League of Worlds

The League of Worlds began in 2004.

It started because a number of people at an Ed-Media conference in 2003 met in the bar and asked why the educational use of virtual worlds was not on the conference agenda.

We decided to hold our own conference, and we did: the next autumn in Helsinki. Since then we have held five conferences in different parts of the world, each one attracting forty or fifty people.

Now, however, the situation has changed. Virtual reality, virtual worlds, Second Life, are on almost every conference agenda, and there are a growing number of books being written and compiled on these topics. So why would we want to host our own conferences anymore, when we can go to other, larger, better organised conferences?

The answer is: we wouldn’t. And this has caused us to step back and ask ourselves what we are doing and what we have done. What we have done is bring a hundred or so people together in ways that continue to resonate.

LoW has never been a formal organisation, with a formal membership. It has never had finance, or tried to solicit membership fees. It has always organised itself from event to event, with participants at one event agreeing to organise the next. People who met at LoW2 and LoW3, for example, are still in contact with each other, and still planning things together.

What we are, then, and what we have always been is a social network.

The site has now been redesigned to make this clear. Our aim from 2010 is to become a useful scoial network for people working with virtual worlds, simulations and role playing in education and business, which is completely in line with our original aims as agreed at LoW1 in Helsinki.

To help the conversation along we are going to begin a weekly podcast called In-League. The first edition will be available for download from here and from iTunes in Spring 2010.