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.