Education and Technology Hub

Here are my notes on this session. Quite interesting…

Liz Losh, Jean Miller, Bill May

Tory Horton: Public diplomacy: what is it? Information and info overload that redefines public diplomacy that focuses on communication and dialogue, collaboration and group work. With this shift came a change: listening, policy alignment… Opportunities include: VW can fulfill an ideal which is collaboration across cultures and have a place for coordinated action. They can have a new relationship. Geography collapses. Credibility is important in relationships and in public diplomacy are important. Building relationships requires credibility and basing your opinion not on what one looks.

Limitations: VW are unattainable [too difficult to learn and too difficult to get etc]… The 2^nd reason is that govnt’s are unable to control the space. 3^rd issue is that public dipl. Is viewed as the end result. It should not be.

J. Miller:

• what did govts want? They were after the hype as a short term goal. Some wanted to get an online campaign: would a virtual space be better or go on youtube and it would be better?
• Who is the audience? Knowledgeable teens or elderly who need more time to learn or their own internal teams.
• Who knew what within a govt agency? They were the group of the convinced and now wanted to convince others within the govt.  There were concerns about finances. Many underestimated the resources. The Swedish Embassy and the Maldives are there. How do you engage community?
• Is this all relevant? When we engage communities and engage cultures, does it actually bring about change?

Losh:

Code and servers and files can be used for unintended stuff and therefore have unintended consequence. Choosing proprietary environments affects how it will work.

Military video games: people coming in from different paradigms: game development or social media.

Bill:

Mutual understanding between the govt and others around the world. Giving context to US policies. The idea was to create space where children could interact and go back home thinking well Americans are not so bad then. People can come and have discussions and talk about things. Tracking the industry 4 and a half years ago. Do people get to know each other in virtual spaces? It is not about building presence but how to use it. Cultural events. A mixed media event with Egyptian bloggers in second life.

This was a delightful session. The speakers were all great. Here are my notes on the session:

Herbert Burket [German law professor]

Three devices in games that maintain the interest in winning and create a taboo in losing: diversion, avoidance and reinterpretation.

• Diversion: a game gives you an indication of losing and lets you try again.
• Avoidance: bringing forward advertising games where you cannot lose at all.
• Reinterpretation: to reinterpret losing as winning.

There is room for thinking about the losing experience in the gaming world. Rather than giving players the experience of losing but losing is an opportunity to take them out of the game and have a more reflective view of the losing experience. There are three strategies that help deepen the experience of losing:

• The tragedy games: when a player has an unsurmountable barrier.
• Winning is losing: eg players upload their friends pics and think they are on their team but end up shooting them.
• Dependence games: other players constantly redefine what is success and leaves each individual players chasing other goals that other individuals are setting.

Not to dwell on the experience of losing in a game is itself a loss.

Mia Consalvo [MIT]

Western Otaku: games crossing

Globalization.  VW as transnational spaces. People play SL and final fantasy play on shared servers. You can play it on any platform so it is also cross platform. Otaku are fans of Japanese who like Japanese culture. Gives them space to encounter ‘the other’.  Impact on culture?

Spectrum of interests: interest in stories/gameplay; might lead to further interests such as learning language; creates possibilities to be exposed to different people, your beliefs challenged etc.

Torill Mortensen [Norway]

Physical playspace: how do people integrate machines into their lives – especially gamers? Game objects come out of the game – eg. Dragons come out in art and drawing.

Results:

• The use of game technology is adjusted to the needs of the players, illustrating social structures as much as game structures.
• Often behaviours overlap mong fields, highlighting cultural synchronicity.
• If we define vw the way bart simon did as ways of living which are artificially constructed and depend on tech, independent of georgraphy, then the ‘rane’ world
• The time spent in digital spaces is as real a the time spent in cars.
• The vw is already in the world.

Will Leverett

What happens when we give people the most sophisticated tools today? Realtimeworlds [will be out in Feb]. Detailed views of avatars – muscles, tattoos, skin color, facial expressions. It also has its own music creator.

Very very interesting session on surveillance and security on virtual worlds. I actually thought it would be all about ‘Muslim terrorists’ and I was quite apprehensive, but then found the session to be absolutely fantastic and very informative.

Here are my notes on the session:

Intro from British intelligence: What can they do for bad-guys: Voip, recruitment..

What can it do for good-guys: twitter for example. There was an operation Crevice to bomb London.

Wikipedia, twitter, facebook, vertical content: the possibility of it spilling over in VW is great. Re the future of VWs going to be where warfare is conducted? [e during the Gaza war: Gaza and Israel in SL].

Bart Simon: perfect surveillance – worries about invasion of privacy. Jeremy Bentham and Foucault’s panoptic. It is not about being watched, but it is about a state that requires minimal surveillance. It is about the people watching themselves – they do the surveillance themselves and they start watching and get info about themselves to police themselves. Surveillance is a systematic exertion of influence on someone’s life and the second is systematic attention. People don’t watch people any more. Now we have dataveillance: where data is collected and put in a database. The surveillance is not of the person but the data about that person and the key is to connect the data to the person. It ends when that person ‘confesses’ that you got him. But VWs make that difficult because you disengage who you are from the data about you.

Oscillating between the concept that VWs is dangerous and the concept that it is not. We don’t want their confessions any more but we want their genetic information. When we increase the individuization of avatars people make surveillance easier because they claim their data directly.

Everything in VWs lets you act as who you are not – it encourages role play and encourages you to be someone else – which real life is difficult to do. How do we create a VW where people will not role play? This is for example for marketing projects.

Charles Cohen: is surveillance technically possible? And is it lawful? [a murder case where normally you would talk to friends etc.. and trace behavior, but he spent 20 hrs online and they decided they had to go there to make the investigation]. Distribution and production of child porn. Found in VWs but as it gets more photorealistic it becomes more difficult to prosecute: is this really a child? How to prove that?

Currently it is more of a challenge than an opportunity. What about servers outside US jurisdiction?

Michael Schrage: raises sociological and legal questions. You design honeypots – in VW what constitutes a honey pot where you trap avatars to do get them – which may sound like entrapment. How do you design a honey pot? The issue is how the VW interacts with the real life. The rise is malevolent mashups. VW as media for trust and media for verficiation. Trust but verify as Reagan said. How do you verify?

Creating jihadi bots. Assembling botnets is not that hard.

The evocative aspect is not the evolution of VWs but because of the proliferation of devices we will see grey markets and black markets and improvisation. It will create interesting collaborations in the community.

Michael Theis: the world has changed fundamentally in such a way that people can steal stuff because it is in a computer in some place. It takes 3 things for protection:

1-      An aspect of trustworthiness: what do I trust and who

2-      Right size my permissions: the software does what it is designed to do. Information about them but not give out info about myself.

3-      Effective monitoring capability: not surveillance but monitoring.

We look at people in real life, and see how they would act in cyberspace. Would someone who shares music steal from best buy for example? Not necessarily.

Trustworthiness: looking at people and assessing facial and physical expressions during an investigation. It is difficult to do that in VWs and cyberspace.

People believe in anonymity but it is not true. In voice it is an issue of meter and tone etc.. pausing, the ummms.. Could I do that in VW? Could I ask questions to determine their trustworthiness?

People also act differently in different VWs. Anamiah.. people could take on multiple personalities but then after a while you can tell that the two are the same people.  What is needed is something that identifies those aspects.

We have to consider how we go about doing monitoring.

From the question/answer session:

Could griefers be prosecuted? For example for sexual harassment?

In terms of constitutional law, how much can you do in terms of going into someone’s virtual home? It has to be viewed as an intercept to do that rather than as a search of the home that needs a warrant. Currently the law does not specify that at all. But also that should fall into the laps of the VW owners and their TOS.