Body image and virtual worlds
Posted on | November 17, 2008
In the past week, the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research released its second issue, and one article that caught my eye from a health viewpoint is a research paper titled:
Ugly Duckling by Day, Super Model by Night: The Influence of Body Image on the Use of Virtual Worlds
The intent of the study was to determine the relationship of body image perception and the decision to use virtual worlds. 252 individuals were surveyed on some key measures: telepresence, physical attractiveness, perceived behavioral control, and subjective norms. The inidividual variables alone make for interesting reading, particularly telepresence, but the interrelationship is the focus of the research. The results? In a nutshell:
The results indicate that telepresence attitude, subjective norms, and the desire to become someone else are directly related to the use of virtual worlds and the influence of body image on the use of virtual worlds is mediated by the desire to become someone else
What this means is that the primary driver for people using virtual worlds is the ability to feel close to others and to be able to transmit emotions. The issue of becoming someone else and body image were found to be only the third biggest influence.
The authors make the firm point of what may determine success for business or individuals in virtual worlds:
These results highlight the relational aspect of virtual worlds which suggest that if individuals and firms want to be successful in virtual worlds, they should concentrate on providing relational experiences.
Who would have thought - people want to socialise with other people.
Linden Lab mainland advertising ban kicks in
Posted on | November 15, 2008
Linden Lab have provided an update on their recent clamp down on mainland advertising in Second Life.
Now that we’re seeing less advertising, is it time for some social behaviour change? Would it hurt to have some positive health messages advertised around the grid? I’d love to hear your thought - what messages would you like to promote if widespread non-profit advertising were allowed?
The rise and rise of the Game Widow
Posted on | November 11, 2008
This article in the Canadian publication, the London Free Press, describes in detail a couple of case studies of gaming addicts. The case studies themselves paint a fairly standard picture of someone with a compulsion for intensive gaming, though some effort has been made to provide balanced coverage of the issue.
The premise of the article is the establishment of a support service for gaming addicts in London, Ontario - apparently the first such group in Canada. What caught my eye was that the wife of one of the addicts described in the article, Wendy Kays, has written a book called Game Widow. (we’ll hopefully be reviewing the book soon).
The term ‘game widow’ has been around for years and it’s increasingly resonating with the broader public. It further emphasises the need for more research in the area as well as a vigilance toward not typecasting all gamers as addicts. Terms like ‘game widow’ also accentuate the gender divide in some gaming genres. There are surely ‘game widowers’ out there but they’re likely to be in a distinct minority.
One final comment to the author of the article - online roleplaying did not begin with Everquest in 1999.
World AIDS Day in Second Life
Posted on | November 8, 2008
There’s another new health project in development in Second Life - Karuna. It’s The focus is ‘HIV / AIDS education, outreach and support’ and it’s scheduled for launch on December 1st, World AIDS Day.
Partners in the project include AIDS.gov and the University of North Carolina Center for AIDS research, Community Outreach, Dissemination, and Education Office (CFAR). A centrepiece of the initiative will be a Garden of Experience where those dealing with HIV/ AIDS will share their experiences via photos, video, music and poetry.
The agenda for the 1st December (in PST / SL time) is:
Complacency is one of the key challenges with HIV / AIDS education, particularly in the developed world. Projects like this will hopefully garner some significant mainstream media interest and heighten the awareness of the issue amongst ‘at-risk’ populations - which is pretty much the whole population.
Find out more about Karuna here and we’ll post a SLURL when it’s available. Thanks to Mal Burns for the heads-up.
Vietnam’s online addiction courses
Posted on | October 19, 2008
I noticed this interesting news article at the Thanh Nien Daily.
Essentially, it’s an intensive course running on weekends for two months. On the face of it it seems a useful option for those with issues impacting their lives detrimentally. Looking a little closer though, and the alarm bells start ringing. Take this for example:
During treatment, teens will work with psychologists and health experts to improve their self esteem; develop other interests and teamwork skills; and learn how to avoid temptations.
There’s some big assumptions there on self-esteem and the approach seems very conservative: ‘avoiding temptation’. It’s a tone that will appeal to parents but one that’ll concern the actual target group. The even more obvious question is: who is assessing that the teen is addicted? What assessment criteria are being used?
On the positive side, there does seem to be a little more than the 21st Century equivalent of an AA meeting:
Also included in the program is a “Box of Emotion” where each student is encouraged to write out their emotions and thoughts since the beginning of the program. The box will be opened in the course’s sixth week with participation from the students’ parents.
The treatment approach seems to be one of reality checking with some real-world skill building:
“Most online game addicts fail to face the real world but want to become ‘heroes’ in the virtual world,” Lien said. “[Through the program] we hope to bring them back to the real world and help them discover their own abilities.”
There’s even some good old community and family work involved:
Parents also take part in other social activities with their children like washing their own shirts to donate to disadvantaged students through charitable organizations.
Will it work? Possibly, though to some participants it will feel like hell on earth for the duration. My main concern is defining where intervention actually needs to occur. Forcing people into treatment where there’s no true issue is not a lot different from sending someone to prison for jaywalking.
Health - spread the word!
Posted on | October 10, 2008
Delivering health messages to the general public is difficult at the best of times. It’s tough to capture the attention of people when talking about health – unless it’s their area of expertise, most people don’t want to be bothered thinking about their health any more than is strictly necessary. Those who are healthy often take that for granted; those with known health problems often don’t want to have to think about having additional problems. Preventative medicine has not achieved high penetration within public view, let alone getting people to take good care of existing illnesses.
All this is true in the atomic world, where conventional means of education and advertisement have existed for decades. How daunting, then, is it to imagine trying to bring these messages to people through a new medium like digital environments? Even large companies with huge budgets and design teams have had difficulty conveying their messages to people through digital environments.
A large part of the solution lies in a statement that far easier said than carried out: use digital environments to their advantage. Designers need to find ways of conveying their ideas to users in a way that is enhanced by the digital environment. There’s too many examples of stark buildings with uncertain purpose, and montages of bits and pieces of information that could be better displayed and searched through using web pages, in existing health installations in digital environments – this money could have been better spent elsewhere.
One of the big advantages to digital environments is that information can be gathered by users interactively. A display that encourages an action to be carried by the user, and that engages the user, increases the likelihood that they will continue to peruse even static parts of your installation. Moderation is key – some interactivity in some displays is good, but too much can be overwhelming, and can detract from purpose. Also, there is nothing wrong with a bit of fun in health education, and a bit of interactivity can lend itself to the light-hearted, but again, there must be a point to it all, or you will quickly lose your audience.
So I had a bit of a think about the type of interactive display that I, as an end user, might find both useful and engaging, and also that I, as a programmer and animator, might have some ability to construct. This is by no means intended to be an exhaustive list, or an indication of what I believe is most needed, it is intended to assist health care professionals and designers come up with their own notions as to what they might like to contribute to the building of their own installations.
- A garden full of digital plants that closely resemble the atomic versions, in which each of the plants can be clicked on to elicit information about the properties of the plant. This could be used for dispensing information about herbal and traditional remedies, or could give information about the chemical compounds used in modern-day drugs that are sourced from plant matter.
- A display about interactions between commonly prescribed and common over-the-counter drugs. Bottles or packs of the drugs could be on display, and when a user clicks on a bottle or pack a single dose is “consumed” by their avatar. The user can select two or more different drugs to take. Depending on the possible interactions, the avatar can be animated to demonstrate the effect, or simply given a notecard with information about their condition after taking the drugs.
- The mock-up MRI. The user clicks on the apparatus to have their avatar lie down in place. As the bed moves, the user can rotate their camera view around to a screen displaying slices of a normal human body. As another possibility, give the option to display anomalous data and let the user attempt to find the anomaly, testing via a quiz if that seems interesting or useful.
- The “brain storm” exhibit. A possibly artistic representation of the brain with depictions of electrical activity, allowing the user to select whether to view a demonstration of a normal, epileptic or fibromyalgic brain.
- “Pin the bone on the skeleton” – see if users can put a missing bone back in place in a skeleton.
- Avatars can be animated to walk as though they have a physical impairment, and users can attempt to guess what is causing that gait.
- Self-assessment information. How to test yourself at home for a variety of health problems, potentially with demonstrations if applicable.
- First aid classes. This requires the on-going support of an instructor to deliver the course material. This course could bring people into a health-related region, with more extensive static information available for after-class examination.
- Release skins that avatars can wear with bones, or musculature, or arterial, venous or lymphatic systems textured onto them.
- Bots with even a limited capacity for chat. As long as the bot’s abilities are cited up front, this can be a good way of dispensing pertinent user information without having an actual human being at the keyboard.
- Fill a facility with animated bots so that the user ends up perusing a facility to find the bots and see what they are doing. Bot placement and activity might be suggestive of actual staffing levels at an atomic facility.
- Health-based machinima. Use digital environments to create movies that would be overly costly or difficult to create in the atomic world, and then display them in-world.
One further note on information distributed:
It’s been my experience that the information available in health installations in digital worlds has either been insultingly simplistic (for example, the Second Life Main grid is for adults only, and I have seen plenty of information suited to a younger audience) or overly complicated and dense for members of the public. It would be nice to see more examples of grading of information, dispensed through a notecard system, in which the user can choose which grade to read at, and can choose to upgrade when their knowledge and understanding have increased.
Health education for public consumption is tricky. Digital environments are a fantastic way of reaching new niche markets and consolidating new ones. However, the techniques used in the atomic world cannot be simply transported into the digital – keep those in the atomic, if they are working well there. Find the new things that the digital world can do for you and capitalize on those.
One ex-gamer’s perspective on MMO addiction
Posted on | October 3, 2008
The individual ex-addict’s perspective has always held power, no matter the source of the addiction. In the MMO gaming sphere, a recent addition to the blogosphere is ExGamer.net. Run by a 40-year old Canadian guy and 44-year old Dutch woman, it’s a blog in its early stages but it does give some interesting personal insights from a Christian and 12 Step perspective.
Thanks to Adrian Bott at Massively for the heads-up. If you know of other sites providing personal addiction stories with a virtual world context, we’d love to hear from you.
‘Rogues Gallery’ health event in Second Life
Posted on | September 23, 2008
There’s a small but growing group in Second Life called Healthcare Education. The group was founded by the University of Michigan’s Patricia Anderson (SL: Perplexity Peccable) and a seminar series has been organised for the 26th September at 7.00am SL time (Midnight on the 26th AET).
The event will be held on Health EduIsland and the first speaker will be Pathfinder Linden, providing a brief introduction to health in Second Life, and asking what healthcare educators most want from Linden Labs.
Patricia has supplied the itinerary:
The format will be:
- 7:00-7:30 - Pathfinder will talk for a half hour.
- 7:30-8:30 - We’ll break into small groups, talk and party, and gather our thoughts for an hour. During this time the “Rogue’s Gallery” will be on display (also known as Who’s Who in SL Health Education). We also have display space available. DrDoug has volunteered to put something up to start, and we can rotate displays.
- 8:30-9:00 - Pathfinder will come back and listen to whatever we’ve decided is most important to share with him. If you have personal observations to share, you may want to consider formalizing your thoughts in a notecard to drop in his inventory during the event.Remember, to receive inworld announcements, please join the group Healthcare Education. If you can’t find it in search, you can find it in my Profile listing of groups: Perplexity Peccable.
Hope to see you all there!
Stepping into Health Conference
Posted on | September 14, 2008
I ran across the following promo this week:
“Stepping into Health” becomes Third in Popular “Stepping into Virtual Worlds” Series
Using virtual worlds to promote health and healthcare is the topic of the next installment of the popular “Stepping into Virtual Worlds” conference series, to be offered October 7th, 2008 in Second Life. Hundreds of people have attended this series, which began with “Stepping into History” in June and continued with “Stepping into Literature” in August. The series is sponsored by Alliance Library System and LearningTimes.
The day-long conference is open to the public, with more information available at http://www.steppingintovirtualworlds.org . It will take place entirely in the virtual world of Second Life.
During this conference, participants will make virtual “field trips” to some of the best and most creative locations that are using virtual worlds to promote health. During these field trips, they will be able to speak with those responsible for creating the simulations, and have time to explore them on their own. Among the field trips for this conference are Healthinfo Island, a health education simulation where visitors can test their knowledge of strokes by walking through a giant artery and destroying clots by correctly answering questions, and ToxTown, a typical American town where potentially dangerous chemicals can easily be seen.
In addition to the field trips, the conference includes:
· Keynote presentations by Randy Hinrichs, founder of 2B3D and developer of the “Medipelago,” a group of health related simulations in Second Life; and Ramesh Ramloll, creator of Play2Train, a virtual world simulator used to prepare healthcare professionals and others for crisis situations
· Table Talks on subjects such as “Healthcare Education and Advocacy in Virtual Worlds,” “Virtual World Health Librarianship” and “Using Virtual World for Training Medical Personnel.”
· A panel discussion, allowing participants to question and interact with a variety of experts in the use of virtual worlds in health and healthcare.
The cost for this day-long conference is $79, and participants may register for the conference at www.steppingintovirtualworlds.org
One of Second Life’s main strengths is as a collaborative meeting / conference platform so it’ll be interesting to see the outcomes of this conference as far as getting the word out about the potential of virtual worlds for health professionals.
I can quit anytime…
Posted on | September 9, 2008
One MMO player’s perspective on addiction. A worthwhile read - nothing new or groundbreaking but it at least engenders some self-examination. On key piece of social research in the future will be work days lost to MMO game playing.
I’m aware of a few people who’ve called in sick to play World of Warcraft or Dungeons and Dragons Online - how about you?
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- Body image and virtual worlds
- Linden Lab mainland advertising ban kicks in
- The rise and rise of the Game Widow
- World AIDS Day in Second Life
- Vietnam’s online addiction courses
- Health - spread the word!
- One ex-gamer’s perspective on MMO addiction
- ‘Rogues Gallery’ health event in Second Life
- Stepping into Health Conference
- I can quit anytime…
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