Virtual Community Interactive Games (Part 2)

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A VCI game may integrate a diverse number of technologies including A.I. personalities, expert systems, full-motion video, 3-D animation, multimedia database, search engine, downloadable music, VCI feedback channel, multi-player compatibility, VoIP phone, proactive/reactive user interaction, and multi-title story interaction. In the following example of a VCI game, you play a “virtual doctor” to save a patient’s life and you interact with a “virtual FBI agent” and a “virtual musician.”

Virtual clock: Day 1, 9:00 pm

Scene:An ambulance rushes in a dying man. He is taken to the emergency room.

Game:The virtual clock starts ticking. The monitor showing his vital signs indicates a rapid health deterioration with the estimate time of death at 9:30 pm if he is left untreated. [The amount of time depends on the level of difficulty you choose.] An array of 3-D medical instruments and emergency medicine are available for you to save his life.

Context-sensitive help: Dr. Kevorkian is there to assist you. (Just kidding!!) A medical expert is available to answer your questions about medical instruments and emergency medicine. [Consultation with the expert pauses the virtual clock. The amount of automatic aid depends on the level of assistance you choose. “No automatic assistance” means that you will try to figure out everything yourself before asking for help. “Fully automatic assistance” basically means show-and-tell. By the way, the expert has a personality of her own. If you adjust her “humor factor” to maximum, she will always tell a joke with every advice she offers.]

Technologies:Full-motion video, 3-D animation, A.I. personalities, and expert systems.

Virtual clock: Day 1, 9:20 pm

Scene: You have saved the man’s life, for the time being. While he is being moved to the ICU, he manages to mumble a few words about music, something like "It's a Small World."

Virtual clock: Day 2, 10:12 am

Scene:You are strolling in downtown.

Proactive interactions:You decide to visit the music store. A courteous store manager asks you if you wish to see a list of the latest musical compositions by the local talents. [These local talents are the virtual musicians. The musical charts (classical, pop, and rock categories) are ranked by the date of submission and popularity based on listener feedback questionnaires.]

You say, “Yes, I want to see the pop chart!” [The computer logs on to the VCI server to download the latest list.] From the chart, you select to hear the first 10 seconds of the new song:

“It’s a Small Virtual World,” by the MediaTalents, 3 min. 10 sec.

After the computer has played the first 10 seconds of the song, you told the store manager, “I want the entire song!” [While the entire song is being downloaded onto your local machine, you fill out the customer feedback questionnaires. General information is stored in the server database whereas specific comments are sent to the original virtual musician via the VCI feedback channel. The VCI multimedia database also stores the virtual player profiles so that compatible virtual players on the same level of game difficulty may search for short-term or long-term partners.]

You are pondering about the connection between the song and the hospital patient whom you just saved.

Technologies:Multimedia database, search engine, downloadable music, VCI feedback channel, multi-player compatibility.

Virtual clock: Day 2, 11:08 am

Sound:An alert box pops up on your computer screen.

Reactive interactions:You received a text message: “Urgent: Call hospital 555-2310” You dial the number on a VoIP phone. The nurse informs you that an FBI Agent is at the hospital and wishes to see you. [A virtual FBI agent is online looking for clues to a murder mystery. She decides to visit the virtual hospital in town.]

You can either accept or decline the request. [If you refuse to see her, she will be automatically switched to the next available virtual doctor online. The nurse will tell her to wait patiently until she locates a willing participant with an appropriate player profile.]

You agree to cooperate.

Scene:You are back at the hospital and a woman (or man depending on the choice of the virtual FBI agent) approaches you.

Interactions:She identifies herself as Agent Scully but not the medically apt Scully from the X-Files. [Again, the name is chosen by the virtual FBI agent.] She begins to ask questions about your recent patients. [In addition to text messages, the VCI VoIP phone allows real-time audible conversations.]

As you examine your patient more carefully, you discover things that will help you in later medical diagnosis as well as things that will help the FBI agent solve her murder mystery. [A multi-title story interaction is in play here. The unidentified patient is one of the common threads linking various software titles including “The Virtual Doctor” and “The Virtual FBI Agent.” However, you, as the virtual doctor, are mainly interested in the medical aspect of the totality unless you happen to play the FBI role also.]

Technologies:VCI VoIP phone and multi-title story interaction.

Virtual Community Interactive Applications

Technologies existing today can be used to implement Virtual Community Interactive games. For example, MySpace and Facebook can host the player profiles, Skype can handle VoIP phone calls, and iTunes handles music downloads. The challenge is in integrating these applications seamlessly to offer the best user experience.

Virtual Community Interactive Space-Time Continuum

In addition to games and interactive entertainment, Virtual Community Interactive can provide a space-time continuum in which people can interact in an exciting and productive way based on two types of “attention spans:”

• Short-term attention span: Online users in the same virtual location simultaneously are automatically placed in a common chatting room if they wish to interact. Some scenarios are:
  • People accessing the same movie database at the same time.
  • People browsing through the “Egyptian section” of a virtual museum.

• Long-term attention span: Users who have visited the same virtual vicinity over a period of time are automatically placed in a common email directory (with an expiration date) if they wish. Some examples are:
  • Researchers searching for technical papers about a disease.
  • Buyers browsing through certain types of houses and realtors putting up houses for sale.

Virtual Community Interactive Space-time Continuumis a new methodology of grouping like-minded people together for online interaction spanning across virtual space and time:

• It is the next generation chat room.The old technology dictates that two individuals must find and join the same chat room, and then hope that they both talk about the same subject matter. The new technology allows people who are browsing a similar subject in many distinct web sites to come together in a dynamically created chat room. For instance, a web surfer on IMDB at http://us.imdb.com/Title?Mulan can meet another web surfer on Wikipedia athttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hua_Mulan in a “Mulan” chat room simply by clicking on a chat button. The existing HTML meta keywords and title tags help decide what chat rooms to join or create. A hierarchical concept dictionary organizes the keywords and presents the choices of chat rooms to the surfers.
• It is the next generation newsgroup and bulletin board.The old technology requires a person to locate a newsgroup or bulletin board, weed out the unwanted information, skip the boring threads of discussions, and hopefully find something relevant or interesting. The new technology enables web surfers to post and read messages specific to a subject matter regardless of which web sites they are visiting. For instance, even though Kelley Blue Book and Craigslist are two separate entities on the Web, a potential car buyer in Los Angeles looking for a ’97 model of Porsche 911 at http://www.kbb.com/ may read about a great deal from a ’97 Porsche 911 owner in L.A. who posted a message on http://losangeles.craigslist.org/

Virtual Community Interactive Space-time Continuumwith dynamic chat rooms, newsgroups, and bulletin boards will not only be a useful tool for everyday life online but it will also be a very productive tool for scholars to collaborate on research topics.

The author welcomes your innovative ideas about how to use the Virtual Community Interactive paradigm to create new genres of applications, to improve human-computer interactions, and to empower human to human collaborations.

About the Author

Newton Lee

Newton Lee is the founding director of the NUS Hollywood Lab for interactive and digital media research and technology commercialization, with computer pioneers Dr. Alan Kay, Dr. Danny Hillis, and Mr. Bran Ferren as the key advisors. He is the founding editor-in-chief of ACM Computers in Entertainment, a nonprofit educational publication to promote research and development in all aspects of entertainment technology.