Finished reading For The Win, concluding the tale of online workers rights. The story ends with the characters all uniting, taking the struggle for works right to a new level. Well the characters face real-world violence, leading to the death of several characters, the overall sense is of victor. Ashok, the economist, creates what is essentially a Ponzi scheme in the virtual worlds, which forces the game companies to allow the game farmers to work and sell to players. The virtual union and real-world unions unite, and a gold age begins.

I found the ending to be hopelessly optimistic. The main part that bothers me is the Ponzi scheme in order to hold the virtual economy hostage to force the game companies to allow gold farming. In reality there would be no way that game companies would submit to such a ridiculous events- they have absolute control over the virtual economy and can fix what ever attempted scheme that golf farmers would attempt to pull. One cannot challenge the absolute authority in a virtual world- otherwise they would not be the absolute authority. The overall impression the book left me with was that something needs to be done about the workers rights of online workers – they are far to easy to abuse in the real world. However, the book seems to assume certain things about the virtual worlds which, in my experience, are not that way in the actual instance of virtual worlds.

I finished reading For The Win, part 2, today. The book continues the stories started in part 1, and adds the viewpoints of several new characters. I found the book’s concentration on the worker’s rights fight during part 2, especially Yasmin’s (A former member of Mala’s army) encounter with Ashok and the leaders of other Unions in the country. The disjoint between the views of the online workers toward what they do and can do against the ‘real-world’ union’s views on the online workers is quite interesting. The online workers feel they are a valid part of the workforce, deserve rights, and can fight for those rights. The real-world unions view the online works as children playing games, and do not see the advantage of adding them to the union movement. I must admit that I have a little skeptical of the idea of online-unions, not because of the humans rights issue, but because of the  moral issues that arise from unionizing a form of work that is actually illegal. No matter the problems that are in the real-world for the online works, the work they are doing is illegal due to the terms of use agreement in the game. The basis of their work is so relate on an industry that is actively fighting to remove them from the game. The book seems to ignore largely ignore the game owner’s rights, demoting them from the owners of the game to being a challenge in the gold-farmers existence. Unionizing is about basic rights and protection for works, and that I approve of, but it does not seem at all logical to unionize over an industry that is on such a unstable playing field, where the work done by members can be wiped out and removed in seconds by game administrators – who would be doing nothing wrong.

Recently, I made my first podcast. Quite the exciting moment in my life, let me tell you. I tried to make it about a hike in the Rancho San Antonio open space reserve, near where I grew up. For the most part, it sticks pretty close to being about the hike, although I feel I put in a lot of random stuff about the area mostly because I did not know what else to talk about. The experience of making the podcast was actually not particularly interesting for me. Lots of people seem to love the experience of making podcasts, as it allows them to communicate their ideas and themselves in a more efficient and personal manner then, say, blogs. I personally do not have that same urge to share information making the podcast creation process feel a bit unnatural. Once I got started talking, it was fine and I was able to freely ramble on about whatever wandered into my mind (train of though style), but the actual overall experience is not something I would naturally try to seek out and do. The follow up of editing was a bit more fun for me, once I got over listening to myself talk. I really just dropped out the ‘um’s and long awkward pauses, then added some music – mostly because I felt I had to add something shiny to the thing.

Overall, the experience of making the podcast was awkward at first, but once I got started and no one got angry at me, it was fairly straightforward. It is not something I think I’ll try to do again, just because I very rarely have something to say that has not already been said by someone else, in a more clear and eloquent fashion.

Over the past few days I’ve been reading For The Win, written by Cory Doctorow. Doctorow is a British-Canadian blogger, journalist, and science fiction writer who strongly supports liberal copyright laws and creative commons. For The Win is the second book by Doctorow and focuses on massively multiplayer online role-playing games (mmorpg) with a touch upon topics of economics, labor rights, gold farming and power-leveling. Part 1 of the book introduces the stories of three people: Matthew Fong, a Chinese boy who is an incredibly talented gold-farmer but has to deal with the established gold-farming gangs; Leonard “Wei-Dong” Goldberg, an American boy who spends all the time he can playing games with his in-game Chinese friends and guild members, who are gold-farmers and power levelers, but Leonard has to deal with his parent’s apposition to playing and eventually runs away. Mala, or General Robotwallah, is a Indian girl who discovers that she is a natural strategist in online games, and forms an online make-shift army out of the players in a local cafe, eventually getting them all hired by a Mr. Banerjee who has her hunt down and kill rival gold-farmers, until her army is defeated by Big Sister Nor, who leads the Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web. The three character’s stories alternate chapters, each with their own themes.

This book was a new experience for me, and a pleasant one. I am already a huge fan of science fiction and this book was a very good addition to what I have already read. I’m only done with part 1, but I find the issues it brings up already to be quiet interesting. The author sets the stage for a very pro-labor rights message from the beginning, detailing the hardship faced by gold-farmers. The labor rights of gold-farmers and their ilk are always at stake, as the entire industry is illegal in most games terms-of-use. Even with that knowledge, I still feel like action needs to be taken, for basic human rights. Even with the obvious labor-rights issues, I found that my dislike was focused on the brutal members of the gold-farming communities and not the corporations that run the games, which was a nice change from many science fiction books these days. The story of Leonard is of particular interest to me, as he shows the particular issue of game addiction; his obsession with gaming is ruining his real-life relationships, but he does not seem to care. The author has yet to make this actually seem like a problem though, which worries me about how his story might continue. Overall, I like the book and the stories, and look forward to continued reading.

Today I read an excerpt of ‘Reality is Broken‘ by Jane McGonigal, a game developer who works to create alternate reality games games that help to solve real world problems. In her book, she talks about how gaming has become a replacement for reality for millions of people. Many people now spend many hours a week playing video games, often at the expense of their real-life relationships, due to the games being more intense and exciting then real life – escapist entertainment. This trend is found worrying by many people because of the immense social ramifications – our society is not built for people who want to escape reality. Gaming has become such a huge part of society because they provide a place where people can be themselves without many of the limitations of real life, can experience much more exciting things then reality, and can devote their talents which are not used in their real-life work environments. The argument has come up that society must decide if it will allow gaming to continue to grow as it has as an escapist entertainment, or if it must fight gaming to prevent being overpowered. Jane McGonigal presents a third idea in her text, the idea that games can be used to help solve real-life problem and find a way to get people to view reality in a similiar way they view gaming. She as spoken about such an idea at Game Developers Conference and it was greeted with great interest- many of the great minds and leaders of the industry have begun moving in that direction. Should be interesting to see what happens from that.

This article as of particular interest to me as I am a gamer and I’ve worried about how much time I spend gaming. It can be difficult to balance real-world relations and work with the constant desire to be in the virtual world. I do agree that something has to be done about the gaming culture to prevent it from growing out of control and becoming the escape from reality that everyone runs to immediately from work. However, there is no good, clean way of cutting it down without causing more problems. The idea of using games is a very interesting idea, one that I would like to hear much more about. I have some difficulty in conceptualizing how that would be done, or how we would work to have people shift their efforts in games to being in reality. But the idea has merit. Games already are used as education tools and as ways for interactions with other cultures (Second Life, among others), and many games are attempting to have people exercise as well. I feel that as a culture, we need to learn moderation: a balanced way of life that western cultures have been struggling to do for centuries.

Continuing my adventures from the previous post, I read a study that looks at the Unintended Outcomes of Second Life, written by William C. Diehl and Esther Prins. Both authors have backgrounds in researching the social impacts of online events. The study focuses on the surprising trends that appeared in second life in terms of intercultural Literacy and cultural Identity. Due to the diversity that exists in the user base of Second Life, users are often experience other cultures and languages, which as the added benefit of making them learn about those other things. People can learn new languages and ideas that are common in foreign countries without ever having to leave their homes. Classes are even offered in certain player area, both free and on payment basis. This sharing of knowledge gives Second Life immense potential as a learning tool for people who are unable to travel in real life.

I find this development interesting, but not altogether quite as exciting as the authors seem to feel it is. I think it is good that people experience other cultures and learn new languages, but I also feel that having those experience in a purely online form lacks the personal depth that is so important for well-rounded social development. There is only so much real development that can take place online. The learning environment is a definite plus over most online games, but still lacks the real connections of real life. I feel that Second Life is a good start toward cultural literacy, but still is not as great as the researches seem to think it is.

I took a trip into the world of Second Life recently. The idea behind this virtual world is that people can do what ever they like with their avatars. They can fly, build, buy, change appearances, and even enter into relationships with other players. I made my avatar, named Minmax, and spent half an hour wandering around and getting used to the world and controls. My first impression was not exactly good. As I am something of a gamer, the worlds that one could enter into seemed very small and limited. There were many options of places to go, but beyond site seeing, I felt like there was nothing to do. What interactions I had with other avatars was, frankly, stupid and something of a waste of time. None of the theme worlds really gave anything to me and the socializing users seemed to all to be trying to impress me or to get my avatar to do something sexual. Compared to some of the other online worlds I’ve spent time in, this one felt very shallow and pointless, and the load time was annoying. The idea of the game is interesting, but the execution just feels lacking to me, as I’m used to fast, more streamline and, most importantly goal oriented worlds.

My avatar reflects my disinterest in the game. I named him/her/it Minmax. It was nice being able to customize what the character looked like to such degree, but then having to pay for anything else did not seem worth the cost. I looked through the character bio options and added a few basic things, but I simply didn’t feel connected enough to want to write a back story for an avatar that I had no connection with, as I could change it at any time and had spend no time developing it in any measurable sense.

The growth of religion on the internet has been a very interesting thing to watch. Elizabeth Drescher wrote about media trends that are shaping on-line religion. I found the first two trends particularly interesting: the social prayers and the ministers on the go. Social prayer groups are among the top most popular pages on many social media sites, like Facebook. The religious activities on-line sites like Facebook and Twitter are growing quickly, and may shape the future of religions. Even religious figures, like ministers, are catching on – they use location services such as Foursquare to let their communities know they are around in the local area to talk. Much of the religious activates that formerly took place in holy sites are now moving on line.

I found this very interesting. Looking back at history, many religious have a very negative view of advancing ideals. How the churches and other religious organizations are adapting their faith to online cultures is quite interesting. I find it quick ironic, as the Internet is often denounced as the space of Atheists and other such heretical groups. The fact that religious groups are fighting for their own space on line is quite interesting. I am curious about how much really gets done on the sites – I imagine the sites would be targeted by other groups as a place to troll (to make inflammatory comments, to anger users) and generally disturb the faithful.

Today, I was poking around in the open source Audacity sound editing program. It is a good example of the type of free tools can be created and shared through open source movement. The program is designed for editing sound files; I am looking into it for a later podcast project which can be edited with this program. The parts in particular I was watching today where several basic ‘how to’ podcasts made as a tutorial for the program. The tutorials where made by Jason Van Orden author of Promoting Your Podcast and general podcasting consultant. He does not go into great depth in the tutorials, instead sticking to the basics of sound editing. This is a plus, as it gives new users a great starting point from where they can experiment and learn on their own. This was perfect for me as I have had very little experience with editing audio files (or editing of any kind, really). It strikes me as a useful skill to have in the modern digital culture with so much of the information and new artist media being connected to such technology. People have made their living off programs like these and that alone is argument enough for me to learn at least the basics about it. I would not be surprised to see schools starting to offer students programs to allow them to learn how to use useful open source software.

Today I read “The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions” which is a study lead by Gilad Lotan, the head of R&D of SocialFlow. The study tracked who was blogging about the revolutions in Tunisian and Egyptian by filtering tweets sent with certain periods of time by key words relating to the revolution. The Tweets were then sorted into flows; a flow is when a tweet is re-posted by another user. The longest 10% of flows where kept and 1/6 of those tweets where randomly chosen, creating the data set. The study then looked at who had published each tweet, where the source was and who re-posted that tweet. The results are rather interesting. Journalist tweeters tend to re-post each other’s comments. The ‘other’ category of users (users of indeterminable goal/source) where the most common tweeters about both revolutions, with bloggers close behind.

This idea of creating revolution through services such as media is an interesting idea to me. It creates a interesting dynamic between traditional journalists and ‘amateur mobile media journalists’, which was mentioned in the study. The two groups will be contesting for attention from readers, and may create issues for creditably in the future. On the plus side, such mobile media and networked revolutions becomes much harder for governments to clamp down on information about revolutions spreading. Even with new found ability to support and share information about revolutions, there is a down side. If a government had the right tools, they could use the tweets to track down dissidents. Incorrect information could be spread with out going through the confirmation process regular journalism does. Even with these downsides, I have a feeling the democratic process and revolution process of the future will depend much more heavily upon such sites and mobile technology. We just need to make sure we can still do both without it as well.