Terra Nova

A Gazillion Lindens

Linden Lab creators of Second Life have just received $11 Million in a new round of financing lead by Globespan Capital Partners, blar blar blar.

Question is: where is all the money going?

Obviously with the increasing roster of TN authors the bulk of the new capital injection is going to fund the next round of drinks Cory gets us, but what are they going to do with the change?

Desperate to know just how to spend that kinda money I went straight to source. Linden bloggers. By blog, this is exactly what inside information I picked up:

Philip Linden - nothing
Cory Linden - nothing
Robin Linden - nothing
Ben Linden - nothing
Reuben Linden - nothing
Babbage Linden - nothing
Pathfinder Linden - nothing
Linden Ops Team - nothing

Of course. *slaps head* I was being stupid. If you want to know what Linden are up to there is really only one place to go - The Herald. After all, Herald staffers know what's on the inside Linden track before Lindens do, OK, the Herald says stuff and Linden have absolutely no idea what they are on about, but it almost amounts to the same thing. So what scoop do the news hounds at the Herald have:

Nothing

I guess it’s it up to us then. If you were Philip (you might want to have a private moment with that thought) and someone just gave you about L$3 Billion, what would you do with it?

Williams Testifies in US Senate

Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Property Rights, holds hearings today on “What’s in a Game? Regulation of Violent Video Games and the First Amendment”. Dmitri Williams speaks on his game violence research in the first panel, 2pm.

For those of you not from America, the "Senate" is an arena we have set aside to handle conflict using words rather than the usual knives, guns, and bombs.  The same rules  apply in the "House of Representatives" zone. The "Supreme Court" zone still sanctions knife and scalpel PvP, although the norm among players there is "legal but rare" and "don't ask, don't tell." In any case, the ruleset in these three zones creates a very different atmosphere than the rest of the US playspace, which is open PvP. Basically, a huge gankfest.

SIGGRAPH Sandbox

Run, don't walk, to the two day ACM SIGGRAPH Sandbox Symposium on Video Game Design on 29 July and 30 July, co-located with SIGGRAPH 06 in Boston, where Ian Shaw and Greg Costikyan are already confirmed as keynote speakers. Others are in the process of being assimilated by the borg. Call for papers here

Taylor Plays Between Worlds

Former TN author TL Taylor (Center for Computer Games Research, ITU Copenhagen) has written a new book that's just come out, Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture. It's a must-read. I get so many emails and calls from people who cannot understand why these spaces matter to those immersed in them. I try to 'explain' it, but I am not sure it can be 'explained'. You have to experience it. Read this book and you'll be a lot closer to experiencing it, and maybe close to getting it. Taylor's approach is ethnographic; she puts you inside the realms and exposes you to the things that happen, all with a sound critical eye. Highly recommended.

Sovereignty and Development

Fritz Effenberger of VNUnet kindly alerted us to a potentially-interesting development. He writes:

"I just want to point at a very interesting turn in mmo development. Reakktor, the German MMO developer, running its cyberpunk MMO Neocron for more than 3 years now, had announced to rework the graphics of the game, only to receive massive complaints from the gaming community. Neocron players rated balancing problems more important than changes in graphics, so the development started an ongoing forum discussion about character classes and balancing issues. I actually never heard of such a thing before: gamers have a voice in balancing reworks, common opinions get re-posted by the devs and re-discussed by the comm. It just looks like this MMO is going to be formed using democratic ways."

On one view this is nothing new, of course. Devs regularly check the forums in order to see where the problems are in their games, and regularly change the game (nerf classes/objects/etc) based on information they receive there. This sort of democracy is a pretty thin version of a public sphere, and can be easily be dismissed as a typical response to consumer demand by a firm.

But it does provide a useful datapoint for Tim's conception of sovereignty within virtual worlds. It's been clear for a while that devs don't have total autonomy (and indeed if they thought about it, wouldn't really want that anyway) and that sovereignty is shared among the community and the devs. Here is another example of the effect of that shared sovereignty.

It also makes me wonder why it is that open source projects in this space have been such a notable failure. The degree of user-generated content on the fora--ideas, suggestions, gripes--demonstrate the huge amounts of time and effort that individuals will donate to the design of the world. In doing this for games produced by commercial developers they are effectively donating their labor-value to the shareholders of that firm. Which I have no problem with, in general; though in reading these postings I often have moments of Marxian-dissonance, a little like the moments I have watching working class people root for NFL franchises owned by billionaires. But that's not the weird thing: the weird thing is that these people care deeply about the community of the virtual world, which is quite similar to part of the motivation in producing open source content (ie, the sense of producing something with is collectively-owned, and for a public good). And yet no open source MMOGs...

WoW to open for-pay character transfers soon?

Transfer-per-pay may be coming to World of Warcraft in the near future.

While trying to get into phone support for WoW, came across an odd recorded message saying something to the effect that character transfers are not yet available, and to keep watching worldofwarcraft.com for information on when this would be made available. (Subsequent attempts to call back in and transcribe the message exactly did not elicit the message again.)

After getting through to a service rep and dealing with my problem, I asked about that message and he said that they hope to have it ready “in the near future”, but that they want to make sure that it’s bullet-proof before it’s made widely available. It will be pay-for-transfer. Gold and goods should transfer with the character, but they’ve been having difficulty maintaining in-progress quest kills in the transfers. Also, I was surprised to hear that honor will be preserved, although the hidden honor “value” associated with each character will map to a possibly different honor rank on another server.

New Math

Rodney Brooks recently penned an essay on the need for a new mathematics "that is so revolutionary and elegantly simple that it will appear in high-school curricula."    He claims that understanding biological systems "demands it."

Brooks  suggests that current tools (mathematics) are brittle when it comes to the challenge of describing "systems" (emphasis added): 

Currently, many different forms of mathematics are used to model and understand complicated systems. Algebras can tell you how many solutions there might be to an equation. The algebra of group theory is crucial in understanding the complex crystal structures of matter. The calculus of derivatives and integrals lets you understand the relationships between continuous quantities and their rates of change... Boolean algebra is the core tool for analyzing digital circuits; statistics provides insight into the overall behavior of large groups that have local unpredictability; geometry helps explain abstract problems that can be mapped into spatial terms; lambda calculus and pi-calculus enable an understanding of formal computational systems...

...all these tools have provided only limited help when it comes to understanding complex biological systems ... inadequate to explaining how networks of hundreds of millions of computers work, or how and when artificial evolutionary techniques -- applied to fields like software development -- will succeed.

Virtual worlds - insofar as they represent large dynamic systems that comingle art, technology, sociology, engineering, economics, and yes, A Theory of Fun - might seem to present a messier take.  Given the size and interconnectedness of this realm how is it possible to usefully talk about any substantial piece of it without lashing together many stove-pipe intuitions?

From time to time some do scratch out notations to help quantify a little of  these surfaces.  Perhaps coming one day to a high-school near you will be new and better tools for so many blind people to converse about this very large elephant.

Game Studies at GDC, Part 2

After the ranting, moaning and blogging about the first session I participated in at GDC this year, I have to say I was a bit nervous about presenting at The Game Studies Download. However, given that it was the last session, on the last day, Ian Bogost, Jane McGonigal and I figured there wouldn't be too many people around to see it, much less heckle. We made 50 handouts and figured that was being optimistic. And then the people started arriving, and then more came in, and the room was filled. Seriously.

They looked friendly enough--at least, no one had fruit ready to throw at us. It was simply kind of surreal, after reading the comments on TN this past week and hearing other things at the conference about the problems with game studies and developer/academic relations.

After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger. Someone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted points. Ian made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic research. While I'm not going to say that what we've done personally has no value, it was a definite challenge to try and make it *directly relevant* in a BULLETED POINT for developers. And there are huge gaps in what we don't know. Where is the research about sports games, to take just one example? Anyway, the point is, I enjoyed the exercise, and learned a lot from it. I hope the audience did as well.

But overall, I like to think that the attendance demonstrates that developers are interested in what academics might be able to tell them (again I will point out: no fruit was thrown). And all week, I talked with developers who were interested in what was going on with research, from the smallest to the largest companies. Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.

Raph Koster

Ordinarily we don't do industry news, but good god, how could we not mention that SOE and Raph have parted ways.

Yeah, not so much

Wired's newest issue is about [drumroll] games. A hefty chunk of which is on MMOGs. Much to tease out, but we received a great note from a reader about one article and we wanted to share it with you.

Steven Johnson has a piece in which he suggests a convergence of game worlds is probable and/or desirable, and that we should be able to move toons across worlds. Andy Havens wrote to Steven Johnson to disagree. He writes:

"Steven:

"Er... yeah. Because people have always wanted to see how Heathcliff would
have ganged up with Beowulf in a tag-team match against Luke Skywalker and
Madame Bovary using those bone clubs from "2001."

"While some of the stuff you mention might make sense -- player data a la my eBay rating in a network of games that might rank how good a player I am in various games -- the idea of trading experience, items, characters, etc. from game to game is just, in most cases -- sorry -- dumb. The best games (especially online) are often story-based entertainments as much as click-fest videogames. The use of anything -- even language -- from outside the "magic circle" of the game does what dramatists call "breaking the 4th wall."

"Yes, we know that Tom Cruise, whom we watching in "The Last Samurai" is that
same guy from "Mission Impossible." But if, at the critical moment in the
19th century, Japanese film he were to whip out a plastic-explosive, pull
off a latex mask and say, "Show me the money, $#%!" we would run screaming
from the movie.

"There's plenty interesting to say about where online gaming convergence is
going. Cross-over of "stuff" from game-to-game ain't it.

- A"

I suspect that the difference here comes down to one's view of embodiment, the avatar-as-self, and the distinction between game worlds and social worlds. Or [shudder] perhaps it's Ye Olde Narratology-Ludology Punch-and-Judy show. But an divergence of views by smart people is always good, since value is often (always?) found in the interstices, not in the received wisdom.

Coding Dispositions at GDC

Not too long ago on the TN backchannel, a few of us got to talking about the tendency for game designers and developers to fall into the trap of looking down upon their users, devaluing their knowledge, opinions, and skills. Well, in the wake of my first (and certainly very limited) GDC experience, I'm surprised to find myself revisiting this criticism of game developer myopia. I'm coming to believe that precisely what this site might be seen as testament to -- the ability of researchers, writers, designers, and developers to talk together productively -- is the very thing that may not have much potential beyond cozy corners such as this...

What really stuck in my craw during the Social Science and Games panels (very well organized by T L Taylor) on Monday was the following: The presentations by academics were interesting, wide-ranging, and mutually conversant (with the important exception of my own, no doubt), yet two leading voices on games research and design, Eric Zimmerman and Raph Koster, took the opportunity to publicly ask how these ideas could possibly be relevant for them.

So, nothing new so far, right? We're used to explaining this gap. Of course it was the academics' fault for speaking in esoteric jargon. Or, of course it was the developers' fault for being mired in the practicalities of their profession, specifically in the need, above all, to make money. But I don't think either of these tendencies (certainly in evidence on both sides) are sufficient to explain the disconnect.

Instead, I am coming to believe that game designers and developers, on the whole (some of the august exceptions being right here on TN), are simply not able to see beyond their own way of thinking about MMOGs. I am not chalking it up simply to arrogance (although there is some of that too, especially from some bright lights who clearly have enough going on upstairs to know better). I'm actually suggesting that they are (largely) incapable of thinking outside the box (to use a well-overworn phrase). This should not be seen, however, as some devastating slam on them  -- all people, in all places (though I would suggest particularly those enculturated into heavily technical professions) have trouble looking at things from another point of view, and this group is really not so different. But it was still a bit surprising, especially given, in Eric's and Raph's cases, their stated interest in academic research.

Here is what I wrote on the backchannel a month ago when the topic was the related issue of developers and their attitude toward the content contributions of their player-base:

But the designer arrogance goes deeper than that, I'd say. This kind of elitist characterization [of users as lacking in skill] itself rests on a rather narrow conception of what "content" is. This is an attitude (deeper than that, it's a disposition) which I'd suggest is rooted in developer practice generally, and computer games developer practice specifically. It is a view which recognizes that which is scripted, modeled, or otherwise generated according to the practice of software development as seemingly both the (only) site of creativity and (therefore) the ultimate locus of value. Other kinds of (creative) human activity vanish from its radar screen.

This is an argument that forms part of a chapter I've written for a volume I'm co-editing  with Sandra Braman (Command Lines) that is currently under review, and there the specific example is Second Life and the challenges that the varieties of user content therein make to the multiple ideas about content held by the different teams within Linden Lab. But GDC led me to see this claim as more applicable here as well.

The best way to put the assertion (and this is all it is at this point; and again, please keep in mind that there are a number of familiar exceptions) is that the practice of game software development generates a way of seeing and defining problems (as essentially precise, logical, and algorithmic), and creating solutions (through linear, text-defined code) that makes other ways of accounting for what happens in VWs seem at worst  nonsensical and at best irrelevant or quixotic.

Here is just one quick example of this kind of disposition in action: Billmonk, which Constance posted about here. The site promises to help you keep track of your obligations throughout your social network precisely (using any of a number of imaginable currencies). It is double-entry bookeeping for your friendships, and thereby prompts you to conceive of these obligations in exact terms. This is a perfect example of a code-based solution to a code-defined problem: People's moral obligations are essentially precise and monetary, and they therefore need a precise tool to manage them. (And this approach is not just applied externally; within software companies one frequently sees similar efforts to address organizational issues with precise and enumerated systems that can be, above all, measured.) Heather Kelly, one of the developers on a panel on Monday asked a great question about game development that she hoped researchers could help answer: Why does money trump everything? The answer lies in the remarkably good 'fit' between the market and code, and in the existence of a lot of well-trained people who can find ways to exploit it.

I submit for your comments the idea that the reason many developers have a hard time finding anything of value not only from researchers, but often from their own players, is that they are, in effect, seeing a different world, all the time. An optimistic disposition -- a faith, even -- in technology and code-based problem solving runs deep in the technology and software development community (see, for example, Gary Lee Downey's ethnography of CAD/CAM engineering, The Machine in Me), and it hampers developers' ability to recognize the range of content and community creation (very broadly defined) by users as well as the fruits of the well-established but different methodologies and concepts of researchers.

He Died For Our Griefing

Via f13, I see that the historical MMOG Roma Victor, now in beta testing, has come up with a unique punishment for griefing: crucifixion.

You have to admire the move just as a public relations strategy for drawing attention to the game (which seems likely to be one of several upcoming MMOGs set in historically 'realistic' rather than fantasy settings, a topic I should turn to soon here at TN).

In terms of MMOG tradition, the basic concept is an idea that's been around for a long time (cue the keepers of the sacred flame of MUD-DEV to remind us of just how long): forms of public shaming or in-game imprisonment of avatars who engage in griefing behaviors. Moreover, as the Roma Victor press release notes, this is just an in-game "skin" for the common game-managerial strategy of banning or suspending characters or accounts for TOS violations.

The question of griefing, it seems to me, become thoroughly a part of the background consciousness of MMOG development and within player culture. It also helps a good deal that there has been some systematic research and writing on griefing within game studies: we just know more about it at this point, and are likely to know more still in the future.

What I like about Roma Victor's concept isn't really what it does or does not do to griefing. I don't expect it to be more or less successful than any other kind of GM suspension or banning.

What I like is that it's a very good example of how I think developer sovereignty might more meaningfully manifest within the terms of a given MMOG's fictional framework. With a game like World of Warcraft, what the GMs do to players for various infractions is entirely outside the framework of the otherwise very well-developed setting of the game. The policing of players (which Blizzard does fairly actively in relation to some other live management teams) always breaks the magic circle. Moreover, because it does so, Blizzard is always under pressure to systematize and make explicit the precise formulations under which its sovereign interest in the gameworld will become active, because that's what we expect in the real world from institutional actors, that they will precisely delineate violations that will trigger intervention.

Roma Victor, on the other hand, by manifesting itself as a Roman sovereign within the game and using punishments which reinforce the game's metafiction, is actually opening up a space for it to conform its sovereignity to the gameworld itself. Being a Roman sovereign actually opens up room both for being bound by a form of law and for certain forms of arbitrary or unequal action towards the players. Hitching the developer sovereignity to the gameworld's fictions is potentially not just a way to make the magic circle more powerful, but even to help the developer understand when to intervene and when not to intervene, to provide a kind of path-dependent constraint.

Boom or Bust?

Why is it that when someone bills themselves as “a leading developer, publisher and distributor of online games”, I’ve likely never heard of them? 

Like I don’t already get enough junk mail from various people who want to show me how to increase the size of my johnson, sell me Cialis, increase my sperm count, send me a watch that looks just like an honest-to-God Rolex so I can pretend to be rich, too, inform me of the latest hot penny stock or introduce me to other shy, but sexually deviant, single daters in my neighborhood: somebody spammed the Terra Nova mailing list with this press release.

It did get me thinking, though probably not in the way the spammer intended.

The industry is starting to remind of the 1994-1996 boom-bust cycle: The same kind of over-hype, the same kind of over-reaching by hundreds of investors on games and portals and, unless I’m quite mistaken, in a couple-three years, the same kind of bust, when 90% of the games and investments get trash-canned. 

This time, it may be on an even grander scale.  In 1996, I counted over 130 online games in development (not counting classic games such as Mah Jongg, Chess, Poker, et al), at least a dozen portals touting themselves as ‘it’, and literally dozens of new studios.  This was the Hollywood era, where movie studios were going to show the game industry how to make games, and with the commercializing of the Internet, they were going to own us.  By 1998, 90% of the games in development and their studios had been quietly closed down, including almost all the Hollywood game studios (anyone remember Time-Warner Interactive?  I didn’t think so) and at least $300 million had been tossed down various rat holes.

It effectively killed outside investment in online games in the US until Asia became recognized as a force in 2001-2002; note that the market went from over 35 MMOs in development in the US in 1994 to 4 in 1998 (that I know of), two of those being funded with ‘inventor’ money and sweat equity until they could demonstrate a working prototype.  Of those 35, only 4 launched by 1998 and another 2 launched in 1999; the rest were drowned in various studio bathtubs.

I’m starting to see that same kind of mid-1990s brash, almost arrogant over-enthusiasm now.  For example, not a week goes by that some VC, fund analyst or investment manager doesn’t contact me, wanting advice about some game, developer, publisher or market (and of course, as money people, they want it for free; “Let’s build a relationship and see where it goes.  As a starter, you can dump me the entire extent of your industry knowledge.”).  Everyone wants to get in on the ground floor.  Except, there are literally hundreds of MMOs in development in Seoul, at least 300 in test in China at any one time, I know of at least 30 MMOs in development in the US and Europe and publisher money is starting to flow back into MMOs and online gaming.  There is no ground floor anymore.

As Counselor Troi might say: “Captain, I sense something…”

Daedalus Data

In the new issue of The Daedalus Project:

• What's life like as a guild leader? Narratives from current and past guild leaders highlight common pain-points and lessons learned.
• As to the origin of guild leaders, younger players who are guild leaders tend to be leaders of guilds they created themselves whiles older players who are guild leaders tend to be leaders of guilds they inherited. An interesting life-cycle of guilds may be at play.
• About 30% of respondents use a VoIP tool on a regular basis. The best predictor of VoIP use was the Achievement motivation (Socialization comes in third).
• 45% of respondents had at least 2 computers in their household on which an MMO is regularly played. About 20% of male respondents and 50% of female respondents regularly play with someone else in the same room.

The future of VWs over a quarter

I like to bet people a quarter. I pick a quarter because when someone wins or loses, it's completely about the principle rather than the money. If you bet someone $100 and you win, you're focused on the money. If you bet .25c, it becomes totally about pride.

So I just bet Cory a quarter over the following proposition: Which will have more North American users two years from now: Second Life or WoW?

Not surprisingly, Cory is going with SL and I'm taking the other side.

The bet, of course, becomes a test of both SL's growth projections (quite robust of late) and WoW's ability to retain or grow its subscriber base. It could also therefore be seen as a test of the long-term growth potential of user-created content versus the more standard entertainment industry model.

What say you? Help us make our own futures market here.

More Than a Pretty Face

They could be your neighbors, your best friends, even... you! Yes, video-game cross-dressers are all around us -- but just who are these gender-bending gamers we keep hearing so much about?

Last time we touched on the subject of video-game cross-dressing, we asked the question: Where does it happen? This time, we want to know: Who's doing it?

Let's start with a some background info:

Lynne D. Roberts and Malcolm R. Parks 1999 piece, "The Social Geography of Gender-Switching in Virtual Environments on the Internet," indicates that 40% of MOO-ers surveyed were either currently presenting cross-gender in-game, or had gender-swapped in the past.

From the work of fellow TN-writer Nick Yee, we see that men are more likely to present cross-gender than women, and that, among men, older players (over age 25) are even more likely to do so. Nic's research also shows us that, out of an assumed 1,000 EverQuest players in the year 2003, approximately half of the female toons were being controlled by men.

When Dr. Kathryn Wright of Women Gamers put together an informal survey of her own on the topic, she found that the majority of her respondents -- all male -- were between ages 20 and 30, and that most played as female for at least 50% of their game time.

These statistics alone certainly raise a lot of questions: Why don't more women choose to present cross-gender? How come older men, and not younger men, more often switch gendered identities?

Statistics aside though, another question remains: What are these people like? Is there a certain kind of person, a certain personality-type, that's more likely to cross-dress than another? On one level, the idea seems a bit absurd, but remember that, in real life, we have plenty of preoccupations and presuppositions about what transvestites and trasgendered persons are supposed to be.

Many gender-bending gamers are quick to describe/defend themselves in forums as "normal" guys who simply prefer watching female tail. But what does that really tell us? I recently conducted a (highly informal) survey as well, and asked for anonymous personal profiles, hoping that the gamers behind the buzz could shed a little light on themselves -- and answer for us, in, perhaps, a more meaningful way, the question of who is cross-dressing.
------
-"I am a male computer geek, 31 years old, married, and a long time gamer. Currently I’m a full time college student again, focusing on east asian history, and the Japanese language. I used to do olympic style fencing, though today I’m too out of shape. Before I went back to college full time I was a computer tutor, corporate trainer, and repairman... I play World Of Warcraft and I tend to play female characters. Of my five characters only one is male. While in game I do not make any particular effort to fool people into thinking I’m a woman in real life, nor do I make any effort to let people know that I’m a man in real life. I don’t flirt, or try to produce any sexual vibes... I *do* tend to refer to myself using feminine terms (ie: “I’m your girl” instead of “I’m your boy” when agreeing to help someone)."

-"I know female characters are just as popular as male ones, but I [male] like playing as non-traditional ones, like a female Tauren. Female Taurens are so loveable! Then again, I did enjoy playing as a female troll, who was very cute, but very insane (it was an RP server). I like haiving cute, silly characters, that will actually whoop your ass... IRL, I’m a 20 year old male who is about 96% attracted to other males... I play as male characters sometimes, but when I do I usually choose an attractive one."

-"I’m a 40 year old male computer programmer/business owner, single, long time gamer on a variety of levels... Strongly introverted; favored hobbies are orienteering/hiking, reading, and game design; music tastes range from classical to new age. In terms of creating avatars, I usually seem to end up with somewhere near a 50/50 split in terms of gender... I generally create avatars the same way I did back in my pen-and-paper gaming days: I have a concept in mind, perhaps based on a character in a recent novel or movie, and that determines the character’s gender... While I have female characters of nearly all shapes and sizes, my favorites generally fall into one of two basic categories: tiny and brash (usually a redhead, heh), and the blond Valkyrie/Amazon type. Then there are the oddities like my female troll priestess in WoW with the red mohawk… I really enjoyed playing her :-)."

-"I’m a 30-year-old [male] software development professional who is an avid multimedia gamer, musician, and armchair psychologist. I’m rather new to the MMO scene, having never gotten involved in Everquest and being disappointed at Dark Age of Camelot. But when playing games that allow me to create an avatar, I usually choose a female character model first... When playing a female avatar, I enjoy feeling popular, sexy, beautiful, and more than a little powerful. it’s amazing how much power a smart female can wield over the desperate, the socially awkward, and the stereotypical unwashed masses of geeks that typically inhabit an MMO setting. And I play that up. Even something as simple as using an atypical male response (like using “cutie” when addressing a male or demonstrating “physical” affection) is enough to convince all but the most jaded skeptic that I am female."

-"I am a 42 year old male. I work for a large school district as their Director of Technology. I’ve been playing computer games since they were text on mainframes, and have beta tested just about every MMO since the first Everquest. I wrote for a major Computer Games publication for about 5 years freelance... I play my avatars like I would play with remote control cars. I am not my characters, nor do I role play much... In the fantasy MMO’s I am just as likely to play male as female. I have two males and a female avatar in WOW right now. My female is a human rogue, I really had this idea of a trim red head dressed in black avatar for this character, don’t know why, it’s just the image I was after... I don’t flirt or participate in blatant female ways."

-"I'm currently 19, straight white male. In addition to the female characters I've played in RPGs, I also play the occasional female skin in FPS I play... [In high school] I played michalla. She was an elven ranger/fighter in D&D. I'm not very good at make up names so I just stole my sisters hawaiian middle name. That was all my sister lent to the character though. She didn't last long... Recently I decided to take up my other big female character... There is a little bit of feminism in the character and I'm trying to be conscious of female aspect."

-"In real life, I'm a 39 year old [female] straight game designer. Pretty normal person, normal family. My hobbies are my kids, three of them. I give them all my time. Before I had kids, though, my hobbies were classic cars and metalwork. I plan to take the latter up again in the fall, actually. I've been a gamer since 1981. Given my long gaming history, I most fondly remember playing party-based RPGs where I would play a whole crew of male-characters. At first, I played characters like this because there was no option to play a female character. Now, I choose characters not so much on their gender - in fact, when I am playing, the avatar's gender doesn't even occur to me - but on what they do in the world and what their statistical benefits might be."

"I’m a [thirty-something, male] writer between employments right now, spent a lot of time in the tech-support business, the insurance business, and a few other odd jobs between... It used to be more of a mix, but these days I find myself playing female characters almost all the time. The ratio is about 3:1. I blame a long-standing fascination with the feminine mystique... I try to imbue the women I play with something of that sensibility. I also tend to play “Girl Fridays.” These are dependable, helpful, cheerful women who don’t shrink from adversity, don’t flinch from a fight, but are still, undeniably feminine... They are not, therefore, sexpots, nymphos, or anything else of the sort. I do not shy away from sexual play... I am also married, no kids."

Hunt and Peck?

Earlier this year Greg Wilson in Gamasutra wrote "Off With Their HUDs!:  Rethinking the Heads-Up Display in Console Game Design."  He suggested that the game industry is evolving away from the Heads-Up-Display (HUD) and moving towards incorporating information directly into the game environment...

One claim is that "many important HUD elements can be seamlessly integrated into the game world to enhance player immersion..."

The examples in this article are console games - especially first-person shooter and racing games.  These genres seem most prone to emphasize formulaic interfaces featuring HUD designs that contain components that (in Wilson's words) " are there not out of necessity, but out of convention..."  (ref also discussion on the Guardian Unlimited).  I suspect, however, a case could be made that user-interface convention and design legacy ripple through all categories of virtual world interfaces.

One take on the trend of embedding more information within the world was documented by Alice a long time ago (re: Peter Molyneux's The Movies, emphasis added):

Look at this game: no HUD...  Left button is pickup, right button is interrogate. That’s it... We use AI to try to guess what you’re doing by where your cursor is. As you rollover the actors, the information pops up contextually.. pick up an actor, and this ‘stream of consciousness’ points out the most sensible things to do... Let the player experiment.

A few thoughts here.  Perhaps moving the user interface into the environment will help overcome the feeling of a cockpit.  But too, is there a small irony as virtual worlds mimic pervasive-computing (emphasizing decentralized interfaces) with a recursive twist:  to interact with this world requires an interface, and to interface with the world requires interaction?

One benefit of decentralizing control into the virtual world may be that it can help counter amongst some casual players the problem Joel Spolsky once described as learned helplessness (emphasis added):

...User Interface (UI)  is important because it affects the feelings, the emotions, and the mood of your users. If the UI is wrong and the user feels like they can't control your software, they literally won't be happy and they'll blame it on your software...

Will closely locating the actions and choices available to the players with the objects in the virtual world help a player to feel more in control and more immersed, or will it instead bring a new dimension to hunt and peck?

Computer Games Magazine to Launch New MMO Publication

Straight from their mouths: "MASSIVE Magazine Will Be Devoted Exclusively to Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Computer Games Magazine, published by the media division of theglobe.com, today announced it will publish MASSIVE Magazine, the first print publication dedicated solely to massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. It will provide avid online gamers a new source for the latest news, features, and previews. The premiere issue will hit newsstands for a three-month run on September 19, 2006, and will start as a stand-alone quarterly publication by January 2007. It will also include a free DVD packed with MMO demos and games.

...MASSIVE Magazine will include in-depth features on the culture of MMOs, focusing on players, guilds, communities, and their adventures both inside and outside the games. The editorial staff of Computer Games Magazine will produce the content keeping the same style and credibility expected among its fiercely loyal readership. MASSIVE Magazine will be written with a lighthearted and breezy editorial tone that will resonate with anyone interested in MMOs and their place in the world of gaming.

“Since MASSIVE Magazine will be the first publication dedicated solely to MMO games, we know it will be very well-received by the MMO gaming community,” said Dubin. “We are confident this magazine will be a huge success.”

First?

Confessions of a Virtual Intelligence Analyst

We live in a world where the technology exists that the government or other technically sophisticated group is able to monitor and analyze a substantial fraction of the communications of the world's population, or can track their movements throughout the day, or keep tabs on their financial transactions.

And that world is called World of Warcraft.

While the NSA has been capturing and analyzing international phone calls and electronic communications, with far less press coverage I’ve spent much of the last year collecting and helping to analyze data scraped from World of Warcraft as part of the largest quantitative study of virtual worlds to date.

We've run into a series of problems trying to scrape information from five of WoW's servers -- some expected, some not -- and developed some rules of thumb in the process.

A Brief History of Peeping

World of Warcraft is not PlayOn’s first entry into listening in on a virtual world. Early in 2004, Nic Ducheneaut and Bob Moore placed bots in the cantinas and starports of one server for Star Wars Galaxies, and collected the chat logs from those environments. My own descent into PlayOn was to help analyze the gigabyte of chat logs that had been collected.

Coming to WoW, we realized that Blizzard had opened up the game programming interface so that most of a player’s in-game actions can be automated, but still preventing game-playing bots. The /who command, combined with enough patience and a small matter of programming, enables a bot which can take a census of the entire logged-in world. Worlds, in fact, one faction at a time.

Starting last April with a census bot, we’ve collected 190 million sightings of the form
     Magtheridon,01/01/06 21:16:51,Deputura,59,Un,st,y,Dire Maul,
     Magtheridon,01/01/06 21:16:51,Onlysurface,28,Ta,er,y,Warsong Gulch,TerrifyingPulsar
(That is, a 59 Undead Priest and a 28 Tauren Hunter.) Most of the analysis on the PlayOn blog, and the data in Nic’s earlier post is derived from the simple information kinds of information shown above. Since then we’ve added scrapers for gender, zone chat, guild rank, and pvp rank, (while failing repeatedly to add a scraper for economic data), chugging away on 6 dilapidated PCs spanning 5.5 WoW realms. And we learned a lot about scraping virtual worlds over this period.

Things Take Longer and Cost More

Virtual worlds conspire against the would-be analyst, so that the “small matter of programming” mentioned earlier became a burgeoning monstrosity. The SMOP that is needed to test whether we can extract some type of information from the virtual world is usually not enough to function 24/7 in the face of different network or VW conditions. A lot of our code isn’t so much concerned with scraping data, but determining if the server is up, or if a request is taking too long, or if the addon is possibly wedged.

Our scripts are very bad at dealing with situations humans can account for. Resilient software in the presence of connectivity and game issues is hard. Good grief, we have software fragments which try to dynamically optimize the amount of time to wait between receiving /who results and sending the next request.

We deal with a semi-supported part of the game. The best documentation for the WoW API has been created by the modding community, but is still spotty in places, and wrong in others. Someone writing scraping code can easily become the expert -- outside Blizzard -- on some arcane portion of the game.

By far the most difficult problem we’ve faced is that the game itself is not static, but presents a moving target. Even our interest in and understanding of certain data changes over time. Patch day is a mad scramble to get the scraping software working again. Maybe the login code changed. Or, for example in the most recent release, information on whether a character was grouped or not disappeared from the API, breaking our software in the process.

Several of these problems leak over from the data scraping into the analysis. It’s simply a fact of life that we have holes in our data. Any analysis we set up has to deal with a day or week missing here, or a few hours missing there. It’s surprising how much this can complicate matters. And however it came about, analysis parsers must deal with slightly different data from different eras.

We can only analyze what is available to the players. As a result, we often have to make a trade-off to find a reasonable proxy. For example, we would like to know when people are grouped to quest together. The best we’ve been able to do to estimate this is to identify guildmates in the same zone, both in some group. We realize that it’s not accurate, but we have to make do. More troublesome are situations where we have no good proxy. We can develop predictors of character abandonment, but we have no way to know if the player switched to another character, or another game.

Tips for the Impenitent

If my confession has not dissuaded you from scraping and analyzing intelligence from virtual world, here are some suggestions for help:

• Expect to spend a lot of the software development time handling exceptional cases like servers down, lag, and time-outs.
• For something that runs repeatedly, try very hard to find a way to have another process detect when the scraper is wedged, in order to exit and restart.
• Be patient. Set your timeouts, as much as possible, for the worst times of day, even if they run slower than necessary during other times.
• As a new scraper comes online, start doing some analysis of the data early, even though you may need weeks of data until the results are truly relevant. By beginning the analysis early, you will expose problems in the data collection that can be corrected.
• Files containing lines of comma-separated values (.csv files) are easy to output as text, and can be easily read by spreadsheet programs. Including columnar headings or scraper version info at the top can allow future changes to the scrapers with minimal change to the analysis parsers.
• Convince Nick Yee that he wants to help analyze your data. This is important.
• Generate log files to record significant events in the scrapers, such as logging on or off, dealing with time-outs, reaching major milestones, etc. These can be invaluable for tracking long-term issues.
• If you have log files with sufficient information, consider writing a monitor script to send you email when your scrapers have been offline for too long.
• Iterate between your game intuition and your analysis of the data to determine what to analyze next, what changes to make to the scraper, and what information you can proxy for information not yet available.
• Have fun. It’s a brave new world.

The Gamer Bloc

In response to anti-game legislation, some of it ridiculous, the Entertainment Software Association has established a Video Game Voters Network. Members are encouraged to advocate for sound policies regarding the medium. I've been thinking quite a bit lately about policy issues as regards synthetic worlds. Some questions, below the fold.

Once formed and self-conscious, how will the gamer bloc vote on other issues?

Is the gamer bloc an extension of the discussion board gaming community into real world politics?

Will the gamer bloc speak out about real-world policies only, or will it try to affect game development as well?

Presuming that it is incredibly useful and important to maintain a distinction between the policies imposed by real-world governments and the rules imposed by game designers, how can such a distinction be sustained when, for example, real-world governments impose laws that affect game development, and there is a self-conscious gamer bloc prepared to act in both domains?

Race Bending

One of our readers, George Lara, sent us a question that is interesting, provocative and on which, no doubt, the hivemind has views.

George writes:

"In the past, I've read articles from various sources about "Gender Bending" players who take on opposite genders while online. I wonder if and of your authors has dived into the subject of playing someone of a different race or skin color? I play a human character in WoW that has dark hair and skin and I notice that my character really was a true minority among human characters (I'm Latino in real life) who were overwhelmingly Anglo. It lead me to wonder if there are players out there who "Race Bend", and is it as common as those who gender bend. Are offline persons of color choosing to play Anglo humanoid players and vice versa and why?"

I can think of Jerry Kang's early piece about race in online spaces, "Cyber-race" and there must be more recent analysis of the issue. Other thoughts, examples?

Welcome Eric Nickell

A while back we announced that we had added Nic Ducheneaut to our authorial ranks, as part of a strategy to take over the brainpower of the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) but pay nothing for the privilege. Since we already had Nick Yee on our non-payroll, this was a moderately-implausible but amusing story. I can now announce the next stage in our takeover strategy, by announcing that we are collectively delighted to welcome Eric Nickell to the blog. Eric is a computer scientist in the Computing Science Laboratory at PARC, with a B.S. from Caltech, an M.A. from Fuller Theological Seminary, and a wealth of experience as a video game designer, and computer programmer/analyst developing high-speed imaging software and task management software. More important than this though, he is one of the principals behind the PARC PlayOn project, which is collecting and analysing and thinking about MMOGs.

Eric and Nic Ducheneaut and Nick Yee all claim credit for the amazing MMOG results that PARC continues to generate, while at the same time suggesting that the other two are total hacks who wouldn't know an avatar if it came up an bit them (Nic Ducheneaut was particularly vehement in his comments, and it turns out that it is true that some Frenchmen cheerfully use words that would be gravely offensive if translated into English). We are fairly confident that, in fact, Bob Moore is the brains behind the operation (Bob, if you're reading this, give me a call). But since we were uncertain about who was responsible for all the good work, we decided to grab as many of them as we could. Especially those who, like Eric, are big fans of Jane Austen, have spent years living in Southeast Asia, and who hold the conviction that every American 13 year old should be packed off to live with a Third World family for a year. Eric is particularly interested in quantititative methodologies of research in MMOGs.

So, welcome Eric! Glad to have you aboard. And please, no fighting with Nic, ok?

Disembodiment, Hypermobility, and Labor

Ge Jin, a PhD student from UCSD, is making a video documentary of the gold farming phenomenon (preview here). The documentary preview shows some of his interviews with Chinese workers in various gold farming workshops. In our conversations over email, he has brought up some interesting points based on his observations. He's also looking for feedback and suggestions for important research questions and different points of view.

One interesting observation he makes is on the general atmosphere in these workshops:

When I entered a gold farm for the first time (tietou's gaming workshop in the preview), I was shocked by the positive spirit there, the farmers are passionate about what they do, and there is indeed a comraderie between them ... I do see suffering and exploitation too, but in that place suffering is mixed with play and exploitation is embodied in a gang-like brotherhood and hierarchy. When I talked with the farmers, they rarely complained about their working condition, they only complained about their life in the game world.

Although they have to work/play for 12 hours a day, they take pride in what they achieve and they seem eager to escape into a virtual reality richer, brighter, and more exciting than their impoverished real world lives.

In watching the video, I am most struck by the intertwined empowerment/disempowerment that is occurring simultaneously for these Chinese workers. Their lives in these virtual worlds are brighter, but yet their interactions with American players (and associated slurs) are a constant reminder of their inferior socio-economic status. The disembodied hypermobility granted by these virtual worlds is, to a certain extent, dispelled when they are labeled as "Chinese gold farmers". For them, it is a double-edged sword.

Other issues that he's also thinking through are:

- the role of brokers in this system (auction houses, gold farm owners, etc.)
- is this a new kind of labor based on disembodiment and pleasure?
- how do these Chinese workers interact with American gamers?
- what does this all mean to the Chinese worker?

Ge Jin is currently looking for feedback, and suggestions for additional research questions. He is aware of this thread and will be happy to hear any comments you have.

Of Mechanical Mice and Men

I found myself wondering Jeff Orkin's muse about "the future of AI in an increasingly multiplayer-dominated world."  He asks whether the AI in the virtual world will be limited to roles for which no player would want to engage.  This is a religious topic in the games  community, easy to miss.  But then along the way comes a report of a "massacre" of Chinese players by Korean players in Lineage and old questions surface:  better to trust the world to AI (and game design) or the players?

Jeff's post  "AI, Inner-Life, and the Multiplayer World" extends the discussion from an earlier Gamasutra article by Bruce Blumberg ("Anticipatory AI and Compelling Characters" ).  Both are notable reads.  A theme that emerges in both discussions is the distinction between an intelligent act and its signal.  In other words, behaving intelligently is not always sufficient to communicate that intelligence - the need to communicate and divine intent is critical.  As Blumberg wrote:

The absence of anticipatory behaviors that predict significant changes in motivational state (and hence behavior) is a consistent weakness of many AI models of behavior. As a result, changes from one motivational state to the next often appear startling and ultimately inexplicable. One source of the problem is that by modeling motivational contexts as finite states, such a system only knows how to display that state when the system is in that particular state.

Analogy with the lessons from Kismet ([1.]) and those involved in social robotics might be possible.  The ability to express intent and social cues via gaze, for example, can go a very long way in communicating something more than just what it does.   By contrast, is Deep Blue intelligent or just smart?

In a way, Dmitri's work ( Cultivation Hypothesis) along with Ted's theory of players aping the virtual world AI (ref) could suggest a pitfall of "AI effects" in virtual worlds.   A contrasting view is to leave it up to the players to do more, and leave the AI to running NPC rabbits and shopkeepers.

But if people-quality  intentions are important, consider their pitfalls...

Recently billsdue ran a post (Financial Times source) of how South Korean players in Lineage are "are ganging up to obliterate the Chinese, whom they view as greedy and rude."  Stories like this are hard to parse from hype (the other media effect), but they do point to a deeper conundrum: 

How much content should a player be allowed to control?

Far East News

The online games Free Style, Audition, Everquest II (China)  cap our Far East thoughts  today.

Large Numbers:

The Korean virtual asset online game Free Style  is reportedly  hitting 20 million  subscribers and 300K  concurrent users in China.  Raph Koster discusses the dance game Audition reaching 50 million subscribers and 400K concurrent users. 

East versus West?

March 6 Pacific Epoch reports that EQ2  will end operations in China on March 30.   Is there an emerging gulf between eastern and western MMOs?

You Owe Me

BillMonk, a hybrid of financial tracking and social networking that allows you to see what your balance is with your friends, now supports virtual game currencies. BillMonk itself is interesting is that the debts it tracks are all informal, backed only by the trust between/among friends rather than hard currency or legal obligation, making it a virtual and voluntary economy of hundreds of thousands of ___ [<-- insert your favorite unit of currency here]. And now, its gone meta-virtual, adding support for virtual currency debt types as well.

According the Chuck, the BillMonk guru, "The awkwardness friends have with money is a chronic social/cultural problem, and our users tell us that we're really helping them make their lives easier. We find it fascinating to trace friendship networks, especially when they cross currency and location boundaries." Best of all, for those of us interested in the kinds of social/monetary network data this software generates, BillMonk is willing to, er, share the wealth (of data, that is). Properly scrubbed of names and all identifying information to protect folks' privacy of course.

Mimicry, Melting Faces, and The Proteus Effect

Those of you who know that The Daedalus Project isn't my main research project at Stanford may have wondered what it is I actually do at Stanford. Here's the short version. I melt faces.

At Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, I work with Jeremy Bailenson in using immersive VR (iVR) to explore social interaction and self-representation in digital environments.  The over-arching theme is something we refer to as Transformed Social Interaction (Bailenson et al., 2004) . Given that digital environments allow us to break the bounds of physical rules of interaction, what can we change and how do these changes affect social interaction in digital environments? For example, in RL, we can only maintain eye contact with one person at a time, but my avatar in VR can maintain eye contact with everyone at the same time (because every person I interact with sees their own version of the world).

Here are three different lines of research that have gotten media coverage lately.

Mimicry

We unconsciously mimic people in real-life, and in fact, the more someone mimics us the more we like them. In our study (Bailenson & Yee, 2005), we tried to explore whether agents could leverage this advantage against people in digital environments. Participants were put into iVR and listened to an agent deliver a 3 minute argument. In the treatment condition, the agent mimicked the participant's head movements at a 4 second delay. In the control condition, we played back the head movement from a previous participant. We found that participants who were mimicked by the agent were more likely to agree with the argument. These participants also rated the agent more favorably. In other words, mimicry offers one simple way for agents to gain social advantage with human users.

This study has also been reported in the NewScientist and Wired.

Melting Faces

We like people who are similar to us, whether this is because they share our values, because they speak the same language, or because they look like us. Image morphing software has been around for a while, so what would happen if a political candidate took on some of a person's facial features? One week before the 2004 election, we took a representative US sample of voting age people (via Knowledge Networks) and blended their face with either Bush or Kerry (40% subject + 60% candidate). Participants always saw a split-panel image - with one candidate morphed with them, and the other image morphed with another participant (so that we could make sure that whatever effects we found weren't simply due to morphing artifacts). Not one of the participants detected the self-morph, but there was a significant effect of the self-similarity manipulation. People were more likely to vote for the candidate that they had been morphed with (see Bailenson, Iyengar, and Yee, 2005 for details and morph examples).

This presidential study built on some earlier work (Bailenson, Garland, Iyengar, Yee, 2005). Related news coverage can be found at The Washington Post and near the end of this other article at The Washington Post.

The Proteus Effect

Virtual environments let us alter our appearances dramatically, but as we choose our avatars, do our avatars change how we behave and interact with others? In one study, participants placed in iVR were shown an attractive or unattractive avatar in a virtual mirror (see video of example of mirror). The attractiveness of these faces had been pretested. The participants then interacted with a confederate in the same virtual room. The confederate was blind to condition and always saw the participant with an average face. We found that participants in the attractive condition were willing to move closer to the confederate and revealed more personal information than participants in the unattractive condition. More importantly, when we asked participants to guess the goal of the study, not one detected or guessed the attractiveness manipulation. In other words, participants in attractive avatars became more friendly and more intimate with virtual strangers.

In another study, we manipulated the height of the participant's avatar to be 10cm taller, 10cm shorter, or the same height as the confederate. Again, the confederate was blind to condition and always saw the participant to be the same height (trig was used in background to correct gaze angles). The participant and confederate then engaged in a negotiation task. We found that participants in the tall condition were significantly more willing to make unfair offers than participants in the short condition. Also, participants in the short condition were significantly more willing to accept an unfair offer than those in the tall condition. And again, participants asked to guess the goal of the study did not detect the height manipulation.

In other words, even though choosing our avatars is oftentimes framed as a one-way process, the avatars we choose actually come to change how we behave in cyberspace (paper under review). These findings have been reported in the NewScientist, NPR, and Gamasutra.

A full list of published papers from the lab (with PDF links) is available here.

Purging

Norseheim is a textual world being run by Jamie Slate at Catawba College as experimental research into co-operation and competition under constraints. This is a long-term project which takes an Economics perspective (although nothing is published yet).

What makes it particularly interesting for us here at Terra Nova, however, is the nature of the constraints. Basically, four times a year, the player database is purged. Everyone starts again from scratch.

Now you might think that this would be a Bad Idea, but apparently the players love it. It may have something to do with the academic cycle, but it seems that people are willing to play a virtual world that they know will only last 3 or 4 months before it resets entirely.

Imagine it wasn't an academic textual world, though, but was a commercial graphical world. Would people still play it, or something like it?

I'm guessing they would. If there were new shards starting all the time, so newbies were never dumped in a "lame duck" instantiation, a fixed time limit could be attractive in several ways:

• You only have to commit for a fixed period, not indefinitely.
• There's greater narrative scope for the designers.
• As most of the characters will be of the same "level" anyway, the concept of levels can be replaced by some less grindy means of measuring success.
• You're free to reinvent yourself periodically, instead of having to wear a character that might have been appropriate for you two years ago but who just isn't "you" any more.
• Content can be arranged so that players will want to be in similar geographic areas at similar times. You won't need so many players per shard to get that "village" feel.
• Lots more...

It also raises some interesting non-design problems. It looks to me as if it would discourage RMT, for example, because investments won't necessarily be seen as sufficiently long-term. On the other hand, if RMTers persuade the courts that people own what their characters own, the whole concept of a purge might be threatened.

I'm pretty sure that scheduled purges have been done before, but Norseheim is probably the first time it's happened under academic observation right from the beginning. It'll be instructive to see how things develop.

Hamlet who?

Hamlet Linden is no more. Arise Hamlet Au. Yup - it’s all change in the VW community this year. Betsy has gone There, Uri has gone who knows where and Hammie has gotten de-embedded.

I would suggest that you can read all about the real deal at LL from my hard hitting interview with the big H where I reduce a grown man to confused tears of rage and pain, or reveal the true life kiss-and-tell story of CA geeks gone wild replete with photo’s, video and avatar reenactments. But no. I’d love to say he’s also joined There, as that would just be funny. But no again.

The truth of is it that he’s changed name, changed URL but has managed to smuggle out the New World Notes brand with him. And he’s writing like crazy, covering free speech, creative commons, abusive float monkeys all this week. Though I have to say the images in Hamlet Reborn are kinda spooky, like a dream where your freakish new clone pitches up and presses your off button.

Anyhoo here’s his new pad: nwn.blogs.com

[note: this message was brought to you by the friends of Hamlet and the letter H, the opinions expresses were bias and may or may not represent those of the author, genuineness being proportionate to units of alcohol bought for said author at time or times to be determined]

Play as Production / Labor

In the inaugural issue of the new game studies journal Games and Culture, Celia Pearce and I wrote two short articles that touched upon some similar themes. We both challenged the assumption of unproductive play in different ways. The full articles from that issue of Games and Culture are available after a free registration.

In Celia’s piece (link to abstract), she uses the example of the Myst/Uru diaspora to argue that play can be productive. The Myst/Uru example also highlights the blurring between content producers and content consumers. In my piece (link to abstract), I use the example of pharmaceutical manufacturing in Star Wars Galaxies (sadly, no longer a potential profession in SWG) to rethink games as work platforms where some players are trained to do work that may be more complex and stressful than their real-life jobs.

Instead of doing a normal post, Celia suggested we do a series of back-and-forth discussion posts via the comments thread so that we could think through some of the issues together. Of course, others should feel free to hop in at any time.

Celia, one question I’m particularly interested in is where you see this trend heading. I’m a little more cynical about this trend, and I see the hypothetical cancer-screening example as something that will eventually happen in some form. What’s your take on the blurring of production and leisure?