howard-rheingold
Latest
Metaverse U conversation: Raph Koster, Cory Ondrejka, Howard Rheingold
We headed to the Metaverse U event at Stanford University this weekend to hear a smorgasboard of prominent thinkers and workers in the fields of virtual worlds and online gaming have a meeting of the minds. Below is a recap (caveat: some paraphrasing involved!) of one of our favorite sessions featuring a conversation with Metaplace's Raph Koster, former Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka, and social media and online community guru Howard Rheingold. Henrik Bennetsen (moderator): (Introduces 3 panelists and asks Raph to kick off with his thoughts on virtual worlds) Raph: From the beginning, virtual communities has never been about the "virtual." All the oddities come from the mediation, not from human nature. We build trellises, and communities are plants growing on them... you get to shape them a little bit, and sometimes in very bad ways if you're not careful. We tend to think we have more power than we do when architecting these things. I wince at the title "community manager" ("relations" would be better) because it perpetuates the myth that we have power to control what users do. Mediation gives us a window into things that in the real world can be hard to see. Virtual communities are an opportunity to see how people tick. Cory: Having spent 7 years building Second Life, the interactions and collisions with the real world are what make it interesting. We had only 400 users at launch and we were ecstatic! Can you imagine that today (especially for companies with big name investors)? I think about virtual worlds as communication technology. I agree there's a need for customer service and arguments about the declaration of avatar rights are important but yet I feel there's something off in these arguments... (he's referring to earlier conversation about declarations of avatar rights) %Gallery-16285%
Stanford University's Metaverse U Conference
Virtual worlds and online gaming continue to grow in cultural importance, changing the outlook of commerce and entertainment almost daily. To make sense of these changes, Stanford University feels it's high time they convened a group of leading experts in the field to discuss what it all might mean, both today and reaching into the future. To this end, the Stanford University Humanities Lab is hosting the Metaverse U Conference, to take place on campus on February 16th and 17th. Among the notable names speaking at this event are Raph Koster of Areae's Metaplace; Cory Ondrejka, formerly of Linden Lab; Howard Rheingold, author and critic, credited with coining the term 'virtual community', and many other guests. In fact, those three in particular will be speaking together in conversation on Saturday, an event I expect will be both illuminating and provocative.I'll be attending with Massively's Barb Dybwad, so look for us and say hi! If you can't make it, however, don't despair -- the organizers have told us that "we are about to announce that the entire conference will be streamed for free into Second Life for anyone who wants to attend there."
