Ludium 2 roundup

I had to leave Ludium 2 early today to catch a couple of flights, however I must say I walked away completely amazed at how well the event went, and how much was accomplished.  The team is still going there, working on finalizing the platform for the speaker(s).

Overall, for those who could not attend, the Studio Cypher team and Ted Castronova arranged the conference as a game....a political convention specifically, with regions and districts vying for influence and mind-share.  Each district in each region developed 10 platform statements, which were then merged with other similar statements in other districts in the region, and subsequently other regions.  There were debates, press broadsheets, bribes, horse-trading, and all of the other tools of the political milieu.

There is a wiki (no griefing, if you please) up here, which is providing a place for the extensive wordsmithing going on, as well as a twitter.

Comments

[Jeff]

Christian,
Ludium sounds fascinating. I was completely unaware of its existence. As I clicked around the SWI website I also stumbled upon SWI's Arden project which sounds absolutely amazing. All of this caused a question/thought to formulate in my head. Most of the information I read about virtual worlds discusses either gaming or collaboration as the main purpose for these worlds. Now I can see a possibility for scholastic applications as well. In your opinion, what are some other applications for 'verses?

Thanks,
Jeff

[Christian Renaud]

Jeff,

Absolutely they can be used for educational purposes. My personal favorite potential application of 'verses is for immersive language training. I recently went to Beijing after taking 8 months of Mandarin, but would have paid good money for an additional 'Virtual Beijing' intensive language training program, where your avatar is deposited in the customs line of the airport and needs to navigate their way out, get a ride to the hotel, check in, order a meal, etc.. You could capture the non-verbal, cultural, and social components in a way you can't do in a classroom generally.

There is obvious benefit to classroom & lecture applications of 'verses, given the benefit of interaction with other students. I'm also looking forward to the 'augmented' applications that 'verses offer that are unrealistic to implement in the real world classroom, such as:

a) collaborative development or design
b) integrated economies of ideas
c) prediction markets and other fitness metrics of content from the course

We can't easily implement these in RL, but can instrument them into the narrative or tools used for classroom training in a 'verse.

My $0.02, jetlag adjusted. - C

[Jeff]

Immersive language training is a great idea. And imagine how much more powerful it would be once voice is integrated into 'verses. I can just imagine myself flipping through my Berlitz Phrasebook while my avatar sits clueless at a virtual cafe on the Champs-Elysees.

[Richard Bartle]

Given that you were the other Koithuo spy (along with Joshua Fairfield and me), remember to add "Joint Winner of the Chalice of Saethryd" to your CV.

Richard

[Christian Renaud]

Richard,

I hadn't heard that we'd won. Koithuons united! It will be the highlight of my CV, I assure you.

Randy informed me that we'd been outed in a separate blog comment. When did that get disclosed to the delegates (and how bad was the beating?)?

Hope to bump in to you in London either this week at ASG or in October if we both end up speaking at VWF.

Cheers!! C

[Thomas Malaby]

Hey Christian -- it was great to get to know you at the Ludium, even though you were a filthy Koithuoan spy! I wanted to let you know that there is a lively discussion over at Terra Nova about the platform -- http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2007/06/swis-declaratio.html -- feel free to dive in!