The Mapping Principle: Open for Comment
Mapping is my name for the concept that something that exists in a virtual world also exists in the real one. Of particular interest is the mapping of human behaviors. Some of these, I assume, will map while others will not. My claim is that if we knew which did and which didn't, we could use virtual worlds as social science test beds in the way that Ted and I have been agitating for for some time. I'm linking to a white paper in which I tackle this mapping idea, what we'd need to do to validate it, and a research framework for those interested. I would love to hear comments, criticisms and general feedback.
November 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (8)
Big Brother wants a cut
From the mysterious world of Guns N' Roses latest album comes this update to the tax issue covered in a previous post from Greg.
China to tax virtual profit at 20%: Story from the Wall St. Journal.
The mind boggles at the enforcement issue.
November 4, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (9)
Lessons, virtualized
In "Fifty days and worlds apart", the weight of comment concluded that politics (and perhaps "ideology") is a factor in game world design. A succinct illustration is offered by Russell Robert's 2005 essay "The Lessons of Monopoly", whose message is plain: "In Monopoly, landlords are parasites that eventually drive everyone into bankruptcy. And bankruptcy is like death. Game over."
Monopoly, of course, is a Great Depression game (1935) in tune with popular viewpoints of that time. Stock market and economics games tied to the real world (but fictionalized into a game) are widely used in education; the Wall Street Journal has an article of students learning recent lessons. Modern video games, however, offer more design freedom. Yet, for discussion, one might claim that there are few models beyond simplistic ones.
November 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (4)
(Virtual) Virtual Worlds Symposium: The Future of Retail in Virtual Worlds and Web 3D
My good friend John Eyles is an educator, philanthropist and activist, and also leads research and alliance efforts at Telecom New Zealand. He is organizing this symposium to explore possibilities for retail endeavors in virtual worlds (ideally imagining possibilities beyond the usual brick and mortar simulacra). I am doing a session on mobile gaming and virtual worlds (a la Parallel Kingdom, which launches Oct 31st), and he is also looking for some more contributors for other sessions that might be of interest, or inspire some new thinking in this area.
It's Oct. 29th - 31st, running for 30 hours so people world-wide can participate.
More information at http://www.futuretelco.net. Schedule, etc. is forthcoming.
October 27, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)
Scientists: Spore Sucks
Everybody wants to use evolutionary mechanisms in new media. There are folks who program little AI bots and let them evolve. I feel this is misguided in that a pre-programmed AI is never going to mutate the way a real entity would. Automata are never going to come up with molotov cocktails and IEDs. A virtual world, I've argued, is the best way to get the emergent/evolutionary thing going: replace the programmed automata with people. You'll get plenty of little nasties you never anticipated.
Now, Spore was supposed to give us an an example of how much better this strategy would be. In Spore, real people were going to make creatures that would survive or die out. But the Spore we eventually got doesn't do that, Science reports. Basically, Spore sucks. They didn't make a virtual world in which everybody's animals had to survive in competition over scarce resources. They made a toy.
OK. So look, just make a virtual world with the people as the entities. You'll get evolution.
October 24, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (21)
Virtual Crime Update
Two tales recently spotted about international virtual mischief -- and real arrests -- after the fold...
October 23, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (8)
VERN Gets Bigger
Our friends at the Virtual Economy Research Network in Finland have added a bunch of content and launched a new strategy for reporting developments in virtual goods, RMT, business models, and more. Their bibliography is already the best in the business. Already worth a high-priority bookmark, VERN's future seems ever brighter. See this post for details.
October 23, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Game changer?
There has been much said on game-centric sites about an “Obama for President” billboard advertisement placed in the Xbox 360 racing game Burnout Paradise; it is a paid official campaign advertisement. GamePolitics(.com) posts are representative early discussion on this topic. Frankly, however, I am wondering what the fuss is about.
October 18, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (9)
Correcting Reality
For almost all MMOs, one of the first things you have to decide when creating a character is the gender of that character. Is it male or female?
Also for almost all MMOs, the choice is of importance only cosmetically (it affects how the avatar looks) or socially (people typically treat male and female characters differently).
What about tangible, in-world differences, though? Jaw-dropping mistakes aside, there usually are none. Male and female characters are identical in all respects. Neither is stronger. Neither is faster. Neither is nimbler. Clothes that fit one fit the other. They're identical.
In real life, however, men and women are not identical. Neither are people of different races (skin colour trades off creating vitamin D against resisting skin cancer). There are advantages and disadvantages. These are not, however, reflected in the implementation of MMOs.
Are MMOs correcting reality by ignoring these differences? Or are they painting a false picture?
Here's a question that may help focus the discussion. Suppose that a new MMO is coming out with a medieval fantasy setting, in which characters can have children so players can establish their own dynasties. Do male characters get to give birth to babies, or is it restricted only to female characters?
Richard
October 17, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (57)
Whither MMO economies?
CBBC, one of our longtime commentators, asked a question by email which seemed worth asking here:
My question -- and do forward it along -- is: What now for virtual economies? What happens to Eve now that Iceland's economy is collapsing?
Long ago, I asked in a Terra Nova link-mail, what influence (or lack of it) Eve had on the value of the ISK. That was when I thought Terra Nova was a hip economist hangout. Nobody wants to identify themself as an economist anymore, so I suppose you are all social scientists. Okay. What now? Will my WoW gold be worth more or less? Will games go under taking their value with them? Will we see a run on games the same as a run on banks?
October 13, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (24)
Protecting Virtual Playgrounds: The Home Version!
You can access the archive of last week's symposium, "Protecting Virtual Playgrounds: Children, Law, and Play Online," here. Plus, you can see Robert Bloomfield and yours truly do a little postmortem of the conference on Metanomics, here. Additional must-see-videofeed: Ted Castronova showed how virtual worlds could cause the end of the human race, because virtual sex could get so good that we stop having children. In short, much fun was had by all--more below the fold.
October 10, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (7)
Professionals See Their Future in Second Life
Following up on the great survey work by Dmitri Williams and others, posted recently on Terra Nova, I have just posted some results from a survey in Second Life. Social Research Foundation, a non-profit organization, conducted the study, and my analysis is now available at Metanomics.
This is a "panel survey," so it does need to be taken with a grain of salt--these are the first 1258 respondents from a group of 11,000 Second Life residents who have agreed to participant in lots of surveys, focus groups, etc.
My headline for this analysis comes from one of the most interesting results of the survey: people who are using Second Life primarily for professional reasons predict that they will be using Second Life more in 2009 than they are in 2008. Those who use Second Life for personal reason also project increases in Second Life use, but not as strongly. Among professionals, those seeing increased use outnumber those seeing decreased use by 4.4 to 1, compared to "only" 2.6 to 1 for personal users
There are other results that could have also served as a headline, such as "Second Life Residents May Be More Interested in Your Brand Than You Thought," or "Getting Harder to Find Good Paid Work--and Good Workers--in Second Life." But the professional/personal twist seemed the most surprising to me.
October 6, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (7)
Mundie on Skinnable World
Ian Lamont, who was kind enough to guest-author here a while back, alerts us to some recent comments of Craig Mundie from Microsoft. Mundie is apparently a bit under-enthused about virtual worlds as separate spaces. But, on the other hand, he is excited about virtual worlds as augmented reality overlays. So said he at MIT's EmTech Conference recently:
Mundie noted that Microsoft is counting on the creation of a 3D "parallel universe" modeled with tools like Photosynth. However, he dismissed the potential of social virtual worlds that include user-modeled objects. "Many people are familiar with Second Life, which is a synthetic virtual world that people came quite enamored with," Mundie said. "Our view was that there was a fairly limited audience who was willing to deal with the construction of avatars and operating in that virtual space."
October 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (8)
Parsing Philip Rosedale
I had a chance to interview Philip Rosedale earlier this month, leading to a broad set of posts by bloggers who follow virtual worlds (and Second Life) pretty closely. You can see the whole thing here (with links to the analysis by Christian Renaud, Nic Mitham, Wagner James Au, Ben Duranske, Bettina Tizzy, Roland Legrand, and Dusan Writer), but after the break I include some of the more interesting quotes.
We are going to be talking about it today at noon pacific time. You can watch online, and participate in backchat, without going into Second Life, here.
September 29, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)
Special IT Journal Issue on Virtual Worlds
San Murugesan recently e-mailed to let me know that the Cutter IT Journal has a special issue on the subject of virtual worlds. His introduction to that issue is here. A PDF of the entire issue can be acquired for free (with registration) here.
It is an interesting mix of articles. It covers the full spectrum of virtual worlds -- from games to kids worlds to Second Life. The articles present a balanced approach. In particular, they are generally positive, with caveats, about the future of the 3D Web and commerce. At the same time, they are fairly critical of the success of virtual worlds to date in living up to their initial promises.
September 24, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Escort derails coverage of science museums in 'Second Life'
First, the disclaimer: I work for Village Voice Media. Village Voice Media runs the Westword. The Westword ran this story on science museums in Second Life. Yes, I'm practicing both partiality and blatant (semi)self-promotion. Now that that's out of the way...
As I reported over on Heartless Doll, we have here another feature piece on Second Life that gets derailed by the decadence factor. It can't seem to focus on the story at hand: namely, that science is finding a home in a world where the welcome lack of safety concerns leaves room for education. Specifically, the article highlights the creation of science museums, like the in-world branch of San Francisco's Exploratorium, that let visitors approach learning in the form of rides that would be too dangerous or costly to build in real life. In addition, there's talk of a replica nuclear reactor, which could serve as a practice tool for those preparing to work with the real thing.
That's all downright fascinating -- especially the part about the people who'll hold the key to our future nuclear safety looking for virtual analogs -- but this piece looses its focus from the beginning, spending its first eight paragraphs ogling a Second Life escort who happens to walk through one science center. Yes, she's "hot." Yes, she's wearing knee-high boots. But wasn't there a story being told here? Not to put down the Westword for their valiant effort, but it's about time that the hook behind virtual world coverage is no longer addiction, or crazy avatars, or sex. Not that I don't like sex, because you all know I do, but because there's more to talk about here than favors being exchanged for Linden dollars...
September 18, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (7)
Won't Get Spooked Again
Via Wired comes this bit of news about the Pentagon's fears that WoW (specifically) could be used to organize a terrorist attack. This isn't the first time intelligence agencies have considered what implications virtual worlds have for terrorism, and noting this ongoing interest on their part is just something we've gotten in the habit of doing around here. What does catch one's eye about this one is the level of detail provided in the simulated WoW scenario (check out the screenies). Does this change our assessment of their risk assessment?
September 15, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (15)
Fifty days and worlds apart
In fifty-and-some days we will see the conclusion of a two year U.S. presidential selection process. Temperatures have been rising as we draw near the end. Rather than finding a new means of arguing one's way into someone else's bubble, perhaps the partisan could profit from an altogether new method of persuasion. I wonder whether an MMORPG can have a political ideology, either by design or by accident.
September 13, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (18)
Protecting Virtual Playgrounds Symposium
On Friday, Oct. 3, the Washington and Lee University School of Law (in scenic Lexington, Virginia) will gather a range of top thinkers to discuss the regulatory future of children's worlds in a one-day symposium.
Our own Ted Castronova, Greg Lastowka, Robert Bloomfield and yours truly will be there. We hope you can all come! More information (and registration forms) at law.wlu.edu/virtualplaygrounds, or below the fold.
September 10, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)
Buying Spore, or just renting?
I admit I haven't yet picked up a copy of Spore (beginning of the school year and all) but I figured it was being released to universal acclaim, sales, yada yada. And of course all of the pre-release information hyped the game to no end, and fans seemed, well, fanatic, about getting their hands on the game. What a difference a day or two makes. Check out the review scores for Spore on Amazon's site. As of my writing this, there are 1840 1-star reviews of the game. Why?
September 10, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (33)
Who plays, how much, and why? Answers.
As some on this list know, my research group has been working on a joint project with Sony Online Entertainment for the last two years. This collaboration has enabled our team to collect virtual world data on--as far as we know--an unprecedented scale. SOE has let us access the full data logs generated and collected by the world Everquest II.
This is one of those "be careful what you ask for" moments in science. We asked for everything, and many terabytes later, found ourselves hosting and analyzing massive data on supercomputers at NCSA. SOE also let us do a large-scale survey of their player base. Although there have been good surveys of virtual world populations done in the past, this is the first that took place within the game engine and with the help of the developer. As a result, it does not have the self-selection issues that the first such surveys have had, and the response rate was impressive.
This post will share the first of what we expect to be a dozen or more papers on virtual world behaviors. As the first, it's the broadest, but I suspect will be of interest and use to the wider virtual world community. You can find the full text of this first paper here, at the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, with no access restrictions.
More below the fold . . .
September 5, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (47)
Habbo Spending Cap
The LA Times recently mentioned an interesting feature of Habbo. Apparently, Sulake does not permit Habbo Users to spend more than $35 per month on clothes and furni for their rooms.
According to the reporter, about 10% of Habbo Users spend $17 a month buying virtual stuff. So, if I can do a little math (which is dubious), Habbo has 100 million users registered, but on its website reports only 10 million "unique visitors" a month. Still, this means ($17 x 1M) = $17 million a month spent on virtual stuff in Habbo. So, for a year (x 12) that's a little over $200 million a year selling pixels to kids -- maybe approaching about 1/3 (or so) of what WoW is making. Since I haven't looked at the actual financials (and usually only do math in private), feel free to correct me with a better number.
But however many kids are paying them, the fact that Sulake is making money this way isn't really news. It's the price limit I find interesting and the curious comment of Teemu Huuhtannen: "We really don't want teenagers to spend more than the price of two movie tickets a month on Habbo." That's followed by Alex Pham (the reporter) making the observation:
If turning down money seems un-American, it is. Sulake's Scandinavian origins meant it grew up in a market that heavily favors consumers' rights.
September 5, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (14)
State of the Diku 2008
It is well understood that the game structures and mechanics that undergird most commercial virtual worlds today draw their underlying DNA from Diku-style text-based MUDs, though many contemporary players have only experienced the latest iterations or forms of those game mechanics. Many of these features are now so familiar and expected, so much a part of the grammar of play activity, that developers seem to implement them without asking what purpose or role they will serve in a particular gameworld. Moreover, precisely because these features have become so foundational, it seems difficult to think of new approaches or game mechanics, even those that offer only a mild twist. But even a single such innovation can do a lot to spark new interest among players.
By way of illustration, a look at two such mechanics in two fairly new commercial virtual worlds, Age of Conan and Warhammer Online. (The latter is approaching open beta, with a release later in September 2008, but the NDA has been lifted .)
August 28, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (38)
YouTube Social VWs Tour
Gary Hayes recently posted a video tour of over fifty social virtual worlds -- his blog entry here (with some commentary). I had not seen many of these before. This is a neat resource to get a few seconds of introduction to what some of these spaces look like.
The video is embedded after the fold.
August 27, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3)
[speechless]
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4557935.ece
August 20, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (12)
Q&A with Google Lively's User Experience Designer
Apparently my gripes over Google Lively's frustrating whisper chat were heard all the way in the kingdom of Google. After posting them here at Terra Nova I received an email from Lively's User Experience Designer, Mark Young. We got to chatting about what was and wasn't working in Google's new virtual world, user-interface-wise, and Young agreed to a little Q&A. The results are posted here for anyone interested in how interface design develops in a world like Lively -- or just anyone who's comforted to know that, yes, Google hears your gripes:
Q: What's your role on Google's User Experience Design/Lively teams?
A: I'm a User Experience Designer on the Apps team, which includes people working on Gmail, Calendar, Talk, Blogger, Reader, Docs, Sites, Picasa, Orkut and more. I am the UX designer on the Lively team.
Q: What criticisms have you been hearing most about Lively's UI?
A: Crashes, problems logging in and lag were the biggest complaints initially. The engineering team has been working furiously to solve those, making great progress which should show up in client updates shortly...
August 15, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)
The Latest on the Virtual Tax
Professor Theodore P. Seto of Loyola Law School has the latest entry into the debate over the virtual tax question. You can find it here. Here's the abstract:
August 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (8)
On Emoticon Flirting
Not to bring down the general caliber of academic discussion currently going on here at Terra Nova, but :).
I recently wrote a feature for a new Village Voice Media pop culture blog I co-anchor called "Top 10 Emoticons for Flirting Online with Minimal Effort." Silly though the piece may be, it brings up some hopefully interesting points about the shifted meanings of what appear to the untrained eye as simple ASCI faces. Much like the socially normalizing LOL, which can supposedly save the dignity of even Second Life players sitting naked in their lawn chairs, emoticons take on new, adapted meanings in online, multiuser environments.
Any additional meanings to add?
August 11, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (10)
Structures of Governance
From a governance perspective – what the key structural differences between Virtual Worlds and the Internet and what does this mean for national governments?
August 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (28)
Rigorous Analysis of RMT
Courtesy of Richard Heeks of University of Manchester, everything currently known with any confidence about gold farming is reported here, without any apparent agenda.
August 3, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (10)
The Virtual Data Collection Interface
In collaboration with the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) in the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), the SWI at Indiana University has developed a tool for collecting survey data within Second Life. The usual protocol with such surveys is to attract respondents in-world and then send them to a web page to complete the survey. This is a poor protocol because it causes attrition and breaks immersion. It is usually necessary, however, because objects in SL usually cannot serve questions quickly and clearly enough. The Virtual Data Collection Interface (VDCI) is an SL object that optimizes question delivery and data retention so that the respondent experience is very close to the typical experience with web surveys. It allows respondents to quickly complete surveys while remaining in-world. We think it is the only tool in SL with this feature, but maybe one is out there and we just haven't heard of it.
The VDCI draws on existing formal survey protocols developed by scholarly survey-creation experts. It extends these protocols into the virtual realm, creating a new protocol that can be termed Virtual Assisted Self-Interviewing (VASI). VASI represents an early step into the future of rigorous in-world data collection from users of virtual worlds.
This working paper describes both the protocol and the tool. Questions or comments? The corresponding author on this project is Mark W. Bell (typewritermark 8t gmail d0t com).
July 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)
Do Virtual Worlds Ever Fail?
Do virtual worlds ever fail?
This seems a simple question if you answer it in purely commercial terms. As products, some virtual worlds fail completely, never even making it to the marketplace. (I was astonished to see that the developers of Atriarch still claim that the game is forthcoming, but there are at least a few designs and products that have been announced by developers or publishers and then definitively cancelled.)
July 28, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (14)
Arden: Final Results
The results of the Arden project are available in a working paper here. The working paper has also been submitted to a journal for peer review.
Summary: In a fantasy game setting, we made two equivalent worlds and set the price of potions to be higher in one than in the other. We found that people bought fewer potions when they were more expensive.
Discussion: The result suggests that people in fantasy games act in an economically normal way. Perhaps these game worlds can be used to study real economic behavior.
The results are based on an environment that was significantly more fun to play than the first one we made and represents the completion of the Arden project. My thanks go to the MacArthur Foundation for their early trust, their support through hard times, and of course the funding that made the study possible. I'd also like to thank the Bioware corporation for allowing us free use of Neverwinter Nights.
You can download the game environments we used for the study here.
July 24, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (18)
Rock on
Commuting today, I listened to "Once Naked For Nirvana, Now A Teen Spirit" on National Public Radio (NPR). It is the account of Spencer Elden who - when a mere infant - was photographed on the cover of Nirvana's 1991 album, Nevermind. Now, age seventeen, he offered a few thoughts, including some about his generation. As I have kids somewhere between his generation and this one - I am genuinely interested in his angst (from NPR):
"Life in general isn't quite as "cool" as it was when he jumped naked in the pool in the early '90s, though, he says. These days, his peers are too stuck on the Internet and video games... These days, Elden says, his peers concentrate on "playing Rock Band on Xbox, like, that's not a real band! That's the difference between the '90s and kids nowadays; kids in the '90s would actually go out and make a [real] band!"
Every generation has their doubts, some individual, some more general. I am too removed from his to have trustworthy insight, but that merely intrigues me.
Are video games really undermining (garage) rock band culture?
July 23, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (12)
Making an Environment Conducive to Cybersex
Since it's release last week, Google Lively has been getting a decent amount of attention for being a bit "too lively." At any given time a handful of rooms on the constantly updating popular rooms list are sexual in nature. Some example: "Bears: Gay bears and cubs. Hairy men,” “Pussy room. Let’s talk about…sex,” “Europe Sex Friends: Have Fun and Meetings in Real Life.” At first glance it would appear that Lively--which is little more than a 3D chat program--has already become a cybersex haven.
Heading into Lively for cybersex reveals another story, however. I write a weekly cybersex advice column for The Village Voice, so I'm often exploring new locales for internet trysts. Having heard about Lively's liveliness, I was excited to settle in with the new world this past weekend. To my disappointment, despite trying a number of rooms and a number of chat partners, I could never get a proper session of cybersex going.
July 16, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (13)
Blizzard Wins v. WoWGlider
A big ruling for Blizzard, as noticed over at Virtually Blind -- where the opinion can also be found. We discussed this case here previously. (NB: Ted is working as an expert for Blizzard.)
Before some comments on the ruling, I should say that I really enjoy reading these early opinions on virtual worlds and law just to see how courts summarize basic facts. For instance, check out how the court summarizes arguments by Blizzard and MDY about the nature of suit--as far as I know, this is the first time a federal court has described gold farming in a judicial opinion:
July 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (42)
Practicing trust
I know this is blindingly obvious, but it’s only really just struck me that one of the things that virtual worlds and game worlds / MMOs do is provide a forum for us to externalize and rehearse largely positive trust relations. Which I think is one plank in an argument that MMOs can be a positive force.
July 11, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (12)
SL Bar Association meeting
The Second Life Bar Association wanted me to let TN readers know that they have a meeting on Virtual Worlds Legal Issues given by David Naylor aka Solomon Cortes from Field Fisher Waterhouse (yes and actual UK lawyer talking about Second Life).
As this is law about SL, by lawyers that know about SL, actually in SL, it seemed well worth a post. This is part of a series by the Second Life Bar Association and can be booked here, more details:
When: 15 July 2008, 12 noon (Pacific Daylight Time)
Where: slurl.com/secondlife/Malfelonius/209/69/61
Who to contact for more info: Cat Galileo, Geri Kuhn
July 11, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Google Lively
(thx, Lum)
News coverage here (via Google). My comments below.
If you try it out, feel free to rearrange the furniture in our coffee shop, embedded below...
July 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (45)
In search of Afunakwa
Last year on Terra Nova, I posted on EVE Online that gave mention of Battlezone, the classic 1980 video game. Battlezone 1980, however, was a waystation, that led to a more robust connection from a more recent past, Battlezone II (1999, Pandemic Studios). The connection to now is Matt Harding, who by his account was:
"a 30-year-old deadbeat from Connecticut who used to think that all he ever wanted to do in life was make and play videogames. He achieved this goal pretty early and enjoyed it for a while, but eventually realized there might be other stuff he was missing out on. In February of 2003, he quit his job in Brisbane, Australia and used the money he'd saved to wander around the planet until it ran out..."
He did, and the rest is prolog.
July 5, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)
Welcome to Bruce Damer
We're very pleased to announce that Bruce Damer,
a well-known virtual world pioneer who has been a guest author here
(twice) has accepted our invitation to join us as a regular author.
Below is a short bio about Bruce's past work in virtual worlds, but
there's much more to be found on his website.
July 3, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (4)
Pssst...Hey, Mac!
So Age of Conan seems to have opened strong, and I'm eager to play it, I guess. I'm not a big fan of the Conan series, but I really miss gritty realism after so long in cartoony WoW, and everything I've heard about the class design has piqued my interest. I even got it for Father's Day. But that was, what, three weeks ago? Why haven't I gotten in touch with my inner barbarian? In short, it's because there's no Mac client, and that leads me to ask a question of the wiser industry-savvy types around here. In the current moment, is not designing your big budget MMO for easy Mac use a Grade A blunder?
July 2, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (28)
Virtually Eternal: A Positive Pathway to a Healthy and Sustainable Virtual Worlds Industry?
With grateful thanks to John Hengeveld of Intel and others for many concepts and wording
Heady Times for Early Adopters
The early years of a technology is frequently characterized by a boisterous cacophony of players. Each player has a dream, but to realize that dream, they have to build everything from the ground up and develop their own platforms. Early consumers of technologies are limited to a small group blessed with the patience, wealth or time (or all of the above) to deal with the gaps in these home grown gadgets to get something to work. Automobiles went through this phase as did personal computers. The medium of Virtual Worlds finds itself there now.
Slowly, through gradual or mass extinction, industry players disappear or merge together and one or more monopoly powers emerge. Concentration of resources and marketing prowess then creates the basis for mass adoption. This happened in the 1930s with the telephone company once affectionately known in the USA as Ma Bell.
The close cousin of virtual worlds, online game worlds, finds itself further down the road to maturity with several big commercial successes under its belt. Game play worlds have settled into a model not unlike the film studio system of the 1920s, with aggregation of talent around big projects producing a few “hits” generating large returns. The game world studios must always be working on the next potential hit as current box office returns fade to black.
Stuck on Max Headroom Island
July 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (19)
Virtual Policy ‘08
As many TN readers know I’ve recently formed a think tank to look at public policy issues and virtual worlds, it’s called the Virtual Policy Network (tVPN). The point of it is to bring together academics, industry and policy makers in local, regional and global dialog.
As part of the usual thinky tanky things tVPN is creating and supporting a range of conferences and is kicking of a number of research projects.
And so to the point of this post: I wanted to make TN readers aware of a possibly the first UK based conference focused purely on public policy and virtual worlds. Snappily titled Virtual Policy the event is on the 22nd & 23rd of July in London at the Department of Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform’s (BERR) conference center. BERR are co-sponsors of the event and it’s quite inspiring to have a central government department so involved in debates over virtual worlds.
Here is the event sign up page: virtualpolicy08.eventbrite.com
The event features some of your TN favorites such as Richard Bartle, Bryan Camp oh and me; as well as a number of Europeans that might not be so familiar such as lawyers David Naylor of Field Fisher Waterhouse in the UK and Dr. Andreas Lober of Schulte Riesenkampff in Germany.
I can’t bring myself to do a pure promo post though. What interests me about this event is that much of the debate about virtual worlds that one sees in academia, at least, has been driven by the US. This means that North American issues, rhetoric and sensibilities have been given primacy. Hosting an event in the UK should help to flush out those areas where Europeans either don’t think an issue is important or have a very different framing of it.
What do TN readers think the main points of departure are going to be?
June 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)
Gender Differentials in Age of Conan
This month, a number of my colleagues in VW research have disappeared from WoW in favor of the shiny-new Age of Conan game, and I'd heard a lot of rave reviews from them. I'd also been encouraged before the release by one of their trailers, which showed a kick-ass female toon.
Yesterday, however, I received this email from my RIT colleague Jessica Bayliss:
As some of you are aware, I've been playing Age of Conan for the past few weeks. It's an interesting MMO with some different things from the standard WoW.Apparently, they have also gender biased their MMO against female characters and according to various reports from the people who played beta, it was a known problem a while ago.
Female animations are slower than the male animations for the attacks of the dual wielding assassin. It is unknown if this effects other class archetypes or not, but I'm guessing it would effect any dual wielding class. Since the female can't attack again until the animation is done, that means that females do less damage than male assassins. And yes, the timing difference is visually noticeable.
There's a video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-C4z-pTrIII wasn't sure that I completely believed it and so I timed it myself. The male is definitely faster than the female and it is as noticeable as it looks in the video.
The latest we've heard from Funcom itself is that they are "looking into" the issue. Meanwhile, I sit and wonder how something like that could have possibly gotten through QA.
When I asked Jessica's permission to post her email here, she also asked me to add the following:
A link that puts together some discussions of the problem: http://forums-us.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=55674Funcom's current admission that there might be a problem and that it's
not intended to work that way: page 10 of the link aboveAnd the latest joke about the bias: http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=105819
Suddenly I'm not feeling quite so bad that AoC won't run on my MacBook Pro...
June 26, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (24)
Call for Papers: Culture of Virtual Worlds
A bit of self-promotion for a special issue I'm co-editing with Mark Bell for the new Journal of Virtual Worlds Research. Feel free to contact me if you have questions about what/when/how to submit a piece, and please consider sending something in.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research
Special Issue: Culture of Virtual Worlds
Deadline: September 30, 2008
Publication Date: November 20, 2008
Guest Editors
Mark Bell, Indiana University
Mia Consalvo, Ohio University
* jvwresearch.org *
Early users of virtual worlds trumpeted their potential to bring together like-minded groups to create community, to encourage social activism, and to explore facets of identity. Over the past 20 years, we have seen virtual worlds develop from text-based to graphical, and from 2D to 3D interactive spaces. Some spaces have focused primarily on game-related activities, from MUD through Ultima Online and World of Warcraft, while others have concentrated on social aspects of being, allowing users to define their own goals, and often create many parts of the spaces they inhabit--from LambdaMoo to The Palace and Second Life. Virtual worlds have also become big business at the same time as some worlds remain resolutely tied to different goals. Yet what of the cultures that have grown up in, around, and through virtual worlds in this same time period? What do we know about that culture, or more accurately, those cultures and how to define them?
June 25, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3)
Patenting Virtual Commerce
Last week I received the following email from an officer of the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO):
I am a Patent Examiner at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office in the area of Business Methods, Finance. I am the examiner of record of multiple patent applications (20+) involving virtual worlds and different types of credit accounts, charge accounts, escrow transactions, risk mitigation (to name a few) used within these worlds….I am looking for references from 2004 and earlier. A published paper, game manual, or even a detailed blog entry that details the economic system / banking system / shopping / business creation in a MMORPG (especially Second Life) would be amazingly helpful.
As a relative newcomer to virtual worlds (I started writing on these matters in May of 2007), I promised I would pass on this challenge to Terra Novans. But I can’t help also asking for opinions on a few aspects of the patents that raise some pretty interesting issues. More background and gory details below the fold, if you dare. (There are a LOT of details).
June 21, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (8)
Onion satire
The Onion News Network is known for its satire. Recently it produced a video that has become well known on video game sites on the Web: "Warcraft' Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing 'Warcraft.' If satire is militant irony (paraphasing Northrope Frye, merci Wikipedia), what exactly is it satirizing, if anything?
June 19, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (6)
A New Virtual World Winter?
(editor's note: find a brief bio of Bruce Damer from his March 2007 guest column)
Its been just over a year since my last guest posting and in that time we have put some real beef into the Virtual Worlds Timeline effort. The team led by Henrik Bennetson and Henry Lowood at Stanford will soon start ingesting hundreds of hours of video and other material produced by a number of people during the mid to late 1990s virtual worlds early-adopter "boom" (a veritable "Cambrian Explosion" of VW platforms happened in 1995-96). Our archival efforts took us back even further with Chip Morningstar's digitization of a superb LucasFilm piece about Habitat produced in 1986. This is also going into the VW timeline project (thanks Chip & Randy!) and you can get a preview of it here on Google Video.
But this column is not about looking back, but about looking forward to the future, especially where this current Virtual Worlds boom may be going. The key question I would like to pose the community is: are we already seeing the early sign of a Virtual Worlds downturn that may lead to a "winter" as severe as the one in the period 2000-2003? The second logical question is: if this is so, what can we do to head off or reduce the slope of a new downturn? If the infamous "chasm" lies before us, and not back in 2000-2003, then what can we do to sling a rope bridge over it?
June 6, 2008 |