Navigating discourses in place in the world of Webkinz

This is the postprint, author's accepted manuscript version of this article after peer review.Geosemiotics (Scollon and Scollon, 2003) frames this analysis of play, multimodal collaboration, and peer mediation as players navigate barriers to online connectivity in a children’s social network and gaming site. A geosemiotic perspective enables examination of children’s web play as discourses in place: fluidly converging and diverging interactions among four factors: (1) social actors, (2) interaction order, (3) visual semiotics, and (4) place semiotics. The video data are excerpted from an ethnographic study of a computer club for primary school-aged children in an afterschool program serving working-class and middle-class families in a US Midwest university community. Discourses of schooling in the computer room and Webkinz complicated children’s goal of coordinated game play and mutual participation in online games. Barriers to online connection produced ruptures that foregrounded childrens’ collaborative management of time and space. This foregrounding makes typically backgrounded practices, modes, and discourses visible and available for deconstruction and critique

Decomposition of transition systems into sets of synchronizing state machines

Transition systems (TS) and Petri nets (PN) are important models of computation ubiquitous in formal methods for modeling systems. An important problem is how to extract from a given TS a PN whose reachability graph is equivalent (with a suitable notion of equivalence) to the original TS. This paper addresses the decomposition of transition systems into synchronizing state machines (SMs), which are a class of Petri nets where each transition has one incoming and one outgoing arc and all markings have exactly one token. This is an important case of the general problem of extracting a PN from a TS. The decomposition is based on the theory of regions, and it is shown that a property of regions called excitation-closure is a sufficient condition to guarantee the equivalence between the original TS and a decomposition into SMs. An efficient algorithm is provided which solves the problem by reducing its critical steps to the maximal independent set problem (to compute a minimal set of irredundant SMs) or to satisfiability (to merge the SMs). We report experimental results that show a good trade-off between quality of results vs. computation time. © 2021 IEEE.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Avatar actors

In this text I wish to discuss, as well as illustrate through pictorial examples, how the Live Visuals of three dimensional online virtual worlds may be leading us into participatory and collaborative Play states during which we appear to become the creators as well as the actors of what may also be described as our own real-time cinematic output. One of the most compelling of these stages may be three dimensional, online virtual worlds in which avatars create and enact their own tales and conceptions, effectively bringing forth live, participatory cinema through Play

Decomposition of transition systems into sets of synchronizing state machines

Transition systems (TS) and Petri nets (PN) are important models of computation ubiquitous in formal methods for modeling systems. An important problem is how to extract from a given TS a PN whose reachability graph is equivalent (with a suitable notion of equivalence) to the original TS. This paper addresses the decomposition of transition systems into synchronizing state machines (SMs), which are a class of Petri nets where each transition has one incoming and one outgoing arc and all markings have exactly one token. This is an important case of the general problem of extracting a PN from a TS. The decomposition is based on the theory of regions, and it is shown that a property of regions called excitation-closure is a sufficient condition to guarantee the equivalence between the original TS and a decomposition into SMs. An efficient algorithm is provided which solves the problem by reducing its critical steps to the maximal independent set problem (to compute a minimal set of irredundant SMs) or to satisfiability (to merge the SMs). We report experimental results that show a good trade-off between quality of results vs. computation time

Authoring the Intimate Self: Identity, Expression and Role-playing within a Pioneering Virtual Community

We examine Traveler, a social-based 3D online virtual community with over ten years of continuous community use, as a case study. Traveler is a client-server application allowing real-time synchronous communication between individuals over the Internet. The Traveler client interface presents the user with a shared, user created, virtual 3D world, in which participants are represented by avatars. The primary mode of communication is through multi-point, full duplex voice, managed by the server. This paper reflects on the initial design goals of the developers in the mid 1990s to emulate natural social paradigms and, more recently, reports on how the online community uses distance attended multi-point voice and open-ended 3D space construction to express themselves both on a personal level and collaborative level to facilitate a tight socially based community. This paper situates the historical importance of Traveler within the framework of contemporary virtual worlds and provides insights into the ways that this software platform might influence next-generation virtual communities

A 3D virtual environment for social telepresence

We examine OnLive Traveler as a case study. Traveler is a clientserver application allowing real-time synchronous communication between individuals over the Internet. The Traveler client interface presents the user with a shared virtual 3D world, in which participants are represented by avatars. The primary mode of communication is through multi-point, full duplex voice, managed by the server. Our design goal was to develop a virtual community system that emulates natural social paradigms, allowing the participants to sense a tele-presence, the subjective sensation that remote users are actually co-located within a virtual space. Once this level of immersive "sense of presence" and engagement is achieved, we believe an enhanced level of socialization, learning, and communication are achievable. We examine a number of very specific design and implementation decisions that were made to achieve this goal within platform constraints. We also will detail some observed results gleaned from the virtual community userbase, which has been online for several year