Terra Nova

NCSoft EULA Provisions Ignored

Edward Castronova

User thoreau (thanks!) notes this story about a man suing NCSoft over the hours he poured into Lineage II. The company argued that he abandoned his right to sue by signing the EULA. The Court disagreed.

What does it mean?

Government 1.5

Edward Castronova

Over at GovLoop, Benjamin Strong is mad as hell. Workers in Federal Agencies are still forbidden from using most of the new social media tools. This means they can't participate in the pro- part of prosumer. Mutatis mutandis they're going to face problems launching anything virtual world-ish, be it MMPOG or MSPOG. It's not impossible, its just that anything they do will require approval from way up top - which defeats the value of open production.

One of the more reasonable grounds for opposing the expansion of government influence is the repeated experience that government actors, exposed to the political winds, tend to build houses of stone. As technology unleashes its earthquakes with increasing frequency, stone goes from being a nice protection from the howling wolves to a rather vulnerable crypt-in-the-making.

Job Announcement

Edward Castronova

The Telecommunications Department at Indiana University is hiring at the tenure-track Assistant Professor level. The announcement is here.

The announcement is rather vanilla - it is an open-field, best-horse-in-the-race search. However, I can report from the inside that the department seems very much in the mood to bet on horses with skin tones reflecting games, social media, and virtual worlds. There's also an interest in advertising and health communications.

Method is somewhat open. We're a social science department with a media production wing. Scholars whose work has no systematic empirical component will be facing an uphill battle. Production applicants face the usual and oft-bemoaned hurdle that you must have a PhD or an MFA to apply. Other than that, though, the search is open to all kinds of disciplinary approaches: Psychology, Anthro, Law, Policy, Economics, Political Science, whatever.

Bloomington is a fantastic place to live and the department is a friendly, warm, dare I say happy group. They often say that they want people with 'spark.' More than any in recent memory, this seems to be a pure 'spark' search. What's spark? Like many good things, its intangible, but the core idea I guess is a combination of imagination and analytics. The concept is not well-represented by this or this. It's more like this or this or this. 

If interested, please apply, and if you have questions, send me an email!

An MMO Manifesto from the Guild Wars 2 Team

Lisa Galarneau

^{Disclaimer: I confess to being a fangirl of NCSoft, publishers of City of Heroes, which I studied  for about 5 years.  They have also published the Lineages, the original Guild Wars and Aion.}

So...

The intrepid warriors from NCSoft and ArenaNet are presaging the pre-holiday beta launch of Guild Wars 2 with a declaration of independent thinking. More on that in a sec.

First off, let's review its pre-cursor, the original Guild Wars. What made it obsession-worthy?

- accessible to the 'casual', newbie MMO gamer.
- highly instanced combat (Sir Richard cringed).
- grouping that includes NPC mercenaries.
- very beautiful emotes like the Monk's dance.  Amazing landscapes, architecture, everything.
- alternative play modes allowing high-level play for the low-level n00b.
- observer mode: enjoy the gank gladiator-style, you emerge un-scathed.
- 'no loot stealing, spawn camping, and endless travel'.
- guild capes  (I confess to leaving guilds if they had ugly designs that didn't match my outfits.  How shallow of me!)

I have more than a few opinions about what an exciting, 21st century MMO might encompass.  Happy to say it appears that true evolution is in the works.  Deviations/expansions of established MMO conventions in Guild Wars 2:

- Doing away with the grind.  Not all will agree this is a good thing, but as my kid says, there is nothing worse than a videogame that is both 'hard and BORING'.
- New character classes (professions) like the Ranger.
- Personalized story-lines.  NPCs remember you.  You are not on the exact same quest path as everyone else, with the same goals, outfits, spells, items, etc. at the same levels.
- Cause and effect prevail, personal agency is paramount.  Changes you effect on the environment persist.
- Dynamic events, a mechanic that has worked very well for CoX.
- PvP in non-zoned, non-instanced areas.  Huge-scale world vs world combat events.
- Variations on healing and death rituals.

And for the techno-geeky among you, it's all being built on a new physics engine, Havok,  that allows the designers and developers to more fully realize their conceptual vision:

We're creating a world, and what's the point of exploring a world if there isn't the awe and wonder, you know? We try to create those moments of awe and wonder. - Jeff Grubb, ArenaNet

For those of you who don't readily embrace change, Guild Wars servers will continue running, and an ongoing free trial is on offer.

Any predictions on the effect on social dynamics, innovations that are likely to stick, etc?  Other games trying new things? My kid, for instance, is obsessed with Wizards 101, a pay-for-stuff-the-kid-MUST-have MMO that creates accessibility and safety for the semi-literate aspiring gamer.

I think things are about to get very exciting in Videogame Land. To over-use an over-used term, epic!

More on GW2:

• The official website.
• Wikipedia is chock-full of up-to-the-minute details.
• Guild Wars 2 Community Hub (wiki, blog, video - share, share, share! - talk to devs and they will listen!)
• The art of Guild Wars 2, in coffee-table-book-format. (when you can't stand to look at your computer anymore)
• A playable demo of the game is available at Gamescom 2010 (August 19 until August 22, 2010). Another playable demo will be available at PAX, from September 3-5.

PlayOn is dead. Long live PlayOn!

Nicolas Ducheneaut

It is my great pleasure to announce that, after a self-imposed hiatus in our data collection and analysis, the PlayOn project at PARC is back thanks to renewed funding. While we are still focused on large-scale, quantitative data collection in World of Warcraft, this second phase of the project introduces a few interesting changes.

The first phase of the project relied on automated robots to log into the game world and collect a census of the entire population of five game servers. We used this data to analyze, among other things, general play patterns in the game, social interactions between the players, and finally the structure, performance, and social life of guilds. This time however, we are moving away from server-wide analysis to tracking the activities of volunteer participants. Roughly 1,000 players have signed up to participate in our study and provided socio-demographic data about themselves (age, gender, education, etc.) that would have been impossible to collect from the game alone. They also provided us with a list of their current characters, which we track in-game using updated version of our robots coupled with daily scrapping of the characters' data from the Armory.

The simultaneous collection of in-game and out-of-game data will let us explore the connection between a player's profile and his/her online behaviors. As an added twist, we recruited half of our participants in the US and the other half in Asia (Taiwan and Hong-Kong), which opens up the possibility of analyzing cultural differences between the two player populations.

As before, we intend to report findings as they come out on our blog - we'd like to invite you to subscribe to our RSS feed and/or follow our updates on Twitter. While our blog will be focused mostly on short, data-centric posts, we also plan to start posting more frequently on Terra Nova with summaries of the higher-level trends we see in the data. We're looking forward to exchanging ideas with all of you again!

Virtual Communion? No

Edward Castronova

From Bryan Camp (thanks Bryan!) comes this notice of a legal ruling against an internet-based church. The ruling denies the group's status as a church, saying that it does not meet the standard of association because it does not hold regular meetings. The court decides instead that live-streamed sermons on the internet are primarily about information dissemination, not communion.

My church agrees: "Virtual reality is no substitute for the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the sacramental reality of the other sacraments, and shared worship in a flesh-and-blood human community. There are no sacraments on the Internet; and even the religious experiences possible there by the grace of God are insufficient apart from real-world interaction with other persons of faith."

Professor Camp wonders, what if the church was in Second Life?

What is association? What is communion? Does a virtual meeting accomplish one and not the other? Does the dimensionality of the space matter? Why does the body matter, especially when it comes to religion? 

MSPOG

Edward Castronova

My current game, Lord of the Rings Online, is going Free to Play. So is EverQuest II. Meanwhile, the casual game sector has sprouted some virtual-worldy features. The intense grindfest games shrink in significance; huge MMOGs have 90% solo content; asynchronous-distant play is the norm; don't grind, rather, buy virtual goods for real money so you can move forward at your desired pace.

In 2006 we learned from Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell, and Moore that surprisingly few people play WoW socially. This paper, it turns out, was the first to identify online gaming's future.

One gets the impression that today, a large number of players dip into environments, sample their experiences, then move on. No subscriptions, no raids, no guilds, no groups even. No Ventrilo; only the occasional banter in general chat. No need to specialize the character or the gear. The columns of Richard Aihoshi at MMORPG.com give interesting insights into this mode of play and the business models that benefit from it.

What should we call a platform that caters to alone-togetherness? How about a Massively Single Player Online Game, or MSPOG. You can find a post on the word at FredCavazza.net. It might be a fascinating post, too; I just don't speak French well enough to know.

The Gnostic Revolution

Edward Castronova

From TN's Armchair Philosophy Department: Gnosis means Knowledge. Not knowledge but KNOWLEDGE, you know? Understanding of Things Eternal, of the Forms, of the Ephemeral, of the Infinite, of the Capitalized.

Gnostics are people who Know. Gnosticism is a school, or a philosophy, or a frame, or what have you, grounded on the notion that there are things to be Known out there that are only poorly reflected in the "real" world. Indeed, you might identify a gnostic by whether she puts scare quotes around "real." In some extreme forms, gnosticism holds that the "real" world is not only only "real," but also bad, corrupt, yucky. All the good stuff is ephemeral and infinite; the stuff we can handle every day stinks in comparison, therefore a person should spend her life trying to stay connected to the Infinite and reject the ick that lies close to hand. 

Tolkien expresses a gnostic sensibility when he writes that a man who wakes up and finds himself in prison cannot be blamed for trying to get out and go home. For Tolkien, the prison is the real world, and home, for Tolkien, is Heaven. Some religious teaching aligns quite nicely with gnosticism, urging followers to seek Truths only within. Other religions emphasize that the world is a good place and absolutely deserves our attention. Moreover, when some people run around claiming that they have a Special Insight to The Beyond, all too often the Movement results in other people losing their money, their time, or their lives.

Gnosticism invites rejection of the real world and its status quo. A new conflict along these lines is going to play out quite directly through the emergence of virtual worlds.

Continue reading...

Women, Men, and Virtual Item Purchases

Edward Castronova

Gamasutra has a very interesting report on a recent study of the virtual item economy. More men do it than women, but women spend more money on average. Medians are much closer, indicating that much of the difference is in the upper tail: There must be some women who really buy a lot of virtual items.

Among those who buy virtual items, the average spending amounts are in the $20 - $50 annual range. A very high percentage of the sample (drawn apparently from people who are in games and on social media sites) engages in some sort of real-for-virtual transaction. It seems to be mainstream, normal behavior within this group, and this group, as we know, is getting bigger and bigger.

Similar studies suggest that the virtual economy continues to grow in significance relative to the bricks-and-mortar economy.

Thanks to Ed Gentry for the tip.

Plants v. Zombies

Edward Castronova

My house, like many others, has been invaded by this little gem of a game that sets life against unlife. Though small and simple, the game upends stereotypes and provokes thought.

Like many good games, PvZ is a violent game. Massively violent. Incredibly destructive. Plants get eaten alive, crushed, kidnapped. The undead get frozen, burned, shot, eaten, exploded, pierced. As the Zombies die, they lose their limbs and then their heads. Yet the game seems completely appropriate for kids. Why?

Though single-player, PvZ is a social game. Yesterday, there were four boys at my house, age 4-8, all crowded around the computer, taking turns at PvZ. When the player unleashed a killer move, they all screamed and jumped for joy. "Jalapeno!!!!" Games are not like TV. If I had them watch a movie, they would slump down quietly on the couch, like, well, like zombies.

PvZ instantiates a fantasy world. Last week, after adults pried the boys away from the computer, said boys invented a RL PvZ game, where one was a Zombie, two were Pea Shooters, and one was the Jalapeno. 

Like many good games, PvZ makes a gendered statement. All the Zombies are male. Most of the plants are male. Some female plants are helper-types, such as the Marigold that creates money. Others, though, are fighters, such as Cactus. Sunflower is the star of the game, taking the lead role in the music video during the credits. She is the main source of power on the side of Life.

PvZ has a dual-currency economy. One currency is Suns, produced by Sunflower (and to a lesser extent, Sunshroom). You use Suns to buy new plants. Coins also appear, dropped at first by Zombies and as level rewards, later by Marigold. Coins are used to buy power-ups between levels. 

PvZ has a coherent ethos that is symbolically consistent with reality. Animated corpses are a universal evil, and living things are a universal good, in RL as in PvZ. RL agriculture is indeed a positive feedback loop, and it does indeed require sun. In RL as in PvZ, disparate weak elements can be combined into powerful teams. The game makes sense.

PvZ is a fine tool for teaching tactical thought. It has been fascinating watching my 4-year-old gradually learn to put tank-like Wallnut by the Zombie entrance points, to hold them at bay, while glass-jawed Pea Shooter plucks away from the middle. At the rear, Sunflower, important but militarily useless, pumps out her sustaining Sun power, which is then used to replace fallen Pea Shooters and Wallnuts. Mind, I didn't teach him any of this. He started with Wallnuts in the back to protect his house, too few Sunflowers, and Pea Shooters up front. The game taught him that the pieces had to be put together in a different way.

If I had to choose a poster child for interactive entertainment, PvZ would be it.

Produce Your Name and Papers, Please

Timothy Burke

It's been a long while since I posted here, but in the interim, I've been thinking a good deal about virtual worlds and games. I'll have more to say soon on where my head is at, but in the meantime, one interesting bit of news from Blizzard today is the announcement that their planned integration of Real ID into their Battle.net architecture will extend into the official forums for their games, including World of Warcraft. In order to post in the official forums, players will have to use their real names, or at least the names they used to register for Battle.net.

Unsurprisingly, this has caused a wee bit of controversy on the official forums.

I've been thinking about what Blizzard's move to RealID is all about ever since it was announced. One assumption I'm making that I think is especially pertinent to the official forums is that it is an attempt to streamline community management costs for current and future projects. When you force people to provide real names associated with real email addresses to comment on blogs, for example, the volume of commenting drops, but so does the amount of spam you receive. (Though as any manager of a blog or other online forum knows, you still have to deal with a considerable volume of 'hand-crafted' spam from people who are paid to send it and don't care much about preserving the reputation tied to the email address used.) I would assume that the volume of posting on Blizzard's official forums will drop by an order of several magnitudes with this change, and this is very much an intended consequence.

There will of course be other consequences. A few isolated commenters welcome the change, arguing that there will be lots more signal, much less noise. I think this is based on a common mistaken assumption that the point of an official forum is informational rather than to build a sense of connection and community. One of the common sentiments in the increasingly frenzied negative threads on the forums is that virtually no women will post on the forums under these conditions. I think that's probably true. On the other hand, there isn't a lot of introspection so far among the critics about what that implies about the depth and intensity of wannafuck misogyny among WoW players.

I think another thing that's going on, however, is something of a category error. Blizzard is increasingly looking like both like the dominant force in its field and like the last of its kind all at once, a huge success that did not inaugurate but instead capped a particular cultural form. Given the combination of relentless professionalism and market savvy inside the company, I think they must know that as well. So what does the future look like? One answer that's been discussed here at TN and elsewhere is Zynga. The effort to connect World of Warcraft, Starcraft II and future projects with social networking via Real ID seems to me an effort to capture some Zynga-hued lightning in a bottle. The problem as I see it is that casual games on iPhones and Facebook pages are something that many people don't mind having associated with their public lives or reputation capital in part because they're seen as compatible with productive work and with mainstream sociality. World of Warcraft, no matter how streamlined its process of play might become, is not and won't ever be that kind of activity. Joining the office betting pool and going bowling for three hours are intrinsically different things in terms of time and process and compatibility with other activities.

Maybe Blizzard's thinking about future projects is that they'd rather not make another bowling-night MMO. But it's not as if game developers as a whole have abandoned multiplayer games which can absorb hours and hours of dedicated activity.

Anyway, thoughts?

Human Social Adaptation and the Technology Backlog

Edward Castronova

The various brands of virtual reality made their appearance at different times and there seems to have been a repeating cycle. The concept gets introduced, some applications appear. Then everyone sees massive implications for the future. And then - nothing happens. Or, nothing seems to happen. Rheingold's Virtual Reality seemed to live through this sort of cycle, and the Second Life bubble was similar. Now we are discussing things like Kinect that point to huge changes in human-machine interface, and ludic organizational strategies that will rewire the corporation.

We seemed to have reached the stage in technological development where the pace of advance greatly exceeds the pace at which advances can be processed by human social systems (see Brown and Duguid and I'm sure many others). Technological change is a self-accelerating process, and so is human social adaptation; but one of these runs much faster than the other. We have two positive feedback loops that are out of synch.

This creates a technology backlog: A set of projects that everyone knows are important, yet that remain to be adopted. The technology backlog that I can identify in my little neck of the woods is already prodigious (virtual currencies, guild-based production, entertaining interfaces, self-customization). It can only grow larger - the industries I watch are coming up with new things every year, even though their "old" innovations are still waiting for widespread adoption.

Imagine a process in which the technology backlog gets larger exponentially. There are a couple of interesting dynamics that might come from this kind of situation.

Continue reading...

The Virtual World of the World Cup

Edward Castronova

Some of it feels gimmicky, as when Alexi Lalas stands on a real pitch explaining how the players move, the players being life-size digital images superimposed on the video. Some of it seems like genuinely useful application, such monte carlo simulations of outcomes (play the game 10,000 times virtually, count the wins, call it a probability). (Note: Doing it once, like this, is not informative. You have to repeat it 10,000 times.)

Older issues arise again. Once again we encounter the virtual world of sport, where utterly trivial things really seem to matter. It is undeniable - look at the faces of the players. It is life and death to them. An evolutionary argument explains it. Take 10,000,000 football players (not handegg players) with a distribution of talent and interest. Among them, a certain percentage believes that football is the most important thing in the universe. Assume the same initial distribution of talent among them as among the general population of players. Over time, the obsessives become better players, however, due to their obsession. Now we have perhaps 50,000 obsessed, talented players. Repeat. Now we have 5,000 super-obsessed, super-talented players. Repeat. Now we have 500 maniacally devoted, machine-like players. Repeat. Now we have the makings of a World Cup team: A community of people who take it all very, very seriously.

Knowing all this, I nonetheless dive headlong into this virtual world, as I do in any other. Ask no questions, respect the aesthetic, participate, float along. Being American, I was thus jumping on Wednesday and moping on Saturday. When society gets into the act, you find yourself having to suspend belief, not disbelief. The default state (unless you arduously train your mind in skepticism, something I would not recommend) is to accept the apparent reality and go with it. 

Finally, let's take a stroll in the darkest, most evil virtual world of all: The World Cup as seen by the referees. This year, the officials have concocted an internal virtual world in which offsides is onsides, onsides is offsides, goals are not goals, and not-goals are goals. A little bit of bad officiating can help motivate the immersion - "The INJUSTICE!" - but systematically errant calls make you wonder why you dove into this place at all.

Pure Imagination

Edward Castronova

I ended my previous post by asking: If we are to make reality, what should we make? Lisa then posted evidence that our powers of creation are growing. We are becoming ever more able to immerse our attention in worlds of fantasy. Richard Bartle, getting straight to the point, asks: Where will it go? 

We will be living in worlds of pure imagination, and that right soon from a historical perspective. Doesn't this reveal the normative question in the most commanding way? If imagination is what will be, we need to ask what that should be. We are gaining the power, and with power comes responsibility. 

By what standard should worlds of imagination be judged? From what source do we derive the moral criteria, the normative stances, necessary to decide what worlds to make? Surely the source is not logic and reason; imagination is not fact. Worlds of imagination cannot be true or false. They can be good or bad - that's the moral question - but what makes them good or bad? The answer must involve aesthetics. Judging the moral worth of an imaginary world begins with its aesthetics. Is it Beautiful? Apt? Shocking? Thought-provoking? Balanced? Engaging?

I cannot think of any area of thought more muddled than aesthetics is today (see Dutton). Yet judgment of beauty should be a well-developed ability of all people. Art should not be judged by its politics or its ability to reject any expressed standard. It should be comprehensible without reading 1,000 pages of arcane theory. Great works should be more than tourist attractions, they should be treated as achievements well worthy of respect.

The imaginary worlds being created all around us deserve respectful appreciation, first, and secondly, they should be subjected to inquiry on aesthetic grounds. Those grounds are not mere whims of the observer; they have universal elements. Dignity is an important touchstone here. On entering a new virtual environment, proceed with care and ask whether the world you find is uplifting for the human person.

Everything's Virtual, Part Deux

Lisa Galarneau

2010 does not disappoint!

Microsoft has finally announced the super secret Project Natal, a controller-less virtual/physical environment called Kinect for the Xbox 360.

People like it.  GAMERS appear to like it.  Someday people will stop comparing it to Wii.

Watch some video if you haven't seen it!

As I was watching the demo, I could not help but imagine the Kinect-enabled MMO, in which I can emit magical powers from my fingertips, create virtual shields/forcefields for my team-mates, and otherwise INHABIT a digital game space. With buddies.

F*!king Hell.

(disclaimer:  I do work for the Xbox Support team, but this excitement is gamer-me, not researcher-me, per se).

In other news, Nintendo rocks the 3-D universe! (adorable video)

Any thoughts?

Everything's Virtual. Now what.

Edward Castronova

Another theme from the Roskilde Conference: More ammunition for the view that what's "here" and "real" is not all that here and not all that real. I used to think that people who were trying to de-center reality were fiery communards or something, but the quasi-reality of the here and now finds support from the oddest collection of evidence. On the one hand, completely pragmatically speaking, irreality is everywhere now, in the form of straight-out fantasy living in VR but also in the form of pseudo-realities like "Reality TV" (not real at all), "News" (actually entertainment), and "Security" (a massively morbid social dance of cordons, machines, and rubber gloves, signifying nothing). The surreal isn't theoretical any more. It hits you right between the eyes.

We all know now that money is virtual. But at the conference, I met Dominic Power, a geographer from Uppsala whose work argues that fashion is virtual. Of course! It's all about convention. And speaking of conventions, the thinking of Thomas Boellstorff seems to be becoming more influential, with many people now citing his simple claim that there's little difference between VR and "reality" because culture makes "reality" a construct anyway. Let's not forget that Tolkien and Shakespeare had issues with reality, and to complete the picture, here's Pope Benedict the XVI: "We must rather have the courage, the joy, the great hope that there is eternal life, that eternal life is real life, and that from this real life comes the light the illuminates this world as well." Strange bedfellows, but the weave of argument from all these directions is hard to deny, even for someone like myself, trained in the most objectivist of disciplines: Reality is what we make of it.

It seems to me that this raises a difficult aesthetic question. If we are making reality, what should we make?

Cory Doctorow's "For the Win"

Julian Dibbell

First things first: Have you read sci-fi-novelist/cyber-rights-polemicist Cory Doctorow’s latest, For the Win? And if not, why on earth are you reading this blog instead? Seriously: Most of what you could learn from seven years’ worth of Terra Novan scribblings on the meanings of virtual economies, the seductions of MMOs, and the emergence of digital play as a global socioeconomic force can be learned more quickly and more pleasurably from this gripping tale of epic, continent-hopping virtual class struggle — a “young adult” thriller for the young adult in all of us (or perhaps the budding games scholar in every young adult) starring that unlikeliest of literary heroes and most culturally fraught of online-gaming personae, the Chinese gold farmer.

So go on, buy the thing or snag a free download and read it. When you’re done you can come back here and, if you’re so inclined, join the inevitable nitpickers in the comments thread. Yes, Doctorow’s vision of the near-future MMO landscape misses some critical trends (for instance those that point to a diminished future for gold farming and secondary virtual-goods markets generally) and proposes some game mechanics any MUD-DEV veteran can tell you will never fly (though frankly, who among us wouldn’t kill to get in on the beta of the Mario-themed Mushroom Kingdom MMO in which the book’s climactic virtual battle takes place?). And while the struggles of the story’s young Chinese, Indian, and American protagonists (a ragtag band of gamers bent on establishing a neo-Wobblies union of virtual workers: the International Workers of the World Wide Web, or Webblies) are bound to leave anyone at all sympathetic with Doctorow’s left-libertarian labor politics humming chiptune versions of the “Internationale,” your mileage may of course vary.

Whatever. The novel’s main achievement stands: In a world that seems increasingly convinced the future of work lies in play, For the Win points out and brings to life the fact that even playful work remains a field of struggle.

Extreme Reaction

Richard Bartle

So, this is a video a woman made in which she deletes her boyfriend's World of Warcraft characters. It rather upsets him.

So, if he sued her, what would the legal arguments involve?

Virtual Worlds Research Project Roskilde

Edward Castronova

A week ago I had the pleasure of attending a workshop with the above-named project at Roskilde University Denmark. While some things are rotten in Denmark, this workshop was not. The themes of the conference (which was attended by an admirably wide-ranging group in terms of skills and interests) involved user-generated and emergent authorship in the virtual world space. Keynotes by good folks such as Jeremy Hunsinger, Mia Consalvo, Jay David Bolter, and John Lester (all available here) sandwiched a number of innovative sessions.

Different parts of the event will be of interest to different people. My own purely subjective takeaways follow below the fold.

Continue reading...

Skirmishes and Powerleveling

Edward Castronova

I was doing an interview the other day and was asked about the future of gold farming. Without thinking too hard (because there's good evidence), I responded that I thought its future was not very bright. While the virtual goods market seems as hot as ever, it also has been internalized by experience providers. This stands to reason - why let 3rd parties monetize the eyeballs you've captured?

The conversation turned to powerleveling and I stopped to think about it - equally dim future there? I think so. I've been in the resurgent Lord of the Rings Online quite a bit lately, and the skirmish system seems well-designed as an internal PL system. (I understand WoW has something similar, instant dungeons.) The main forces driving the powerleveling market are the need of experienced players to level up alternate characters. Once you've gone through the geographic content a few times, exploring's not a thrill any more, and it becomes a grind. Riding switchback alley from Ost Guruth to Rivendell for the umpteenth time - bleh. Enter the Skirmish. If you just need to kill stuff and gain XP, you cut out the traveling. Press ctrl-J and pow, there you are, solo if necessary, facing a challenging 45-minute adventure with good XP and loot rewards.

On the whole it seems that the industry has worked on co-opting and internalizing 3rd party services. This seems to be good for the gaming experience. There's no gold spam in LOTRO, and my server (Landroval) has a very active RP community with little evidence of griefing between them and the powergamers.

A History of Social Games

Mike Sellers

Over on his blog, Jon Radoff provides a terrific map of the history of social games.  Really worth looking over in its more detailed version.  He starts with ancient times and wends his way down to the present (leaving out many games, even some seminal ones, but still catching the main currents).

What I'm most interested in is where we are now and (of course) what's next.  Jon's brief taxonomy separates current social games into Strategy, Sim, RPG, and "experiences" (music, pets, etc.). Not a bad set of categories -- and note that this includes some social games as descendants of MMOs and VWs as they descended from paper RPGs and MUDs.   I'm particularly interested in the potentially convergent growth of RPGs (Mafia Wars, etc.) and Sim games (Farmtown, Social City), and whether both can interweave well with some kinds of strategy games.  Are these kinds of games sufficiently social that as they evolve they can support hybrids and cross-overs, or are we more or less stuck with these genres?

(Crossposted in slightly edited form from my Online Alchemy blog.)

13 Percent

greglas

According to Playspan, and reported by various outlets this week, 13% of internet users bought virtual goods last year, spending a little over $90 on average.  (If this is accurate, it matches the percentage of voters who claim membership in the Tea Party, the percentage of CEOs who drove hybrids in 2007, and the percentage of teenagers who eat the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables.)  Estimated global revenues from sales = over $10B.

In related news, 44M game passwords were reportedly stolen, presumably with the hopes of supplying a bit of that 13 percent, multi-billion dollar market.

Steven Spielberg's New Show

greglas

...has a pretty cool name.  Eric Nickell is keeping the death watch on our #1 Google fu.

 

Quick Notes

greglas

• Just a quick follow-up to Mike's post from about 3 years ago. It looks like Club Penguin, while it has done very well, hasn't met the requirements for the extra $350M -- so the final price tag to Disney will be about $350M. Worth noting: Mike's earlier predictions about a significant trend toward lightweight, non-traditional VWs/MMOs were right on the money, esp. if you factor in Facebook.  Somebody probably owes Mike a quarter.
• And in other news, CNN ran an article on the Second Life lawsuit du jour, discussed by Ren immediately below, with Prof. James Grimmelmann making some nice feudalism analogies (cf. this & this & this).
• Update: And while I'm at it -- I just noticed that there's a new issue of Game Studies online, featuring an article from Vili L, Virtual Worlds don't exist, a review of Mia's Cheating book, and Richard doing a very in-depth review of the Euro guild "WoW Reader" book.
• Update 2: And apparently, Ted is speaking today (or yesterday) at The Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds Conference 2010.  Video w/interesting "name that VW" potential embedded below.
• Update 3: And one last note, if you're looking for VW-related Podcasts, Robert's Metanomics series has a page with MP3 downloads.  Interesting interviews with Josh Fairfield, Doug Rushkoff, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, and many others.

Bragging Again?

Ren Reynolds

Another group of plucky plaintiffs have dusted off some of Bragg’s arguments and are squaring up for a tussle with Linden Labs.
After skimming the 64 page Action with a fine Italian red in hand my totally unqualified analysis of the basis of the action is: you’re having a laugh, right?

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How to make a cool $2MM+ in one day -- with a sparkle pony

Mike Sellers

In case anyone thought that virtual item sales weren't a big deal in the traditional MMO world, this morning Blizzard announced the online sale of a new "celestial steed" for use in WoW.    These mounts cost $25 (on top of the retail price plus $15 monthly subscription).  So in a world of free games and virtual items selling for a dollar or two, how popular could a $25 sparkly flying pony be?

Well, the queue for their purchase was at least up to over 91,000 people waiting in the queue earlier today.  When I took a screen shot, it had fallen to "only" about 85,000.

90,000 X $25 = $2,250,000.

In one day.  From one item.  In a game that isn't free to play anyway.

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Zynga sues PlayerAuctions

greglas

The maker of Farmville and Mafia Wars has sued PlayerAuctions, the prominent virtual property trading site.  The Complaint alleges copyright and trademark infringement, state unfair competition claims and intentional interference with contractual relations.  Lots of interesting statements about "virtual property" and "virtual currency," but at this point, the majority of this Complaint is made out to allege standard copyright & trademark infringement.

Complaint below the fold...

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From Winter to Crazy Spring

Mike Sellers

It's April 1!  But this isn't an April Fool's post (though there are plenty around).  It's April, so it's Spring!  Literally and metaphorically we seem to have come through a long hard winter.  At the end of 2007 here on TN I wrote about the possibility of a virtual world winter, and Bruce Damer wrote similarly in 2008.  Since then there have been some hard times, as well as a huge amount of growth in online games -- just not so much in virtual worlds or traditional MMOGs.  In that area World of Warcraft continues to dominate, while other major efforts struggle and dwindle.

Over on my blog I've been posting more frequently recently, including some thoughts on the end of this virtual world winter -- punctuated by the demise of three different and significant virtual world efforts.  My conclusion is that yes, we've been through a tough winter, and now it's coming to an end -- but the new growth blooming all around us isn't perhaps quite what many of us, steeped in prior generations of virtual worlds, would have expected.  

We're certainly seeing unprecedented growth in online games, though many of these remain fairly primitive (and early examples were sometimes ethically questionable).  I don't believe we're going to return to the days of huge multi-tens-of-millions-of-dollar-budgets any time soon (though they aren't all gone yet), or to the all-inclusive all-immersive MMOGs and VWs that many here have come to know, love, research, and even defend vociferously.  

I believe instead that this new generation brings with it new forms of growth, just as MMOGs and VWs were once new.  These new games and proto-worlds are primitive just as many early MMOs were, but are also developing in fascinating ways, from both economic and psychological perspectives.

Welcome to Spring.

MediaFX Sound and Fury

Edward Castronova

A new study from Craig Anderson and colleagues at Iowa State University claims to be definitive proof that violent video games cause aggression. The claim is based on a meta analysis of studies in the media effects paradigm, which has been discussed here before. There will debate about the validity of the study's conclusions, just as there has been about the individual studies on which this meta-analysis is based: Were samples properly chosen? Can you learn anything from a study of correlations? Do short-term effects matter? And so on.

The debate misses the point. For the sake of argument, let's grant every scientific claim that Anderson and colleagues make. According to Professor Anderson, exposing a person to a violent video game makes the person feel more aggressive. As to the size of this effect, Professor Anderson expresses it thus: "These are not huge effects--not on the order of joining a gang vs. not joining a gang. But these effects are also not trivial in size."

Very well. Let's say we have 10,000 perfect studies showing positive effects of videogame violence on individual aggression, and these effects are big enough to show up on the radar consistently without being the biggest blip anyone's ever seen. If this were the state of the world (I don't think it is, but again, for the sake of argument), what would we make of it?

Professor Anderson: "From a public-policy standpoint, it's time to get off the question of, 'Are there real and serious effects?' That's been answered and answered repeatedly. It's now time to move on to a more constructive question like, 'How do we make it easier for parents--within the limits of culture, society and law--to provide a healthier childhood for their kids?'"

Hear hear! I say. And yet - what an odd time to be saying this. Why would a professor ever decide to study a question that, by his own admission, is not very "constructive?"

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Farmville = ?

greglas

Back in October, Mike & I & others mulled for a bit about Farmville and its place in the gaming/MMO sphere.  Recently, a lot of other people have been mulling about Farmville too, in a crabbier sort of way.  From various sources, it seems Farmville was the bête noire of GDC this year (see this Sauron reference), both envied (for numbers, revenues, and buzz) and despised (for various reasons, but it seems to me, at least in part, for not being anything remotely like Portal).

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Mapping finalized

Dmitri Williams

With many thanks to the comments here and via email from TNers (original thread), the Mapping project manuscript has moved from white paper to in-press manuscript. Yes, it took a long time.

Here is the final version.

I hope this is something researchers and thinkers find useful. From talks with funders and fellow researchers, I know that the issues of real/virtual comparisons and inferences are of keen interest, and it's my hope that this paper helps people think through the attendant issues. As I was contemplating the many uses I see in this space--disaster preparedness, military training--it occurred to me once again that the price of doing this wrong and drawing bad inferences is very high indeed.

O how I love thee, Media Effects Paradigm!

Edward Castronova

I just reviewed a grant proposal to a big agency. It was a media effects proposal. Depressing. We've gone over this many times here, but it needs repeating:

1. You cannot characterize a videogame without playing it. All of it. You certainly can't label it as "violent" vs. "non-violent" by just looking at the art, let alone the art on the box.
2. A game may have an effect in the lab. If you're going to claim that the game affects society, the lab effect had better be big and permanent. If all you're doing is having people fill out a survey - no.
3. Don't do an experiment with only one game and say you're studying the impact of "games." Just - don't.

Is Everquest II a Place of Public Accomodation?

greglas

About two weeks ago, I told Ren that I'd write up a post about the Stern v. Sony decision, which was issued early last month. This is a case where a federal court essentially answered the title question of this post.  The answer, at least according to this particular court, is "no." 

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Virtual Goods at GDC

Edward Castronova

Spent the day at LiveGamer's event. Virtual goods now a $6b business. Secondary market at $2b. Growing at 40% per year. Number of people with some kind of virtual world account in high hundreds of millions. Rumor that US states will begin charging sales tax on virtual item sales within the year. See RetailingToday.com, Dan Hansen, Feb. 26.

Build Your Own Sheldon Syllabus

Edward Castronova

There’s been quite a lot of buzz about Jesse Schell’s great talk at DICE. In it, he mentions the syllabus of Lee Sheldon as an example of how you could use game design to re-think the college classroom. I’ve asked Lee to share his syllabus, and he’s graciously done so. Check it out. Below the fold, some thoughts from Lee on how to administer the syllabus. And then finally, some more general thoughts of my own on how to build your own “Sheldon Syllabus” – your own class-as-an-MMORPG.

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Studying Game Studies

Richard Bartle

Recently, I did a review of Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft® Reader for Game Studies (no, it's not published yet; this is just setting the context, not trying to trick you into reading a book review). Although this WoW-related anthology of papers doesn't claim to be doing Game Studies, nevertheless the review was for a journal of that name, and all the papers in it could have been published in that journal.

It occurred to me, though, that individually almost all of the papers could also have been published in journals that specialise in other subjects. They could have found homes in journals for Anthropology, Psychology, Sociology, Communications, ... That being the case, what is Game Studies about? Is it merely an interdisciplinary holding pen for people whose object of study is games but whose subject is Something Else? Or does it have something unique at its core?

Put another way, what kind of paper could only be published in a journal of Game Studies?

Real Money Is Actually Virtual

Edward Castronova

Editors at a mainstream news organization have finally realized that US Dollars are no less virtual than gold pieces.

Lights Going Out in the Anti-RMT Bunker

Edward Castronova

For years I've argued that fantasy in virtual worlds is a special human joy and that everyone (courts, legislatures, players, devs, pundits) ought to do their best to prevent anything that breaks immersion. A chief culprit has been RMT, that practice of using dollars during games that some of us play in order to take refuge from the world of dollars.

This position of mine has gradually eroded and recently has taken some severe hits. The roof is cracking and the lights are dimming. It might be time to get out of here before it caves. Below the fold, the hits and what they mean for the future of living fantasy. There are also some implications for social theory.

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Horror Play about MMORPG

greglas

Has anyone seen Neighbor 3: Requisition of Doom? Currently playing in Chelsea, MA.  First time I've seen a play about an MMORPG.  Anyone aware of others?

Training & Games

greglas

Just a brief link & thought.  One of the oldest uses of game simulations is strategic training.  Tripp Robbins passed this Wired Article along, about how football players are learning new moves from playing Madden.  Of course, to the extent we learn things by virtually doing, isn't this just a bit troubling as applied to Grand Theft Auto?

Role Player Study released

Dmitri Williams

Given that they are the titular players, they don't get much attention, do they?

So, recently accepted for publication, and now cleared for posting on the Interwebs is our paper (no, sorry, not connected to the movie dotting this page) "Behind the Avatar: The Patterns, Practices and Functions of Role Playing in MMOs." You can find a pre-press copy here.

The paper combines the big trove of server-side data and quant analysis of our other EQII papers, with a full-on second step of participant observation and ethnographic interviewing. The result, we hope, is a pretty deep look into who role players are, why they play, and what makes them tick. The chocolate and peanut butter of combined qual-quant methods we think gives the paper good generalizability, but with depth to boot. As always, there were some obvious findings and some unexpected stuff, below the fold:

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Journal Adds Social Networking Focus

Edward Castronova

It used to be Cyberpsychology and Behavior, but now it's Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networks. The Editors say they welcome papers about Twitter, Facebook, games, and VR.

It's an interesting moment. You'll recall a decade ago when newspapers proclaimed that "Someday, computers will be everywhere! Your car, your fridge, your phone..." The funny thing about that kind of reporting is that there's never a followup article. "The day has arrived! Computers are now everywhere, you car, your fridge, your phone..." That's because once processors make their way into ordinary gear, the whole thing is ho-hum. Not news.

The same thing seems to be happening with virtual worlds. A virtual world could be defined as VR with other people, and since Facebook is a type of VR-lite, it is kind of a lite virtual world. The Editors of the refocused journal, and the comment-scape generally, are no longer piqued by the particular form in which virtual worlds first came to our attention: WoW and SL. Rather as media and the social have become blended everywhere, so the focus has become more general, on the idea of mediated sociality.

I sense also that there is less and less interest in the meme of gaming as a personality failure. The bugbear now seems to be (once again on the basis of some limited and methodologically questionable research) multi-tasking.

Now that games and virtual worlds are everywhere, they are increasingly unnoticed.

Full CNET Avatar Interview with Daniel Terdiman

Bruce Damer

Daniel Terdiman: okay...so why don't you start off by explaining your premise of how Avatar presages the future of 3D virtual worlds?

Bruce Damer: Cameron and his team developed a 'virtual camera' which as he walked through the set, he could see the virtual terrain. This was possible in a very crude fashion with the VR of the early 1990s, but today it is called AR (Augmented Reality). What Cameron was doing on the set of Avatar is possibly and probably a glimpse into the future of Avatars (multi user virtual worlds in Cyberspace)

Daniel Terdiman: how do you see this manifesting in future consumer-oriented virtual worlds?

Bruce Damer: So for example, if you combine the Wii or the new Microsoft system, with AR glasses or to some extent just holding up your smart phone you will "see" into the virtual world that is cast all around you.

In Vernor Vinge's superb novel Rainbows End, the characters use a kind of contact lens that gives them a parallel vista into the virtual landscape mapped around them on the physical landscape. Its a breathtaking vision for the late 2020s.

Daniel Terdiman: you think that far from now?

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Interview on how 'Avatar' (the movie) may influence the future of Avatars (the worlds)

Bruce Damer

Terra Novans, you might be interested in this interview on Daniel Terdiman's Geek Gestalt blog on how James Cameron's film may presage the future of virtual worlds (how we will interact with them beyond our current "keystone kops" era)...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10443265-52.html?tag=mncol;title

Virtual Goods Economy: Going Strong

Edward Castronova

Major James D. "Pidge" Fielder, USAF, points us to this report by CNET's Dave Rosenberg indicating that the virtual goods market, once confined to the insides of MMORPGs, continues to expand into all kinds of social software systems. Thanks Pidge!

Fortitude, Save Games, and the MMO

Edward Castronova

While wandering around the Catholic blogosphere I encountered Basilian Father Chris Valka discussing video games. Fr. Valka's concern is that games erode one of the cardinal virtues, Fortitude. As you know from your Catechism (see Para. 1808), Fortitude "strengthens the resolve to resist temptations and to overcome obstacles in the moral life." As Fr. Valka has come to understand videogames, they seem to allow anyone to costlessly restart at any time. In real life, of course, there is no SaveGame. Mistakes, once made, create problems that cannot be avoided. Fr. Valka worries that coming generations won't be very good at overcoming obstacles in the moral life. Instead they will give in, on the (false) assumption that it will always be possible to go back and start over.

Forgive Fr. Valka for being like so many others in misunderstanding a cultural phenomenon from which he remains distant. It will not be that way forever. In 2010, though, his judgments raise important questions that only we who have experience in games can address. I'm particularly struck at the reliance of his thinking on the patterns of single-player games. In multi-player games, as in real life, there is no save button. Moreover, reputations in MMOGs take months and years to build up, and surrendering them is costly. I wonder if he is commenting on a rather transient feature of gaming.

Are the features of games, generally and over the long haul, conducive to the development of virtue? If a boy plays World of Warcraft instead of hiking in the woods or rebuilding old cars, is he more or less likely to develop prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, as well as faith, hope, and charity? What features of games and virtual worlds contribute or detract from the virtues?

A Rainbow follows Clouds - Korean Supreme Court's Rule on some RMT

Unggi Yoon

* This post is a correspondence to Ted's recent post 'SCOSK Legalized RMT'

 Supreme Court of South Korea just interpreted game industry promotion act that I introduced in my old posting on Terra Nova: "Selective bombing of RMT in Korea" legaly literally.

 By the law and its implementing decree, in-game money banned for trading should be gained either by luck or thru illegal/abnormal play. In this case, what the accused resellers bought and sold were Aden, a virtual currency created and circulated in Lineage(a famous Korean MMORPG since 1998, its EULA rules out RMT of Aden). And throughout the trial, there were no evidence shown to prove those resellers bought the money from Bot-using sweatshops or hackers.

  Therefore, the critical point of the case was whether Aden is money of luck game to be banned or not. Public prosecutor asserted that attribute of Lineage is also a game of luck like a poker game, even though the former is less clear than the latter. 1st tier court judge found it guilty, but did not mention clearly about reasoning in the ruling.

  The appellate court overruled the decision and explained that Lineage is game of sweat, not a game of luck, considering that it takes lots of time and effort to get Aden by hunting & Aden can be earned not only thru hunting but also thru PVP combat and P2P market in lineage world. So appellate court acquitted the resellers from the conviction for violation of game law. Finally, on Christmas eve last year, SCOSK confirmed appellate court's ruling.

  I agree with Greg in that SCOSK's ruling itself does not mean total legalization of RMT. Definitely, The game industry promotion act in S. Korea selectively command to bomb the RMT of cyber cash of luck game and illegally/abnormally taken virtual money. Cause, the aim of game law is to protect 'Game' from 'Gambling'. Of course, it's not easy to detect and make a proof for selection. After the SCOSK's decision, korean authority announced its endeavor to ban abnormal RMT must go on.

 Yes, right now, there's no change in this long gray colored clouds even in S. Korea and the EULA of NCsoft will (if the company want to) survive though somewhat depowered. But I think, some day, this decision opens the way of rainbow and new world to evolve into. In S. Korea, where the Second Life was serviced as RMT castrated and now withdrawn from, If SCOSK decided to the contrary, and extended the word of game law to Lineage-like virtual world, then, Grabbing with the dead bodies of RMT intermediaries, looking over dying Bots, Koreans will never imagine and meet in EVE online -like, Second Life -like, and There-like futuredoms.

 Just same as lovable game, 'Gaia' of terranova to be kept.

SCOSK Legalizes RMT

Edward Castronova

Thanks to Ren Reynolds for passing this around the backchannel: The Supreme Court of South Korea overturned fines imposed by lower courts on RMTers in Lineage. Does this mean that you can't have a ToS clause forbidding RMT? We can't tell. Can anyone help? And from the what-does-it-mean-for-me department, do US courts use foreign courts for precedents?

Nelfs on Pandora

greglas

I still have not found time to see Avatar, but since I keep a running search query on avatars in the news, I have seen quite a bit of commentary about the film , including spoilers.  One thing I have been wondering about, for obvious reasons, is exactly how much Avatar has to do with avatars.  In particular, is this fantasy about new embodiment in a new society connected to a broader cultural moment, when World of Warcraft is now recognized as being a "mainstream video game" du jour?

Today, Ethan Gilsdorf, blogging at USA Today, explicitly states the thesis: 

Box office conquered, Avatar also proves the culture has shifted. Part role-playing game come true and part special effects masterpiece, its hybrid gamer-geek pedigree is as glaring as the blue skin of the Na'vi race that director James Cameron brought to life on the imaginary planet Pandora. Cameron's movie — alongside the rise of Harry Potter, the return of Tolkien and Lord of the Rings, and the obsession with online games such as World of Warcraft — shows that fantasy is no longer a shunned or exotic side dish. The genre has become the main dish.

Gilsdorf suggest that the cultural drift toward the legitimation of escapist fantasy is a good thing, for a variety of reasons:

They give us hope in hopeless times. Indeed, when you read heroic stories such as Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, you sense that if a mere hobbit can withstand evil, why not you?

Hope is good, I would say.  Of course, there are some other readings of the movie, which aren't quite so positive about the messages it conveys.

So, I'm curious to hear about 2 things from those reading this:

1) To the extent that MMORPGs and escapist fantasies are becoming more mainstream now (are they?), what are the pros and cons of this trend?  What positive and negative roles does the fantasy genre play in society?

2) Avatar is certainly in the sci-fi/fantasy/escapism genre, but exactly how much is Avatar, the movie, really an expression of "gamer culture"? (Points for WoW reference spotting and links.)

It's 2010! Let's predict!

Lisa Galarneau

• What's in the pipeline?
• What are the major trends in MMOs and virtual worlds?
• When's the Star Trek MMO coming out?
• Who will be TN's next contributing author?
• What conferences will rock?

This is your chance to give TN all of your opinions, so please do!

Prior crystal ball gazing:

2004 Predictions...
2006 Predictions...
2007 Predictions...