Partying with Pixels

Shout out to Vanessa Schneider once again, for her "Partying with pixels" coverage on our “Virtual Worlds: Real Connections” event The Ithacan: Brink!

Excerpts:

Tonight’s IC event, “Virtual Worlds: Real Connections” was basically just one big Second Life wine-and-cheese party. Henry Jenkins, a professor at MIT, and James Gee, a professor at the Univesity of Wisconsin–Madison, were the night’s main guests. Unfortunately, Jenkins missed his flight. But Gee was great — more on him later.

The event was held in the physics lab, and students and faculty demonstrated the game on eight projection screens around the room. The space is perfect for this kind of thing. The designer, Michael Rogers, said the lab has a pretty great soundsystem, too, and one night he projected The Matrix on all eight screens and blasted the volume. That got me thinking, and, at the risk of sounding totally geeky, this lab would be perfect for a Halo party.

While playing, I spoke with Joan Falkenberg Getman, the senior strategist for Learning Technologies at Cornell, and Gee. Gee told me he’s been playing World of Warcraft since it came out, and there’s a group of about eight faculty members and a bunch of students out at UW-Madison that play it all the time. 

We talked a bit about PMOGs (which, you may recall, I talked about last week), and he raised an interesting point: That PMOGs are really just “awareness” tools — they alert you to your Internet use, and point out what and how often you are using. PMOGs make you aware of the Internet structures you work within every day. So why not track your e-mail use and, as with some PMOGs, get points in a game for it? You’re going to be e-mailing all day anyway, might as well make it fun. 

What was really great about the evening was the enthusiasm about the potential for using these online networks as educational tools. Professors from Cornell and IC, with little knowledge about Second Life, were willing to take 10 minutes to learn about it and even give the avatars a try. One of the Cornell business professors is now figuring out how to set up business classes that would teach accounting, stats and so on in a game that mixes Second Life and, what he called, “World of Bizcraft.” 

Senior Austra Zubkovs, who has been doing research on religion in Second Life, talks about the virtual world to Shelley Semmler, v.p. of institutional advancement, at right. 

Read full article: http://theithacan.org/blogs/brink/2007/04/17/partying-with-pixels/