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Ron Meiners confirmed!
We are thrilled to announce that our second keynote speaker, Mr. Ron Meiners, has been confirmed!
Ron has worked on a wide range of online community applications, from casual games to virtual worlds, including Myst IV: Revelation and Myst Online: Uru Live, and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory for Ubisoft, as well as the free online gaming community Mplayer.com.
He is passionate about the potential for online communities to foster relationships between participants and to open the range of experiences to collaborative creativity, transformative experiences, and the evolution of social organization, as illustrated in his position as the volunteer Online Community Advocate for the Burning Man organization.
He is committed to the exploration of new forms of interaction and collaboration online, and the evolving relationship between consumer communities and host brands. His recent projects include Multiverse.net (platform for independent MMOG creation), Dogster.com (community of passion for pet owners), and MyHollywood.com (casual game and social networking site with an entertainment theme).
Much of his talk, and the activities following, will focus on the need for ongoing community engagement and support - whether the goal for your world is to facilitate team-building exercises, or to excite and enhance the experience of players in a for-profit game universe. An elemental part of the process, the maintenance of person-to-person connections is the oft-overlooked and single most defining component of virtual world development. Ron will offer his experience and expertise as a model for the best practices in this area!
We've got a logo!
The Virtual Worlds Workshop now has a graphic identity:
Our friends in Smaller Indiana
Speaking with Pat Coyle the other day, two things were abundantly clear:
1) There's a lot more going on in Indiana than we think, and
2) Virtual communities can bring people together in a way that old school handshake networks can't. It's not just about who you know, it's also about where you are!
By bringing Hoosiers together virtually at Smaller Indiana, Pat has created a mobile, networked online gathering of expertise, resources, and ideas. And it's working!
In addition to serving as a launchpad for locally grown business and recreational activities, Smaller Indiana presents a multidimensional public face for those of us in Indiana that feel connected well beyond the borders of our state.
We've created our very own group - Virtual Worlds, Alternate Realities & Games - so that we can bring this discussion to a group of people with a wide variety of perspectives and interests.
We hope that the momentum from the Workshop will develop into something much bigger in the scope of ideas and applications...
Stay tuned!
Introducing the Board of Advisors
Bringing together heavy-hitters in the design and study of virtual worlds is no small feat!
In addition to Rich Vogel, we are thrilled to announce the involvement of the other members of our Board of Advisors:
Dr. Richard Bartle, whose resume reflects his well-known wit, is alphabetically first on our list. And what a way to start the line-up! Dr. Bartle is credited with developing the technology of virtual worlds from its humble beginnings as MUDs. We can't really say anything in better humor than does the man himself (though we have bragged about him a little more).
Raph Koster, game designer extraordinaire and man-about-Metaplace, is up next. What to say but that Raph is the hardest human being to get hold of because he is seemingly everywhere at once. Fortunately, virtual space doesn't GO anywhere! His bio is brief but out of the park.
The heart of the batter's box is occupied by partners in crime, or, we should say authorship, Dr. J. Leighton Reed and Dr. Byron Reeves. Listing their collective accomplishments is a task for more ambitious souls, but needless to say, they are individually impressive and collaboratively authoritative. In addition to being a medical doctor, Leighton is a businessman and venture capitalist. And, in addition to being a philosophical doctor, Byron's list of leadership positions spans almost any communications-related venture ever begun at Stanford. Together, they're going to tell us how the future will work!
Rounding out the line-up are two of the most influential game designers in the business: Rich Vogel and his co-studio director at BioWare Austin, Mr. Gordon Walton. We could say a lot about their careers, but why bother. You'll learn a lot more by playing! (But if you do need a text version, there is a succinct version of Gordon's bio, and we've pretty much worn Rich out by now - and he hasn't even shown up for the keynote yet!)
