-social effects will become even more intense.

When a computer user enters into a virtual world such as Second Life, she projects her consciousness into that synthetic space. From a phenomenological standpoint, she experiences “presence” in the virtual world. Since it is impossible to be fully present in two places at one time, her consciousness effectively leaves her immediate surroundings. As she becomes more deeply immersed in the on-line world, she evacuates the physical world around her.

While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this defection from the physical world, it is important to identify the hidden cost of virtual sociability. If we’re really there, we cannot be really here.

This baby’s caretaker is deeply immersed in the game Ragnarok in a gaming cafe in Thailand.

This personal epiphany dawned on me when I recently became a step-father to an imaginative first-grader. Immersed in Second Life as she played on the floor of our living room, I realized that I had to make a decision. I could interact with other people on-line, or I could play Barbies with my step-daughter, but I could not do both at once.The choice was easy, and I’ve never looked back.Though I’ve scaled back my on-line activities in order to be fully present in the lives of the people I love, my enthusiasm for virtual worlds has not diminished. If anything, I have a deeper understanding of the challenges that must be overcome if virtual worlds are to emerge as playground for mainstream consumers.In the near future, interface technologies could bring families and friends into virtual worlds together from the couch in their living rooms. By overcoming the inherently anti-social nature of virtual worlds, these collaborative technologies would unlock entirely new ways of learning, exploring, playing and creating with people in our immediate environment.For now, however, I’m sticking to Barbies.

Image Credits:

1. Second Life Logo

2. Jason Rowe. .

3. Burma rally. .

4. Gaming cafe.

5. Home Page: Second Life logo design: Peter Alilunas.

Please feel free to comment.

1. Thomas recounted this anecdote at State of Play V: Building the Global Metaverse in August, 2007. The quoted material in this passage is roughly paraphrased from his comments at the gathering.

Really. I’m not kidding. Things are speeding up. We see it on the faces of our loved ones, in the rising stack of unanswered e-mails, text messages, and voice mails, and in the relentlessly scrolling RSS news feeds that tell us everything but answer nothing.

In slightly more than a century, humanity has progressed from the motion picture, telegraph, and radio to personal computers, cell phones, and the world-wide web. The speed of computer processors doubles every two years, and this exponential growth is transforming our species in ways we don’t fully understand.

Consider the unending emergence of technology-fueled subcultures. Ham radio. Jazz. Beat poets. Personal computing. Hip-hop. Punk. Computer networking. Zines. Indie rock. Raves. Flash mobs. Alternate reality games. Virtual worlds.

In all of these cultural movements, there is a familiar tendency. The sub-culture starts with a spark: an act of technical or creative genius that points the way to entirely new possibilities. As new minds become involved, they riff, modify, and extend the movement in new directions. During the early days, enthusiasm is contagious and sub-cultural participants are driven by a shared passion that seems unfathomable to outsiders. Eventually, as more people are drawn into the mix, motivations multiply. Some join the movement because they want to look cool, while others are primarily concerned with delivering new cultural inputs to the marketplace.Gradually at first, and then almost overnight, the subculture bursts from the fringes into popular awareness. In the process, the movement is folded back into the mainstream, changing both the virus and the host in the process. A few pioneers stumble into great fortune, cool hunters move on in search of the next big thing, and the subculture’s most passionate practitioners carry on much as they did before.Complaining about this phenomenon would make as much sense as being upset that the Earth rotates around the sun. In the fractal cultural patterns of the human species, sub-cultural absorption is as inevitable as the movement of the moon and the tides. It has happened before, it is happening now, and it will happen again.

Though it is inevitable, there is something fascinating about that transformative stage when ideas and technologies formerly relegated to the margins are folded back to the center. We are living through such an era right now, in late 2007. This is the moment when virtual worlds such as Second Life, There.Com, and China-based Hipihi are announcing their presence in homes and Internet cafes throughout the wired world.

During the month of October, on US television screens, the social virtual world Second Life functioned as a crucial plot point for Law and Order: SVU, CSI: New York, and The Office. One year ago, Second Life claimed fewer than eight hundred thousand residents and it was used in a few dozen classrooms around the country. Today, more than ten million people have downloaded the software to their personal computers, and the number of educational institutions investigating virtual worlds continues to skyrocket.

According to the industry group Virtual Worlds Management, more than one billion dollars were invested in the virtual world landscape in the past year. Seventy percent of this figure is accounted for by Walt Disney’s $700 million purchase of the kid-oriented Club Penguin, while the remaining $300 million funded close to three dozen software designers, content developers, and hardware manufacturers.Despite this flurry of creative, financial and cultural activity, there has been little attention to virtual worlds in scholarly publications such as Flow. This is likely to change in the coming months. In fact, the jargon currently associated with this nascent medium (e.g. metaverse, virtual currency, avatars) may soon seem as dated as the cyber-, e-, and i- prefixes of the late 1990s.In this, the first of four columns focused on virtual worlds, I will sketch a broad outline of the technology. Future columns will explore pedagogical considerations as well as potential implications for media studies.

Origin stories are always controversial, but most virtual world researchers agree that this all started in 1978 at the University of Essex. An 18-year-old college undergraduate named Richard Bartle worked with Roy Troubshaw to create MUD-1 on a PDP-10 mainframe. They wanted to convert the single-player computer adventure game Dungeon into an experience that could be shared by multiple people simultaneously. The acronym MUD originally stood for “multi-user dungeon,” but politically-savvy researchers eventually reformulated it as “multi-user domain” in an attempt to garner greater institutional support.

Today, when we discuss virtual environments, most people imagine the compelling graphics found in games such as World of Warcraft and Halo III. Many are surprised to learn that the first MUDs, like novels and short stories, relied solely on written prose to submerge readers inside compelling, artificial worlds. These MUDs also added four elements that continue to characterize all computer-based virtual worlds. These are:

• Immersion in a synthetic world created entirely through computer-mediated representations,
• user embodiment in the synthetic world in the form of game characters called avatars,
• co-presence of multiple users in the synthetic world, and
• the ability of user-controlled avatars to make persistent changes to the shared world entirely as a result of their in-world behaviors.

As MUDs evolved, developers incorporated programming and scripting commands that made it possible for users to dramatically modify characteristics of the synthetic world while they were actually “inside” the game itself. This revolutionary innovation went much further than merely having a persistent impact on a pre-built environment. Users could make significant changes to the content and the form of the medium in which they were contained.

Powerful tools for user-created content are at the core of only a few contemporary virtual worlds. Second Life offers accessible three-dimensional modeling tools along with client-side scripting and server-side programming control, and China’s Hipihi delivers similar functionality. A handful of other worlds are moving in this direction, but — since most contemporary virtual environments lack these content creation technologies – they are not considered one of the medium’s defining characteristics.

During the past three decades, virtual worlds have diverged into two major categories: game-worlds and social virtual worlds. These are not mutually exclusive categories, and some environments attempt to blur the boundaries, but this can be a useful distinction.

Game-worlds such as World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, and Warhammer Online are fun, heavily structured environments in which players compete, cooperate, and socialize within the framework of rules and stories designed by the game developers. These game worlds offer immersion, embodiment, and co-presence, while scaling back the ability of players to affect the virtual environment in persistent ways.

Social virtual worlds do not include an overarching narrative or game-based framework, and they exist primarily as vehicles for open-ended interaction between users. These social worlds host user-created role-playing, sports, and action games, but such activities are dwarfed by a broader emphasis on creation, dialogue and performance. Also, as hard-core gamers are quick to point out, the game physics and audiovisual qualities of most social virtual worlds pale in comparison to the dedicated game-worlds.Because social virtual worlds and game-worlds share so many characteristics, they sometimes seem indistinguishable to newcomers. To a parent who is reminding her teenage daughter to finish her homework before bed, it makes little difference if the student’s attention is riveted on Second Life Teen Grid or Everquest II. From the bedroom doorway, these worlds appear to be identical distractions, but they encourage different types of on-line interaction.Some of us dream of a virtual world that will seamlessly incorporate the best elements of both forms. We would hunt Orcs in the morning, fish for puzzle clues in the afternoon, learn a new language in the evening, and engage in critical political discussions after dinner. We would do all of this while expressing facets of a coherent virtual persona. This sounds far-fetched, but platform developers are working with scholars, government officials and industry giants to develop interoperability standards similar to the W3C guidelines that provided the foundation for the world-wide web. With such standards in place, there will be many more connections between formerly isolated virtual landscapes.There is much work to be done before such a vision is realized. Then again, cultural change is accelerating.I’m not kidding. Things are speeding up.

Acknowledgements

Many of the ideas expressed in this column are based on ongoing conversations with other virtual world scholars and game developers via the academic web log Terra Nova and Metaversed, and the annual State of Play conference hosted by New York Law School. The defining characteristics of virtual worlds are adapted from Edward Castranova’s noted article “Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier” and Richard Bartle’s textbook Designing Virtual Worlds. Available via Amazon, Bartle’s work focuses on all aspects of virtual community. Though the title suggests a heavy technical tome, the book is primarily concerned with people and communities. The distinction between social virtual worlds and game-worlds was originally introduced by Betsy Book at the second annual State of Play gathering in 2004.

To learn more about Winifred (St. John) Mont Eton, Chapell, visit the web site created in her memory by her son (Larry Wagner) at http://www.sdarabians.com/mom.html.

Image Credits:
1. Virtual worlds
2. Second Life
3. MUD
4. World of Warcraft

Please feel free to comment.