University of Southern
California Network Culture Project at the Annenberg School for Communication.
The Network Culture Project (NCP) examines the rapidly
changing and evolving space of network culture through the study of
virtual worlds, online games, and social networking. The researchers believe that we
are seeing a fundamental shift in the ways that knowledge is being
created, disseminated, and shared, resulting in the emergence of new
large scale knowledge economies that fundamentally transform the way we
need to think about learning, interacting, and living in virtual spaces.
The worlds we study and the social life of these virtual spaces give us
a glimpse into what the future might hold as new media continues to
evolve and as computing power transforms virtual words from platforms
into media. The task is to begin the process of creating new theories
and methods, as well as constructing new analytic categories that can
help us make sense of these spaces as they emerge as an increasing part
of everyday life and experience.
Projects include:
Learning in the 21st Century
Modern Prometheus is a game designed to teach students about issues
of science, technology and ethics through experiential learning.
Situated
within the context of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Modern Prometheus
encourages learning about ethics, particularly as they relate to
science and technology, by immersing students in an imaginative play
space and requiring them to make choices that affect game play. By
making ethics about the choices they make and the effects of those
choices, rather than prescriptive rules for conduct or behaviors,
students can better understand the complexities of ethical judgment and
better evaluate their decisions and how their decisions affect others.
Tweens and Reproductive Health in Virtual Worlds
Tweens and Reproductive Health in Virtual Worlds
is an effort to gain insights on how tweens, an understudied but
growing group of online players, approach the issues of sexuality
within a virtual world.
This study will examine the sexual content and related behaviors in
tween conversations in a virtual world called Whyville.net, which is
populated by over 2 million registered players between ages 10-16 -
thus a prime audience for our developmental topic. Access to Whyville
is free and players can spend time participating in science activities,
creating their own avatars and socializing with others through
multi-player games, chat spaces, newspaper articles, email, trading
(Kafai & Giang, 2008).
This project, led by Douglas Thomas, is
an effort to better understand what role philanthropic organizations
might play in the context of virtual worlds. As virtual worlds grow in
size and scope so do the opportunities for engagement with the players
who visit them, the communities they build, and the spaces they
inhabit. In order to access the ways in which foundations might be
integrated into virtual worlds, we ask the following three questions to
help us understand the purpose of philanthropy in virtual worlds:
- How do we define "public good" in the context of virtual worlds?
- How do we use the capabilities of virtual worlds to further the goals of foundations?
- How do you build "real world" connections between physical and virtual spaces?
Games & Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media
This journal, edited by
Douglas Thomas,
is an international journal publishing innovative theoretical and
empirical research about games and culture within the context of
interactive media.
Network Culture Project
http://networkculture.usc.edu