The features of Club Penguin, one of the most successful virtual worlds aimed specifically at children, may defy logic - and gravity - but they represent the new frontier of children’s entertainment, where the whimsy and colour of traditional kids TV blends with computer game-style tasks, and the networking power of the internet.

Some 750,000 British children aged between 6 and 14 are estimated to inhabit Club Penguin, the brainchild of two Canadian entrepreneurs who as parents became frustrated with the lack of the options for kids who wanted to play computer games but also meet friends online.

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Technology Review assistant editor Erica Naone spoke with Kingdon earlier this week about his plans for Second Life.

A lot of new users seem to have trouble getting to that place. They get confused by the controls, and aren’t sure what to do inside the world. Do you have any thoughts about how to make it easier to get started?

I’ve got a lot of background in the kind of user-centered design work that’s going to be important for Second Life, especially as you look at the first-hour experience. I haven’t come to any specific conclusions yet, but I think it starts with understanding what the resident needs in order to make a powerful experience, and looking at the kinds of people that you want to attract and bring in-world. The answers will emerge very clearly from that.

How do you plan to get different types of users acclimated? For example, business users might just want to get in-world quickly to have a meeting, while other users might be looking for a more playful experience.

I think the first thing that I need to do … is really immerse myself in the different user bases and then think about if, by giving them additional tools, they can create that entry point for themselves, or if it’s something we need to encourage, or if it’s something that we need to create for them. I think the question is, how do you make that happen without becoming the primary content creator?

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“Playfulness, like usability, refers to a quality of user experience that can span many disciplines—information architecture, information design, interaction design, and graphic design. In our minds, however, many of us have relegated play to the realms of gaming or kids’ stuff and don’t consider play daily when designing. Though, in the digital space, satisfying the desire to play can be integral in determining the success or failure of a digital product or service. So it’s time for user experience designers to take play seriously. (And stop being so darn boring.)”

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“With the popularity of virtual worlds such as Second Life and games such as “World of Warcraft” and “Sims Online”, companies, academics, health-care providers and the military are evaluating virtual environments for use in training, management and collaboration. Superficially, such uses look a lot like playing a video game. “The thing that distinguishes them from games is the outcome,” says David Wortley, the director of Coventry University’s Serious Games Institute. Rather than catering to virtual thrill-seekers, the aim is to find new ways for people to learn or work together. […]

As with any novel technology, virtual worlds bring new opportunities and new problems. The embrace of virtual worlds by companies for mundane uses on the one hand, and by scam artists to get up to no good on the other, points not to the shortcomings of such environments—but to their increasing maturity and potential.”

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Her presentation (audio file) was titled “Massively Multiplayer Online Games as an Educational Ethnology: An Outline for Research,” a deceptively straightforward talk about Steinkuehler’s [ethnographic] research findings on what constitutes gameplay in MMOs and virtual worlds, and how that research might be applied to education programs.

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“Much has been made of the potential of Second Life as an environment for entertainment, marketing or even terrorist financing. But the Serious Games Institute, a center for the development of “serious” applications of video game technologies and virtual worlds for businesses, security agencies and other users, says that it is one of the first places dedicated to helping businesses enhance their own operations by harnessing virtual worlds for things like training, communication and emergency planning.

The institute, which is affiliated with Coventry University and funded in part by a regional economic development agency, has a handful of tenants set to take up residence in November. It plans to operate as an “incubator,” helping these companies grow, as well as serving as a hub for networking and research. […]

Coventry, in the former industrial heartland of England, may seem like an unlikely location for an institute devoted to cutting-edge technologies. The spire of Coventry Cathedral, which rises above the landscape of postindustrial office parks, survived a German bombing raid in 1940. Car factories, which used to be the area’s economic backbone, survived a few decades longer, but have now mostly been shut.

But Wortley said the automotive industry also left a legacy of industrial design, which is now being put to use at the institute.”

Read full story (International Herald Tribune)

The conference LIFT08 will take place for the third time in Geneva, Switzerland, on 6-8 February 2008. The main structure of the programme has been presented tonight in a trendy bar downtown Geneva by organizer Laurent Haug and editorial producer Nicolas Nova.

And again, like last year, they seem to have got a knack of seeking out many new voices and speakers that haven’t made the rounds yet – but have interesting things to say. The programme is structured in thematic “tracks”, four per day on Thursday 7 and Friday 8. On Wednesday, a pre-conference will present a series of focused workshops. Thursday evening will feature the now-traditional fondue for 500+ people. Alongside the main conference there will be a “blogcamp”-like space for unplanned discussions and presentations, as well as an “off” space dedicated to design, art and games.

Here a quick rundown of the main tracks:

• Internet in society — With Jyri Engestrom (he just sold microblogging platform Jaiku to Google), Jonathan Cabiria (on virtual environments and social inclusions) and others
• User experience — With two tech anthropologists, Younghee Jung (Nokia, Tokyo) and Genevieve Bell (Intel, Seattle) and UC’s Paul Dourish.
• Stories — With serial entrepreneur Rafi Haladjian and others.
• A glimpse of Asia — With Marc Laperrouza, a specialist of new tech in China, Heewon Kim, a Korean researcher on teens and social networks, and others.
• New Frontiers — With “cyborg” Kevin Warwick, Henry Markram who’s trying to simulate the functioning of brain cells, and Holm Friebe talking about new forms of cooperation and collaborative work.
• Gaming — With Robin Hunicke (who worked on games for the Nintendo Wii) on gaming trends, and others.
• Web and entreprises — With David Sadigh and David Marcus on how the web is reshuffling work practices.
• Foresight — With future researchers Scott Smith (Changeist) and William Cockayne (Stanford) and Nokia designer Francesco Cara.

Haug also announced that LIFT is exporting itself to Asia: after a successful small launch event a few weeks ago in Seoul, South Korea, they’re now planning a full LIFTAsia in September 2008, again in Seoul.

I am very pleased to notice that Genevieve Bell, Paul Dourish and Francesco Cara are amongst the speakers.

A wave of articles was published recently on how marketers are not getting the returns they were expecting, how deserted it is, how it is all about sex and pranks, how it has become a virtual nanny state, and even how terrorists are using it to plan attacks.

Leaving aside for now the discussion to what extent this is just negative hype, it does make sense to see Second Life as an experimental environment where we can prototype new interaction and communication paradigms. Experimenting in these virtual worlds can also help us understand and imagine a future where a mix of real and virtual worlds will become increasingly prevalent.

I can see four good reasons for businesses, institutions and experience designers to be present in Second Life.

1. Prototyping of new participatory communication paradigms often involving very targeted and selected communities
A lot of lectures take place in Second Life. In fact, more than 300 universities, including Harvard and Duke, use Second Life as an educational tool. Some educators conduct entire distance-learning courses there; others supplement classes. Also big companies such as IBM and Intel use these graphics-rich sites to conduct meetings among far-flung employees and to show customers graphical representations of ideas and products. IBM went even as far to take the unusual step of establishing official guidelines for its more than 5,000 employees who inhabit “Second Life” and other online universes. Philips Design uses Second Life “to gain feedback on innovation concepts, engage residents in co-creation and obtain a deeper understanding of potential opportunities in this virtual environment”. And the Italian bank BNL and others are using virtual worlds to create communities to recruit some of their future employees, especially for more creative or technical job openings. Even something simple as chat is an entirely different experience on Second Life, with the other person’s presence is no longer communicated through an MSN-style presence icon with a small photograph or drawing but instead through a full three-dimensional moving avatar.

2. Prototyping of new interaction paradigms
Researchers at MIT are building realistic training simulators in Second Life, often controlled through a Wiimote. Some are even creating simulations for companies, such as a medical-devices firm, a global-energy company focused on power-plant training, and a pest-control firm — all looking to reduce training costs. In the words of one researcher, “the ability to easily integrate a wide range of psychomotor activities with simulations running on standard computer platforms will change the ways people interact with computers.”

3. Experimentation in an unconventional digital environment
These virtual worlds may be primitive still, but if we think of it, we are already living in an enriched world where our interactions with companies and banks, institutions and universities, cities and public services, are no longer just based on a physical communication paradigm. Instead they have become highly mediated by technologies. This will continue to grow. Our interactions will not only become more mobile but also more involving, more three-dimensional, and more experiential. Virtual worlds will be important, no matter what. There will be new types of interfaces - as already alluded to here and here and here - and new types of feedback, and it makes sense for forward looking companies to explore these new ways of reaching out to and involving their customers.

4. Virtual laboratories to understand human behaviour
Also researchers are exploring Second Life and other virtual worlds. A recent article in the journal Science addresses how researchers are getting insights into real life by studying what people do in virtual worlds, suggesting that virtual worlds could help scientists studying ideas of government and even concepts of self, while other researchers are looking at how behaviour peculiar to online worlds differs from that in real life. Also our colleagues from Adaptive Path are involved in this type of research.

Opening in fall 2009, the school is being created by the Gamelab Institute of Play (blog), a New York City-based not-for-profit organization that leverages games and play as transformative contexts for learning and creativity, in collaboration with New Visions for Public Schools, a not-for-profit organization that works in partnership with the New York City Department of Education to improve academic achievement in the City’s public schools.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation recently awarded a grant of $1.1 million to help with planning and development.

According to a Wired news story, the planners “are looking at how games naturally engage players and teach them new skills, and hope to apply those principles to create kids who not only ace their SATs, but are also well suited for the 21st century.”

“Games offer a context for problem-solving with immediate feedback, and often involve social interaction that can reinforce lessons learned. Combine that process with the skills that modern games encourage — like computer literacy and navigating through complex information networks — and you have the basis for a brand new pedagogy. […]

The meaning of ‘knowing’ today has shifted from being able to remember and repeat information to being able to find and use it.”

“Companies are investing more into understanding their customers and trying to anticipate the perfect product. As designers we have seen or participated in focus groups, surveys, questionnaires, beta programs, and various forms of ethnographic research and observation in order to understand what consumers really want. More recently some organizations have begun to use co-creation sessions. These are participatory gatherings where designers and researchers sit with a panel of target users and, through story telling and with the help of “toolkits” (a collection of objects that may represent features, functions, or forms), try to elicit features that consumers might want but never knew how to explain. Although co-creation is still a far cry from users designing their own products, it is the closest we can get to translating user wants and needs. But what is the next level? Can we get even closer? […]

According to the designers involved in this exercise, it was an eye opening exercise, confirming to the designers what they had already suspected: that to a significant degree, consumers or end users really do know what they want or need in a product–even what they aspire to. But it is the job of the designer to tease it out of them, like a therapist helping a patient unlock their inner feelings. Sitting down with the students, evaluating their concepts, explaining the system architecture problems, the back-end of mechanical design—all through a combination of explaining and educating—thesee were the steps in helping them to refine their raw content into the idealized end product they desired.”

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“Researchers are getting insights into real life by studying what people do in virtual worlds, reveals a review in the journal Science.

It suggests virtual worlds could help scientists studying ideas of government and even concepts of self. Others are looking at behaviours peculiar to online worlds and how they differ from real life.

Online worlds offer great potential to social scientists because they overcome some of the problems these researchers encounter when gathering subjects in the real world, Dr William Bainbridge, head of Human-Centred Computing at the US National Science Foundation, wrote in the journal.

For instance, he wrote, social scientists often face problems finding subjects fast enough or securing funds to carry out the research.

The popularity of online worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft meant there was a ready pool of subjects that could be recruited over long periods of time for little cost, he said.

The game worlds also gather huge amounts of data about what players do that could easily be analysed by social scientists, wrote Dr Bainbridge.”

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In this article on boxesandarrows McMullin describes why we use games, core game principles, how to apply games, and how to sell design games to your organisation or client. There’s also some good links and great commentary.

“One tool that I started to use in 2002 is design games: game-like activities that help my team gain insight, understanding, and clarity while avoiding dry and often unproductive meetings.

I’m a passionate proponent of ethnographic field studies and other ways of gaining human-centered insight. At the end of the day, that work needs to dovetail with organizational realities and requirements—and understanding business vision and drivers is where we often use design games.”

(via Ireland’s Centre for Design Innovation)

Yaniv Steiner, Experientia’s director of R&D, has been working (together with some of our other collaborators) on Feedamass, a new application that can take information from Wikipedia, Google Definitions, and what not, and send it in a clear text format to almost anything. In other words, you ask a question and Feedamass answers it immediately, e.g. as a text message on your mobile phone. Now it has been implemented in Second Life.

Feedamass, the “know-it-all” sidekick that fetches information to nearly any device, is also eligible to function on virtual spaces as well. Second Life, for instance. Its services might be needed not just in the real world, but habitantes of online communities, and their aliases, might also find it useful to have answers “whispered in their ears”.

From word definitions to encyclopedic entries, from “what’s ‘Gesundheit’ in spanish” to “how to change my avatar’s hair-style”, Simulated characters will surely encounter the necessity to know stuff. And just as people employ Feedamass to retrieve content as SMS to their mobile-phones, as an example, web entities might also like to send out for data, without leaving the screen.

Feedamass can manifest itself on different interfaces. It can be part of a toolbar, or a HUD (Head Up Display), just like it is able to take the form of a chatting contact on an IM application, or an E-mail address to where queries are sent.

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The target audience for this game is those unfamiliar with UCD, yet whose work relates to the definition, creation, and update of a product or service. In other words, everyone involved in the software development process.

The UCD game is structured in 4 sections mimicking a standard user-centered design project: defining the users, analyzing the users’ characteristics, designing and evaluating the designed artifact. The last station – evaluating the process – requires the participants to look back on the three previous stations and reflect their design process.

The game was developed by three people associated with the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, Spain).

The first item in the menu of this flash-based mini-site are Vodafone’s customers. Ten stories explain how Vodafone has changed the way people work and play. The stories are quite promotional, but they nevertheless clearly emphasise the people-centred approach of the company.

Nice too is that the people featured are from New Zealand, Germany, Australia, Greece, Tanzania, Ireland, Spain, Egypt, UK and Italy, and that everyone speaks their own language.

“While I’m not sure any one company has this figured out, all the chatter clearly shows that everyone thinks there is a gold mine for those who can combine games and social networks. […]

This is happening because people in modern society are suffering from the “lost village” syndrome, says Trip Hawkins, the CEO of cell phone game maker Digital Chocolate and founder of Electronic Arts.

Hawkins’ theory: We’re all basket cases because we no longer live in closely-knit villages. People reside among strangers in big cities far from families, work away from home, and don’t know their neighbors. To him, we’re all desperately using technology to restore or extend our social networks so we won’t be isolated anymore.”

In conclusion: “Game consoles have penetrated only about half the homes in the country. Maybe social networking will get everybody involved.” Remains to be seen, I might add.

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“This is my bold claim - I need you to experience something in Fable that you as gamers have never experienced before,” he declared.

Gamers will be able to start a family and watch their child grow over time.

Emotional reactions to gaming, such as love, fear and even empathy, remain the holy grail for many developers.

“Everybody is talking about emotion, story, engagement and narrative,” Mr Molyneux said. “We have tried to approach it in a different way. We are going to explore love.”

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“At Club Penguin, which launched in October 2005 and had 4 million unique visitors in January, according to comScore Media Metrix, your 8- to 14-year-old can waddle through a virtual world as a flightless waterfowl, interacting with other penguins of her choice. Registration is free, but if junior wants to decorate her penguin’s igloo or use other advanced features on the site, you’ll need to pay a $5.95 monthly membership. And Club Penguin is just the tip of the iceberg.

A new site designed for the skinned-knee demographic seems to pop up nearly every day. Their potential market is huge: there are some 28.5 million kids between the ages of 8 and 14 in the United States, according to emarketer.com. A 2006 Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg survey found that an equal 38 percent of both male and female teens aged 12 to 14 use MySpace (even though the site’s age cutoff is 14) or some other social-networking site.”

Sites featured: Club Penguin, Whyville, Habbo, Imbee, Tweenland, Webkinz, Nicktropolis, and Disney Xtreme Digital.

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In the interview, Knudstorp starts of by explaining how they became a user-centred toy company by involving their users to an extreme degree. He also states the core brand value as “the joy of building and the pride of creating things”, which is a description of an experience.

The interview, which was conducted by Monocle editor-in-chief Tyler Brûlé and took place at the company’s innovation centre in Billund, Denmark, then goes in to an interesting discussion on the changing nature of play. Knudstorp describes some insights from an anthropological survey the company did recently, in particular about interactivity, community and what children expect from a brand.

Watch interview
(Note that the actual video file seems to be huge and the streaming is not exactly smooth. I couldn’t get beyond the first half: it simply stalled. Unfortunately a download is not possible.)

“U.S. residents made up only 31.2 percent of active Second Life users in the month. France has the second-highest number of users after the virtual world became a battleground for the country’s presidential election.

Although French residents had long been a part of Second Life, thousands more joined Second Life in January as demonstrators picketed the virtual offices of Jean Marie Le Pen’s far-right National Front party. Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal also established a Second Life presence.”

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(via Loic Le Meur)