Ted Castronova’s Ludium II was recently announced, which, if it’s anything like Ludium I, will be an innovative and exciting gathering of many of the top folks designing and doing research in MMOGs (aka synthetic worlds). Ted structures the event around a competitive nucleus, in this case a competition to create a public platform for the virtual world community and a speaker to act as the spokesperson. The structure provides a nucleus for community formation - just as, online, good community formation usually needs a catalyst of shared experience or values, the Ludium format spurs innovative collaboration and creates a common bond among team members, and a shared competitive experience among all the participants.
The initial Ludium was based on a core competition to create a MMOG with some social impact (is how I remember it, but I’ve got a rotten memory) and came up with some amazing ideas - check out Damion Schubert’s comment in the post-event write up here: http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2005/10/ludium_i_wrapup.html
I have to say, as a card carrying member of the awesome Thalo delegation (along with the incomparable Betsy Book, amazing Nick Yee, stellar Greg Lastowka, fantastic Dave Rickey, and phenomenal Larry Yaeger), winning required a variety of skills, some great team chemistry, and a solid dollop of luck. But as a participant, there’s no doubt but that our team was awesome, and the experience was valuable both in the competition and in the bonds it formed. I still really like our proposal (not accurately represented here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bsquared/49177221/ ), which involved a combination of education, research, and cross-cultural boundary relationship formation with ARG-like elements of combined online/default world competition. And it was called Ghost Pirates! Anyway, it was a great proposal…
The format of the event shows the kind of innovation you see in the recent mashup-type events, as well as drawing clear parallels to online game design… it was a really valuable experience in many ways, and I very much expect Ludium II will be similar: a combination of interaction and experimentation that functions successfully on many levels.
I wasn't able to attend the last Ludium but I hope I can participate this year to some degree. It sounds like a lot of fun!
Posted by: animagnum | May 08, 2007 at 08:09 PM