Terra Nova

Game Design: The Art of the Human?

I can't get it out of my head or understand it when it is in there. Please discuss, share.

Artists :: Art as Game Designers :: People.

I dwell in possibility

On Monday I am defending my dissertation via video conference to New Zealand, a semi-public review of a five year effort. I even got written up in a tome on Internet ethics, after being interviewed on my made up on the fly research methods.  Awesome.  But I am a little cross about something.  The examiners have an opportunity to send me questions that arose for them while reading my dissertation. There is an insistence on positing that the digital world is scary and littered with bad intentions, faulty manners, some creep-o-rama here and there, and really nothing really good at all.

I am annoyed that this is a major question that appears in both examiners' reports, amidst all the possible questions and areas of possibility and exploration, I am criticised for not being negative enough.  One examiner accuses me of 'techno-optimism' or 'techno-celebration'. Therefore I have developed this statement:

Why is it considered mandatory in media studies and related disciplines to explore the dystopian perspective (see page 33 of the thesis), and why is my work considered faulty because I believe in focusing (while explaining rather comprehensively, I think) on what’s positive and possible and hopeful and different about digital spaces and my experiences within them?  I in fact did review and integrate all the major 'negative' or 'dystopian' literature, as well, because my committee wished that I appear ‘balanced’, however I am in rather violent disagreement about this necessity.  In fact, I think the focus on negative aspects of media culture are a bit of an albatross around media studies’ neck.  I think the Internet is the most amazing thing to have happened to humanity in several hundred years.  Not perfect, but amazing.  I find the constant nagging to explore and predict all of the horrible facets quite disconcerting, and rather a waste of time.  These aspects exist, yes, but are typically the outliers, sometimes sensational, yes, but I believe it is my right as a scholar to choose to focus on the positive aspects without being  taken to task for some lack of judgment or critical thinking.

Now, if it is mandatory that scholars of media studies take these stances: ‘the media are out to get us!’, then perhaps my ultimate disciplinary home will be a different one.  I understand the legacy, of propaganda, radio, Nazis, mass media, effects and impacts, and other drivers of thinking in this area; media studies considers itself responsible for informing and protecting the unassuming media consumer.   I suppose this is a useful task.

 But I am an unabashed techno-optimist, and I think our populous is becoming much more capable and empowered and broadly literate via these technological vehicles and venues, and I think that should be allowed with some suggestion that my decision to focus on what I believe to be the truth is somehow lacking.  My focus on the positive does not mean I am not rigourous; it just means that I have dismissed the writings of pundits such as Oppenheimer as I think they are a bit crusty, certainly dogmatic and prone to fear mongering, and often have no actual experience in the areas they choose to consider so critically.    In a way, I do not even believe they deserve any attention at all, however we continue to demand that their insight be heard and integrated.  I am not sure this is right.

I do make a point of reading them (know your enemies, right?), but I find their scholarship typically weak and their research projects built in order to vociferously and crossly prove particular (rather negative) points.  The world used to be so much better before were all interconnected.  Spam will destroy us.  Kids spend a little too much time indoors.  So do I. Yes.

Perhaps I am guilty of this coddling of my dogma, as well, but I believe that this area needs to be generally balanced, and that is why I took the approach I did.  Also, the cultures and environments I study are typically extremely positive cultures and ecosystems that thrive happily, even with some occasional ganking and bad language and homophobia (that’s gonna take a couple thousand more years to resolve, or so it seems).  I am taking an inside out approach, not the outside in observation and conjecture so typical of media effects research.  And as a participant observer of gaming cultures, starting at age 12 or earlier, I know intimately what I am talking about.  I also know several dozen gamers personally, in addition to the 10,000 surveyed in my study.  Despite some insistence that these sorts of entertainment must be folly, and that which will take all real culture down, I believe their gaming experiences constitute the development of critical and fundamental literacies that are critical to life in digital spaces, and the exploration of which is the basis of my thesis.

I hope this clarifies why I have not taken one of the more expected positions.  My focus is on habits, practices and opportunities, not a limited set of concerns or visceral reactions to our changing world.  ‘I dwell in possibility’, not a mere assessment of digital spaces’ less perfect or less savoury aspects.  I will leave that to others more concerned than I.  Change is not disconcerting to me.  People do some messed up things when cloaked in anonymity.  We will live.

Worldplay Research Initiative Survey

(this is posted on behalf of Ashley Funkhouser - greglas)

Dear Terra Nova readers,

I am an undergraduate researcher at Trinity University who is part of the Worldplay Research Initiative. Our collaborative research project explores transnational communication in virtual worlds. This project is connected to a course taught by former Terra Nova contributor Aaron Delwiche.

Violins: Magic Items in the Real World

I have been discussing violins with my neighbor, violinist Alex Kerr (who is both classy and world-class).

Once made, a violin matures over the course of hundreds of years. It comes to produce sounds of unparalleled high quality: voice, sweetness, juice, subtlety. When played by an expert, the best violins produce experiences that approach a kind of transcendence for the player. For an eloquent expression of this transcendence, read these remarks of Thomas J. Beczkiewicz, founder of the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis. While we on the outside can detect the quality of sound, we cannot explain it, and we certainly cannot trace it to anything observable or measurable about the instrument. The instrument is, somehow, special.

The best violins have a known history: Who made them, who played them, for how long, and how they were transferred from one owner to another. As each generation of great violinists ages, speculation goes on about which members of the upcoming generation will inherit the great instruments. Once a great violinist has his hand on one, he does not easily give it up, as the instrument he owns becomes a part of his reputation vis a vis other violinists.

Violins become named for previous owners, such as the Strad ex-Gingold. While many violins sound about the same to an untrained ear, experts can detect minor differences in quality along many dimensions. Some violins are considered to be best in every respect; even though the quality difference between 'great' and 'best' may not be big, especially in terms of impact on the general audience, the price differences are huge. Since 1850, the price of fine violins has appreciated at 3.5% per year in real terms, better than US Treasury bonds.Given the high prices for the best instruments, fine violinists often enter into loan-to-play arrangements with groups of well-heeled investors.

Let me now describe violins in the terms game players apply to special items. Violins are magic items...

New Facebook Patch Nerfs...

On many occasions, I've had to stress to people that Facebook really is not a virtual world.  Even Farmville is just barely in the virtual world category for me.  Still, the latest uproar over new interface changes reminds me a lot of the uproar over, well, just about every VW patch.  It seems to me we're dealing with similar, though not identical, concerns about social contracts and investment-backed expectations.  So, e.g., read these comments and try to connect the dots to your favorite virtual world.  As online "homes" and interpersonal networks grow richer in their media, it seems that the past of virtual worlds might have something to offer the future of social software.  They aren't the same, but they're certainly related.

Gamer Pride

Sort of apropos of Ted's post, take a look at this short essay in The Guardian: "To come out as a gamer is still to risk looking a social n00b: Even with sympathetic friends, we still speak low when we speak games."

This certainly is not true everywhere, and certainly is not true among communities of gamers.  We don't tend to speak low on this blog about games, and there are plenty of gaming blogs out there.  So I'm curious as to how this maps onto your personal social perceptions.  In what particular circles do you "speak low when you speak games"?  Work?  Family?  School?  Where isn't it cool to "come out" as a gamer?

Total Engagement

Byron Reeves and J. Leighton Read have written the best book to date on games and work. Business people still seem hung up on the virtualization of the office when in fact WoW increases group productivity not because it is virtual but because it is a game. Reeves and Read try to right the ship. They describe practical ways for using game design to make work better: Not just for the bosses, but for employees too. Imagine if the workplace were no longer boring. That's where we're headed, and these guys are great guides.

 

Farmville = 56 million

In Ren's thread on virtual world history, Mike made the following comment:

But let's put it in perspective. In three months the number one social game on Facebook has gone from zero to over 50 million players. Not registrations, but actual unique monthly players (about 20 million daily uniques).

So, yesterday, USA Today noted the same.  Zynga's Farmville is at 56M:

Virtual Parentalism

By way of background: about a year ago, W&L held a symposium entitled Protecting Virtual Playgrounds: Children, Law, and Play Online.  Lots of TerraNovans were there.  The panelists gave some really great papers, which we turned into an issue of the Washington & Lee Law Review (that issue goes to press this month).  And that's a good thing, because the papers were ready when Congress asked the FTC to report on the potential availability of adult materials to kids in virtual worlds.  (The FTC's report is due out in early December.)  More on my personal paper, which ended up with the title Virtual Parentalism, after the fold.

History Version 3

In the beginning there was mud.

We all came from mud.

Taking a Gamble

The French government has proposed a new law regarding gambling. The idea is that sports have "betting rights" that they can sell. Unless they sell or otherwise release those rights, you can't bet on that sport.

Does this have potential implications for virtual worlds?

…but we agreed, we have a contract! waaaah

Not if you contracted in Second Life you don't.

Or do you...? 

Me vs The Daily Telegraph

I’m a really irritating person.

 

I irritate myself.

 

I’ve probably irritated you. 

Great Big Monopoly

This week Google launched Monopoly City Streets. The concept is simple. You buy real streets, develop them virtually, and earn a corresponding virtual income. Like Jerry Paffendorf's million-inches-in-Detroit, MCS combines alternate reality, games, virtual worlds, and social networking.

Is it good? I have no idea. Can't get in, because massive user inflow has already crashed the product. I'm reminded of the way that Quake broke some parts of the network when it launched, and EverQuest clogged all the bandwidth of San Diego on its opening day. When somebody comes up with a good idea on the net, the user storm becomes awe-inspiring.

There's a lesson here in the contrast with Google's Lively, a virtual world of avatars and rooms where you could hang out. /yawn. The crash there was caused not by massive user inflow but massive user apathy. Merely virtualizing something is dumb. VR a necessary tool, not a sufficient one. To create new energy, you have to reinvent the game people are playing.

Thanks to Daniel Polonsky for pointing this out.

Space: The Boring Frontier

This year I fell for the Mars Hoax. Hard. I bought a telescope and planetarium software to plan a viewing of the red planet with my eldest son. As we scanned the skies using the software, we were able to look at anything and then magnify it into a large, beautiful image. We had a great time. As the image of Mars was growing on our computer, through magnification, we started to pretend that we were in the cockpit of a ship traveling there. "Mars needs women!" I shouted. We giggled with glee. "O Noes!11! we're gonna crash!!! AHHHH!" Great fun.

The software told us that Mars was to rise above Bloomington's horizon at 3:30am this morning, so yesterday we planned a breakfast and he came up with the idea of Solar System pancakes: Whipped cream for the Sun, M&Ms for the planets (Earth blue, Mars red, Mercury orange) and drizzled chocolate for the orbits. Yum!

Last night at about 6pm a friend suggested it might all be lies. Indeed. LIES! Those damn internets.

Now I had the dilemma of explaining all of this to a child.

Virtual economy: As real as real

Our first paper on the economics of EQII is now out in the current issue of the journal New Media & Society. There's a link to the paper on my research page.

We think the paper is notable because it is the first instance (as far as we know) of published, peer-reviewed, basic economic tests using actual large-scale data from a virtual world. No estimates, no samples, no bootstrapping--just all of the data, period. These data were anonymous and privacy protected, and what we analyzed were the macroeconomic trends and patterns. We have three main findings, below the fold:

Xstreet SL Commerce Guidelines

Alas, because I have way too much to get done, this has to be just a short post.  But this recent post from New World Notes caught my eye -- Xstreet, which is a sort of Second Life virtual eBay, has issued some very interesting guidelines (see here, here) about the rules of Second Life commerce, at least such commerce as is listed on Xstreet. 

CFP: New Journal

Call for Papers:  The Journal of Virtual Worlds and Education

Me vs. The Archbishop

My dissertation is currently being examined, so I have been holding out on posting it.  But there has been a whole new round of 'the Internet is bad for you' talk that makes me get my knickers in a twist, so I will give you all a sneak preview.

The latest, courtesy of the BBC:

Archbishop Vincent Nichols said MySpace and Facebook led young people to seek "transient" friendships, with quantity becoming more important than quality. He said a key factor in suicide among young people was the trauma caused when such loose relationships collapsed.

"Friendship is not a commodity," he told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper.

He added: "Friendship is something that is hard work and enduring when it's right".

The fact is he has this ENTIRELY wrong and I have data to prove it.  My research project involved, among other things, a 50-question survey that asked participants to describe the online gaming experiences (City of Heroes/Villains), with a focus on grouping, social dynamics, skills development, and yes, friendship and belonging.  The results were staggering, even to a gamer veteran like me.  For one thing, I got almost 10,000 responses in 3 weeks (this was in 2006).  For another thing, there were several open ended questions in the survey.  I got responses like this:

The long time it takes to progress during the later levels has greatly improved my patience as of late, allowing me to stay calmer under stress as a side-effect. Separately, forming and organizing pick-up groups has given me a venue to practice my leadership skills, and to a lesser extent my organizational skills. I've had co-workers and friends notice the improvements in patience and organization repeatedly, and the few that have been around during a situation leadership was called for noticed my improvements in that area as well. 

The fact that I am in charge of an super group in both City of Heroes and City of Villains has encouraged me to take a leap in my job: I've applied for a management position. I doubt I'd have ever even made the attempt had I not been in a position of leadership within the game.

Being in a super group comprised of people from all over the world has taught me to be patient when dealing with others and compromise my position on things. I often hold high positions in super groups/guilds and need to be patient with its members. This has transferred over to real life where I've learnt to be more patient with others in a work environment & a social one.

Needing to plan and prioritize has been a big thing for me, as has communication (though I've always found text-based communication much easier than face to face, which is easier than voice with no face a la Teamspeak). I've also found that I can deal with real life social situations better by being able to analyze them as if they were in game situations. (But I'm autistic, so my RL social skills have always been a bit lacking. Having a simplified model to compare them to has been a
boon to me.)

My chief reason for playing City of Villains was because I could not, physically, do much else. I was recovering from a traumatic brain injury and was going stir-crazy with the few hours a day I was actually conscious. This gave me a way to interact with RL friends because I was unable to get together with them. From there, it stemmed off into a way to communicate with them, and form other friendships. I have met several people from my super group at various locations, and that alone
is worth the playtime.

I have 10,000 of these comments, some even more poignant than those I just quickly grabbed.

Here is my proclamation:  digital game/social spaces have the power to be the most transformative social experiences some humans have ever had, indeed sanctuaries from our physical lives, as Ted Castronova has suggested.  This is sad, but it is true.  What Mr. Archbishop has wrong is the notion that because it's not physical it's somehow not real. Wrong!  This falls in the category of 'don't talk about things you know nothing about!'

I'm also gonna write Obama too and tell him to lay off the videogame criticism.  Wonder if he will read my diss?

You've Been Blerped! Now What Do You Do?

The web layering tool Blerp announced today that they are in open beta.  The basic idea is that members create a layer of user-generated content over any website; people who sign up for Blerp and join the layer-creator's group can see and add content in the layer.  Thus, any site--yours or someone else's--becomes the backdrop for social networking, casual gaming, whatever.  (See this Blerp video for an intro, and you can also see a Metanomics interview with the CEO and VP of Rocketon, which developed Blerp.   The interview is actually filmed in Rocketon, so you can see what that layer-as-virtual-world product is like.)

As someone who reads a lot of policy-oriented blogs, I can see a very simple application making Blerp as talked about as Twitter.  The conservative National Review blog The Corner doesn't allow content.  The National Review probably had  good reason for making that decision, but so what?  Some ambitious left-leaning Blerper can create a layer to allow anyone to pepper the pages with unflattering commentary. 

Which leads me to ask Terra Novans:  How likely are the following (not mutually exclusive) futures?

• This never catches on, because Blerp simply ends up being too clunky and/or intrusive.
• After a brief newsgasm of coverage about how "Left-Wingers Take Over Conservative Website", the left-wingers go back to what they are doing now...namely, criticizing right-wing posts on their own websites, so they get their own traffic.
• The Blerpers continue to build viewership on sites they criticize, but the targets don't mind, because they get the traffic.
• The Blerpers build enough viewership for their layers that they sell advertising viewable only by layer members, maybe making even more than the sites they target.
• The National Review calls their lawyer, who asks for damages from the Blerper, and perhaps Blerp itself, for activities that are different in form, but similar in substance, to pirating content and modifying it without permission of the authors.  (In theory, one could use Blerp to put a Hitler mustache on every picture of a Republican, cover up The Corner's advertisements with their own...or put Hitler mustaches on those too.)

The virtual census

This isn't an entirely VW post, but it seems related enough to toss up here. Working with colleagues Nicole Martins of Indiana, Mia Consalvo of Ohio (and TN) and Jimmy Ivory of VaTech, we embarked a couple of years back on a content analysis of all game characters. It was kind of ambitious, but we thought someone ought to take a census of who is in all the worlds and games we study. We do a lot of research on effects and identity, but until you know what's there, well, it's hard to say a lot. The results are in and in print, available from the journal New Media & Society, or in a pre-press version off my site.

The highlights are that whites, males and adults are over-represented compared to the actual US population via US Census data, while females, Hispanics, Native Americans, children and the elderly are under-represented. These numbers parallel similar research for TV. Breaking the findings down into primary (playable) and secondary (NPC) characters, the divides are stronger still.

More below the fold . . .

Duffy: How Not to Experiment in Virtual Worlds

Economist John Duffy of University of Pittsburgh went to an experimental lab in Second Life and came away unconvinced. Some thoughts:

• The virtual lab he visited was a replication of a real-world lab. We've learned, however, that using virtual world technology to simply replicate a real-world thing is usually counter-productive. The utility of virtual worlds does not lie in their ability to re-do, in virtual form, what we do in the real world.
• He carries with him some honored norms about what an economics experiment must be. Participants must not know what the experiment is about, for example, so you ought to ask every participant "Are you an experimental economist?" and exclude them if they are. Otherwise they'll recognize that they are in a test of backwards induction or whatever. Duffy did not face that kind of question, nor anything that would allow the screening of participants based on expertise. There were other issues, other ways in which an attempt to replicate a real-world econ experiment, in traditional form, simply breaks when placed in a virtual environment.
• He properly noted that the incentives (couple hundred Lindens) are very low in terms of cash value. Why would anyone think hard in return for a quarter? However, this raises a debate about the utility of the Linden dollar. Some people seem highly invested in the state of their virtual things, despite low real-world values. This in turn raises big questions in economics about how things, utility, and happiness relate. Punt.
• He was able to lie about his age, a problem for the internet at large.

I come away convinced that there's little point in trying to replicate the standard micro-level lab experiments in virtual worlds. While you gain in terms of distance communication, you lose in terms of body signals and eye contact and such. In that kind of hands-on experiment, you can't automate much.

I would note, however, that Duffy's criticisms are cast too widely when he concludes that these problems also condemn truly macro-level experiments such as those proposed by Bloomfield and Castronova.

Twixt

Dave Myers, a long-time games researcher and commenter here at TN, received some media coverage yesterday for his tale of Twixt, prompting 132 comments and counting. Scott Jennings has some snarky comments on his blog and thinks this is all about a game design flaw.

Personally, I find these kinds of social "flaws" and how they are fixed pretty interesting.  In my book, I'm using the story of Twixt to make a simple point that most readers of this blog will already appreciate.  The rules that are enforced in MMOGs, like the rules enforced in any society, are not limited to the formal rules set forth in writing or coded into the software.  Users decide for themselves how games should be played.

Update: Dave responds to all the attention here.  A few lines I find particularly interesting in relation to what Richard says below and the question of EULAs:

Most surprisingly of all (maybe only to me), game designers themselves seem no longer interested in their rules.  They seem to focus increasingly less on game rules and increasingly more on game rulers.   Rulers don’t like the game rules?  No problem.  Eliminate those rules.

Virtual Bank Robbery Redux

This July 2009 story feels sort of August 2006, doesn't it?  Or maybe even sort of October 2003? 

Like night follows day, it follows that if "virtual" currency X has a "real" exchange value of $Y, and the virtual world mechanics permit or even encourage player A to rob or swindle player B of a substantial amount of X, then we're going to have this sort of virtual crime. 

Q: When will it be old news?  A: Hopefully, sometime in 2012, after my book comes out.

Also, Reuters (or CBC?) doesn't seem to understand the recent Chinese regulations very well.

Update: Apparently, a blog on the New York Times thinks this is new stuff.

Social Network Adoption Effects Map From Real to Virtual

The broader mapping project (first identified by Dmitri Williams) has an new entry in the social networks field. The mapping project is a (unorganized) effort to find out where real-world behaviors map onto virtual worlds and where they don't. The Law of Demand maps; human response to deadly plagues does so only in part.

A new paper from Michigan and Santa Fe (Bakshy, Karrer, Adamic) (thanks Mark Bell for the tip) reports on social network adoption effects in Second Life. "Adoption rates quicken as the number of friends adopting increases and this effect varies with the connectivity of a particular user. We furtherfind that sharing among friends occurs more rapidly than sharing among strangers, but that content that diffuses primarily through social influence tends to have a more limited audience. Finally, we examine the role of individuals,finding that some play a more active role in distributing content than others, but that these influencers are distinct from the early adopters."

The authors don't explicitly associate these findings with mapping; that is, they don't ask or test "is this the same as we see in the real world?" But that conclusion seems fairly easy to make, in that the results don't seem (to me anyways, a person decidedly not expert in this field) all that amazing. In fact it all looks rather normal. That's a finding. The news is: Though virtual, it's pretty normal.

Bit by bit, the grid in Williams' paper is filling in. In many areas, the things we do offline are replicated well when we go online. 

The Postnational Sodalities of Second Life: An Iconographic Approach

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

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

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

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

China to ban RMT, maybe.

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

So: What is China up to?

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

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

You No Take Candle!

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

State of Play 6

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

Officialish backchannel

Twitter hashtag

Functional Governance

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

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

Virtual Worlds Workshop at Indiana University

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

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

More information about the board and the workshop here.

The End of the (Virtual) World

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

Media Violence, Aggression, and Policy

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

Death, Taxes, and Property

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

IARPA and Reynard

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

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

Third Party Beneficiaries Online, Redux

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

MacArthur Foundation Enters Second Life

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

Free Realms

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human rights & the 'online game provider'

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

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

The guidelines at hand are"

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

Grad Student Symposium at State of Play 6

Calling all VW grad students...

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

Third Party Beneficiaries and Other Fantastical Beasts in Virtual Worlds

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

Medium Rare

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

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

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

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

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

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

Machinima Law at Stanford in April

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

G20, we20, v-we20

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

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

Research Methods, Culture and Virtual Worlds

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

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

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

And read on for the dramatic backstory!

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

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

Well - now it is.

State of Play 6

 

 

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

 

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

 

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