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Say what you will about Mayor Doug Wilder, he is not a lazy man. Not busy enough single-handedly busting up the rusted guts of Richmond city government, he is now taking on Web 2.0 by explaining (as patiently as he can, understand) the exciting new world of online collaboration. This week he clarifies once and for all what the term RSS really stands for: Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Syndication (guess what–it’s neither).
Go to Richmond.com to submit a question to the Mayor about podcasting, social bookmarking, or tagging, or to post a comment to the mayor’s blog.

If you haven’t already, you should check out the very sincere, extremely wizardly diaries of 30 year old man-boy and Dungeon Master, Babycakes. Read ‘em all at creator Brad Neely’s page at SuperDeluxe.com, including my favorite, I am Babycakes Diary #3. Check out the Professor Brothers while you are at it. Love that Kenny Winker.

The folks down at Chop Suey Books are always coming up with new ways of bringing a little hippy stink to Richmond. First it was puppet shows. Then the Bizarre Market. Now it is the Mo’book Mo’bike Mobile, a traveling bookmobile-cum-bike repair shop. The best thing about the mo’book mo’bike mobile, though–they not only give away the books, but the bike repairs are free, too:

Books on Wheels is dedicated to providing free books and bike parts/bike repair to Richmond and beyond. The organization distributes books through a mobile book and bicycle repair bus that travels to communities and certain community events to provide services free of charge to people who may lack transportation or resources to obtain such products or information. This organization is able to distribute books and bike parts to a variety of communities, though there is a focus providing such resources to economically disadvantaged communities. By providing books and bikes we strive expand our community’s access to information and transportation. Books onWheels has bi-monthly events within the city of Richmond and makes sporadic trips to other cities.

Last week I linked to a 3 way debate going on about Second Life between Henry Jenkins, Clay Shirky and Beth Coleman. The online debate concludes with each of the authors (well, almost) posting their follow-up responses to their respective blogs. You will find Henry’s here; Beth’s here. I will link to Clay’s when it is posted.

Update: Clay has posted his response. you’ll find it here.

Author and prominent games & learning researcher James Paul Gee wrote an article called “What Would a State of the Art Instructional Video Game Look Like?” In the article Gee argues that many off the shelf commercial games are already state of the art learning games, citing as an example Full Spectrum Warrior. His argument is that the learning is already there, in what he calls the game’s “authentic professionalism.” So, even though players are playing a game, shooting enemies, etc., on a deeper level they are building expertise in a specific knowledge domain, learning how to behave, how to communicate, and what skills are important.

Could we ask the same hypothetical question about Alternate Reality Games? For a player fully engaging in the activities of a well-designed ARG, I think there is a similar “authentic professionalism’ taking place. Players need to contact and negotiate with the larger community that develops around the game. They need to investigate the boundaries of the game space, recognize a domain of knowledge to which they might contribute. Players need to help establish, or at least learn, the communication rules that form around the gameplay, etc. Useful stuff, if you ask me.

To play a video game, a player has to actually sit down, joystick or computer keyboard in hand, and turn it on. Otherwise, nothing happens. Not so for an ARG. The game play in an ARG is driven partly by the designers, and, perhaps more importantly, partly by the active participation of the players. In many ARGs, there are many players who sit by the sidelines, lurking, joining in only rarely, or they participate for social rather than ludic reasons. For this reason, game play in an ARG can be fairly hierarchical, with much of the game being advanced by a small number of intensely active players, are supported by a larger group of less committed, more casual players. These player participation levels move outward, in concentric rings, until you get to the far-flung players who play peripherally and rarely contribute.

While the individual path of a video game differs from player to player, the overall experience is the same. Most importantly, there is a reset button. The ARG experience is always going to differ from player to player, depending on how much he or she participates. And if individual players decide not to play, too bad. There is no reset button. The game continues.

To implement an ARG in a formal educational environment, everyone must participate at some level. If there are serious learning objectives to achieve, gameplay can’t be optional. So, unlike Full Spectrum Warrior or Civilization, the learning in an ARG is not found in some separate game structure but is distributed throughout the community of players.

So, for me, the question remains: what would an educational ARG look like?

to be continued…

Not only does living in a “post-9/11 world” require the suspension of certain constitutional freedoms–you know, habeus corpus, protection from illegal search and seizure, right to privacy, right to a free trial, and um, what’s the other one?–oh yeah, freedom of speech–it also must require each of us to suspend our
sense of humor as well. A guerrilla marketing campaign for the upcoming Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie, in which Lite Brite-like circuit boards depicting “Mooninite” characters from the show were placed in various public locations in Chicago, LA, New York, and Boston, scares Boston officials shitless, causing them to shut down several major expressways and bridges. Apparently officials in the other cities didn’t notice them, or recognized them for what they were: harmless pranks.

The description on CNN says it all:

Authorities have arrested two men in connection with electronic light boards depicting a middle-finger-waving moon man that triggered repeated bomb scares around Boston on Wednesday and prompted the closure of bridges and a stretch of the Charles River.

So, these are the folks in charge of our security in this “post-9/11 world”? They see some cheap circuit board with batteries and wires and a “middle-finger-waving moon man” and immediately leap to the conclusion that the device is some kind of dirty bomb. While the ad campaign does bear some responsibility for not acting sooner to address the growing panic of Boston officials, isn’t it a bit frightening that the we haven’t become more sophisticated in identifying terrorist threats, separating the real ones from pranks? The bluster and indignation surrounding the arrest of the two gentlemen responsible for planting the devices in the Boston area should be embarrassment, and should cause officials to re-evaluate their ability to recognize and contain true threats to public safety. Otherwise, our public spaces are bound to become sterile places, and our creative impulses replaced with fear.

There is an interesting conversation of sorts taking place between Henry Jenkins, Clay Shirky and Beth Coleman about Second Life, what Beth calls a “3X3 posting”. Each has drawn a line in the sand re: SL on their respective blogs in response to an earlier, some would say contentious, post by Shirky about the skewed membership numbers and inflated use of Second Life as reported by Linden Labs. While Shirky’s shot over the bow caused the SL discussion boards to light up with ALL CAP denunciations of his comments as abject heresy, his comments, whether you agree or disagree, have generated a much-needed discussion about the real value of SL and what the future of virtual worlds in general hold for entertainment, communication, and education.
Shirky sees SL as another in a long line of overhyped technologies, like MOOs and MUDs, that eventually end up in the innovation junkyard–or at least remain niche applications, “of considerable interest to a small percentage of the people who try it.” While Shirky admits that there are very interesting activities happening in SL, his argument basically focuses on numbers, and the fact that SL’s supposed low adoption rate bodes ill for something being billed by many as Web 3.0.

The logic behind this belief is simple: most people who try Second Life don’t like it. Something like five out of six new users abandon it before a month is up. The three month abandonment figure seems to be closer to nine out of ten. (This figure is less firm, as it has only been reported colloquially, with no absolute numbers behind it.)

More importantly, the current active population is still an unknown. (Call this metric something like “How many users in the last 30 days have accounts more than 30 days old?”) We know the highest that figure could be is in the low hundreds of thousands, but no one other than the Lindens (and, presumably, their bigger marketing clients) knows how much lower it is than this theoretical maximum.

The poor adoption rate is a form of aggregate judgment. Anything bruited for wide adoption would have trouble with 85%+ abandonment, whether software or toothpaste. One possible explanation for this considerable user defection might be a technological gap. I do not doubt that improvements to the client and server would decrease the abandonment rate. I do doubt the improvement would be anything other than incremental, given 5 years and tens of millions in effort already.

Jenkins is less interested in the numbers and more interested in SL’s unique participatory culture.

The numbers matter if we are asking whether Second Life represents “the future of the web” but personally, I have never believed that SL is going to be a mass movement in any meaningful sense of the term. As I stated last time, I do not buy the whole nonsense that immersive worlds represent web 3.0 and will in any way displace the existing information structures that exist in the web, any more than I think audio-visual communications is going to replace written communications anytime soon…(snip) I do not even think that Second Life represents the future of multiplayer games — it represents one end of a spectrum of player experiences which maximizes player generated content and minimizes the prestructured experiences we associate with most computer games. World of Warcraft represents the other end of that spectrum and so far, that model draws more customers. My own ideal lays perhaps some place in the middle. As such, this becomes a debate not about affordances but about the desirability of professional entertainment versus the pleasures of participatory culture. It also becomes an exercise in mapping what some have described as the pyramid of participation in which the harder it is to create content, the higher the percentage of participants who will chose to consume content someone else has produced. What’s striking to me is not that so many people still prefer to consume professionally generated content (it has always been thus) but what a growing percent of people are willing to consume amateur content and what a smaller but still significant percentage of people are willing to generate and share content they produced themselves. Second Life interests me as a particular model of participatory culture.

Coleman is still somewhat cautious about SL, but more optimistic than either Jenkins or Shirky about its future. She calls for more rigorous measurement of SL use and user engagement–for collecting the real SL data that Shirky says is currently lacking–but also sees in SL parallels to the early Web, another innovation whose imminent failure many prognosticators wrongly predicted.

I guess mutant-indie-minority culture is not what it used to be. OK, perhaps the future tense of virtual world development will not be dominated by radical experimentation in nation building and identity play. The cyber-strip joints will get moved to the periphery of town as it were. There is a civilizing mission going on, but it is not from the top down.

These are worlds made by user-generated-content. The “world gods” have provided the code, servers, and procedural aspects. On these collaborative grids, world building is done in the image of its users: us. This stage of open-ended development parallels, in many respects, the early moments in the popularization of the Internet. The shift from multi-format Internet to World Wide Web, with its html code, coincided with a population of net citizens represented by an explosion of individual Web pages. In the mid ‘90s, people had doubts that this “e-commerce thing” would work. Uh, guess it caught on.

Like Jenkins, Coleman also sees the value of SL’s shared social space. While Jenkins doesn’t see us spending too much time in these virtual spaces, Coleman apparently thinks we could come to see them as intimate locations, as homes:

What virtual worlds promise is an augmentation of human-to-human communication. We seem to yearn for synchronous connectivity and virtual worlds promise to deliver exactly that. Looking at the 150-year build out of telecommunications capabilities, what we find with many of the current platforms from text message to instant messaging to virtual worlds are designs for simultaneous connectivity. Putting a human face to things is a lot of what this is about, even if that human face is a codebot. These platforms are not simply to facilitate shopping but to develop further (or perhaps more massively) the ways in which virtual and “portable” spaces can be inhabited as a home.

Like Shirky, I too see the success of SL partly as a diffusion issue, especially regarding using it as a platform for formal and informal learning. I have noticed real disconnect between novice users’ ideas about using SL, which are usually pretty enthusiastic and full of promise, and their actual use of SL–actually logging in, building, becoming expert users. For novice users, it quickly becomes apparent that to do the things they want to do in SL requires them to either commit lots of time inworld, or else commit lots of money–to buy the things they don’t otherwise have time to build themselves. Perhaps some of this disconnect has to do with my age, and the ages of those who seem enthusiastic about SL but never get around to trying it out.
But, regardless of SL’s viability, it has opened up new possibilities in the ways we interact with each other, and enlarged our concepts of identity, ownership and collaboration. The deeper structures that SL is built on I think will last, even outlast SL itself, where a visit 10 years from now will reveal a world of sandy ruins, decorated with the sun-bleached bones of long-dead avatars (all 3000 of them).

VCU continues its Creating and Consuming Culture in the Digital Age lecture series, kicking off the spring schedule on February 6th with a Roundtable discussion on blogging in the arts and humanities. Guest bloggers include Charles Bernstein, founder of the Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY—Buffalo, Tyler Green, editor and writer for the Modern Art Notes blog, and Dan Cohen, Director of Research Projects at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Three men, zero women, by the way, a fact that would be of interest to Kathryn Hayles, author of My Mother was a Computer and Hillis Professor of Literature and Media Arts at UCLA. She will talk on Gender in Cyberspace on February 26th. On April 11, the lecture series ends with a collaboratively edited bang flourish whimper “conversation” with Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikipedia.

I received this message on my voicemail at work. At first, I thought it was a “rabbithole” into a new ARG, but then I realized it was just a mentally unstable person calling my toll-free number to exorcise a few demons before an afternoon nap. Have a listen:
http://richardsebastian.com/blog/audio/5663.mp3