Immersive Education at Boston College

These are my assignments from the Immersive Education course that I am taking at Boston College. The course is called Video Games and Virtual Reality. To learn more visit the Immersive Education BC portal at http://ImmersiveEducation.org/@/bc

I worked on a number of these assignments with my fellow classmates. This semester I took this course with:

AJ Prince (http://ajprince15.blogspot.com/)

Amanda Yerke (http://virtual35801.blogspot.com/)

Andrew Langone (http://langonemt35801.blogspot.com/)

Diana Cheung (http://dcmt358.blogspot.com/)

Greg Dunn (http://virtualgregd.blogspot.com/)

Jeff Andrade (http://immersiveeducationjeff.blogspot.com/)

Matt Blinstrub (http://mstrub.blogspot.com/)

Michael Rodriguez (http://michaellrodriguez.blogspot.com/)

Ryan O'Hara (http://chroniclero.blogspot.com/)

Sam Bellar (http://617music.blogspot.com/)

Suzanne Veiga (http://svmt35801.blogspot.com/)

WoW Machinima

Here is the youtube link to my World of Warcraft Machinima. I made this one extra long since the tour of my world didn't take as long as I was expecting. Hope you enjoy my narration :)

Machinima of my Virtual Library

Here is the link to my youtube video of my Machinima of my virtual library. Hope you like it!

These are my assignments from the Immersive Education course that I am taking at Boston College. The course is called Video Games and Virtual Reality. To learn more visit the Immersive Education BC portal athttp://ImmersiveEducation.org/@/bc

Machinima

Machinima is the process of creating animated films using 3-D graphics technology from computer or video games. The term can also refer to the films which are created using this process. Machinima is generally used for 2 main purposes. Its primary purpose is for entertainment. Whether it is telling an action, adventure or comedy story (and all genres of Machinima do exist) Machinima like most media exists first and foremost to entertain. Its second purpose though (and the reason why many video game companies both love Machinima and work actively to promote it through in game capture software and licenses that make Machinima fair use) is to promote the game itself. Whether the Machinima is about the games story (or even refers to it at all) the Machinima is filmed using a game and this has been proven to make people think, ‘huh, that game looks cool’ or what have you and buy it. One large example of this I will talk later is Red vs Blue.

The modern history of Machinima began in 1996 with the quake video, diary of a camper. Prior to this video Machinima was stunt or speed runs basically like a sports replay or highlight reel. What makes Diary of a Camper so important is that it introduced the idea of making actual films of video games with their own independent storylines rather than just filming the game itself. Following the release of Diary of a Camper Machinima has both gotten more popular and more mainstream and has come to be featured in other forms of media, like the episode of South Park, Make Love Not Warcraft which features extensive Machinima content of the game the episode is parodying, World of Warcraft.

Machinima #1: Red vs. Blue

In the History of Machinima Red vs. Blue is one of the most important works. It is a show that has been since its inception filmed from various Halo games. It has existed over the course of 11 seasons since its premiere on April 1, 2003. Over that time it has become wildly popular, and more significantly been embraced for promotional and advertising purposes by Bungie the makers of the Halo series of games it is filmed in. It was one of the first Machinima to have this happen and is historically significant for this reason. It also happens to be a Machinima I am personally fond of. Unlike the other two examples I have included two screenshots of Red vs. Blue instead of one. The first screenshot is from one of the more famous episodes of the first season (the where church dies and Tucker says “You killed church, you team-killing #$!#tard” is how most people remember it). The second screenshot is a trailer for the upcoming 11th season. By comparing the two you can see just how far video-game graphics and Machinima itself has come in that decade Red vs. Blue has been around.

Machinima #2 Massive

    If you have eagle eyes you might have spotted that this Machinima is not in a video game at all and been confused. You would have been correct, Massive is a piece of Machinima creating software that was never intended for (or to my knowledge used) in a video-game at all. Massive was actually created by Hollywood for the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers movie (and has been used in many movies since) for the purpose of creating more intelligent and realistic armies for the many large and epic battle scenes in the books. This one, the Battle of Helm’s Deep had over 70,000 Orcish Uruk Hai and human soldiers fighting and would have been prohibitively expensive to film with that many actors. It also would have looked awfully unrealistic done the way Hollywood previous filmed these things by duplicating every individual actor (playing a soldier) thousands of times to create a gigantic crowd. Instead Massive intelligently and indepently simulates each individual soldiers movements (on both sides) and their interactions and fighting. Its Artificial Intelligence makes the battle look believable by having soldier choose individually from a wide range of possible attacks and thus looks much more realistic than having hundreds of clones doing the exact same thing. It is a great example of the potential of Machinima technology outside of its traditional environment.

Machinima 3: An 8 Reenactment Bit Dungeons and Dragons

    For my Third Machinima I chose something much less well known but totally hilarious. I thought it important to show that Machinima isn’t always epic battles and wacky sci-fi (though Red Vs. Blue is also sometimes a comedy) but it can also just be a silly parody. A second thing that An 8 Reenactment Bit Dungeons and Dragons demonstrates is that Machinima need not have anything at all to do with the game it was filmed. In the case of An 8 Reenactment Bit Dungeons and Dragons it was filmed using an early Final Fantasy game, yet besides using its sprites it has nothing to do with Final Fantasy at all. It is just an entertaining parody of Dungeons and Dragons players and common stereotypes about them. The most famous line from it, “I cast magic missile at the darkness,” has shown up in a few surprising places like the Borderlands 2 Expansion Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon’s Keep (itself a D&D Parody) where you can cast the spell ‘Magic Missile’, at a hidden area called ‘The Darkness’ to unlock a secret treasure chest.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machinima

http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Spring08_GameCapture.html

http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/machinima3.htm

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/machinima

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_vs._Blue

http://roosterteeth.com/home.php

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2002/12/56778

http://borderlands.wikia.com/wiki/Tiny_Tina%27s_Assault_on_Dragon_Keep

http://borderlands.wikia.com/wiki/The_Darkness

IMMERSIVE EDUCATION: THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS AND LEADERSHIP.

In the first article, Virtual Worlds, Real Leaders IBM discusses lessons it feels real businesses can learn about leadership from online games. Specifically they discuss the lessons in leadership which can be learned from leadership in Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (henceforth MMORPGs) like World of Warcraft and Eve Online. Stylistically the article itself is actually formatted more like a pamphlet with buzzy quotes and large dramatic pictures scattered throughout. The article starts by stating that businesses spend millions of dollars trying to figure out “What’s next?” but notes that some of the answers to that question may already exist and that we should look to MMORPGs to discover them.

The most important point in the first section is that MMORPGs, show a lot about how leadership develops and people lead in such multinational, distributed, and hyper-competitive virtual environments. Following the introduction which lays this point out, the author continues to list similarities between MMORPGs and today’s competitive business environment finally ending with a rhetorical “sound familiar?”. This obviously was written to convince older business people and investors who have never heard of an MMORPG much less player World of Warcraft like we have in this class. Still the point is a key one (and one I had surprisingly never thought of despite participating in high level Raid Content with my guild is EverQuest and World of Warcraft myself), and looking back I can definitely see how the organizational and communication abilities I learned killing 40 man bosses online translated into my work environment.

The rest of this section seeks to prove the points laid out in that quote. The authors quote an internal survey (4 out of 10 IBM employees who play MMORPGs say that they have used the knowledge gained in their leadership style…) and quotes a PHD who basically restates the quote.  The second section is about a study MIT’s Sloan School of Management and IBM did on leadership in Online Games (not specified) which concluded that all four models of MIT’s Leadership model were present in leadership in Online Games. The next section argues that leadership is a function of environment. It uses online games as a proof for this idea and lays out five different ways that online games facilitate leadership and make taking up the role of leader easier than normal. The following section is an interview with a woman who has lead an online raid guild in which she explains the process through which she became a leader, despite not being a natural leader.

The next section after that was especially interesting to me. It discusses how businesses need to learn from the temporary and flexible nature of leadership in MMORPGs and lays out the reasons that temporary leadership is more effective in them. The section after that talks about how businesses should learn from MMORPGs relationship with failure. Basically in MMORPGs failure is accepted as a cost of doing business and by taking risks that could result in failure players (and presumably businesses) are actually more successful in the long run even if the fail short term. The paper concludes by saying that like psychologists and sociologists IBM believes that interactions in virtual worlds offer key lessons with important real world applications. The author then lays out what IBM is doing with the information it has gathered and the lessons it has learned from MMORPGs.

           The second article, Leadership in a Distributed World, IBM tackles the same subject (lessons to be learned about leadership from MMORPGs) but from a slightly different angle. A more accurate description might be a slightly different intended audience. The first article is mainly angled towards how investors and business-people can evaluate the future of leadership through the lessons learned from online games. This second article is much more focused on the lessons that current high level leaders such as executives (a term the authors use repeatedly) can learn about leadership from virtual worlds and the leadership therein. This is a very fine distinction and there is a very large amount of overlap between the two articles but I think an important one nonetheless, as one key to understanding something is understanding who its audience is. 

Skype is an important communication tool that online leaders use to communicate with their guilds, clans or groups.

 Both of these Articles discuss grouping in World of Warcraft as an important venue for leadership, here one of my classmates and I are teaming up to take down a monster in World of Warcraft which we could not defeat individually.


Citations

1. IBM Gaming Report: Virtual Worlds, Real Leaders. This is a report from IBM on the connection between playing video games, such as WoW, and real-world business leadership skills.

2. IBM Report: Leadership in a distributed world - Lessons from

online gaming. This is report from IBM that discusses what this international technology company has learned from its own internal gaming community.

This is a post for the class I am taking through Immersive Education at Boston College. To learn more, go to ImmersiveEducation.org

Additional Optimization of my virtual world

In an attempt to address some of the rendering problems that people had with my virtual world, I redesigned it to make it more spaced out.

I also decreased the number of trees and the number of cubes I had in my world in an attempt to make it run more smoothly.

Here are some screenshots of my work!


This is a picture of my new world when you enter it. I added text to guide people to the different aspects of my world

This is a zoomed out view of all of my PDFs! I have more PDFs than videos because I was finding that meshmoon would crash if I had too many videos

I was trying to show me deleting some boxes and trees in this shot, but it looks like I'm deleting the ground. I hope that deleting some of the extra content that meshmoon needs to render will make it run better

Here I am moving my videos and PDFs around so that they are much more spaced out. 

virtual world clickable image 5

virtual world clickable image 4

Virtual World clickable image 3

Virtual World Clickable Image 2

Virtual World Clickable Image 1

 

WoW in Groups

Andrew Prince and I grouped together, and had a lot of fun leveling our new Draeni to level 3. Unfortunately as we were on trial accounts we could not invite anyone to a group but we still teamed up to help each other kill monsters. We had a lot of fun together and chatted on skype, check out our journey shown below through screenshots.

 Meet NoodleDude (me) and JermaineD (Andrew). This screenshot serves to demonstrate our initial challenge. Sadly it wasn't monster related but the game denying us the ability to group up because we were on starter (freebie) accounts.

 Yet we were undaunted and together gathered on skype to fight the monsters!

 Here we have found each other, got our first quest (to kill moths and recover blood) and embarked on our journey of Moth-murder.

 Our first dastardly moth vanquished, our first blood gathered.

 Here we are teaming up for a double attack! DIE MOTH SCUM!

 A few moths later and I've leveled up!!!!

 Turning in the quest. We gathered a few more and about 30 minutes later this happened...

DING LEVEL 3! Another moth bites the dust to give me my final level--and unfortunately bring our playtime to an end. It was unfortunate that we could not group together but we found an enjoyable and creative alternative.

MORE LEVELING UP IN WoW

Here I am leveling up in WoW....I started a new character because I thought mine was a bit lame.

Here he is, I made a Worgen which is a Werewolf-ish character race that is new since I played. He's a Rogue. He's also my first alliance character on this new account.

Here he is, Garulfas!

Completing my first quest, I'm in my human form. I thought I could turn into a werewolf initially but was disappointed that I couldn't.

Turning in quests! SO MANY QUESTS! Not just this guy but another girl over yonder.

Next I had to seek out this chick and practice my new "FINISHING MOVE!" EVISCERATE. Fun fact, eviscerate doesn't just mean eliminate or own or kill or something unspecific, it actually means to disembowel (slash open the chest so the guts spill out). Pretty gross tbh. Also I got my 3rd levelup to reach level 4.

I had to keep playing until I got bitten, so I could turn into a werewolf. It happened just here. Also notice the cute adorable doggie dogs. I got one that would follow me around to detect things.

FINAL PROJECT: ADDING 10 NEW CONTENT ELEMENTS TO MY IMMERSIVE LIBRARY

Since I found adding PDFs to the world much easier than the downloading youtube videos work-around that my classmate found, I decided to upload 7 PDF files, and 3 youtube videos to my world. Plus, the work around we discovered for adding youtube videos I'm told only works for 2-4 minute videos. I have a bunch of TED talks in my research database, so I'm a bit limited on the number of youtube videos I can upload. I added additional 'arms' onto the wooden stand that I have arranged my videos and PDFs on. I like that there isn't a particular order to which link visitors mist click on. Rather they can start viewing videos or reading PDFs in whatever order they want in my world.

First, here are the pictures of me adding the PDFs to the world:

 adding another PDF

 Moving the page to just the right place

 All done with the PDF uploads!!


Okay now onto the videos! Adding arms to my wooden monster of immersive education video knowledge......

 This one kind of goes around in a circle.

And here is me adding one of the 3 extra videos...

FINAL PROJECT: ADDING 5 PDF PAPERS TO MY IMMERSIVE LIBRARY

I forgot to take photos for the majority of my adding of the first 5 PDFs, so unfortunately I don't have many photos. I decided I would have three groupings of media in my world that would come off of the spikes or arms that I made of the boxes. I didn't want to present the library in any particular order (like someone walking though a walkway being presented with information one after another) I like that you can click on whatever image/webpage you want in whatever order.

I couldn't upload a PDF directly, like everyone else in the class, however I inserted a webpage, so that when people click on the link they will be taken directly to the article where they can read online or download the PDF.

FINAL PROJECT: TESTING MY FELLOW CLASSMATES' IMMERSIVE LIBRARIES

So I looked at three classmates Museums, AJ's, Ryan's and Amanda's. These were my tests, observations and thoughts.

 Here I'm testing AJ's videos. This one certainly worked as planned. Also observe the paths, they are brilliant, I wish I'd thought of them. In my library I decided to go for a more natural sculpture garden aesthetic and my videos are on top of the sculptures. Visually I like it more but organizationally AJ's works much better.

 Here is AJ's documents, organized into one blog post. Earlier today they didn't work but since I wrote feedback on his post they have been fixed and now work perfectly.

 Here is my first [post about Ryan's library. I used the load screen because it best to highlight my main difficulty with Ryan's world. For some reason Ryan's world automatically loaded the soundtrack for all his videos all at once. Even worse they are all playing at once cacophonously during the load screen. Auditorilly it is a mess and it is even worse to try and understand the words during his videos. Also it meant the load took my computer 5 minutes rather than less than 30 seconds for every other world.

 Here I'm demonstrating that visually his videos work, the previous audio issue is still present though and so I can't hear the individual audio track really at all.

 Ryan's documents also wouldn't load as you can see in at least three of the web pages on this screen.

 This is Amanda's world, she also had issues with documents loading.

 Here embedded videos worked well though. 3D Printers are super cool. Feels like we are entering Star Trek!

Her videos work great as well!

BUILDING MY IMMERSIVE LIBRARIES/MUSEUM

 This first screenshot is of my first layer. It had me underwater, and I thought that that wouldn't be a very good place for a library......

 Whenever I tried to enter build mode last night, meshmoon would crash. This is why the assignment is getting in a day late

 More crashing....

 Finally I was able to get meshmoon working. I decided to go with and outdoor layer. Originally I had a construction site as well, but decided to turn it off. I placed a bunch of plywood cubes to be the stand for my 'about me' section. It gives it a construction site feel.

 My first photo! I have no idea why it ended up tilted, but I like it

 Adding photos of the things I love.... my girlfriend and the stanley cup

 This pic shows how I adjusted the images to arrange them on the platform

All done! As others have noted, Meshmoon no longer supports clickable images to websites, so I wasn't able to complete that part.