Now admittedly, one can do most of  that with a good book, so why not be a writer? Or for that matter, a filmmaker. The world of the theatre has many ways to bring you into the world of its characters, but that pales in comparison to the sheer thrill of finding myself in the company of other virtual companions, some human driven, others computer driven, who are telling the story with me, not at me or to me.

I find it transformative, it makes me develop new sides of myself, and it deepens my understanding, and my world perception. In fact, I find this experience so compelling, I decided to make something of it, a game perhaps?  I’ll let you, the reader decide what it should be called.

Cyberspace may very well  be the next biggest meme after God and religion. If not, then it’s certainly the most fertile ground a meme ever landed in.  If cyberspace is ” a Civilization of the Mind” as John Perry Barlow states, then of course it will have all that a civilization does good and bad, important and banal. And if we stop believing in it, would cyberspace just disappear?

What if you had a game that was about the belief in that meme, which traversed the virtual realms of cyberspace, and demanded that you transform yourself to play through it?  A game where you seek to give away the energies or labors of your avatar, so you can transform to the next state of being; a game that demands you travel across the servers of the world to find the next stage in your transcendence, and a game that lets you bring home the new perspectives that it has shown you.

And what if, that game had aspects based in our real lives woven into it?

One of the most exciting experiences I ever had in New York City was the Angel Project in 2003, directed by Deborah Warner.

http://theater.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=9406e0de133df933a25754c0a9659c8b63

For hours, I followed the clues, discovering all the scenarios that they had installed throughout the city. Eventually ending my path on 42nd street and Broadway. After a couple of turns through some hallways behind a foodcourt, and a half hidden entrance that looked like a construction site, I entered the final place.  To turn at a small sound in a darkened and abandoned Broadway theater, and discover the gaze of an angel with black wings looking down on me from the uppermost balcony, was unforgettable.  For several hours afterwards, I was both in the real world and the virtual world of the creator’s imagination.  New York had taken on, as Ben Brantley describes, the aspect of a “holy city”.

This is my “twisty road”, how to find a way with servers and modelers, scripting and programs, avatars and environments to create this experience.  Want to come along?

So, hmm, how do you actually make a game that can be experienced equally by a person with low vision and a person with hearing issues?  Furthermore, how do you do that when you only have 10 sec low-fi sound clips, and limited space and geometry?

How do you make it redundant enough so they understand the need to use a private channel for each local chat answer, and yet not be distracted from hearing the clues, which are only presented once? What about sound bleed, and the confusion that will cause to a visitor in a tiny area.

And lastly, how do you keep the space  ”in architectural character”  an environment that says, “come in- all of you- you can play here”.

Tough questions, and a significant design challenge for two weeks of building time. Did I succeed?  On some levels perhaps, and on others, things took an interesting turn or two.

Our next game “the gods that walk among us” is about mental and emotional transformation, about how everyone can have “godlike” powers in virtual worlds, and about how the search for these qualities will carry us across the Metaverse.

I used the visual metaphor of masks, one for each of the ancient elements- Earth, Air, Fire and Water as the key ingredient. Images of them were displayed on the exhibit, and you would win each mask by figuring out the riddles presented to you by their elemental icons distributed around the exhibit.

Having some experience with Second Life game players, I expected to see some folks hang around for long periods while they played the game, and to get sent commentary on their progress, if they happened to notice me hanging around, which I did frequently.

What I did not expect, was for them to take the elemental masks and to make their own games out of them, and to be honest, this thrilled me.  It also got me to wondering, why do we like to make games so much?  Some deep seated need to control people? Or perhaps just the same kind of joy that anyone feels when they watch someone else play.

I was given art work with images of my masks in it.  I was involved in a prolonged photo session with a small red panda.  People took the masks to parties, and wore them home.  It interests me to note, that although the avatar is one kind of mask, putting a mask on top of that would elicit yet another kind of behavior, as if  it frees the avatar, just as it does a real person at a party.  I also noted that designing for accessibility was just a support structure eventually, not the focus, which is something I am pleased with. Seamless access, that is a good goal.

Watching people play- that is my reward.

Images are on my Flikr site here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/annabellefanshaw/sets/72157626940555383/show/

Special thanks to the following players and advisers:
Jaguar Faulkes
Sea Mizin
Joachim Quintus
Lina Lageos
Poly Dawg
Eme Capalini- Virtual Ability
Shelenn Ayres
Bourne Denimore (red panda)
Isabeau Firehawk- thanks for the photo session!
DiJodi Dubratt- thanks for the lovely art work
And of course- the orginal Alchemists- Vicki Brandenburg and Layton Destiny, who have contributed
so much to the creation of our games over the last 3 years.

When I had finished that model, which was a prototype for the SENDS Virtual Center for the Science of Cyberspace , I sent a note about it to Ener Hax whose blog and Open Sim builds set a high standard for virtual world design and utilization.  Ener and I got to talking, and I told her about a workshop in game design that I would be doing at the Federal Consortium of Virtual Worlds Con 2011.

With all the best intentions, I described how I would build a castle, set up home safety hazards, and work with the attendees on how to make it work as a game.  Ener stopped me in my tracks when she said “I’m a big fan of section 508, Will it be ADA compliant?”

Safety Castle

I have to confess, up until that point, I had never even heard of section 508, and had never considered the accessibility of my builds for people with disabilities.  This looked like a really large can of worms to me, and I had a very short deadline.  Nevertheless, when someone throws down the challenge glove, I cannot resist.  So I dug in and tried to figure out how to make my Home Safety Castle accessible to people who are hearing impaired or visually impaired.  Very quickly, I learned that this means layers: layers of sound on the visuals, layers of visuals on the scene and some way to keep them organized, functional, and loading in time to make the game play smoothly.

Here is a short walking tour of what has been done so far- it is still a work in progress-

Future Applications

Slowly it dawned on me that what this meant, was a new way to think about how to design a game. In fact, thinking like this could show us how to improve the game as well and to deepen and enrich the experience for the player.  I started think about other things, like red/green color blindness, and how people with that can see more and are less distracted by the shades of colors.

I also started to think about “mouseless” game interaction.  At the Federal Consortium of Virtual Worlds we saw avatars being moved by mind control, one small part of  Team Orlando’s efforts with Army Research.  I asked myself questions about gaming and what it means for people with disabilities when they can play a game without hands or fingers.  I began to wonder how someone like Stephen Hawking could create a virtual model of their theories in cyberspace, just by using their brainwaves.

And finally, I started to think about how we will make games in the future, and what that means for the design of them

What if you lived in a land where people could move things with their minds, or they could see secret patterns on things, or they could hear the sound of butterfly wings? What kind of games would they play?

“O brave new world that has such people in it. Let’s start at once.” (Shakespeare-The Tempest)

Ann Cudworth / Founder- Alchemy Sims

When we exert effort to create virtual worlds and the games we play in them, we use up part of our lifetime to do so.

In the 1970′s, an industrial designer named Victor Papanek , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Papanek , decided to set a challenge out for other designers. He devoted 10% of his time to designing things that would make the world better. It is gratifying to see, that his idea is still being practiced. Imagine if all of us did that.
There are many people in the world who do good things, who think about our global problems and how to solve them- these are some of those folks, and they do it with game environments and virtual worlds.  They deserve to be recognized.