TOPIC 5 ONLINE COMMUNITY BUILDING AND SOCIAL ARCHITECTS

EXERCISE 5.2: Social architects and online games

1. What is meant by a social architect? They are those individuals who transform our online adventures, through their development of "smart games" for communities.



2. Whyville.net was a weird site, it felt kind of creepy joining and moving around this site which is designed for young people. Not that I could do much no one wanted to chat and I didn't push the issue because of the creepy feeling I felt. Zanpo at http://www.zanpo.com/virtualcity.php is another odd site it is a building site you can chat and move around and buy and build houses. Very weird, I couldn't find much about this site at all:(



3. The objectives, rules of engagement and unique features for Whyville.net are as follows:
   

• objectives an educational virtual world for curious minds to explore, learn and create together in a safe environment.
  
  
• rules of engagement you can chat anywhere in town , you are not to interfere with another users enjoyment of the site, you are not to upload, post or transmit through the site.



• unique features of the site offers parents and users the ability to delete user information at any time. Inactive accounts will be purged from their database.
  
  
  

The objectives, rules of engagement and unique features for Zanpo are? who knows there was nothing special at all about the site it was kind of fun and you could chat using the screen and blog to others.

4. "Numedeon established Whyville as its first virtual world in 1999 in an effort to provide preteens and teens a chaperoned, safe learning environment in a wide range of subject matters, some serious, and some just fun. Whyville runs on the company’s proprietary virtual world engine, NICE (Numedeon Interactive Community Engine), which supports a wide range of interactions and engagements."

http://www.whyville.net/press/Sajak_Numedeon_Investor_Press_Release.pdf

Whyville is sponsored by major corporations such as NASA, Toyota, Adobe, and Sun Microsystems.

Zanpo is owned by gaudreault.org and has been online since 2000.

I would say that the whyville site was designed by a social architect as the game seems to be evolving to suit the nature of the users. Zanpo is just a game and is a follower not a leader in its field.