There is a lot of interest in Second Life and the educational potential of this and similar immersive game-like worlds. Club Penguin — a site supposedly for 13+ (but likely 9-14) — has recently been sold to Disney for $350 million. These have fascinated me since reading Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) , Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash (1992) and watching that wonderful episode of Red Dwarf featuring Better than Life.

I am reminded of questions that arose in the 1990s when the hot topic was “computer supported collaborative learning”. In those days there were attempts to use the forrunners of these environments: MUDs (multi-user-dungeons) : text based computer environments arranged as “rooms” were you could chat to others in the same room as you, you could collect artefacts left in the room, and you could read the description of the room. The architecture/landscape metaphor persists – it is now made visible. The addition of executable program code in the rooms is another enhancement.

None of this MUD functionality was any different from the other paradigm – the computer conference or forum. The question that I raised in the 1990s concerned any advantages and disadvantages of going for one paradigm or the other. Fundamentally there is a perceptual difference – in the case of the conference material is pushed to you like email. You log onto the system and it is like using a personal portal/ Facebook site/ Lotus Notes type environment- and the stuff is there for you in varying folders adopting a window-based desk-top metaphor or (nowadays) a web based hyperlinks. With an “environment” those folders and links still exist – it is just that they are pseudo-geographically distributed around some virtual geography. In one case you think that stuff is brought to you- or you communicate in ways akin to using a telephone (chat), in the other you have to go to somewhere to go some virtual location to get stuff and have face to face conversations. Is one system easier to navigate than the other? Is one more engaging than the other? Does one kind better suit one kind of personal preference? What does the 3d-ness add?

Second Life seems to get all the publicity. It is also a very “open” environment – you can have encounters you may not allow for (or wish to have). It is not the only one. The main prompt for this post is a comparison chart of a number of sites with varying degrees of immersion and membership styles. It is on the Techcrunch blog. In June 2007 there were over 9 million visits to Club Penguin, nearly 2 million visits to Barbie Girls. There were 3.5 million for Second Life. Anyway it is worth looking at the Techcrunch comparison chart.

Trackback

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 11:06 am and is filed under games and learning, tools and technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.