Metaverse Mod Squad

A few weeks ago we had asked the kiddos on Webosaurs Island to send in their questions for Webosaurs Art Director “Juiceking” to answer in a video. Juice and I (Rex) answered some of their questions on camera, and had a little fun in the process. It’s a bit long, but worth sticking through to the end. That is, if you want to see me doing an awful Justin Bieber impersonation.

No matter how much Webosaurs has grown, we’ve always tried to keep a close bond with the community. Rather than just presenting a product, we try to actively involve our kids in everything that we do to let them know that the continued growth and development of Webosaurs Island is not a one-way process.

Chase Straight

Manager, Youth Media

Metaverse client Hangout Industries, the creator of the Facebook virtual world Superstar City, has announced the initial results of a collaboration with the pop rock band We The Kings.  In Superstar City, fans of the group can outfit their avatars with the band’s clothing, network with other fans, dance to the band’s music and are able to seamlessly buy the band’s music on iTunes.  The campaign has been hugely successful and has improved the band’s reach and engagement in conjunction with its tour.

“We have been thrilled with our ongoing collaboration with Superstar City.  In just one weekend, Hangout increased our fan base on Facebook by 6%,” said Jennifer Grossbach, Senior Director at the band’s label, S-Curve Records.  “The application has been a huge value-added service in our efforts to expand the exposure of our bands and the engagement of our fans.”

“Our integration with S-Curve Records and We the Kings has been mutually beneficial. With more than 300,000 Facebook fans and growing, the label was looking for a way to take fan involvement to the next level. Superstar City allows them to expand their reach, while providing a genuine and immersive experience that stays true to the band’s personal style,” said Pano Anthos, CEO at Hangout Industries. “The opportunity with We the Kings provides our users unique access to the band, further improving the social gaming experience.”

Metaverse is proud to work with Hangout to build a compelling community around the social game that incorporates national brands and real world spaces for players to share with their friends.

For a copy of the press release, just click here.

MMS moderated two panels at the Engage! Conference in New York last week, including “It’s the Activity, Stupid!, Keeping Kids and Tweens Engaged in Virtual Worlds.”  Panelists Jacques Panis (Webosaurs), Jim Bower (Whyville), and Josh Fisher (Brandissimo!/NFLRush Zone) knocked it out of the park with candid observations about what’s worked and what hasn’t in their respective virtual worlds.  For those that missed it, here are the slides.

Two of the biggest goals for people over the past couple years involve saving money and saving the planet. Both are obviously worthy goals, and fairly complex issues. But when it comes to entertainment, choosing Massively Multi-Player Online games (MMO) and virtual worlds over traditional video games can actually accomplish both.

Consider the sheer amount of stuff used to produce video games. There are the consoles (plastic, circuitry, wires, etc.), as well as the games themselves, and their packaging (plastic, metal, more plastic). All of which end up in landfills after just a few years of use. Now think about MMOs and Virtual Worlds. No packaging, no DVD, no console. Nothing that can get broken or lost and has to be replaced. True, one needs a computer, or at least access to a computer. But most of us have a computer that we use for many other tasks.

Now on to money. A traditional video game console costs upwards of $200. Video games themselves cost anywhere from $25-$60 a pop, on average. When someone grow tired of a game, they might get a few bucks back by selling it at a yard sale or on EBay, but chances are, it won’t fetch much, if anything. Think especially of kids - $45 per game, and they may grow bored of it in just a month or two. In addition, once the game has been conquered, when all the levels have been completed, that’s about it. Sure, you can play it again, but it’s just not quite the same. Virtual worlds and MMOs, on the other hand, change constantly; they expand and morph over time. Virtual worlds also tend to have more economical and flexible pricing – a whole year of many MMOs and virtual worlds costs about the same as one video game. Not sure if you’ll like it or not, or whether your child is likely to stick with it? One-month and/or six-month membership options - about the price of lunch at a fast food restaurant – are generally available.

The intangibility of virtual worlds and MMOs seems to make some people a little uneasy, as if they should not spend money on something that cannot be physically held. And yet that is precisely what makes them both environmentally responsible and a great value.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a report in December about the availability of explicit content in Virtual Worlds entitled “Virtual Worlds and Kids: Mapping the Risks”. Despite a slightly alarming header in the press release, the report results are not as negative as they may first appear. Little explicit content appeared in child-oriented virtual worlds, and the explicit content found in some of the teen and adult sites could not be accessed by children if they accurately self-reported their age.

It is important to note that the report states that “because the Commission’s researchers examined these worlds with the express purpose of uncovering sexually and violently explicit content, it is unlikely that a typical user would stumble upon such content unintentionally”.

Equate this to a child spending time in a book store or library: the amount of potentially questionable/explicit material differs based on the section of the store a child spends time in. If a child sticks to sections that have books and other media designed for their age group, the odds remain low. Should a child head out of the children’s section and into a section of teen and adult material, the chances of seeing explicit material, either pictorial or printed word, go up. But again, one would really need to be looking for such material in order to find it.

The report also finds that many virtual worlds are taking successful steps to screen content as well as to keep children from viewing content that may not be appropriate for their age. Researchers found little or no explicit content in18 of the 27 virtual worlds they visited. In others, such content was only found when registered as a teen or as an adult, not when visiting the site as a child user.

The FTC makes the following five sagacious recommendations for all virtual worlds:

• Better age screening to ensure that the virtual world’s target audience is, in fact, the age they claim to be.
• Age segregating in worlds that appeal to a wider demographic, such as Second Life
• Strengthen word filters to ensure that user-generated content is appropriately screened
• Community moderators to help ensure adherence to codes of conduct, as well as clear codes of conduct so that users can better self-adhere to community standards
• Parental and Youth Education about the complexities of this particular type of social media.

The final take-away from this report should be that, while it is important for creators of virtual worlds to spend time and effort to thoughtfully craft a safe virtual world, the worlds themselves are not inherently fraught with negative content. It is important to reemphasize that the instances of explicit content, as defined by the FTC, were rare in the children’s virtual worlds, and researchers had to dig really hard to find it. Virtual worlds contain an amazing wealth of creative, thoughtful and positive content, and with the help of electronic tools and sharp trained community moderators, the benefits of these worlds can far outweigh any detractions.

Excitement continues to build for the theater release of James Cameron’s upcoming epic, “Avatar,” on December 18th. The film is a 3D science-fiction action movie starring Sam Worthington as Jake Sully, a paralyzed Marine who becomes reborn as an alien species - his “Avatar.”

While it’s uncertain exactly how the movie intends to use it, Cameron’s use of the word “avatar” is probably different than the one we encounter in our industry and the hype surrounding the film inspired us to delve into the word itself. This three part blog series will explore the use of the word avatar as we know it, the origins of the word and the varying cases in which the word “avatar” has been applied.

The notion of the avatar has come a long way from the historical, religious sense to how we use them today in our online communications. The story of avatars and virtual worlds is far from over as technology and popularity of using an avatar continues to grow. The question we’re asking today is where does our concept of avatar go from here?

Avatar technology continues to grow in both 2D and 3D forms. Our avatars will share our expressions and represent us in ways that will cross the boundaries of real life and static, graphical representations. Avatar portability allows us to use the same graphical representation across multiple platforms, bringing our “other self” along to different destinations.

Even then, the use or definition of the avatar may not stop at the computer. CNN introduced (semi) practical holograms into the mainstream back in 2008. Recently, futurist Ray Kurzweil delivered the keynote speech at Germany’s Trendforum conference via holographic projection. How practical is this? Kurzweil himself predicts that by 2020 we will regularly interact in virtual environments and even be able to touch each other virtually.

On the future of technology in the virtual world space,Tim Leberecht explained it well in his article “Going human with Shy-Tech” “Their common thread: technology in disguise, with front ends that are becoming touchable, intuitive, and human-centric. Mueller coined the term “Shytech” for this phenomenon: technology that can afford to be nonintrusive because it is fully immersive.”

Hologram avatars would still keep avatars in an intangible position, but consider James Cameron’s idea of an avatar. In “Avatar,” a human inhabits a physical body and controls it from a remote location. Earlier this year Honda demonstrated a brain-machine that could control a robot by thoughts alone. Much like the hologram, it is possible that one day we could meet up and interact as our robot avatars.

These are wild concepts and lead to some interesting discussion about what an avatar is and could be. The ideas we’ve discussed in this post do not cling to our stated definition of what an avatar is but it’s likely that the definition can grow just as much as the possibilities of avatars do.

Read More: Avatar - Part 1: Defining the modern avatar and Avatar - Part 2: Origins of the word

Excitement continues to build for the theater release of James Cameron’s upcoming epic, “Avatar,” on December 18th. The film is a 3D science-fiction action movie starring Sam Worthington as Jake Sully, a paralyzed Marine who becomes reborn as an alien species - his “Avatar.”

While it’s uncertain exactly how the movie intends to use it, Cameron’s use of the word “avatar” is probably different than the one we encounter in our industry and the hype surrounding the film inspired us to delve into the word itself. This three part blog series will explore the use of the word avatar as we know it, the origins of the word and the varying cases in which the word “avatar” has been applied.

In the first part of this series we discussed the word avatar and gave the modern definition as a graphical representation of one’s self, personality or alter-ego while engaging in online communication. Avatars take on many forms in the computing world, but the word itself dates back thousands of years.

The word “avatar” comes from the Sanskrit word अवतार (avata-ra) which means “descent” or “coming down from far away.” The idea comes from the Hindu religion, where it implies a descent from a higher realm of spiritual being into lower forms of existence. Many of these ancient avatars were said to have had special powers and were used for certain purposes on Earth. This concept dates back to 500 BC and earlier, used for years in oral traditions before being recorded in an ancient Hindu text known as the Garuda Purana.

The Gurada Purana tells of the ten avatars used by the god Vishnu to perform special tasks in the human realm. Vishnu’s avatars, known as Daśāvatāra, took many forms such as a tortoise, boar and even the Buddha himself.

It wasn’t until thousands of years later that the term avatar as we know it made an appearance in the realm of the metaverse. Arguably the first use of “avatar” in computing games comes from Ultima IV, an RPG released in 1985. The player is tasked by the character Lord British to become the Avatar, a shining example of spiritual enlightenment to ensure peace.

It is interesting to note the theme of limitation used to describe the Hindu avatars. Avatars were a “lower form” of being, limited in what they could do in comparison with their godly nature. In many ways our avatars are limited versions of ourselves. Even though they escape aesthetic barriers, they are not granted the level of function that we have as physical human beings.

Read More: Avatar - Part 1: Defining the Modern Avatar and Avatar - Part 3: Future of the avatar

Excitement continues to build for the theater release of James Cameron’s upcoming epic, “Avatar,” on December 18th. The film is a 3D science-fiction action movie starring Sam Worthington as Jake Sully, a paralyzed Marine who becomes reborn as an alien species - his “Avatar.”

While it’s uncertain exactly how the movie intends to use it, Cameron’s use of the word “avatar” is probably different than the one we encounter in our industry and the hype surrounding the film inspired us to delve into the word itself. This three part blog series will explore the use of the word avatar as we know it, the origins of the word and the varying cases in which the word “avatar” has been applied.

Part 1 - Defining the modern avatar

While many folks are still confused by the term “avatar,” its use is becoming more widespread as culture and communication continue to move online. We will explore the various forms and applications of the avatar, but for this part of the series we will need to place a definition to begin our journey.

An avatar is a graphical representation of one’s self, personality or alter-ego while engaging in online communication.  Avatars can range from simple, static 2D graphics to complex, animated 3D forms controlled by the user.

We see avatars in many forms of online communication. AOL instant messengers are using avatars when they place a “buddy icon” next to their name. Forum users will often use a picture under their names to represent themselves on their posts. Even a social network user who opts for a cartoon or other image that is not their photograph is using an avatar. It can even be argued that an altered personal photograph is in fact an avatar since it is not an “actual” representation of the person.

These are the simpler uses of an avatar but a person’s self representation online can be manifested in more complicated forms in virtual world spaces. Perhaps the most enabling of area of avatar creation is Second Life, a 3-dimensional world created entirely by its users. There are almost no bounds to what a person can be in this world. A person can run around as a tiny rabbit, a giant robot or even just themselves. Areas like Second Life give online communicators an incredible reach of self-representation.

Avatars allow people to connect what they are reading (or hearing, as the case may be) with the person generating it. They allow faces and visuals to enter in to the conversation on a platform that is often nameless or faceless. Whether an avatar enhances or detracts from the communication, they certainly provide more dimensions for absorbing it.

Read more: Avatar - Part 2: Origins of the word and Avatar - Part 3: Future of the Avatar

National Geographic has announced today that they have teamed up with NDi Media to develop and distribute “Virtual World of Music.” While they haven’t released details of how users will be interacting in the world, it will be a multiplayer social gaming experience to be released in early 2010.

Users will use NDi Media’s Mixing Studio to create tunes using themes and beats from around the world. The platform has already been tested by kids to ensure that every song made will come out sounding good. National Geographic already has a series of mini-games and exploration tools on their site and will hopefully be taking things to the next level with this launch.

What is particularly exciting about this announcement is the possibility of integrating music discovery with creation and then being able to take it to an online community for discussion. Good music isn’t only created in the US and Britain and hopefully this project will allow music exploration along a wide range of cultures.

We’ve seen other kid’s virtual worlds base their ideas around music but none capture the scope of ability and education that this world seems to be offering. It’s too early to tell how the world will pan out and what level of engagement it will offer but the announcement leaves plenty of room for excitement.

-Chase

What if you went to Disneyland and Mickey Mouse took his head off, shook your hand and said “let me tell you about what we are doing here”? That is exactly what the kids virtual world Webosaurs will be doing today during a live event held inside the world.

As Webosaurs founder Jacques Panis plans to embark on a journey to South Africa with Webosaurs spokesperson and BBC wildlife expert Nigel Marven to film educational videos for the site, Webosaurs has invited children and parents alike to an in-world party where they can interact with artists, developers and the child safety experts from Metaverse Mod Squad.

Metaverse Mod Squad CEO Amy Pritchard and Chief Moderator Susan South will be among the attendees at today’s party, promoting the safety aspects of the site and interacting with the children along with other Webosaurs moderators that will be on-hand.

Pritchard believes the party will be important because, “from a parent’s perspective, their kids are in a real place with real people that care about them. It’s not just a cartoon game.”

Panis agrees.

“Tying in Metaverse Mod Squad is crucial to today’s event because we are showing parents that behind all of the beauty and fun there are real people who are very concerned about their family’s safety and online experience. These people are at the forefront of safety and security of online properties,” he said.

Since its inception, Webosaurs has promoted an environment where creators and users can interact and share their investment in the world. Panis, known in-world as “Flyboy,” is a regular fixture at Webosaurs events and makes daily visits to meet and talk with the children. Metaverse Mod Squad moderators are in-world just about every hour of the day guiding and helping the users while utilizing best practices to provide constant protection. I’m also a regular fixture in-world as my avatar “Rex,” listening to the users and attending to their needs directly rather than waiting for a customer service email.

In addition to these attendees, Art Director Justin Harder and Lead Developer Diego Cibils will be at the party as “JuiceKing” and “Colegate,” respectively. The event this evening will provide parents and children alike a chance to meet and talk to these people along with other Webosaurs artists. Panis believes this level of interaction is unlike any other found in virtual worlds for kids and he hopes today’s event will raise the bar on what Webosaurs provides to its users’ experiences.

“We see what the kids are doing out there with their blogs and the things they create. We want to inspire and show them that anything and everything is possible,” he said.

Creating a successful and engaging virtual world for kids is as much about pushing the level of interaction as it is about the “physical” product presented. While Mickey Mouse may never take his head off, Webosaurs is happily opening its doors to let parents and children see and meet the people behind the magic.

-Chase

Chase Straight is Metaverse Mod Squad’s Head of Community for Webosaurs. For more details on today’s event such as time and place, please visit the Webosaurs blog which is also maintained by Chase.