Terra Nova

The Postnational Sodalities of Second Life: An Iconographic Approach

Jonathan Kinkley, who has just completed his Masters Thesis in Art History at University of Illinois at Chicago, ask if we could share his research.  We're always happy to link to new work on virtual worlds.

The full paper is available here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/15860034/PostnationalSodalitiesSecondLifeJKinkley

His thesis analyzes the visual culture of Second Life and explores the complex spaces that online social networks create. Jonathan explains:

In Second Life's Caledon, we get a glimpse what an online social formation looks like. It is a society based entirely on shared interests - a themed community built of a patchwork quilt of Victorian-era iconography. Elsewhere in SL, artists like Cao Fei (SL avatar China Tracy) are fascinated with this idea of creating a sense of place out of virtual space. Her RMB city isn't about China, it's about China-ness - an amalgam of all the icons, stereotypes, and archetypes past and present of China. This paper is about the types of spaces in SL and how and why they are created out of the iconography of visual culture.

China to ban RMT, maybe.

Thanks to Andy Schwarz for tipping us to this article in Information Week reporting on a Chinese government press release supposedly banning the sale of virtual stuff for real money. In the backchannel, Julian Dibbell reminded us that Korea did the same thing a couple of years back to no effect. No effect because it is hard to do without redesigning the virtual economy, and also because the law's intent was not actually to ban RMT. As we all know, some laws regulating a practice are not really intended to stop it - whatever the preamble might say - but to control it merely.

So: What is China up to?

The Soul of a New Regime: Thomas Malaby's Making Virtual Worlds

Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life, by our own Thomas Malaby, has its official release today, and the timing couldn't be better. I'm writing from the midst of State of Play VI -- "The Conference on the Serious Study of Virtual Worlds" -- where Thomas's book will be feted this evening and where the mood, in general, is that of a not entirely unwelcome intellectual hangover. The hype surrounding Second Life (and the broader phenomenon of virtual worlds for which it's been so imperfect a proxy) has come and, finally, gone, and there's a sense that only now can we begin to dig beneath the shiny, first-pass questions that provoked the hype and get a deeper handle on what we've been talking about. This is a challenging, exciting project, and if the thoughtful, game-changing ethnography Thomas has produced is any indication, it's off to a promising start.

You No Take Candle!

Yesterday at State of Play, Bart Simon made a tongue-in-cheek suggestion: that journals like Games and Culture adopt a five-year ban on articles that focus on Second Life and World of Warcraft.

State of Play 6

State of Play 6 (2009) is up and running at New York Law School.  Yesterday was the grad student symposium and today is the first day of the two-day main event.  Dan is kicking things off at the podium and Raph Koster will be giving the keynote next on metaplace.  Feel free to post whatever conference-related in the comment.  If I can, I'll do some live-blogging in the comments here.

Officialish backchannel

Twitter hashtag

Functional Governance

The regulation and governance of technology has tended to be based around industry sectors such as film, radio, television etc., or on things such as the radio spectrum or personal data.

I propose that we change this on a global scale and frame regulation in terms of the relationship between Functions and rights.

Virtual Worlds Workshop at Indiana University

This August, Lee Sheldon and I are hosting VW², a one-week workshop on the possibilities and pitfalls of using virtual worlds for business and research. Our aim is to help professionals who are new to the field from wasting several years and heaven knows how many millions of dollars re-learning the same old lessons. Our focus is practical, not academic: Here's what you do, and here's what you DO NOT do.

In designing the program, we've been fortunate to have the input of an illustrious advisory board. Rich Vogel and Ron Meiners are coming to give keynote lectures. Participants will learn by developing applications specific to their own environment. This includes pitching ideas, writing design documents, setting up hiring plans, choosing tools, and building their own virtual environments. On exit, participants will have created a shovel-ready virtual world project for their home organization.

More information about the board and the workshop here.

The End of the (Virtual) World

At the Digital Entrepreneurship conference, I remarked on the rising number of bankruptcies of virtual worlds or companies that develop them (most cleverly illustrated by Woody Hearns' bugzapper at gucomics, here, here, and here).  I'm interested in what we can learn about the bankruptcies of virtual worlds. 

Media Violence, Aggression, and Policy

There's no solid evidence that violence in media causes violence in society, certainly not at the level that would warrant any kind of policy response. Here at Terra Nova, this has been discussed again and again and again and again and again. Yet the issue will not die, or, more accurately, a misguided conversation continues and at times certain points need to be reiterated. The immediate spurs to this post include a) getting an email about videogame violence effects from an undergraduate at another school, b) seeing one of Indiana's PhD students give a talk on videogame violence, and c) seeing media effects being debated at the International Communications Association meeting in Chicago this past weekend. Researchers continue to pursue evidence for a causal link between violence in media and real-world violence, and important people in the real world still think there's some sort of emergency.

Common sense objections to the agenda and the urgency are legion, best summed up here and here. Yet there are deeper issues, of a scholarly nature, that need to be addressed as well. Research in the field of media violence effects is generally ill-conceived, poorly executed, and result-driven. I have seen few things that I would describe as findings - results that become a permanent part of my view of the world and how it works. Before any more PhD students waste their careers on bad science, let's once again put the cards on the table.

State of Play 6: Possibly My Last Press Release In This Space

Here is the dull version of the marketing release about SoP.  For the interesting version (which discloses all manner of personal information, including my many vices) you'll have to sign up for the email channel.

---

The Sixth Annual State of Play conference returns to New York City this summer!

            On June 19-20, 2009, New York Law School’s State of Play VI Conference will convene in New York to examine the past, present and future of virtual worlds. In conjunction with the University of Southern California Network Culture Project at the Annenberg School for Communication, and with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the conference will focus on the startling rise of virtual worlds and multiplayer online games, and ask whether these worlds have reached a plateau in their development. At the same time we will question whether we have reached a limit in our understanding of these worlds, and ask whether there are useful research questions still left to pursue.

Death, Taxes, and Property

In law school, death drives property.  Property law is generally taught, somewhat anachronistically, by teaching the mechanisms transferring it at death.  So I find especially interesting the recent public attention devoted to transferring virtual assets upon death.  Legacy Locker creates an "online will," that transfers your online assets to designated beneficiaries.  And Eternal Space permits the creation of virtual spaces that honor the deceased.  Just one more step on the way to functional recognition of property interests in digital objects, IMO.

IARPA and Reynard

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), Incisive Analysis Office has just released its "Reynard "Broad Agency Announcement" which "sets forth research areas of interest in the area of identifying behavioral indicators in Virtual Worlds (VWs) and Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) that are predictive of real world characteristics of the users."  

Lots of TN authors mentioned in the footnotes, and lots of interesting possibilities to use their money to study VWs...

Third Party Beneficiaries Online, Redux

Jackson v. American Plaza Corp. (with analysis at the E-Commerce and Tech-Law Blog), has non-trivial ramifications for virtual worlds.  The case holds that one Craigslist user cannot sue another for violation of Craigslist's TOU.  For a while, lawyers have been discussing whether virtual world players can sue each other based on third-party beneficiary theories. If I grief you, can you sue?  True virtual world junkies will recall that this question was left unsettled by the Hernandez v. IGE settlement.  Jackson says no, which is a relief to both attorneys and, I would think, players.

MacArthur Foundation Enters Second Life

The MacArthur Foundation will launch its own island in Second Life on May 18. A major event has been planned. Details here. Significant? You decide.

Free Realms

This is pretty much an open thread for comments/reactions about SOE's Free Realms. 

I haven't had time to play with it yet, but there sure has been buzz and the rarely impressed Scott Jennings even seems to be sort of impressed, which impresses me.  Wagner James Au seems not too impressed, but I'm not sure he's right that kids are dying for Habbo-style retro 2.5D graphics.  He has a point about the downloaded client, but that hasn't held Maple Story back -- tweens will probably cross the install hurdle.

So my first impression, which is based entirely on the launch video below, is that this is pretty big.  By giving FREE title credit, they're billing that they're not billing, which targets the zillions of kids now on Runescape, WebKinz, Maple Story, and Club Penguin. 

But more importantly, I watch this video and I think: "Hey, isn't that Goldshire?  Haven't I seen that guy before in IMVU, There, and Home?  Is that a Nintendog?  Aren't those Pokemon cards? MarioKart?"  It is clear that SOE has done its kids media business homework really well -- as Scott puts it, tweens are "bracketed with laser-beam accuracy".   Free Realms taps into the appeal of many of the choicest bits of the most popular properties out there for the demographic. They seem to be rolled together into a shiny integrated package.

Of course, one can't judge a virtual world by its cover, which I why I'd like to hear your reactions.  Does it grind?  Is it buggy?  Does it feel coherent?  Does the micro-payment model seem to work?  But something about this video reminds me of seeing the first screenshots of World of Warcraft -- probably because they looked a lot like this.  This is free, though.

Update: Good thoughts from Rocks, Paper, Shotgun ("all things to all children") More links to thoughtful analysis would be great.

Human rights & the 'online game provider'

The Council of Europe (CoE) has developed two sets of Guidelines that seek to interpret Human Rights in an online context. On 6 May 2009 there is a Council convened workshop in Strasbourg to explore the guidelines. Prof Bartle and I (with my think tank hat on) are speaking at the meeting.

In this post I’ve provided a short background to the context of the documents and some of my views on the way that key concepts are constructed in the guidelines intended for online game providers. I think that the Council would appreciated a wide set of views on these guidelines as they seem sincere in trying to gather input from a wide set of actors, hence I post these views here to gather your comments.

The guidelines at hand are"

• “Human Rights Guidelines for Online Games Providers”
• “Human Rights Guidelines for Internet Service Providers”

Grad Student Symposium at State of Play 6

Calling all VW grad students...

I wanted to let you know that we're running a grad student symposium as part of State of Play 6.  It's going to run on the Thursday before the conference (Thu, June 18) and will feature a whole lot of discussion between students working in this area, and some of the graybeards (e.g. Mia Consalvo, Doug Thomas, Greg Lastowka, Bart Simon, Torrill Mortensen, Tom Boellstorff, Dan Hunter) who have been doing this VW thang for a while.  Details about it will follow soon, on the conference website, but I wanted to alert any VW grad students out there of a scholarship deal that we have on offer.  Details below the fold...

Third Party Beneficiaries and Other Fantastical Beasts in Virtual Worlds

My article, Anti-Social Contracts: The Contractual Governance of Virtual Worlds, just came out in the McGill Law Journal.  I profited enormously from the great discussion on Terra Nova when I first proposed the piece, so my thanks to this wonderful community.   Of course, I always learn a lot while writing a paper, and it’s that further thinking that I want to write about.   (Some of this thinking is based on or responds to Michael Risch's excellent piece, Virtual Third Parties.  I agree with him on many points and disagree on a few, but I think that he has done a fantastic job of presenting the other point of view, and the paper is very short and well worth reading.)

Medium Rare

Like a lot of World of Warcraft players, I found reports about WoW designer Jeff Kaplan's GDC critique of quest architecture in the game to be intriguing.

For one, I thought the talk was further evidence of how Blizzard's success with WoW has a lot to do with their internal corporate culture. It's clear that Kaplan's criticisms were the result of sustained attention to WoW's weaknesses and strengths by its live management team coupled with a healthy degree of honesty and confidence. Most other virtual world management teams to date have come off as much more defensive and blustering, at least in their public presentation to players, trying to bluff their way past problems and mistakes until the magnitude of such problems becomes such that the developer has no choice but to address them publically.

Like a lot of other people, I found myself quibbling with Kaplan's views of what does and does not work in World of Warcraft, sometimes because I have my own treasured beliefs about what could work if only it were implemented more effectively. Sometimes that's because I'm unrealistically wishing that WoW was something other than what it is. What Kaplan calls a "mystery quest", for example, strikes me as potentially very workable, but only in a game that's more of a dynamic environment, more of a sandbox. In WoW's extremely controlled, hand-holding design, it's perfectly true that a mystery quest just comes off as designer sadism. There's a reason why you still hear new players asking plaintively, "Where is Mankrik's wife?"

I guess I'm most struck at Kaplan's argument that World of Warcraft's quest designers have suffered from "medium envy", that they have rarely succeeded in designing quests which are native to the distinctive character and affordances of virtual worlds and digital games.

How Online Communities and Flawed Reasoning Sound a Death Knell for Qualitative Methods

Yesterday, I participated in a panel discussion in Second Life, with Celia Pearce, Thomas Malaby and Tom Boellstorff, on the roles and merits of qualitative and quantitative methods in cultural anthropology.  The audio and a text transcript will be available soon.  (I will provide a link here, as soon as they are.)  UPDATE:  You can find the transcript here.  Instead of rehashing the arguments, I would like to simply spell out my rather bleak prediction of what data-rich and easily-manipulated online communities (like virtual worlds and social networking sites) mean for the future of qualitative research in areas like anthropology that study culture.

Machinima Law at Stanford in April

Cool looking conference in April at Stanford Law about the copyright, EULAs and machinima.  Among the speakers: Henry Lowood, Lauren Gelman, Julie Ahrens, Matteo Bittanti.  More info here.

G20, we20, v-we20

Next week sees the meeting of the G20 in London and we have the opportunity to use the unique power of virtual worlds to have a voice.

[edit 29 March 09] There.com are supporting we20 by setting aside a meeting space where all Thereians can we20, see over the fold for details.

Research Methods, Culture and Virtual Worlds

Monday, March 30th at 11am Pacific Time, Tom Boellstorff, Celia Pearce, Thomas Malaby and I will be in Second Life on a panel discussing the following question:

What can qualitative and experimental methods tell us about virtual worlds and culture?

Roland Legrand of the Belgian news outlet MediaFin, and author of Mixed Realities, will moderate the panel.  Click here to get details on attending the event in Second Life.

And read on for the dramatic backstory!

Mind Bank får banktillstånd - Entropia it's a bank!

It struck me some time ago that under EU banking regulations MindArk’s Project Entropia looked a lot like a bank, or at the very least an e-money institution.

Well - now it is.

State of Play 6

 

 

On June 19–20, 2009, New York Law School’s State of Play VI Conference will convene in New York to examine the past, present, and future of virtual worlds. In conjunction with the University of Southern California’s Network Culture Project at the Annenberg School for Communication, and with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the conference will focus on the startling rise of virtual worlds and multiplayer online games, and ask whether these worlds have reached a plateau in their development.  At the same time, we will question whether we have reached a limit in our understanding of virtual worlds, and ask whether there are useful research questions still left to pursue.

 

The State of Play conferences examine the significance of virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online spaces. It continues to be the only conference series that studies these environments from multiple perspectives: commercial, academic, governmental, and technological. Six years after the founding of State of Play, this year’s conference will take stock of how we got to where we are, question whether there is anything new to say about online worlds, and ask what should be the direction of the these worlds and their study as we move forward. Multiple panel sessions are planned, along with specialist workshops, and a graduate student symposium.
We invite your participation.

 

For more information and to register, visit www.nyls.edu/stateofplay.

From the Desk of Eric Nickell

(who appears to have lost the keys to this place)

"World of Warcraft UI Add-On Development Policy Blizzard announced a WoW UI Add-On Development Policy for World of Warcraft addons today. Among other things, the policy that all addons be distributed free, unobfuscated, and it bans them from advertising in-game.

In a few short hours, a very lengthy -- and sometimes overheated -- discussion (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=15864747207&sid=1) has started to take place on the game's UI forums about everything from the causes that prompted Blizzard to take this action, to legal and moral issues surrounding such a policy, to the real-world mechanics of how some mod authors make the transfer from for-fun to for-profit addon development.

Eric Nickell"

Nomenclature

On the official World of Warcraft forums, there's a long conversation going on about the most common character names. Participants in the discussion are using the Armory to search text strings.

The thread itself is a nice demonstration of a large group of people investigating their own underlying patterns and practices. Reading the thread made me think about how interesting just the naming practices of players in virtual worlds are, in and of themselves.

Terra Novans Interviewed for Paper on MMO Research Ethics

Thomas, Constance and I (among others) were lucky enough to be interviewed for a fabulous paper by Miami University's Heidi McKee and James Porter on the ethical challenges associated with conducting research in MMO spaces. It has just been published in the International Journal of Research Ethics.  Woot!

Ludotopian

Adj. The belief that through games the world can become a better place.

European Parliament Wants One-Button MMOG Interdiction

From GamePolitics, we learn that a committee of the European Parliament wants a screen-closing red button on keyboards so parents can press it when something awful happens.  Online content is user-generated, meaning that provider censorship schemes don't work. You can't punish Verizon for things people say on Verizon cell phones. But I guess you could require Verizon to put a red button on the phone, so that a father who felt his daughter was in an awful conversation could turn the phone off before too much damage was done. Yeah. I guess you could do that.

BIG News from Great Britain: VWs Make People Lonely and Sick

Yay, a super-scientist with all sorts of opinions about virtual worlds and their ill effects.  I am SO tired of this silliness.

Here's the lead-in:

Britons' health at risk from time spent in virtual worlds, says Dr Aric Sigman
Britons could be jeopardising their health as they spend more time in virtual worlds than the real one, according to the psychologist Dr Aric Sigman.

And the conjecture:

He claims the amount of face-to-face contact people experience has fallen by two-thirds over the past two decades, from six hours a day in 1987 to just two in 2007.

At the same time, he believes the amount of time UK citizens spend sitting in front of the TV, playing video games or visiting websites has doubled to eight hours a day.

Then:

"One of the most pronounced changes in the daily habits of British citizens is a reduction in the number of minutes per day that they interact with another human being," he said.

Does he know anything at all about virtual worlds?

He goes on to cite loneliness as a major cause of ill health:

'In an article published in the journal Biologist, he cites research that claims lonely people are more likely to suffer a stroke, develop high blood pressure or dementia and even die earlier.'

Well, in my experience (and doctoral research) VWs are a massive panacea for loneliness, a lack of belonging and other societal ills.  People do NOT have to have face-to-face meetings to have meaningful and lifechanging interactions with the millions of other occupants of virtual worlds.

Any other comments?  We have had lots of discussions here about what's really happening in online spaces, and how play and various online interactions (thinking discussion boards, support groups, etc.. here) can transform people's lives.  How do we connect the dots to other disciplines, research communities, etc?  How do we make 20 hours of WoW mandatory before writing ANYTHING about VWs?  Sheesh.  I'm indignant.

My country's finest hour...

wtf?

SMH report

Current.com report

IGN report

Other People

This past weekend, I saw the film Coraline, which I found terrific in many respects. Among other things, I think it has a lot to say that applies very strongly to virtual worlds, about why though we may all complain about bad pick-up groups, griefers, loot farmers, Barrens chat, virtual worlds are not a demonstration that hell is other people. Quite the opposite: virtual worlds live (and sometimes die) on whether they infuse authentic sociality into everything we do within those worlds.

In Coraline (modest spoilers ahead), the title character is frustrated with her parents' quirks and lack of attentiveness to her. Drawn into a magical world that exists inside her new home, she is at first enchanted by her Other Parents, who have marvelous talents, live surrounded by wonder, and are utterly devoted to Coraline herself. I don't suppose I'm giving away much when I say that there's a big catch to all this, and the last portion of the film is about how wonder gives way to horror.

The only seeming clue that Coraline's Other Mother is anything but perfection is that her eyes (and the eyes of almost everything else in the magical world) are made from buttons. And yet there is another clue right from the outset, in some ways a much more unsettling sign of just how wrong this world is. Everyone and everything in it exists only for Coraline. They have no apparent interests of their own, no desires apart from hers, nothing to do but please and delight Coraline.

Virtual worlds occasionally toy with treating each player like Coraline. In World of Warcraft, my character is greeted with delight by guards and non-player characters who allude to his past adventures. This lasts only until I begin a new round of quests in a new zone, whereupon my famous achievements are forgotten and I am merely one more anonymous grunt. When my character seems to make momentous choices that should hang about him forever, those too disappear into the haze. I am torturer one moment, and the next a saint who seeks all across the world for a cure which will save the life of hero faced with enslavement to the Lich King. In my most important adventures, I exist inside wholly private instanced worlds with a small number of friends or allies. That world, too, exists only for me.

What keeps World of Warcraft or any other virtual world from being as ultimately empty and terrifying as Coraline's magical hideaway is that these worlds are full of people who do not exist for my own pleasure. They may be people I know and like, people I tolerate, people I find pathetic, people who infuriate or disgust me. But they mean that the world is not merely my mirror.

Now I think that virtual worlds themselves could function more that way: they could react to my actions (or the actions of many players together) in much more dynamic and autonomous ways. Reading Jim Rossignol describing the latest astonishing developments in the long-running war between BoB and Goonfleet in EVE Online makes that very clear. The underlying world in EVE does not exist in a one-to-one relationship to individual players, and its basic economic and politcial infrastructure transforms in relationship to collective action in some striking ways. A world which is itself a dynamic presence in play need not be as harsh or treacherous as EVE's world is, but the basic principle is an important one.

Until we have a fuller range of dynamic worlds, though, other people, acting in the most unmanaged and unfiltered ways possible, are the only thing that keep virtual worlds from total sterility. Sometimes we all feel like Coraline: we'd like a world which exists only to delight us, full of cheering throngs and valiant allies. But like Coraline, we'd be better off knowing from the first moment of that desire that we're really chasing something horrible rather than something pleasant.

GLS Conference, CFP

From the organizer of GLS:

Back by demand and now expanded to accommodate last year’s waiting list, the GLS conference this year will features substantive discussion and collaboration among academics, designers, and educators interested in how videogames –- commercial games and otherwise -– can enhance learning, culture, and education. This year’s theme of “Learning through Interaction” highlights the expansive nature of our definition of games & game culture to include research and design in areas including popular culture and fandom, interactive design more generally, and digital/visual cultures. This three-day conference will be held at the UW’s historic Memorial Union, overlooking downtown Madison's beautiful Lake Mendota.
 
Submissions deadline has been extended and all submissions are now due online by Monday March 2, 2009. Complete submission guidelines can be found on the submissions site, here.
 

###

Sean Michael Dargan
GLS Conference Coordinator
http://glsconference.org

Greenland Open Beta

A main goal of the synthetic worlds initiative at Indiana University is to develop large games as research environments. To test some ideas, we have prepared a browser-based game of kingdoms, trade, diplomacy, and warfare in the stone age. The world is called Greenland and it enters open beta today. We invite those interested in such things to help us by testing the environment and contributing reactions and criticism to the forums.

To enter Greenland, go to http://greenlandgame.com/ and choose the Mercator server (the other two servers are closed for internal testing).You will need a code to register for the server; it is GLOPENACCESS. 

If you have questions or problems, please contact our community manager Matt Falk at mfalk@umail.iu.edu.

Thank you.

These Great Urbanist Games

In a recent post I raised the idea that, like religious experience for William James, play may best be thought of as a mode of experience. Less foregrounded in that discussion was a further lesson from James: that we should expect to find this disposition in as many varieties as there are times and places for human life, rather than in some universal form. I've recently posted a paper to ssrn that aims to get us thinking about how play may be distinctively configured in different times and places, specifically in Europe directly after WWII and in the United States through the present day. In it I consider "New Babylon," the fascinating project of Unitary Urbanism by Constant Nieuwenhuys (aka Constant), who through it sought to make a city for Homo ludens. I set Constant's vision against Linden Lab's Second Life, a world also deeply informed by ideas about games and play. In both, though in quite different ways, architecting for play held the promise of post-bureaucratic sovereignty.

A Taxpayer May Wonder

Two weeks ago, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service's "taxpayer advocate," Nancy Nina Olson, announced the release of her office's annual report to Congress, a yearly federal ritual whose long and impeccable streak of unnewsworthiness was broken this year by the inclusion of an item that actually made headlines. IRS May Push for Tax Compliance in Virtual Worlds, was the Washington Post's. IRS Official Recommends Policy on Virtual World Transactions, echoed the gamers at Kotaku, and IRS Report Recommends Self-Reporting Virtual World Income, added Second Life watcher Wagner James Au at New World Notes. The stories all correctly related the basic fact of the matter: In a detailed, 13-page passage, the report urged the IRS to "proactively address emerging issues... arising from virtual worlds." And if the stories all nonetheless failed, each in its own way, to relate the real news of the matter, that's understandable, because the news here is subtle: What this report delivers, in effect, is nothing more and nothing less than official recognition that the question of virtual-goods taxation is actually, like, a question.

Gaming and Guanxi

I recently read and enjoyed a paper that has been posted to ssrn on gaming and guanxi in China, and I wanted to post about it here because this is the kind of new scholarship on online gaming that we need. Guanxi is the management of relationships of reciprocity in China, primarily through gift-giving, and it is a topic with a long history in the anthropology of China. Here, Silvia Lindtner, Scott Mainwaring, and Yang Wang accomplish what has been a relative rarity in game studies -- they give an account of how the rise of online gaming there shapes and is shaped by this longstanding cultural practice. What is really impressive about this kind of new work is that it resists two common temptations. They do not reduce online gaming there to existing cultural forms (which would be the old wine in new bottles argument), nor do they argue the exceptionalist position -- that online gaming changes everything and sweeps away the past. While I would like to see this kind of work weave in more participant observation data (the emphasis here is on interview material), this is a step forward. Highly recommended.

1984 2.0

So, in the interests of blatant self promotion, my short essay encouraging government to respect privacy interests in virtual worlds is now up at www.yalelawjournal.org.  But I wanted to take this further: I think our acquiesence to the rule of contract law in virtual worlds has come home to roost.  Bad law combined with EULAs are to blame for our loss of civil liberties in virtual worlds.  More on this admittedly controversial statement after the fold.

Serio II

[Comments are still borked. Apparently the system is receiving them, but not displaying. It's a problem with Typepad; nothing we can do directly. But I will open a new thread here to allow some commenting to continue.]

My closing thoughts: I hear what everyone is saying and I respect it. Sometimes I just have to get hit in the face with something before I see it. For example, last week my wife and I were invited by my chairman to a dinner, with another professor couple. We asked what we could bring. The chair's wife said "Nothing, just yourselves!" My wife asked me, "Well, what are we bringing?" I said "Nothing, of course. That's what she said isn't it?" My wife rolled her eyes. She got some little flowers. I rolled my eyes. We get there and the other wife had brought big flowers. My wife, whose suffering of my ways has been long and not always patient, glared at me. OK, OK, OK, finally, I get it: "Nothing" means "Flowers."

I do think the world is a better place with such things and so I respect what this community is saying about the Serio. You've convinced me; I made a mistake. Therefore I will not ignore emails that have no Serios attached. I will try to read everything I get. This is nice anyways because it also allows me to go back to Thunderbird, which I prefer to Outlook.

However, I still like the virtual game aspect of the Serio. So if someone gets an Attent account and sends me some Serios  - which you can do without Outlook - I will perk up and notice, if only because the sender seems to share my interest in virtual currency. Heck if you want Serios, just go get an account, email me a request, and I will send you some.

Serios remain on my radar. If you are someone I don't know and you really, really, really want to dialog, do the Serio thing and I promise to get to your message quickly.

Thanks everyone for your comments and if I offended, I apologize.

On The Serio

[1/13/09 there's a tech glitch with typepad right now that seems to be messing with some of the fields, including comments. we are trying to figure it out.]

A few days ago I sent an message to my distribution list (full text below the fold) telling everyone that I'm starting to sort my Inbox using a currency called the Serio. The Serio is a virtual currency that can be attached to emails. Since it is a scarce resource, I know that a message with more Serios attached means more to the person who sent it. For that reason alone, I should pay more attention to that message.

That was my reasoning. Since I sent the note out, there has been quite a lot of negative reaction. That is not all that surprising if you know much about the history of public reaction to prices - people hate them. Making things more heated in this case is the frequency with which people think that virtual is the same as digital which is then thought to be costless.  As a result, the idea of applying a price in terms of a virtual good, to ration attention, a good that has always been thought to be free, has stoked some angry discussion. The anger in turn calls for a calm reflection on what prices are, why we have them, how virtuality changes prices, and how all of these things relate to human well-being.

New Paper on UGC

Mira Burri-Nenova has just posted a working paper on SSRN: "User Created Content in Virtual Worlds and Cultural Diversity "

User created content (UCC) has often been celebrated as a grassroots cultural revolution that as a genuine expression of creativity, localism and non-commercialism can arguably also cater for a sustainable culturally diverse environment. The present article puts these claims under scrutiny and in a more differentiated manner seeks to identify the value of UCC within digital game environments considering the constraints upon players and upon creative play that these impose. The article subsequently tests whether UCC in its dynamic sense of a creative and communicative process can be seen as a channel for the promotion of cultural diversity and if so, what the State should (and could) do about this.

It is a brilliant paper.  Burri-Nenova manages to synthesize the current thinking on user-generated content and virtual worlds in wide variety of fields.  She presents a wonderfully sophisticated analysis of the policy issues presented.  (Photo Credit: Clairegren)

...and IMVU-Forterra Word Balloon battle outcome (ref Farmer)

Terra Novans, related to the Worlds.com patent story below, I thought you might be interested in Randy Farmer's blog posting today on the IMVU-Forterra "word balloon" patent lawsuit which came to a messy conclusion last year after a 2 year drama (and a full patent reexam by the USPTO). Both Randy and I worked on this case. All the documents were made public due to the reexam.

Direct URL:
http://thefarmers.org/Habitat/2008/12/the_demise_of_the_word_balloon_1.html

This case as well as the Worlds.com move are representative the sorry state of the IP/patent system and reflect the  "corrupted" nature of business, government and general bad behavior throughout today's society (for which we are finally starting to pay the price).

Sigh... hoping for change in '009.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention Randy!

Bruce

Update on Patent Wars: Worlds.com Picks a Fight

According to a story in The Register, Worlds.com made good on its promise to go after MMOG companies using its patents.  Playing the role of Mr. Potter, Worlds.com lawyers delivered a lawsuit to NCSoft on Christmas Eve, saying that NCSoft "willfully and deliberately infringed on its patent."  They are seeking "an unspecified amount of damages along with prejudgment and postjudgement interest, or 'in no event less than a reasonable royalty.'"

The Register article also notes that "the patent was filed in August 16, 1999 and granted to Worlds.com on May 4, 2004. (Note that City of Heroes was released April 2004, before the patent was issued. Lineage was released in 1998, before the patent was even filed.)"

Game as Cultural Form, Play as Disposition

I've just posted a piece to SSRN about play. In the past I have focused on games as a culturally-shaped activity (what we anthropologists would call a "cultural form"), and in the course of that I have made explicit efforts to decouple games from the concept of play (see here, for example). I argued that it is not very useful to see play as an activity, with games as a subset of it, and suggested that play more usefully denotes a disposition, a way of approaching the world.

In doing that I wasn't trying to argue that games and play are not related to each other, but rather that we need to move beyond seeing them as intrinsically linked (where the question of, for example, whether something is a game boils down to whether it brings about a playful experience). The primary motivation was to make room for an approach to games on their own terms, but the issue of play has been simmering with me for a long time. The posted essay is the result – a long-planned attempt to articulate play as a disposition.

Worlds.com Asserting Patents on Virtual Worlds

News in the blogosphere this morning (from Sean Kane's Virtual Law blog, via Virtual Worlds News) that Worlds.com, a company that was an early pioneer of virtual worlds development, but which has long been relegated to the shadows of online history, is flexing potential litigious muscle in asserting certain patents it has been awarded on key aspects affecting virtual worlds and MMOGs -- essentially, just about anything with a virtual space and an avatar. 

Gender differences: New findings, new paper

So I pull up TN and my good colleagues are concerned that there isn't much to say. Sounds to me like a good time to release some findings!

We (Mia Consalvo, Scott Caplan, Nick Yee in this case) had a paper on gender differences among MMO players accepted to the Journal of Communication yesterday, which means I am sharing those findings and a pre-release copy of the paper (based on a conference version so as not to violate copyright). Here are the highlights:

- Contrary to expectations, women are more intense players than men, on average and among the most hard-core
- When men and women play together in a relationship, the men tend to be less happy and the women more happy
- All players under-report how much they play, but the women more so
- Men play slightly (not overwhelmingly) more to beat the game, whereas women play slightly (not overwhelmingly) more for social reasons.
- Although the men think they are healthier, it is the women who actually are

Is Terra Nova Aging?

Yes it is. Things are not what they were. A reader (who may decide to de-lurk) wrote to us asking why the frequency of posts has declined. A little discussion emerged in the backchannel and it presents a moment to reflect on the blog as well as the subject matter it covers.

The gee-whiz era for virtual worlds has passed, and this changes what happens at TN.

Why this blog exists...

Many many years ago, four ne'er-do-wells became interested in a topic that was both arcane and pointless. One of the things which catalyzed their interest was an activity that was so ridiculous that it didn't seem possible. Yet this ridiculous activity formed the basis of the early work of all of the four ne'er-do-wells (and was the core of three tenure cases and one book deal).

When they looked at this ridiculous activity they noticed that there was this guy, who had this company. The guy had been a child actor in Hollywood, and had formed the company to make money doing the ridiculous activity. And this company seemed to be making a ridiculous amount of money. All of the four ne'er-do-wells met the ex-actor, and looked at his company, and simply couldn't believe their eyes.

Simply. Could. Not. Believe. Their. Eyes.

So they created a blog. They called it Terranova, and they started to look at the weird topic of virtual worlds, and the ridiculous activity of gold farming, and the ex-actor called Brock Pierce, and the company called IGE. But they never got very far, because investigating this stuff is hard, and calls for fact-checking, and is slightly dangerous. So they didn't do much with it.

But then the most talented of the founders of the blog got a commission to write a piece for Wired, providing chapter and verse on the early days of gold farming, and Brock, and IGE.

And the others read it.

And. Simply. Could. Not. Believe. Their. Eyes.

GLS Conference 5.0 Call for Papers

Games+Learning+Society 5.0: Learning Through Interaction
June 10-12, 2009 Madison, WI

The GLS conference in beautiful Madison every summer is one of the highlights of the year for many game researchers. Constance Steinkuehler, Kurt Squire, and the gang of incredibly capable GLS students somehow combine high-level discussions, fascinating presentations, and (most important) great gaming time and time again. The coming year's theme is "Learning Through Interaction," and I've put the full call for papers after the jump.