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basic info 2008/01/10 21:50
I'm back. FOR REAL, this time. :)For many personal and professional reasons, this blog has not been really taken care of for...say 2 months or so. But now it's 2008 and I'm ready to get it going again.Fortunately, I've had a chance to talk to A LOT of people last couple of months in real life, over skype, and through email, etc. What's amazing is that people are still very interested in what's happening here in Korea. Of course, things here simply rock :)Good news is that I'm getting my Wibro modem back tomorrow. To tell you the truth, I had lost it months ago and because of how the contract was structured, I wasn't able to get a new modem till now. Once I get it, you know TechnoKimchi is going WILD again!Thanks for your patience and interests. I've needed some time to grow as a person more than anything, overcoming some of the personal hardships. (Yes, I was secretely in love with this girl and it didn't quite work out, so you know how hard that must've been --> this is when you use the expression "OTL") I think I'm through now and ready to fly for another exciting year.By the way, my book is out. It's named "Meconomy", meaning that the current "Web 2.0" landscape encourages and even empowers individuals, (i.e. ME) to be the center of the economic force. You can purchase the Korean version of it HERE. Sorry, folks, so far it's ONLY in Korean, but for anyone who's interested, I'm up for publishing it in another language! If you're interested, please let me know.I'll do my best to bring you all some good news and insight about the digital generation here. It'll be about e-sports league, digital devices, citizen journalism, Google vs. Naver, the new 3-D Cyworld, the importance of cultural understanding when going global, and some personal stories as well.Just for your information, this is how I'm going to be smiling all year in 2008. See ya all soon :)brought to you by
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basic info 2007/08/21 01:40
I wasn't able to write too much after the first session. So, rather I'm going to try to put down the summaries of the last 3 sessions I had today.
Regulating Virtual Worlds
Legal experts explore how controversies related to intellectual property, real-money transfer, gaming as political speech, time-limit addiction laws and the policing of Internet cafes play out throughout the region. They will also draw our attention to culturally variable assumptions that underpin analytical approaches to these issues. Much of the panel discussion revolved around whether it's better to have communities self-regulate or have external forces to step in. At large, there are three forces at play: 1) community of players regulating themselves, 2) game and virtual world makers deciding what needs to happen within through creating systems certain way, 3) actual regulating bodies like the government. Many factors come into play here. Obviously, it'll be the best if all the players and communities act reasonable enough to reach certain social agreements and norms to control themselves; however, not quite so in reality. That's what makes things complicated. Besides, creating laws and regulations for a world that doesn't really exist is a very difficult task itself. For example, let's say there is a crime in Second Life. What country's law should be applied to that member? Is it for Linden Lab to decide? Or should the U.S. government intervene? What if the player was Korean?
Education, Kids, and Teens in Virtual Worlds
There has been an explosion of interest in the use of virtual worlds in education. This panel will examine what works and what doesn’t work, and will present some ideas for the effective use of online spaces for student learning. It will also ask examine how children and teens interact within virtual worlds, and what this teaches us about building kid-and-teen-friendly environments for learning and playing. This session was very interesting because I've always known there's so much learning, in a non-traditional sense, that could be done through an environment like virtual worlds. People indeed train themselves and learn a great deal in this kind of environment. They set goals for themselves, leadership becomes visible, and they collaborate with each other to solve certain problems. Some of the examples in the session were astonishing--like teaching classes in StarWars Galaxy. Now how much of this could be applied to the real world education?
Currently the real world education system is designed for a world back in 1950's. Kids are growing up enormously influenced by the digital technology. They are a lot more participatory also. The social and economic scenes are changing faster than ever due to the Internet. Unfortunately, none of this is reflected in the current one-way-teaching and text-based education system. For us to be able to adopt the opportunities given by virtual worlds and other technologies, we need a completely new mindset.
However, not everything can be learned in virtual worlds, obviously. It's our job to figure what virtual worlds can offer in this space. It seems at the moment that virtual worlds are good providing an environment in which people can come together to collaborate to solve certain problems, rather than learning specific skill sets.
Connecting East and West
Experts explore variations in playing styles, the influence of game mechanics on cross-cultural cooperation, the challenge of intercultural communication, and outcomes of forced localization. This panel will also explore issues of society, governance and virtual worlds as a vehicle for people-to-people diplomacy.
Well, as you know, that's the goal of this blog. I want to let known to the world what's here in Korea and Asia and see if we can make any connections between East and West. I was actually one of the panelists during this session. But, I wasn't invited as an "official" panelist, but rather as a translator to Judge Unggi Yoon, who is a very well-respected member here. He'd explain what the MMORPGs are like in Korea and I'll translate that into English for the audience. But, hey, I was still up on the stage. What an honor! ;)
The session covered various topics ranging from the two different purposes of playing games in Lineage and Second Life, gold-farming, index for measuring the east/west-ness and etc. I really enjoyed the session while listening on the side most of the time. We definitely need to take a more analytical approach to crossing the gap. While there are fundamental differences between the two which will never get any closer than they are right now, there are also a growing number of commonalities among the two that something could be done for further development. The most important point of the session, I guess, was acknkowledging the value of the differences and how the differences indeed enrich our virtual world experiences.
- - -
Just like every time I attend a conference, I really enjoyed meeting new people and having conversations with them. It's simply because you get to learn so much by doing so. For me, this is a completely new experience: the first time being in Singapore and first time being immersed in the virtual worlds talk.
I'm very excited for tomorrow and hopefully I'll be able to bring even more interesting stuff to you all.
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tags : Asia,
Culture,
digital generation,
education,
Korea,
laws,
learning,
Media,
metaverse,
MMORPG,
regulations,
Singapore,
state of play,
technokimchi,
Web,
Web 2.0,
World of Warcraft
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basic info 2007/08/21 01:30
Virtual world builders now encourage third parties to develop content
inside their worlds, and so we’ve seen the rise of businesses built
inside virtual worlds. This panel will explore the nature of these
businesses, and look at how businesses get built within virtual
worlds. It will ask whether the trend has played out, and examine the
future of businesses inside the virtual worlds. The first session was on "Building business in virtual worlds." I liked how the conference started off with the business aspect because you typically get the information that's very "real" when talking about businesses.
Discussion was started with a question about the different branding strategies for real world and virtual worlds. Can the same branding strategy be applied to virtual worlds, too? Obviously, the answer was No". Like in Web 2.0, it's a lot more about having conversations and engagement. There's so much social going on here that virtual world branding strategies must incorporate the social nature of the medium. It's better to start your first chatper and hand the pen over to fans and users. This way you can totally up your innovation speed, too.
The question of "open vs. closed" came up here as well. Again, like in Web 2.0, not everything needs to be open all the time; however, people in this field are increasingly discovering the value of open in virtual worlds.
So I decided to act brave and went up and asked a question:
"It seems like given the strong media nature of virtual worlds, much of their business aspect has to do the marketing/advertising after all. Within the context of convincing the clients, what are some of the metrics and methologies to measure the efficiency of marketing and advertising in virtual worlds?"
I really wanted to know the answer because with my background in Web 2.0/Media, I needed to know how things are different in virtual worlds. Answers were basically that virtual worlds are a lot more about interactions themselves than information flow like on the Web. Also scales are far smaller in virtual worlds than the Web. Thus, we get smaller scale, but much higher engagement in virtual worlds. One of the most frequently used metrics are the amount of time spent by players around a certain advertising object. It could easily go up to hours and hours every day.
The session closed with a question, which I thought was very appropriate for closing, which was "what are some opportunities for enterpreneurs in virtual worlds?" Answers really varied. And when you get diverse responses like that, what that really means is "it's up to your imagination" :) Some of the answers were:
- Creating consultancies within virtual worlds
- Real companies/organizations can use virtual worlds as collaborative spaces
- More opportunities in developing countries because they can move in with so much less barrier-to-entry. Product designer/developers will have huge opportunities
- Turn the World Wide Web into the World Wide World
- Short term: Infrastructure - code developement, design skills, creative (story lines)
- Long term: any job you see in real world will be seen in virtual worlds
- Collaboration applications
I'm ending this post with one memorable comment made by one of the panelists: "SecondLife is like the Mosaic browser in 1993. It's only the beginning. It comes down to communications, collaboration, communities."
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basic info 2007/08/17 12:22
These virtual worlds are crucial building blocks of global civil society. As such, they harbor the promise for relationship-building and cooperation across national borders. Solutions to the cross-cultural growing pains of this new medium require a sincere commitment to transnational dialogue.
I'm flying to Singapore on Sunday to attend the State of Play Conference.
As I briefly mentioned before, in order to appropriately cover the digital generation in Asia, the gaming culture and industry, now expanded to virtual worlds altogether, must be extensively studied. Unfortunately, my expertise has been more on Web 2.0 and Enterprise IT industry in general, not so much games and virtual worlds.
But they're all coming together. I get to interact with lots of kids of age 5-15 or so at church and they live in a different world than the one I grew up in. (I'm only 28 by the way). They don't seem to draw the line between the "real" world and the "virtual" world. The two worlds are so interchangable in their lives. What's imaginary and what's physical? They don't care and they don't know, but it's all in their minds. I get to talk to people working at NCSoft and Nexon, two largest game companies in Korea, and Cyworld. AND I HEAR SOME CRAZY STORIES FROM THEM.
IBM is training their employees in Second Life. When I attended Supernova in June, there was this great session on virtual worlds and I remember Raph Koster, one of the gurus in the field, saying "many of the Web 2.0 principles and phenomenon have come from games." I totally agree with him, especially as far as how social interactions are concerned.
I go to PC bangs and see middle/high school guys in their school uniforms spend 4 hours straight playing Starcraft, Lineage, WoW, FIFA, etc. after school. What's scary is how this is such a big part of their lives. I mean their real lives.
What would happen when you combine everything together? I mean combining different virtual worlds with blogs, mobile, social networks, and messengers. Maybe some efforts towards standardization would help? What if you can play WoW on the bus for an hour using Wibro on the way to school? What if your Cyworld buddy can be found on Club Penguin? Possibilities are endless, I think.
Of course, we'll be seeing various social and legal issues come up in this fast-developing medium as well. I know much about what's up with social networks and blogs. Can the same principles be applied to virtual worlds? What's the same? What's different?
We'll find out at the conference. I'm not sure if I'll be able to live-blog the conference, given I don't know much about the wireless connections at the site. But I'll be constantly feeding you guys with what I learn there. And trust me, what I'll be learning there will be extremely important to anyone who has anything to do with anything digital--Web 2.0/portal services, H/W & gadget makers, game makers, social networks makers, book publishers, network providers, teachers, legislators, parents, kids, or even HR people.
Should I go, "stay tuned and excited" again? ;) Well, I am!
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tags : Asia,
broadband,
Culture,
Cyworld,
digital generation,
games,
Korea,
Media,
MMORPG,
Mobile,
Singapore,
state of play,
technokimchi,
Virtual,
Web,
Web 2.0,
WIBRO,
World of Warcraft
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