Terra Nova

Leaky Faucets

Object-oriented software guru Grady Booch will be speaking (IBM link) at the upcoming Game Developer's Conference in March ("Best Practices for Game Development").   A harbinger of things to come?

In "Troubles with Tribbles" we discussed the problem with computing parallelism confronting game developers.  Assuming Tim Sweeney's point of a driving growth in the numbers of game simulation objects (to implement larger worlds with more content) then how *does* one begin to manage the complexity of those objects.

Why should you care?  Hang on...

In "Troubles with Tribbles" we suggested the object-based culture of the building-blocks of our virtual worlds in this way:

...If Code is the Law in our realm, then the modern conceptualization of code (see Footnote [1]) often aspires to be object-based.  The craft of software objects is then Object Oriented Programming... Software object-oriented design has been (by-and-large) a cultural touchstone for nearly a generation of software developers and designers - objects provide a convenient and intuitive means of partitioning/ decomposing problems and mapping them onto code building blocks.

Grady's 2005 presentation on the nature of software complexity (excellent set of slides from his keynote at 2005 Aspect-Oriented Software Development) presents a compelling claim: software is expensive and getting more expensive, and a great deal of its cost is driven by its increasing complexity. Games, virtual worlds, or not, that is the bullet.

To manage complexity do developers need to be able to better decompose software into components in a way that trades-off successfully one type of complexity for another?  Is it, in the words of aspectprogrammer.org about the illusion of simplicity:

...(T)he task of the development team is to engineer the illusion of simplicity. In (programming) languages we see the tradeoffs in history. Control structures are a tradeoff between primitiveness and convenience. Garbage collection is a tradeoff between expliciteness and abstraction. VB and Smalltalk are tradeoffs between performance of development and performance of execution. Beans, aspects, services are a tradeoff between packaging for design versus packaging for development versus packaging for deployment...

While Grady in his 2005 slides goes on to discuss the nature of software componentization (vertical vs. horizontal, "layers of abstraction" vs. "interdependence") he fundamentally hopes that software abstaction is simplifying.  What are the right abstractions for game simulation objects and software? 

Jonathan Blow in  "Game Development: Harder Than You Think" (ACM Queue, February
2004) suggests a problem lies with the "glue layers" - the mortar to components fitted against ill-matched abstractions (emphasis added):

...Often the API (application program interface) is difficult to deal with because it embodies some conceptual model that is a poor fit for the way your game needs to work. Thick glue layers are usually necessary between the main game code and the third-party API. Application program interfaces for rendering or physics often want data organized in very specific ways, a situation that propagates through the rest of the program and imposes difficult constraints (because a lot of data needs to be passed back and forth...)...

Not to forget all the game simulation objects crowding to complete content and the rush to get product out the door, is there time to even think about the right abstractions?

In 2002 Joel Spolsky forwarded a widely cited article on "The Law of Leaky Abstractions," there he provides several simple but colorful examples (such as TCP vs. IP) - read it. His high-level claim can be summarized as:

All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.

By leaky he means that they fail us, to varying degrees.   By failure he means that they don't accomplish what they were set out to do - insulate us as from the detail.  Consider this example of his, albeit in geek:

...When I'm training someone to be a C++ programmer, it would be nice if I never had to teach them about char*'s and pointer arithmetic. It would be nice if I could go straight to STL strings. But one day they'll write the code "foo" + "bar", and truly bizarre things will happen, and then I'll have to stop and teach them all about char*'s anyway...

If you are scratching your head on this technical bent, pause for a second and consider Tim Sweeney's crude measure of complexity for Gears of War (ref "Troubles with Tribbles" above):

~20 different middleware, ~250k x2 = 500K lines of code

Then consider then Grady's ball-park estimate of 100$/SLOC (single line of code) and  recall Johnathan Blow's account of the messy glue that is now used to bind the layers of game software.  Even if game programmers work for less, perhaps the implied constant moving between the disparate levels of abstraction impedes progress.

When do abstractions become too complex and when do virtual worlds suffer for it?  Perhaps driving down software costs is the first step along the road to having more choice in worlds.

Does Bandwidth Buy Crowds?

Technology question: Yesterday a documentary film crew from Tellabs was in my office and one of their questions carried the premise that the size of the broadband pipe to the home was going to increase 100-fold in the medium term. Their question was: how is that going to affect online games? I answered with an opinion that, primarily, it would allow more users in one virtual space at one time. Ten times more, I'm guessing - if the pipe goes up by 100x, but the information load of a crowd of size n goes up by n^2, then the max crowd size goes up by sqrt(100x) = 10x.

I've been making so many stupid arguments and claims lately, I don't feel a lot of certainty in anything I say any more. So can I ask: Is this sensible? Is it at least not personally offensive to anyone? If so, that would be an advance...

I'm So There

Just wanted to let the TN community know that I’ve started this week on staff at Makena Technologies (the folks who bring you There) as the new Director of Product Management.  In this role I'll be focusing on There's in-world marketing programs, merchandising and events as well as helping to develop and implement new product features.  As many of you know, I've been intrigued by There since its beta period.  Now I'm thrilled to have the chance to gain some first-hand experience with the development of a social virtual world product and I couldn't be happier to have this opportunity.  Looking forward to great things in 2006!

Less *Bang Bang* for Your Buck

Much to the surprise of the folks over at GameDaily and trigger-happy GTA fans alike, sex workers are people too -- even when it comes to video games.

SWOP, the Sex Workers Outreach Project, recently issued a statement denouncing Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto for encouraging the mistreatment of prostitutes. "In the interest of furthering sex workers' human and civil rights to life and personal safety," the statement says, "we object to any media which represents sex workers as legitimate targets of violence, rape and murder."

While SWOP stresses their stance against censorship, they feel their boycott is warranted, given the circumstances, and call upon consumers to "vote with their dollars by refusing to purchase products which encourage the denigration and destruction of prostitutes." The statement goes on to suggest -- with the help of a David Walsh's "Video Game Violence and Public Policy" -- that players who act out against prostitutes in GTA are more likely to take out real-life aggression against them as well.

Whether or not GTA fans are actually running out to reenact their in-game rampages, a possibility that seems over-stressed both here and in other anti-game rhetoric, SWOP is making a valid point about the portrayal of sex workers in video games (Even if they have some of their details wrong; players can't rape and don't "accrue points" for murdering prostitutes.). Sex workers deserve to be seen as real people, not just disposable NPC's. However, as in the real world, where prostitutes are commonly regarded either as comic caricatures or pitiful victims, they're often looked at as non-persons.

To that extent though, games like GTA are merely reflecting the ideas of our larger culture. Even the impetus to sleep with a prostitute and then kill her, to reassert her supposed inadequacy with a bullet -- and to enjoy doing it -- is part of our socially-constructed view of proper and improper members of society. Do video games allow us a level of interactivity, of engagement and agency that other mediums lack? Sure, but they don't create new urges. And like all art forms, they have the right to portray respectful ideals or violent realities as they choose.

Of course, not everyone who shoots a hooker in GTA is thinking these issues through. Those impressionable players who aren't influenced in their actions by the in-game violence might well be influenced in their thinking. A virtual act, like killing prostitutes willy-nilly -- or just being able to do so -- can reinforce real-life stereotypes and preconceptions about sex workers.

Personally, having never shot, or even slept with a GTA prostitute, I've always found this element of the game amusing. I take the ridiculous violence as a satirical critique, or at least a comment, on our absurd attitudes toward sex workers, and the pop culture that reifies them -- of which, of course, GTA is the epitome. Unfortunately, not everyone sees it that way: not many of the players, and, as an understandable result, not the real-life sex workers themselves.

AAAS Conference

Greetings from St. Louis, where I had the opportunity yesterday to give a presentation about virtual worlds with fellow Terra Novans Cory Ondrejka, Josh Fairfield and Mike Sellers, at the annual conference for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).  Unfortunately I missed Cory’s presentation, which was moved to the morning session. Josh, Mike and I covered the afternoon session and it was quite a range of topics.

Josh spoke about legal and property issues (with great flair I might add) and included the obligatory WoW demo, which turned out to be an excellent tool for luring unsuspecting scientists into the room.  Actually, several attendees were already familiar with WoW and much pre-session WoW chat ensued.   

Mike switched gears to discuss emotions and AI, which not surprisingly seemed to resonate most strongly with a roomful of scientists.  He covered everything from historical and current theories in the field to ethical issues of AI and even threw in a visual demo of reputation systems and a disturbingly funny story about an agent named Stan who turned into bot-food for two other hungry agents.

My presentation was about advertising and branding in social virtual worlds. It wasn’t remotely scientific in any way, shape or form, but included an overview of ways in which social worlds are being used by corporate advertisers for ad campaigns along with an introduction to the new trend of member generated brands.  I’ve posted the presentation here for anyone interested. (Go to View --> Notes in the powerpoint to view the presentation notes).  Fair warning: the file is 8 MB.

My only regret was that I couldn’t attend the concurrent session on kids’ and teens’ uses of the internet by Henry Jenkins, danah boyd, Justine Cassell, Amanda Lenhart, and Dave Huffaker.  Happily, danah has blogged it and posted her presentation notes.       

The WoW_wave

WoW wave (noun): The phenomena of online gaming creeping in to the public consciousness evidenced by a deluge of exploratory contacts from journalists, marketing organisations, VCs, TV types, blue chip companies and random others asking what all this online stuff is all about, what it means, what they can do with it, and where the money is.

Ahh it’s just like the mid 90s all over again. Suddenly everyone knows that they have to have a virtual world, or at least be a part of one in some way. Trouble is that they don’t actually know what they are or what being into them would entail.

And WoW as Golf is just one aspect of this. The broader thing that I see occurring is people taking a notion of virtual worlds, generally their idea of what they are or should usually gleaned from third hand experience or some of the media references that are going around, and adapting this to their pre-exiting needs. These being things like brand extension or a need to ‘capture’ an audience.

The potential outcome is an explosion of virtual this, thats and do-dats. The MMO version of blink tags. Worlds that are productised, merchandized, branded and channel marketed. But worlds that are thin. Words that serve the idea of a purpose and are created on mini budgets chasing immediate returns.

I keep saying that no one with a history of MMOs is going to like the mainstream and now I’m more confident than ever.

But I’m sounding too damming. What’s wrong with a world created to serve a product or a brand? It might be a short, narrow experience bereft of the social and ludic complexity of WoW or EvE or ATITD or one of the many others.

But so what?

I like a bag of chips as I walk a long the sea front, I also like dining in Paris. I don’t confuse the two. I know a good fat steaming chip when I see one, a good 3 minute one-hit-wonder when I hear it.

So. Yay for branded worlds, yay for Richard’s vision of worlds as personal expression, yay for boutique worlds and yay for gazillion dollar WoW’s of the future.

100K

Eve Online has been in the news - recently voted favorite MMORPG of 2005 by MMORPG.com's Reader's Choice Awards (see Joystiq's coverage and comments).  CCP also announced that it had crossed the 100k subscriber mark (Slashdot's comments and links).   

On the one hand we may discount these huzzahs! to an active fanbase and concerns about the meaning of subscriber metrics especially in an "alt friendly" world.  Yet it is still noteworthy.  To quote what I wrote in September 2004 when Eve Online crossed the 50K mark:

... Impressive for a space opera MMOG characterized by bewitching graphics, PvP and piracy, all the cut-throat corporate melee you could desire, a brutal newbie treadmill (new meaning to rock grinding), and for those who play traders - all the spreadsheeting you can imagine.   In other words, while Eve may not be everyone's cup of tea, if you are a player, you still can't help but be impressed that there are 50K other like-minded folk out there...

Well, now 100K.

Eve Online is a place that has always been such a conundrum (e.g. recently):

...(it) is Icelandic with Calvinist overtones - yet in this confining straightjacket there is opportunity to find one's own way towards a demeanor of play.  One represents a fall into an abyss, the other, a rise from one to redemption...

Clickable Culture points out that ultimately Eve-Online's growth may be capped once it fills its niche.  The law of niches.  Yet Eve-Online claims to be going to China.

The interesting question beyond Eve-Online is how do "far-out" niche worlds evolve with success?  Who changes more, the niche or the mainstream?  Beyond a dash of iconoclasm and exotica - are niches only interesting because of their limitations?

GLS Conference: Submissions Deadline Extended

Games, Learning, and Society Conference
June 15-16, 2006 . Madison WI

Deadline for submission to the second annual Games, Learning & Society (GLS) Conference to be held June 15-16, 2006 in Madison, Wisconsin has been extended to March 3, 2006. The GLS Conference fosters substantive discussion and collaboration among academics, designers, and educators interested in how game technologies – commercial games and others – can enhance not only learning and education but also culture and society more broadly. Speakers, discussion groups, interactive workshops, and exhibits will focus on game design, game culture, and games’ potential for learning and social change.

We invite creative and interactive proposals for presentations, discussions, symposia, workshops, debates, respondents, and exhibits on topics and issues related to conference themes. Please visit our website for detailed submission information: www.glsconference.org

Poster Note: Last year the conference was a huge success (we had a waiting list to get in and only 13% paper acceptance rate) so we've decided to try to make it an annual event but keep it small so that folks can still engage in genuine conversation. I'd personally love to see more MMO representation there, so please consider submitting something!

World of Warcraft is the New Golf.

So, Cory was right.   World of Warcraft is not only the new golf, but there are country clubs forming.

Take a look at this.

Given my own very positive experiences in continuing and developing real-life relationships online, I'm not at all surprised to see the growth of organizations intended to foster not only entertainment oriented play, but also the growth of real-world social groups.

Tell that to your spouse the next time she / he claims you're wasting your time online!

Religion in MMOGs

Many MMOGs have within them some nod toward religion, some degree of religious trappings at least.  Priestly characters are common, as are holy warriors (paladins).  To say nothing of demons and angels based loosely on Christian archetypes, the former of which make regular appearances in online games. 

And yet, actual religion and theology are pretty much absent or at best non-operative in most MMOs.  In fantasy games the priest is typically a "healer" but otherwise the character is a façade.  In modern or science fiction games, religion is conspicuously almost entirely absent. 

I've been wondering for some time about enabling the presence of both real-world and made-up religions in MMOs as thematically appropriate.  Is this a good way to flesh out a world, to create gameplay surrounding a moral code and shared identity, and to bring a significantly missing piece of human community to the game, or would it just be a way to invite controversy -- in effect, to draw aggro from both religious and non-religious players and cause a heap o' customer service trouble?   

The companion to this question is a bit more introspective: to what degree does the answer to the question of operative religions in MMOs vary with our own degree of spirituality/religiosity?  Is the perceived  agnosticism of the game development community keeping religion out of MMOs?

When religion does appear in MMOs it does so as a vague prop that provides nothing in the way of gameplay based on themes of faith, adherence to a code of conduct, membership in and sacrifice for a larger organization, etc.  In game terms religion could become operative in a number of ways ranging from socially motivated achievement gameplay to role-playing to exploring somewhat deeper themes than we typically find in existing first-generation MMOs.  Even in straight achievement terms amenable to current games, imagine for example a paladin who gained bonuses for things like making a personal sacrifice for weaker members of a party (your paladin receives buffs when rezzing if by your death the mob was killed while other party members who had sustained over 50% damage did not die).

But if we open the door for gameplay with a religious component, is it desirable or even possible to keep the religions in an MMO entirely fantastic?  If a group of players want to set up an guild/organization that's avowedly Christian or Hindu, or one which has no relationship to any actual religion, is there any reason not to allow it?

Another way to ask this is, would players be accepting of having Jewish, Shinto, Lutheran, Puppeteer, and Flat-Earth organizations in-game?   Would "proselyting" -- people advertising their religion or religious organization in chat channels -- be a problem?  (Yes, there are echoes here of the recent GLBT discussion.)  And might people holding a particular religious belief in their own lives either be offended by its presence in a game, or use that presence as a lever to annoy others with their beliefs? 

One immediate problem of course with anything along these lines is that religion is one of those areas where people unfortunately often leave civility behind when discussing others' beliefs.  For the sake of this discussion, assume that any organization that in name or practice actively disparages another's philosophy is excluded or shut down -- though of course even that is open to the same sort of "giving offense" interpretation as has been seen in the latest GLBT flap in WoW.  By this thinking we wouldn't have to allow the KKK or Aryan Nations, but we probably would have to let players form the Church of All Things Chuck Norris.

Is this on balance a good thing or more trouble than it's worth?  Are there new forms of MMO gameplay that can be explored here, or is it better just left alone?  And again, how do our own individual religious biases play in to how we see the answers to these questions?

De-levelling

GM: In accordance with TOS Para 16.2.3.1(i) you level was just decreased by 2 for repeated homophobic comments in public chat

Player: wtf

GM: pwnd

This was inspired by a comment on the Guardian’s Gamesblog - it got me to wondering whether character nerfing would work as a penalty system. OK, this has probably been tired somewhere and discussed on MUD-DEV but the archives don’t seem to be online so let’s kick this one round the block again.

I wonder what impact this might have on the social dynamic and group norming. If you were fixed up to do something and one of your party is suddenly a lvl-1 this might impact the groups ability to complete a quest, would that put more pressure on individuals not to offend.

Say they used an alt – fine, just nerf all their alt’s.

It might also have an interesting impact on the ownership debate i.e. they idea property in a character might be loosened if one realises that a GM can simply de-level it or nerf it at any time.

Troubles with Tribbles

The slides from Tim Sweeney's (Epic Games) POPL talk are available; it is a deeply technical presentation (PPT, "The Next Mainstream Programming Language: a game developer's perspective") worth noting for a number of reasons.  The most important is its hint of a looming challenge confronting the games industry.  Will the industry need to change how it works with its software?   

While the issues presented are not unique to the games industry it will likely be felt there sooner.  In so many ways the games industry has led the rest of the pack by way of technical challenges, solutions, and breakthroughs.  The problem of software engineering was hinted at in an earlier discussion - albeit vaguely, when the distinction was made between virtual world design and its added-ons (see "Lipsticking the Chicken").  The question here is a more vexing extension:  if I can't practically express it, how can I build it?

What follows is the first in a series of posts planned on software and virtual worlds.   There are large forces in play that shape what worlds look like today and into the future -forces rivaling the imaginations of designers...

A programming language and a programming paradigm can shape how we engineer a world.  As with our natural languages perhaps there is a cognitive dimension, but without having to even reach that far it is safe to say that engineering practices establish approaches to problem-solving that bias solutions.  These practices are hard to ignore in especially high-stakes, risk-adverse software development environments.  Thus our first biq question, can game software development as it is now conducted scale in the face of advances in hardware, appetite for content, and capped costs?

Our story now migrates to *objects*.  If Code is the Law in our realm, then the modern conceptualization of code (see Footnote [1]) often aspires to be object-based.  The craft of software objects is then Object Oriented Programming, even if it is only sometimes realized.  By and large, software object-oriented design has been a cultural touchstone for nearly a generation of software developers and designers - objects provide a convenient and intuitive means of partitioning/ decomposing problems and mapping them onto code building blocks.  Challenges emerge, however, when one scales interactions from small numbers of objects to large sets of objects.  Throw in parallel threads of computation and all hell breaks loose.  Why the concern with large numbers of objects?  Well, that is arguably where gameplay simulation is heading.

This is where Tim's slides enters our stage.  They worry a particularly difficult and central problem: how to have large numbers of objects interacting across many threads of computation.  On the one hand this may seem like technical arcanum, but note that we all often pretend this point in our discussions and comments on Terra Nova and elsewhere. It is how most of us conceptualize a simulation. We talk  to the illusion of a world with many concurrent activities and a speak least metaphorically, to the agencies that  can live in such places (e.g. of Non-Player-Characters and Player-Characters interacting with shared world state).  In the fact of today, however, such parallelism is a fiction - most games are implemented within a single simulation thread (they just iterate through all the objects quickly but in sequence... "butcher before baker before the cat jumps over the moon..."), but this is likely to change, perhaps very soon.

A question for the future is how to implement larger simulations with more objects.  In a Gamespy.com article a while ago, Tim Sweeney stated that while the last ten years of programming progress were about objects, the next ten years will be about "ecosystems of objects."  One problem looking forward is how to work reliably with game simulation objects in parallel (see "concurrency").  As he points out, the approach of today using mainstream programming languages is to manually synchronize object state - a developer has to explicitly lock/unlock the bits of the object and figure out how it should share with other objects   ("shared state concurrency").  This won't scale - it is too error prone and too complicated to implement over large object sets.  It is also expensive (skilled developers).  Thus, we stand at the edge of the abyss looking to worlds feared with plains of bugged tribbles.

Beyond software engineering there too have been subtler claims favoring parallelized code.  Assuming tools and practices catch up (a big if), can it lead to more fine-grained definitions of game simulation behavior? Fewer quest chains, more negotiation?  If true this can mean that content creators / script-writers will be able to more naturally express game-world behaviors - allowing them to produce more cost-effective content.  This would be in contrast to how scripting and coding games is currently done in games (imperative styled programming, see also other related discussion:  "Nested Worlds") using approaches that are arguably non-scalable (labor-intensive).

If the suggestion sounds pie-in-the sky, consider that we're likely on our way.  Tim identifies  these types of code in a game:

-Shading code
-Numeric computation
-Gameplay simulation

Shading code is presented as already "data parallel" (within the GPU - or Graphics Processing Unit/graphics card).  Numeric computation (building blocks of path-finding, physics, collision detection, btw, an interesting stat - 80% of CPU in Unreal Engine can be parallelized at this level) is well partitioned and should be straightforward.  The challenge lies therefore with the last category.  Gameplay simulation is where Tim identifies the bottleneck for the industry.  Given the number of code pieces (objects) and the degree to which these pieces must interact, the problem is hardest there.

A solution is forwarded in the slides (in geek: "software transactional memory").  Regardless of the merits of this particular approach the more general question lies with the inertia of culture, technology (tools), and legacy (existing code):  how quickly can new techniques, skills can be adopted. Too risk adverse, or ready or not?  2009 was mentioned as a date to watch, Tim's prediction:  CPUs with 20+ cores, 80+ hardware threads, 1 TFLOP of computing power and GPUs with general computing capability...

Scary stuff if you want to take full advantage of this!

The trouble with tribbles is that there are so many of them and they do multiply so.  How ever to organize and herd them in worlds to come?

Ref discussion:  on Lambda the Ultimate (Programming Languages Weblog); on Quarter to Three.

--------------------------------------------------------

Footnote [1]:

Tim forwards a nice couple of slides quantifying  the amount of software that goes into a
modern game:  e.g. Gears of War :

(~10 programmers
~20 artists
~24 month development cycle
~$10M budget)

Software Dependencies
1 middleware game engine
~20 middleware libraries

Gears of War Gameplay Code ~250,000 lines C++, script code
Unreal Engine 3  Middleware Game Engine ~250,000 lines C++ code

All Your Heals Are Belong To Us

The Canadian Red Cross wants game developers to stop using the Red Cross logo in games, claiming trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and playing the "support the troops" card by suggesting that use of a red cross in games removes the “protective value” of the mark in real war zones. No, I'm not making this up. I wish I were. The Vancouver Sun quotes David Pratt, the international issues director of the Canadian Red Cross:

"The fact that the Red Cross is ... used in videos which contain strong language and violence is also of concern to us in that they directly conflict with the basic humanitarian principles espoused by the Red Cross movement,''

Pratt said in a Jan. 31 letter to a Vancouver law firm that represents several Canadian game developers.

"The crux of the problem is that the misuse of the Red Cross in video games is not only in contravention of the law, it also encourages others to believe that the emblem of the Red Cross is `public property' and can be freely used by any organization or indeed for commercial purposes."

Now, let me stipulate for the record that the Red Cross/Crescent is just a peachy institution. Really, it ranks right up there with apple pie and my mum. But just as my mum has been wrong on occasion, the Red Cross is acting like a jackass here.

This is a bad, bad claim that the Red Cross is making here. It is wrongheaded, and stupid. Part of the problem is the demonization of games and the whole "Jack Thompson and Hilary Clinton and Every Other Politician vs The Games Industry" Punch-and-Judy show. In trademark law this issue gets played out as "tarnishment" and the implication here is that the Red Cross's mark is somehow tarnished by association with a violent videogames. Please. I could maybe buy this if you built a videogame that had Red Cross workers as spawn of Satan, going round killing innocent babies under color of helping them. But the mere use of a Red Cross symbol within the game? C'mon.

Beyond this there is a more pernicious problem that demonstrates a lot of what is wrong in intellectual property policy. The Red Cross seems to think that the symbol is its property (it isn't exactly, but leave that be for the moment) and the concept of private property demands the ability to exclude others from using your stuff without your permission. But the problem with strong claims of property here is this means that we have to remove this symbol from the common pool of expression. That is, if we recognize a property claim in this red cross, then the only way that I can, for example, have red crosses float over my character when I heal myself is by striking some deal with the property owner. The owner (ie the Red Cross) can stop me from using it otherwise. But how else, exactly, am I supposed to communicate graphically the concept of healing? What about the representation of a hospital within a MMOG? Sure, I could put "The Edward Castronova Memorial Hospital and Treatment Center for MMOG Addiction" on a generic building; but how much more expressive is this same building with a great big red cross on it? As my character races past this building, on his way to committing a foul murder or a random carjacking, I know that this is a representation of a hospital that may come in handy when the cops shoot me and I'm in need of some bandages.

This problem is an example of the way that the expansion of intellectual property claims restricts the ability of people to express themselves. If I wasn't goofing around with loopy blog posts like this one, I would be finished the book I'm allegedly working on that is exactly on this topic, and I could upload it for you to see more examples. I'll do that when I get a readable draft (in about ten years at the current rate).

In the meantime, someone contact the Red Cross and tell them that this is a daft idea. I tell you what, you can even infringe my intellectual property and copy this whole blog post in your letter to them.

[Tip o' the hat to Igniq]

Open Letter to Blizzard Entertainment

[Editorial Note: The following letter is a statement by the author posting it and by those who have signed it; and it is cross-posted at Many-to-Many. It is not a public statement by Terra Nova, or any of the Terra Nova authors who have not signed it]

Open Letter to Blizzard Entertainment—Speech Policy for GLBT guilds in World of Warcraft

Recently, Sara Andrews, a player in Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft (WoW) recruited for a Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transexual (GLBT) Friendly guild in the general chat channel on the Shadowmoon server. She was reported to a Game Master by another player, and subsequently sanctioned for “Harassment – Sexual Orientation”. Under the Terms of Use of WoW, it is forbidden to transmit offensive material, including abusive or sexually explicit material.

Ms Andrews was given a warning not to undertake this again. She assumed this was a mistake, but Blizzard confirmed that the sanction and the punishment would stand. An official from Blizzard responded:

“To promote a positive game environment for everyone and help prevent such harassment from taking place as best we can, we prohibit mention of topics related to sensitive real-world subjects in open chat within the game, and we do our best to take action whenever we see such topics being broadcast. This includes openly advertising a guild friendly to players based on a particular political, sexual, or religious preference, to list a few examples. For guilds that wish to use such topics as part of their recruiting efforts, our Guild Recruitment forum, located at our community Web site, serves as one open avenue for doing so.”

As a result of public comments about this issue, Blizzard has reversed its decision and has privately communicated to Ms Andrews that no punishment will stem from this incident. It also has privately indicated that it is reviewing its sexual harassment policy. It has issued no public statement about the issue.

We write this letter as educators, journalists, writers and players interested in the development of virtual worlds like World of Warcraft. We congratulate Blizzard on the courage to rescind its initial decision, and urge it to make a formal announcement that they were wrong to make it. The decision to sanction and punish Ms Andrews was wrong as a narrow matter of interpretation, and as a general principle of policy for WoW and other virtual worlds.

The WoW Terms of Use provide as follows.

“When engaging in Chat in World of Warcraft, or otherwise utilizing World of Warcraft, you may not…[t]ransmit or post any content or language which, in the sole and absolute discretion of Blizzard Entertainment, is deemed to be offensive, including without limitation content or language that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, hateful, sexually explicit, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable, nor may you use a misspelling or an alternative spelling to circumvent the content and language restrictions listed above”

Blizzard does not monitor all chat, and instead only punishes the author of offensive chat when it is reported by another player. In order to reduce the number of reports it must investigate, and to make sense of what is “offensive”, Blizzard only punishes chat which other players might reasonably find offensive. In explaining why it punished Ms Andrews Blizzard indicated that

“Many people are insulted just at the word 'homosexual' or any other word referring to sexual orientation".

We understand that Blizzard was seeking to defuse the potential for harassment and griefing, but this justification is both wrong and extremely damaging. Let us be clear here: we are not saying that homophobic people should like gay people, or that they should accept gay marriage, or any other hot-button issue within modern American life. We are saying that it is inappropriate for Blizzard to characterize the mere mention of homosexuality as an insult to those who hear it.

It is not possible for Blizzard to claim that it sanctions any mention of the “offensive” categories mentioned in their Terms of Use. If that were the case then we would not see language that is “harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, vulgar, obscene…” But the general chat channel of WoW is an extremely open communication environment, that is routinely threatening, abusive and vulgar, not to mention misogynistic and homophobic. This may or may not be regrettable, but it seems to be part of the game and is now widely accepted to use vulgar language in describing encounters with other factions, or to note that a particular sword is “gay” or that a character is a “fag”. Blizzard does not sanction the routine use of homophobic and misogynistic insults, nor does it sanction all manner of vulgar and abusive trash talk. They should not sanction the mention of the existence of a GLBT-friendly guild.

We are greatly relieved that Blizzard appears to have changed its decision in this specific case, although it is not clear what Blizzard’s general policy is in relation to these sorts of issues. We urge Blizzard to make a public statement that the mention of homosexuality in general chat is not offensive. Beyond this, we also suggest that Blizzard investigate ways of making WoW more inclusive for GLBT guilds and players. WoW is a remarkable place, and we believe that it points to the future of networked communities and communications. Blizzard is supportive of gay players and guilds, and has the difficult job of balancing the interests and playstyles of millions of players. Usually it does an excellent job of this. But its decision in this case was wrong, and as a leader in the development of virtual worlds it should make a public statement to this effect.

It would be deeply regrettable if incidents such as this were ignored, when they might be used to explore how we can live together within the virtual worlds.

Signed

Gordon Calleja, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Julian Dibbell, Author My Tiny Life
Roger Fouts, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology
Dan Hunter, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Ph. D., Associate Professor of Information Technology & Director of the Lab for Social Computing, Rochester Institute of Technology
Thomas M. Malaby, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Ross Mayfield, CEO, Socialtext
Bonnie Ruberg, Journalist
Bart Simon, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec
Douglas Thomas, Associate Professor, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California
Kevin Werbach, Assistant Professor, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania & Founder, Supernova Group LLC

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Or, Hooray for Hollywood (for real this time?)

If articles in the NY Times, Washington Post, The Economist, and even (today) CNN Money weren’t enough to make you think that maybe MMOs really are finally gaining mainstream credibility, there was the recent announcement about startup Multiverse and its Advisory Board, which includes Oscar-winning movie-makers James Cameron and Jon Landau, among others (full disclosure: they’ll let just about anyone onto one of these, apparently).

In a separate online Business Week article, Cameron said that his next movie project was going to have a companion MMO that would be released before the movie's debut.  So is this yet another lame licensing deal, a bastard child between games and Hollywood, or does this signal something different?  And what do this and Multiverse's announcement mean for MMOs in general? 

First, the Hollywood side.  In the BusinessWeek article, Cameron said:

If you look at the relationship with movies and games in the past, it has been unidirectional. Either a great movie comes out followed by a pretty crappy game, or some game intellectual property led to a pretty bad movie. It's gotten to the point where that isn't even happening much anymore.

What I'm visualizing is generating in parallel a game created by top developers that takes place in the same universe as the movie. There are some of the same characters, but players are empowered with their own characters. The game doesn't run against the action of the movie, but it doesn't necessarily have to follow the same action, either. Right now, actually, I'm looking at ways for to co-generate my stuff in the film with the world with the games.

This is an example of something I've been hearing from different directions recently.  I've seen Hollywood and games try to work together in the past, and it has rarely ended well.  This time... things seem to be a bit different.  Figures like Cameron seem to understand that movies and MMOs are both views into a world, but views with different -- and potentially complementary --  properties and experiential value.  If this thinking carries through to MMO development and deployment, we could see a new generation of games building on but not being bound by accompanying movie experiences. 

Why hasn't this happened before?  Well, first it sort of has a couple of times: Star Wars Galaxies and The Matrix Online are both movie licenses made into MMOs.  In both cases however the games appear hobbled by their movie predecessors rather than being able to build on the slice of the world presented in the movie.  The trick seems to be providing the same thematic experience for the players that they gain from a movie, but without running afoul of (or being limited by) the narrative line the movie takes.

Beyond these two cases, the two answers I come up with are that, first, prior to market-broadening successes like World of Warcraft, MMOs weren't often taken seriously as entertainment or as a business.  $80M per month revenue does tend to make people take notice though.

Second and maybe more importantly, the barriers to entry into MMOs have been increasingly high.  There are conceptual barriers surrounding gameplay, art, etc., but those, being conceptual, are easy for some to ignore (as demonstrated by well-financed MMO projects with gameplay that hasn't lived up to its promise).  Just as significantly there are huge technological barriers: anyone who wants to build an MMO has to first invoke the dark arts of server, network, and client creation, to say nothing of the defocusing but necessary elements of login, security, billing, customer support, production tools, etc.   

And this is where the growing group of MMO middleware and platform companies come into play.  There are several of these now (Big World, Kaneva, Emergent, Nevrax, and Multiverse among them), each in different stages of development and each offering a different configuration of technology and licensing agreements.   Multiverse's focus is on lowering the developer's up-front cost of server, client, and content tool creation to zero and seeing what people come up with when these technological obstacles are removed.  This is a heady thought for indie developers, and as evidenced by James Cameron's involvement, reaches far beyond that group too. 

Personally, I'm fascinated to see what happens when it doesn't take a million dollars or more (which might as well be an infinite amount of money for most developers who haven't managed to make a diabolical pact with a publisher) just to make a  client and server platform sufficient to support a bona fide commercial-grade MMO.  Creation of these games has become increasingly cut off from the vast majority of those who would like to try their hand at it.  What happens when thousands of instances of "two guys in a dorm room" suddenly have the ability to create their vision of an MMO?  Yes we'll no doubt get a lot of instances of "BabeQuest," but I bet we'll also get the MMO equivalent of Counterstrike, or even Yahoo (whatever those might look like).  And what about the hundreds or thousands of professional indies out there, to say nothing of the many academics who have been pining for a way to create a research MMO, or those movie producers who might see a bit over the horizon to what really comes next? 

What do you think?  Is this the next revolution in MMO development, heralding in greater creativity and innovation from small projects to movie blockbusters, or is it just more techno-hype and false hope for current and potential MMO developers?

Be Afraid, Be--Well, you know

Sometimes Hollywood movies are subtle, giving us a small taste of an idea by hints, whispers or analogy. The conch is really our voting system in a democracy. The lion is really Christ. That sort of thing.

And then there are those times when it walks up, smahes you in the face and says "Ripped from the headlines!!" If producers knew "ZOMG!!", I suspect it would have been in this trailer:

http://www.themoviebox.net/movies/2006/STUVWXYZ/Stay-Alive/trailer.php

I suppose it was inevitable that this generation would get it's own "Mazes and Monsters" movie tapping into people's general fears of new technologies.

Should we be taken aback that it is focused squarely on tacit fears of MMO addiction? Or is it, when combined with WOW's success, merely another sign of virtual worlds entering the US mainstream?

Pharaoh's Expectations

I've been following an interesting discussion around A Tale in the Desert. Andrew Tepper, aka Pharaoh, commented on the first use of the legal powers of that game's citizens to have another player banned, by wondering why the relatively expansive political power that the developer-sovereign of the game cedes to the players hasn't been used more often and more pervasively.

Tepper writes, "I fully expected this unique form of in-game democracy that we use, to breed an ever-growing, increasingly intrusive government, just as real-world democracy often does. In fact, one big advantage I saw to Tellings was the chance to undo the implosion that I thought was inevitable. The culture that evolved in ATITD was just the opposite, and I still don't have a good explanation. The force of law has always been applied with the lightest touch. And it's not just in law that Egypt has been cautious...In three years we've elected about 20 Demi-Pharaohs, players with the power to permanently exile up to 7 of their countrymen. And in three years, that power has never been used..."

I don't think I'm nearly as surprised as Tepper seems to be. Partly because I think his expectation here invokes a common form of cyberlibertarian narrative about contemporary American politics that is at the least an over-simplified hypothesis about the development of post-1945 liberal democracies, that refers implicitly to some kind of universal tendency of individuals to surrender freedom to authority. 

Partly because, as some players have also observed, the size of the playerbase of A Tale in the Desert promotes a more trusting and close-knit community (an issue Raph Koster has been writing about lately). Partly also, as some ATITD players have noted, there's a selection filter here, that ATITD is a boutique product far less likely to attract the kinds of griefers and antisocial players who players in other synthetic worlds might desperately wish to control or expel, and far more likely to attract people with a lively interest in participating in the political affairs of their synthetic world.

It's also a question of time, however. Not a surprise that a historian would insist that this is a question of history and accumulation, I suppose, but this is where I think most synthetic world developers and even some scholars of synthetic worlds remain remarkably ahistorical or presentist in their expectations about how worlds will develop or their explanations of why worlds develop as they do. It's not that these explanations are insensate to the history of a particular world, but that they don't take contingency seriously in relation to that history. Instead, they look for structural or consistent explanations of historical structures, and think that a particular structure of game design or mechanics will reliably produce those structures in future iterations of similar designs.

I certainly agree that many existing synthetic worlds, including ATITD, have deep drivers and attractors embedded both in their designs and in the pre-existing social and cognitive predispositions of the players drawn to them, that re-running the game again from scratch would lead to convergent evolution of the gameworld in many respects.

But not everything. Here I'll crib from Gould's A Wonderful Life, as I'm often wont to do, with a healthy nod to ideas about emergence and the concept of path-dependence.

If the governance capacities ceded to players in ATITD have been used lightly in the gameworld's first two iterations, that might simply be because no one ever tried to use them otherwise. That sounds intuitive and obvious, but a major divergent branch in the political or social history of a virtual world or community is always one impulsive moment away, one possible event from happening, one serendipitious (or tragic) heartbeat distant from the world that comes into being.

I think the broader history of virtual communities (and the real-world) is a pretty good demonstration of that. Julian Dibbell's justifiably famous account of LambdaMOO is a good example. You might think that it was inevitable that once certain governance capacities were ceded to the inhabitants of that community by Pavel Curtis, what followed was inevitable, but I think that would be profoundly wrong. Even Mr. Bungle did not make the shape of politics and governance that came into being after his actions inevitable by his actions: for a considerable time, the community hung in an indeterminate space where many political roads and structures were conceivable. The institutions which the community created afterwards created new tools which defined and expanded the capacities of intrusive power, but their use was occasioned also by the history of prior conflict, prior action, of the contingent manifestation of particular individuals into that social space, and then of the accumulation of many contingent actions which became a kind of emergent structure of political life that no one could then undo or act outside of.

So maybe version 3 of A Tale in the Desert will be the one where a player--perhaps just for the experimental hell of it--tries to persistently and influentially act more napoleonically, or methodically explores their antisocial capacities the way that a LambdaMOO player named "Sunny" did once upon a time. That fork in the road is always there, just never taken up until the day that it is. The only problem, of course, is that once you step down some paths, you can't ever back up to the crossroads.

"Alone Together" in World of Warcraft?

The "social factor" is often advanced to explain the popularity of MMOs: "it’s the people that are addictive, not the game." And indeed, social networks are essential components of the online gaming experience. Game designers build "virtual third places" to encourage interactions. Quality time in a MMO is time spent with others, be it raiding a dungeon in a group, socializing with bystanders in a cantina, or chatting with remote guildmates while exploring the wilderness on your own.

Or... is it? The data PlayOn has assembled from World of Warcraft challenges many of these assumptions. Could it be that a less, not more, social environment contributed to WoW’s success? Read on for more.

For the past 8 months, we have been collecting and analyzing data from WoW. We use "bots" on 5 different servers (covering PvP, PvE and RP realms) and take snapshots of the population every 10 minutes or so (more detail here), capturing data about each present character's level, location, grouped status, and guild affiliation (among other things). So far, we have observed about 150,000 unique characters. While this data is far from perfect (after all, we are only getting what Blizzard is willing to let transpire through their API), it can still yield a surprising amount of insight into the social dimensions of multiplayer games.

We have tried to assess the prevalence of social activities in WoW using a variety of metrics. The most obvious is the time players spend in groups. In the early stages of the game (level 40 and below), it hovers at around 30%. Even if we assume players spend a fair amount of time crafting, selling goods on the auction house, etc., it is hard to see these activities accounting for 70% of the time spent in-game. It is only at level 56 and above that players spend the majority of their time in groups (probably raiding high-end instances). Moreover, players favor "soloable" classes (warriors, hunters) that, by design, survive mob encounters better in solo play - the more social classes (e.g. priests) that require a group to work well are among the least favored. Compounding the problem, and despite features like WoW’s "group xp bonus", grouping is an inefficient way to level, which naturally steers the more "hardcore" players away from groups (at least, in the early stages of the game).

Overall, this data indicates that instrumental group play in the context of quests might not be an important source of social interactions in WoW. How about guilds? Excluding level 1 characters, 62% of WoW’s players are in guilds. Interestingly however, 17.5% of them belong to a "one-person guild" - in other words, nothing more than a custom tag below their name (which, incidentally, says volume about the trouble players are willing to go through to customize their avatars). That leaves only 44.5% of players in guilds with at least 2 members. Moreover WoW’s guilds are fairly small (median size: 9) and very few grow beyond 35 members (90th percentile) - a kind of Dunbar Number for guilds.

More importantly, guilds are also very sparse social networks. Our analyses indicate that the average guild member in WoW spends little time with a large majority of his/her guildmates. Over a month, the average guild member is online 20 minutes or less with 80% of his/her guildmates. The same average member collaborates (in quests, etc.) with only 11% of his/her guildmates for more than 10 minutes over the same month. In other words, most guilds in WoW are not highly social and/or collaborative environments.

Considering all this, it is easy to wonder why WoW’s players spend so much time (more than 10 hours per week) in this game instead of a single-player RPG! To me, WoW illustrates how a large number (the majority?) of online gamers enjoy being "alone together." The social factor at work here clearly has little to do with direct interactions and camaraderie in the context of quest groups or guilds. Instead, it looks as if other players are mostly:

• An audience (to showcase your latest "elite" gear and other accomplishments).
• A social presence (the constant flow of chat in the wide-reaching "general" channel, the movement of other avatars around you, make playing WoW somewhat analogous to reading a book in a densely populated café - while you may not necessarily choose to interact with the other patrons, the sense of being in a public social space can be attractive enough to conduct individual activities there).
• A source of spectacle and entertainment ("people watching" is fun in WoW, in part because Blizzard encouraged it by design with many humorous objects that can be appropriated by the players - the gnomes’ various trinkets with unpredictable effects, the infamous 20-lb catfish that can be used as a weapon, etc).

Does this mean that, to reach WoW's scale and attract gamers as-yet unfamiliar with the genre, future MMOs should focus less on collaborative questing and other traditional techniques to encourage interactions, favoring instead "looser," more indirect forms of social experience? A "society of the spectacle," to use Guy Debord's terminology? Or are there alternatives?

(P.S.: an expanded version of this analysis will appear in a CHI 2006 paper I'd be happy to send to interested readers).

Welcome to Nic Ducheneaut

We're insanely delighted to announce that we have a new author, Nic Ducheneaut, a research scientist in the Computer Science Laboratory at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Nic's research interests include the sociology of online communities, computer-supported cooperative work, and human-computer interaction, and he is one of the principals of the amazingly amazing PlayOn blog.

We've been thinking for a while about how best to mount a takeover bid of the PlayOn blog, coz we're so impressed at what they do. We realized that we just don't have enough capital to buy Xerox (even though the share price is a little deflated these days), so we just thought we would just poach their talent and not bother to pay for it. It works for us. Nic is only the first stage in a long-term project that we anticipate will culminate in us acquiring John Seely Brown at no cost. But more on this later.

Nic's interest in virtual worlds is how they function as public spaces and communities, with a particular emphasis on social capital and collaboration. How can we assess and possibly improve the quality of social interactions in games? What makes some of them successful social environments, and others abysmal failures? He is interested in 1) observing social behaviors using a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches; 2) modeling these behaviors using a variety of techniques including social network analysis, information visualization, and data mining; 3) building tools to help members of these communities and/or game producers manage their social environment better.

His work on the ethnography of MMOGs is balanced by his love of sailing, his ability to drill through the hull of his self-restored 1961 sailboat below the waterline ("This has to be above the waterline, right?" [sound of a powerdrill, followed by gurgle]), and his ability to bake Kouign Aman, a specialty of Bretagne from whence he hails. Like many of us here he has come surprisingly close to dying as a result of multiplayer gaming. He set up a gaming LAN in a friend's small apartment when he was an undergrad. They were so absorbed in Command & Conquer that they forgot the fries they'd put on the stove. His last words were very nearly: "What's this orange glow on my monitor? And why is it so hot all of a sudden?"

Welcome Nic!

Geography And Travel

A while back Kotaku publicized a Google Map application that featured the World of Warcraft (WoW).   For WoW players and map lovers it is a visual feast.   But this is just the tip of our iceberg...

The first thought I had when I looked at MapWoW's Google Map of Azeroth was how patchworked this world seemed from up high.  Deserts, artic regions, ancient woods, and volcanic wastelands lay abutting each other "higgeldy piggeldy" with stark contrasts.   Hard to imagine the accidental rules of climate, geology that led to this outcome...

Avalon Hill in 1979 published a board game (The Source of the Nile) about exploration and trade in the era of "Dr. Livingston, I presume?"   I haven't played the game in years but one of its most interesting aspects to my memory was how the the details of Africa (not the basic shape) was effectively generated with each new expedition using simple rules like if the hex you were in was forested, the chances an adjacent one would be forested is robust etc.   Given the importance of rivers in the game, the rules governing how rivers were generated was hearty indeed ( see section 10.3+ ).

The rules governing the generation of Azeroth seemed less clear, except likely for the bits involving trails and flight paths.  In other words, those aspects dealing with the all important movement of players though this world.

This brings me to my second thought.  I was struck by how as a player how unaware I was of the high-level disorder of the map of Azeroth.  Surely the roads, quest structures and even flight paths are co-conspirators to a design that tries to shape the player-on-the-ground's perception of the world in such a way as to disguise the strategic cacophony of the map...

Somewhat afield, but interesting nometheless, Kotaku recently pointed us to the map that comes with Tengai Makyou: Daishi no Mokushiroku (The 4th Apocalypse). Yukihime.com described this map as (colorfully):

...what would happen if you got a bunch of Japanese guys in a room, got them drunk, and then asked them to draw what they could remember about America on a bar napkin.

We've seen these sorts of map caricatures elsewhere.  It is funny how the mind's eye can shape the contours of the geography of a world around us...

This last week saw an article on MedPage Today - "Money Trail May Mark Path of New Pandemics" - that looked at some ongoing research related to estimating the spread of pandemics.   Interestingly,  one model was based on data gleaned fromwhat the authors called an "online game" Wheresgeorge.com - a currency tracking website.  The hypothesis is that in this modern world, the movement of money provides a better basis for a model for predicting the flow of people and the spread of disease than a traditional spatial propagation model.  Here are the travels of an example  dollar bill.

The recasting of the detail of a space is often necessary to glean meaning from it.

For those of you who've navigated the network of Eve-Online galaxy of star systems it can be a bewildering display of many thousands of links filled with critical detail.  Abstract projections such as these political maps are inevitable to sharpen understanding.

But what do we lose in this process of streamlining meaning and experience?

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood, 
And sorry I could not travel both 
And be one traveler, long I stood 
And looked down one as far as I could 
To where it bent in the undergrowth; .....

World Persistence: One In A Series of Queries

For me, the holy grail question about MMOG design centers on the vesting of persistence in the world itself rather than in the characters. Almost everything I find unsatisfying, both as player and as scholar of MMOGs, has to do with the almost complete lack of dynamism in synthetic worlds themselves, that the only thing which changes, grows, reflects persistence, is the character.

When I've ventured out before on this topic, I've found a reasonable degree of consensus on this point among scholars, developers and players, that dynamic, changing, responsive synthetic worlds are what we need. I've also heard on many occasions that they simply are not technically possible at the present time.

My basic problem is that I like to think about synthetic world design but lack the technical background to go past thinking fairly abstractly about what is and is not possible. So I want to start a series of fairly focused posts on applied world-persistence where I ask the technically adept among our readership just how difficult a particular fairly precise design would be to implement, especially in comparison to existing designs.

I want to approach this problem strictly as a problem in technical feasibility from the programming and server architecture side, not about whether or not this would pose difficult problems in management of the player base.

Applied design problem #1, then.

Let's say a design document calls for the following. I want to simplify this down to the basic essence of the problem, so wherever you might balk at graphical requirements, etc., imagine that the graphics and so on are highly rudimentary.

Let's project the space in which this problem takes place onto a hex map.

A series of ten interlinked caverns, roughly speaking running in two parallel lines from a common entrance that goes to two entry caverns.

In the caverns are one hundred orcs, initially spread evenly over each distinct cavern-room and remaining within the cavern to which they are initially designed. Each cavern-room is roughly circular, ten hexes in diameter.

An orc's hearing range extends for two hexes around the hex it occupies. An orc's visual range extends for five hexes around the hex it occupies.

An orc can move a maximum of two hexes per time step.

Each orc is an autonomous agent with the following rules governing its behavior.

a) If catches sight of non-orcs, each orc-agent has a variable weighted probability (e.g, at creation, each individual orc has slightly different weightings on each of these actions) of doing the following:
     1) running in a random direction and making no noise until non-orcs are no longer visible
     2) running towards the nearest orc and making an alarm noise
     3) moving directly towards non-orc at maximum speed and attacking once they are in range
     4) begin to build a defensive fortification.When finished with fortification in one hex, continue to build in random direction unless non-orc sighted. If non-orc  still sighted when fortification finished, attack with ranged weaponry from fortification; fortification offers major defensive bonuses to ranged attacker. Fortifying orcs will not respond to alarm noise orcs.
     5) move directly towards one of the two connecting caverns. Once in this cavern, build traps in each hex, moving in random direction when completed. Continue to build traps until non-orc sighted or alarm noise-making orc interrupts trap building.

b) If an orc hears an alarm noise, it moves towards orc making alarm and then makes alarm noise, unless already engaged in combat with non-orcs or building fortifications.
c) If alarm-noise making orcs are in hexes proximate to each other, they will move in same direction from that time step on.
d) If more than 5 alarm-noise orcs are proximate to each other, they will move directly towards visible non-orcs and attack once in range. If non-orcs are not visible, they will move towards nearest visible orcs and continue making alarm noise. In neither are visible, they will move in a random direction.

Fortifications prevent movement of non-orcs until they are destroyed, but orcs can move through them with no penalty.

Each trap space can be traversed with no penalty by orcs; non-orcs take damage unless they first detect and demolish the trap.

Ok, up to this point, this has no major dynamic world-persistent aspect to it--it's just a really simple AI routine with some obvious design problems. The next part, however, is this:

a) When non-orcs (e.g., players), leave the caverns altogether, record the number of remaining orcs. If more than 65% of the total cavern population remains, all orcs in caverns will move towards one of the two entry caverns and remain there. They will now have only one ruleset: attack all visible non-orcs.

b) If less than 65% but more than 45% of the total cavern population remains when non-orcs leave the area, the entire remaining population will move to (or remain within) the entry caverns and construct fortifications continuously. When the entry caverns are completely full of fortifications, each orc will occupy a single fortified hex and attack non-orcs from range if they enter the caverns. Any orcs which do not fit in the two entry caverns will move to adjacent caverns and revert to the "standard" ruleset.

c) If less than 45% of the total population remains, the orcs will construct traps continuously in the entry caverns and then retreat to the most distant interior caverns once the entry caverns are full of traps. Once they have retreated, they will stay tightly clustered and if they sight non-orcs, all will attack at 150% effectiveness.

d) Once all the orcs are dead, the caverns will remain empty save for whatever traps and fortifications were not destroyed by the players.

-----------

Here's my basic technical question. Compare this design with a static world design where each of those caves have 10 orcs who respawn at a set rate and who never change their basic AI routine in response to changing circumstances.

How much harder and more expensive in technical terms and in terms of burdens on underlying infrastructure is it to design and maintain the dynamic design than the static one? Twice as hard? Ten times as hard? One hundred times as hard? Like I said, for the moment, don't worry about what happens when the players run out of orc-filled caves to attack, or similarly large-scale problems of dynamic world design. I'm interested in just the narrow scenarios and how they compare.

Linden Lab Fellowship

Creative students take note of another fellowship competition involving virtual worlds. Linden Lab has announced a 'Fellowship in the Visual and Performing Arts'. Here is the announcement that Robin Harper of Linden Lab sent to educators who use Second Life as part of their teaching:

I'm very excited to announce that Linden Lab is offering its first fellowship in visual and performing arts for creative innovation in Second Life.

This $4,000 fellowship will provide a young artist with a chance to be free for a semester or summer to explore the use of the digital world of Second Life as an artistic medium. In doing so, we hope that we will see Second Life used to even greater potential in the expressive arts to the benefit of both the Second Life culture and the broader world of art.

I hope that all of you will take the opportunity to visit www.secondlife.com/education for more information, and please let anyone at your university who might be interested know of the March 15, 2006 application deadline. Applications will be reviewed by a panel of distinguished academics, and the fellowship recipient will be announced in mid-April.

Also, please feel free to share this announcement with any colleagues who may have eligible students.

Questions can be sent to education@lindenlab.com.

Thanks! Robin