Design choices in Lively

Google Lively is a web-based 3D virtual environment. It's new and undergoing a lot of changes currently. It's quite obvious to relate this game with Second Life, both of them are open to the creation and change of end users (players). However,there are several design decisions that are made differently, I am going to discuss the pros and cons of them. 

  - How real the characters should be?

Lively provides more options of characters on the spectrum from human and cartoonish representations.  It's interesting to compare this design choice with "There", in which the subtlety of social interaction (such as gestures, facial expressions) is praised by previous researches (e.g. Isbister, 2005). It's hard to say that the more realistic character is, the more social interaction is stimulated. For me, the fun of playing a cartoonish characters is to be comfortable to interact with other players by more physically, like huging or punching, which will not happen if I am using a human-like avatar to interact with strangers, even in a virtual world. Comparing with the example of MUD community LambdaMOO as described by Curtis, there is no graphical representation of the characters. However, the intensity of the social interaction is high. (refer to the example that a college student delayed visiting his parents on Christmas because of MUD). Curtis noticed the detachment between the self-description that usually involve role play and more direct and normal discourse that players quickly turned to. And he also cited the case of PernMUSH in which the role-playing happened due to the single-minded feature, which each of the player having the common ground of the story. What I learned here is that, role-playing is a social and collective behavior. This makes me think about the diversity of the representation styles provided in Lively, which seems to provide more option to the players. However, it does not has a consistent role-playing storyline or common ground knowledge. Eventually, the interaction falls back to the text-based chat assisted with expessions accompanying certain texts you typed. The fun of using different characters are constraint to personal choice, instead of contributing to change the dynamics of social interaction. One possible change is to give different abilities for different characters, and set some mini-games or tasks in the virtual world to require players with different abilities to cooperate with each other.
 

 

- Creating and sharing: Lively, as a web-based virtual environment, fits well with the web2.0 model. In particular, Lively provides the openness of creating places to share with friends. Google is definitely embracing the value of user-created content as they usually do. A lot of the lessons learned from previous multiplayer online game community are taken as the fundamental design principles by default, such as "Detailed central planning is impossible", "An object-oriented data representation is essential" (Morningstar and Farmer). However, in Lively, there is not enough tools for building user-generated content, which become a bottleneck for the growth of the online community. Write now, there is not much you can do in the virtual world except decorating your own room by dragging and placing objects from the library, and chat with people arround. Instead of creating more playgrounds by the developers, I believe they should focus more about giving the tools to build playable objects. Only by doing so, the virtual world can reach the kind of play that "games were made up, changed, and reconfigured by groups of ordinary people in site-specific, socially and culturally specific contexts." (Pearce, 2006) MUD is a good example here. It is substantially easier for players to give themselves vivid, detailed, and interesting descriptions (and to do the same for the descriptions and behavior of the new objects they create) in a text-based system than in a graphics-based one (Curtis). The ease of creating new objects corresponds with the richness of social behaviors, including both laws (Mnookin) and crimes (Dibbell). In LambdaMOO, the involvement of users push the interplay between the system technology and politics futhrer by the petition process (Mnookin). This partial democracy replaced the top-down centered control by the wizard.

- Structure of spaces and places in Lively: In lively, players are free to create "rooms" either private or public. Different from There or Wow, in which space are more constraint to their physical representations, Lively is more similar to MUD, in the sense that the spaces are basically infinite, although you can not embed a room to another. This structure of spaces and places allows infinite numbers of "residents" to the online world, each of them are only one step away from each other. One of the exciting features about publishing and sharing the room in Lively is that you can embed the room in websites, blogs, or facebook profiles. Also you can attach Youtube video or pictures to some of the objects in the game world. I believe this is where the potential of Lively is.I will see it will be more likely to be used among friends who you already know, like what instant messaging does.However, will the individual-centered space creation mechanism conflict with the folk art and culture that's based on the collective contribution (e.g. the Myst/Uru Diaspora as described in Pearce, 2006)? By looking at the list of rooms that's been built on Lively, many of them are very much like a party house with differnt themes (such as festivals, cultures). However, it still adopts the model of one central control and less fun to play with.

  K Isbister, Better Game Characters by Design, Elsevier, 2005.


Yan Xu, yxu7@gatech.edu