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Player vs. Everything: Gaming with a disability
Stephanie Walker was a gamer who had never expected to have to deal with a disability. She was 23 at the onset of her condition, a college student who also worked a full-time job. She liked to spend the little free time she had unwinding online. Initially resistant to the idea of playing EverQuest, Stephanie quickly discovered that slaying virtual orcs and bandits while joking around in party chat was surprisingly fun. It was a great way to keep in touch with long-distance friends and burn some stress after a long day. She didn't have a lot of time to play, but she was good at it when she did. While working at her job one day, Stephanie noticed that her right hand and leg had fallen asleep. When she tried to get up to walk the sensation off, she realized that something was seriously wrong -- the entire right side of her body had just stopped working. Stephanie was rushed to the hospital, and the diagnosis was confirmed the following morning: she had multiple sclerosis, and she would have to deal with it for the rest of her life. Overnight, everything changed. She went from being someone who spent 20 hours per day away from home to someone who really never left. Moving around within her house required an enormous effort on her part. Even feeding herself had become a challenge. The little things, like not being able to get online and chat with her friends (something she really enjoyed) just made her situation that much more painful.
Big business analysts looking more kindly on Second Life once again.
It seems like only yesterday, but I guess it was about 6 months ago, that a lot of big business analysts were saying, in rather more business like language, "OMG what's all the fuss about Second Life?" This isn't from the point of view of the casual player, this was stories such as "a responsible IT manager should block access to Second Life because it is a risk to your data security" and "No one can make a decent return on investment in Second Life."Over the last few days I've started to see, directly or indirectly, articles changing this advice: Erica Driver asks does it matter if Second Life appears empty in places for the Forrester Information and Knowledge Management blog; Peter Abrahams, for IT Director, suggests that Second Life is now too important not to be accessible - and whilst he concentrates on disabled accesshe has the underlying assumption that businesses are increasingly using Second Life productively and this will continue to increase in importance; Pham Neutra in his Otherland Blog points out an article from Gartner saying that by 2010, 20% of tier 1 global retailers will have a marketing presence in virtual worlds and online games. That's in 2 years time remember! We are starting to see more and more people working out how to use Second Life - and as Pham comments in his blog, they are starting to learn how to define useful metrics for success in this brave new world.
