Last weekend, I co-hosted an NSF-funded workshop at UCI Irvine entitled "Productive Play: The Convergence of Work and Play in Online Games and Virtual Worlds." We had a stellar cast of participants, who can be seen here: Productive Play Web Site: Participants
One of the highlights was our opening "pioneers" keynote conversation, which included Randy Farmer, Chip Morningstar, Pavel Curtis, and Bruce Damer. The four of them showed and talked about early virtual worlds dating back to 1986 and it became apparent pretty quickly that other than better graphics and higher bandwidth, we are grappling with a lot of the same issues today, and may even be moving backwards in some respects. A special treat was that Chip showed the original promotional video for LucasFilm Habitat, which is now posted on YouTube. Pavel Curtis showed Jupiter, a distributed work environment that was developed by extending the basic LambdaMOO "engine." Bruce Damer also talked about his early Avatars! conferences in ActiveWorlds.
More to follow...
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