1. Welcome to the
Future…
Why Virtual Worlds are Good for the Soul
Lisa Galarneau BIL
Ph.D. Candidate, Screen and Media Studies Monterey, Ca
Research Director, Intrepid March 2008
E-mail: lisa@socialstudygames.com

2. Spontaneous Communities
of Learning

9. Page 9

27. What are online
games/virtual worlds?
Characteristics
 Persistence
 Freedom/open-
ended
 Characters/
avatars
 Guilds/clans/
teams
 Cooperative
and
competitive
play
 Economies/
virtual
property
(sometimes)

28. Complex Social Systems

29. Robust Economies

31. Who the
heck are
these
people??
?

33. Thriving on chaos, managing self, relating to
others, language, symbols, text, multi-tasking,
negotiation, networking, distributed cognition,
performance, play, collective intelligence, etc.

34. Comfort with diversity,
participating/contributing, performance,
negotiation, networking, etc.

35. Managing information, thinking,
participating/
contributing, using language, symbol and
text, transmedia navigation, judgment,
networking, negotiation, distributed
cognition, collective intelligence,
appropriation, etc.

36. From the survey: player
perceptions
Big Improvements to RL skills:
 Patience/helpful attitude
 Communication/social skills
 Team-work/cooperation
 Sense of humor
 Dealing with conflict
 Self-control
 Problem-solving/resourcefulness
 Leadership/organization
 Decision-making
 Creative thinking
 Language/literacy

37. “I think working well with others and understanding each person’s role based on abilities is
something that translates into any team environment.”
“Having Asperger's Syndrome and a lack of positive social experiences in the past with which to
build upon a stable foundation for communication I found that I benefited the most from the
community and social interactions with them. They helped me refine my social and communication
skills.”
“Dealing with problem customers is like dealing with problem players. Keeping a cool head when
someone gets upset usually leads to a better outcome. Having a good (and sometimes dark)
sense of humor helps others feel less tense about situations and in the game(s) it helps
people feel more welcome.”
“Leadership . It has helped me to deal better with groups of people in the workplace that I
supervised. Delegate, praise and train to do jobs necessary.”
“Dealing with people from different areas, across age generations .”
“I have learned that praise in a team environment is incredibly important.”
“I used to be very shy around new people. I learned a lot about communication by helping others
and organising online events.”
“Working as a team has taught me more patience than I used to have.”
“Being able to communicate without fear of ridicule really helped me learn to be more
outspoken in real life.”
“My wife passed away last year and I started playing as a way to help me socialize in a safe
way . It's been wonderful for that but I think I'm almost ready to get back to the real
world.”
“Language. As I’m German, typing and talking English on a more regular base helped greatly :)”

38. “My attitude in general has improved- I was
a shocking communicator and non team
player who thought I was good at
communicating and working as part of a
team. After an incident of having 54
people ignore you in a guild for
unsatisfactory behavior I actually went
and learnt how to communicate at a private
learning institute, this made a massive
difference to my life on all levels
especially dealing with conflict-knowing
when to walk away when to stay and
communicating like an adult to try to
create win-win situations.”

39. Who believes?

42. Vintage Images from Tales of Future Past: http://davidszondy.com