Bob Moore

researchers are striving for “omniscience” in real life
– PlaceLab (MIT): attempting to capture near-total behavioral data through hundreds of sensors in the home

omniscience in virtual worlds is much easier – far less expensive

PlayOn – http://blogs.parc.com/playon/

mixed methodology in PlayOn
1. Virtual Ethnography - main focus is the virtual persona of the participants; the person at the keyboard
observe —> field notes —> pictures; can access the “field” from any PC
focus on identifying critical episodes; can use virtual cameras;
is it too easy to capture this data?

Star Wars Galaxies – first major game to have combat– and non-combat-oriented professions
– doctors, dancers, musicians, architects, droid engineers, chefs, tailors, mayors
team created a combat player and a non-combat player to explore the game
as sociologists, they were interested in the “hot spots” – turned out to be starports and cantinas

cantina practices: seedy places where players seek “mind healing;” game developers did motion captures of real dancers for the virtual ones
you have three kinds of health, one of which is “mind;” you have to spend a few minutes in a cantina to rejuvenate your mind health
“a mind buff” – temporary mind boost that you pay dancers and entertainers for
“xp grinding” – entertainer & medic
best way to level up is to join other entertainers; can even set your character to a macro to loop it so it keeps dancing, playing music, etc.
get varying degrees of socializing/role playing around all of this; even though it’s an RPG, users don’t “play” as their character, they play as themselves
the game is so complicated that there is lots of knowledge sharing
cantinas have different reputations
“ooc” = “out of character;” they’ll mark their conversation when they’re speaking out of character

2. Going Deeper: Conversation Analysis
a “microscope” for examining conversation; recordings of naturally occurring interaction (face-to-face and technologically mediated)
record —> compress (MPEG-2) —> transcribe
can use screen capture software, but there are problems with file size; use a video camera connected to the computer
then digitize them and annotate system logs

showed a “mind healing” sequence; self-serve model of service delivery with very few opportunities for social interaction because you just click on a dancer to “watch” and mind heal; the player that needs the mind heal initiates the game command

showed a “mind buff” sequence; player has to ask others if they mind buff; dancer has to direct their attention to that player; provides opportunity for social interaction (convention is to sit down to watch them dance), so they end up talking; takes about 8–1/2 minutes; “it’s like when you go to get your hair cut” – you don’t have to talk, but you generally do; full-serve model because the entertainer has to initiate the command

Nicolas Ducheneaut

3. Going Broader: Analytic Software
what kind of social spaces are SWG’s cantinas?
– a virtual “third place”
– what are the opportunities for interaction and learning

Studying sociability in online communities
– they placed “bots” in key game locations and recorded activities 24/7
– they wrote software to format the data prior to analysis
– they wrote applications to compute key metrics and visualize patterns of activity

had to program the bots to do something periodically or else they’d get “kicked out”

program bots —> capture logs —> process and visualize data

“Beggar Bot” – when you get more data than you planned for; they had collected 300,000 credits in tips after just one month (enough to buy three starships)!
some people came up to the bot saying they’d seen it in the corner all alone for months - don’t be afraid, come join us

Putting It All Together
nothing replaces immersion

did some hands-on data analysis
one group had lots of advertising spam instead of socialization