The Sydney Morning Herald journalist, Asher Moses, who wrote “Web filters to censor video games” - the story which led to “mass” Second Life hysteria – has disclosed to SLED-lister, Second Life resident and PhD candidate in the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, at the University of Queensland, Morgan Leigh, that Second Life was never actually mentioned by Australian Senator Conroy or his spokesperson, just “online games”.
Moses told Leigh that the story was based on a question the Green’s senator for Western Australia, Scott Ludlam, had asked of the government.
The question was “(13) Will computer games exceeding the requirements of the MA15+ classification be RC (refused classification) and potentially blocked by ISPs on a mandatory basis for adults; if not, what other exceptions to RC would be similarly permitted.”
Leigh said Moses had “expressed surprise at the resultant hype regarding Second Life”.
Leigh, however, also told SLED-listers, “The latest (Australian) Government should have learned from the previous attempts ( to filter internet content) that unless it wants to turn Australia into China it cannot widely block access.
“I for one am totally not worried that I will wake one day soon to find Second Life unavailable to me,” he said. “I am, however, worried by the broader issue of governments seeking to decide for adults what those adults can and cannot do.
“Australia is sadly lacking any kind of bill of rights. Our constitution apparently ‘implies’ we have certain rights, like free speech etc., but beyond that we are still just subjects of Her Majesty.”
I haven’t commented on the latest round of histrionics and hysteria fomented by “tabloid” bloggers about the Australia moves … but as one of the most authoritative writers on virtual worlds, James Wagner Au (pictured), has pointed out in NewWorldNotes it’s more about smoke than substance, with Second Life and video games bloggers implying a lot more from the Sydney Morning Herald story than is actually in it.
I say this despite the fact that the Christian Today Australia, an online Christian “tabloid”, in a blatent, unattributed lift from one of the more rabid bloggers, Duncan Riley, said today that Second Life was to be “banned in Australia” and that this had been confirmed by a spokesperson for Australian Federal Minister Stephen Conroy that “under the (Australian Rating System) filtering plan, it (censorship) will be extended to downloadable games, flash-based web games and sites which sell physical copies of games that do not meet the MA15+ standard.” [The MA15+ means restricted to those people ages 15 and above. Games for 18-plus "adults" are classed as RC (Refused Classification) because of pornographic, illegal material, certain forms of ‘hate speech” and copyrighted content, despite some Australian States having legalised brothels and a large "adult" porno industry both in real life and easily accessed on the net]
The story just grows like Topsy: the interpretation of one trenchant critic of Australian Government filtering of internet content, quoted by The Sydney Morning Herald as referring to the possibility of Second Life being blocked, has become fact. But whether true or not it’s important to New Zealand residents of Second Life because it gives more “ammunition” to critics in New Zealand even if that “ammunition” is more akin to bulldust than reality.
But one thing that seems very common among Second Life residents is the propensity to have panic-attacks and anxiety complexes and to find rumour and innuendo nutritious.
The possibility of an Australian ban/block on Second Life has been canvassed off and on for months in various media – but there has never really been anything more than a little smoke.
And, anyway even if the Australian Government does receive “complaints” and goes ahead with a “ban” it need have no effect on educators.
Adult Zindra – virtually another Second Life game which could be
blocked without harm to Australian educators …
With the creation of Zindra, Linden Labs have virtually created two “games” – to use the Australian reference – and it should be easy enough under the current filtering regime being trialed by Australian ISPs for any Federal Government agency to block the “adult” potentially more raunchy game while continuing to allow access to the “PG, Mature” Second Life without the raunch.
Although not on line this has been done with video games sold in real life shops in Australia, such as Grand Theft Auto and Fallout 3, with a special edition being created for their Australian audiences.
Given this, for teaching purposes, “blocks” on the “Adult” game should not affect Australian educators because they have no reason to go into Zindra (for education purposes) and so should have little effect on the real life education and business uses of Second Life in Australia – unless, of course, the main reason for some Australian “educators” being in the game is “adult” content.
I also wonder whether the Australian video games industry is not promoting this issue and the Second Life connection to it in a bid to deflect criticism and draw Second Life and other virtual worlds into their bed, as it were, to obfuscate the real issues of violence and violent sex in many video games.
The debate, however, as noted above is obviously not about pornography because some of the most raunchy pornographic picture and video sites on the web originate from Australia, and have only rudimentary age checks (answer what date you were born before accessing this site) and so are, in reality, open to anyone of any age: as they are not” games” however, they appear not subject to the debate in the on-line games context.
Finally, as an afterthought, I think money could be well spent on doing research on Second Life residents and Second Life bloggers to see whether they have a higher propensity for hysteria and paranoia than the average person who doesn’t get “addicted” to SecondLife. *grin*
The challenges health professionals face in using virtual worlds have more to do with the commercial cost of developing serious games or health purpose virtual worlds rather than with the quality of the environments being delivered over the internet or through off-the-shelf games, according to Dr Andrew Campbell, an Australian researcher in Cyberpsychology.
In a wide-ranging interview with Lowell Cremorne, of The Metaverse Journal, the director of the Prometheus Research Team at the University of Sydney, said that in addition to this, research, looking at how immersive environments could be used to tackle problems in health, behaviour and education, was facing a health professional vs tech industry challenge in trying to effectively harness the ideas for scientifically-based delivery of health interventions.
“In short,” Campbell (pictured left) said, “the health professionals need to learn more about the tech industry and vice versa. Once this bridge is finally built, I believe we will be entering a new error of technology consumerism – games for wellbeing and ICT for personal health management.”
Campbell’s primary job is an academic researcher and teacher in the field of Psychology, particularly Cyberpsychology, which is the study of how technology is impacting human behaviour, both in good and bad ways. Secondly, he is a general practice psychologist who specialises in child and adolescent mental health and behavioural problems. His clinical work is focused on treating children with ADD/ADHD, anxiety and depression, conduct problems, as well as parental counselling and family therapy.
His fascinating interview with Cremorne covers gaming and violence and addiction and the often-hidden benefits of video games – “parents themselves do not know anything about the games their children are playing” .
Based on his experience he is dismissive of the anecdotal direct causative link between the regular playing of violent games and violent real-life behaviour.
“Playing a violent game is no more likely to trigger someone’s violent behaviour than eating your favourite food is going to motivate you to become a chef,” he told Cremorne.
Conversely a number of studies of gaming, he said, had shown wonderful results through helping people to ameliorate either behaviour or, in some cases, the management of pain.
This is only a very limited taste of the full interview which you should read here.
It’s often difficult for an outsider – especially one with little experience in virtual technology - to get a real impression of what happens in an education environment in Second Life and just what the benefits can be.
As part of the on-going SLENZ Project, Midwifery Pilot lead educator Sarah Stewart (SL: Petal Stransky) and Foundation Learning Pilot lead educator Merle Lemon (SL: Briarmelle Quintessa) have attempted to show those benefits with the recent release of two machinimas, which are worth looking at.
The first, Te Wahi Whanau 2 ( the second video from the Midwifery Pilot team) demonstrates the benefits both in Second Life and Real Life of building and using an architect-designed “ideal” Birthing Centre like that on the SLENZ island of Kowhai.
Uploaded to YouTube by “Debdavis5″ (Dr Deborah Davis, principal lecturer in Midwifery at Otago Polytechnic, Dunedin, New Zealand) the machinima displays the build of “Te Wahi Whanau: The Birth Place” by Aaron Griffiths (SL: Isa Goodman) . “The Birth Place” is used in the Bachelor of Midwifery programme at Otago and also aims to inform Second Life residents about the importance of space/place in facilitating physiological birth. The machinima is also on the SLENZ Project website here.
The second video, Bridging Education: Interview skills @ SLENZ, by Merle Lemon, of the Manukau Institute of Technology, is somewhat different in that it is designed specifically to show Foundation Learning tutors why their students will benefit from the use of Second Life to improve their interview skills.
The video, which is also available at the SLENZ Project website, illustrates the difference between a real life practise interview situation and a Second Life interview situation.
Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology’s Mike Baker (SL: Rollo Kohime) will be presenting a paper at The Society of Dance History Scholars Conference 2009 at Stanford University, California, USA, from Wellington Railway Station on the Second Life NMIT island of Koru [Koru: 81,57,21 (PG)] at 3:00pm SLT/PDT on Saturday, June 20 (10am NZT Sunday, June 21.
He has issued a special invitation to SLENZers and others to participate in the event in Second Life and hear his paper, “In the Company of Strangers – Negotiating the parameters of Indeterminacy; a study of the Roaming Body and Departure in Urban Spaces”.
There will be a notecard-vendor in the station proper which will, once touched, give participants instructions for the presentation, one of a number which Baker has been invited to do this year at universities and conferences around the world.
Baker, who specialises in improvisational contact dance, is currently completing a Masters in Art and Design, majoring in dance and video, with AUT, Auckland, New Zealand.
An abstract of his presentation will be available from a dispenser in the wall next to the station cafe in a corner of the concourse.
He has asked participants to select the appropriate ambient lighting for viewing the videos, making sure that their media is enabled with loudspeakers turned off to avoid feedback.
He will be responding to questions from the audience at the end of the presentation with the real life audience taking precedence over the virtual audience.
As if, worrying whether the soon-to-be-released Second Life Viewer 2009 will require educators to completely revamp their techniques and training of students, was not enough, we still have to wonder whether we might not have backed the wrong horse and that the possible peer-to-peer virtual world competition for Second Life - both public and behind the firewall – waiting in the wings, might not provide better applications.
We already have Entropia, Forterra(Olive), Twinity, Wonderland, Croquet, Prototerra, Kaneva, Hipihi, and others in the virtual world arena but just when one might have thought that Second Life and the Second Life-based OpenSim worlds – OpenSim, OpenLife, OsGrid, and smaller players like ONGENS, etc – were holding their own for education purposes, at least one and perhaps two of the Open Source alternatives to Second Life appear to be breaking through, although they don’t have numbers yet.
The latest food for thought on this issue came from Feldspar Epstein, of The Metaverse Journal, who explains the difference between the OpenSim concept, and that of Open Source such as “Open Cobalt” and “Solipsis”, as being that essentially while OpenSim grids are designed to be served from a common point, Open Cobalt and Solipsis implementations are designed to be served from many points – they are both peer-to-peer technologies.
“Open Cobalt (based on Croquet technology) consists of two parts: a browser and a toolkit,” Epstein says. ” The browser is used to view the 3D virtual workspaces created with the toolkit. Each workspace can live on a separate personal computer. Workspaces are real time and computationally dynamic, and each can host multiple participants. Additionally, individual workspaces can be interlinked into a private and secure network of work spaces.”
Attractive features
Epstein lists a number of attractive Open Cobalt features, particularly for researchers and educators, as: Open source licensing (MIT); deeply malleable, collaborative space; runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux; internet access is not required; it can run over LANs and Intranets; private and public environments can be created; in-world text, voice and video chat, web browsing (VNC allows access to browsers like Firefox) and annotations; Access to remote applications via VNC; Navigation between virtual workspaces is possible using 3D hyperlinks; Mesh, texture, media, and whole avatar imports.
An alpha phase Open Cobalt download is available here and further information is available here. The beta release is due this year, and a full implementation is expected to be released in 2010.
Meanwhile the efficacy or on-going viability of the French Telecom-developed Solipsis is more murky, although according to Epstein it is about to go into beta testing but I would question this.
A search of the net would suggest otherwise.
On Solipsis netofpeers.net it is revealed, in a link from Professor Shun-Yun Hu, of the University of Taiwan, that although Solipsis is a pure peer-to-peer system for a massively shared virtual world with no central servers, only relying on end-users’ machines, the initial Solipsis project ended some time ago when the core team left the project. The original Solipsis web site is available here. Although the dowloads are available there appears to have been little real activity since 2005, and the developers’ page is here but a number of the links appear dead.
More recently, however, Joaquin Keller, has started TwinVerse – a virtual world based on geography, pictured right- and which seems little more than a glorified video and text chat room overlaid on Google satellite pictures/maps of various world spots, and nothing like the 3D virtual worlds, as presented by Second Life or Twinity or Entropia et al, and less than half as interesting.
Speaking of peer-to-peer virtual worlds Epstein doesn’t go into the much-touted Australian startup, Project Outback (from Yoik) which folded sometime ago after considerable promotion by one of the former Kazaa peer-to-peer network promoters, nor the most viable other offering VastPark. currently in closed beta (downloads here) and based on the OPeN (Univ. of Melbourne) software funded by NICTA, Australia’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Research
Centre of Excellence, which signed a commercial license agreement with VastPark, in 2008.
Other peer-to-peer possibilities, in various states of array and disarray, include : Colyseus (CMU);HYDRA (National Univ. of Singapore); and peers@play (Univ. of Mannheim, Duisburg-Essen, and Hannover).
However, after looking at all the offerings I could find for peer-to-peer worlds ( I may have missed some) I believe that aside from Open Cobalt, which is actually Croquet in another form, and VastPark, there appears nothing in the peer-to-peer virtual world public domain that is any real threat at this stage to Second Life and open-source Second Life-based products, for credibility, ease-of-use, attractiveness, population, and what I believe is the fundamental key to virtual world success, immersibility (suspension of disbelief).
So forget peer-to-peer virtual worlds for the moment and concentrate on worrying about the Second Life 2009 viewer, or perhaps the new adult continent of Zindra. Just kidding.
I’ve been mulling over, for a few days now, whether Microsoft’s latest offering in virtual worlds, Milo and his virtual friends, is going to prove a greater boon to video games and MMORPGs or to personal computer-based virtual worlds.
Is Milo the next step along the road to virtual life becoming mainstream or will he ,being console and television screen-based, kill off the virtual worlds like Second Life. In other words is he the next step.
The benefits are obvious and the reality of Milo is in many ways astounding. But I will let you judge for yourselves.
Project Natal is a hands-free control system for the Xbox that recognises facial expressions and body movements and allows, so it is claimed, virtual characters to recognise not only voices and even faces but also read moods [Interestingly, one could pose the question: Is Milo, Microsoft's answer to Eve? Massey University, New Zealand, announced earlier this year it had developed a virtual teacher, Eve (pictured right), who can read and react to a student's emotions].
Head Teacher said, “If anything was ever worthy of the description game changing this is it … Microsoft may have done for virtual what the Iphone has done for the mobile interface. Others will surely catch up but if Microsoft can really deliver on this, virtual experiences will soon be split between clicking in a make-believe world and apparently walking around something we can almost touch.
“For me,” he said, “the conclusions are that the future of virtual experiences won’t be limited by uptake or not of the current crop of virtual worlds: it is virtual experiences which overlay and blend with our real lives in ways we are only working out now. Virtual worlds will continue and thrive but will not define our experience of virtual reality.”
Meanwhile on the BBC, film director Stephen Spielberg described Project Natal to journalist Peter Emery as “a window into what the future holds”.
Saying it was an evolutionary step for games, Spielberg said, “It’s like the square screen we saw all of our movies on in the early 1950s. Then The Robe came out in Cinemascope. And then came CinRam and Imax followed. That’s what [Natal] is.
“The video games industry has not allowed us the opportunity to cry, because we were too busy putting our adrenalin rush into the controller, or wherever we swing our arm with a Wii controller to get a result,” Spielberg said. “Because of that, there is no room for a video game to break your heart. We now have a little more room to be a little more emotional with Natal technology than we did before.”
Stairway to knowledge … the SLENZ Project’s Foundation Learning
Pilot’s “rez-on-each step” guide to interviewing
SLENZ Project lead developer Aaron Griffths (SL: Isa Goodman) and the Foundation Learning Pilot’s lead educator, Merle Lemon (SL: Briarmell Quintessa) have come up with some interesting ideas to make learning easier for Merle’s students.
Their stairway to interviewing knowledge, on the Government-funded SLENZ Project’s Second Life virtual island of Kowhai, is the latest – a concept which allows a student to “rez” each knowledge notice by stepping in front of it and allowing it to vanish once absorbed as she or he proceeds up the stairway.
At the same time Lemon is nearing the completion of a video for publication on YouTube, “Bridging education interview skills @ SLENZ”, which has be designed mainly to explain to lecturers the benefits of using Second Life and the facilities created by her and Griffiths to hone student’s interview skills compared to those of a real life classroom (You will alerted here when this goes live).
At the same time Griffiths has constructed among other things, an interview room which will be able to be used by a variety of students and lecturers to overcome hurdles which stand in the way of many of them achieving success in interview situations and thus securing jobs.
The interview rooms, which are in reality holodeck skyboxes, will be “private” for students and/or their lecturers.
Waiting for a job interview … learning how to handle the stressful moment of truth.
Meanwhile Griffiths has invited casual educator visitors to Kowhai to test out the midwifery animations and other facets of the Midwifery Project’s Birthing Centre on Kowhai as well as the animations and other facilities created for Foundation Learning.
He believes testing by casual users will enable him to eliminate any bugs before the system goes into full operation.
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) School of Public Health have secured a grant of US$1.6 million to fund a study to determine if collaborative virtual environments designed to improve public health preparedness and response planning really work.
The school which is relying more and more on virtual environments for training and education has received the grant from the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The results should be of interest to health educators worldwide given the number of Second Life health applications, including New Zealand’s own midwifery pilot study under the auspices of the SLENZ Project and Auckland University’s Second Life and ONGENS medical centres.
Under the programme, according to Virtual World News, UIC researchers will recruit 40 local health departments from across the United States to take part in the study.
Half the participants will use Second Life to train public health workers in emergency preparedness while the other half will use a traditional meeting approach to planning.
The study’s principal investigator Colleen Monahan, director of the Center for the Advancement of Distance Education at the UIC School of Public Health, said, “We believe that using virtual environments will improve collaboration across agencies and jurisdictions, raise awareness about planning for vulnerable populations, increase the realism in the training exercise, allow participants to participate in different scenarios, and allow emergency responders to return to the training exercise at their convenience for ongoing training.”
Three major New Zealand universities are planning to establish an open-access, open-source New Zealand National Virtual World grid based on the ONGENS OpenSim grid which is currently under development.
The universities are Otago University, the University of Canterbury, and the University of Auckland. They have been joined by Telecom in the proposed establishment of the grid which will operate on New Zealand-based servers and will leverage other national investments in IT infrastructure. Funding is currently being sought to support this initiative.
Although the NZVWG will be primarily for research and education it will also offer proof-of-concept application deployments and testing. It is being designed to provide both experimental and routine use of VWs in teaching and research; to develop engaging interactive in-world content customised for New Zealand use; and to develop new context-specific plug-ins, enabling interaction between virtual and real (non-virtual) worlds.
The announcement of the planned NZVWG was made by Dr Melanie Middlemiss, manager of the GNI Project, from which the ONGENS testbed originated and which she runs with GNI technical manager Ms Hailing Situ.
The developmental ONGENS Grid, set up in the ONGENS Test Bed Facility developed by Otago University and Canterbury University to explore the possibilities of Virtual Worlds and Web3.D technology, already has nodes run by the University of Auckland, the University of Canterbury and Weltec. It currently is “open” for avatar registration but because it is in the developmental phase is not as stable as some other virtual worlds. It has about 100 registered users.
ONGENS uses both the Government-funded KAREN (Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network) system and local networks.
Otago, Canterbury and Auckland Universities along with Telecom have formed a Governance Board for the NZVWG.
The proposed NZVWG will be composed of individual nodes at each University, connected together.
The project has been described as ” exciting” by the University of Auckland’s associate director, IT Services, Scott Diener, who is well known for his championing of virtual world education. The university, which has a two-sim presence in Second Life, is currently is running full test and development servers, hosting 12 islands on the ONGENS grid.
Announcing that further funding was being sought, Dr Middlemiss, said it was hoped to get more New Zealand and Pacific universities involved – the University of Papua New Guinea already has a research site – but it was a matter of finding people who were enthusiastic and dedicated to the development of the NZVWG.
Meanwhile the Government announced as part of the 2009 Budget in May a NZ$16m investment in KAREN to support the organisation’s ongoing operation and transition to a self-funding model.
Welcoming the Government’s new investment “to ensure KAREN keeps operating as New Zealand’s advanced network,” Donald Clark, Chief Executive of REANNZ said, “Such an investment, especially in these difficult economic times, indicates a strong commitment to science and to the investing in the underlying infrastructure of the country.”
The proposed New Zealand National Virtual World Grid
The Virtual Life Education New Zealand (VLENZ) blog (slenz.wordpress.com) is designed to provide an independent view of progress and technological/social developments in MUVEs (Multi-User Virtual Environments) in New Zealand and around the world with an emphasis on education.
The blog is based on the personal experiences of and observations concerning MUVEs and MORPGs of the editor, John Waugh (SL: Johnnie Wendt) and,
from time-to-time, guest editors/writers'. As a result it may not reflect the views of the VLENZ Group, individual VLENZ members and/or the Group's leadership, and/or the various tertiary institutions and other organisations connected to it, either directly or indirectly. The views expressed and posted are completely those of the named author of each article unless otherwise stated.
Second Life® and Linden Lab® are registered trademarks of Linden Research, Inc. No infringement is intended.
Looks like bulldust to me …
Adult Zindra – virtually another Second Life game which could be
