The Great Hunt
by Pixeleen Mistral on 12/11/06 at 4:01 pm
by Budka Groshomme, Raving Reporter – Science Fiction desk
I recently ran across an intrepid band of residents who had a rather unique joint hobby of cooperatively following scavenger hunts. This sounded interesting. Has a new sport been developing in second life or are the scavenger hunts so many property owners have used to attract visitors nothing more than a marketing ploy? Are these quests to always be restricted to single plots or sims or will someone paint the searches on a broader canvas, a la Myst?
I joined the group and found that they were going to search for “The Ring”, which I immediately interpreted as a Lord of the Rings reference, and assumed that they were in a role-playing game. Only after we decamped to the Crescent Moon Museum did I realize that the museum’s owner had hidden a mysterious ring somewhere on its premises and that was to be the quest for the day. After arriving, the group immediately set about searching. By chatting a bit as we searched, I discovered that this was an international group. The members were from Australia, France, Spain, United States, and, an undisclosed location (could this be Dick Chaney, I wondered?)
That world-wide participation gave me pause when I considered the time zones, cultural differences, and possibly, ages that had to be involved, not to mention the technology that made this possible. People who would likely never meet in real life were engaged in a cooperative venture, which, while exceedingly silly, nevertheless demonstrated in a striking way, the power of this virtual world.
Suddenly, in the midst of this particular quest, one of the team discovered that someone had hidden thirty pumpkins in another sim. Thirty! That was wonderful, someone IM’d to the group. Immediately abandoning their frustrating search for The Ring, the group teleported to MIA and the pumpkin hunt.
Once they arrived they quickly spread out, using the strategies they had honed in previous hunts. The strategies were varied: one person note-carded the coordinates of each pumpkin she found and shared those coordinates with the team via IM. Others informed one another of locations through the multiple instant messages that constantly flew back and forth. There was a continually running chat dialogue whenever team members grew close and, as the search widened, there were competing teleport requests as someone found yet another pumpkin.
By using all the tools available to them, the group cooperated and shared information constantly as they found the pumpkins. Very quickly the team located 75% of them, but time limits and sleeplessness finally overtook some of the participants. The group split up and the quest ended. But only for that day.
The most interesting part of this experience was the manner in which an arbitrary group of residents around the world were able to organize themselves to accomplish a specific objective. Their pumpkin hunt might have only been a time-wasting search for worthless objects, but the cooperation, use of advanced tools, and development of group strategies are worthy of note. These same techniques could be employed to harness the power of our world for more substantial and useful purposes.
I look forward to other examples of such efforts.
Nacon
Nov 12th, 2006
uhh… what is the point of this report?
Nothing. Quit wasting my time.
Prokofy Neva
Nov 12th, 2006
Geez, that was stupid, if you don’t like the Herald, you can flip to the next web page.
Budka, I’m thinking about this and wondering about it. For one, I stoppedh olding scavenger hunts because too many people used scanners to go all over the sim and find my objects and scoop them up quickly. I’d try things like put them out on alts — kind of hard to do.
What I think would be more fun than objects would be things like riddles, “I have a weak spot on a powerful landowner’s parcel,” and the answer is: “The Achilles statue on Linden Land in Ambleside” lol
But, you know, I wonder at all these international group skills being honed are for too.
I suspect that the minute you get away from the game itself and ask people what they think could be done about say, the U.S. elections, they might all disagree.
When people need to do something like figure out how to make more potable water available in Northern Uganda, which is a problem of politics and terrain and international aid as much as it is about weather, they don’t say, oh, let’s all get on a 3-d streaming video space with our avatars and Google sketch-up and really run this baby to ground.
Instead, they have to travel to the real place and deal with the realities of that place and the strings that control them in capitals.
I’m waiting to see if SL might eventually become a meeting place to accomplish talks like these. I do wonder. I would hope so, but I can’t be sure, given the difficulties involved.
Urizenus
Nov 13th, 2006
I too think this is a very interesting story, and I think scavanger hunts like this are the sorts of micro-games that actually work well in socially rich but technologially challenged platforms like SL. No just that, but they provide little laboratories for us to study how individuals as a group grok out information, correct error etc. Studying this could be extremely fascinating, and in an online platform we finally have the tools to see how the information flow and error correction methods work: all that information is preserved if we agree to preserve it for research purposes.
I agree with Prok that this kind of group info trading doesn’t solve all problems, but then part of what we might be interested in studying could be the question of whatkinds of problem *can* be solved in this way and what kind can’t. Sometimes learning about the limits of a tool can be as interesting as applicatios of the tool itself.
I believe things are done like this with cell phones, no? But online we can archive the information exchanges and search paths more easily. That is key.
Chrischun Fassbinder
Nov 13th, 2006
Yea! A postive article from The Herald. Good one in fact, to the extent that it’s faith renewing in SL to read of such a story.
Sure, right now the environment is such we’re just getting a story about a bunch individuals located in various RL locations working towards a simple goal by moving around an avatar and camera while sharing results. Got to lay the ground work somewhere so we’ve got the human apps and platforms to handle the technological singularity when it arrives. It’s this or we use Windows 2050 it work with super intelligent machines.
budka groshomme
Nov 15th, 2006
Thanks for the comment Uri. I tried to bring out the skills aspect here because these same skills have so many applications in the real world. Self-organizing groups are somewhat rare and I wonder if they are only the provence of technologically sophisticated people or are a consequence of the tools available to people when the drives of hunger and shelter are removed.