Plus ca change

I’ve been using Google+ for a while now and I’m starting to build up a bit of stickability with it. There are already millions of guides and resources building up around it, a bit like the buzz surrounding launch of an Apple product. Including Mashable resources, the Google+ guide and Professors use of Google+ in classrooms to name three I’ve read recently.

The launch of Google+ put me off a little, because it was much like that of Google Wave in that there was a kind of limited public release surrounded by lots of PR and buzz. Luckily they moved quickly to a more open release as I was complaining that the whole concept of circles seems diminished if you can’t share with other Google people who are excluded from the release.

Lets start with Circles…

I enjoy the circle concept for allowing me to place people and share with different groups. I don’t on the whole enjoy categorising people though and I started to try it at the beginning and quickly just moved everyone into my ‘friends’ circle. I have however more recently received some requests from people I don’t know so well and have set up a circle for them. I also move people between circles and so I’m becoming familiar with the paradigm. I do think it’s a bit like Grainne Conole said in her recent keynote at MoodleMOOT about the evolution of people and technology and I’m wondering how much I’m adapting my behaviour to suit the product.

There are ways to do ‘friend’ grouping within Facebook and friends of mine who are adept at Facebooking do set up groups to share specific things with. I’ve always said that I find the cognitive overhead of this a bit much for what are, in effect, just my public outpourings. In general within Google+ I tend to share with everyone but there have been occasions where I’ve selected groups to share with and so the intuitive method Google+ have devised to allow this may well mean that I start doing this more often and therefore the metaphor is more like one of entering different rooms or online forums where you pick the forum you want to post to and go there to do it.

The streams are quite Twitter like, although at the moment more like Facebook because there aren’t too many people posting however I expect as the numbers grow the ‘streams’ will really start flowing and managing that will be like dipping in with twitter. I’m sure that Google have done testing to see that under heavy usage the important stuff does actually surface using the +1 concept and the fact that you can select the groups (circles) to view but I don’t think there’s enough usage yet to really get the impression of how this will pan out.

I like the fact that you can post longer posts than with Twitter. Twitter is good in limiting you to say thing succinctly but there are times when you need more words to express yourself than Twitter allows easily. I’m very verbose though (as you can tell from this post!). The lack of limit though means that there is more scope for pedagogic  application.

What about Hangouts?

I tried using the hangout feature (not sure that I like the name!) but quickly came unstuck as the whole thing crashed on me. I later discovered (thanks to colleagues who investigated further) that the problems arose because of the local firewalls at work that blocked me from hanging-out. I think this may be a problem for Google if they want to get it used more widely as corporate firewalls will simply not allow it. I’m not generally one for social video sharing as I prefer to mong around in scruffy clothes and unkempt hair when using social sites at home and wouldn’t want the effort of having to become presentable to chat to people. Note to Lord Sugar – That’s why the Amstrad video phone never took off.

So how does it shape up overall?

I like the integration with other Google products, this may well be the killer move since so many people use Gmail or Google Docs regularly. I think that Google+ mixed with Google Apps for Education for example will make a very interesting a dynamic suite for constructivist learning.

I think that on a simplistic level Google have done something that could be considered as much of a social experiment as it is a technology breakthrough. Are people evolving to think more overtly about the groupings they share information with or do they just want to be public and open with everything as they can with Twitter?

I’m still unsure about whether I’ll be sticking with Google+ in the long-term as I tend to spend most of my ‘cognitive overhead’ time in Twitter and even then most of that as a consumer rather than a producer of information, I especially like reading the postings by my peers but also like the feeds coming from tech news services etc. This flow is important to me. What Google + allows though is the movement of information easily between social groups and this may become something extremely useful. It will require the evolution of people and product and it will also require a tipping point where organisations start adopting it so that we get a mixture of social space and feeds of useful information.

For me the jury is still out but I’ve stuck with it for over a week and I logged into it before either Twitter or Facebook this morning so perhaps that is a sign of things to come.

I’d like to know what other people think of it.

Personae gratae

A group of us who are involved in developing the future learning system plans for the Open University are using a range of techniques taken from “User Centred Design” and User Experience (UX) to help us create the future systems for the OU and also to explain the complexity of the systems developments to senior management in a way that is easily understood and powerful. I wanted to share some of these techniques that we’re using without going into any of the detail which may be business sensitive.

First of all what we’re doing is using a combination of Personas (some people suggest personae as the plural but I’ll use personas to describe these) and scenarios. There are many websites and blog posts going back years which talk about the power of personas and scenarios to design and development. JISC have used it within their design workshops and they’re used in different ways by different groups, for example here’s a post on “Web Design from scratch” by Ben Hunt which describes their use in design.

We’re using these in a slightly different way than for design but rather to describe areas of functionality to be developed to meet particular needs. In the persona development we adopted a range of persona’s that were created by the Online Communications team to describe target users for OU websites.

Here’s an example snippet of one of the persona’s to help explain them…

Jason
Gamer
Age/personal:  18, lives in Glenrothes with his Mum
Job:  Works in Dixon’s part-time
Education:  Highers
Studying aim: Degree in Computing/IT
Online likes:  Interaction, multimedia,
customisation and iPhone apps
Web games, chats, texts; surfs fast, but without
direction

Jason?

We use a set of personas to describe a range of target users and they test the system through a typical use case. We also have some high level scenarios to describe the depth of a particular system in supporting users from end-to-end. Scenarios in our case describe the environmental elements not possible easily through personas, so our scenarios are focused on direction setting and understanding where the OU should be going to meet the demands of new learners. for example we have scenarios based around informal learning becoming prevalent and another scenario around the need for key skills.

Personas are powerful because they:-

• Allow systems to be developed to meet specific user types
• Afford consistency of development across different systems
• Are a useful tool for describing how people will use the services
• Are useful for testing and benchmarking services against requirement, i.e. are useful for usability and accessibility testing.

Scenarios are powerful to us because they:-

• Describe the full end-to-end functionality of a system
• Take socio-economic and other environmental factors into account
• Set direction of development
• Describe the strategic value and business benefits

We are using these to map through to a set of “Roadmaps” which describe how we intend to deliver the changes. The roadmaps, programmes and projects within it are along the lines of the JISC P3 model which itself is a variant of PRINCE 2 methodology and therefore well established. The creative bit is how we’re describing this through the combination of personas and scenarios. We have been through this process once before with a programme called RAP (Roadmap Acceleration Programme) where we used a world cafe approach to gathering requirements (see my previous post on Future Learning Systems ). We used the user testing sessions to “validate” the personas against real people to ensure that they’re accurate and complete and the testing informs the system development, this was particularly useful to establish what works in the less clearly defined areas of the roadmap such as the development of Google gadgets through the JISC DOULS project.

The next steps are to build in the marketing knowledge that we have received through consultancy reports on segmentation which can help us plan out which personas we particularly want to target, and  secondly to get areas of the OU to adopt sub-set of the personas and ensure that they refresh them to keep them relevant. We already have some success with this since Student Services have adopted a persona approach to describe the “targeted services” which they want to provide through StudentHome the OU Student portal.

I can’t stress enough though how important it is to have a single coherent set of OU personas. The power comes from system developments being mapped holistically i.e. when values are shared across the organisation about meeting specific user needs and creating, buying or customising systems to meet those needs.

Nevolution

Nevolution = Evolution through networking

Borg - Are we evolving into them?

Since listening to a keynote by Grainne Conole recently at MoodleMOOT I’ve been thinking about the concept of people and technology co-evolving. It’s not that profound a concept really and links to a previous post about the “hidden influence of social networks” we adapt to technology probably more profoundly that the technology adapts to us.

In the case of Twitter this is becoming somewhat of a concern to me because I’m starting to become the type of person who will try to make his posts witty and engaging (perish the thought), this leads to a tendency to exaggerate or enhance. You have this kind of hyper-reality dynamic played out in Twitter where there are the seedlings of truth but couched in the attention grabbing advertising blurb that gets them noticed, you then run the risk of becoming obsessed by ego rather than the topic. It’s not true of all interactions of course, and there is a lot of very good factual information provided without hype, but I’ve been on twitter now for a number of years and it’s only recently that I’ve started noticing the ego-centricity of Twitter.

I think blogging is similarly an egocentric method of communicating and I remember when Martin Weller first encouraged me to blog many years back I was concerned at the time about it being all a bit of an ego massaging exercise. Perhaps that is one of the reasons that when I started my blog I tried deliberately to blog about things that I’d refer back to and find useful for me and my work so treated it like a diary and reminder. A “To-Do” of research ideas. I did originally intend to blog about all things but technology is the predominate subject within many of my posts and perhaps it because my “other life” is one I’m still not comfortable in sticking into blog posts because that does seem rather egotistical. I do occasionally do put family stuff up on Facebook.

So that leads me to another evolutionary trend which is that I’ve noticed now that I’m CATEGORISING my online persona and using different media to reflect different parts of myself and to interact in different ways with different groupings of people. In Facebook the club of followers is quite narrow and when people are flagged to me as “mutual friends” that perhaps I should friend, I don’t tend to do that unless I have a close connection with them in the real world.

So Facebook is, for me, only a group of real friends and close colleagues, and where I feel safe to share personal information.

Twitter on the other hand is more like a pub where I have some close friends that I’m out with and where there are various other interesting people who I know or ‘follow’, some of which are celebs and where listening to them is amusing. The pub persona also means that I do a bit of boasting and bragging and ‘hyper-reality’ is the norm.

Blogging for me is that part of me that wants to remember things which I find useful and may also be useful to others, so my use of blogging is a kind of therapeutic method for me to relieve myself of some thought that I’ve been struggling to articulate. It is like revision classes where I’m repeating stuff that I may have mentioned in class (in a tweet or on Facebook) and trying to explain it, mainly to myself, so that I can work out if it’s got any validity.

This persona building is happening constantly and it’s evolving over time. I also have my “linkedIn” and my “academia.edu” and various other elements of myself expressed online.

How much though is the media I’m engaging in changing me? …am I becoming ‘hyper-real’?

Dark clouds ahead?

I have been considering the issues of betting the future or your organisation on a commoditized cloud based-approach.

I’ve tweeted many times about the benefits of cloud and how were exploring those at the OU. It’s always interesting though when things come along that wake you up to some obvious dangers.

Organisations lose their autonomy and right of decision making when moving to cloud providers.

Take for example the cull of Ubertwitter, this article by Dave Winer sums it up nicely. In it he says…

“They [twitter] sent two wakeup calls to their users:

1. Hey it would be safer to use our client to access Twitter.

2. We will kill your use of Twitter if it suits us. “

Why is it important? – Well taking the control of your users outside of a carefully crafted institutional environment and leaving it in the hands of a for profit commercial organisation does bring risks and one of those is that they have the power to decide how and which users access their site. You only have to look at the Google censorship row in China to see that big organisations can cause big problems for governments, that in itself can cause problems for organisations who rely on those services to reach learners in countries such as China.

As well as institutional loss of control there are also individual loss of control issues with cloud. Summed up by Richard Stallman with regard to Chrome OS (again I’ve blogged about this being potentially very powerful in past posts). Another post by John Honeyball talks about the “thorough data rogering” of Twitter and the fact that some cloud providers are still not giving guarantees about where data is being held.

Imagine how embarrassing and difficult it would be for example if an organisation had recommended UberTwitter to it’s clients (learners) and then found them cast adrift (and perhaps unaware of being adrift). I’m most concerned though that to work in a loosely-coupled distributed way organisations must take a significant risk over ceding the right of access, delivery and protection of information for their community. If you get into bed with one of the big providers and then they piss off a country you lose a potentially huge market and also remove access to anyone currently studying from there. It’s a risk.

Google User Group Event

This week I attended the Google Apps For Education UK User Group Event in Loughborough.

There were a group of hardcore tweeters and the event had over 1000 tweets (search for #guug11) – also some nice work done to demo a mash-up using Google Apps spreadsheet and crunching twitter data to display top tweeters against this hashtag. (@timbuckteeth won the day!)

Highlights included the first UK live presentation of the CR-48 Chrome OS laptop.

CR-48 Chrome OS laptop

..I was impressed by the simplicity, the fact that you can install multiple copies of the OS so that you can have failover if an OS gets corrupted and also that you don’t need any other software as it’s all simply a browser. The always on concept is appealing, and thankfully at Loughborough we had good Wifi, but I’ve been to events where it’s patchy or non-existent. I do now however store almost all my ‘stuff’ in the cloud and use Google docs to master and then convert into MS Word to clean up and send on so I think conceptually it’s where we’re moving. For those who don’t know about Chrome OS there’s a good explanation at Geekosystem

We saw a live demo of Google Translate which was impressive real-time translation of IM chat messages (into and from Japanese in this case). Worked very well and available within docs, sites and gmail. We saw a demo of this in sites and again it seemed to do a complete translation of the page.

As well as the new tools and functionality presented we also had the opportunity to hear accounts of how people were getting on with using Google Apps to support students. A couple of notable quotes here…

“How many people are happy with their VLE’s?” – a total of five hands went up.

“the platform must be intuitive FOR THE TEACHERS, the students will know how to use it anyhow”

“If it’s good the students will sell it for you”

“Walled gardens present problems”

“Most VLE’s are actually only CMS’s”

“Sakai 3 is a Facebook like environment”

“Will we need Moodle, Blackboard etc. in the future or simply mix and match Google Apps and tools on marketplace to create the LMS?”

This was for me one of the most interesting aspects of the day and when at the end of the day we returned to Google presenters and had a Q&A session the same concerns were being voiced across the group. Those who had not adopted the suite were generally concerned about security and privacy of data. Those that had adopted the suite were generally concerned about accessibility, onward directions with respect to the learning landscape (integration with VLE products) and how Google was going to support the HE community that it was cultivating.  Google stressed its commitment to achieve better accessibility in the Apps suite and working with us to do that. http://www.google.com/accessibility/

Google also stressed the support for the community and it’s ambition to address concerns that individuals had which would be raised directly through the Google reps at the event.

Overall the event was thoroughly enjoyable and I’m looking forward to the next one. I particularly enjoyed the chats with people both on twitter and face to face during the breaks in sessions as they provided an extra dimension to the event.

Further blog posts and event summaries

Outsourcing Mega-Deal

Due to the current economic climate and the need for belt tightening in the public sector many organisations are now exploring various forms of outsourcing to try and ‘reduce costs whilst still maintaining services’. Hmmm. The latest one that I’ve heard of is Suffolk County Council who are doing this wholesale to a single outsourcing supplier as a “megadeal” – There’s an article in Computing Magazine about this. There are many other articles about this and the common theme seems to be outsourcing is more likely to be a consideration during recession.

I have however read many articles which say there are risks with outsourcing within the public sector, and I know these from my own experiences and those of my colleagues, the main risk being outsourcing can be beneficial in the short term but have negative impacts in the longer term because you lose skills internally which you may need down the line. However more outsourcing and shared solutions within the public sector is inevitable, and I think healthy. We are moving to a more commoditised view of services and therefore we should all be looking to move ‘up the value chain’ and deliver at the level that is most appropriate.

For example why are Universities investing in infrastructure and IT Support, in management of those services and in server rooms and hardware and system software when these things can all be bought off the shelf through a IaaS, SaaS and PaaS providers like Amazon?

The question senior management should ask is where is the right balance? – We have had fifteen years at least of commercial vendors such as Microsoft and Sun creating products for the educational market with mixed success however the landscape is changing and products like Blackboard and Moodle are now fully featured, mature and relatively low cost options compared to creating bespoke environments. The amount of customisation varies, blackboard is more of a “blackbox” solution, allowing the value to be added through the way it is used, whereas Moodle allows for more customisation at lower levels which can be powerful but also costly.

But the models aren’t just limited to LMS. Outsourcing could apply to the course (module) materials, and in fact to the assessment services and assessment of courses. If you go down this route you get more into the realms of the ‘for profit’ organisations like Kaplan and you then do look at the bottom line all the time in assessing your curriculum. I’m not sure that’s always a healthy way to be but there is a need for Kaplan, just as there is a need for open and free educational resources.

Each organisation has to assess the level of outsourcing and how the quality and values of that organisation work within the proposed model. If you add value through the richness of the engagement with students and that requires specific adaptations then you must either have environments which allow that customisation, or work with partners who can understand your organisations needs and allow you to have control of the quality assurance.

Google Bad Day?

I heard about the demise of Google Wave last week and I’ve been reading a large number of the hundreds of blog posts and tweets that accompanied it and continue to do so. I’m not going to try to capture all of these but the TechCrunch and Mashable articles are as good a summary as any.

One article suggested that Google does simple things very well but doesn’t do complex things well, it suggested that where the concept (not necessarily the technology) is simple, such as with search and mail, it flourishes, but where there is more conceptual complexity or a larger leap forward then Google struggles.

I’m not sure that I totally agree with this argument but during the week when Wave was ‘crashing against the shore’ as someone put it I was taking a second attempt at swapping from using iPhone onto an Android device. In this case the Google Nexus One.

My primary motivation for the swap was some rubbish customer service from O2 when trying to change my “bolt on” on my account.

Anyone who has tried this and has texted the number that O2 provide to get a response “you are not subscribed to that bolt on” as a response and then had to deal with a call centre in some far flung country where you get assurances but then find you’re charged for the service you have asked to cancel will understand my frustration.

Anyhow coming back to Android the main downfall of the Nexus One in my opinion is the complete failure of Google to support devices which might need to connect to Wifi networks in ‘work based’ environments and to provide methods to address different ‘proxy’ and network types. There are 623 messages on this thread in the Google Code forum but the upshot is Google did a bad thing omitting this and haven’t addressed it in the 18 months since it was first highlighted. For me this is a ‘show stopper’ and not only did I attempt many of the suggestions and found them unsatisfactory solutions but also having spent this much time on the issue I was not very pleased with how the Android phone is set up considering it doesn’t rely on ‘syncing’ with a PC and therefore the importance of the Wifi connectivity should have been paramount to the success of the device in the workplace.

It would put me off buying it in a corporate capacity or recommending it to others to do so until this is addressed. It doesn’t seem to be affecting the take up for the device by end users but I think Google are missing a big market by not fixing this problem. (and only working with some Wifi networks, e.g. eduroam, is not enough).

It may appear in my blog posts that I’ve got a firm opinion on these things but that’s not the case and I’d like to hear other opinions about how well or badly Google handles the delivery of the more complex. I’d like to think that Google can put Wave and Buzz behind it and start afresh to hit Facebook in the social arena after conducting some good research, or studies research done by others and investigated the area well enough to deliver something that users really want.

I want to end by saying that I used and liked Wave because it did bring something new to the table in terms of allowing the blending of synchronous and asynchronous sharing of ideas and it could have been developed into a strong CRM or mind mapping solution for example, but it wasn’t in itself enough to provide stick-ability. It needed a killer application.  Buzz is in danger of suffering the same fate however I applaud Google for trying though and not a lot of concept stuff becomes commercially viable so accept that and move forward to the next big thing.

Anthropomorphizing Technology

I’ve just read an extract of Clay Shirkys Cognitive Surplus book in the Times along with a very good interview about him and other web gurus. Unfortunately you have to pay to get Times articles these days (hmmm. Ironic) but there’s a good review if it in Guardian. There are lots of good videos on YouTube of him talking about the concept of cognitive surplus so I encourage you to listen to them.

…anyhow I could spend the rest of the year dissecting Shirky’s writing because I love his enthusiasm and agree with much of what he says but what I wanted to get out in this post is the fact that people are really anthropomorphizing technology. He does it and Skirky has particularly emotional prose about the internet and how when he used the internet in 1992 it was an emotional experience for him (his brain flipped out!), his compatriots do it when they write about the internet and technology and we’re all doing it as a society.

I was out drinking with Martin Weller the other week (always a bad idea) and we got to talking about the fact the friends of ours talk about a piece of technology with such irrational love and affection that to an outsider it seems bizarre but to us it’s quiet normal although we might not always share their love of a particular technology. Some people at the OU for example love FirstClass because we’ve used it at the OU since the mid 90′s and some feel a kind of ownership of it that others might not.

It’s not just ownership though but a sense that the technology is life enhancing.  Take the recent ‘buzz’ about the iPad. When all is said and done the iPad technology is not a big leap forward from that of tablet PC’s or indeed from Apple’s own iPhone but it really got into people emotionally in a way that I haven’t seen a technology do to the same extent before. It was slightly scary to see the reaction of some people to it and how they talk about it as if it is a living breathing thing.

I think there are two distinct patterns here.

1. A kind of addictive quality to new technology where it fills a gap that people never knew they had.

2. A sense of ownership and stakeholding for technology that has been around a long time and has given that person a wholesome experience over a sustained period of time so that they have become personally involved with the technology in a way they wouldn’t have imagined when they first saw it.

Both these have parallels to relationship building. The instant attraction of new lovers, and the slowly growing deep love of long term relationships.

…I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Net Security for the ‘digital natives’

I’ve been reading with interest the many articles floating about around protecting yourself and your kids on the net. This is becoming particularly relevant in my household at the moment as eldest daughter is asking to use MSN Windows Live Messenger (N.B. not any other IM client – it has to be MSN as all her friends use that!) and my wife who is hearing all these scare stories about kids being lured into all things bad by strange men is concerned about her being ‘safe online’ within some kind of walled garden.

I’m kind of in the middle of this as on the one hand I think eldest daughter is a digital native and knows a lot more about the pitfalls of net behavior than the older generations. After all she accesses her schoolwork, finds out about events at the school and engages in discussions using Moodle and checks and accesses all her homework online using a product called Planner Live! but I am concerned that she is a bit ‘…yeah Whatever’ about the consequences of ID theft or net bullying or …etc. (although she is taught about them at school)

An analogy for me is having a wallet. When I first got one I was quite relaxed about leaving it lying around (despite my dad telling me about the dangers). I then got it stolen one night on a night out and spent a couple of frantic weeks worrying about it, making a statement to the police and stopping my cards. In the end I did get it back but without the 50 quid cash that I had in it, a valuable lesson learned!

- I got it stolen once more a few years later even though I’d taken a bit more care (I left it out of sight but in a coat and I left the coat behind in an office) and the second time they tried to book a 2K holiday on my credit card….without success….as I had learnt to contact my company early to stop my cards.

So to cut a long story short it took me to have experienced the problem to fully understand it. My eldest daughter thinks she knows the dangers of the net but really she is very naive but I don’t want to be the person who is seen to be the enforcer and keep her locked away from the lovely pastures of the internet

So I’ve been looking at ways to make her internet experience wholesome but with some security. At the moment I’m favouring Microsoft’s Family Safety (for Instant Messaging) but I’m still open to exploring what other stuff is out there. I’m also conscious that eldest daughter might see this as us trying to pry on her and tweenagers are a distinctly paranoid species so I’m taking steps to reassure her that this is for her protection and that we trust her implicitly and have no interest or desire to spy on her.

I do feel a little uncomfortable with this stance because I do think digital natives generally understand the net well and do know the dangers and would avoid them so part of me wants to let her roam freely without protection. I’ve read many articles on this recently by psychologists and the overwhelming opinion is that using protection software is generally something that doesn’t make much difference and doesn’t decrease online addictions or decrease other online issues from taking place  in the long term, in fact it may increase them (referring back to my ‘pastures of the internet’ from earlier).

It is a placebo for parents. Nothing more.

Death Through Immersion

I was both fascinated and appalled last weekend when I read about the South Korean couple who let their own three month old child starve to death whilst they were obsessed with rearing a ‘virtual child’ in the SecondLife-style game Pruis online.

This was covered in a number of newspapers but a couple of good articles are the Telegraph and BBC News

I haven’t heard of anything exactly like this occurring before although there have been cases of individuals letting a child die in favour of some addiction (internet or otherwise). Perhaps someone can correct me and show that it’s more common than I imagine – and that would be even more disturbing.

I’m currently part of the supervisory team of Jo Iacovides who is doing a PhD in the area of engagement and informal learning (through games). We regularly have discussions about the level of immersion and the increasing depth of reward and interaction required by gamers. Heavy Rain for example takes gaming in a different direction. I read a good article in the Independent interviewing David Cage the creator of Heavy Rain. He’s quite weird and I’m not sure I totally agree with his future of gaming but you can’t deny that he is pushing boundaries.

I do start to wonder though about how far immersive gaming is taking us and where it will lead. There are already immersion suits for gamers and anyone who has tried the 3D Gaming experience will know that it does lead to a deeper sense of ‘being there’ - couple that with a richer set of ‘rules’ and characters with humanistic characteristics then add a sense of responsibility and reward – Now we start getting to towards the truely scarey SciFi Virtual Reality future as predicted by  Tad Williams “Otherworld” series or “Better Than Life”, “Matrix” et al.

When games and the virtual world gets to be more interesting and rewarding than the real world then VR will just be another type of psychoactive drug, a wonderful one in which people have a greater level of environmental choice than with a hallucinogenic and this will make it very powerful and dangerous. If you think I’m being fantastical here then read this Virtual World article  from 2008 and judge for yourself. I believe this Korean couple had a number of other things outside the game which influenced their behaviour but none the less it continues to make me uncomfortable.

We truly live in interesting times however I hope we’re going to be responsible about what we create for the next generation.