This year’s Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference aims to focus on imagination. Themed Imagination Around the World, this free virtual event takes place in Second Life on March 12–13. Second Life is growing as a venue for education at multiple grade levels. According to Nielsen, Second Life is the second most popular PC game worldwide (behind World of Warcraft). Imagination is sometimes neglected in traditional education settings, but is actually IMO the most important area to develop. Without imagination and creativity what are we? The VWBPE 2010 committee wants to highlight the importance of stimulating the imagination as a means of “sharing knowledge.” Education in virtual worlds relies heavily on collaboration and communication, but would you say that it is more collaborative than traditional education? I guess the answer is, “it depends.”

In general I think that smart people will find ways to educate themselves. I’d like to see learning environments that give students the opportunity to specialize at younger ages. In other words I think it would be beneficial to gear high-school and even some middle-school students towards the subject areas where they excel rather than forcing everyone study every subject (even when they’re just not built for it). Each student might not be as well-rounded but as whole each generation still would be. There’d be more positive engagement and less dropouts. Virtual worlds may be a great resource for accomplishing this because of their ability to open the imagination and at the same time foster communication among like minds across the globe. Thoughts? Anyone planning on attending the conference?

From early childhood we teach our children what is “right” and what is “wrong.” But we do not typically teach children that these are fluid terms. The lines are blurred, or as The Monkees would say, “Today, there is no black or white, [there are] only shades of gray.” As Wikipedia puts it, “Everything has both yin and yang aspects, which constantly interact, never existing in absolute stasis.” I think that to progress we need to teach ourselves to be more accepting of other people, more in balance, and less judging of right versus wrong.

flickr.com/photos/viciedo/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

There are many interaction-based influencers of moral values. Family, friends, school, religion, television, movies, videogames, music, and the internet all play a part today. Movies and television often emphasize right and wrong as viewers attempt to identify who is the “good guy” and who is the “bad guy.” But a distinction cannot always be made—blurred lines are more realistic, and more human. Think about reality television and its focus on people—does it break this convention? Unconventional twists and moral dilemmas are the reasons that the acclaimed drama series Lost is so popular isn’t it? Lost breaks boundaries by creatively blending black and white into gray. Many videogames also rely strongly on social behavior and moral values. Web-based videogames are even increasingly being used as a virtual platform for education—social education—seen through avatars and virtual worlds. Time no doubt plays a factor in shaping our morals as well. Laws have changed. Murder. Marriage. Slavery. Society continues to evolve, right? Or does little change in the grand scheme? How might social media, social gaming, reality TV, and virtual technology shape our moral values and our social evolution?

As a club-goer in the game’s easy mode, you would be 21+ or 18+ depending on the country or venue rules. With your politeness and your ID, you would pass through the bouncer and get inside to have more interactions inside the venue or on the dance floor. In the advanced mode, you would be underage, and you would have to try to pass a fake ID, or invent a way in without one—a lie, another entrance, etc. Once inside you would be able to see, hear, move around, and interact just as you would in a real, live venue. You would get to witness an actual, or virtualized, video stream from the venue. The setting choices for the game might be bars, clubs, concerts, festivals, or any other type of music venue. They could be real or fictitious, and who’s to say what’s real? Level 1 could start on the city street outside a dive bar, and in the subsequent levels the player would work up to larger and larger venues.

As a bouncer in the game’s easy mode, you would have to be polite as you worked the door, checked ID’s, spotted fake ones, and greeted incoming club-goers. Bouncers would lose points for being rude, or for mishandling the crowds. In more advanced bouncer modes, you would have to responsibly prevent violent behavior, by pacifying out-of-control partiers without causing them any physical harm. As for the game levels, the bouncers could start out working for a dive bar, and work up to nicer and nicer jobs at different venues. Even job interview interactions could be simulated in the game.

Maybe you could not attend a real-life Radiohead show in London, but in VirtualVenue you could. Music would be featured throughout the game, and licensing would be paid to those real-life musicians whose songs and live appearances were used in the game. The company that produced this game could generate huge revenues by selling advertising to actual venues, and having them featured as game-setting locations with live, 3D, video feeds of the actual performances. With the game connected to the internet, and the touring artists in the game being real, ticketing companies could pay to have their gig listings in the game, which would increase actual ticket sales and further promote the artists and the venues. A third revenue stream for the game company could be selling subscriptions, of the behavioral data findings, to robotics developers, or to security industry professionals who would want to know all the latest security flaws and use that knowledge to tighten real-life security.

There are myriad ways to expand on all of these ideas. The game could work best in a mashup with social networks, and enable you to play with real people from around the globe.

I think that crowdsourcing videogame technology could lead to the training of real, digital bouncers—an idea that I don’t think is too bizarre. The VirtualVenue network could aggregate data about how players reacted in different situations, and help teach computers human-like behavior. The data crowdsourcing model is already widely used. For example the familiar reCaptcha essentially uses humans to teach computers to read our handwriting for the purpose of digitizing books. Crowdsourcing leads to open innovation, and we may not be far from crowdsourced, robot-teaching technology becoming a mainstream reality. This game, and others like it, could include physical and vocal input from the player, making the game feel more realistic, and opening doors to teaching robots our body language, and our spoken languages. It will be key that we maintain ethics and use this technology in smart ways, because we’ve all seen Terminator and can imagine how this sort of technology might explode. How can we ensure that the relationship between humans and computers remains symbiotic? Computers educated by humans…where might this lead?

Upcoming: We aim to look at this issue in reverse—how videogame technology might enrich our learning through virtual education—see virtualmusic.tv/education/