Josh Fouts: The “ROI” on Virtual Worlds, The Importance of Understanding Culture
Filed at 1:27 pm on October 25, 2007 in Games • 3 comments
Josh Fouts debriefs his recent experience at the Virtual Worlds conference in San Jose. He discusses concern for return on investment and the rise of the Immersive Web in China.
I spent the past week at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo in San Jose, California.
There were a number of interesting panels, but two themes caught my attention that I’d like to discuss here: 1) Concern for ROI or Return on Investment in Virtual Worlds; and 2) The Rise of China.
ROI
As interest in virtual worlds and the 3-D Immersive Web continues to peak, there has been much-ballyhooed media coverage about the flood of corporations rushing into the space; some who missed the boat during the dotcom boom of the 1990s and don’t want to miss out on this. But the narrative has turned. Lately media coverage and pundits have turned to reporting on the subsequent disappointment of corporations who found that building an edifice did not necessarily mean that, if they built it, people would come.
It was with this in mind that I attended the ROI panel. To my surprise, the line of questioning to the panelists was tantamount to asking how widgets should be managed in virtual spaces. I suppose this makes sense, since the title of the panel was “ROI.”
What intrigued me was that the audience seemed more interested in the result rather than in the process.
One of the panelists, Rita J. King, who is collaborating with us on our grant from the MacArthur Foundation made an interesting observation. Shouldn’t the focus and concern around ROI be on how to understand and cultivate vibrant communities? In the aforementioned project, The Role of the Foundation in Virtual Worlds, which is funded by the MacArthur Foundation, our core tenet is to enter the space without ego. By that, I mean that we do not enter into virtual worlds or the 3-D Immersive Web with assumptions about what we already know, or what we hope to teach the people in these spaces. Instead, we enter ready to listen and learn. We have intentionally sought not to construct a new edifice in places like Second Life to which we would invite people (building it so they will come). Certainly we will build some places for gatherings, but the intent will not be to bring people to us, as much as it will be to go to the people where they spend their time.
Our work with Rita is to see how we can best understand the community before we engage them, to engage them on their own terms, and to utilize the newfound understanding of the culture to maximize understanding and cooperation, which we believe is one of the cornerstones to understanding what the role of a foundation can be in these spaces.
We’ll keep you posted as this progresses.
China and the Immersive Web
While one half of the crowd was focused on widgets the other half was in a feeding frenzy trying to get a few minutes with the various representatives from the Chinese virtual worlds constituency.
Mssrs. Xu Hui and Zafka Zhang of HiPiHi.com made a big impression. HiPiHi is an all Chinese-language virtual world created to provide an environment in which to learn about Chinese culture. Similar to Second Life, it is entirely user created. Dissimilar to Second Life, there are no English-language fonts. To visit HiPiHi is to visit the 3-D Immersive Web through the eyes of China. It is a world in which English is not the dominant language and the United States is not the dominant culture.
What can we learn from this?
As with the ROI reflection above, our hope is to engage the virtual world community of China as we are in the U.S. We will ask them in the same culturally-sensitive manner, “What can a foundation do in this space?” “What does it mean to do this in a language other than English?”
To be sure the MacArthur Foundation has a significant presence in China. But does it mean something different to have a presence in the 3-D Immersive Web of China? Or the Second Life of China? Some of the questions we hope to address include: How will the culture and politics of the evolving China manifest in these spaces? What kinds of things do people do in Hipihi? Do Chinese notions of “public space” differ from Western notions, are we seeing those difference play out in Hipihi, as opposed to SL? What are the idealized notions of community in Chinese life? Are they reflected in the space? What kinds of things does Hipihi allow people to do that they might not be able to do in physical space? (I don’t necessarily mean politically, though that may or may not be a part of it). What are the emergent properties of the space, the things that are not designed it to, but that have come from the act of people participating?
In coming months we hope to do some community conversations in HiPiHi.
We hope you will join us in this adventure.
Next: Barry Joseph: Staffing the Virtual World > >
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Comments (3)
1: John Sweeney from Entergy Corporation at 9:42 am on Friday, October 26, 2007
As I watch co-workers immersing themselves in the vicarious melodramas of professional sports, I realize that virtual worlds have been around for quite some time. I think of various virtual communities down through history, and immediately the Christian church comes to mind, along with the communal notion of world Marxism.The early church was thought of as the ghost of the defunct Roman empire, using its communication methods, its divisions into governance regions, and its notion of a boss in Rome. So Rome, at least, had a vibrant second life as early as the year 300 C.E.
The millennial outlook embraced by Marxist fellow travelers up until the demise of world communism in its first life, has jumped the tracks, and infused more vibrant intelligences recently as greenism, (Marxism’s second life), than it ever did in its original guise. So world millennial communism began its second life sometime around 1985.
I think I spy the old United States of America transitioning even as we speak, from a realworld phenom, into a malleable virtual entity, existing more for its vibrancy, its entertainment value, its excitement—- its ghost, so to speak, than for its dying incarnation as a true military/industrial world entity.
I realize now, looking down at my Chinese-produced keyboard, glancing at my Taiwanese wristwatch, shuffling my feet in their Chinese-provenance brogans, that I’ve been unwittingly role playing as a barbarian petitioner to the virtual middle kingdom for at least a decade already, as virtual Mexico , (old Spain’s ghost) mows the corporate lawn quite joyously outside my office window, and virtual New Orleans happily prints out my virtual paycheck in cyberspace, abandoning forever the realworld messiness of stamps, envelopes, broken levees, and (ugh!) paper checks.
I’ve watched, bemused, as Ms. King has ascended directly out of Front Street in Yorktown, accepting the nasty death of her firstworld journalistic vehicle with great grace and verve.
I will strive to learn the lesson she has broadcast to all of us by doing so, even as I ponder my fellow Gaian engineer-priests around the real planet, chanting, om-humming, worshiping the ghost within the stone….Gaia’s own virtual fire…..smokeless, carbonless, eternally vibrant, now finally jumping the tracks to save humankind, as it was apparently always destined to do!
John Sweeney
Indian Point Energy Center
Buchanan New York
2: J.Sweeney from Entergy Corp. at 12:32 pm on Friday, November 2, 2007
The insight that virtual relations can be more durable/transportable than their realworld originations, is a valuable one (I think), one that could provide hope to any strictly “Gamer” oriented enterprise hoping to devise real value for all the time so many people now spend inside PC gameworlds.
The trick I think, is providing real worth. The way I see it, is you have the constituency already wired up, already interacting, but so far, only in ways that provide deadend outcomes.
In my realworld present, outside of SL, my engagement in a totally separate virtuality may (or may not) interest you. I work as a designer at a nuclear power plant. My specific job function is to maintain synchronization of a legal plant, described in law, a virtual plant, imaged in 2D and 3D computer models, and a real plant that channels some pretty awesome physicalities to power the east coast.
I spend my work week building VR spaces enabling plant operators to have full confidence their Armageddon device is exactly the way they imagine it. Should they think it’s some way it isn’t, high energy could go unchecked and cause problems. So the confidence-building regime goes kinda like this:
Operator “A” complains that some button has a confusing result when pushed. Investigating designers hustle up known models of the widget, and responsible engineering types view legal docs limiting how it’s allowed to be. Once the two parameters of “How we see it” plus “How NRC deems it” are compared, and an expected finding arrived at, a factual trip is launched, like those Star Trek forays into the tube where the dilithium crystals live. Hopefully, that gives us the “How it is right now” lowdown. The brain trust serves up its findings to VR/RW resolver types, who parlay on what the most ethical course of resolution is. Once a “best resolve” is envisioned, fixit types are dispatched to stroke the realworld widg, or designers are tasked to stroke the VR model, or both. Thus the asymptotic closure of VR to RW. We handle about 100 requests a week.( It’s called “Configuration Management”).
So my second universe (SU) is about 35 years young, is being continually perfected, (we expect the build will never be finished), and its verisimilitude to our actual raging hell furnace is compellingly urgent. By incremental acts of individual design, we get it more and more right as time goes by. The work differs from a gameworld, in that we don’t have avatars, and the VR space is totally determined by realworld feedback events. The value provided, is a powered Northeast, sans carbon footprint.
Without the VR verisimilitude we designers provide, humans lack the innate capacity to envision such monstrous processes accurately enough to prevent mishap. (Thus your Chernobyl and Three Mile Island). Nowadays, with designers providing all the frontline types with heightened VR IQ’s, it all works fine. Thus does our future emerge.
So you’re not alone over at SL. But you’re not the first, either.
3: Evonne Heyning from Amoration at 8:32 pm on Friday, November 16, 2007
I was sad to miss the virtual worlds event and wanted to ask you more about HiPiHi and emergent forms of governance.
Today I sat and watched Kid Nation episodes; in Second Life we have the same strong attachment to the wild west of media that is being griefed and policed throughout the grids. In the Nonprofit Commons we talked about policy, standards and porn, the difficult choices of building a community. How does civic engagement and true connection grow in such thorny and tender new places?
I’m interested to hear how HiPiHi has allowed (or disallowed) the dialogues and community tools that we have come to clamor for in other worlds. Is there a place for them to clamor?
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