Halloween Party at Park

The students in my Games & Society class held a Halloween party on the park School island the Thursday and Friday before Halloween. I wanted them to practice a couple of basic skills - shopping (they had to find decorations and costumes), building (they had to put their decorations in the right spot), and socializing (dancing and talking to the guests). They signed up for time slots and I put the event in the SL calendar and an announcement on the SL Educators list.  We had some visitors all but one party time so most of the students had practice talking and socializing. Students from two colleges in Ohio came with their professors.

I did the party assignment for a couple of reasons. The first is that I want the students to be a part of the Second Life community. People in SL are always looking for things to do, events to go to. Dancing and listening to music is a very popular thing to do. So the students' party was a way to add value to the community. The second reason is that I have seen many game companies hiring community managers to create events that help retain users in online games. Second Life is a good place to practice the skills needed by community managers.

Here some of their observations.

During my shift (11-12 Thursday) we met a women from Ohio who decided to stop by, as well as one other dude who left fairly quickly.

My enormous dancing squid avatar kept some people mildly entertained, but after the 10-11 team left, there were not many people left for the remainder of my time.

Riding on the spiders seemed to work out well, as I could move around the dance floor and look engaged without actually having to move my avatar manually.

I wasn't sure what to expect with the Halloween Event our class hosted on Second Life. I helped host the dance on Friday Night, but not many people showed up compared to Thursday night. I met an alum from Ithaca who is is an avid Second Life player. She wanted to keep her real identity separate from her second life one. I guess I didn't realize that Second Life is really a "second life" for some people. From talking to her, I found out that Second Life allows you to meet people and also make a living. I shopped for a costume and purchased one using some of my lindens. It was a pretty ridiculous costume, but I liked it. I also found free masks and t-shirts. I put them in a box for the event. I thought it was cool that you can actually make your avatar dance. I also liked that spiders and all of the decorations people brought and created to make the event good.

I was told before I knew about it that Second Life was just a breeding ground for sex and wasting money. This is not so, as I found out during my Halloween weekend. Thursday night, I witnessed a Kool Aid man dance, a bus ride through a dance floor, and a slave trade that never happened. This was the party which I hosted, along with two of my real life friends.
At first, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. My better judgment told me that it would be me, my two friends, and my professor. However, slowly but surely, other people started to show up from all over the world. Second Lifers from our own class, from Ohio and even from other countries showed up to party with us. We gave away a few of our freebies, played some fun music, and ended our shift feeling good about ourselves. Even while my roommate was using my computer, my avatar – dressed as Zero from the Megaman series – was dancing right along to the streaming music.
While it doesn’t have the same effect as an actual dance, a Second Life dance can be a fun way to meet people or simply play along with strangers. At one point, a very frighteningly dressed woman attempted to capture our professor for money. While I will never be sure if the sale was intended to actually happen, it was an interesting and almost nerve-wracking situation which we were all facing. Most people would consider being worried over such a thing only a trivial matter, but at one point I was actually begging. To me, the intensity of the predicament was quite real.
Overall, the dance was interesting not just as a dance but as a social event. People all over the world were only sitting in their chairs on their computers and talking, yet somewhere in cyberspace their digital counterparts were moving to the beat. While I am sure that this will bring about the downfall of person to person communication within the next century, I believe that it is the best alternative that we have right now.

Here are some photos the students took during their shifts. The students will be sending in reports of their perspectives of the parties and I will post them as well.

 

Videogame Expo - kind of a disappointment

The Videogame Expo was held this weekendin Philadelphia, PA. It bill's itself (I"m looking at the logo on my wristband) as America's Videogame Expo.

Well - if that's the case, the videogame industry must be hurting. There are many fewer people here than last year. The number and variety of panels has decreased. There aren't as many exhibitors. Last year's expo had space in both wings of the convention center. The Retro-Con had it's own exhibitor space. Tey had more classic games; this year there's no pacman or ms pacman, no qbert, no lunar lander... This year, the main exhibit hall isn't even full and Nintendo takes up a huge chunk of the front of the hall.

We came for the career seminar that last year had panels on both Saturday and Sunday, including on on pitching your game. This year there are 4 panels including one on picking the best college. Remember me mentioning the dearth of exhibitors above - well, colleges are strangely absent. As are developers and game studios. Granted there aren't as many on the east coast as the west, but where are the ones we do have?

One cool panel - well, we all laughed - was from a voice actor. It was supposed to be about creating characters, but really it was about being a voice actor and creating some characteristics of the character with your voice. Interesting, but not as much info as we expected.

Here's a couple of pictures. Enjoy. Here's a link to a full set of pics I took - click here.

Want more pictures - here's the flickr picture stream labeled "vgxpo" - I don't guarantee they're all from this year's expo, but the most recent ones should be. Click here for the vgxpo stream.

Just a thought

Image via Wikipedia

I think I"m going to have the freshmen game students create a Halloween event in SecondLife - dress up a section of the island and host a dance party or something. They have to wear costumes, decorate the space, invite people, be hosts. They could go shopping for the decorations and avies. Make notecards to hand out. Might be fun and good skills. I"ll have to think about that a bit. Unfortunately Halloween is on a Saturday - but we could do it a bit early I think. People in SecondLife never need too much of a push to celebrate.

I have to see if they know any people outside class. Tho maybe we just do the dance during our class - 30 avies all dancing at once = lag lag lag. Still could be fun

It's VideoGame Expo Time again.

Not as exciting as the Game Developer Conference or E3 but...a heck of a lot closer and more affordable. And still pretty exciting in its own right.

Videogame Expo: http://vgxpo.com in Philadelphia October 9-11

I went last year with 3 students - here's a link to a post from there and some photos I took  . Going again this year with some students to check out the classic arcade games and retro videogame section and the career seminars. They may take part in some tournaments too, and hopefully, meet some other game development students.  At least one group will be videotaping tings at the expo for a project; if they like how it turns out, I"ll include a link to their project in a future post.

Last year there was a little bit of anime and a room with a giant multiplayer DDR set up - multiplayer as in 30 or 40 people at a time. It was a hoot.

Cool things I did in SL this weekend

I went to the Cinese Moon Festival this weekend. Live actors - well, their avatars - in great costumes. A video with avatars. All to tell a chinese fairy tale about the moon. Then we watched part of a martial arts movie made in SL. Lots of blood and action! There was a great audience too. Classical CHinese music and moon cakes. Here are some pics I took. We had the time of day set to midnight for the show but the pictures didn't come out so good.

Another event

I went to the stock car races. They're about as exciting as real world races: cars go round, and around, and around, and ....You get the picture. The cars are cool tho and they have good driving animations. There's a mall and a pit area. It would be a col place to film a machinima. Ok - I"m watching Death Race on HBO ....maybe we don't want to reenact it tho.

ANyway - I'm glad I got a chance to see the races. There was some impressive driving. I'd like to meet the script writers and the people who created the cars.

Here are some pictures

We have a cave and a waterfall now - thanks to Zoltan Bigboots

Zoltan Bigboots, one of the game design students built a cave and waterfall today. He figured out texturing, transparency, building, and some elemental scripting. He used the smooth animation script in the library to make his water fall ...wellll...fall. It came out great. And you can walk thru the waterfall into the cave. Nice work!

Here are some photos. Zoltan was playing as the Alien today - that's him in the pictures.

Events in SL

The students in Games & Society have to go to some event in SL this weekend. I sent them some examples to consider - giant snail racing, MMA fighting, poetry performances...something for everyone. I will post some of their pictures in a later post.

I figured I would check out some new events too and went to a geisha performance. there are pictures below. As you can see, the stage was set with a taiko drum and a statue of a samurai - or let's say samurai armor on a stand maybe. There were 5 or 6 performers on stage in gorgeous kimonos with highly decorated fans. The audience sat quietly on floor cushions and really seemed to be enjoying the performance. It was a nice change of pace from the country music/line dancing I have been doing a lot of lately. The sound track to this performance was drums and string instruments and a flute - no steel guitars or twangy fiddles.

PLay games and more games and more games

There's a thread on a mailing list I"m on about helping students have access to old classic games. One interesting suggestion was to get a license with steam as an internet cafe. Another was to get a subscription with GameTap. Both of them have interesting older games. Game Fly subscriptions for the students (like buying a textbook) is another possibility. The conversation turned to lists of games people should be playing.

Here's one list from the Game Career Guide - new, old, Flash, board, card, D&D....an ipmressive list -
http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/668/ask_the_experts_31_games_students_.php

And here's a list of games that seem to have been abandoned by their publishers or their publishers have gone out of business. You might not be able to play the games, but you can use the descriptions and images on these lists to get a sense for what the games included and how they looked.

• Abandonia - http://www.abandonia.com/
  
• Abandon Games - http://abandongames.com/
  

And last but not least by any means is to look for game play videos on youtube and elsewhere on the net. This is especially good for older games that just aren't available anymore (or their consoles aren't available. My students use game play videos now to illustrate the games they're presenting each week rather than bringing in hardware we don't have at school.

Game students exploring social games

We are talking about social games a bit this week so I had students play some facebook and twitter games.

Here are a couple they made using the tools from shufflebrain and sharendipity to earn some extra credit.

Alyssa Onofreo made two Shufflebrain Photograb games that are really challenging - Game One and Game Two

Students exploring SL

I gave my freshmen (for the most part) games & society students an assignment to go take a picture of themselves someplace cool. They had to use the camera controls so they would show their face in the pic. They couldn't be wearing newbie clothes.
here are a couple I got the day of the assignment. It was an assignment designed to encourage them to practice a few basic SL skills - camera controls, inventory manipulation, and searching.




And no collection of pics would be complete without a little Zombie action. Thanks, Mary, for this one!




And here's a link to the whole collection on flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/kgregson/sets/72157622435425358/

Cutest Little Avatar!

OK - I"m a big softie - I just bought a Chilly WIlly avatar. Is this not the cutest thing you've ever seen? He stands about .4 meters high. Normally I'm about 3.5 or 4 meters tall so he's tiny. Here's chilly standing on the carpet in my house (check out the pink flamingo statue behind him giving him the evil eye) and little chilly sitting on the couch. I will not be using this avatar often - but he's fun and most people have a very positive reaction - my girl friends all want to take him home in their pockets. My friend who plays as a dog sometimes wanted to use him as a chew toy but i put my foot (or in this case tiny webbed yellow flipper) down on that idea.

After 4 years I finally decided to buy a skin

We go thru SL looking at our own backs for the most part. I'm not sure I could pick my face out of a crowd with out looking at the name. In fact I changed my hair once and couldn't find myself in a crowd till I moved.

I've been fairly plain looking till just recently. I had the default skin or some freebie skin I picked up. Same with eyes and shape. Default was good enough.

This summer tho I suddenly got the shopping bug and bought a new skin and eyes and hair. I love prim hair - so does everyone in SL I think. Here's a pic of me in my new skin sitting in the house I built. I bought a pink dress too - me in a pink anything is pretty funny if you knew me in real life.

Some awesome avatars I saw over the summer

I forget where I was when i took these pictures but these are some cool avatars I saw over the summer.

Students building on the Park Communication island

At the end of the Spring09 semester my game design students did some building in SL - they didn't get much past basic prims, texturing, but they turned out some good board games so I'll give them a pass this time. Here are some photos of what they built