Terra Nova

IMVU = There lite?

Yet another visual chat system is making the break for mainstream acceptance. This one is called IMVU. The neat thing about is it that it sits on top of a range of Instant Message clients and though its in Beta it seems fairly stable. Like many other things virtual IMVU has its own currency Avatar Dollars (AV$) and allows users to buy and sell clothing and accessories.

Team TN, well Betsy and I, have been road testing the software – see screen shot on right of our intense user test procedure in full flow.

The There link?

Well I have not been able to track down anything official yet, but if you do a whois on the domain you find that it is owned by The Will Harvey Company in CA and just how many Will Harvey’s working on vitual words can there be. Oh and the avatars floating chat bubbles are seem to be give away.

Virtual (Wikipediac) Worlds?

On Slashdot they reviewed Robert Glass' book Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering.  Fact 21 snagged by eye:  "(f)or every 25% increase in problem complexity, there is a 100% increase in solution complexity."   On BoingBoing they continued with  the controversy of Wikipedia and whether a publically vetted (open source) knowledge base can be trusted.  All this led to a few thoughts about scaling problems in future virtual worlds...

...Because of the Wikipedia controversy, Alex Halavais conducted an experiment: he deliberately introduced 13 errors into the Wikipedia only to find them corrected "within hours."  On Alex's blog, a provocative comment by Danyel Fisher pointed out that:

(What) you may have forgotten that there’s a (fairly large) number of people who read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Recent_Changes religiously (usually as an RSS feed)... So when you made your change, it popped up on a lot of screens—and one or another glanced at it, said “that’s wrong,” and fixed it. Indeed, check out the RC Patrol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RC_patrol for some idea of how this happens.

Danyel then goes on to suggest that  this approach to change is "cataclysmic" insofar as  "a great deal of interest gathers around a single page, many changes are made, and a new steady state is negotiated."  For this, he cites some stunning work (graphically speaking) out of IBM Watson Labs.

Virtual worlds...

I wondered about Robert Glass' Fact 21 and whether it might underlie the problem of virtual worlds in the future:  big places, complete places, lots of emergence... a place where scale gets in the way.     Personally, I tend to believe the most difficult scaling problems lie not in engineering and technology per se... but at the interfaces with, and the interactions within the player systems: the game world laws; the stories versus simulations; and all those cataclysmic, productive moments waiting to happen.    I can't help but think that we should somehow harness all those buzzed folk scanning RSS feeds - and  turn virtual worlds into collaborative worlds, somehow,  Wikipedia-like...   However, I cannot yet imagine what this sort of world would look like, can you?

Terra Nova Welcomes Jim Purbrick

One of the fortunate few who have been able, at this early stage, to acquire both academic and industry experience in analyzing and implementing virtual worlds, Purbrick hails from Nottingham UK. Primarily a network technologist but also a designer, his credits include experiments with time-linking in virtual worlds (recording and replaying events), persistence mechanisms (the PhD thesis), and real-world projects like Dragon Empires and the now-retired Warhammer Online. In the latter, we would have been treated to Jim's version of a seamless load-balancing technology - a holy grail for us lag-tortured players.

You can see a collection of Jim's writings at this link. Welcome!

Are Virtual Worlds Blind?

In the August Popular Science you can find "Is Science Fiction About to Go Blind?" A fun and thoughtful read that claims Sci-Fi -- once the domain of fresh thinking and edgy choices about imminent possibilities -- has gone soft, safe, and docile:

...(To) imagine the relatively near-term future... is a strangely courageous act, because modern science fiction is facing a crisis of confidence. The recent crop of stories mostly take the form of fantasy (elves and wizards), alternate history (what if the Black Death had been deadlier?) and space operas about interstellar civilizations in the year 12,000 (which typically gloss over how those civilizations evolved from ours). Only a small cadre of technoprophets is attempting to extrapolate current trends and imagine what our world might look like in the next few decades. “We’re staring into a fogbank,”

What is this "crisies of confidence?" Perhaps it stems from an inability or unwillingness by writers to attempt some of the hardest work in the genre: reason, imagine, and distill crisp storylines from the zany, paranoid, mixed-up, internet-speed details of our lives extrapolated in short fictional bursts from today.

Likewise, could our virtual worlds be similarly better served by greater world-building imaginative discipline? In other words, the question should never really about how to map proven team dynamics (e.g. Healer-Tanker-Nuker-Mezzer) into a "futuristic" setting, but should be about asking how to imagine real, touchable worlds, and then worry the dynamics:

... futuristic science fiction isn’t just about understanding relativity and estimate the approximate surface area of a solar-sail spacecraft capable of traveling at half the speed of light. You have to factor in politics and civil rights too. You have to think long and hard about the capabilities of a robotic pet cat with human-level intelligence, and then you have to ask whether it should have the right to vote.

I believe there is something deeper here than just Science Fiction and Sci-Fi worlds. Is it about building virtual worlds, imagined or not, that are palpable and exciting for their own sake. Should we try to get those right first, and hope for a game... or do we aim for the game and hope for the world. In the end, does the latter represent a creative pragmatism doomed to timidity? Or, alternatively, is the former wildly dangerous, but exciting?

Virtual Worlds 101: Draft Syllabus

The following course outline is for a upperclass undergraduate seminar on "Virtual Worlds" here at Indiana University. I'd be eager to get some commentary before inflicting this stuff on helpless students. Don't forget that they are college students, after all, and won't be enthusiastic about reading thousands of pages. Also, book purchases are to be kept to a minimum. The goal is to cover the basics without imposing too much burden. Plus I want lots of time to just discuss things. Suggestions for improvement / change of direction / more representative works are welcome.

DRAFT

Indiana University Telecommunications Department
TEL 451 Topical Seminar in Media and Society: Virtual Worlds
Fall 2004
TR 4:00pm – 5:15pm Room TV 245

Syllabus

Instructor: Edward Castronova, Associate Professor of Telecommunications
Contact information: castro@indiana.edu or try Comolan at Yahoo! IM
Office (temporary): TV 337. Office hours: Mondays 9-10am, Wednesdays 3-4pm, and by appointment.

Course abstract. The seminar introduces students to massively multi-user spaces on the internet, especially those with a role-playing game component. We will go over the history of virtual worlds as a communication technology, and survey their current state. We will use theories from a wide range of disciplines to predict future growth trends. We will also discuss implications for human interaction and public policy in the near and long term. Students will have about 100 pages of reading weekly: some of it fun, none of it technical, all of it interesting. Grading based on in-class presentations, a final paper, and overall participation. If you’re interested in learning how much your grandchildren’s world will be different from ours, this is a good course for you. Less lofty objectives include: introducing students to the most rapidly growing sector of the game industry, making them familiar with the guts of avatar-mediated communication technology, and point out some of the more pressing policy issues being raised.

Format: The seminar will rely exclusively on round-table discussions of the readings and course material, jump-started each session by a specific student.

Grading. Grades will be based on 1) three kinds of in-class presentation work (worth 10% each, 30% total), 2) a research paper (50%), and 3) overall class participation (20%). The research paper should aim at 15 - 20 pages and can be a critique/analysis of an existing virtual world (example: explain how the combat system in Game X encourages grief play) or a piece of original research (example: discuss the implications of censorship as applied to a player-run news website). More information about the paper will be given in class. The paper will be the basis for a presentation to the class near the end of the semester (10% of the total grade). A second presentation will be a brief, 10-minute ‘first impressions’ report on a massively multi-user world of your choice; this is also 10% of the total grade. The final 10% of presentations grading comes from brief presentations / introductions of the readings for the class. Each student may have more than one of these; the total weight will add up to 10%. Class participation is based on your overall behavior in class: contributing in a friendly, respectful, sincere way. Highest grades in presentations and class participation go to those who can clearly summarize the essence of their ideas and then engage in friendly Q&A about them.

Materials. Most of the class readings are available on the web. There are some items that you are required to purchase:

Bartle, Richard, Designing Virtual Worlds, New Riders, 2003.
Kurzweil, Ray, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Penguin, 2000.

In addition, each student will have to spend some time in a virtual world and report about that experience in class.

Finally, it is recommended that students spend time at the Terra Nova blog site. Certain posts may be highlighted as required reading.

Reading List

August 31. Social reality
Borges, The Lottery in Babylon
Shakespeare, Hamlet

Optional
Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum
The Matrix

September 7. Technological change
Kurzweil
Joy, Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us

September 14. Early history
Dibbell, A Rape in Cyberspace
Bartle, chapter 1, pp 1-32

Optional
Dibbell, My Tiny Life

September 21. Current state
Castronova, Chapter 3
Bartle, chapter 1, pp 32-80

September 28. Design features I, the front
Bartle, chapters 4 and 5

October 5. Design features II, the back end
Castronova, chapter 4
Bartle, chapter 2

October 12. Effects on the user.
Yee, The Daedalus Project
Bartle, chapter 3
Book, Traveling Through Cyberspace

Optional
Gerard Jones, Killing Monsters

Submit a one-paragraph description of your paper topic.

October 19. Sociology and Community
Jakobsson and Taylor, The Sopranos Meet EverQuest
Castronova, The Price of ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’
Koster, The Laws of Online World Design

October 26. Learning in virtual environments.
IU Center for Research on Learning and Technology, Quest Atlantis
Steinkuehler, Learning in Massively Multiplayer Games

November 2. Economic systems and commodification
Castronova, Virtual Worlds
Dibbell, The Unreal Estate Boom
Book, These bodies are free, so get one now!

Submit a one-page outline of your paper.

November 9. Legal implications
Hunter and Lastowka, The Laws of the Virtual Worlds
Bartle, Pitfalls of Virtual Property
Balkin, Virtual Liberty

November 16. Long-run implications
Castronova, On Virtual Economies
Jenkins, The Virtual World as a Company Town
Ondrejka, Living on the Edge
Reynolds, Playing a “Good” Game
Ward, The Dark Side of Digital Utopia

November 23. Workshop: how to make formal presentations

November 30. Student presentations

December 7. Student presentations

December 13. This is a Monday. Papers are due in the Turnitin.com dropbox by 2pm.

Richard Posner & Virtual Worlds

The Honorable Richard A. Posner is a judge on the Federal Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, a renowned public intellectual, and pretty much the inventor of at least one or two entire fields of legal scholarship. He's also guest-blogging this week over at Larry Lessig's weblog. Perhaps I should have seen this coming when he said that The Matrix was his new favorite movie--but in any event, his latest post shows that he's as fascinated with the social, economic, and legal implications of virtual worlds as we at Terra Nova. Read the post, you'll see what I mean. Professor Beth Noveck, in the comments field, has told him he must come to the State of Play II: Reloaded. We agree!

Forterra = The New There

Those who read Clive Thompson's NYT Magazine piece blogged by Greg earlier this week may have noticed the new company name for There: Forterra Systems. Yesterday the company issued a press release that confirms the name change and announces a new round of financing to the tune of $14M.

This round comes from existing VC partners plus a new Israeli-based partner JVP (Jerusalem Venture Partners).

Forterra's corporate site lists its new management team, headed up by Robert Gehorsam, former VP of Strategic Initiatives at There.

Who says geeks

..can’t get a date?

Well how else are you going to explain news-fad-of-the-day: The Virtual Girlfriend from Artificial Life Inc. The business model seems to be that you buy the character stuff and, according this BBC story, ‘she’ will introduce punters “to different aspects of her life”.

So, it’s a cute Tamagotchi with a slot marked ‘keep inserting money here’?

If any one wants to send me money to reveal different aspects of my life the bidding starts at $/€ 500 per go – I promise to make something up that is almost mildly interesting.

News Links

A busy day in the digital world news cycle. Protests, digital items and donations, oh my!

First, the Terra Novans were asleep at the wheel and missed the Star Wars: Galaxies protest, covered in detail on Law Meme. Digital world protests are nothing new, but this is an interesting look into how SW:G's customer service reps handle emergent situations.

Second, Wired News has an article about earning real money in digital worlds, specifically on using cheaper, international labor. Julian is mentioned and Brock Pierce is quoted.

Finally, actually a bit of original news. Following VERTU's successful campaigns for Heifer International and EFF, IGE has now opened a donation page as well, allowing digital world residents to give their earnings to Mercy Corps. Any of the lawyers want to jump in with a discussion of how simple US charitable giving rules are :-)?

Rayne, Rayne, go away?

The game character Rayne (BloodRayne series) appears to have a full schedule: on September 18 she is to appear on MTV2 where "Rayne and crew (will) give a stunning lip synced performance to Evanescence's hit 'Everybody's Fool.'" In October she will appear topless in Playboy magazine.

More details of her busy schedule can be seen here. A photo snapshot (paparazzi, no doubt) can be seen on BoingBoing. In this era of contrived human actors in contrived bands and sports, why not?  But I wonder: is there some uncanny valley for ambitious video game characters - confounding their full integration into our increasingly synthetic world? Or, as asked in an earlier Terra Nova discussion, Are We Really a Cheap Date just waiting to happen?

The Virtual Military

Clive Thompson, a journalist who shares many of our interests, has a new article in the NYT Magazine about There.com and the United States Army. We've discussed There.com & the Army a few times here: 1) U.S. Army adopts MMOG Tech (1/16/04), Earth the (Army) MMOG (2/18/04), 3) There's Army (4/24/04).

Clive's article has plenty more details, e.g.:

In 2002, Gehorsam showed There to some people in the field of military simulations, and they agreed that he was onto something. In early 2003, he landed a $3.5 million, four-year contract from the Army Research, Development and Engineering Command to build a simulator geared to model warfare against insurgents in urban settings. Forterra's game designers immediately set to work creating a new, parallel version of their online world -- a separate, cordoned-off virtual earth for the Army's exclusive use.

The military, of course, has always been interested in wargames and technology. Wargames, indeed, were some of the first games, and DARPA created the early Internet. So, to some extent, I think America's Army is a more interesting phenomenon than this.

Update: "Large-scale distributed virtual world technology products maker Forterra Systems (formerly There, Inc.), of Menlo Park, says it raised $14 million in a new round of funding... In another development, Forterra has appointed Robert Gehorsam as chief executive officer."

Update:This month's Wired magazine has another aticle by Steve Silberman on JFETS and the Fort Sill facilities.

30d6 fireball: AD&D turns 30 this Week

Dungeons and Dragons turned 30 this week. I listened to the NPR story with some excitement - it also mentioned the GenCon kickoff, also this week. The story asserted that AD&D was "hugely influential" in defining how computer games, and MMOGs, look-and-feel today. There were a number of aspects to this claim: 1.) the "geek overlap" (programmers and AD&Ders); 2.) AD&D made palatable numeric models of behavior (percentile dice thing); 3.) cooperative (multi-)play; ... How much influence do you think AD&D really had?

Or is this event just a nostalgic throwback to circa Aerosmith staged for the Yu-Gi-Oh! era?

Also:

See Dungeons & Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Gaming Culture From Geek to Chic. Here is the BBC story. Here is BoingBoing's post (Gamespy citation). See also SlashDot's take here and here.

Auteurs & Hollywood v. Flash & MUDs

Looking around The Witchery during the pre-conference dinner at the Edinburgh International Games Festival, it really sunk home for me how far computer gaming has come since the days when game makers like Steve Russell or Richard Garriott were hacking. I was well aware of the financial strength of game companies like EA, Sony, and Nintendo, but I had not fully understood what that kind of size meant for the culture in which games are created.

Presentations at the conference like "Hollywood Model- Come On Up!" and "Videogames Are The New Rock'n'Roll" underlined that games are increasingly being integrated into the larger entertainment industry. The latter talk, by Steve Schnur of EA, stressed how major artists were providing tracks for EA games, and EA was also providing a new platform for introducing and selling new recording artists to the public. Long gone are the days of this kind of thing (more here), which were a separate genre of weird and wonderful music. (Which made great grist for musical analysis by musicologists like Robert Bowen.)

Envelopment by Hollywood is perhaps inevitable for the mainstream games industry. With the cost of MMOGs, it's no surprise that new virtual worlds are increasingly tied into other licensed IP. But what's lost in the transition to the Hollywood model? Aleks Krotoski has posted some thoughts, and Justin Hall and Greg Costikyan had some similar thoughts a while ago.

Perhaps the problem is that large-scale capital is required to produce games with the state-of-the-art technical snazziness? Is the answer to that problems simply the promotion of creative auteurs, who are given the freedom and control to direct large teams, sell games with their names, and take creative responsibility? Or if you're looking for true originality in games in the future, are you be better off heading over to the lower-tech, more independent offerings you'll find listed on Jay Bibby's blog or the MUD Connector?

Update (thanks, Phin!): A Good NYT article on the subject:

Movie producers are often criticized for running at the sight of original ideas, preferring instead to milk plays, books, news events, toys and even video games for their screenplays. Now the video game industry is returning the favor, and then some. Seeking to establish the medium as a mass market form of entertainment instead of a niche technology, the game industry has taken the playbook of the movie business. The results have been movie-based games, Hollywood-quality special effects, professionally composed soundtracks, celebrity voices--and even Hollywood-style economic problems, including ballooning budgets and a greater reliance on monster hits.

link

Heralding Cory

Just in case you have not seen it - The Alphaville Herald has an interview of TNs own Cory Ondrejka about the moonlighting he does over at Linden Lab as VP of Product Development. The interview focuses on the Intellectual Property issues raised by SL, in particular the fact that one can upload images and now stream music (or any other sound) in-world.

Online console gaming pwnd?

According to this news piece in The Register, U.S. patent 6,769,989 has just been granted to Nintendo. The patent seems to cover all generic aspects of online gaming via a “home video game system”.

While this is an interesting corporate move, I’m not sure that it actually means anything. Though the idea of Microsoft and Sony having to pay Nintendo a fee for each system that they hook up online is momentarily amusing.

The summary from the patent reads as follows:

“The invention generally relates to special purpose, home video game systems. More particularly, the invention relates to a modem and hard disk drive-based enhancement for a home video game system to allow a video game player to dial-up a network service provider and communicate over the service provider's network to access the World Wide Web, send e-mail, play games and/or download executable programs, video and audio data to the system's hard disk drive.”

So gaming over broadband is not covered then?

Law is code

The rules of regular computer games are defined in code. If the game lets you do it, you can do it; if it doesn't, you can't. Want your RPG party members to fireball one another? Go ahead. Want to drive the wrong way round a racing circuit? If it lets you, sure, why not?

The rules of virtual worlds are also defined in code, but there are other rules beyond this that can't be coded: no profanity, no hate speech, no commodification, no [whatever]. These rules are defined in the EULA.

Because EULA rules aren't "part of the game", some players feel free to disregard them. The typical response to a violation is, "Hey, the program let me do it. If you didn't want me to do it, you should have coded it out".

Alternatively...

Let's take this "the only rules are those in code" argument further, and drop all EULA references to in-world activities. If the virtual world lets you do it, you really can do it. Swear your head off if you like - the code lets you, so it's OK. Spam players with URLs to Nazi web sites, macro to your heart's content... If the only rules are those in code, what's to stop you?

Here's what.

The designers specify that the code contain special commands that only certain character classes can use. Let's call these character classes "admins", and make them only available to people on the payroll. The commands are like very powerful spells; let's call the most powerful of them FOD ("finger of death"). If an admin FODs a character, that character is permanently dead and all their kit is garbage collected.

So now you call some player a cucking funt, and FOD! You're evaporated. "But the code let me do it!" you wail. "Yes", replies the all-seeing admin, "and the same code let me FOD you."

What would RL law have to say about that?

Richard

Virtual Crime on SSRN

Dan and I have posted a new draft of the Virtual Crime article on SSRN.

The potential for virtual property rights in MMORPGs inevitably gives rise to the potential for virtual property crimes. So this paper dovetails nicely into a space left open by our first article. We had touched on MMORPG crimes in the To Kill an Avatar article and we had initially thought we could just re-write that piece in a scholarly format. But the issues presented kept getting more and more interesting and so we ended up exploring different paths after reading about Julian's Bone Crusher dilemma, as well as talking with folks here and working through various "virtual crime" posts and comment threads (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

Nick's recent post on the isk-scam story highlights the continuing interest in these issues from an ethical standpoint. Nate's earlier post about blackmail and piracy in Eve Online is another example. I also noted in Tim Burke's 2001 Rubicite Breastplate article, a few sentences about exploits and duping:

Essentially, this kind of economic activity corresponds to criminal forms of economic behavior in the real world, with the singular difference being that the most ambitious and unscrupulous criminals can actually alter what amount to the local laws of physics... Duping was once a strictly internal crime with strictly virtual effects, but it is now a kind of real crime, with real financial consequences.

That pretty much captures what the article is about: how real is virtual crime? The article is only 26 double-spaced pages with 100 footnotes, and due to the brevity, there are many interesting issues that we didn't have space to pursue. For instance, we just roughly sketch the legal status of dupes and exploits without any detailed application of the case law, and the whole question of the salience of narrative structures in MMORPGs had to be relegated to some good citations in footnote 24. But, c'est la vie -- this is pretty much a final version. (And we should say thanks to Richard and Cory for some helpful last-minute comments.)

Ordinary Worlds, People?

An admirer of Hayao Miyazaki films, I recently was drawn into comparing how place was depicted in My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke. The forests and countryside of Totoro are ordinary - a place where spirits co-exist with a pastoral stillness. In contrast, the forests and spirits of Princess Mononoke live in a far away place, a place accessible by journey, a place of extraordinary form and drama. All of this led me to wonder about virtual worlds and their sense of place and folk.

With your virtual worlds, do you prefer your forests to be larger-than-life, or should they be similar to the ones you know, but just magical, somehow. Do you prefer your worlds ordinary with its folk extraordinary, or vice versa?

An Intergalactic Investment Scam

A lengthy, but intensely fascinating and well-written account of an Eve Online player who brokered a large investment scam by creating a puppet corporation. He does an incredible job of explaining the complexity of MMORPG worlds, the emotional salience of interactions, and how play transforms into work.

It's a lot of reading, but it's well worth it. Captivating, suspenseful, and at times, simply pure evil.

[Edit: The text may also be available here and here. Castronova, 4:21pm August 16]

EAs Eyes wide shut

Here at the Edinburgh International Games Festival the panel discussion on virtual currency that I chaired has caused a bit of a storm thanks to Jeff (lawnmower man) Brown, VP of Corporate Communications for Electronic Arts.

During the discussion Greg Lastowka and Linda MacKellar (of MacKellars law firmand Slam Games) both stressed that games companies need to take some stance on item trading both in their EULA and through actions i.e. if a company bans item trades in word they must follow up in deed by warning and possibly banning players that transgress the contract. Greg made the point that sleeping on rights and allowing the other party i.e. the players, to assume that they are not being enforced, could invoke some interesting common law concepts should the games company want to invoke the rights later. Whereas Linda, who also runs a development company, made the point that game companies can’t simply tack a EULA on at the end of a development process but have to think of their intended legal position through the design process.

Jeff stated that EAs position is quite clear – they are aware of item sales in games like Sims Online currently do absolutely nothing about, nor do they intend to do anything about it in the future.

In front on an increasingly stunned audience Jeff went on to comment on the whole business of making money out of virtual items – stating that if a kid had a choice between spending time creating something in an online world or going out and mowing the lawn for a few bucks, then obviously they should go mow lawns.

Sitting next to Jeff was Jamie Hale of Gaming Open Market and while I looked for somewhere to take cover Jamie and Jeff ‘discussed’ whether virtual item / currency sales (the basis of GOMs business) was the complete waste of time that Jeff seemed to be suggesting it was.

After the panel several audience member came up to me and asked: Did that EA guy really say that this virtual world stuff is a waste of people time – can you say that about your player base? I think Jeff’s point was that doing it for money was waste of time but that certainly was not the impression that many people seemed to take away.

News About Numbers

Three headlines today: Runescape Hits 100,000 Subscribers; Final Fantasy Grows Enormously; and Girardo Develops Cool Tracking Stats...

From the "Another Win For Innovation Over Graphics" Department: Runescape runs on Java, and now has over 100,000 subscribers. Although gameplay doesn't look dramatically different from anything we've seen before, the business model is unique. You can play for free if you want; pay $5 monthly to get access to more quests, skills, storage space. And it's from England. Auf geht's, Europa!

Meanwhile, Bruce Sterling Woodcock's latest MMOG growth chart shows Final Fantasy XI piercing the 500,000-subscriber barrier, on a trajectory whose second derivative hasn't gone negative yet. Are we about to see the first truly million-person virtual world? (Lineage's huge numbers are tainted by PC-Baang subscriptions.) By the way, Bruce, if you're listening: we are all in your debt for these numbers, many thanks.

And finally, have a look at Luca Girardo's new MMOG site. Coolest thing: a chart showing web traffic to the homepages of major virtual worlds over time. The numbers are newly available because Amazon.com is trying to out-google Google, and unlike the soon-to-be-IPO'd giant, they freely show the site statistics that generate their rankings. Here, for example, is Terra Nova's datapage. Not sure why we grew in March and shrunk in April, but we did. What's cool about the Girardo Index is that it measures buzz, even for worlds that are only in beta. One finding from the current figures: it looks like World of Warcraft is going to be a fairly big deal.

Quebecois Wanted

Jean-Francois Gazaille, magazine writer in Montreal, is looking to interview French-speaking folk who participate in virtual item trading. Quand c'est vous-meme, um, on sendez-il un, ah... O, BOTHER. If you fit the bill, send him an email at gazaille@cam.org .

When do Themes Collide?

Greg Aleknevicus, at The Games Journal - a web publication concerned with the art and design of the boardgame, poses an interesting cross-over question.  In "German Games are Fradulent" he claims that there should be a thematic <-> mechanical connection to good (board) game design.   Is there an equivalent principle for MMOGs: a thematic <-> simulation connection?

Greg states the advantage, for board games,  in this way:

Look back to the games that Avalon Hill produced in the 1970's and 1980's and you'll find that they're much more closely tied to their themes. Merchant of Venus may have some rather odd bits of thematic colour but there's no mistaking that you're a merchant trying to make a profit. In New World, you really do feel that you're exploiting the Americas. Most of the mechanics in Dune are quite abstract but it all adds up to a game that feels remarkably faithful to the book.

He  goes on to suggest to us a methodology of appraisal:

Consider playing a version of either game that has had all thematic accoutrements removed. (i.e. No artwork or descriptive text on the cards, the pawns are generic and the board is plain.) There's nothing in the gameplay of Ivanhoe to suggest that it's concerned with battling knights, it has as much theme as Hearts or Bridge. Clearly you could fit a theme to the mechanics but they do not suggest one of their own accord. A "de-themed" Duell, on the other hand, would be instantly recognizable as a fencing match to anyone who plays a few hands. The mechanics not only suggest the theme, they practically demand it.

A 'Dances with Elves Bard Fest' in an MMOG should not feel like Kung Fu Kombat, right?

Beyond the narrow considerations of the human-machine interface, are there more process-oriented links between game themes and game mechanics that need to be carried through in the the MMOG space?   Should a Healer-Tanker-Nuker group pattern in a fantasy MMORPG be translated differently into a Sci-Fi Dune setting, should it *feel* different there?

You spent how much!?

As TN readers will know, the development of Shenmue Online - a Sega / JC Entertainment / T2 co-production was announced recently (press release .pdf).

The proposed MMORPG is set in China (including Hong Kong) during the 1980s. It features Kung Fu action (nanaa nanaa, nanaa nanaa, na na naaah, every body was…) and is seen as an attempt by Sega to break into the Chinese gaming market. All good stuff - then I saw the development budget!

Reports suggest that the budget for Shenmue Online is somewhere around the $/€ 25 million mark (the original RPG allegedly cost somewhere between $50 - $70 million).

So, three questions for TNers:

• What is the biggest spend on an MMO that launched?
  
• What is the biggest spend on one that didn’t?
  
• What is a reasonable figure for an MMO that thinks it’s ever going to see a return on investment?

The largest figure I can find is There who report a $34 million development spend to date.

AvA no DB

This month’s PC Gamer Magazine (UK September Edition p 19 (no I don’t know why publishing is a month in advance here either)) has an ‘Academic Deathmatch’ between: me, Dr C, Proff B and Gonzalo Frasca (of ludology.org), the scores on the doors are:

Edward Castronova: ***** (5 brains)
Gonzalo Frasca: **** (4 brains)
Richard Bartle: *** (3 brains)
Ren Reynolds: ** (2 brains)

Where are the Heroes?

Why are there so few opportunities for an epic heroic gesture in MMORPGs?   Or do you disagree?

I was recently exchanging AD&D tall tales with friends of adventures from long ago (e.g. attached below). 

In the accounting below, one can note the process advantages of paper/pen role-playing over MMORPGs - Game Masters (GMs) can dynamically  customize the encounter and expose an impossibly narrow loophole that could be exploited by (relative) low-levels at great peril (charge against a rearing dragon). 

On one level, this tale highlights the plight of low-levels in the MMORPG.  Yet they pose the litmus test: do opportunities for heroism exist for them in and amongst the treadmills?  Is it ever possible for a low-level to make a *real difference?*   Perhaps, for some, an exceptional stand by a NOOB ("newbie") party against MOB trains (large flocks of NPC monsters) in some NOOB dungeon somewhere, qualifies.   But is there a more fundamental difference?

Consider.  Can one make the argument that MMORPGs, as an adventuring platform, have gone astray with player = single(few)-avatar assumption?    Because of the investment of time (read treadmills), social and emotional capital,  players are practically limited by the number of characters they can play.  Consequently, they are loath to get in "over their heads" and virtual worlds are loath to offer dire scenarios with only heroic exits for a few.  Hardly a profound point, but the question: is such a dynamic, in some guise, necessary for the organic emergence of heroic narratives in an MMORPG?   

Or are we talking about something different here?  After all, perhaps the MMORPG as we know them now,  can be best thought of as a tapestry-of-fiction stretched over systems built around socialization ponds and treadmills?    Would too much heroism be unsettling to the natural progression of large groups of players whose sense of fun is premised on predictability and a guarantee of seniority, eventually, in their virtual domain?

[Thanks to Kevin Conway! ]

The Knights Templar (our paladin & cleric, "guild") were searching for the artifact the "Invulnerable coat of Arn". After about 2 months (real time) of play searching, we had a lead that the coat was part of a dragons hoard. It was located in a remote region. I think we went for the dragon at X-mass, because we had a lot of people pulling out old high level characters. We expected a walk in the park, and went swaggering in.

Little did we know (the GM) had created an abomination based loosely on "chivalry & sorcery" dragons. The "dragon" was the last person to wear the coat too long and use the primary powers. He gave it the best armor class then in the game (-10 I think). The bite was like a purple worms and could swallow (like 20% of the time) a person. It had massive claw & wing attacks. And the tail swung in a large arc knocking & stunning anybody foolish to get behind it.

We surprised (yeah right) the dragon sunning itself in a clearing. The group unleashed it massed attacks, when the mushroom cloud cleared, the dragon has a chipped nail, half the warriors were swallowed, and a couple of casters were charred bones. We had done over 1500 point of damage in one round (an all time high I believe). Then in the best tradition on Monty Python we RAN AWAY.

Take 2: we scrapped together everything we had, made some calls got other players to come over with their cannon fodder. Then.......... Well WE RAN AWAY.

Take 3: communes, auguries, brow beating (the GM), we discovered that if a "Knight" on horse charges the dragon, the was a % chance per level of the knight that the dragon rears up, exposing its weak spot on its chest. Not expecting a normal horse to survive the breath on the way in, someone, I think Steve's warrior was polymorphed into a horse. Since (the GM) didn't roll (the percentile) dice, we figured that horse didn't count as a horse. Add 2 more high level players to the swallowed category. A couple of fighters later we got the roll, bam one hit the dragon died. It then exploded killing a couple more people, and rained down treasure.

The Tricky Business of Predicting the Future

A research firm called DFC Intelligence has released an industry report covering the online gaming market. The Table of Contents is posted on the DFC site.

Unfortunately I don't happen to have a spare $2,995 to access it but this Media Post article reveals a few interesting tidbits:

- DFC predicts the online gaming market will generate $9.8 billion in 2009
- Industry growth will be driven by greater adoption of broadband
- Women and kids will play a big role in future industry growth

The TOC seems fairly comprehensive, covering everything from the history of online games to discussions of player demographics. One item that caught my eye was "Glut of MMOG Products = Major Shakeout?"

Got a Life

Salon.com and the UKs Guardian Online both feature a piece James Meek called Get a Life. The feature covers the business of MMORPGs both from the publisher stand point and the growing trade in item trading. I did not spot anything that would surprise a TN reader (though of course they have impeccable sources: Dr C, Julian and Professor Bartle are all referenced [edit: scandalously Julian is not cited, but Nick Yee is – sorry I was halucinating]) but it is interesting to see MMO coverage stretching across the media landscape.

Incidentally the Guardian aunched a games blog this week.

Nuclear Family Fallout

The running joke about the Nuclear Family is that it went critical sometime in the 70's and blew up all over the place, with fallout we're still trying to sort out even now. The modern paradigm is the "Blended Family", the product of divorce and remarriage. I'm intimately familiar with that, as the reason I've been so scarce for the last 6 months has been dealing with trying to make a family out of me, my fiance, her two boys and my daughter.

My paternal grandparents once told me that the world had changed so much since they were young, they didn't even recognize it anymore. Born in the 1920's, their childhood was during the Great Depression and their young adulthood during World War II. When they were young, divorces were rare, mass entertainment was movies and radio dramas, and long-distance calls so expensive that you heard from relatives in other states only on special holidays and in emergencies.

By the time they died, movie newsreels and radio dramas had gone the way of the dodo, divorce rates were stable at around 50%, cell phone service plans had made long distance calls essentially free, and their grandson was making his living working in an imaginary world that existed only inside computers. Not only did they not recognize the world from the one they grew up in, but they couldn't even relate to it anymore, they no longer understood the chain of events that had led them from the world they knew to the one they were in.

This is far from a new observation, Alvin Toffler coined the phrase "Future Shock" to describe exactly this scenario and described it in the book of that name. What he also observed was that the pace of change was continuing to accelerate, that in the future everything that you had learned as a child would be irrelevant by the time you were middle aged, and future generations would face the same cultural obsolescence in young adulthood. Each of us deals with this in our own way, and chances are if you're reading this then you're one of what is sometimes referred to as "Shockwave Riders" (from John Brunner's novel of that name) and others call the "digerati", those who ride near the forward edge of the technological curve, determined to keep up and stay relevant.

Part of what seems to be emerging at the opposite extreme is what marketers call "never-adopters", a sort of neo-Amish that has stopped trying to keep up. Not luddites, they have no real objection to the increasing role of technology in everyday life, they just don't understand it and don't try to adjust, picking and choosing cafeteria style. They'll take the ATM's and online banking, but not PayPal and eBay. DVD's in their SUV, but not TiVo in their living room. This group, as parents, is as out of touch and marginalized as the grandparents of a generation before. It's not their grandchildren who seem to be speaking a foreign language as they describe their pursuits, but their own kids.

When 20/20 did their report on online gaming, they featured the case of Shawn Woolley and interviews with his mother. One of the most telling things she said was "I tried to tell him, 'Shawn, those people aren't real.'" Anyone reading this is likely to understand the fallacy there: The world Shawn spent so much time in wasn't real, but the people in it were. Elizabeth Woolley was unable to understand this, and it undoubtedly complicated and confused her attempts to discuss her son's heavy gameplaying with him.

On the other hand, in my house I, my fiance, her older son, and my daughter, are all online gamers. When he says "I'm in the middle of a Task Force," I know that other people are depending on him to carry his share of the load in City of Heroes and he's not going to be eating his dinner for a while. Just as with a soccer practice or other group pursuit, I know that real people are going to be impacted by my regulation of his gaming time. For other parents, neo-Amish, for whom the other people in the game "aren't real," this has to be a confusing and perhaps frightening concept.

So the question I would pose to the readers is this: What will the effects of online gaming be on family life, for digerati, neo-Amish, and those in between?

Virtual World Economy: It's Namibia, Basically.

In my original study, EverQuest's productivity was measured at about $2,000 in terms of annual GDP per capita. This was misreported in the press as "Economist finds virtual economy bigger than Russia!" Absurd. No virtual economy could outproduce, in gross terms, Russia's hundred-million-worker economy. I wonder how many sensible people have rejected the whole line of research on the basis of this misreporting.

But let's address the question head on. Is it possible that virtual world economies might make a gross impact equivalent to that of a real country? Actually, yes. Virtual worlds are already that big, economically speaking. More accurately, some unfortunate countries remain that small.

Let's assume in the absence of other data that virtual worlds, on average, have a GDP per capita of about $2,000. As in the original study, this figure would be arrived at by taking the total production of valuable goods and services, whether marketed or not, and using real-dollar exchange rates from places like eBay to assign a value to that production.

Second, let's assume the current population of all virtual world users is about 20 million, and that the average user spends about 20 hours a week in the world. This would imply about (20)x(20)x(52) = 20.8 billion in-world hours annually, or (20.8b)/(365.25x24) = 2.37 million full-time equivalent people (people living there on a 24/7 basis).

I tend to think of these as conservative estimates, but of course I could be wrong. If they are not conservative today, they will be within five or six years.

Here is a list of real countries with populations between 1 and 3 million:
Panama 2940000
Mauritania 2629995
Jamaica 2617000
Oman 2538000
Mongolia 2449000
Latvia 2338000
Kuwait 2328000
Macedonia, FYR 2038000
Namibia 1985000
Slovenia 1964000
Lesotho 1777000
Botswana 1712000
Guinea-Bissau 1447000
Gambia, The 1389000
Estonia 1358000
Gabon 1315000
Trinidad and Tobago 1304000
Mauritius 1212000
Swaziland 1088000

And here is a list of real countries with GNI (Gross National Income, the Bank's preferred statistic) per capita between $1,000 and $3,000:
Dominica 3000
Belize 2970
Brazil 2830
St. Vincent and the Grenadines 2820
Jamaica 2690
South Africa 2500
Turkey 2490
Marshall Islands 2380
Maldives 2170
Europe & Central Asia 2160
Fiji 2130
Russian Federation 2130
El Salvador 2110
Peru 2020
Thailand 2000
Tunisia 1990
Micronesia, Fed. Sts. 1970
Suriname 1940
Romania 1870
Colombia 1820
Namibia 1790
Bulgaria 1770
Guatemala 1760
Jordan 1760
Algeria 1720
Iran, Islamic Rep. 1720
Macedonia, FYR 1710
Kazakhstan 1520
Ecuador 1490
Egypt, Arab Rep. 1470
Albania 1450
Tonga 1440
Samoa 1430
Serbia and Montenegro 1400
Belarus 1360
Bosnia and Herzegovina 1310
Cape Verde 1250
Swaziland 1240
Morocco 1170
Paraguay 1170
Syrian Arab Republic 1130
West Bank and Gaza 1110
Vanuatu 1070
Philippines 1030

(Source: 2002 World Bank World Development Indicators)
(Sorry about the formatting, I am too lazy to do more than cut and paste.)

The following countries appear on both lists:

Jamaica, population 2.6m, GNI/capita $2,690
Namibia, population 2.0m, GNI/capita $1,790
Macedonia, population 2.0m, GNI/capita $1,710
Swaziland, population 1.1m, GNI/capita $1,240

For comparison:
Virtual worlds, FTE population 2.4m, GNI/capita $2,000

In other words, the virtual economy would be roughly equivalent to the economy of Namibia or Macedonia, in terms of its overall role and position in the real global economy. It may be catching up to Jamaica. No, not Russia. Not even close. But not chopped liver, either.

After currency

In this exclusive interview TerraNova talks to Second Life member Jacqueline Richelieu about her plans to create an in-world investment bank and stock exchange.

For those not following SL here is a quick bit of background which should put the notion of in-world investment banking into context. Old hands can probably skip this bit:

As many here know Second Life (SL) is a ‘social world’ that is unusual amongst VWs in that its contract (TOS / EULA) recognises player creation and grants certain rights over virtual objects to their creators – they players / members / citizens of SL. SL creator, Linden Lab, also accepts the trading of SLs currency on sites such as GOM.

With many social worlds one might ask ‘what is the game?’ in SL the answer is easy: it’s the economy, stupid.

A large number of players are active in the creation of product and / or services. These range from clothes and furniture through to animations, avatars, photography, live-DJing. Most of this merchant class own land - which they rent from Linden and seems to represents the core of the SL business model. The land is used for houses, clubs and of course shops and malls. An avatar vendor I met recently, for example, has space where he runs events – which is conveniently right next door to his shop, and rents five other outlets within malls and other businesses.

Gradually the SL economy is gaining a recognizable structure: people buy things e.g. custom avatars, avatar business rent space in a malls, mall owners buy land and services to create their malls. At the top of tree are popular merchants and the so called ‘land barons’ who buy large chunks of land from Linden then re-sell small parcels (aka ‘land stripping’). For the top merchants all of this activity generates a respectable real income, in some cases enough to live on.

Given the status and structure of the SL economy - and to be frank, the amount of money to be made in there, the next logical step for the ‘economic game’ is in-world financial services - which is where Jacqueline Richelieu (character name) enters the picture. Jacqueline is currently working on an in-world investment bank. Intrigued, TN caught up with her [Interview took place on 31/07/04 on the tennis courts at Avalon, transcript is edited for flow and typos]:

TN: Can you give us an overview of your venture Jacqueline Richelieu: as the first investment bank, we will be tracking many variables of SL's economy. We seek to provide financial analysis, place money, and determine attractive investment opportunity

TN: what kinds of things will u track?
Jacqueline Richelieu: land sales, USD$ to L$ ratios and the biggest opportunity: taking virtual SL companies public in SL.

TN: have u had much interest so far?
Jacqueline Richelieu: yes, many companies want to go public some of the largest enterprises seek to capitalize themselves… I envision our biggest market in taking SL companies public the SL stock exchange

Jacqueline Richelieu: The "hard" part will be auditors the need for 3rd party independently verified financials… our auditors will report on our undertakings from an independent perspective
TN: can u say who they are / will be
Jacqueline Richelieu: they will be announced, though at this point, we have yet to engage any

TN: will u have a web site to, and compete with GOM and IGE on the currency exchange front
Jacqueline Richelieu: we won't be direct competitors of GOM or IGE, in that we will most likely analyse trends there and not do actual USD$ exchanges but a web site providing investment opinions and analysis, yes

TN: do you have official underwriting from Linden [Labs]
Jacqueline Richelieu: no, nor will we seek it we seek to avoid regulatory oversight

TN: I also wonder about the enforceability of contract in here [Second Life]
Jacqueline Richelieu: IMHO, there is no enforceability. That is why auditors become so important
TN: So why would anyone invest if there is no security
Jacqueline Richelieu: the oldest point in the world: *principle*. Trust. Trust will be EVERYTHING at Richelieu and Associates.

So there we have it. Some people thought the idea of virtual currencies was odd, I’m just beginning to contemplate the kind of issues and complexities virtual investment banking is going to unearth. The firs thing that does spring to mind, as noted in the interview, is how enforceable an contract is going to be, and in what ways does a contract between players for a virtual enterprise relate to the TOS obligations that they have entered into with Linden (for reference here are the Second Life Terms of Service)

Other Players conference

Due to some technical difficulties the submission deadline for the Other Players conference has been extended to August 16. Papers should be submitted online (contact Miguel Sicart for any questions about the process). The conference is December 6-8 at the IT University of Copenhagen and is sure to be a good one so hope folks can make it!

It's Academic

Following on from Ted's job news, as of today I'm officially Visiting Professor in the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering at the University of Essex, England. The main consequence of this as far as I'm concerned is that I can use the job title Professor.

Readers from the USA and elsewhere may be thinking "so what?" here, but in the UK the title of professor is reserved for people at the top of the academic tree, and (in line with our wonderful class system) is accorded some degree of respect by members of the general public. When professors make statements concerning their field of expertise, the default is for people to believe them merely because they're
professors.

How long this situation of trust will last in today's world of increasingly diluted academia is anyone's guess, except in my case I know it's for one year only: "visiting" means I'm on a part-time, yearly contract, and if it isn't renewed in August 2005 then I'm back to being plain old Dr Bartle again.

Until then, though, I'm Professor Bartle (but hey, you can call me Richard).

Richard