So I spent half of last week in Bloomington, Indiana (which was very lovely, I might add) attending a Ludium. Now you might be asking what a Ludium is. That’s okay. Dictionary.com doesn’t know either. Hell, I didn’t even really know when I signed up. But here is what the Ludium was meant to be, as written up by Edward Castranova of Terranova, who was the brainchild of the event:

What’s a Ludium? It’s an academic conference built as a live-action game. At this one, a mixed group of academics, MMORPG designers, and experts with funding contacts will compete to come up with the best ways to use avatars in university research. Anyone who reads this page knows that basic research using the technology of multiplayer persistent gaming will open countless new approaches to the exploration of human sociality. That’s valuable in and of itself, but there are all kinds of spinoffs that advance the agendas of others. There’s IP for businesses in this; information-spreading tools for foundations; policy levers for government. There are so many good research ideas that the question is not whether we should do anything, but where do we start? This conference will try to pick out the five best ideas and lay down, concretely, the pragmatics of working on them. Who benefits? How deep is the impact? What will this kind of work cost? Who will fund it? How quickly will the results be available?

The short version is that the event was an attempt by Ted to lock Academics and Professionals in the same room, in hopes the two will actually talk to each other and possibly come up with research possibilities that the Academics consider important, but the Developers consider doable.

On top of that, the whole event was structured as a game, with 5 teams competing each other not only in terms of a presentation we were attempting to put together, but also in little mini-games and brainstorming exercises aimed to make us think laterally and exchange ideas between the group. The rules had their glitches and were frequently patched on the fly (one change, in particular, made our group cry out ‘nerf’). It was definitely strange, but make no mistake. In terms of actually encouraging interesting discussion and discourse, the event was probably ten times better than your average ’sit around and listen to someone with no presentation skills talk about something that’s painfully obvious’ which is what about three-quarters of all GDC talks seem to be in this day and age.

I don’t want to go into great detail and undercut the official report that Ted is undoubtedly preparing as we speak. However, the long and the short of it is that we were given a very broad mandate, which was to “Think about how to use Serious Games so the developers learn something moreso than the players” – I.e. how to use online games or virtual worlds to learn stuff. The interesting thing is that all five of the produced talks created vastly different results. In my opinion, the mandate was too broad, and the result were ideas that vastly different in ambition, scope and utility. Here they are:

  • A proposal to build a new virtual world to test and observe disaster response. They won the most amusing stated goal award, which was to make disaster response fun.
  • A proposal to build a geocaching-like virtual initiation to help new students to IU. This one also involved Dave Rickey dressed up like a pirate.
  • A proposal to determine women’s aptitude of choosing an ideal breadwinner of a mate in an existing virtual world. This one earned bonus points for appalling the female documentarian recording the event.
  • A proposal for a virtual research foundation. The important part – at least to me – to connect people who need research with those willing to pay for it (such as government funders).
  • A proposal to create virtual petri dishes of players who wanted to be experimented on. The idea being that, if you had the framework and populations set up correctly, it would be ripe for almost any research you wanted done.

So, five wildly different ideas in terms of ambition, feasibility and overall benefit to the field of research. I suspect that one of the first things Ted will do is try to identify which proposals ended up delivering closest to what he was hoping to get in response, and modifying the game rules in next year’s conference to ensure that what is delivered is in band with his expectations.

My team was an interesting mix. I had Julian Dibbell (author of a Rape in Cyberspace), Lee Sheldon (the two of us regularly needle each other during conference presentations), Dmitri Williams (whose AC2 study I recently, er, examined carefully, Jeffrey Bardzell (who works at the School of Informatics, a word I was surprised the dictionary.com does know), and Fred Krom (who is working on a supercool Serious Game MMOG, but I don’t know if I can give details). Overall, it was a room full of wickedly smart people (perhaps excluding myself), with shockingly little overlap on what we were smart about. There was overlap on at least one topic though: both Fred and Lee had written for ST:TNG, which led to a surreal conversation between them asking about various Hollywood sci-fi behind-the-scenes type people the other knew.

Our proposal was the last of the five, which was, I might add, cooler than it’s one-line description makes it sound. We were easily the most ambitious of the projects pitched, but also were the most difficult and expensive to get up and running, so once all the points were counted, we found ourselves in last place. On the bright side, we did have a couple judges tell us we were robbed, which was nice. On the brighter side, Dave Rickey and Julian Dibbell were able to collude their powergaming of the rules to hand first-place to Dave’s pirate band, barely beating out Raph’s disaster proposal. If you can’t be the king, be the kingmaker.

Original comments thread is here.