In my remarks, I advise folks to keep an eye out for these Virtual World trends:  open source to create your own worlds, public grids, virtual workspaces, serious gaming, casual gaming, and the return of virtual reality technologies (now that we have more interesting places to visit, maybe it’s time to start digging those gloves and goggles out of the closet).

The legal types seem to be most interested in virtual property rights and regulating money transactions, but we had time to talk about fun stuff like the virtual ’strike’ against IBM in Second Life.  A continuing point of controversy:  the terms of service for most virtual worlds give users little recourse if a company decides to suspend or delete their account. But what if I built and furnished my whole mansion online?

Here’s a taste of their research results since 2007:

College students

• More internet use by college students leads to more school life satisfaction.
• Time spent playing video games has a negative correlation with college GPA.
• More time IMing at college is associated with greater difficulty in concentrating on academic tasks. More time reading books leads to less ‘academic distractability’.
• College students with a ‘high sexual disposition’ (erotophilic) on the Sexual Opinion Survey are more likely to click on a link to unsolicited internet pornography. Antisocial students are even more likely to click.

Gaming/MMOs

• MMO players spend an average of 22 hours per week online.
• A great college student experiment: students are randomly assigned to play arcade games, console games, solo fantasy/adventure games, or MMOs for a month (minimum one hour per week). MMO players reported significantly more hours played, worse overall health, worse sleep quality, but also greater enjoyment in the game, greater desire to continue playing, and more online friendships. MMO players reported more interference with real-world socializing and schoolwork.
• About 75% of MMO players have made ‘a good friend’ online. 55% of female players have met an online friend in real life, 37% of males. 43% of females have been ‘attracted to’ another player. 15% of females date other players. 39% said they would discuss sensitive issues with online friends that they wouldn’t discuss with their real life friends.
• 21% of MMO players prefer socializing online to offline. 57% of gamers had engaged in gender swapping.
• Warcraft players rate their characters more favorably than they rate themselves.
• 18% of online poker players are problem gamblers (according to DSM-IV criteria). Problem gambling is best predicted by negative mood states after playing, and by gender swapping during play.
• Super Monkey Ball 2 players experience brain wave (EEG) changes when they pick up bananas (consistent with increased cortical activation and arousal), fall off the edge of the game board (consistent with motor functions), and reach a game goal (consistent with relaxation).
• For Taiwanese students, online game players are more extroverted and more open (creative, curious, open-minded) than non-players.
• Teams that wear red in first person shooter games are significantly more likely to win than teams that wear blue. Players also perform better in warm (reddish) lighting than cool (bluish) lighting.
• People with a more physically aggressive personality play violence-oriented video games in a more aggressive way.

Virtual Worlds/Virtual Reality

• Pairs of mixed-gender avatars (male/female) stand closer together than male/male and female/female pairs. Males stand farther apart than females (just like real life). Female-female pairs are more likely to be looking at each other while talking than male-male avatar pairs (just like real life).
• For people giving a speech to a virtual audience, increases in cortisol were comparable to those during a speech in front of an imagined audience (behind a one-way mirror), but less than a speech in front of a panel of peers.
• People exposed to uncomfortable heat or cold stimuli report less discomfort if they are walking through a virtual world with the opposite temperature (a ‘winter’ or a ‘summer’ scene).
• Travelers who use virtual reality features on a hotel website have decreased ‘travel anxiety’.

Social Networking

• Women on MySpace are more likely to mention significant others in their profiles than men.
• New MySpace users who intend to blog report higher psychological distress, self-blame, and venting behavior than those who do not intend to blog. They also report lower satisfaction with their number of online and face-to-face friends.
• Korean users prefer online communities based on real world groups, while Japanese don’t.

Internet (general)

• Higher status employees are more likely to cyberslack at work.
• People with internet access during ages 12-17 report younger ages for first sexual intercourse than people without internet access during those years.
• For Australian seniors aged 55+, greater use of the internet as a communication tool is associated with lower levels of loneliness, but greater internet use to find new friends is associated with higher levels of loneliness.
• For Taiwanese students, high ‘sensation-seeker’ individuals on the Brief Sensation-Seeking Skill (“I like to explore strange places”) are more likely to engage in ‘online interpersonal deception’ (“I deceive others while chatting online”).
• Germans who participate in a suicide-prevention forum report having fewer suicidal thoughts, though the majority of participants don’t attribute this to the forum itself.
• For Korean 4th-6th graders, more internet time is related to reduced family time, but not reduced family communications. Recommendations from parents of useful web sites, and co-using with children, are positively related to the frequency of online educational activitles. Parental restrictions on time and web sites do not alter children’s actual internet usage.
• Lonely people prefer to make voice calls, anxious people prefer to text.
• Low-income 13 year old African American boys use the internet primarily for entertainment. Porn sites are popular at first, but their popularity decreases dramatically after 3 months.
• 35% of Swedish men and 40% of Swedish women in an online survey reported meeting someone online that they later had sex with offline.

I recently helped Nina Bakisian run a session of her graduate seminar on Games and Simulations in Learning. Ever since one researcher used Civilization to successfully engage inner-city middle school students, there’s been renewed interest in using commercial games for education (instead of the ‘educational games’ I had to play as a kid, like Oregon Trail).

vs.

In class, we downloaded the free demo (good for 100 turns) and jumped right in–the tutorial is too slow for most. But with a bit of coaching, people had no problem setting up their first 2-3 city civilizations, choosing buildings and technologies, and encountering other civilizations. At the end, I showed them the editor which allows you to change anything in your world, and how to create and download new scenarios for students to play. I actually thought at the end, hey, this could work.

The slides from the talk (available below) only start to illustrate the issues, rather than provide the ’solution’. Thanks to Tom Grossman and the USF Faculty Development Committee for supporting this work.

ARGs are games that mix online and real-world play, where players (sometimes thousands of them) work together to solve challenges. The game’s story changes in response to what the players do. ARGs began as a kind of intense promotional tool for movies and videogames, but have diversified into ‘collective experiences’ for business, entertainment, and politics.

ARGs are hot (see the Wired article), but it’s difficult to explain exactly what they are, much less why they’re attractive or how to run one. The article (written with my main man Jeff Kim at U. of Washington, and Elan Lee of Fourth Wall Studios) describes the first two successful ARGs that defined this new type of gaming: the Beast ARG tied to the Spielberg movie AI, and the ilovebees ARG tied to the Halo 2 game release. Wikipedia and the ARG network are other good resources if you’d like to learn more about the games that don’t admit they’re games…