Homo ludens-designing tomorrow's games

In an electronic and cybernetic world, when one is faced with the task of devising different kinds of interaction among participants, it is worth reflecting that, out of the many and various activities which people engage in, there is one kind of activity which has been cultivated, practised and performed for thousands of years by all members of society. This is the playing of games

3D virtual worlds as environments for literacy learning

Background: Although much has been written about the ways in which new technology might transform educational practice, particularly in the area of literacy learning, there is relatively little empirical work that explores the possibilities and problems - or even what such a transformation might look like in the classroom. 3D virtual worlds offer a range of opportunities for children to use digital literacies in school, and suggest one way in which we might explore changing literacy practices in a playful, yet meaningful context. Purpose: This paper identifies some of the key issues that emerged in designing and implementing virtual world work in a small number of primary schools in the UK. It examines the tensions between different discourses about literacy and literacy learning and shows how these were played out by teachers and pupils in classroom settings.Sources of evidence: Case study data are used as a basis for exploring and illustrating key aspects of design and implementation. The case study material includes views from a number of perspectives including classroom observations, chatlogs, in-world avatar interviews with teachers and also pupils, as well as the author’s field notes of the planning process with accompanying minutes and meeting documents.Main argument: From a Foucauldian perspective, the article suggests that social control of pedagogical practice through the regulation of curriculum time, the normalisation of teaching routines and the regimes of individual assessment restricts teachers’ and pupils’ conceptions of what constitutes literacy. The counternarrative, found in recent work in new litearcies (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006) provides an attractive alternative, but a movement in this direction requires a fundamental shift of emphasis and a re-conceptualisation of what counts as learning.Conclusions: This work on 3D virtual worlds questions the notion of how transformative practice can be achieved with the use of new technologies. It suggests that changes in teacher preparation, continuing professional development as well as wider educational reform may be needed

An Exploratory Study into the Accessibility of a Multi-User Virtual World for Young People with Aphasia

This paper describes an exploratory study into the accessibility of the virtual world Second Life for two young people with aphasia. Aphasia is a communicative disorder most commonly caused by a stroke. It affects both written and spoken language, is frequently accompanied by right-sided paralysis and people with aphasia can experience isolation and social exclusion. Multi-user virtual worlds are a potential source of fun and contact with others, but how accessible are such worlds to those with communication issues? We report an investigation into the accessibility and potential of Second Life for people with aphasia. This was accomplished through a critique and an empirical study involving two young people: Ann was in her mid twenties and Bob in his early thirties. They were selected because both were comfortable with computer technologies before their strokes and each continues to use them, albeit in a more limited capacity. We discuss implications of the results for people with aphasia interacting with multi-user virtual worlds

Autonomous Secondary Gaze Behaviours

In this paper we describe secondary behaviour, this is behaviour that is generated autonomously for an avatar. The user will control various aspects of the avatars behaviour but a truly expressive avatar must produce more complex behaviour than a user could specify in real time. Secondary behaviour provides some of this expressive behaviour autonomously. However, though it is produced autonomously it must produce behaviour that is appropriate to the actions that the user is controlling (the primary behaviour) and it must produce behaviour that corresponds to what the user wants. We describe an architecture which achieves these to aims by tagging the primary behaviour with messages to be sent to the secondary behaviour and by allowing the user to design various aspects of the secondary behaviour before starting to use the avatar. We have implemented this general architecture in a system which adds gaze behaviour to user designed actions

Using affective avatars and rich multimedia content for education of children with autism

Autism is a communication disorder that mandates early and continuous educational interventions on various levels like the everyday social, communication and reasoning skills. Computer-aided education has recently been considered as a likely intervention method for such cases, and therefore different systems have been proposed and developed worldwide. In more recent years, affective computing applications for the aforementioned interventions have also been proposed to shed light on this problem. In this paper, we examine the technological and educational needs of affective interventions for autistic persons. Enabling affective technologies are visited and a number of possible exploitation scenarios are illustrated. Emphasis is placed in covering the continuous and long term needs of autistic persons by unobtrusive and ubiquitous technologies with the engagement of an affective speaking avatar. A personalised prototype system facilitating these scenarios is described. In addition the feedback from educators for autistic persons is provided for the system in terms of its usefulness, efficiency and the envisaged reaction of the autistic persons, collected by means of an anonymous questionnaire. Results illustrate the clear potential of this effort in facilitating a very promising autism intervention

Towards Communicating Agents and Avatars in Virtual Worlds

We report about ongoing research in a virtual reality environment where visitors can interact with agents that help them to obtain information, to perform certain transactions and to collaborate with them in order to get some tasks done. In addition, in a multi-user version of the system visitors can chat with each other. Our environment is a laboratory for research and for experiments with users interacting with agents in multimodal ways, referring to visualized information and making use of knowledge possessed by domain agents, but also by agents that represent other visitors of this environment. We discuss standards that are under development for designing such environments. Our environment models a local theatre in our hometown. We discuss our attempts to let this environment evolve into a theatre community where we do not only have goal-directed visitors buying tickets, but also visitors that that are not yet sure whether they want to buy or just want information or visitors who just want to look around, talk with others, etc. It is shown that we need a multi-user and multi-agent environment to realize our goals and that we need to have a unifying framework in order to be able to introduce and maintain different agents and user avatars with different abilities, including intellectual, interaction and animation abilities

Towards virtual communities on the Web: Actors and audience

We report about ongoing research in a virtual reality environment where visitors can interact with agents that help them to obtain information, to perform certain transactions and to collaborate with them in order to get some tasks done. Our environment models a theatre in our hometown. We discuss attempts to let this environment evolve into a theatre community where we do not only have goal-directed visitors, but also visitors that that are not sure whether they want to buy or just want information or visitors who just want to look around. It is shown that we need a multi-user and multiagent environment to realize our goals. Since our environment models a theatre it is also interesting to investigate the roles of performers and audience in this environment. For that reason we discuss capabilities and personalities of agents. Some notes on the historical development of networked communities are included

Investigating affordances of virtual worlds for real world B2C e-commerce

Virtual worlds are three-dimensional (3D) online persistent multi-user environments where users interact through avatars. The literature suggests that virtual worlds can facilitate real world business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce. However, few real world businesses have adopted virtual worlds for B2C e-commerce. In this paper, we present results from interviews with consumers in a virtual world to investigate how virtual worlds can support B2C e-commerce. A thematic analysis of the data was conducted to uncover affordances and constraints of virtual worlds for B2C e-commerce. Two affordances (habitability and appearance of realness) and one constraint (demand for specialised skill) were uncovered. The implications of this research for designers are (1) to provide options to consumers that enable them to manage their online reputation, (2) to focus on managing consumers’ expectations and (3) to facilitate learning between consumers