Virtual worlds: A new paradigm for advertising?

This thesis explores the new paradigms that are emerging as advertising encounters the Internet. The area that I explore is the convergence of corporate advertising and the online game, Second Life. The thesis takes as its starting point the economic and social/cultural history of advertising. I examine both Marxist and cultural theories of advertising, in order to properly understand the paradigm shifts of the past. I also investigate the effect that technological change has had on the practice of advertising. Having established an historical framework I· then turn to the current state of the advertising market, as it is defined by modern technology. The second and third parts of the thesis concentrate on the emergence of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) on the Internet and the effects that these virtual worlds are having on advertising. I focus on the paradigms that the industry employs in entering these worlds. I argue that Second Life has a number of distinct and distinguishing features that render it unique among MMORPGs and that these features have also attracted significant interest from major corporations and advertisers. Finally the thesis investigates the practice of advertising in Second Life, through a comparative analysis of advertising originating in world and a case study of a successful corporate campaign that embodies the new paradigm that has emerged to facilitate engaging with Second Life and its users

The Impact of a Multi-user Virtual Environment on Teacher Instructional Time, Voluntary Student Writing Practice, and Student Writing Achievement

Thesis (PhD) - Indiana University, School of Education, 2006Two major obstacles to using PBL methods in K-12 classrooms are the time it takes to design the rich learning environment and the time required for students to interact at their own pace with ill-structured problems. The focus of this study was to determine whether game-design design principles can be used to both compliment a digital PBL environment and improve student learning. Further, this study sought to determine whether such a design could allow teachers to act as a challenger of poorly developed knowledge constructs instead of as a font of directional and procedural knowledge for students To answer these questions a digital learning environment was designed that used embedded scaffolds, nested goals, clue trails, narrative context, and explicit rules to improve student writing. This unit was part of a larger multi-user virtual environment, but was designed to be a self-contained unit that leveraged advanced technologies to establish an immersive experience for learning writing skills. The unit was designed to be two-times per week for four weeks in total length which included student training on the active role of a reporter who investigated mysteries taking place in a virtual town. The learner then composed feature stories relating their understanding of the mystery. A comparison class was recruited and the teacher was observed teaching the same content and skill standards but through more didactic methods of instruction. The results of this study showed that the treatment condition had decreases in teacher time spent answering procedural and directional questions, increases in the amount of voluntary student writing activity, and improvements in standardized achievement scores on prompts that consisted of writing tasks similar to those that students participated in during the treatment. Students engaged fully with the learning environment although several tensions emerged. These included tensions between student perceptions of teacher rules versus system rules, student play versus completion of learning tasks, and whether they should learn through the system by reading versus being told what to do. Student disabilities were also encountered during the study which placed the system under a different kind of test than it was designed for, though it successfully engaged these students as well. A final tension arose in the result of the research methods themselves, bringing home the point that a need to capture data may interfere with the learner's experience, possibly reducing or improving the impact of the treatment itself

Massively Multiplayer Online Gamers’ Language: Argument for an M-Gamer Corpus

The past few decades have seen a steady, and sometimes rapid rise in the production and consumption of Massively Multiple Online Games (MMOGs), spanning a global arena. Players from a wide variety of demographical, economic, geographical, cultural and linguistic backgrounds congregate under the banner of MMOGs and spend a considerable amount of time interacting and communicating with one another, in the context of playing and socializing through such playing. It is only logical then, to see such players become part of larger and extended socio-communal landscapes, wherein they may appropriate multiple roles in conjunction with their MMOG player roles, such as teachers, learners, family members and workplace cohorts. It is also equally logical for a curious mind to speculate the effects of the communication and language characteristics of such gamers on themselves, and the greater communities they may inhabit, investigate the realms of such possibilities, and appropriate knowledge garnered from such investigations to share. That is precisely what this study and paper is about. In this paper, I report the findings of an investigation of the communication and language characteristics of MMOG players, using 23 participants for interviews and journal writing, as well as multiple online documents. The findings suggest that MMOG players share some unique communication and language patterns, based on which they can be justifiably categorized as a sub culture with their own corpus. Additionally, researcher and practitioner implications are also discussed

What World of Warcraft is Teaching Us About Learning.

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2017

Mobile virtual worlds

This thesis examines the role of mobile access to virtual worlds in massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG:s). Online gaming worlds have existed for decades, but ever since the smartphone has become more common, new interaction possibilities to these worlds have emerged. We have conducted a literature review to clarify existing gaps in the research community regarding mobile virtual worlds. Through this review, we have constructed a research model containing previously established motivation factors for MMORPG:s, interconnected with possible categories of how to improve the game experience with mobile features. An online survey on this topic was sent out to World of Warcraft players and the results show that many aspects of gameplay through mobile access could improve the gaming experience of virtual gaming worlds. The responses showed very mixed feelings about using many game features from the mobile phone, especially those that tie in with real life. An important finding among the results is the strong reluctance among the players to pay extra money for the addition of mobile access to the virtual world, and a low motivation to use synchronous gameplay features via a mobile computing device

Towards enhancing indigenous language acquisition skills through MMORPGs

The growing interest and access to massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) has opened up significant new scope for educational methodologies, from standard language teaching options through to formalising the skills that a ‘player’ develops through their quests and other activities. This scope is extensive and has created numerous opportunities for innovation both within education and the world of work. This is evidenced by the increasing presence of educational establishments in the virtual world, with Second Life being the most popular for conventional educational purposes. In Second Life and many other realms participants are earning some income and in some cases enjoying a reasonable living from online activities, while developing their skills base. These MMORPGs may open opportunities for promoting language acquisition provided this is located within a suitably attractive realm; ‘players’ would then engage in activities that would contribute to their abilities to use the indigenous languages in everyday life. This article explores how such a system could be developed and the likely contribution it could make to promote a multilingual environment at school and post school levels. Further, it will identify the implications for the future of teaching and learning through the harnessing of MMORPGs

GAYME: The development, design and testing of an auto-ethnographic, documentary game about quarely wandering urban/suburban spaces in Central Florida.

GAYME is a transmedia story-telling world that I have created to conceptually explore the dynamics of queering game design through the development of varying game prototypes. The final iteration of GAYME is @deadquarewalking\u27. It is a documentary game and a performance art installation that documents a carless, gay/queer/quare man\u27s journey on Halloween to get to and from one of Orlando\u27s most well-known gay clubs - the Parliament House Resort. The art of cruising city streets to seek out queer/quare companionship particularly amongst gay, male culture(s) is well-documented in densely, populated cities like New York, San Francisco and London, but not so much in car-centric, urban environments like Orlando that are less oriented towards pedestrians. Cruising has been and continues to be risky even in pedestrian-friendly cities but in Orlando cruising takes on a whole other dimension of danger. In 2011-2012, The Advocate magazine named Orlando one of the gayest cities in America (Breen, 2012). Transportation for America (2011) also named the Orlando metropolitan region the most dangerous city in the country for pedestrians. Living in Orlando without a car can be deadly as well as a significant barrier to connecting with other people, especially queer/quare people, because of Orlando\u27s car-centric design. In Orlando, cars are sexy. At the same time, the increasing prevalence in gay, male culture(s) of geo-social, mobile phone applications using Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and location aware services, such as Grindr (Grindr, LLC., 2009) and even FourSquare (Crowley and Selvadurai, 2009) and Instagram (Systrom and Krieger, 2010), is shifting the way gay/queer/quare Orlandoans co-create social and sexual networks both online and offline. Urban and sub-urban landscapes have transformed into hybrid techno-scapes overlaying the electronic, the emotional and the social with the geographic and the physical (Hjorth, 2011). With or without a car, gay men can still geo-socially cruise Orlando\u27s car-centric, street life with mobile devices. As such emerging media has become more pervasive, it has created new opportunities to quarely visualize Orlando\u27s technoscape through phone photography and hashtag metadata while also blurring lines between the artist and the curator, the player and the game designer. This project particularly has evolved to employ game design as an exhibition tool for the visualization of geo-social photography through hashtag play. Using hashtags as a game mechanic generates metadata that potentially identifies patterns of play and ways of seeing across player experiences as they attempt to make meaning of the images they encounter in the game. @deadquarewalking also demonstrates the potential of game design and geo-social, photo-sharing applications to illuminate new ways of documenting and witnessing the urban landscapes that we both collectively and uniquely inhabit. \u27In Irish culture, quare can mean very or extremely or it can be a spelling of the rural or Southern pronunciation of the word queer. Living in the American Southeast, I personally relate more to the term quare versus queer. Cultural theorist E. Patrick Johnson (2001) also argues for quareness as a way to question the subjective bias of whiteness in queer studies that risks discounting the lived experiences and material realities of people of color. Though I do not identify as a person of color and would be categorized as white or European American, quareness has an important critical application for considering how Orlando\u27s urban design is intersectionally racialized, gendered and classed

Investigating Real-time Touchless Hand Interaction and Machine Learning Agents in Immersive Learning Environments

The recent surge in the adoption of new technologies and innovations in connectivity, interaction technology, and artificial realities can fundamentally change the digital world. eXtended Reality (XR), with its potential to bridge the virtual and real environments, creates new possibilities to develop more engaging and productive learning experiences. Evidence is emerging that thissophisticated technology offers new ways to improve the learning process for better student interaction and engagement. Recently, immersive technology has garnered much attention as an interactive technology that facilitates direct interaction with virtual objects in the real world. Furthermore, these virtual objects can be surrogates for real-world teaching resources, allowing for virtual labs. Thus XR could enable learning experiences that would not bepossible in impoverished educational systems worldwide. Interestingly, concepts such as virtual hand interaction and techniques such as machine learning are still not widely investigated in immersive learning. Hand interaction technologies in virtual environments can support the kinesthetic learning pedagogical approach, and the need for its touchless interaction nature hasincreased exceptionally in the post-COVID world. By implementing and evaluating real-time hand interaction technology for kinesthetic learning and machine learning agents for self-guided learning, this research has addressed these underutilized technologies to demonstrate the efficiency of immersive learning. This thesis has explored different hand-tracking APIs and devices to integrate real-time hand interaction techniques. These hand interaction techniques and integrated machine learning agents using reinforcement learning are evaluated with different display devices to test compatibility. The proposed approach aims to provide self-guided, more productive, and interactive learning experiences. Further, this research has investigated ethics, privacy, and security issues in XR and covered the future of immersive learning in the Metaverse.<br/

Investigating Real-time Touchless Hand Interaction and Machine Learning Agents in Immersive Learning Environments

The recent surge in the adoption of new technologies and innovations in connectivity, interaction technology, and artificial realities can fundamentally change the digital world. eXtended Reality (XR), with its potential to bridge the virtual and real environments, creates new possibilities to develop more engaging and productive learning experiences. Evidence is emerging that thissophisticated technology offers new ways to improve the learning process for better student interaction and engagement. Recently, immersive technology has garnered much attention as an interactive technology that facilitates direct interaction with virtual objects in the real world. Furthermore, these virtual objects can be surrogates for real-world teaching resources, allowing for virtual labs. Thus XR could enable learning experiences that would not bepossible in impoverished educational systems worldwide. Interestingly, concepts such as virtual hand interaction and techniques such as machine learning are still not widely investigated in immersive learning. Hand interaction technologies in virtual environments can support the kinesthetic learning pedagogical approach, and the need for its touchless interaction nature hasincreased exceptionally in the post-COVID world. By implementing and evaluating real-time hand interaction technology for kinesthetic learning and machine learning agents for self-guided learning, this research has addressed these underutilized technologies to demonstrate the efficiency of immersive learning. This thesis has explored different hand-tracking APIs and devices to integrate real-time hand interaction techniques. These hand interaction techniques and integrated machine learning agents using reinforcement learning are evaluated with different display devices to test compatibility. The proposed approach aims to provide self-guided, more productive, and interactive learning experiences. Further, this research has investigated ethics, privacy, and security issues in XR and covered the future of immersive learning in the Metaverse.<br/

Watching Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: Immersive Technology, Biometric Psychography, and the Law

Virtual reality and augmented reality present exceedingly complex privacy issues because of the enhanced user experience and reality-based models. Unlike the issues presented by traditional gaming and social media, immersive technology poses inherent risks, which our legal understanding of biometrics and online harassment is simply not prepared to address. This Article offers five important contributions to this emerging space. It begins by introducing a new area of legal and policy inquiry raised by immersive technology called “biometric psychography.” Second, it explains how immersive technology works to a legal audience and defines concepts that are essential to understanding the risks that the technology poses. Third, it analyzes the gaps in privacy law to address biometric psychography and other emerging challenges raised by immersive technology that most regulators and consumers incorrectly assume will be governed by existing law. Fourth, this Article sources firsthand interviews from early innovators and leading thinkers to highlight harassment and user experience risks posed by immersive technology. Finally, this Article compiles insights from each of these discussions to propose a framework that integrates privacy and human rights into the development of future immersive tech applications. It applies that framework to three specific scenarios and demonstrates how it can help navigate challenges, both old and new