Superstruct MMO: The Fate of Humankind

There’s an interesting site up from the institute for the Future announcing the start of a new project with the tagline “play the game, invent the future”.

Superstruct

The intro on the webpage states:

“This fall, the Institute for the Future invites you to play Superstruct, the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. It’s not just about envisioning the future – it’s about inventing the future. ”

I guess the best way to describe Superstruct is probably to post the FAQ from the website:

Q: What is Superstruct?

A: Superstruct is the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. By playing the game, you’ll help us chronicle the world of 2019–and imagine how we might solve the problems we’ll face. Because this is about more than just envisioning the future. It’s about making the future, inventing new ways to organize the human race and augment our collective human potential.

Q: Why should I play Superstruct?

A: Here are some of our favorite reasons: Because you’re curious about the future, because you want to make friends and collaborators all over the planet, because you want to learn how to become a future forecaster, and because you want to change the world.

Q: What does “superstruct” mean?

Su`per`struct´
v. t. 1.To build over or upon another structure; to erect upon a foundation.

Superstructing is what humans do. We build new structures on old structures. We build media on top of language and communication networks. We build communities on top of family structures. We build corporations on top of platforms for manufacturing, marketing, and distribution. Superstructing has allowed us to survive in the past and it will help us survive the super-threats.

Q: Who can play Superstruct?

Everyone! The more players, the better the collective forecast.

Q: How do I play Superstruct?

A: Superstruct is played on forums, blogs, videos, wikis, and other familiar online spaces. We show you the world as it might look in 2019. You show us what it’s like to live there. Bring what you know and who you know, and we’ll all figure out how to make 2019 a world we want to live in.

Q: Who is making Superstruct?

A: Superstruct is being developed by the Ten-Year Forecast team at the Institute for the Future, a not-for-profit think tank based in Palo Alto, California. Project leads include TYF director Kathi Vian, blogger and futurist Jamais Cascio, and game designer Jane McGonigal.

Q: When can I play Superstruct?

A: The game starts October 6, 2008, and it will last for six weeks. Top Superstructure Honors will be given out by our celebrity game masters’ favorite superstructures at the end of the game, on November 17.

Here’s a link to the scenario information for the game:

Press Release: Humans have 23 years to go

If this interests you, jump to the website and sign up for an email reminder for the start of the game on October 6, 2008.

Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo Afterthoughts

Well, things have been very crazy at work since returning from the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo in Los Angeles a few weeks ago. I am finally getting back to blogging about my experiences there. As I stated before, I was not going to blog word for word from the sessions, but would instead try to give my impression of the show.

Linden Lab and Second Life

I was really impressed with Linden Lab’s presence at the show. Their booth dominated the exhibit show floor with the only booth reaching to the ceiling. Adding to the draw of their booth, they had a rotating schedule of people presenting in their booth. There were many people from Linden Lab in the booth, milling around the exhibit floor, and attending sessions. If you look hard enough, you’ll even see Pathfinder in the above picture. Claudia was there the first day as well.

OpenSimulator Project

The guys at the OpenSimulator project really impressed me. I got a chance to talk to several of them at length about this project, and where they are trying to take this open source project. This shot is of a few of them in their booth after they won the award for Overall Innovation (the trophy is clear glass and being held by the person second from the left in the picture). They told me that they currently have about 60% of the functionality of Second Life, and that they are working very closely with Linden Lab to develop interoperability between the BETA grid of Second Life and OpenSim. After speaking to people from IBM, Intel and others at the booth it became apparent that these guys are not messing around, this is a serious project, and many see this as the future platform for businesses and schools that want to host their own grids. I am now officially interested in this project and will be following its development closely.

Virtual Worlds Roadmap

While on the subject of open source and virtual worlds, I have to mention the Virtual Worlds Roadmap project. This is a project to try to define the standards and best practices for virtual world use. Their mission statement in pretty straight forward:

“The Virtual Worlds Roadmap seeks to accelerate the mass adoption of virtual worlds and the creation of an industry with very low barriers to innovation and business success.”

This is an effort that anyone can get involved with at the Virtual Worlds Roadmap website. There are already two vision documents up at the site for comment. Be sure to check out the concept video from Samsung on a mobile interface for Second Life. As a side note, I saw a demo of the Vollee mobile Second Life client at this expo. Pretty cool stuff!

Impressions

I was really disappointed that Mark Kingdon, CEO Linden Lab, did not speak at this conference. He’s making the trip to the London Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo, why not LA? It just seems like it would have been a short hop from San Francisco for him to make an appearance at this gathering. Hopefully he was tied up in meetings, or out of town, as I would hate to think he would skip such an important conference in the same state as their corporate headquarters and the center of the motion picture and entertainment industries.

Steve Parkis, Senior Vice President of Disney Online, gave a keynote speech. One of his first statements was:

“If it doesn’t matter to the kids, it just doesn’t matter”

Steve started by talking about the success of ToonTown and how after six years it is currently at its peak subscription rate. He was very proud to say that not only did they get the kids, they also got their moms to play TuneTown. He was also talking about the huge success of their recently acquired Club Penguin. Following up on the success of these two virtual worlds they will soon be releasing a girl centric virtual world, Pixie Hallow. And the big announcement of the show was Disney’s upcoming World of Cars. As evidence of the continued popularity of Cars, it was mentioned that a second movie will be released in 2012 and that Car’s Land is coming to the redesigned California Adventures theme park at Disneyland in Los Angeles.

It’s obvious that Virtual Worlds is an industry that is experiencing rapid growth. The number of vendors showcasing products on the Virtual Worlds Expo floor more than doubled from last year. It’s very clear that there’s a big focus on kids and virtual worlds. As a matter of fact, if I had to point to one thing that was a consistent theme at the show it’s the pre-teen and child demographics for virtual worlds. Many agreed that it will be easier to raise these kids in virtual worlds and move them into education and business centric worlds later in life than it will be to bring in the digital immigrants.

Another discussion that was being had at this conference is how to prepare students for careers in this business. Several colleges and universities were present and asking questions at the keynotes and in sessions. John Landau, Producer from Titanic and currently working on Avatar with James Cameron, said that it was very difficult for them to find people for their production that already had the talent necessary for working in virtual worlds and content creation. It will be interesting to see if this industry grows and expands here in the United States or overseas. In an unrelated discussion with someone from Microsoft several months back, I was told that most video game development (especially with consoles) has now moved overseas where the talent is cheaper for creating content for these games.

(updated: After driving home and eating dinner, I sat down to scan the news.  I stumbled on this article on India emerging as a major player in the games development market.)

There was an education session covering the pilot of DizzyWood at Bel Aire Elementary in Tiburon California. Scott Arpajian, cofounder of Dizzywood, spoke with Patti Purcell, Principal, about the six month week pilot that took place at Bel Aire Elementary. Scott’s company is small, and supporting this project took a good chunk of his staff during the pilot. While they had some very positive success with the project, it was shut down because of the resource requirements and scalability issues only planned for a six week run. Scott went into great detail about why it was not scalable and why it was so labor intensive. Patti, the principal, was clearly excited about the pilot and I am sure in search of another project of this type now that they’ve had a taste of working with students in a virtual world setting. As most in education quickly learn, students do best when they have a set of tasks, or quests, to accomplish while in these virtual worlds. Scott said that because of this pilot they are adding quests to the public version of Dizzywood because of what they learned with this pilot. (note: as shown in the comment below, Scott wrote in and said that this project has been extended through this school year).

After listening to the Bel Aire presentation I came to the realization that while I may not like all the “monetizing” of the youth market, there was no way to get from here to there, with respect to getting this stuff into the classroom, without this early development and expansion of this market commercially. It is the wild success of the Second Life platform that has lead to the efforts of the OpenSimulator project. This project is one of the best hopes in the near future for privately hosted education sims (along with Sun’s Wonderland project). It’s going to take more commercial successes before we start to see reliable and scalable solutions made available for schools that are also affordable (or open source).

I am very glad that I had the opportunity to attend this conference. I had expectations for this conference that were not met, specifically the change in the Education track to a Kids track. But overall, it was an informative conference. I had the opportunity to talk to a lot of very interesting and engaged people in this community, and made some great connections with others who are working with virtual worlds in education.

Exciting eBook Reader News

The Wired Blog Network has a post up today about a new eBook reader that was just shown at DEMOfall 2008:

DEMOfall 2008: Plastic Logic’s Reader Is Thinner, Less Ugly Than Kindle

The opening line of the post shows the bias of the blogger:

“A new digital-book reader unveiled Monday is super thin and attractive — seemingly capitalizing on the flaws of Amazon’s bulky and hideous Kindle.”

So right from the start we see that this article is going to be negatively biased about the Kindle.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will state right up front that I was an early adopter of the Kindle. Over the past year the amount and variety of what I read has increased exponentially, and I attribute that directly to the wireless downloads available on the Kindle.

I was at the Sun Worldwide Education and Research Conference last February. Barry Libert was a featured speaker. He was talking about his book “We Are Smarter Than Me” at the conference. By about 15 minutes into his talk I knew that I would like to read his book. I took out my Kindle, went to the Kindle store, and downloaded a copy to my Kindle. Barry announced that they were giving away free copies in the lobby after his talk. By the time I got out there the boxes were empty. By chance, later at lunch, Barry sat at the table I was eating at. He asked me if I had gotten a copy of his book (he was offering to sign it for me). I told him they were gone by the time I got there for my free copy, but yes I did get a copy during his talk. He looked at me funny until I took out my Kindle. It turned out that he is a Kindle user and we had a great discussion over lunch about the potential for future eBook readers to replace textbooks.

My assessment of the Kindle after a year of use is very good, with a few suggested improvements:

• Buttons must be redesigned. It’s far too easy to click page buttons on the edge of the Kindle accidentally.
• The Kindle could be sleeker and more durable. My left “next page” button on my Kindle is already looking like it’s out of alignment. I use my Kindle daily, and this is the button I use the most while holding it in my left hand.
• The software needs to have folders for organizing books/magazines/newspapers/audiobooks. Once you get out past about 4 pages of titles it becomes tedious to page through looking for books. Even the earliest of computer operating systems allowed for folders.

When I purchased my Kindle I assumed that it was v0.9, and that I would likely be upgrading to newer models in the coming years. This is not a new concept, and any early adopter of any new technology knows this going in. I am on my fourth iPod that I use for Audiobooks from Audible.com.  I’ve been purchasing audiobooks online now for nine years.

Some of these whiny articles that bemoan the Kindle as being inadequate when compared to new and up coming readers just don’t get it. Someone had to open the market that these new devices are entering. While the Kindle may not have been the first eBook reader, it is definitely the first to penetrate a mainstream market.

I was just reading an article (on my Kindle) at lunch yesterday talking about how eBook readers might save newspapers. The article was from Newsweek: A No-Paper Newspaper. This new reader would definitely address the problem mentioned in this article:

“The biggest problem, though, is that e-readers work best for “linear reading”—reading long pages of text, as in a book—and not as well for the buffet-like browsing behavior that makes reading a newspaper one of life’s great pleasures. Instead of offering well-designed pages that entice readers to skim a story they might otherwise skip, today’s e-newspapers merely list headlines or tops of articles, which makes it hard to decide what’s worth reading.”

I’ve subscribed to a handful of newspapers over the past year on my Kindle. I’ve not stuck with any of them for more than a few months. The one that held me the longest was the Wall Street Journal. I really want to read my local newspapers on my device. Currently, I am subscribing to Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report for my news delivery on my Kindle. With better graphics and a layout truer to a magazine or newspaper, a larger format reader would provide a much more pleasurable and engaging experience.

I subscribed to magazines on my computer before moving to the Kindle, and the best example I can give for what I would like on a portable device is what’s available at Zinio. The formats at Zinio are exact to a fault (even including the irritating postcard inserts found in most magazines, but not as easily shaken out of the eVersions) to the printed magazines.

The blog post at Wired states:

“Here’s where Amazon has an advantage: Plastic Logic’s reader is not yet Wi-Fi-enabled. It currently features a Micro-USB port and Bluetooth connectivity to sync media from your computer, but the company said it has plans to eventually implement Wi-Fi features.”

Again, this shows that the author is not a Kindle user, or even casually familiar with the Kindle. The Kindle Whispernet uses the EVDO network. This is more similar to a cell phone network than an infrastructure wireless network like WiFi.  Please, if you are going to throw stones at something, at least know what you are throwing at.

Trying to hold up this Plastic Logic reader as the new model is as wrong as Kindle users stating that their devices are the best design on the market. There will never be a “one size fits all” device that meets the needs of all users.  Portable eBook readers offer a form of consumption, and there are many different appetites for this market.  We should be focusing on the technologies and standards, and not so much on the products. Digital Ink, open space wireless (like EVDO), infrastructure wireless (WiFi and WiMax), memory cards, bluetooth, and other technologies will all be building blocks for future readers.

As a consumer who likes magazines and newspapers, I may like a large (flexible, thin and rollable) reader that uses EVDO wireless for content delivery (expensive). My wife who only likes to read books may like a form factor like the Kindle that is nestled in a leather bound cover with a build in LED light for reading in darker environments and WiFi (moderate cost) for downloading books at home or from the local coffee shop. I may decide that a larger format reader with WiFi and memory card slots would be best for use in my school district for students (low price, easier content management).  Different consumption models will dictate different configurations.

In my mind, the ultimate student reader will be low cost (look at the MIT proposal), color, memory card based (for text book distribution and content management), and durable with a long battery life. An upgrade for secondary ed would be wireless and a lightweight browser.  Let’s hope that standards emerge for file format and DRM, or at least that all readers can read all formats. The worst possible scenario would be one that linked formats to devices leading to an iTunes model that ultimately limits the content available for all devices.

The very fact that development has been moving forward on this technology is evidence that we may be past the early adopter stage and moving towards a broader adoption stage over the next few years.  That should bring economies of scale to these devices, lowering the prices, and opening this market even further.  Once the right price point is hit, education should embrace this technology.

Education or Monetization?

As with any new technology, there are usually many facets and uses for a specific technology. This conference started out advertising an “Education” track many months ago. For some reason (lack of speakers, lack of interest, or more demand for an expanded topic), that track morphed into a “Kids” track. Don’t get me wrong, there are still education speakers in the Kids Track. I am really looking forward to Cathy Arreguin and Barry Joseph’s presentation on Thursday about Best Practices in Education. However, there is also a strong undercurrent at this conference for those wanting to cash in on the “perceived” virtual world gold rush to be had with young kids and their use of virtual worlds.

As I alluded to in my previous post, the Dino Kids commercial is a perfect example. Take a successful project like Club Penguin and clone it with Dino’s. The expo floor is littered with firms that are promoting virtual world development platforms that will allow anyone to quickly (and easily) produce a kid centric virtual world for profit. I lost track of how many times I heard the word “monetize” in conversations yesterday. I’ve ranted on this topic many times in the past. The most memorable was last January when I posted a blog entry on my PacRimX blog about “Commercialized “Kiddie” Virtual Worlds“.

Well, the trend that I highlighted in my commercialized kiddie virtual worlds post is in full swing now. It saddens me to see that so much focus and effort is going into monetizing our youngest computer users, and not into educating them. So much more could be done with these technologies to transform education instead of turning our young into rabid consumers of toys that are linked to plastic empty virtual worlds that are nothing more than button mashing mindless quests for virtual rewards to buy virtual goods. And the ones that incorporate advertising into their brainless online activities are even worse. But this post is not a rant, go read my rant from last year for that sort of thing.

As I said, there is education at this conference. We had lunch with a few SLEDer’s, one who came all the way from Spain to attend this conference. Linden Lab has the largest and most prominent booth on the expo floor. They have had a steady stream of speakers and demos in their booth that focus on education. Cathy Arreguin did a talk on the San Diego State University projects in the afternoon yesterday. And if you stop and talk to people at some of the booths you will quickly discover that their best projects, the ones that they are most proud of, usually involve a college, university, or in a few cases a K-12 district.

I am finding that the networking with other people, the conversations with people on the expo floor, and the enthusiasm under the covers of what this technology can ultimately be used for (and no, it’s not monetizing our youth) is what’s the best thing at this conference. It’s there, and people will gladly discuss it with you at length, you just have to find it and ask about it.

I found it in a big way at the OpenSim booth. This is an open source effort to reproduce the Second Life server. The people I spoke with at that booth really impressed me. People from Intel, IBM and others who are involved in this project for the potential that it holds. Their eyes light up at the possible uses of their project. They whisper about the projects that are being worked on, the education that will take place, and the potential for what can be if their project succeeds. That’s the theme that needs to be out front and center. That’s the philosophy and goal that should be shouted from the isles of the expo floor. This is where the most potential to educate lies.

We’ll see where all of this goes in the coming years. Will this new technology be wasted away like time spent by my generation watching Saturday morning cartoons? Or will we instead turn this technology to good, to educate AND entertain our kids?

The Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo

So it’s day one of the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo. The first mission of the day was to find out where it was. It turns out that the L.A. Convention Center is a pretty big place and there were not a lot of things going on here today. As a matter of fact, I think the only thing going on was this small conference. After looping around the Convention Center a few times in my car, we finally found a small direction sign pointing us to the West Hall Parking Garage. It was a short walk from the parking area to the convention.

There were no long lines for checking in, and I got my badge and bag and headed to the main theater for the morning keynote. The first speaker was Sibley Verbeck, CEO, The Electric Sheep Company. They have done many large scale projects over the past few years, and are one of the largest consulting and development firms working in Second Life. He started right off with a statement that there were two paths to follow with moving virtual worlds further into the mainstream (one of the underlying goals of this conference). The first is to track the kids of today as they grow up, and to grow virtual worlds with them. The other path is one that seeks to overcome the challenges that exist today, or the “Multi-Global War on Geekiness” as he put it. He appeared to support the later in how we should move forward (while the Expo floor appeared to support the first path in spades).

Sibley explained that most of the virtual worlds that have been popular to date are very geeky in what they expect from their users. He explained that today there are many millions of Internet users around the world that are perfectly comfortable with the point and click method of getting information. The key is to make virtual worlds for the masses that are as easy as point and click. It was pointed out that kids worlds will likely rise in sophistication fairly rapidly, as that audience is growing up with virtual worlds and will expect much more from their worlds. He said that virtual meeting places, shopping and education will not be widely adopted until their ease of use is as simple as a point and click.

Sibley announced that on September 4^th they would be launching the Virtual Worlds Roadmap SIG. Immediately I wondered how this would differ from the Metaverse Roadmap group. I found a FAQ at the site that explained how they are different:

“The Virtual Worlds Roadmap is an attempt to describe what needs to be done to overcome technical and business barriers to the widespread adoption of applications that use virtual worlds or similar technology. As such, it is not attempting to set standards and does not create or endorse specific technologies. It is also not formally a consortium and relies on individual volunteers to contribute content and effort.”

In his words, the goal of this group is to spark the ease of use of virtual worlds that is needed to push this technology forward.

Prior to this keynote there was a looping set of, for lack of a better word, commercials playing on the big screen. One that played entirely too much was Dino Kids. From all appearance, this is a prehistoric clone of the popular Disney kid’s virtual world Club Penguin. The attendees would come to hate this commercial by the end of the day, as it played over and over and over again at all of the large gatherings. But it was also a preview of an underlying focus (or should I say drooling) by those who were in attendance wanting to “monetize” the kiddie sector of virtual worlds, and expand it with every conceivable toy and gadget supporting kiddie virtual worlds. More on that later.

The main keynote was an interview by Corey Bridges (Executive Producer, Multiverse) of John Landau, Academy Award winning Producer, Lightstorm Entertainment, Inc. John has worked on many movies, including the Titanic with James Cameron. His current project is Avatar, also with James Cameron. This project makes heavy use of virtual worlds for prototyping the sets, and also in the production of a virtual world game that will release prior to the movie.

The first statement that John made about technology, and our current state of affairs, is that we no longer need to worry as much about “Big Brother”, but rather about “Little Brother”. This is the person who can instantly reach millions of people on the Internet. The YouTube phenomenon is a perfect example of what a person and a camera can do (both good and bad). The first example that popped into my mind was the Star Wars Kid meme of a few years ago. It was his “friends” that posted his video to YouTube, the Internet collective that then spun off remixes of the video, and the kid that eventually dropped out of school and had to seek counseling because of the attention and embarasssment.

John spoke a lot about the production of Avatar, and how different it is from previous projects. He says that they have developed a new “Performance Capture” process (as opposed to “Motion Capture”) for this movie. He says that it will convey the emotions of a performance much better than previous attempts at this type of a project. And referring to the name “Avatar” for the movie (a term much used today with respect to virtual worlds), he said that this story was written, and the title decided upon, 14 years ago. James Cameron has a virtual camera to walk the virtual sets and see the world of Avatar through a virtual lens. Once everything is finalized, they can create the real sets. Assets from the virtual sets are then used in the virtual world of Avatar. John stated that cinema was the art form of the 20^th Century, and that virtual worlds have the potential to be the art form of the 21^st Century. This is mainly due to their participatory nature, and that they will be more engaging than movies (but that movies will never go away).

They went on to discuss how these worlds might be opened to non-traditional users, non-gamers. This is where a plug was given to Multiverse’s new Multiverse Places project. Multiverse is one of the best looking and most polished virtual worlds development platforms available today. It’s open source and free to use until you start charging for worlds that you develop, and then Multiverse only takes a 10% cut. If you’ve not seen it before, do some Googling to get a feel for what can be done with it. They pointed out that Open Source can create an upswelling of content, but that not everything can be Open Source.

John briefly talked about their upcoming Buffy the Vampire Slayer MMO, and how other virtual world projects can expand and extend the popularity of TV shows and movies for their fan bases. He stated that virtual worlds will become the pervasive way to communicate and socialize in the future. A post at THR.com details out these projects in more detail (the reporter was obviously in attendance at the Expo).

Amazingly, John closed out talking about education. He said that “Education is the cornerstone to everything we do”. This was in reference to a question from the audience about the need for a bachelor’s program in virtual worlds design and production to support all of these new virtual world projects. John said that they had a real challenge finding and hiring talent for their Avatar movie, people who already knew the trade and were not going to have to learn on the job. He stressed that any education program for virtual worlds would have to focus on not only the technology, but also on creativity.

Virtual Worlds Expo – Blogging 4 Educators

I am down in Los Angeles for the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo. I’m not sure if this is the first annual event, or if this conference has been held in recent years. I will be blogging and linking out to resources that I find while attending. I could not be at SLCC (budget), but this was a close second on my list. It’s odd that they are running concurrently on different coasts. Maybe next year it will be out on the West Coast. It looks like Linden Lab has a group of people down here in their booth, including Claudia.

Tonight I sat down in my hotel room and inked out my schedule. The conference schedule has a full selection of sessions in five tracks; Kids, Hollywood, Enterprise, Future, and Technology.

Here’s the full conference schedule.

Here are the sessions that I am planning on attending:

• Technical Visionaries Discuss and Debate The Future of Virtual World Technologies
• Unified Communications Meets the Virtual World
• Mobile Virtual Worlds
• Best Practices for Education in Virtual Worlds
• Virtual Worlds Roadmap
• Virtual Worlds in Schools
• Open Source Interoperable Virtual Worlds

There will also be three very good keynote addresses:

• Jon Landau, Academy Award winning producer, Lightstorm Entertainment Inc., Advisor, Multiverse
• Steve Parks, Senior Vice President, Disney Online
• Colin J. Parris, Ph.D., Vice President, Digital Convergence, IBM Reseearch

What could be the highlight of the expo is the exhibit hall.

Here’s a map and listing of the vendors with booths.

I will be keeping detailed notes and will try to post as complete of blog entries as possible on the session that I attend, and booths that I visit. I always like to get involved and sometimes I get caught up in the discussions and conversations, so we’ll see what I can capture and post. I will also post my impressions of what I see and hear at this expo.

Keep an eye out on this blog for updates over the next few days.