Week 8 - Instant Messengers and Virtual Worlds.

Well, today our tutorial task was a fairly simple one really, we were to use and state the various differences and aspects of 3D and non-3D instant messenger (IM) programs. Seems simple enough right? Wrong. First of all I tried out ActiveWorlds which is basically a group of 3D worlds where people can chat, and build houses, and generally do all the things that you can do in real life etc. Well, to start with, trying to run this on the uni computers under Firefox caused the PC's to crash. This was the first wonderful experience. So two restarts later and I had it up and running in Internet Explorer (IE). I was pretty impressed by how quickly all the items loaded and the draw distances etc. The second program I attempted to use was Habbo Hotel. Well, after booting the client, making a character, creating a user name and password and finally entering my email address, what could you suppose happens? Thats right, their server gives me a dead response and it tells me to basically start again. This I did not like.

So, now that I've gone over that I can tell you that I decided to compare ActiveWorlds to the non-3D IM service that I chose. It seemed the lesser of two evils. Now the main IM program I use is MSN messenger service (MSN). This has one very very vast difference other than the simple 3D/non-3D user interface. MSN in NOT a chat room, it has or at least had access to chat rooms, but was not one itself. So in effect, to talk to people you had to know their email address (through prior contact) to add them. This is probably the main difference between the two, and also the main reason for the other varying differences. To start with, people in ActiveWorlds were immediately crass. I think that the main reason for this is the simple anonymity of the world. People log on with a new persona and new image, and they can say and do whatever they like with no social backlash. This is avoided in the IM world of MSN however mainly because you generally know who the person in that you are talking to and plan to have a more permanent connection, and thus are more polite.

This idea is pretty similar in most messenger systems. Most 3D services are more like chat rooms than actual IM services and this is where the real difference comes in, rather than the actual 3D environment. Finally though, when we compare a 3D chat room, to a purely text base chat room (rather than IM system) the trend seems to move in the other direction. Where people feel slightly more responsible to their 3D persona and image, than they do to simply a text based name. Therefore you tend to get more vulgarity, and less social care when entering into a purely text based environment.

So, I suppose to sum things up, what I've really discovered about the differences between 3D and non-3D messenger services comes down to the level of social responsibility and the level of social backlash that people believe they are accountable for.

Week 3 (Finally)

I've had some issues with blogger recently, however they are now resolved and I can post from home again :D enjoy my rather late blog.

So, first off we had to do some research on our major topic essay. Now I decided from the start to do something internet related, after all it is the largest form of world wide communication in the present day. However, I wanted to look at something a little more abstract when it comes to internet communications and for this reason I have settled on a rather strange topic of the MMORPG, or MMOG (Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game, or Massively Multi-player Online Game). This may seem like a strange form of communication but with the largest of these games boasting upwards of six million subscribers it has certainly become a new communication technology.

When looking at this topic I have come across a number of online journals which I will briefly list and give summaries of.

First
Learning to fly in persistent digital worlds: the case of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games
Secondly
Defining grief play in MMORPGs: player and developer perceptions
Last
The social side of gaming: a study of interaction patterns in a massively multiplayer online game

Each of these papers looks at different aspects of MMORPG social interaction, this ranges from the negative interaction of "ganking" or "griefing" and the large amount of anger that can be generated from these activities to the positive social interaction between "allied" players, or those communicating within in game groups or teams known as "guilds". The overall structure of sociality within an interactive world is also discussed within these papers.

So heres the second part of our blog for this week, a scavenger hunt.

1) 1140 pounds
http://www.steeleoriginals.com/ls/lee/pumpkin.htm

2) Through the use of fan mail
http://www.geocities/collesseum/court/5449/from_Creator.htm


3) 18-21 feet
http://www.angelfire.com/ks3/merickson/Animalia.html
http://members.rediff.com/guneetsingh/animals.htm

4) An idea on the philisophical nature of beings, objects and the idea of existence.
Actual Meaning: specification of a conceptualisation of a knowledge domain. An ontology is a controlled vocabulary that describes objects and the relations between them in a formal way, and has a grammar for using the vocabulary terms to express something meaningful within a specified domain of interest. The vocabulary is used to make queries and assertions.
members.optusnet.com.au/~webindexing/Webbook2Ed/glossary.h4tm

5) Stereo
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000343/

6) January 8, 1986
http://www.technozen.com/manifesto.htm

7) Because the 555 exchange in the US is not a real exchange, and is reserved specifically or movie, tv and radio purposes. This partially came about due to people calling the number 867-5309 consistantly after it was featured in the song "867-5309 Jenny".

8) The ferry for 30 Euros
http://www.athensguide.com/ferries.html

9) The Seekers - I'll never find another you
http://www.onmc.iinet.net.au/topspot/1965.htm

10) The Black Assassins
http://www.griffith.edu.au/school/art/staff/stockwell.htm (It should be noted that I lol'd my heart out)

Well thats it, finally posted and done, and only 3 hours till dawn :)

Week 4

All of the images that I'm using were found on google and resized in photoshop.

Friends: The image is representative of friendship as you can see a group of people clearly interacting in a friendly, close manner.











High-Tech: I think this image is a perfect example of something high-tech. It is an image of a fiber optic cable, this type of cabling is considered as the next-gen data transfer system.








News: This image is of a group of news cuttings from various papers, this is an ideal image depicting news considering that the newspaper was the primary source of news projection over a number of years before television and radio.









Summer: A perfect image for summer, palm tree's and the beach, this is an image than any Queenslander comes up with when asked what summer is about.










Abstract: How to describe something as abstract? I guess the fact that this image is quite strange and certainly doesn't fit into any normal category has to make it abstract. Plus, a table and pillars on water is mighty strange.









University Life: It was going to be either a library or a bar, but I thought the library was more symbolic of how we should be living our university life.