Terra Nova

WoW v. MDY: Copyright, EULAs, and Game Rules

Greg L

We've been talking about TOS/EULAs for quite a long time here at Terra Nova.  Here's a fairly obvious theory about these agreements, borrowed from Jeremy Bentham's felicfic calculus:

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I Gamer

Ren Reynolds

Computer games are a catalyst for a generational change in self-identification.

I believe that the notion of being a ‘gamer’ is not merely growing but becoming mainstream. Gamer is no longer a excuse for having bad personal hygiene and no social skills but simply something one is.

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An Atlas of our Terra Nova?

Lisa Galarneau

Truly a herculean effort has been undertaken!  The Association of Virtual Worlds has compiled 'The Blue Book: A Consumer Guide to Virtual Worlds", an index to 250 virtual worlds from all over our physical world, all neatly meta-tagged and linked.  Oh, and there's a glossary... 

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The Cookie Monster Economy and "Guild Socialism"

Timothy Burke

Recently, I happened to catch a segment of Sesame Street that my daughter was watching. In it, Cookie Monster was trying to hire a human assistant to help him sell six cookies. Cookie Monster explained helpfully, “Cookie Monster sell cookies in order to have money to buy cookies”.

Virtual world exchange can feel like a Cookie Monster economy sometimes, but never more so than in Flying Lab Software’s Pirates of the Burning Sea. It’s been an interesting economy to watch as the live game has taken shape. Not so much because it is innovative or provides a fun game mechanic. Even by the standards of persistent virtual worlds, the economy in Pirates is unusually broken in functional terms. However, on one hand, it is one of the most successful Cookie Monster designs I’ve seen, in that it attracts players who are most strongly drawn to the game’s setting or the game’s design ambitions and niche vision. On the other hand, it also throws a sharp light on collective action in MMO economies that are designed to blunt or hedge against exposure to markets.

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Bears are People Too! The Metanomics Colbert Challenge

Robert Bloomfield

Last Monday capped off the first season of interview series, Metanomics:  Business and Policy in the Metaverse.   Over the course of the season (35 shows in 35 weeks), we refined our focus to the following four target audiences:

• representatives of real-world enterprises using virtual worlds to achieve their goals
• virtual world entrepreneurs meeting the needs of those enterprises or their fellow residents
• developers,  policy-makers and analysts who will shape the future of the metaverse; and
• academics who are studying and educating these groups, or using virtual worlds as their classrooms or laboratories.

One industry we haven't delved into yet is entertainment.  The fit is natural, as the reports on Virtual Worlds News shows us just about every day.  But how do we get movers and shakers in entertainment to appear on Metanomics?  Well, one way is to be a little more entertaining.  So take a gander at our Metanomics Colbert Challenge.

No one is going to suggest I quit my day job to do comedy, but SLCN does an excellent job of packaging.  Feel free to pass it on to your friends--and to Jon Stewart, Rob Riggle and Stephen Colbert, if you know them.

Metanomics is running 'best of' shows on Mondays at 11am Pacific Time and Tuesdays at 3pm Pacific, until we start our second season in June.  If you want to suggest guests, please do--self-nominations welcome. 

EA to Close EA-Land: Goodbye to TSO

Mike Sellers

As has been reported in several places starting with the EA-Land blog (to which the EA-Land site now points), EA will be shutting down EA-Land in August.  EA-Land was the do-over of The Sims Online, which at one time in its heady pre-release days was the presumptive heir to the "first million user virtual world" crown.  A virtual world/game  from EA and built using the biggest, most successful and accessible game IP ever? 

What could possibly go wrong?

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Tell us what you really think

Dmitri Williams

Ah, the sounds of spring: classes ending, birds chirping, and one Englishman going apeshit on his countrymen. Witness the awesome power of this fully operational Bartle-station in the Guardian.

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The Sexual Implications of Going Hands Free in Second Life

BonnieRuberg

Earlier this month, Linden Lab released a demo of a hands-free interface for movement within Second Life.  While they were careful to explain that this project is still in the early stages of development, the interface as it stands would allow players to walk and fly through the world using only the positions of their bodies.  Apparently inspired by the controls on Segway scooters, a 3D camera would capture players' movements as they stand a number of feet in front of their computer screens--or, as in the case of the demo, conveniently ginormos televisions.  Linden also claims that the technology in development can sense facial movement and expressions.

While other bloggers are seeing a potentially ground-breaking new way to interact in a world whose current user interface is a giant pain in the butt, I'm wondering: what will going hands free do for sex in Second Life?

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Did We Ignore the Rise of the Personal World?

Lisa Galarneau

In a week when Sony has announced yet more delays (another in a longer series of gaffes that has spawned endless humiliation) in the development of their much hyped virtual space, Home, and when even the roar from WoW’s success seems to be fading into an echo, a reminder about the incredible success of a little game that could...  Like All in the Family or this year's indie darling Once (or the Aeron chair, for that matter), it almost never got made 'cause people making decisions about such things didn't believe Will Wright (who doesn't believe Will Wright?!) when he said it would be the best thing ever. Cause after all, who the heck would want to play in a virtual dollhouse?   

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The air that we breathe

Nate Combs

Neils Clark forwards a five page collage on "Gaming Addiction: Clearing The Air, Moving Forward" on Gamasutra (April 3, 2008).   Clearing the air might be ambitious at this stage of the discussion, but Neils provides a useful catalog of the range of ideas that have taken root in this landscape.  The difficulty of charged-up umbrella issues is that all sort of argument can become ensnared.   A few selected quotes are provided below the fold; read the essay on the Gamasutra site.  There is excellent comment there too.

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Against Cyberproperty

Greg L

This post is a plug for an article that I’ve recently completed with my colleague Michael Carrier at Rutgers-Camden.  The article is here. It is very short (for a law review article — 36 pages) and is our best effort to decisively end to the doctrine of “cyberproperty,” a.k.a. “cybertrespass,” a.k.a. the Internet variant of trespass to chattel doctrine.

Though this article doesn't explicitly mention it, cyberproperty doctrine has some interesting connections with virtual property and virtual worlds -- below I'll explain what cyberproperty is and how it relates to the concept of virtual property.

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Voice in Virtual Worlds, Take 3

Nicolas Ducheneaut

In line with the recent discussions we had here about the role of voice in virtual worlds (see for instance this post, and more recently this one), some new research by Greg Wadley from the University of Melbourne adds more empirical data to the debate. The findings are summarized in this paper but click below to read Greg's own summary of his findings:

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Can you hear the game now?

Mia Consalvo

I was recently invited to speak at the Culture and Computer Games: Studying Online Activities conference held at the HumLab in Umea, Sweden. The conference was organized by Torill Mortensen, and the participants were mainly European games researchers who have their own WoW guild, The Truants. As a non-WoW player I was honored to be asked, and the conference was great, featuring not only research talks and research-in-progress discussions, but also workshops on how to make machinima and how to pull data from games for interesting sorts of analysis and display.

I arrived in the middle of one presentation about game audio (by Kristine Jorgensen), and I'm so sorry I arrived late. Her talk was one of the first I've heard that takes seriously the audio in MMO games. More thoughts on why audio is so fascinating below the cut--

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The Point of No Return

Richard Bartle

I ran a roundtable session at IMGDC last weekend on the subject of "Government Interference: How Much Can you Take?". The way it worked, I presented a number of scenarios in turn, ramping up each one of them to see when (if ever) the situation would become so intolerable that it would stop the attendees from ever wanting to develop an MMORPG.

Some things were irritating, but not so irritating that they'd cause the assembled developers and designers to give up. For example, government requirements for tracking every single transaction to prevent fraud fell into this category: it adds a huge overhead, but it's something people can just about live with.

There were two proposals, however, which hit the abandon ship button for everyone. Both of these are ones I've seen advocated a number of times, included here on TerraNova.

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AIIDE '08

Nate Combs

Games AI seems most associated most with single-player computer games.  This is because with single-player games there is no social dimension to highlight (it is up to only the AI for dynamic content).  However, AI has an important role yet to play in social "massively multiplayer" spaces, I believe.   Consider the features readers of MMOWatch thought were important in RPGs (see site poll) as illustrative.   In order of importance (at the time of my reading): "NPC interaction", "Character development", "Exploration", "Combat" (only 5%),  "Puzzles", "Questing"...

A call for papers is out (AIIDE '08), details below.  Readers here might take this time to suggest to those considering writing what they think are the important qualities of entertainment AI in MMORPGs.

The Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE '08) is soliciting papers and presentations on research and applications involving artificial intelligence in computer games and entertainment. The conference will take place on October 22-24, 2008, at Stanford University in California, USA. Paper drafts and talk proposals are requested before April 22, 2008. More details can be found at the conference website: http://www.aiide.org ...

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U.S. Congressional Hearing on Virtual Worlds

Greg L

It's April 1st, but this is legit. 

It's a hearing of the Energy and Commerce subcommittee.  See this witness list and there's an MP3 of the proceedings now that can be found here.  I'll refrain from comments until I've listened to all of this, but the opening statements of the Congressfolk were, to say the least, interesting.

Update: Video, audio, and prepared statements now archived here.  Some news reports now available  here.  And one initial thought: apart from the opening remarks, this was mostly a hearing about Second Life.  The speakers other than Rosedale talked primarily about Second Life and UGC worlds.

Update 2: On listening to testimony and further reflection, in lieu of commenting, I think I'll just point to Lum's reaction.  I'm really not sure I have much to say about this event myself.  Still, it is the first Congressional hearing on virtual worlds.  I wonder what the first hearing on airplanes was like?

Update 3: Ok, my last comment on this, in reply to Raph's thoughts.  If you can get past 1) the opening remarks, 2) the promotional video for Second Life, and 3) the fact that everyone at the hearing seemed to think that Second Life was synonymous with virtual worlds (made convenient by the fact that the other witnesses had major investments or involvements in Second Life), then you'll find the Q&A (starting at 51:20) has some very interesting stuff.  Some of it shows the legislators being perceptive.  Some of it shows the legislators and witnesses being not so perceptive.  But if you're interested in the regulation of virtual worlds, it's worth a listen.

Report of the Byron Review

Ren Reynolds

The long awaited and, in part, widely feared report of the Byron Review into children, the internet and video games is out.

Titled Safer Children in a Digital World, the report is 226 pages long and includes a section specifically on online games – which recommends that guidelines are created for ‘good practice in child safety’ (I think I get to say to the industry - I told you so, see KidSpace Stamp )

I’ve posted the exec summary below the fold but I suggest people go to the full report, in particular Chapter 8 ‘Online Gaming’.

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Even More on Teaching Languages in Second Life

BonnieRuberg

Fresh from the press release oven, we have word of an entire 24-hour conference to be held in Second Life this May on the topic of teaching languages in virtual worlds.  The event is called SLanguages2008, and it should prove fully multilingual (neat!).  It's still two months away, but ESL dorks like myself have been officially advised to mark their calendars.  From the release:

"The conference will be held within Second Life allowing the participants to exchange ideas and share experiences simultaneously around the world. The online conference is free to attend and includes talks, workshops, discussions and posters on language education using virtual worlds such as Second Life. The events will cover methodologies, teaching tools and experiences."

Blizzard v WoW Glider: Interesting, no?

Dan Hunter

The EFF's Fred von Lohmann just sent round a note on an email list about the summary judgment briefs in the WoW Glider case. I've mirrored the briefs here and here for those who are interested, and below the fold I'm gonna engage in rampant copyright infringement by reposting all of Fred's message. He sums it up too well to bother trying to explain any better, and I'm sure that he'll forgive the infringement...

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Using Second Life to Teach English as a Second Language

BonnieRuberg

This one definitely gets filed under "blatant self-promotion."

I recently started freelancing for Forbes.com, and the first article I've written for them is called "How to Spark Remote Learning." The piece covers the (surprisingly sizable) movement to use Second Life's immersive environment to teach residents foreign languages.  Specifically, I talked to Kip Boahn--head of a German ESL school by day, and founder of a new island named Second Life English--who's dedicated himself to providing free resources for the game's estimated  5,000 language learners and 1,000 instructors.  What's particularly interested is the way Second Life English and other programs make the most of the world itself.  From the article:

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Second Skin

Greg L

Did anyone see the MMORPG documentary Second Skin at SXSW? 

I'm curious because the story from the official weblog seems to be that gamers are wildly enthusiastic about the film.  The Escapist says: "gamers walk away feeling like they had seen seen their life story, with slick editing, a peppy soundtrack, and the seductive polish of an Apple commercial."  On the other hand, this opinion at Gamasutra says: "As the lights dimmed, I was excited to explore how interactive media is changing our experience of ourselves. But instead, I just wound up feeling sorry for the losers playing World of Warcraft."  Eric Zimmerman's comment (scroll down on that link) seems to accord with that: "I was distressed by a film that seemed to be a parade of gross stereotypes, most of which were clearly negative."

Who is right?

Virtual Law Bibliography

Greg L

As part of the preparation for the book on law and virtual worlds that I'm writing, I've been trying to make a comprehensive list of published law review articles and student notes that focus on the intersection of law and virtual worlds. 

Just in case readers are interested, the current version is attached below.  If I'm missing something, please let me know in the comments or by email.

As you'll see, the rate of publications has been increasing, with the majority of the publications coming out in the past couple of years.

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Arden I Going Offline

Edward Castronova

For a couple of months, we've had the Arden I environment available for people to experience, but we have to take it down now. We need the server space to run a social science experiment in Arden II: London's Burning. More on that in a little while.

If you are interested in playing around with Arden I, please do. The module is available for free download at this URL. Go ahead and monkey around however you'd like. See what you can do with a Shakespeare fantasy module.

Philip Rosedale the CEO is Dead....Long Live Philip Rosedale the Chairman of the Board

Robert Bloomfield

Today Reuters' Second Life division reported the scoop that Philip Rosedale is stepping down as CEO of Linden Lab, but will replace Mitch Kapor as Chairman of the Board of Directors.

Eric Krangel (Eric Reuters in SL) asked me for a comment on his page of resident reactions, and I went with this:

Linden Lab’s unique business vision allows them to break plenty of rules, but they can’t ignore the basic economic forces governing corporate growth and ultimately access to capital markets.  The search for a successor is going to lead to some real soul-searching about two key trade-offs in Linden Lab’s strategy.  First is the tradeoff between stability of the software platform and feature-heavy construction that allows creators with tremendous freedom.  Second is the tradeoff between catering to individual residents who want a new world full of fantastic possibilities for their personal lives, and enterprises who see virtual worlds (but perhaps not Second Life) as the future of electronic commerce and the virtual office.  Without a tremendous influx of capital that would allow them to become all things to all people, Linden Lab’s new management will need to make some big decisions on which way to turn.

So, what do YOU think?

 

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Lying Online

Thomas Chesney

Here we have a top Prof laying into some virtual world research. His objection is basically, that he can lie about his personal details and generally not take the research seriously. While it is more difficult to lie in a real world laboratory about age and sex, as the experimenter can immediately see through the lies, it is still entirely possible to make stuff up. Even with age and sex, if I fill in the form and submit it with 10 other people, it's possible the experimenter won't realise if I say I'm an 80 year old granny.
An experimental economist discussing the possibility of running experiments in virtual worlds, commented that when subjects show up to his real life lab, they see him looking stern, dressed in a suit and generally being threatening. This, he said, causes them to 'straighten up' and take the whole thing seriously. It's true that in our own in world experiments, we've had people clowning around before (sometimes during) and after the work. We just accepted that as part of the world's culture, although we did take steps to try to get people to take the work seriously (mainly by explaining what we were trying to do, rather than using visual cues like the experimental economist, although we did wear suits and our lab was as 'serious-looking' as we could make it).
So here's the question - how can virtual world participants be encouraged to take online research seriously, or should no attempt be made to change their online behaviour?

Are Religions Virtual Worlds?

Merci

Right now I’m reading about player behavior in MMOs. I keep thinking how similar those player behaviors and game worlds are to the fantastical real-world-overlays we know as religions. Both imbue players with feeling of elevated direction.

Religions and MMOs give believers/players a lot in exchange for their subscription. Believers get a realm to achieve in that doesn’t necessarily affect what most people hold to be the real world. Recurrent personalities exist at the same time as the believers, but persist regardless of the life span of any one believer. Your grandmother's Jesus is your Jesus. The NPC you met last week during a quest will be there two months from now when you sign up a secondary character. And lastly, religions and virtual worlds both contain objectives that can be broken down into steps for the believer. Religions almost always require believers to do at least one thing, even if it's only to take an NPC into their heart. That action is not much different, and frankly, takes much less time, than solving riddles, collecting items, or grinding XP.

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Games+Learning+Society 4.0 Conference -- Call For Papers

Dan Hunter

Just got pinged by the fabulously fabulous Sean Michael Dargan who, when not touring the world as a surprisingly-tall-and-dapper-guitarist-cum-singer, coordinates Games+Learning+Society for Constance and Kurt and the Madison gang. He reminded me that they have a CFP out. GLS is a great conference, and the location is just wonderful. The CFP is below the fold and y'all should be thinking about submitting a paper, and then going.

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Review of "The Second Life Herald"

Dan Hunter

I just did a short book review of Peter Ludlow and Mark Wallace's "The Second Life Herald" for Science. It's just been published and so I can make it available here. For those who don't want to read a one page review, I'll give a mini-review of the review over the page, and ask a couple of questions of y'all.

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Localization meets Culturalization

Mia Consalvo

Due to my interest in the global aspects of MMOGs and games generally, I wound up at a really interesting session at GDC a couple of weeks ago. It was titled "Self-Censoring Potential Content Risks for Global Audiences: Why, How and When" given by Tom Edwards from Englobe. His talk went far beyond the "avoid blood in Germany, stay away from the Taiwanese flag if you want China as a market" tidbits I've seen before. He argued for something beyond localization--adequate culturalization of games, which makes increasing sense, given the emerging markets and necessities for creating games that appeal to more than one cultural/national/whatever group. Yet his talk was focused on single-player and offline multi-player games, and I began to wonder, how would MMOGs fit in?

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Residents versus Users

Thomas Chesney

There's been a lot of press lately about how virtual worlds can be used to study human bahaviour. But is it really human behaviour? The following is from an unpublished paper about behaviour in virtual worlds:

 

An interesting point to consider is whether we are researching residents or users (the term ‘resident’ referring to an avatar and ‘user’ referring to the human controlling the avatar). They are not necessarily the same - Turkle (1995) discusses one of the appeals of virtual worlds as being the ability of a user to change themselves, with change of gender being discussed most. For example, one study of a Japanese virtual world revealed there to be 4 male users to 1 female user, but only 3 male residents to 1 female resident (Stone, 1995); given the number of players of that world, many tens of thousands of users were swapping gender (Turkle, 1995). The approach taken here was that we were collecting information from residents about acts performed by residents and the effect this had on other residents.

Is it good enough to study avatars? Or should some attempt always be made to tie things back to the guy sitting at the computer screen?

 

Gary Gygax, 1938 - 2008

Nate Combs

Perhaps Gary will be best remembered for Dungeons and Dragons (1974).  I  fondly remember the colorful 1977 Monster Manual (1st Edition), I believe I may still have it in a box in the attic.  I also can look to my bookshelves and see the first version of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), 1974 soft copy plus Greyhawk and Blackmoor supplements winking at me from behind a mountain of paper, "it has been a long time."  Indeed.

How many other books do I still keep from the 1970's?   You?

A story I like is from the Wikipedia: "The game Gettysburg from the Avalon Hill company captured Gygax's attention. It was from Avalon Hill that he ordered the first blank hexagon mapping sheets that were available. He began looking for innovative ways to generate random numbers, and used not only common dice (with six sides), but dice of all five platonic solid shapes."

A generation of kids learned probability from those dice, and a whole lot more.

This quote also  illustrates how imagination and genres of game are cross-fertilized.    A theme we've discussed many times on Terra Nova in the past is the legacy of table-top Role Playing Games (RPG) to modern video-game RPGs and indeed through MUDs to the massively-multiplayer MMORPGs.  Yet, I think this technical lineage is too confining.   Perhaps the clearer statement of legacy is from Anton I., from comment here:

May he rest in peace proudly as one of the very few people whose creations will outlive them.

Of not many people will this ever be said.

Yet, Gary sounded humbler than his legacy, "I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else."

Gamers everywhere, whatever your genre, salute.  One of your kin has passed.

Fair play

Thomas Chesney

(I think the new bloggers here could use some help with the "Continue reading..." feature of Type Pad.)

Second Life griefing was recently defined by a group of residents as unacceptable, persistent behaviour which disrupts the ability to enjoy Second Life. This is strikingly similar to definitions of bullying: aggressive behaviour in a relationship of imbalanced power which happens over a prolonged period of time. Residents described a number of motives which may explain why griefing occurs.

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Human Data as a Playfield: The Passively Multiplayer Online Game

Merci

For the last two years I've been designing an experiment in play: PMOG, the Passively Multiplayer Online Game (said P-Mog). Justin Hall, Duncan Gough, and I founded a company called GameLayers with investment from O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures, Joi Ito, and Richard Wolpert. We quit our day jobs last summer and got serious about bringing play to the world wide web.

The impetus of my design is my lifelong desire to play with the layers of information that, unseen but forceful, impact our real and online lives. I want to see the invisible world, or at least become more aware of it. Perhaps ironically, PMOG is not a visually intense game. I don’t know that we rank 2D, much less 3D. This is the game HUD that persists from page to page in the Firefox 2 and 3 browsers:

We're now in the beta of our second public version. Both versions were implemented as Firefox extensions that follow players as they surf the web. The players provide the game with access to their browsers; the game provides the players with weapons, writing instruments, a gifting system, and a self-generating RPG character.

We started out to make a casual, massively multiplayer online game that took place alongside the rest of a player's online life. To do that, we had to answer two questions. One: what kind of interaction that occurs alongside the Everyday can we provide to players that they'll accept? And two: how can the game provide players with a set of behavioral summations that they could reasonably attribute to their decision-making process?

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VW Taxonomy Q1 ‘08

Ren Reynolds

MUD, MOO, MUSH, MMORPG, VW, Metaverse,,,,

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In Search of Furry Economicus

Thomas Chesney

Hi, I'm Thomas, and I'm a first time blogger...

There is a popular perception that people will say and do things online that they never would in a face-to-face meeting. It's easy to find extremely personal blog posts, and 'screaming and shouting' goes on a lot in forums. Anonymity is usually blamed. Economists view human behaviour as based purely on self interest –  ‘homo economicus’ is what they call rational man. He is selfish and uncaring, and has never been found anywhere on Earth (sure we might know individuals like him, but never an entire culture populated by him). You would think that behaviour in an online environment such as Second Life would approximate more closely than anywhere else this concept of rational man - if anyone is ever going to act selfishly, it will be there, as a person can say and do things hidden behind their avatar. Residents do not normally know each others’ identities, and no one can be seen, for example, blushing from having performed a selfish act.

However this doesn't appear to be the case. Participants in recent experiments in Second Life revealed themselves to be as kind, caring and trusting as people in First Life.

Why is this?

Could it be that there is no such thing as a ‘Second Life culture’, and that residents simply bring their First Life culture in with them? The theory behind this says that when people go online they more readily take on the culture of the group they are joining; in this case the 'group' is Second Life users. So current findings imply that the culture of Second Life is identical to the cultures of the users. If this is correct, does it mean that the 'popular perception' mentioned in the first line is wrong? Or are blog posts and discussion groups just fundamentally different from interaction in virtual worlds?

Gaming / Life

Ren Reynolds

It’s my birthday.

Did you know?

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Welcome to Merci Victoria Grace

Dan Hunter

GameLayers which is developing the Passively Multiplayer Online Game (PMOG), which is trying to meld the existing web with a game space in interesting ways. She's going to be joining us to talk about the sorts of opportunities and challenges that this generates. Her details are over the fold, but I wanted to be the first to welcome her.

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Criminal Law in Virtual Worlds

Greg L

My friend Orin Kerr is a leading expert in the area of cybercrime and the author of the Computer Crime Law casebook, the first legal casebook in this area.  He is also a blogger at the Volokh Conspiracy, one of the most-visited legal weblogs.  Orin has just posted a draft to SSRN of his forthcoming essay, Criminal Law in Virtual Worlds.  It's quite timely, given the ongoing discussion of Arno's recent post.  Here's the abstract:

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US Government Looking for Terrorists... In Virtual Worlds

Mike Sellers

I've read this story in Wired a couple of times, the Secrecy News blog entry from a few days ago that it came from, and even went and looked at the (unclassified) original report (PDF) from the Office of the  Director of National Intelligence to Congress discussing it.  I still don't know what to make of this.  From the report:

Reynard is a seedling effort to study the emerging phenomenon of social (particularly terrorist) dynamics in virtual worlds and large-scale online games and their implications for the Intelligence Community.

"[The project will ] conduct unclassified research in a public virtual world environment. The research will use publicly available data and will begin with observational studies to establish baseline normative behaviors."

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Collaboration in the Virtual World

Andrew Jinman

Since 2006 I have been working within Second Life, using it as a collaborative platform. But one of the key questions to be answered is what makes Second Life qualitatively better than a discussion forum or VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) application? What is the added value of a virtual synthetic world like Second Life? And where will this lead in 2008?

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GDC 2008: Game Designers' Rant

Liz Lawley

I was sick on Wednesday, and missed the annual Game Studies Download featuring Terra Nova co-author Mia Consalvo and the amazing Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost. (Perhaps Mia will post about that talk...) But on Friday I was healthy enough to make it to the "Pouring Fuel on the Fire: Game Designers' Rant," which included Jane as well.

The session was wonderful--engaging and inspirational. I took copious notes, which follow.

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Why not qualify the taking away of virtual objects as theft?

Arno R. Lodder

As a coincidence, on the same day I gave an in-company course on Law & Virtual worlds, a Dutch 17 year old boy[1] was arrested for ‘stealing’ items from the Habbo Hotel.[2] Both the producers of Habbo and the kids that lost their virtual items turned to the police. The producers reported hacking, the kids reported theft.

Whether virtual items can be stolen is an often recurring issue, which core is the status of virtual objects. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Dutch Supreme Court decided that computer data cannot be stolen. The element of “taking away” was considered problematic: one can obtain computer data after copying them, but the original owner still has possession of the same data.

This ‘multiple character’ (identical computer data being at different locations) is no longer prominent in case of most virtual objects.

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GDC 2008: The Future of MMOs

Liz Lawley

What self-respecting virtual worlds blogger could pass up the opportunity to attend an all-star GDC panel on "The Future of MMOs"? Not me, certainly. So at noon on Thursday I found myself in the first row of a crowded room, listening to John Wood (managing editor of MMORPG.com) pose a series of interesting questions to:

* Jack Emmert (Cryptic)
* Matt Miller (NCSOFT)
* Ray Muzyka (BioWare)
* Min Kim (Nexon America)
* Rob Pardo (Blizzard)

What follows are my notes on the session; in many cases the responses are not verbatim, but instead are condensed versions of the key points. I was very impressed with how articulate and thoughtful these questions and answers were; it was an hour well-spent.

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Is 'Free Gesticulation' For Avatars Here Yet?

Bob Moore

I attended the Metaverse Roadmap workshop last week at Stanford, and I was pleased to hear Mitch Kapor touting the benefits of gestural input for virtual worlds (see Dan's blog post). I was especially excited when he said you can (almost) buy "3D webcams" - cameras plus an infrared depth sensor - for only $39! (Not sure if he was talking about the ZCam specifically). A couple of years ago, when Richard Marks of the Sony EyeToy team visited PARC and demonstrated their "real-time motion capture" for games, he said 3D cameras still cost $20,000!

Now I don't know if gestural interfaces will revolutionize computing in general, but I'm very excited about the new possibilities they create for 3D avatar control. As I've written about before, avatars will never be fully expressive until they are enabled with free gesticulation. With 3D cameras and real-time motion-capture techniques, "Players could use their own bodies and faces as joysticks in puppeteering their avatars." Currently in MMOs, gesture and facial expression are limited to a pre-specified library of commands (/bow, /wave, /point, /smile, /wink, etc.). Imagine if text chat were like this? What if you could only send chat messages by selecting them from a pre-specified library of phrases (like chat between strangers in ToonTown)? This would be severely limiting in terms of communication and expression. However, that's the current state of avatar gesture in virtual worlds.

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Consensus

Richard Bartle

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading Benjamin Duranske's excellent virtual-worlds-and-law blog, Virtually Blind, and came across the following remark:

Most writers, including VB’s editor, take commodification and subsequent legal intervention as a foregone conclusion at this point.

This got me thinking: the first State of Play conference was in November, 2003, and since then the arguments have settled down considerably. When we do get legal intervention, it will be far more informed than it would have been 5 years ago.

I'm wondering, though, what degree of consensus there is out there with regards to how the law "should" treat virtual worlds?

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Virtual Trademarks

Greg L

About a year and a half ago, I pointed out some commentary on trademark law in virtual worlds.  In the past year, there have been many developments on this front, including the Eros lawsuits in Second Life and more attention from legal practitioners (see this from WIPO).  So, when I was recently invited by the Santa Clara Computer and High Technology Law Journal to write about user-generated content and virtual worlds for a Symposium, I decided to write a short overview of the topic of Virtual Trademarks with Candy Dougherty.

You can find the current draft here on SSRN.  The abstract reads:

In this article, we discuss how trademark law might apply to virtual worlds and virtual economies. In Part I, we consider how trademark infringement in virtual worlds resembles and differs from trademark infringement in other media. In Part II, we look at the various business models of contemporary virtual worlds and how commerce takes place within them. In Part III, we consider the circumstances where trademark infringement may occur in virtual worlds by discussing questions of use, confusion, dilution and fair use. In Part IV, we examine the issue of contributory trademark infringement.

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Organising Virtual Events

Andrew Jinman

On the 18th December 2007 Twofour Learning and the Beyond Distance Research Alliance at the University of Leicester launched the Second Life Media Zoo project. The Island showcases a range of learning initiatives put forward by the Beyond Distance Research Alliance and is intended as a learning and research platform, aimed at gathering data on social interaction, behaviour and the importance of learning within a virtual 3D environment.

The event was synchronized between a virtual and real life launch at the University of Leicester and at the Media Zoo Island, within Second Life (SL). Many academics, company representatives, students and reporters attended both events. 42 avatars in total attended the launch at the Media Zoo Island, an extremely positive number as the Second Life architecture only caters for a maximum of 100 Avatars, with more than 60 causing increased lagg and decreased sim stability.

 

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An MMO in the Imagination of a Little Girl

BonnieRuberg

What do little girls dream of? 

A number of journalists, myself included, are pretty psyched about this new, small-scale MMO called Lila Dreams.  It's still in the early stages of development, but it's due to be published by Kongregate later this year, when it'll be available to play free.  According to designer Jason McIntosh, the game takes place in the imagination of an eleven-year-old girl, where "darkness... surrounds the world, constantly encroaching inward and eating away the landscape. But there is also going to be an array of strange creatures from Lila's thoughts and nightmares with which to contend and befriend."  The concept art, the creative concept, and the game's small (three-person) but enthusiastic team make Lila Dreams a promising title to keep an eye on when it comes to innovation in MMOs.  We all love fantasy titles like World of Warcraft and social environments  like Second Life. but it's refreshing to think there are new artistic directions we can take virtual worlds!

Surveillance: whose territory is a virtual world anyway?

Arno R. Lodder

When I visited mid January 2008 a technology crime police team in
Amsterdam, they told me about the internet related issues they were
struggling with. One issue was related to the physical location of a server.

They said to have permission to open someone’s mail box
only if the servers are physically located in the Netherlands.
In any other case they needed permission from the “hosting” state.

There had been a case where a mother killed her child and the
Yahoo-mailbox showed an unread e-mail with a subject that
seemed highly relevant for the case. Not looking at this e-mail
because the mail is hosted in the  US seems to me an
unjust territorialisation of the internet.

How should this policy be applied to virtual words?