Hedgehog & Fox » Virtual Worlds & Games

More on Virtual Worlds

jtcobb — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:28:01 +0000

I recently did a post on virtual worlds that referenced Gary Hayes’ “metaverse” tour. For those interested in this topic, I just came across Virtual Worlds: Comparisons and Overviews, which also references Hayes’ video and includes a wealth of other information and insights. I recommend it.

Note also that Google announced yesterday that it will be shutting down its virtual platform, Lively, by year end.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out my earlier 7 Virtual World Essentials for Meeting Planners post.

Jeff Cobb
Hedgehog & Fox

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Touring the virtual worlds of the metaverse

jtcobb — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 23:34:19 +0000

Virtual worlds. After generating a great deal of buzz a year or two ago, interest in them seemed to fade considerably, or even turn downright negative. Work on virtual world platforms has marched steadily on, however, and the number of users has continued to rise. In a session I led with colleague Hal Richman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last week, interest was clearly high in the potential Second Life and other platforms might offer for leadership development. The discussion inspired me to start doing a bit more poking around in the universe of virtual worlds (to pick up where I left off long ago with Second Life), and one of the useful items my early searching has produced is the following video tour of a long list of virtual worlds. (Click through if you do not see the video.)

Popout

Links for each of the sites in the video, which was produced by game developer Gary Hayes, are included below in the order in which the respective sites appear. While most of these do not represent great platforms for organizational initiatives -many are aimed at children, for instance – they do offer some good insights into how virtual worlds are being used and, to borrow the term favored by John Seely Brown, what they “afford.” Aside from Second Life, organizations that are serious about looking at virtual worlds for educational or productivity purposes might want to have closer look at Qwaq, Prototerra, or Open Croquet. (Though who am I to judge whether Barbie Online might not be the perfect platform for your purposes!)

I’ve also mentioned John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas’ Why Virtual Worlds Can Matter before in Taking Games Seriously, and I think it is worth recommending again here as reading to accompany your exploration of these worlds.

Have fun.

Jeff Cobb
Hedgehog & Fox

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Games, Associations, Generations

jtcobb — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:25:41 +0000

I am just back from the American Society of Association Executives annual conference (with a few days of vacation thrown in on the end). It was a great event, though I regret that I was not able to get to the gaming session that Sue Pelletier recently highlighted on her Face2Face blog: How online gaming will affect the future of associations.

As I noted recently in Taking Games Seriously, games – and in particular, multi-user online games – are an element of the social Web that I think few organizations are watching as closely as they should. The “gamer disposition,” of which John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas have written, has great potential value for organizations. And serious games – which I recently wrote about in a WE magazine article, Playing for Change – can be powerful tools for creating social change as well as engaging customers, members, and employees. I am thrilled to see that the gaming phenomenon made it onto the agenda at ASAE.

My only criticism of the session – and this is based solely on Sue’s recounting of it in her post, since I was not at the session – is that presenter Susan Fox seems to have placed the usual emphasis on generational differences. I always chaff a bit at this, whether the topic is gaming or the social Web in general.

In the first place, the numbers for games do not skew as young as people instinctively think. The average age of a gamer, for instance, is 35. (See ESA Essential Facts.)

Perhaps more importantly, broad generational differences, or even somewhat more specific distinctions like “digital native” and “digital immigrant” are blunt instruments at best for describing what are ultimately rich, complex cognitive phenomena at the individual level. While early exposure – the main advantage of younger generations – can facilitate certain types of learning, it’s not at all clear that youth in and of itself predisposes an individual to the gaming disposition. Any number of factors can contribute to older minds flourishing (or not) in online games or other forms of collective intelligence: social circumstances, personality, and cognitive abilities, just to name a few.

I may be putting too fine a point on the issue, but when it comes to the social Web, I hear the generational argument thrown out too often as an excuse for deferring action, taking no action, or pushing action to those who may not really be in the best position to lead. I don’t expect that most current organizational leaders are likely to transform themselves into World of Warcraft guild leaders – but I am betting the best ones will ignore generational generalizing, trick out an avatar, and give games a try.

JTC

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Taking Games Seriously

jtcobb — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:41:01 +0000

I recently wrote an article about serious games that will appear in the first volume of WE , a new Internet magazine. By games I mean the type of high-tech online and console-based interactivity represented by World of Warcraft or Nintendo’s highly-popular Wii.

By “serious” games, I mean these same types of games, but intended for purposes other than pure entertainment—for training, for instance, or for addressing a social issue, like the online game Darfur is Dying does. Really, organizations need to be taking both of these types of games seriously.

While I would not describe myself as an avid gamer – you won’t catch me leading raids in World of Warcraft on Saturday afternoons – I am nonetheless intrigued by the educational possibilities that games offer as well as how they fit into our overall conception of the social Web. That certainly includes leveraging games for marketing purposes, but it also cuts right to the core of how organizations are managed and led going forward.

A recent Harvard Business Review article, for instance, references World of Warcraft (more than 10 million players and counting) in suggesting that:

The best sign that someone’s qualified to run an internet startup may not be an MBA degree, but level 70 guild leader status. [As quoted in a very good, highly-recommended article by Tom Chatfield in Prospect Magazine. Also see the post on this over at Educational Games Research.]

Guilds are central to WOW, as are social relationships in general. For one thing, you are unlikely to conduct a successful raid against an enemy without strong relationships. And, of course, defeating the enemy is among the more obvious goals of the game.

Parallels can be drawn, of course, to the daily activities of less belligerent organizations. John Seely Brown, in collaboration with Douglas Thomas (aside: Seely Brown must be among the truly great intellectual collaborators of our age) has suggested that there is a “gamer disposition” that is of great value to organizations. “The gamer disposition has five key attributes,” write Seely Brown and Thomas on a Harvard Business Publishing Conversation Starter posting.

More than attitudes or beliefs, these attributes are character traits that players bring into game worlds and that those worlds reinforce. We believe that gamers who embody this disposition are better able than their nongamer counterparts to thrive in the twenty-first-century workplace.

The five specific attributes are:

They are bottom-line oriented.
They understand the power of diversity.
They thrive on change.
They see learning as fun.
They marinate on the “edge.”

I’ll leave it to the Seely Brown and Thomas article to fill in the details on these attributes, and I’ll also point you to an excellent (but longer and significantly more challenging) piece by these two titled Why Virtual Worlds Can Matter which covers similar points and many others in much more detail.

No offense to the fine folks at Harvard Business Publishing, but when these kinds of thoughts hit the HBSP site, they have generally moved beyond the cutting edge. Nonetheless, I have a hunch that few organizations are putting serious thought into what the games phenomenon means for their future—internally, or out in the market. If the “social” side of the Web has been relegated to younger generations, in spite of evidence to the contrary, then one can only imagine the place that games occupy in the mind of the average executive.

But games are a growing force, a pervasive one that is beginning to overtake more traditional media like movies and television. Here are a few recent statistics via the Educational Games Research blog:

65% of US households play videogames
38% of US households own a console
Women over 18 make up a larger percentage of gamers than boys under 17 (33% to 18%)

Age, too, is not the factor that many would make it out to be. The average age of a gamer is 35, and it is telling that AARP, of all organizations, recently launched a games portal (with a focus, naturally, on “brain games”).

If any readers out there work for organizations that are doing interesting things with games, whether for training, marketing, or other purposes, it would be great to hear from you. In any event, it is a topic you may want to start raising from time to time around the water cooler – and the executive suite.

JTC

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