feedback from-The PingWu Martial Arts SL Academy Competition by Delonzo Pope

The Trading Game by Chris, Steve, Laura, & Brandon

Feedback from-Virtual Tourism: Not Your Mother’s Tour Group by Alisa, Micah, Zhen, Iwuen, Jade

Feedback form-Battle of the Appliances by Jose and Tara

Feedback form-Machinima Studio by Xiaomin Zhou

Feedback form-Virtual World Racing by Karen Chan

Feedback Form Virtual News by Beth Renneisen & Josh Gruetzmacher

Feedback form - Danny

Feedback Form - Stephen

Feedback Form - Colleen

Feedback Form - Ed

Final Project Design Document

This seems kind of interesting....

MATTHEW HEBERT
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 15
7p.m.
TIMKEN LECTURE HALL, SAN FRANCISCO CAMPUS
1111 Eighth Street (at 16th and Wisconcin)

Learning from Second Life: Maintaining the Senses of Craft in Digital Fabrication

Matthew Hebert's lecture-Learning from Second Life: Maintaining the Senses of Craft in Digital Fabrication-will cover the theoretical and practical implications of digital technologies for those who are making-and teaching-craft in the 21st century. One of the biggest challenges: the abstraction of the object into a purely visual phenomenon. The physicality of craft objects, he argues, is too easily overlooked in the digital age.
Hebert creates work that deals with technology and its effects on the domestic environment. He adds layers of use and meaning to recognizable furniture forms to generate new modes of interaction among objects, environments, and users. He holds degrees from UC Berkeley and CCA, and he has taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently an assistant professor of furniture at San Diego State University.

All lectures are free and open to the public.
Call 415.703.9563 or visit www.cca.edu/calendar to confirm dates and times.
THE DESIGN AND CRAFT LECTURE SERIES is funded by the Wornick Endowment Fund.
Generous support for CCA public programs in San Francisco has been provided by Grants for the Arts / San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund.

Sign up at www.cca.edu/subscribe to get more CCA news and events delivered by email each month.

3 Cool things in Second LIfe

Surfing- While I was in Spain, I stumbled upon a surfboard. This was funny, you could actually surf. It was more like I was just hovering on top of the water and moving around, still fun nonetheless.






Skydiving- Again in Spain, they have a place to skydive. Not super cool, but kinda funny. Your avatar sits in a chair on this platform. Then you pick how high you want your avatar to go and hit START, your avatar is lifted into space to this height, then it free falls for a bit. You can't see much from the skydive until you get closer to the flying level and you can't make your avatar really do anything crazy while your up there. I thought this was fun still and funny to think that someone designed this to be like skydiving, eventhough the part of skydiving that is supposed to be fun is absolutely impossible to replicate in a 3D environment. What is the point of doing things like this? There is no adrenaline rush, no sense of freedom, no freefalling or floating, and you cannot see the amazing panoramic view of the world below. Why not just go skydiving if you want to skydive?!!!


Campfire- This campfire was on the beach in Spain also. Your avatar can sit back and relax next to it with others and chat. Again, I find this kinda funny. I have grown up in a family that loves to camp and be outdoors, this beach campfire in no way replicates what it is like to sit around a campfire with family and/or friends and share stories and food and good times. Its so goofy to me to do these types of things that require a real world environment in a 3D world that can in no way give the same feelings as if they were done in real life.

3 Cool Places in SL

New York- I thought this was cool because it is New York City. You can even go to the Statue of Liberty, which I thought was pretty funny. I had a hard time at first finding cool places to visit in SL because everything seems the same to me, just some fake version of something else, but after poking around for a bit and thinking of the places I actually want to visit [in real life] I found some relatively cool places.



Spain- This was my favorite place to visit, I hadn’t really thought of going to actual places that exist or abroad in SL, but this was pretty cool, everything is in spanish. There are a lot of cool/funny things you can do here. [See my list of cool things to do in SL]






Italy- I decided to visit Italy because I really want to go back to Italy, I visited there a few years ago and hope to go and stay for awhile after I finish in school. I don’t speak Italian, but have taken a class on it and it was fun to be able to sort of decipher what people were saying. Nothing too special here, just lots of the Italian language everywhere.

Things to do over Spring Break

1. Cool places to visit

>3 places

>blog each, include screenshot

>email to everyone the SL URL

2. Cool Second Life feature [how to]

>3 features

>blog each, make it searchable

>email to everyone

3. Build Asignment

>details to come

Bartle Quiz

After taking the Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology, I found that myself and my avatar are pretty much opposite. I am a socializer in the gaming world and would rather talk to other players than actually have to kill anyone, while my avatar is a killer who thrives on being better than everyone else and having more kills, weapons, and basically just be better than everyone else. 

Final Project Idea

For the final project, I am going to work with James and maybe some others, on creating an alternate reality game, possibly within Second Life. If you have never heard of this before, it is kind of like a viral advertisement, where the player uses things from both the real world and virtual world to play the game and complete tasks. For example the game may be mostly based online and the player may use email and phone to get clues as to what to do next or where to go. In some cases they may tell the user to go out into the real world and do physical things or interact with other players in the game. Usually these games are thought of as just that, games, not advertisements or marketing schemes. The player does not usually find out until the end what the game is actually promoting, though there may be some hints along the way. Here is a link to the wikipedia article on it, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game, its probably a little less confusing and a little more descriptive.
We have not yet decided exactly what we want our game to be about, but we were hoping to come up with something that would incorporate design in some way since that is what both of us are studying. One idea was to incorporate some version of Photoshop Tennis or something similar, where the ultimate goal of the ARG would be to promote the artwork of the designer of the game. Whatever it is, we want it to have something to do with our area of study and hopefully be something that can ultimately have a positive learning outcome for us, as well as something to contribute to our portfolio.

Final Project Proposal

For my final project, I want to do something in Second Life that could maybe test the real-worldness[will specify later] of it. I am not quite sure what that means yet, but I want to do something that would show how life-like/un-life like it is. 

Second Life Telemarketers

Second Life is an interesting game to me. I am really pretty surprised how many real life factors are integrated into it. I am not a huge fan of it, but can absolutely understand how people can become obsessed. You can pretty much do anything within second life that you can do in the real world. One thing I thought was interesting that is included, [in its own Second Life sort of way], is basically telemarketing. They do not call you and bother you with a lower long distance rate, but they do bombard you with bites, that you must defer every time, I guess there is some sort of garlic necklace you can get to automatically defer them, but I guess I have not played quite enough to figure out where I would do that. I researched this I a little bit and found out that they basically use the same technique as the telemarketing companies to do this. They have got a database of everyone who signs up for the game, I'm not completely sure if its everyone, or if you have to do something first to trigger this, but its really pretty similar. Your name is basically sold to a company that can do what they want with it; and the garlic necklace works in a similar fashion, once you get it, your name is again put on another list telling them to say no to bite automatically. This is similar to the no-call list for telemarketers.

Toontown Virtual World First Person Research

16. What are your favorite activities in Toontown?

My favorite activities in Toontown are the mini games that you play when you ride the trolley. They are more fun to me than the rest of the game, I think because you can actually complete and win them. In the rest of Toontown you really just walk around and defeat cogs, which really the computer does for you. I do not like that there is really no ultimate  goal for this game and that the longer you play, doesn't mean that you are getting better. It just means that you've had more time to defeat more cogs, which takes no skill.

11. The concept of “health” of each avatar is a key element in all online virtual worlds.  In Toontown, how is “health” managed and its status displayed? 

In Toontown your health is displayed as your laff points. You laff level is decreased every time a cog returns hit to you. You can then increase your laff points by doing a few different things, like hanging out in the toontown playground area, playing mini games in the toontown playground area, completing tasks giving to you by HQ or on your own, defeating cogs, and also by finding treasures in the playground area like ice cream cones. These are the only ways that I have figured out so far, but there may be more

9. Which features break the immersive feeling?

The immersive feeling for me is broken by the large amount of text that is constantly displayed on the screen. It is to give you information about where other players, shops, and cogs are, which is helpful, but  I think they could have given the player this information in a much more appealing way. Right now, it just clogs up the screen and distracts my eye.