Collaborative Design Game in Second Life

[AlinaNazmeeva]

Hi Everyone, 

I am Alina, I am relatively new to Second Life ( have registered a bit more than a year ago). Currently I am working on my Master Thesis in Architecture and Urbanism at MIT.  I have been working for a while on the topic of virtual worlds and the importance of online graphic virtual environments and the implications of their design to contemporary culture. I believe that wider design community (not only virtual world or game designers) should look at virtual worlds as some of the critical social, experiential and cultural places of contemporary world. I am currently studying and exploring Second Life as a main case study for my thesis, because I am mostly interested in collaborative environments and platforms, where the residents themselves design every artifact found in them. 

For my thesis I have been designing a game-like collaborative design experience, which I need to launch in Second Life.

I am almost done with the design of the structure and rules for it, got the land for it and have been experimenting with 3d-modeling and uploading models from different software ( I work in 3dsmax, Cinema4d and Sketchup).

Regarding the land: The land is 5000m2: not so big but should suffice for the first playtest! That in my opinion can work for the group of ~9 people. Based on the results of this test, I could think of the modifications for the larger space.

Regarding the built elements: I propose to create a library of 3d elements which can be used. It will potentially save time and will open the experiment for the people who are not professional builders.

Below is the short description of general logic of the experiment, which I am very happy to share for your comments but also it is time for me to find the people who would be interested in participation.

The experiment itself evolved into a game-like experience: there is a structure, rules and rounds. 

Overview:

It is a two-round semi-cooperative game for 9 players. You are appropriating space, negotiating with each other over land, claim right of way across other players’ property and design and decorate your own land. Right of way through other players’ property is a cooperatively owned land, shared between the initial owner and the player, who claimed the right of way. Cooperatively owned land has to be designed cooperatively, with the input from all players who has a stake in it.  

Goals: The collective exercise is to design a shared space. Shared space emerges if most of the areas you own are shared with someone else. So, right of way is a shared space. Thus, everybody wins if some of the players are willing to share their land and want to collaborate with other participants in the design process. If the site has less than 50% of the total area as shared space, everybody loses. The whole area is successful (everyone wins) if the proportion of shared spaces is larger than the proportion of individually owned spaces. However, there are also two types of the individual winners. First, the participant with the most individually owned land is a winner within the game. The individual landowner who has the least of individually owned land (the one who gave up the most) is a second winner. You have to compete and collaborate with each other at the same time.

During the first round your goal is to acquire as much land as you can. You can’t place your properties adjacent to each other. You can place our property adjacent to other players’ holdings. There is a minimum and a maximum size of the land you can have. Yet the shape/size of the land you own is determined by other players. Each player is assigned a special 'land use' (education, convention, culture, green, entertainment and others) to help to determine a program for their property.

During the second round you have to connect your discrete properties through the rights of way, and negotiate rights of way for other players across your land. The size of right of way is determined by the shape of the land ( the width of RoW has to be a half of the shortest side of your property).

Artifacts: There is only one in-game artifact, a favor cube.You receive it from the players who is above you, or has the tallest space. Also, you are given a favor cube in the exchange for a favor: if another player asks you to move a few rows down, in the exchange for that you can claim a favor cube from this player. You use favor cube as a powerful negotiation tool when you claim your right of way. You can claim up to 50% of your opponent's land if you you have their favor cube.

My goals as a designer: I want to see what kind of space will emerge from social interaction and negotiation. I am interested to design a game for collaboration, emerging from competition. 

Second Life goal: To have a space which will be meaningful for the community afterwards. Thus, the participants come to play this game with the interest in the designing space for their own future use. I want to continue using this land and share the ownership rights with the participants after the game is played, so the space lives and is being used after it is designed. 

Please let me know if this is something you would be interested in!

Any feedback and interest in participation is very much appreciated!!!

[Wili Clip]

Hello,

In past I've been experimenting with a similar multi-people collaboration within my main gaming community for my main games Gold Hunt and Fish Hunt on my sim. I created clans and clan owned lands that clans were able to claim and use. Several clans formed and created their own internal politics and through internal members donations in L$ for common purpose and to compete against other clans they were collaborating to be able to rent bigger plot of land for members use. It was interesting and nice to see the growth.

At one point I played with idea of creating a simulation of virtual government or a virtual city (experiment). Those are interesting concepts and can be very successful if they are create as a fun game with easy to achieve goals and lots of different players options. And right team with a good 3D designer, programmer, + other skills could achieve something remarkable on that space. Its waiting for pioneers ☺

I like the topic of your thesis ^-^ and your opinion "I believe that wider design community (not only virtual world or game designers) should look at virtual worlds as some of the critical social, experiential and cultural places of contemporary world".

I fully agree on that with you. Second Life is the best platform for trying different social and cultural experiments. I share your views and I've been using Second Life for different social game experiments. I recognized potential and I am after it I am just very limited by the time that I can have for it as REAL LIFE is demanding more and more of me.

I create games inside Second Life with fully featured market economy. So far my games experiments and business in SL was about using economic incentives (players earning L$) + marketing needs (of landowners wanting traffic and exposure) to create a growing community. But I want to create games that go beyond that and could create a meaningful impact on how people (players) / online communities collaborate and interact with each other. Also the way people work is going to change radically in coming years.... there are just new concepts that virtual worlds enable but they need to be "invented". I think that through games its possible to grow system that then can turn into big online or virtual world ran business systems that can employ people and have an impact on real world.

 

 

[AlinaNazmeeva]

Hi Wili!

Your sim sounds fantastic! I will definitely check it out. 

Yes I totally agree on :

On 4/18/2019 at 10:10 AM, Wili Clip said:

At one point I played with idea of creating a simulation of virtual government or a virtual city (experiment). Those are interesting concepts and can be very successful if they are create as a fun game with easy to achieve goals and lots of different players options. And right team with a good 3D designer, programmer, + other skills could achieve something remarkable on that space. Its waiting for pioneers ☺

I am so much interested in continuing working in that direction! 

However, I am not sure what channels to use to promote my experiment ( I need more participants!!) Would you recommend any other channels besides this forum? 

 

[AlinaNazmeeva]

Hi All!!

Currently I have 4 participants for the experiment, and I need 5 more

I can  provide 25USD Amazon Gift Cards for your participation, but I don't think that this type of an incentive can do any good for the game, this is one of the reasons of me trying to find participants who would be interested in becoming a part of a new community and interested in participating in the game itself. 

But it will be fun regardless + you will have a shared ownership of the land in the end (if you want to).

I made a short teaser of the game which you can find here:

Of course all shapes/colors here are very abstract and they represent different players rather than any rules. It is fully up to the players how to design their pieces of land.

 

 

[Kyrah Abattoir]

Where can we see this???

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

Oh right. My difficult month of unmerry May is over and I've mostly survived

I can't fathom how your system works but I'm ready to give it a go.