From Utopia to Second Life

In my last post, before Christmas (and doesn't that seem like a long time ago already?) I gave a brief history of the type of game that evolved into today's online virtual reality game like World of Warcraft. You may have wondered what this has got to do with Councils or new ways of working – well I'm coming to that, but some background was needed.

Alongside those games, loosely describable as "roll playing games", another type of game emerged – the so-called "god game" or "sim game" (sim being short for simulation) where you, the player, acted like a god who is in charge of a world and could make life heaven or hell for the (virtual) inhabitants. Early examples were based on reality and often used historical settings so you could build your own version of ancient Roman or Egyptian civilisation, for example.

The 1982 Utopia for the Mattel Intellivision game console was probably the first such game. This was followed in 1989 by the PC-based Populous which spawned a series of which the latest incarnation was produced in 2007, illustrating the enduring nature of this type of game. Civilisation followed in 1991 and it, too, has had a series of very successful sequels (the latest being only last year).

The Utopia game for Mattel, 1982
The Populous game for PC, 1989
The Civilisation game for PC, 1991
It wasn't long before this type of game branched off into a more specialist realm typified by titles like Railroad Tycoon and Rollercoaster Tycoon, and into the more fantastic with titles like Black & White (2001, where you truly do play a god and have an animal-like "pet" who you use to entertain and subdue your people, and you have the "Hand of God", which can move or form the world, and even grab villagers - generally a frightening experience for them) and Alien Nations (1999 – where you direct the fortunes of one of three alien races while the computer deals with the other two – eventually warfare breaks out and you have to handle that as well).
The Black and White game for PC, 2001
However the mainstream continued and eventually the most popular series so far was launched – The Sims which was released in 2000 and which has led to the development of over forty spin-offs and is still going strong. As of March 2008 it was the best selling game franchise in history. To what does it owe its success? Its ordinariness! The Sims is basically a virtual "ordinary" world where you direct the lives of people who live in houses like yours, have jobs like yours, and even date, marry, have children, etc. Basically, then, it feeds on the thing we are most interested in: ourselves.
The Sims game for PC, 2000
Although The Sims has now developed from its single player origins into multi-player versions it has not so far developed a virtual reality environment. After an abortive attempt in 2002 (The Sims Online) it closed down the project in 2008 after renaming it EA Land in 2007.

Possibly it was just too soon, because in 2003 Linden Labs launched Second Life which has become the world's most popular online virtual reality world. It now has over 15 million registered accounts (this may not mean users as some people may have more than one account), and at peak times there can be up to 40,000 people online simultaneously.
Second Life is a virtual reality world that resembles our own in that there are people and buildings and land – cities and towns and parks. Cars and bikes and planes. You can "build" almost anything. It also has fantasy elements – your avatar (the computer representation of you) can fly, and you can design him, her or "it" to be non-human (e.g. look like a bird or a dragon, etc.). However like the real world, you can also trade and Second Life has its own currency, the Linden Dollar (which you can earn within the world, or purchase for real money).

Because it's a virtual world inhabited by real people (or at least their avatars), it shares the pros and cons of the real world. There is pornography, violence and fraud; but there is also genuinely improving endeavour ranging from educational (at least 300 universities around the world teach courses or conduct research in SL) through to commercial (being used for design, public opinion testing, etc.) and political (several countries now have SL embassies, including Sweden and Israel). There is a flourishing live sports and entertainment stream: artists such as Duran Duran and Suzanne Vega have held live concerts in SL and there are sporting leagues for football and racing cars (among others).

So where does this lead us in terms of new ways of working? Second Life (and its like: there are now several other virtual worlds) is not yet mainstream. In the UK about 36 million households have Internet connections, but only a few thousand are SL visitors. But it's an environment with many opportunities, and we're just at the beginning. So we have an opportunity to help it develop as well as to use it to help us. Here are just a few ideas:

• Get school children to design classrooms and schools (or collaborate with architects) and link this to Building Schools for the Future.
• Develop SL-based teaching: there is evidence to show that people react better in terms of distance learning within a virtual environment compared with a less personal one such as emails or online conferences.
• Hold SL Counsellor surgeries.
• Hold events in parallel in real and SL, e.g. art exhibitions, musical concerts.
• Use SL to model new or improved environments in parks and housing (e.g. linked to Housing Market Renewal).
• Hold council meetings in SL with members of the (Oldham) public invited to watch and/or contribute.

The list is almost endless. SL has the advantage that you don't have to be there to be there: so meetings that people might not attend in the real world might be attended in SL. It has the advantage that you can try things out at relatively low cost and little risk, and get high quality feedback from users.

Oldham has already started experimenting in SL, and there's an Oldham "island" – though not yet fully public. This is exciting stuff – let's not ignore the opportunities it raises. And going back to the background on games: if there's anything to learn from the lessons of the popularity of The Sims and of environments like World of Warcraft, it's that people love this stuff. So you've already got them on your side just by the fact that being there is entertaining.
Oldham in Second Life, 2008
Oldham in Second Life, 2008

Soap Life - a playful history part 3

In my previous two posts I have been looking at computer gaming history and how it relates to the upcoming phenomenon of virtual reality worlds. My conclusion so far has been that virtual worlds like Second Life potentially supply a cornucopia of opportunities for the public sector. Examples include service delivery, citizen engagement and consultation (and many more).

But why should we take notice of this opportunity? Surely it's just another channel? And surely we should concentrate on what our customers / citizens want now (which is still largely telephone, with online self-serve still dragging behind)? Whilst there is some truth in this, I'd argue that we ignore the developing channels at our peril. Yes indeed let's continue to develop and support existing channels, but let's also develop the new ones - especially those that have a great potential.

So why do virtual worlds have potential? I've already alluded to the two main factors, and in this post I want to develop these further.

Virtually brainy

In my post of 18th December 2008, in my penultimate paragraph I wrote 'Perhaps ... at heart we are virtual reality creatures... By this I mean that everything we experience has to be modelled in our brain. The things we see, hear, touch, smell and taste are all converted into electrical and chemical impulses that travel through our body to the brain where this information is processed into what we perceive as "reality"'.

I have to admit this idea is not my own. The IT columnist Dick Pountain introduced me to this in his column in the UK PCPRO Magazine of November 2008 (Idealog, issue 169, p.11). He explains very lucidly that "the external world is full of unevenly distributed, moving matter that exhibits forms (shapes, colours and so on) imposed by the basic attractive forces of physics. Living organisms sample these forms via their sense organs, store and process them encoded as electrochemical signals" and goes on to relate that therefore organisms' "knowledge" of reality is based entirely on these sensory samples. The reconstruction they create within their brains (and in our case, within our consciousness) could potentially be very far from what reality actually is. We already know, for example, that our senses have limits so we cannot see the infra-red spectrum. Thus the visual images our brain translates are limited samples of the range of light waves that are actually impinging upon us. In other words, our reconstruction of reality is a part of what is actually out there and our reality is entirely dictated by the reconstruction within our brains.

Pountain goes on "While many of our stored samples originate as perceptions from the outside world, our brain can dismantle, rejig and distort these images and construct new ones from them that correspond to no external object. An almost infinite number of forms are physically possible that aren't manifest in matter right here, right now, but our brain can construct them for itself (as, for example, when we remember a dead friend's face). Also, some forms not physically possible can be conjured up by the brain, as with demons or angels."

Thus we truly live with a virtual reality already: the mixture of memory, imagination and sampled reconstruction that is our experience of life.

My take on this is that we are predisposed towards virtual reality because in fact that's the currency our brains deal in: we are virtually brainy creatures!

Soap life

The second factor I alluded to in my post on 16th January, where I noted when writing about The Sims game "it feeds on the thing we are most interested in: ourselves".

Second Life is a virtual reality world that we can immerse ourselves in to a far greater extent than The Sims. The Sims, at the end of the day, have no real intelligence and we cannot really engage with them. In Second Life we are "in" the game and all the other players are other people. Maybe Second Life should be called Soap Life because we can play out the sort of "real life" fantasies that so engage the millions who watch TV soaps.

My point here is that TV soaps are interesting because on the one hand they are like real life - the situations are realistic and the people are "ordinary". But they also have this fantasy element where things are played out more intensely than in real life. The success of UK Channel 4's Big Brother is aligned to this, and it's even more alluring because the people in the Big Brother house aren't playing to a script, they're living a real (if not exactly normal) life in front of us. This kind of thing is intensely interesting to us because it's all about who we are and the lives we live.

So a virtual reality world like Second Life allows us to be in our own soap opera. We can create our own persona and interact with the created personas of other real people. We know, when we talk to another SL resident, that the chances are they don't look at all like their avatar (though boringly, mine does look a bit like me - see Jan 20th post), and we also know that they may not act in the same way they do in real life. But in all other respects it is a real engagement with another person live in our own "soap".

On the holodeck

The creators of Star Trek knew this when they dreamed up the Starship Enterprise's holodeck. That place where the crew could go and live out their fantasies in a real world 3D environment. And it's interesting that most of the crew chose to create environments that were close to their own rather than very different: Captain Picard's detective Dixon Hill is the perfect example of this.

That's why I think virtual reality is so important: it's, more than anything else we have at present, an opportunity for us to create environments which are richly familiar and creative for our "virtually oriented" brains, and in which we can recreate the things that we love best: ourselves. And we're right back where I started (18th December 2008) with films like Tron and The Matrix!