CM 4.0: Experiences

After reading about the criteria CM has to cope, before it can be entitled to its 4.0 status, the success story of the platform called "second life" immediately popped up. I read the following: "A cross-media 4.0 property is co-creative, collaborative play with the audience across many devices, which evolves and grows a life of its own"

And than started to investigate the meaning of the key phrase "Story Environment"
A story environment is a physical, adaptive, augmented 3D reality or virtual space that can become host to narratives. Distinct from a story world, these environments can be in close proximity and even overlapping, and may have quite different narrative themes. The stories may be heavily scripted, or be created and shared by the space's users.
A story environment has potentially five levels:
Level 1 - Shared
Inhabitants create their own stories and shared mythology in a non specific narrative space.
Level 2 - Seeded
Catalyst writer/actor role plays and brings others into their story world in a generic narrative space
Level 3 - Influenced
Static - The environment is rich but only communicates in a visual static way
Living - The environment speaks to the participant, a monologue, pushes story at the participant eg; ghosts, residual lives, placed signage etc:
Dynamic - The participant has a dialogue with the environment which responds to most things they do. E.g.: objects and bots respond to chat
Level 4 - Character
Environments that are richly rendered with strong back-stories and require the participant to improvise around a range character definitions with others who are also role playing.
Improvised - human
Non-player characters are key role players
Level 5 - Scripted
The most passive where the participant inhabits a scripted part using two methods depending on the technology
Automatically animating the participant and talking for the participant with others (automated) in group scenes
The participant delivers a pre-set script as actor - Wikipedia

In my example "Second Life" the sky is the actual limit. At parts of this so called "vr-cybergame" the user is able to go as far as Level 5, the ability to get behind the wheel and build a world of its own.

For those who are not that familiar with Second Life I'll show its key drives and absolute bizarre possibilities in a short summary:

Residents can explore, meet other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade virtual property and services with one another, or travel throughout the world. Applying the levels of integration experiences into this platform shows that it carries all of them in one way or the other:
Level 1: Starting your second life gives you the freedom fully shape it the way you desire. You can even start a religion, and convince others to follow.
Level 2: Agencies like institutes, embassy's, schools all made up their own stories and rules which you have to obey after subscribing.
Level 3:There is the ability watch art exhibits, listen to live music or event theatre.
Level 4:Get in touch with "real-virtual" real-estate dealers to bargain on the price of your dream house.
Level 5: Built into the software is a three-dimensional modeling tool based around simple geometric shapes that allows a resident to build virtual objects. More complex three-dimensional Sculpted prims, textures for clothing or other objects, and animations and gestures can even be created.

Shocking but interesting facts that carry allong with the success of the crown jewel of cross-media interaction "SecondLife":
People and company's actually profit from this platform that once started as a vr-game. A few residents of the game actually profit more than $1.000.000,- a year. Some companies do even over $6.000.000,- a year from selling their product on this platform. With 16.000.000 subscribers in 6 years we might say this project has been quite a success. The effects of this invention worked, probably opened the eyes of many entrepreneurs, innovators and a lot of people were inspired by this phenomena.


Sam for Crosslink