(Not a) Game Friday: Virtual Worlds 101

Today, an interview with Sibley Verbeck (Hathor's his virtual name), founder/CEO of the Electric Sheep Company, which does experience design for real-world companies in virtual worlds including Second Life. It’s a little disjointed, but the key points are: 1. Virtual worlds provide an opportunity for social engagement with content, and 2. Virtual worlds allow designers (and evaluators, and educators) to explore new modes of content delivery that are physically impossible in the real world, but may provide rich and new ways for visitors to learn.

Let’s start with the basics. How would you define virtual worlds?

Virtual worlds are a communication medium in which people use avatars (animated characters) to interact and have shared experiences in a 3D environment. Second Life is the virtual world to take off as an open platform where anyone can create content and own intellectual property for what they create. It’s not a game—there’s no goal or restrictions on how you use it—instead, it’s a technology platform for immersion and interaction, like the web.

Most museums already have websites. Why would they want a Second Life presence?

Well, they already have telephones as well. The point is that this is a very different kind of communication medium, and it’s good for different things. Virtual worlds are the first communication medium where people can remotely have shared experiences—not just communicating in real time, but interacting with each other and with content. That is its primary strength, whereas the web’s is efficiently communicating information.

I’m not an expert on museums who can comment on why museums have websites and what they use that platform for. It seems that the primary reasons museums have websites are to convey basic information about the museum and as a marketing mechanism for content. And while a website can increase interest in the museum, it’s not a way for people to have a museum experience. It’s not a way to do it socially. Websites are more like picture books about the museum—in virtual worlds, you can have a social, real-time, interactive experience. The browsability is much greater—you can walk into a room, turn your head—there’s no clicking through content. Content that’s inherently 3D can be shared more naturally in this way.

It seems like the real world museums that are starting to work in Second Life are pursuing the social interaction element of the platform through events. The Exploratorium did the solar eclipse, and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum is doing all kinds of programs around Darfur.

I think that’s partly because they are dipping their toe in the water—individual events are a less expensive way to try it out than having a sustained presence. But if a museum really committed to developing a space in a virtual world, there are so many other physical things to explore. Exhibits that can’t be built in real life because of any number of prohibitions could exist in the virtual world. You could also pursue iterations of objects and experiences from the real museum—in the museum, you only have one version. But on this platform, you could go in lots of different directions. You can also create a highly themed, immersive, living museum experience quite inexpensively and safely—no one’s going to break things. It’s not like being there in real life, but it has other strengths with regard to the extent of interactivity and immersion possible.

If a museum were to go beyond dipping a toe in the water to create something bigger…

Doing a really great project in Second Life is more substantial—and expensive—than just putting some pictures up on a virtual wall. Even if you rely on volunteers and users to help create and assemble the content, you have to manage that process. It seems similar to me to what would be involved in developing a temporary exhibit or set of programs.

How do you measure success of a project like this in Second Life?

There are some obvious metrics—how much time to people spend coming there, can you convert those people to visitors to the real museum—but I assume you’d look larger than that. What’s the mission of the museum? You would measure it in the same way you measure the success of an exhibit or a museum. What do people learn? How do they feel when they leave?

There are some philosophical barriers to extending the museum mission. For example, Richard commented that most people in the museum (and funding) world think of games as for kids.

The median age for time spent in SL is early 30s, so you have an adult audience. Those people are not confused about whether this is a game—so you can start by reaching out to them.

Is now the time for museums to get into Second Life? There are still a lot of problems and it’s not exactly user-friendly yet…

Some other people on your blog raised some issues also about the experience and features—like the communication features—which are going to significantly change this year. Linden Labs has expressed they are well along with audio integration into Second Life, and I think there will be many other features around communication and social networking and ease of use that will come along soon. I think we’re right on the cusp of a lot of that happening. And the usage of SL is continuing to increase exponentially.

So given the time it takes to plan and test something, I think now is the time for museums to go in and figure things out and those institutions that do so will become a leader in this area as this technology is exploding and those features emerge. I know this is a tough sell for grant-funded institutions, but there can be opportunities if the funding is to figure out what is this medium and how can it be used for our mission? Go and do some studies and publish them.

There are probably a lot of museum folks out there with expertise in exhibit design, experience design, and evaluation of museum experiences who could translate their skills directly to those kinds of questions.

I think that’s absolutely true. Whenever a new technology comes along, people talk about the evolution of use: people port their expertise in other platforms into the new one until they figure out how to use the new medium. But another reality is that a lot of people working in virtual worlds don’t have the experience design background, and they think of this as “totally new”—but there are lots of translatable experiences out there, and the museum platform is a huge example of that. Museum people could be the leaders in creating superlative learning experiences of all kinds in the virtual platform.

To me, one of the most exciting possibilities in virtual worlds is to be able to throw off all the barriers of real world physics, etc. and design something fantastical. The Sheep built something for Nature that I love—a bubble gum machine that spits out models of chemical compounds. Then again, there are some fun things you can do in the virtual world—step into a 3D rendering of a painting, ride a dinosaur—that some museum people would hate because they seem disrespectful to objects or antithetical to an educational mission.

This technology is only relevant for those who are comfortable with and want to pursue some of those more playful and creative opportunities. But there are “safe” ways to deepen people’s engagement with content, too. If you go on an audio tour in a museum—well, you could really do it in 3D and bring it to life—show the sculpture taking form, how it was built. And a lot of this you could do on the web in 2D—but how can you present in 3D in a way that’s better than 2D? That question is wide open, and I don’t think anyone’s addressing that really well yet in Second Life.

And exhibit designers, who are used to building in physical spaces, could do that—forget the restrictions and create something really hot.

Exactly. You could deconstruct objects. You could reorganize the museum, move things around, create new structures for content flow, in a way you can’t do in physical space.

I think this goes back to the strong reasons for museums to go into virtual worlds. There are basic rules of exhibition design that are mostly a good thing, but can also be limiting in terms of creativity. In the virtual world, there are opportunities to explore building things in whole different ways, which may, in turn, affect how we think about what we can design in real museums.

And it’s worth pointing out that while Second Life can be used in an escapist way as a fantasy land, it’s also a communication tool. Are we escaping reality when we use the web? Use the phone? And it’s a more advanced tool because it accommodates a more social, human experience.

This is already a much more human environment than the web, even though it’s clunky. For example, when we put on the Major League Baseball Home Run Derby in Second Life (in which people could cheer, wave foam hands, and chat in the stadium as avatars reenacted the actual hits), we had huge buy-in. People who watched the Derby on the web stayed for 23 minutes on average. In Second Life, they stayed for the whole thing. They were doing it socially. Here’s another example—the average unique person who logs in to SL in a given day uses it for four hours.

Couldn’t they be dormant for some of that time?

Well, you automatically get logged out if you do that for too long. The point is, if you pop to a website and browse around, maybe you stay 7-8 minutes and then you move on. If you pop into Second Life, you see something, you touch it, you build something, you talk to someone, and it’s been an hour and a half. So for museums who use Second Life instead of or in addition to the web, people will interact with the content more, talk about it more, engage more deeply in Second Life than they will on a website.
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There are many more conversations and debates to have and things to think about museums in virtual worlds. Personally, I am not someone with strong interest in designing or engaging in virtual experiences, but I appreciate that this is a technology that is growing, and while I--and many museums--may not be an early adopter, I think it's useful to be aware of what's going on. And I think there are other uses--networking, prototyping, distance learning--worth exploring that we didn't get to touch on here.

If you want to pursue more, here are some good links:
--There is a Museums in Second Life group led by Richard Urban that hosts meet-ups, tours, and discussions in Second Life.
--“We the Sheeple,” the Electric Sheep blog, which covers everything from the thousand-foot level to the nuts and bolts of virtual world projects.
--Metaverse Messenger, the premier newspaper of Second Life, is of mixed quality but can give you some sense of what's going on in-world.

Quickie: Dumb Crowds, Smart Crowds

There's a brilliant post today by Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users on user-generated and shared content. "Collective Intelligence" versus "Dumbness of Crowds." Enjoy.

Your Questions about Second Life?

For game Friday this week, I plan to interview the esteemed Sibley Verbeck, founder/CEO of the Electric Sheep Company, the largest "metaverse applications" professional services company out there. He's also my fiance. When Sibley decided to start a Second Life-focused business last year, I thought he was nuts. I argued strenuously with him about the value and importance of something that looked to me like a diversion for nerds with big graphics cards. Well, a year, 40 employees, awesome projects, and a whole lot of hype later, I've been converted. I now believe in Second Life, not as a game environment, but as a new platform for social interactions with people, objects, and ideas. I used to ask, "how would I ever use this?" But now it seems evident that this is a great platform for long-distance, contemporaneous experiences--at concerts, ball games, museums, workplaces, reunions--of all kinds.

There have been lots of posts all over the place about Second Life and museums. Sibley and I plan to discuss the potential--and barriers--for museums in Second Life. We'll talk about exhibits, collections, educational programs, and audience. We'll talk about good and bad reasons for museums to get into Second Life.

But don't let him preach to the (mostly) adoring choir. What would YOU like to know about Second Life? There are plenty of places to learn the basics. Check out Sheep Giff Constable's excellent commentary on SL good, bad, and overhyped. What would you like to add to the conversation?

Museum Cocktail Chatter

It's the new year, and while I spent the holiday drinking rum punch from a bucket and playing an absurdly fun game called testicle toss, perhaps others of you were at more sophisticated soirees involving clinking glasses and the American cocktail question of choice, "What do you do?"

I've met many people who struggle with this obsessive "what do you do?" business. I have friends who refuse to ask, others who come up with clever alternatives ("What keeps you busy?"), and then the rare people who have some other attribute that trumps that question ("How old is your baby?" "Is that piercing uncomfortable?"). But the fact is that when meeting new acquaintances, most Americans ask the same few establishing questions to determine whether further interaction with the acquaintance is desirable.

Which got me thinking about museums, and the metaphor Elisa Giaccardi and I discussed about museums providing "encounters" between exhibits and visitors. Just as there are basic patterns to the cocktail chatter we have at parties, there are patterns to the conversations we have with exhibits. So, in the celebratory spirit, I offer up some party animals from the exhibit world, and their language of acquaintanceship.

The enthusiastic know-it-all: "Did you know this? See this? Bet you didn't know this!"

The aloof, mysterious one: "I have something incredibly interesting that I have no intention of sharing with you."

The bully: "Try this!"

The foreigner: "I would love to engage with you. Sadly, given our communication barrier, all we can do is wave our hands at each other."

The self-centered one: "You can wonder about anything, as long as it's about me."

I'm sure you could come up with others (and if you do, please add them here as comments!). But the common factor of these museum exhibit party-goers is their self-absorption. In fact, I'd argue that most exhibits are lousy conversationalists. At least humans can pretend to be interested in what the other person has to say and how they want to engage. How many times have you been in a museum and felt like a kid at a cocktail party, patted on the head, talked past or down to or not at all? I like this analogy of the party conversation as a fresh way to evaluate exhibits. How do you meet exhibits? Which ones do you want to talk to, and which ones turn you off?

Game Friday: Interactive Conversation

Remember "You Don't Know Jack"? First released in 1995 by an educational films company, the game has grown into the Obama of the trivia world. It's sassy, smart, and successful. The company that created it, now called Jellyvision, Inc., has gone on to build other games and tutorials, but their bread and butter is the crafting of honest, successful "interactive conversation interfaces."

What's an "interactive conversation interface"? At its worst, it's the automated voice from your bank that you'd like to shove back into whatever mechanized hellbox she came from. At its best, it's a lively, clear, trustworthy AI program that responds to your inputs appropriately and usefully. It reacts when you move. It goes at your pace. It gives you the suggestions you want. In short, it's a killer interactive.

Jellyvision has now released a list of Jack Principles on Interactive Conversation Interface design. You may want to skim them and then try one of their simple games, like Dis or Dat, or check out one of their more serious applications in the iCi showroom. They seem pithy at first, but after seen in practice, you'll go back for more.

There's nothing too shocking in this design list, but it's a great alternate view into the window of interactive exhibit design. So often people bemoan the limitations of unfacilitated exhibits--the phenomena that goes unnoticed, the deep learning overlooked. Folks like Jellyvision are creating interactive educational experiences that are totally computer-facilitated, and yet they look, sound, and feel like you are interacting with a human--or, if not a human, something infinitely more pleasant and interesting than the automated phone demon.

The guidelines start with pacing--pretty well-trod territory--but then move to creating and maintaining the illusion of awareness (of the user). Game designers try as hard as they can to make you feel like the game is a responsive thing created solely to serve the player, your own private butler handing you machetes or poker chips as needed. The guidelines talk about responding to users' inactions as well as actions, taking into account their real time and place, creating a sense of intimacy. In short, creating a consistent, positive environment for user interaction.

Everyone who walks up to a museum kiosk knows it isn't "alive". But the Jellyvision demos convince me that people's engagement with museum content could increase significantly if people feel that the exhibits are there not as conversation pieces, but "interactive conversation" partners. That's right, Calder mobile. Talk to me. Tell me something good.

Game Friday: Collection Management in the Garden

Every year, there’s a Flash festival/conference, Flashforward, that highlights novel uses of flash in web navigation, art, games, instructional demos, and more. Today, I want to share a small application that was nominated for the prize in Navigation… but it’s a lot more than that. Appropriate for the holiday time, forget e-cards and give someone a flower from the Hope Garden… and think a bit about collection organization at the same time.

The Hope Garden was set up by BSD Medical, a company in Utah that specializes in a kind of cancer treatment called hyperthermia. I didn’t know that when I first arrived and planted a flower for a friend who was struggling (who was then perplexed by my linking her with cancer, which was not her issue). But no matter. This is the first social e-carding I’ve experienced. You can plant a flower for someone with a small message, and then you can also wander around the garden, reading the (mostly inspirational and loving) flower messages that have been planted by others. You can “water” flowers with prerecorded responses (Thank you, All the best, etc), and you can search for specific flowers with a text search.

This is a powerful example of how a collection of user-generated messages—most of which are rather generic—can accomplish something impactful. I have an emotional reaction to all of these flowers of goodwill, in different languages, shared for different reasons. I know how much I love and care for the person to whom I gave a flower—and it makes me (and her) feel good to see others expressing the same feelings in the same space. The metaphor of a garden is apt; I feel like my contribution is helping “grow” a more loving place.

That all sounds pretty New Age-y. There’s another way to think about this garden—as a way to present a collection for viewing. The Hope Garden won accolades for navigation, and indeed, it offers an addicting way to “surf” through largely generic material. You are focused on individual flowers, but always in the context of other flowers in the garden. There’s no map or locator; just click and explore.

What if a museum’s virtual collection was presented in an abstract form like this? Rather than viewing one artifact with pertinent info at a time, having the opportunity to navigate through many artifacts in a contextualized location? Space exhibits in a meteor shower? Sculptures in a garden? Coins in a fountain? The beauty and consistency of the Hope Garden keeps me tied in and makes me want to keep exploring. I’m immersed. My dwell time goes up. Heck, maybe I could actually learn something.

Thing a Day: Good or Glib?

We all have processes by which we create things. Maybe you’re a painter who sketches the scene outside your window over and over to get started. Or the mathematician with half-proofs splayed around the kitchen. The thing is, most of us take pains to conceal these processes and misfires from others. We use these processes to get us to an end goal, then wipe the desk clean and present the finale as an isolated, perfect thing.

I recently had an experience that changed my perspective on this. I have a side-life as a poet, and had been having trouble finishing some poems I’d been working on for months. Rather than continue banging my head against these poems, I took a break and devised a new plan. For one month, I would write a poem every day in under 30 minutes. I would finish each one in one sitting, without revision. So? Just another personal process, right? Well, there’s a twist: I put them on the internet.

I didn’t decide to post the poems on the internet—initially—to be viewed by anyone else. It was a practical decision; I write poems from different locations and different computers, and a googlepages site seemed the easiest way to keep them all in one place, easily retrievable from anywhere. But then, once I’d set up the site, it seemed silly NOT to share the info about it with others. I sent an email to a few friends and family members letting them know, let out a deep breath, and hit send. I was nervous—previously, I’d only shared published work with others—and I knew that my goal with the poems was not quality but quantity. This was not putting my best foot forward; this was me clumsily learning how to swing dance, on camera.

Shortly after starting the poem-a-day project, I became more aware of the extent to which a vast majority of the internet is about this concept—exposing processes, opening up the innards. Some web applications are banal—Twitter being the ultimate example, an application in which you type and disseminate what you are doing RIGHT NOW. Others are artistic projects—Jonathon Coulton’s popular Thing a Week (he writes a song each week), Scott McCloud's "Morning Improv" comics. And then of course there are blogs, in which millions of people are airing their brains out daily or weekly for everyone—and anyone—to watch and comment on.

Is “process exposure” a valuable way for people to communicate and grow their talents, or does it replace the value of the final product with the instantaneously available one? What’s appealing about this, and what’s prurient? How can museums learn from it?

Process Exposure lets people become more invested in great products. I’m a sucker for the “making of”—if the product is great. When I see something truly breath-taking, I want to understand all the bits of it, whether it’s a piece of art, a commercial, or a boxing match. I assume that the people who chose to look at my poem-a-days were people who already had interest and appreciation in the “finished” poems they’d read—and therefore had some reason to want to experience a little bit of “the making of.” But that leads to…

Process Exposure encourages people to reduce greatness into pieces. Which makes me understand why so few magicians will ever spill their secrets. They know that the magical nature of their work demands that their process remain secret, that, in fact, that guarded secrecy is one of their talents we most appreciate. Which leads me to feel that an artist can only feel comfortable exposing his/her process if either a. they don’t care about protecting their image as a performer or b. they have such a strongly defined and loved image that they can now give away little bits, strategically, as they see fit. But for new artists…

Process Exposure may derail people from ever achieving greatness. This is highly debatable. But I’ve taught hundreds of poetry students—kids and adults—who refuse to edit their poems. Except in very rare cases, people who are unwilling to revise and grow their craft are doomed to mediocrity. If you become famous for what you created right now with no resources, why would you want to develop anything more complex?

Where do museums fit in? Many museums have a fascinating relationship with process exposure—lips sealed when it comes to their own final products, megaphones on when it comes to exposing the processes of others. Many museum exhibits focus on exposing the process of greatness—how did Newton develop his theories on objects in motion? How did impressionists re-envision light?—so that people can understand and unlock love and interest in the material. In some museums, this goes too far and I’m left feeling cold—like everything has been explained away. In other museums, I don’t get enough and I feel lost, like there’s something beautiful nearby but I can’t quite see or articulate it.

The new explorations that everyday people are doing on the web with process exposure can—and should—lead to new explorations inside museums as well. One of the most enjoyable process exposure experiences I’ve ever had in a museum was at the entrance to COSI Columbus, where you can control a small time-lapse video of the construction of their building. Would visitors enjoy seeing the iterations of a label, or an exhibit of failed prototypes? If the museum is perceived as great, a disseminator of extraordinary final products, than the “making of” DVDs may fly off the shelves. If the museum is just another slapdash work in progress, well, save that for your MySpace page.

Some Light Weekend Reading

A blog post by the excellent Kathy Sierra, "Become the Thing that Replaces You," about keeping your eyes on the big picture as you determine how to evolve your institution/product to fit new criteria/expectations...

A 39 page report (don't worry, there are ten pages of notes) from Gyroscope, an exhibit design firm, on "Museums in Transition: Emerging Technologies as Tools for Free-Choice Learning"...

And this is neither in English nor is it reading, but it's a pretty darn funny to connect with visitors. It doesn't become 2.0, I guess, until you let the visitors wear the armor...

Game Friday: The Beauty of Finding Things Out

Games often get a bad rap in the museum world. Too gimmicky. Too goal-oriented, or, paradoxically, too process-oriented. But recently, I've been exploring the world of casual Flash games on the web, and I've been amazed. There are thousands of game developers out there creating unusual, beautiful, fascinating games that have changed the way I think about museum exhibits and game/play spaces.

So, new tradition. Every Friday I'll offer up a couple of games on a theme for you to explore. All are free, and most take about 5-30 minutes to complete. Today, two games about navigating non-linear narrative spaces, The Telephone and The Museum of Broken Memories. Both of these games are museum-esque. They encourage exploration of spaces, focusing on evoking emotion through rich graphics and sound.

The Telephone presents a very simple collection of spaces, each with its own challenge, strung together by a "magic" telephone that transports you from one space to the next. There is no over-arching story or puzzle (unless you fall into a Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure reverie). I like this as a new way to envision the transition between spaces and experiences--through a device instead of through physical space. Imagine C. S. Lewis's wardrobe parked in the entrance of a museum exhibition, ready and willing to transport you to something wild and unexpected. It's a beautiful quickie. Enjoy.

The Museum of Broken Memories is an extraordinarily beautiful, and disturbing, game. You navigate through a museum-like setting, exploring "artifacts" of a person's emotional life. It is dark and captivating. The Museum of Broken Memories is an outlier in the broader genre of "point and click" Flash games (like Myst) where your goal is unclear, but the compulsion to keep clicking is high. I'm fascinated by the way that good game design encourages me as a user/player to delve deeply into scenes, looking for items to interact with, never sure that I've "seen it all." When the game is easy to use and the puzzles are not frustrating, I find myself doing things I rarely do in museums--taking a closer look, trying it again to see if something changes, wondering what could possibly happen next. This one is longer, and requires download to your computer.

My game source is Casual Gameplay, where you can also find reviews and hints on these and other games. If you have other sources to recommend, I'd love to hear about them. And where does the Telephone take you?

Two Notes from O'Reilly Radar on Web 2.0

There have been two good posts on the O'Reilly Radar recently that I wanted to bring to attention of these folks, both on the definition and use of "Web 2.0".

The first was a post offering a brief definition of Web 2.0: Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (This is what I've elsewhere called "harnessing collective intelligence.")

The second is about pre-roll advertising, but contains this generalized gem: So if you want to build a business around digital media, you have to be the best place to view/consume the media. Being the only place to see it is a naive strategy that won't work. You have to make digital media easy to find, easy to watch/listen/view, easy to comment/tag/share, and easy to replicate/reblog/republish.
Both of these ideas can be applied to museums and potential approaches to use of 2.0 in museums. The first is the familiar concept of museums transitioning to being a platform for specific kinds of encounters and experiences. The second quote builds on this by pointing out that it's essential, when you build a platform for user information, to make it the most appealing place to access that information.

Many museums share content beyond their four walls through virtual exhibits, online collections, etc., which begs the question of whether visitors will pay for the cow when they can get the milk for free. Why go to the museum if you can see it all online in your pajamas? The answer is--or should be--that the museum is the best place to experience the content. If you are confident in this fact, then making all kinds of content open source is a benefit to the museum--extending the reach of the content, motivating interest in the brand, encouraging others to use and experiment with your content.

There are certain advantages to starting as a content provider and then expanding services as a platform. Museums already have strong brand identity, and people expect that the best (and mostly, unfortunately, only) place they can connect with their content is in the museum.

With that in mind, I'd love to see museums opening up their content to users on the web--and in the galleries. There are some interesting comments out there from people who are pissed off about not being able to take photographs in art museums. If there's a copyright issue or a safety of the artifacts issue, I understand, but if not, what do you gain from protecting your content in this way? Wouldn't you rather have 42,000 photos from your museum logged on Flickr (MoMA, which does allow photography) or 3,900 (SFMOMA, which does not allow photography)? Similarly, encouraging people (staff AND visitors) to post videos on YouTube, blog about museum experiences, podcast programs... it all generates interest in the museum itself.

Seeing a video of someone walking through an exhibit doesn't make me think, been there done that. It makes me want to see the exhibition. Imagine if we applied the same fearful logic to sex. Reading about it hasn't been shown to diminish interest in the genuine article, the "best place" to experience it.

How can/are you opening up the content at your institution to become more "platformesque"?