This will be one of my last posts on this K.U.Leuven-blog.
I’m leaving the university in October, and since I won’t be able to update this blog after I leave, I thought it better to already start up a new one, all brand new and a bit empty for the moment, but I’m sure that will change soon. I’ll hope you’ll have a look there too!
It has always been the case for me, but now a research study at the Flemish university of Gent has proven it: social contact is one of the main reasons to play World of Warcraft. More than 2000 gamers from 39 countries answered a survey and 70% of them states that they should stop playing shouldn’t there be a possibility to interact with other players. The era where gamers locked themselves up in their rooms to play lonely on their pc or game console is long gone. Today we play, interact and connect with people from all over the world, ingame, but also through Facebook, forums, e-mail and chat. The synergy between games and social networks is regarded as the latest revolution in entertainment.
The study also distinguishes between two types of gamers: those who identify themselves closely with their avatar and those who regard their character as completely fictional. The first group plays more or less 3 hours more and also attach more importance to the escapist element of gaming. Although the percentage of women in the survey was only a mere 6 % of the respondents, more than 70% of them seem to belong to the first category.
From the survey the researchers gathered that the average player is 23 years old, male, spends 25 hours per week gaming WoW, is a student and single. Oops, I’m clearly not a typical WoW-player!
It has been estimated that every 98 minutes, a new word is created in the English language. The Global Language Monitor announced that on June 10, at 10:22 am GMT, ‘Web 2.0′ became the 1,000,000th English word. A new expression or word needs at least 25,000 citations to be officially accepted as an English word. It’s remarkable that some of the words that became officially registered just before ‘Web 2.0′ are also related to the internet, ICT, gaming and social software, like ‘Noob‘, ‘Cloud Computing‘, ‘Sexting‘ and ‘Defriend‘. Another trend in the recent acknowledged new words is the influence of the economic crisis: ‘Zombie Bank‘ is officially a day older than ‘Web 2.0′, while ‘Financial Tsunami‘ is recorded as the 1,000,001st word.
Experts state that the average person knows 14,000 words, whereas a linguistically gifted person could use up to 70,000 expressions. That’s still only a mere 7% of all existing words. Perhaps a good excuse for all those students out there who are now cramming for their English exams: it’s only logically you can’t know all these words!
After all the commotion around Facebook, Twitter and other web 2.0 sites at work, there is now a study that states that browsing the internet during work actually improves productivity.
Professor Brent Coker from the University of Melbourne claims that employees who engage in what he calls ‘Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing’ (WILB) for less than 20% of their time, are more productive than their co-workers. The most popular WILB activities are looking for information about products and browsing news site. Playing online games was ranked as number 5, watching YouTube movies number 7 on the list. After ‘zoning out’ for a brief moment, workers are ready to concentrate back on their work and perform more efficiently. In companies where people aren’t allowed to use tools like YouTube or Facebook, the lack of short breaks has a negative effect on the concentration of the employees.
Like with all things, we should all WILB, but with moderation. There is a thin line between surfing for a brief moment and getting addicted. Therefor, I have to wrap this blog post up and get back to work, now that I’ve sharpened my concentration again!
The success of Wikipedia has triggered all kinds of ‘pedia’-clones. Are you looking for inspiration in the kitchen, check out RecipePedia or Pizza-pedia. Are you looking for information about the Nintendo-games with the same name, go and browse Mario-pedia. There even is a webcampedia and an Elvis Presley pedia. However, don’t let these names fool you. Most of these pedia-sites are not powered by a wiki, they are fairly old school website. But there are nice exceptions. After Toledopedia, there now is also Intellipedia.
This wikiproject was started in 2006, and now contains almost 1 million pages on espionage. It grew out of the perception that after September 11, the US needed an intelligence system that could rapidly adept to the changing threats of the last decades, and that would be driven by a bottom-up collaborative approach, just as Wikipedia.
The American intelligence services are also exploring other web 2.0 tools as well. Facebook now has an alternative for spies: A-Space. And for those of you who like to be part of as many social networks as possible, you’ll be disappointed. For some weird reason the access to A-Space is restricted.
It seems the swine flu pandemonia has spread itself throughout the internet. Not only does Google find 2.450.000 hits for the expression ’swine flue’, it seems that as usual, some people have smelled money in others misfortune, registering hundreds of domain names, containing ’swineflu’, mainly for adventisement reasons. Even when you look for the Dutch equivalents, the domain names varkensgriep.be and varkensgriep.nl show little or no information about the actual disease.
This widespread internet ‘infection’ made me think of the presentation of iTunes U I attended a couple of months ago. It seems that this store of free learning materials reflects the current hot topics in the world. At the time of the presentation, the inaugural speech of Obama and podcasts about Darwin were top of the bill in this educational version of Apple’s shop. But thus far, the swine influenza does not seem to have spread in the academic podcast sphere, although the top download from the health & medicine category was in fact a vodcast about ‘lungs’ from the University of Warwick. Just a coincidence? Who knows…Perhaps it needs a bit of an incubation period before the swine flu hits the iTunes U store.
There was one reference however that I could find on iTunes when searching for the disease, was a song called ‘Swine Flu’ by the band ‘Tumor Circus‘. I had never heard of them, but Wikipedia seems to know they exist, and labels them as ‘noice rock‘, another thing that I had never heard of. How I love Wikipedia, a man (reads: woman) learns something new every day just by clicking on all the blue links.
Well, up until now I haven’t been fooled by any of the jokes that are circulating in the newspapers and on the internet.Even Blizzard, who always seems to make me forget that I shouldn’t believe all that is written on this day, didn’t succeed this year!
The only one who got close was a colleague who send us all a mail this morning stating he had won a laptop during an event yesterday and since he already had a very good one, his supervisor agreed that he could sell it to one of us for the very interesting price of € 50. Since I already made one bargain this week and bought a very good second-hand pc, I thought that perhaps I could also add a cheap laptop to my collection, but I noticed that another colleague had already replied, asking if the laptop smelled like fish, and then it became clear to me what day it was.
During lunch time today we discussed what news items could be fake today, and since there was no agreement, I decided to look up a list of known April fools jokes in a Flemish Newspaper. I must admit that most are a bit too obvious, but one in particular caught my attention. Since I’m still suffering from my RSI, and I’m open to almost all alternatives for clicking and moving the computer mouse, I couldn’t help but feel a bit disappointed that the news Opera published today about using facial gestures to operate your browser was a joke. Imagine how fun working in an open plan office could be with such a tool!
Another shooting in a school, and once again video games seem to be the culpit, according to the media. The Flemish newspaper De Standaard’s headline yesterday was “Dader speelde graag ‘Counterstrike’” (Gunman liked to play ‘Counterstrike’). Why is it that every times something like this happens, people seem to blame computer games? What about the fact that his father had numerous guns and over 4000 bullets in the house, and carelessly left a gun laying around? What about the fact that he often went along with his father to a shooting club (and no, not a virtual one)? What about the fact that it was known that he had a depression, but was allowed to stop his treatment?
For every study that states that video games arouse violence, there is another one that says completely the oposite, namely that violence in games can work as a katharsis. I must admit that, after a stressfull day at work, I rather prefer to blast some things in WOW, and leave the healing for someone else. And it’s not cause I play games in the evening, that I like to blow everything out of my way during daytime. Although… I must admit I have already thought about ’sheeping’ some people from time to time…
Has it really been this long since I posted on this blog? Was I that busy? Or has nothing really interesting happened the last 5 months?
Time for a come-back! A new year… a new blog service (watch the new URL), and thus a new sound. Our university’s blog service that started more than a year ago, has been redeveloped during the last months to be able to be used by all students and staff members of the 13 institutions of the Association K.U.Leuven. Powered by Wordpress, but with some adaptations to suit the needs of the educational context in which are being used.
My blog was one of the first ones created on the blogserver… or should I say blogfarm? It was there before all the automisation started, before the service was launched to staff and students. It was manually created for me, to test out the functionalities and give feedback. I never had to sign the agreement that stated it should be used for educational and/or research purposes only, and that blogs had to be related to my work at the uni. I has never even seen the ‘rules’, so I happily blogged about everything… and nothing. However, now that the service has been launched at such a large scale (potentially 100.000 staff and students), I somehow feel that I should ‘preach as I teach’, and stick to work related subjects.
Which makes me wonder what those subjects are? My parents always have a very hard time when friends ask them what their daughter does for a living? Stating that she works at a university will impress most people, but after they explained that not everyone at K.U.Leuven is preparing a PhD or being a professor, they usually stick with ’she works at the ICT departement, but I’m not sure what she does there’. But I can’t blame them, I don’t always now what I do here too!
As an effort to comply to the topic policy, I wanted to delete the articles that were not related to any of mine work/study topics. However, I only found one of my first articles, about pasta. Since I studied both literature and art, and my work topics comprise new media and the internet in general, I decided that Crowded House and Dumbledore have earned a place on my blog. So do the Pocket Dragons… didn’t I graduate on a thesis about dragons? Sure, these ones arn’t from the Middle Ages, but they are cute! And the posts about games, online and offline? Well, someone has to follow up on this gaming and virtual world hype, so that we can launch ‘your second virtual environment’ soon! No more Toledo+, or Toledo 2.0, welcome Toledo2.
Blizzard has stopped the virtual plague they unleashed upon mine and 11 million other wow-player’s characters. Personally I must admit that I found it a fun event, but I can understand that for lower level characters, like Mark’s hunter, this was a complete nightmare. Everywhere, zombies were spreading a highly contageous disease, which turned you into one of them. You could die of course, and rez and be human (or in Mark’s case elf) again, but 5 minutes later it would happen all over again. The protest on the offical forums was huge: for low level characters, it just wasn’t fun to play wow during the last week!
The first virtual plague in wow emerged a couple of years ago, when a blood plague in one of the high-level dungeons was brought outside, and effected many towns and numerous of avatars. It wasn’t designed to leave the dungeon, but somehow it did, and the effect was gruesome. In a very small amout of time, the big cities were infected, and numerous characters died.
The interesting part of this 2008 plague is that once again, scientist have been following the spreading of the plague and investigated the reaction of the characters. They hope to be able to gather information about how people would react to an outbreak of a plaguelike disease in the real world, and more importantly finding clues on how it can be contained. Almost a year ago, several papers appeared in the journals Lancet Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology, about the spread of the corrupted blood plague. The authors argue that the mathematical models that are used nowadays to predict the outbreak and outcomes of a contageous disease, are not reliable. They use the example of the failed quarantine during the blood plague spread in wow to prove their point. Instead, they hope to make more use of virtual worlds in the future to simulate and study epidemics.
Although some argue that people will still be far more adventurous and brave with their avatars than in real life and that the absence of risk make virtual worlds nor suitable for such experiments, one of the observations of this last plague event in wow is that characters reacted very much like in real-world epidemics. Some started to avoid the big cities in order to hopefully have a higher chance to survive, whereas others travelled to the most infected zones, to help and heal the victims, like rescue teams would do in real life. Therefor, these scientists are hopeful that virtual worlds can help improve the understanding of the spread of a disease and the reactions of the people involved. I guess this means that we haven’t seen the last plague in wow!