it's good Brian Mathews, Associate Dean here in the
libraries and it's familiar faces. Glad to welcome you
guys here. And you know what I really like
about this program is forces us, encourages us to
kind of stop pause for one day every month and
really to celebrate the scholarship that's happening all around us
. And this is our into our second year of
the program and I'm glad that we could continue that
. And it's a great partnership between the library and
so each month we kind of look at a difference
of scholarship. Usually it's a different medium and you've
kind of seen that film, music, poetry,
even kind of letters and correspondence. And I'm excited
now that we're kind of crossing into digital domain.
I've been waiting for us to do something like the
linguistics of code or something like that. I'm gonna
get this. But from the library point of view
, what really excites me about virtual lives or virtual
communities virtual environments. Is this how to sort of
knowledge yet created or our information or whatever the product
is? How do you, how does it get
communicated and shared and express and built upon? And
we met and that kind of thing. And the
larger question really is how does knowledge, how was
that experience differently in the digital domain? So,
I think that's that's what I'm excited about and hopefully
we'll learn a little bit more about that. And
just perspective. I think it's also too is really
think about how our perceptions change when we're kind of
dealing with an online environment, which is another thing
that drive is really kind of explored a lot,
is that the impact of media and online games and
that nothing on that. So right now, I
would like to introduce you. It who is our
partner in crime in this, this and then the
visual scholarship initiative wouldn't be possible without him. And
so welcome. All right, thank you. I
appreciate that. As always, I'm very grateful for
what the library does in not only, um,
setting up this display and designing and printing the posters
and paying for the printing and and the shooting them
around campus, um, but also hosting this reception
, um, providing the cookies in the water and
and as and also much of the attendees. So
I'm very grateful for what they do also want to
thank Turner, which in who's a college ambassador who
actually does the really hard work of walking around campus
and putting up the posters. I think she's grateful
. We're moving into fall and it's not quite as
hot as it was when she did this a month
ago and was walking all around campus. So I
really enjoy these, these events because it's a good
opportunity for me to talk. Uh, so talk
in ways that really recognizes the quality of scholarship that's
done by faculty in the college of Liberal arts and
Human Sciences. Um, and really to, to
take this time uh, to um, show our
respect and and recognition for the accomplishments and the hard
work that faculty do. Having said that every time
I started to think about what I was gonna say
, I started to think about Palm, which is
the first video game I encounter, and I encountered
it in the basement of the Sears department store at
the Landmark Shopping Center in alexandria Virginia In probably 1976
or 77, probably before you were born. Oh
boy. Um, and it was a, it
was a game for those who remember this where you
had a little thing, joystick thing and you moved
a little box up and down and it blocked a
little like ball that was supposed to be a ball
except it was a square that was going back and
forth across the screen. And if you missed it
, went out and made a little punk noise.
And then you started over and we did this for
a really long time because if you went to Sears
with your mother who was off looking at towels or
sheets or whatever it is, you know, you
could go and play this game as long as there
wasn't somebody else there and they didn't charge you for
it. Um, so I kept thinking about that
and I guess what, what it reminded me of
is at the time the world seemed more compartmentalized,
right? I mean if you wanted to play a
video game, you had to go to Sears or
you had to be in a family that actually bought
video games, which my family didn't or have friends
who did this. And obviously the video games got
more and more complicated and sophisticated very quickly after that
. But there seemed like there was much more of
a divide between the kind of time you spent reading
or doing homework and the time you spent playing video
games and then the time he spent interacting with people
, whether this was outside or whether this was inside
in some kind of context, you know, and
I think what we know now is that our lives
have become much more blur right these boundaries no longer
exist. You know, you can be reading off
of a tablet, you can be outside and online
. Um you can be sitting in the library as
many of these young people are actually taking a class
or playing a video game or doing any number of
things. And as those of us who teach know
all too well, you can be sitting in a
classroom doing all of those same things and pretending like
everyone knows you're really taking notes or whatever it is
you should be doing, you know? And so
it really raises this question of which is the real
life and which is the virtual life, right.
Those things are more and more interchangeable. Um,
and that's nothing new for scholars in the liberal arts
. Right? I mean, you go back to
one of the oldest kind of puzzles for philosophers having
do with Plato in the cave and what's real and
what's the shadow. I mean, this is very
much about virtual life. Certainly scholars in the english
department, like Professor Milner who spoke last time,
they're studying abstractions of life as represented in literature and
novels and poetry in other places. Certainly as a
historian, I may think I'm studying facts and writing
histories of facts. But really it's about abstractions,
right? It's about the ways that those lives have
been represented in some form, that have been been
preserved into into newspapers or archives or other kinds of
sources, photographs. So, you know, we're
in some ways the visible scholarship listenership is wait up
to push back at that and say, OK,
here's here's real scholarship. Right? Here are the
books that scholars use in this case. Here are
the articles that they used to write the books that
then, you know, part will become part of
the scholarly record. But again, those distinctions may
not be that important. You know, that our
lives really are um simultaneous in multiple ways, both
virtual and Real, and our scholarship is that way
also. And so I think it's especially um appropriate
that we recognize a book called Virtual Lives, but
we're fortunate to have the real author here to talk
about it. So I'll turn it over to dr
James ivory and let him talk about his scholarship.
Thank you. Yeah, I'll take the water.
Thanks for coming. I'm excited to be a part
of this. That's been need to follow the development
of this visual scholarship initiative over the year and just
exciting to see all the things that Virginia tech libraries
due to sort of keep up and adapt and change
and kind of a changing knowledge environment and I appreciate
it. Doctor you and all the things he's been
doing in his year urine change so far as uh
, in his position for the college. I want
to talk about a few things. I can't talk
about everything with the book, but I want to
think about maybe the sort of people who might be
here and things will be interested in. I thought
we might see a few people from a lot of
different walks of life in the college and university that
might just sort of be here too. Support the
program may be not be interested in virtual worlds at
all, or maybe just a little curious about them
. So I want to talk about some things as
much about real nuts and bolts inside of virtual environments
, but maybe how they're more similar to other things
that you might be interested in than you think whether
or not you're interested in virtual environments or not.
Uh My research background here actually only partly deals with
some of the things that this book is about a
lot of times more specific kind of laboratory based psychological
and physical logical responses to media, including games.
So in a lot of ways this book was really
interesting when I was asked by the publishers to write
it, because let's be kind of look at some
broader sort of social things, a little bit of
history, which is not something always spent a lot
of time with at work and uh some kind of
broader kind of integrating research with current events or events
that were current kind of popular events at one time
or another. And it can also interest in,
I'm kind of relating some ideas and interests that I
have more kind of just personally going all the way
back to my childhood with my current research. And
I think that some of the things that interest me
about the virtual world that I want to share with
you, there's just some little parts of the book
about sort of where they come from, which they
might be from places that are more familiar to you
than you think. How many of you think you
have a real good background right now in virtual worlds
or virtual environments? A lot of you looks like
a little slow to bring your hands up some of
you already on board. You might be surprised at
how many familiar things you see by the time we're
done. So this is actually kind of a lot
of areas from sort of the first chapter of the
book, the way the books designed. It's a
little bit structured within the series that they have.
Well, there's about three long chapters that are sort
of essays, kind of readable essays on the history
and development use controversial issues and things like that.
And then there's a lot of kind of more reference
type things, Some uh, little biographical pieces,
some timelines, some uh, just sort of references
to documents and legal documents and everything else. So
the book is, as the rest of the series
is a sort of meant to be something that a
person get a quick reference of like, oh,
is there anything about virtual worlds related to my topic
? Let me grab that book and look it up
. But there's also some kind of narrative readable parts
two. And you know, I guess you can
find out for yourself what you think, But this
is just a little part of it. I'll go
ahead and kind of try to hurry through a few
things. This isn't a lot of real depth here
, but I want to tell you a little bit
of some of the stories why this stuff is important
. One reason is just the sheer number of use
. There's a lot of kind of conflation with video
games in general, which is a Around a$10
billion us movie box office. To give you some
idea of size and scope and a medium that a
lot of people, young and young adults spend more
time with than other traditional media like television. Uh
, specifically virtual worlds. We see big commercial virtual
worlds. A couple examples to give you an idea
of the scope is currently the dominant commercial virtual world
game. This World of Warcraft. Pricey television commercials
for about 12 million users by 2010. And I'm
kind of reusing figures from the book, instead updating
them. I guess since it's about the book,
I figured I could be lazy that way and then
a smaller but kind of more social, less commercial
focused in the traditional, like play a video game
since second life, which probably gets less attention as
we go on. Another example of the size of
it is 18,000 people turning up a month with a
new account. Overall time 400 out of 100 million
hours spent in there in a year. Which is
a reasonable amount of time there. And then you
get an idea of what besides just messing around on
the internet is ain't going on in this second life
, which is a little bit more kind of trying
to be real economy based About$29 million 2011,
which is a fair bit of money. You can
argue why there's so much money tied up in a
bunch of fake stuff. I don't know, but
it's there um a little bit about what we mean
when we say that when you talk about virtual spaces
and things, of course that could mean almost anything
usually online with the internet, although not just if
you want to get a little more philosophical when people
talk about virtual world specifically let it kind of interchangeable
terminology. Some of it was sort of different kind
of social aims or politics around it. But at
least some people have argued when we talk about virtual
worlds in the in the newest sense, they have
to have three things. One is they have to
be interactive. And then a person can not only
see things in the world or wander around in it
like a virtual presentation assisting chapel, but be able
to actually interact in a meaningful way. So if
they do something influences the space and other things in
it. So instead of being something that you can
see virtually it's actually something you're in and influencing.
So in a game it might mean you can hurt
people or take things that they can't get any more
or help them or build things that they can see
. But in some way you can interact with the
environment in meaningful ways, has to be persistent.
So unlike a video game that you can turn off
or leave and then it's better when you get back
. It's just like a real world, which is
part of the problem. Some people talk about with
addictions and things when you're gone, you're gone and
you're missing out. Just like if you skip work
, you're gone and where it goes on without you
. They argue it's not really a virtual space if
it's not persistent like that if you can shut it
down and pick it up anytime you like, like
a book and then it's gonna have some sort of
physicality in other words, sort of a semi three
D. Kind of space and some sort of physical
universe laws. You can't do this, you can't
do that. They might not be the laws we
have, you might go to fly or do any
number of things, but there has to be some
sort of structure that provides a little bit of a
social presidents. Besides just sort of this picture tableau
in front of you. These criteria and the importance
of them sort of get debated. But especially the
people that want to look at virtual worlds as sort
of a proxy for real life people who want to
study anything from like interpersonal social behavior to the spread
of epidemics. They say that a lot of these
are necessary to have that sort of are similar attitude
that we're really in a virtual space. We talked
about where they came from and again, someone interested
in kind of games in general or media development.
I want to tell this story that some of that
first chapter of the book comes out of a tradition
to some extent of sort of computer games more general
. But there's sort of a two diverging evolutionary kind
of ancestors. One of video games more general and
one of them is sort of more text based kind
of games where you just sort of inter commands,
try to walk north, try to walk south,
try to talk to the monster. Um, and
goes back to this uh class exhort game and goes
even further back to a game called adventure that's partly
based on cave system in Kentucky. And then a
game that some students in England at the university of
texas. S ex excuse me, developed called mud
, which would stand for multi user dungeon, which
would be based on that dungeons and dragons, paper
and pencil or board type game going further back into
the seventies. That's a lot of people to play
back and forth with each other on the internet and
try to hurt each other, but more kind of
a role playing environment, try to pretend to be
knights or wizards or whatever. And uh using the
internet in the 19 seventies. So I think the
idea of people playing games online. And then in
the late 19 seventies, early 19 eighties, based
on something some college students made still kind of surprises
me because that's not the traditional timeline I think people
think of with games and online. And then we
see hundreds of uh emulations of this mud for different
kinds of themes, different kinds of, you know
, now you have a harry potter type one or
something. Different intellectual properties that get adapted to this
role playing environment. People can get online and talk
to each other back before people really knew about things
like online. For the most part you start talking
about, when did we actually have virtual worlds?
You know, the distinction is probably not necessarily crucial
, but everybody wants to get that arbitrary first distinction
. Uh Again, going back to Castro Nova's criteria
, the first virtual world might be a game called
Meridian 59. You can see here other than being
the first, it's not necessarily particularly important except that
one of the first people who first developed it,
we see sort of a similar pattern with the game
in virtual environment development as we do with like television
or movies where somebody might write a script and the
originator of it ends up pretty far from the process
by the end. But the people who first developed
it were two brothers, one of whom was studying
at MIT and one of whom was studying guess where
Here in the 1990s so kind of interesting study and
of course got other studios and things became involved but
they were involved all the way through and still kind
of maintain a copy of the game for archive purposes
. A little before that we had a social virtual
environment called habitat that lucasfilm was involved with. And
they have a tradition of at least putting their toe
into things when they see a chance and didn't really
quite get on and didn't have that three D.
Perspective. So a lot of people argue that it's
not wasn't a physical enough to be a true virtual
environment. So again you have that argument about exactly
what constitutes a virtual environment. The people who develop
mud that text based game. One of them actually
just talked on the computer there last month and he
argues that even like things like World of Warcraft er
nothing different than his game except they have pictures on
top. So everybody has different arguments about what a
virtual world is. But sticking to that original criteria
actually has roots here, which I thought might interest
some of you. Although a lot of that's kind
of historical or for people who are really, really
up on the internet stuff at the time and things
in terms of virtual environments that are real, commercial
and social impact. We're probably talking about these later
uh later games that came along got called Richard Gary
had been involved in a video game franchise called ultima
for quite a while, he does pretty good.
He's involved in like that maybe going to take a
commercial space or one of those kind of tourists,
Spaceflights like the, like that Branson fellas. So
he did all right with all this. Um,
and uh, they ended up getting a bit more
than 200,000 subscribers, which is quite a bit in
the late 19 nineties for a game that you have
to play on the internet and pay every month to
play game called Everquest. They've got a lot of
attention because the potential for addiction comes along and it's
almost half a million subscribers and a lot of attention
about social concerns. And then again, that World
of Warcraft, that's gender domino, general dominating right
now with more than 10 million subscribers all over the
world, a lot of them in places like china
that might interest you. I think for the most
part I wanted to say, you know, if
you don't know if this is important, some of
the numbers in history will tell you that it is
. And I think it's kind of interesting to see
some of the roots of this. It's not like
uh, as much of an offshoot of Palma Nintendo
with things, as much as an offshoot of just
really early people wanting to interact with each other in
interesting ways on the internet and sort of again,
kind of that convergent to evolutionary paths of video games
and other kind of internet things. But some of
you interested, especially from the College of Liberal Arts
and Human Sciences, I thought you might be interested
in where really a lot of this really comes from
, is why did people like Richard Bartle try to
make something where they can interact with each other online
and kill monsters or be monsters or whatever. And
here's where I think somebody might not be as interested
in games or the internet might uh see some uh
, some kind of similar paths. And so maybe
I'm actually more interested in this than I thought are
more interested in what's going on here than I thought
. And a lot of the influences and inspirations basically
came from literary visions of cyberspace and things that sort
of come true. We see a lot of that
where science fiction comes true because somebody envisioned something that
seems like a good idea and the people who are
working on it, it kind of fans of that
idea and it sort of comes together that way.
We see that with a lot of this William Gibson
in the 1980s, sort of coined, not necessarily
first to use it, but sort of popularized the
term cyberspace or actually I guess was the first to
use it, but in another story, but the
story popularized it. This idea that you can have
a real self in a virtual self and you have
to do things on there and there's sort of crime
and punishment and all the exciting things that could happen
online. They sort of visualize this at a time
that we have the internet, but I don't think
the internet is being conceived as sort of this virtual
social space as much as a useful way to convey
information back and forth. And uh I got called
NEal Stephenson is still active, basically kind of more
popularized the idea that sort of avatar that you have
sort of a real representation of yourself. And they
had ideas such as that if you had a lot
of money, your avatar would be really nice and
handsome if you didn't have a lot of money,
your avatar be kind of a doesn't have trouble doing
things and stuff like that. And kind of brought
in some ideas about sort of the social kind of
kind of things traveling back and forth between the online
space in the real life space and getting at Tom's
idea of there's sort of a real self in a
virtual self, but in a very, very concrete
way that you basically get one and it's tied to
a lot of the limitations of your real self,
which I think sort of uh probably has more to
do with how things have really turned out in terms
of the use of the internet is not a thing
that jumps against all what you have in real life
, but the mirrors which you have in real life
in a lot of ways, at least on a
global scale. And then a lot less clear influences
talking. And that's part of why I'm an interest
in these environments is when I was young, I
mean we're not always having games but finding really interesting
partly because of the challenge and things, but partly
because of sort of the story or the place or
the imaginary kind, intellectual property that was in there
. I remember playing a video game in a friend's
house or something and then stepping away and, you
know, drawing little pictures of what the people might
be doing from that game and think so sort of
a narrative in there. But also when I was
really young, uh spent a lot of time and
sort of remote places and often places that a lot
of kids. So I read a lot of old
books and won the ones that came across as all
the tokens books and always found that really interesting.
Even though I don't know if that genre necessarily interested
me a lot of the rest of the time,
but for some reason found him really interesting. And
uh, a lot of people have argued that he
saw really to start all this. We'll see if
you agree by the time you're done, he's always
been big on this sort of creation of an alternative
, alternative universe, the sort of secondary world.
He considered writing his whole, you know, kind
of cannon based on the idea of sort of a
person kind of popping in there and then pop them
back, sort of that meta narrative of some of
that somehow pops up in there and then and then
writes it. And instead he sort of rights it
more as almost as if he's a person who found
all these documents as if they exist in real space
is real big on this sort of alternate reality,
which is why of course you see a guy creating
like nine hole languages when they might use four or
five words from them in a book and things like
that. And then the people involved with the dungeons
and dragons were heavily inspired by him. And then
in turn we saw video games related to the muds
and virtual worlds were inspired by that. A lot
of people that think a lot of people are talking
a lot of money actually for all the things that
have been borrowed from him and he's got him and
his family have gotten a fair bit of that already
though. I think that's pretty interesting story partly because
those of, you know much about Toki No,
you know, like technology, you could probably work
that out if you've ever read any of his books
or seen the stories based on them all. The
heroes aren't really using a lot of machines and gears
and all the bad people and ugly places usually do
have a lot of those things. But he's a
lot less uh, you know, allegorical and his
real life correspondence with people, he basically said he
wished they didn't have a combustion engine. He often
didn't have a car. I didn't even think like
things like refrigeration. He wasn't really like a progress
through technology, partly because the guy is born in
Central England right around the turn of the 20th century
and gets to see a lot of not really handsome
things happen to Central England with industrialization and because he
fought in World War One as an infant treatment and
got to see a lot of misuse of technology there
in real ugly ways. So and then now if
you think about the movies and books, if you
didn't already know that what you probably did, you
can see a lot of parallels in there, but
he doesn't like the stuff writing letters to his to
his son who at the time was fighting in World
War Two and the R. A. F.
Basically still doesn't like machines, machinery, combustion engines
. The only decent reason you can think of one
existing is that they can at least get his letters
to him. Now that said, I printed a
bunch of books and things like that and took a
lot of money for it. So he's had to
compromise some of his technology in his life. But
I'm not a big fan. You probably imagine people
on computers all day and things, but people did
probably because of him because again the idea comes through
that we have a lot of people inventing these ways
to try to get into worlds like tokens of paper
and pencils and board games and little pewter figurines and
things like that. Somebody trying to figure out a
way to do it online at the time, people
aren't really getting online And then eventually getting the right
to pay$10 or$15 a month to do it
with millions of people. And to kind of try
to at least maybe sort of awkwardly tie together the
beginning and the end there. Or at least what
I think is a big part of the beginning of
the end. People just sort of desiring to be
in this kind of imaginary spaces the same way people
like reading you know the same C. S.
Lewis book over and over and over again. And
again I think that's kind of part of what I
wanted to get across here that a lot of other
things going on socially in virtual environments is that whether
or not you're interested in the technology or not?
I think all of you are interested in the idea
of stories and narratives and getting into them and I
think that's really what the roots of all this are
just like favorite books. One of the big popular
virtual environments right now is uh Second Life. Again
it's not big on the commercial scale compared to the
big ones but tries to create like a monday in
reality you can go visit with people and make friends
, you don't have to be a night or a
dragon whatever. But still one of the big popular
commercial ones is based on tokens intellectual property. So
even we see things like World of Warcraft that are
real roughly based on that. One of the popular
virtual environment games is directly based on tokens which whether
you can you can decide whether or not, I'm
forcing that analogy back around, but I think that
tells you how directly tied some of the old stories
and classic narratives you might already be interested in are
actually a lot more closely tied to the phenomenon that
you see now, people subscribing to video games than
you might think. It's a little bit story about
some background stuff. If you already knew that,
I'm sorry, you got nothing new. The book
gets into a lot more about uh current use,
Social concerns of the biggest chapters actually dealing with a
lot of kind of social problems and opportunities ranging from
, you know, addiction, educational opportunities and economic
opportunities and opportunities for research, which is what a
lot of people interested in virtual worlds in. As
they say, this is where people do things like
they do in real life. We can study them
in cheaper, more efficient and sometimes more ethical ways
. But that's a little bit about sort of the
background for those of you maybe didn't know whether or
not you had any interest in virtual worlds, it's
actually a little more closely tied to some of the
kind of imaginary worlds you've been interested in for a
long time or seeing people interested in. I'm getting
a little over hair behind so I better go ahead
and finish up and see if they've got anything to
ask about. Is that right? Thanks again.
ST any questions almost think about where do you think
it's going? Well? It would depend on how
you take that question. I think a lot of
the kind of interesting historical stuff has been, you
know, like I said, things that people developed
almost kind of spare time. I think the direction
now it really commercially dominated, like most of the
biggest social impact is by big for commercial worlds.
Like uh, you're not gonna see somebody like a
Richard Bartle who created that mud be popping up on
the radar in any kind of capacity the way something
like a warcraft is. So it's going to go
in the way that commercial, uh, products go
. And I think in a lot of times will
be more and more tied to existing intellectual properties.
That sort of convergence of, it's easier to market
something people already familiar with. Like one of the
big releases in the last year is the Star Wars
based Virtual world. So I think you'll continue to
see this sort of commercialization of existing beloved intellectual properties
for people to play in. Uh probably not a
lot of innovation in some ways because of that.
And but another way to interact with intellectual properties that
you already like. How much freedom do players have
to recreate the narrative? So is it more along
the lines of like a virtual fan fiction or do
they just have to call it through the steps existing
? And that's a good question. I mean,
I mostly focused in in in my attention a lot
on the like said the big commercial virtual worlds because
a big believer that what people are using the most
as the biggest social impact, you know, even
if other things might be more interesting. Um we
often see again because of the usually interested either exploiting
existing uh, intellectual properties are adapting things kind of
in parallel with other intellectual properties. I think a
lot of times you don't want to have a story
that uh you can't have a story with a half
a million people in it where they all get to
be the star. So in like a video game
, everybody can be, you know, bilbo baggins
or luke Skywalker or something. So there's a lot
of tangentially related narratives like you have to, you
know, follow around and make sure The Hobbits don't
get into trouble, but you're not actually one of
them are meeting them or anything. And that way
everybody gets to kind of think they're in a story
that they already know and love usually, by the
way, the way these virtual worlds are that are
commercial is there's kind of a main narrative that would
take hundreds of hours to complete but is linearly complete
double. But there's also a lot of just stuff
you can do with other people to keep people busy
. And that engenders a lot of different players,
which obviously the players and these are studied very closely
to produce now that it's gone more commercial to produce
something that's going to keep them there. So they
have something for people just want to play a game
and get to the end and they have something for
people just want to mess around with friends. Studies
virtual environments. There's people that just sit around in
front of like a tavern where you can get supplies
and like playing music and things that play these like
playing Journey, you know, in from Lord of
the Rings and stuff. And you can tell that's
all they do all day. They're not worried about
killing the Big Dragon or whatever. So there's a
lot of latitude in what you do. But the
actual narrative was pretty structured, kind of interactive story
, like a choose your own adventure more than anything
. But within that people can, if they choose
to they can subvert it and just sit around on
the hill telling stories all days or whatever. What
do we know about what holds the attention? Um
People unlike Tom I learned pong in the place he
didn't mention because I'm older than he is and that
was a bar. But popping quarters in after a
while became a disincentive and I have not been able
to get interested in these environments since. But that
might just be me. But what are the characteristics
of technology and what do we know about the kind
of people who are, who will embrace them or
will find them on interesting? Well, I think
when people talk about virtual worlds and virtual environments by
name, again, it's sort of a subset as
sort of the video games or more of a kind
of in diagram with a lot of overlap. Since
you can have a lot of virtual worlds that don't
have a game component, although that's always been a
problem. There's that Castronovo that I mentioned is a
real well known researcher from economics. It's now in
communication. He got a genius ground or whatever they
call them. Macarthur Grant now to make a virtual
world and made the Shakespeare world. He's going to
study the economies in there and nobody wanted to play
it because he didn't really make much of a game
in there. And I guess it wasn't that fun
to be in Shakespeare I guess. But uh so
they are kind of still games the most popular ones
. But uh there's a little a little bit different
, a lot less of like a partly because originally
because the constraints of an online connection, you can
really only pass a little bit of data back and
forth, and the game might look really rich,
but there's only a tiny amount of data going back
and forth. It's not so much like timing and
completing tasks quicker, faster, better than somebody else
. It's a lot more kind of a a board
game that feels like real time. And a lot
of people sort of made fun of the MMO type
virtual world, because really all you do is you
push buttons and walk around and accomplish things and there's
a real kind of psychological reward based mechanism that you
do a lot of pretty easy mundane tasks for a
long time. So it's probably not the same as
like people playing what you think of as video games
, people have real good hand eye coordination or really
like to beat somebody else as much as people who
like to being an environment socially and they found that
people get addicted, which is a bad thing,
but it tells you probably the the draw of these
virtual environments are not the people who have achievement motivations
as much as like social immersion motivations. So it
really does have more of a space, there's sort
of status for people who have acquired something that took
a long time to acquire. But it's not like
an arcade where you can go be quicker to shoot
somebody down or something. It's almost a little bit
of a different skill structure the way a good board
game player would be or something like that. At
least that's my mama's love it. Think there's often
kind of this people kind of conflict games and virtual
environments when they sort of go in different directions and
of course there's a lot of people unfortunately need to
make money by keeping people on. So they think
of ways to very incrementally use a really simple incremental
rewards structure. You imagine this. So I'll be
and I'll be in this token world, that'll be
exciting. And you get, If you kill 12
pigs out in the field, you get a little
sword and then if you go to kill 12 bigger
pigs, you get another one and then I'll sit
in 10 hours are gone, you know, so
it's not quite like you're thrust into, you know
, battle for Middle Earth or whatever. I don't
know why um, why the game makers try.
Uh, it must be commercial, but I noted
in the, in the old days, I started
with a request right now with my little son.
Yeah, it seemed like they wanted you to stay
on as long as possible. I thought, I
thought it had something to do with with the the
mechanics of internet. The more traffic going to a
certain site, the more popular this site would be
on the searches and stuff like that. Yeah.
I mean, I think the mechanics of it are
a lot like other media as they get more and
more commercialized over time, as they get driven by
whatever is going to make money. So of course
, a good example of television is gonna be very
ratings driven and has to be to be successful.
Um, with video game, with the virtual world
games, excuse me, traditionally hasn't been selling a
copy of a game, which used to be the
video game model. Can you sell A copy?
Because that's, it doesn't matter how much they play
it after that, but subscription based so$10 or
$15 a month. So the goal is to get
people to stay, stay online. And that's where
part of the idea of not having so much a
linear completion point. That's easy to get to like
with a game If you can finish a video game
in 10 hours once you bought, it doesn't matter
you've bought it. But with these ideas to string
people along a little further, add new things,
mundane things and a lot of what it kind of
fascinates me about the most about these in sort of
a depressing ways. All the narratives about people that
almost don't enjoy it. It's sort of a place
you live, kind of like you'll probably enjoy your
jobs, but you don't say another day at work
today or maybe you do sometimes, but surely not
every morning if you're really honest about it. And
there's a classic example from that ultimate game. About
a wired magazine about a guy who was a was
in construction. I can't remember the exact nature of
his job and then he spent a lot of time
building like a castle or something in an ultima and
I had to do you click a button to make
a brick, you click a button to put the
brick there, imagine this medieval landscape and jousts and
battles. But he spent all this time building this
castle and then when he kind of wanted either I
remember he lost interest or needed money or both,
but he sold his account via Ebay and they tracked
the economics of that. But they asked him,
so here's a guy who's some way working with building
buildings in a pretty mundane way in the day and
then he goes home and desert at night and asked
him which was more boring and he said the game
probably when he thought about it. So it tells
you a little in a lot of ways that's probably
helped these virtual worlds have accomplished. Reality is somehow
motivating people to go do kind of relatively mundane things
all day. They're not in like these sword and
sorcery battles there, building houses, saving up money
to buy a new suit, stuff like that.
I can Miami's boys. Yeah. Mm advertisement.
So are you going to study content of these games
? People who are or in your people are playing
and working or created. Where, where where do
you intend? You're, where most of what we've
been doing over the past several years has been kind
of different things with different media. We've been doing
other, never minding for a second. That kind
of non game type media with kind of traditional or
console type games were studied a lot of effects stuff
, partly because it's easier to, you can sit
somebody down in front of a specific game and say
play this and a lot of uh, either content
or technological variables, like somebody enjoy a game more
experience more arousal with a different kind of controller with
the virtual world type games. We've mostly studied content
, which also means what people are doing in there
. Like I did a big analysis of several 100
characters just by paying people to play a game,
which is a pretty good deal for them and then
recording the content and saying what our characters like,
for example, found there really disproportionately male and white
, which was in some ways mirroring the player base
, but also in other ways that might kind of
have social statements about reality and the players in it
. Increasingly though, we've been able to kind of
study behavior online by just uh, example, we
had a master student last year's now graduated, had
a really clever study where he had different avatars.
They were either male or female and attractive or not
. And he asked people to do him a small
favor, like show them where something was in town
and he measured their compliance and he found predictably that
the female avatars got more help, which I thought
was interesting. But if he said he was a
man, he got a generally consistent amount of help
regardless if he said he was a woman, uh
, his avatar, he got more help of,
his avatar is more attractive, which I thought was
kind of uh, online replication of the idea that
, you know, if I came here and well
, I kind of am disheveled and my shoes are
a little scuffed that some of the gender norms say
that that won't be used to judge me as much
as if I were a woman, that, you
know, you just take care of her shoes,
let's not listen to her or whatever. So that
a little more examples of online behavior, but I
don't know for sure where we're going next. But
that's what's interested me the most kind of observing people
and really gently kind of doing field experiment type manipulations
to see how people respond. Yes, ma'am,
wow. I guess I'm looking and saying he's going
to find your research and then where he went the
result, I would say that most of my research
has quite a bit overlap with social psychology in terms
of responses to media as a sort of stimulus.
And that's even though most of the publications or whatever
would be sort of more media communication feel as if
the citations and things probably kind of show a pretty
good intersection with social psychology. Like like I went
to the A. P. A. Convention in
august and I didn't feel like I was on another
planet or anything any morning. But also I don't
know. Thank you. You're in the book.
Ready player one. No, I haven't. It
doesn't sound familiar to me actually. No, I
have to see this must be able behind. I'll
believe you. It's on the audio. I mean
, it's it's our collection. It's a sweet pea
review of, of gaming from day one and it's
terrific lee excited. It's a game when you're,
when you're reading, you're playing a game. I'm
in the right place. I'll have to see if
I can track it down before I leave. I'll
do that. Anybody from collections here? Let's get
yeah, I haven't. So it sounds like sounds
like a good one. We have some cookies and
water. And then let's thank. That's what everyone
. Thank you. Thanks again.