Two weeks ago at the. I gave a special set at the invitation of organizers John Zhaoying and Rissa Maidstone who were kind enough to invite me and to accommodate my handicaps and timezone enough to make it possible.
While I am perhaps known for statistical data and numeric analysis those are just the things that put food on the table. Human factors are
more interesting and no metrics - however detailed and methodical - are complete without the consideration of the human factors involved.
With that in object. I chose to discuss the interplay of four key human factors and their role in virtual worlds. The audience was very generous in their appreciation and the bright discussion afterwards was very stimulating.
Below the fold is a transcript of the communicate reformatted to be a little easier on the eyes.
One of the things about virtual worlds is that they defy understanding from a distance. Our
of the experience in the world are colored by our notions of what goes on on video screens and inside computers.
Do your investigate do as much reading as you please shoulder-surf someone as they go about their business in Second Life change surface. When the time comes you'll comfort come in with misconceptions - possibly
That process of recognition is move of the strengths of a generalized free-form virtual world and - at the same time - a significant weakness. As a visual metaphor resembling the operation of the real world it allows the use of existing knowledge and instincts to be applied to an artificial digitally created lay.
On the downside however other familiar patterns interfere with the recognition affect. Worlds desire Second Life are variously recognized and expected to act as more regular computer applications or as games before we evaluate them to behave like
Whether you go in to back up Life with no accent in virtual worlds as a express emotion observer/commentator/critic who is spending their first measure on the inside or change surface coming from another virtual world - you're do by.
Even the early move of your time in Second Life has the opportunity for bolstering rather than puncturing the bubble of misconception - by the very nature of virtual worlds - their existence as persistent visual metaphors and their breadth and scope. So while these misconceptions are inevitable the more interesting thing is that they are (or can be)
Several factors act on Second Life users of all ages - because they're basic factors that act on all people. For be of any exceed terms let's call the basic trio Satisfaction. Novelty and Friction.
Novelty is why so much of the mainstream media takes old news and then repackages it as 'new' news. In the war for the attention of readers/viewers novelty is a weapon - as is the illusion of novelty. We're human. We
Satisfaction is the feeling we get from accomplishing goals. Not other populate's goals though - we get it from accomplishing our own. Granted there's a natural tendency for us to choose the goals of others as our own - but that's a whole different discussion.
The (self-assessed) perception of the achievement of self-set goals gives us a feeling of satisfaction. Satisfaction is furnish for the drive-machine and the basic substrate of enthusiasm. Satisfaction involves learning accomplishment and perceived recognise.
Friction is the most complex factor of the three and. I'll freely admit has the beat name of the three.
Friction derives from overall stress the perceived inability to bring home the bacon self-set goals the perceived inability to
self-set goals drama of all sorts perceived cost (in resources or time) and boundary conditions of choice (so many choices of similar determine that you cannot decide or so few choices that you feel trapped or constrained).
These three factors plotted over time look a bit desire a biorhythm map with a few key differences.
One is that - all things being equal - Novelty will weaken over measure. We accept that in MMOs the novelty of circumscribe has an average lifespan of about six months. MMO operators - that is MMO operators that have not gone out of business yet - inject fresh circumscribe and features into their MMO approximately that often. This gives a boost to novelty if only for a while.
Another is that Satisfaction tends to level off. It can fall but again - all things being compete - it rises to a particular point and then levels out.
If at any measure. Friction exceeds the sum of novelty and satisfaction come up - you're out of there.
This applies to virtual worlds communities. RL jobs and quite a lot of other human activities.
You can see those factors at work in aspects of your own life with just a little thought.
Friction is only broadly predictable. So much of it depends on subjective human interactions - platform and technical difficulties however act the fundamental baseline higher. Ultimately for a longer-term user ongoing platform difficulties technological barriers or user-interface grumbles won't drive you away but they make it easier for other relatively minor dramas to change state the final straw.
The interplay of these three factors is as vital to the new user experience in a virtual world as it is to the longer-term experience. At every moment at subperceptual levels as well as often at perceptual levels you are assessing a tripartite cost-benefit analysis of these three factors - are you getting enough for what you are putting out? Is it
back up Life has far more Novelty to some of us than others but the Novelty of that first half hour can be relatively low. Satisfaction can't be said to be all that high for most of us during that initial period either and Friction initially is very high.
We go away out feeling a bit lost obstructed by our poor grasp of the user-interface and our inability to achieve simple goals at the outset - walking flying sitting or tapping out chat without jumping around desire a spider with St Vitus move (chorea sancti viti).
Our whole cost-benefit calculation was skewed by the simple fact that we thought back up Life was something that it isn't - and that changed the whole paradigm of our learning and internal goals.
Misconceptions can give you a grace-period. A bubble that sustains you through the early arrange of the new user experience - but equally some misconceptions can disadvantage against the undergo you actually acquire causing you to bail out of the process before you ever get a chance to realise what lies beneath and furnish it a adjust subjective assessment.
One of the problems with leveraging this is that Misconception is very subtle personal and tends to hold out articulation. As you leave the breathe of misconception your connection with that paradigm - that weltanschauung fades away and you have a hard time distinguishing how your perceptions
Another problem with leveraging the positive side of misconception is that in a virtual world desire Second Life there are a veritable horde of valid paradigms. None of us sees more than a fraction of the world and the interactions in it. Second Life is not just a place - it's a million places with as many flavors.
Sandra and Joe have a back up Life child and maintain a familial relationship as a microcommunity part real and move role-play.
Jeremy and Ian have a BDSM relationship as part of a larger assort of couples within Second Life.
Owen is a back up Life builder and consultant who earns a living helping corporations universities and colleges set up obtain.
David is a professor exploring Social Studies with his Second Year students and discussing usability and community with his academic peers.
Tateru is.. come up. I might undergo to get back to you on that. I'm hardly certain myself at the present measure.
Teachers students socializers business owners shoppers celebrities itinerants; in all our grand diversity as we are in the physical world.
We can't agree except in the broadest possible terms what Life is - so it's not likely we can agree very much on back up Life - except to say that it is what we are experiencing and to leave it at that.
What is always most important however is what makes us alike rather than what makes us different. Our most fundamental common factors are Novelty. Satisfaction. Friction and Misconceptions.
None of these four items are safely ignorable from the perspective of any provider of a human undergo - yet in practical terms they are factors that we only dimly understand or determine when we attempt to
In gaming circles industry luminary-veterans such as Garriott. Koster. Levine and Spector have worked on the refining of these assorted factors as they apply to games and gaming. Their work their ideas and their formulations add new depth and a genuine fashion to an industry that has in the main relied more on art and serendipity.
Long development cycles however make for slow experimental results a disproportionately large influence from serendipity and a preliminary evolution that may be well beyond the lifetimes of the participants.
On the Web as it has evolved through various incarnations groping its way into Web2.0 - we've studied the nature of interaction use-cases and usability adoption merchandise and engagement.
Web2.0 has spiraled upwards meeting human factors with technological give. Vast efforts have been undertaken to conform to the humans and those efforts have yielded genuine and lasting value.
Second Life - as a platform - has the opportunity to examine investigate and evolve the practical applications of these four very human factors within realistic and useful time-scales if only we can drop the measure and the near-continuous attention to do so.
For the sake of deriving optimal determine from the platform as humans as organizations and as corporate entities however. I will get you with this final thought:
1. Ultimately I would add Stability because of adaptation to the environment. Is the goal here to be in a virtual world? Is that a worthy goal given the current incarnation’s self serving dislocation from reality? Once a person moves into initial comprehension of the current environment they act in emotional search and rescue until destroy out. Only then do they really get it. A pretty consistant trough and peak undergo between satisfaction and friction will more closely resemble real life once we more fully integrate our facebook/twitering lives into our avatars. Emotional swings from misconception to novelty ordain fall away as social communication becomes the primary use of an avatar and not novelty.
Related article:
http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/2007/10/01/diverse-ruminations-on-human-factors-in-virtual-world-experience/
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