Games vs. Virtual Worlds for Nation-sized Problems

3D Shooters are the most prominent form of game system and environment in the consumer and the defense space. These portray conflict, combat, and deadly threats. They immediately plunge the player into a simulating environment with urgent problems to solve. They also mirror some of the most important engagements that real people and real societies engage in. However, these environments are extremely limited in time and space. The battlefield is a relatively small area – usually just large enough to contain a specific vignette, and never so large that the players can wander far enough to miss the entire point of that piece of the world. These vignettes and geospaces are linked together in such a way that the player can move immediately from one “hot spot” to the next. There is no room in these for intervening relationship building, downtime learning, AAR, or planning for the next engagement. For entertainment this hot-spot-hopping is exactly what you want. But as a venue for wrestling with real problems, this is a very small and single-focused experience.

MMOGs create a much larger space in which player spend more time wandering, conversing, building relationships, and joining clans that will participate in specific battles. It includes spaces for combat, socialization, trade, and exploration. This size and diversity enables a much broader and somewhat richer experience of the world and the other players in it. Specific battles may still be the focus for many players, but they can also plan, rehearse, and regale in stories surrounding these as well. The algorithms that determine engagement outcomes, but battle and trade, are simple – often just subtracting and adding points to a player’s health.

Virtual Worlds create an world that can be smooth and continuous like the real world. They can create context, connections, and history that is similar to what exists in the real world. But in their current state they are only slightly different from MMOGs. Second Life, and others like it, are unique in that the content is created by the users, not by the development company. This begins to allow the users to shape the world to meet their needs. But to really become distinct and useful, these spaces need to allow the users to upload/link their own models into the world. The VW needs to provide an infrastructure that can accommodate heterogeneous models provided by users and allow these diverse models to interact with each other. Business and Government problems cannot be represented by generic one-size-fits-all models provided by an entertainment company.

Each game designs a set of models that meet the needs of that game. The preference is to create sparse models that are computationally inexpensive and that fit together to allow interactions across all of the objects in a space. As virtual worlds are adopted to the needs of real government and intelligence customers, there is going to be a need to (1) add much more complex models that require more computational power, (2) bring together a very diverse set of models that were not originally meant to work together. A government Virtual World cannot align these models one at a time, that is an N-squared problem that will very quickly become impossible to manage. There needs to be an infrastructure that allows heterogeneous models to be integrated into the world and to work with the existing models without requiring customer model-to-model modifications. This would be a big environment with an underlying software infrastructure that present real value to the government.

For the complete briefing see: http://www.peostri.army.mil/CTO

Virtual tea parties on the ceiling

Why do we have chairs in our offices, classrooms, and public spaces? Are they a real necessity? Somewhere in the distant past people recognized the advantage of doing certain types of work mounted on a platform up off of the ground. They also found the need to keep nice clothes off of the ground and out of the dirt. Then there is the comfort factor for sitting down rather than standing up. In the physical world, chairs have become a staple of our existence.

When we enter the virtual world, what is a chair good for? There is no dirt, there is no physical fatigue, and characters can often float anywhere? So what use is there for chairs?

But if you navigate through Second Life you will find chairs, desks, lamps, and all of the typical artifacts of the the real world. All of them useless. We are so excited about the possibilities that can be achieved in the virtual world. But once inside it appears that most people cannot imagine anything different from what they have in the physical world. In fact, it looks like the virtual world is just a place where we can possess something that resembles what we cannot get in the physical world. If, in the physical world, you have a small office or cubicle, the first thing you might build in the VW is a bigger office. One bigger than the boss'.

Where is the imagination? It appears that most VW residents have little and most large organizations that enter the VW have absolutely none. Even though people complain that sitting in conference rooms and classrooms all day long is the most boring part of their lives, that is the first thing we offer them when they enter the virtual world.

Given an empty virtual canvas we create images directly from the physical world. We create load-bearing columns for buildings that weigh nothing. We hang light fixtures from virtual chains even though there is no gravity to pull them down. We put all of the furniture on the "floor" and leave the walls and ceiling of buildings empty. Where are the tea parties on the ceiling?

Second Life has many very clever and imaginative residents. But for some reason the islands of large organizations are just as sterile, standard, and unimaginative as the real offices. The "rules of the office" carry into the virtual world, even the rules that call for chairs that serve no purpose.