Pathfinder Linden at Games for Health

Pathfinder Linden gave a great talk at the Games for Health Conference this week, titled "It's all about the people". After 2 days of presentations looking at statistics proving games facilitate learning and all the whiz-bang technologies one could imagine, Path gave a presentation reminding people that healthcare is often about connecting people to people. He explained Brigadoon, Virtual Hallucinations, Relay for Life, and a few other projects as an example of SecondLife being used to connect people.

He had one of the last presentations on the last day of the conference, which veteren conference goers will realize is a time slot that people sleep during, but his presentation was funny and engaging.

He woke up the crowd by showing the Leeroy Jenkins Video which had the crowd laughing. The video was appropriate because it demonstrates the real immersion and emotions that virtual worlds provide, and is funny because we've all had our meticulous plans screwed up by a friend not paying attention. The keynote speaker had started the conference with a WoW video (the WoW virus episode) and it was really great the way Pathfinder tied 2 days of presentations together by closing the conference with a WoW video. Even the stuffy people who hadn't smiled in 2 days were laughing at the Leeroy video... at that point the crowd was hooked.

He followed that video with Javier Puff's SL Trailer which was a really great way to introduce people who have never seen SecondLife with our world and some of the things we create.

After the video he went into his slides about some of the efforts in SecondLife regarding health and healthcare. He had a great presentation style, not just standing in front of the podium but walking around the stage to maintain peoples attention. Very J. Allard like [that one's for you Path ]

People really enjoyed it. You could look around and see people scribbling down the SL URL when he got to the last slide. As residents we are constantly bashing the Lindens, so I just wanted to report and remind people LL is doing a hell of a job.

Big ups to Pathfinder for bringing more awareness to SecondLife and doing a great job at representing our creative community.

Very cool, this is good to hear. I had never quite understood why it appeared that Pathfinder had some kind of exalted position, because he just seemed like Torley getting paid to me (and Torley probably does a better job).

Now it makes sense.

I find it interesting how such powerful people skills lose some of their potency when translated to SL.

Whether this is good or bad, I will leave that up to you to figure out.