How do you pronounce MMORPG?

Mike Butcher of Mbites.com has invited me to speak at the My So-Called 2nd Life event, organized by NMK. Mike will be leading presentations and discussion on the business, culture and evolution of synthetic worlds as media platforms.

My own contribution will focus on entrepreneurship, e-learning and education. I’ll blog more about it closer to the event (anyone who tells you they plan presentations weeks in advance is lying), but I predict it will draw heavily on experience and ideas that come from working on the Upstart project.

Whatever ends up as the main point, I’ll definitely kvetch a little about the words we have for environments like World of Warcraft, Second Life, and (from my native Reykjavik) Eve Online.

Have you tried pronouncing “MMORPG”? It looks like a rude word in Klingon. I’ve seen “MUVE” (multi-user virtual environment) around, but try using it in a sentence (“Second life is a social MUVE, not a violent one”). I like the term “synthetic worlds,” which comes from the economist Edward Castronova. He writes about online environments in accessible, acronym-free English in his book Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games (2005), and in this article, and I wholeheartedly recommend his work to anyone who wants to understand the economics of buying an EverQuest magic sword on eBay with US dollars.

I’ll try to present in plain English, but I’ll be practicing my Klingon pronunciation of MMORPG just in case.

Filed under: Education, Social media

Wanted: Your social life, to sell you crap

The next time anyone asks me that classic Enlightenment-question “what is a university?” I will confidently answer: It’s a convenient concentration of consumers.

(Yes, forget about Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties, and that whole business about the cultivation of independent thought. You want enlightenment? Hand me the remote).

Online social networking services are getting into higher education in a big way. In the UK the latest challenger to Facebook, the inventor of the closed-off campus networking site (not to mention MySpace and Bebo) is Univillage – a social networking site for university students. It works on the same model as Facebook, restricting membership to students in higher education by only accepting participants with a “.ac.uk” address (for Facebook it’s “.edu” in the USA).

Univillage is not particularly shy about its marketing strategy, already having secured an uninspiring lineup of sponsorships from Sky, Apple and Red Bull – which is great for uni students desperate to see an image of themselves as telly-watching, iPod-toting drinkers of caffeinated sugarwater (see Mark Sweney’s MediaGuardian article). In short, Univillage does not seem overly concerned about using the same strategy that already has given MySpace bad press – ubiquitous, scattershot advertising. As Wired’s Michael Calore says, MySpace is just begging for someone to come along and build something better. It will be interesting to see if Univillage takes off, and whether their strategy to embrace sponsors first and participants second will pay off.

Filed under: Social media

DIY Media

The Annenberg School has put on a series of seminars that makes me wish I lived in California, on Do-it-yourself media production. Check out the DIY Media Weblog for updates throughout the autumn.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Comparative Carnivalgoing

I’ve been to two carnivalesque street events in the past month. First in Reykjavik, Iceland, at the Gay Pride festival:

And last week, I joined the heaving masses at the Notting Hill Carnival for some fine music, dance and a bit of spicy food.

Both were colourful, loud, crowded and a lot of fun. Both were also obsessively recorded by the performers and the audience – each videoing and photographing the other.

Filed under: Social media