Terra Nova

Situational Awareness

Regarding the display and representation of information, Ben Shneiderman's famous mantra "(o)verview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand" (OFZaFtD-o-D) may seem unambiguous.   Most of us likely intuit that we consume the global structure of a scene first then move onto its details.  Yet it worthwhile to remember that it wasn't until the digital age that information layering became a practical option in many cases - recall the visually stunning chrome dials of automobiles of the days of yore. 

However, the OFZaFtD-o-D is an incomplete answer.  The follow-on question becomes what is the right organizing global structure to use?   The virtual world interface provides us with an opportunity for an interesting thought experiment...

By and large the disagreements in design of virtual world user interfaces (e.g. to emphasize a Head's-Up-Display or not) center on the best way to communicate to the player an awareness of her situation in that world.  Few would likely quarrel with the need.  The arguments start when trying to decide what is the right global situational structure from which to hang the rest of the game world representation.  Desired is a form that reflects the priority of the player (and implicitly the world/game design).

In some ways  recent discussion on the role of the avatar (Dead Metaphor Walking) and the Non-Linearity of Chat (chat display) are proxies for a different point:  what is the best way to represent the the MMOG universe to a player (OFZaFtD-o-D)  given the limited resources of screen real-estate, player interaction and memory?    In the Cockpit of your Avatar  these trade-offs were suggested using a more theatrical turn:  if you can't fly your avatar, you surely can't play it.

Recently P&V posted "Visualizing the overall structure of a tennis match," reviving a topic from a 1997 article [1.].  The graphic is worth a thousand words, take a look at it there.  The goal is simple enough - as  a tennis game has a hierarchical structure to its play that is not immediately clear to noobs, why not invent a graphic that communicates it more effectively?  In this case a TreeMap.

Now, there are a number of easy arguments one can throw at this were it the display of a hypothetical eTennis.  Starting with a.) how immersive would this be  b.) wouldn't a strategic view  transform a tactical game into a different game; c.)...

Yet, stepping back.   I wonder if in this age of rapidly approaching ubiquity in game world  access (e.g. "Towards Situation-aware Cross-platform Ubi-Game" [2.]) when even our good friend Alice Taylor speculates (AULA presentation) whether Google Earth is going MMO, there may come the need to freshly reevaluate how to design the virtual world experience (interface and all) to effectively communicate an efficient and engaging situational awareness.

New paradigm anyone?

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

[1.]  Liqun Jin; Banks, D.G. (1997): TennisViewer: a browser for competition trees, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 17 (4), 63 - 65

[2.] JungHyun Han, Hoh Peter In, Jong-Sik Woo, "Towards Situation-Aware Cross-Platform Ubi-Game Development," apsec, pp. 734-735,  11th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC'04),  2004.

Play Money

Julian Dibbell's book deserves a thread of its own. I sometimes get the sense that people don't believe any of the things we talk about on this page until they hear some stories by real people. What a story Julian tells, and it's all about the econ. Run, don't walk, to Amazon.com and buy this thing.

Summer Reading Suggestions

                  

Gamers are Standing By

Dave Elfving (of Machine Chicago) pointed me and others to this insurance commercial ("The Lord of Mishap"), which he first saw on television. Take a look and come back. I'll wait.

Clearly, you're in good hands with gamers.

But how did we get here? This is an industry (insurance) widely known for its conservatism in marketing and its focus on, above all, playing to its potential customers' desire to feel safe and secure. Isn't it remarkable, then, that we've reached a point where a long-established insurance company can reasonably expect to gain customers by saying, effectively, "You shouldn't worry if you've got Farmers insurance, because gamers are standing by"?

Is this an index of how far gaming has come in the cultural imagination? It seems to me that we are in the midst of a transformation where the hallmark of frontline competence in business and technology is moving away from an engineering-style application of linear rationality to solve problems, and toward the application of the embodied, improvisatory, and multiple competencies that games instill.

But there are other interesting questions. Is this shift primarily generational, an attempt by Farmers to reach younger customers? Or do we think that this kind of appeal has broader reach? That is to say, how widely is gaming competence coming to be seen as the kind of competence you want on your side?

Also, does this reflect more a growing idea that gamers' competence is what we need in a technologized environment (since we assume all of our long-term customer-corporate relationships are deeply technologized)? Or is it deeper than that, reflecting a growing cultural tendency to see the world, technologized or not, as a game? In this vein, note how the commercial draws upon its audience's gaming competence as well, in the game-like interface that overlays the suburban setting, and which provides the first clues to what's really happening to the poor Lord of Mishap. Marketing always aspires to get customers to identify with a product's providers, so apparently not only are gamers standing by, they are also white-picket-fenced home owners and minivan drivers, and it makes perfect sense to them to liken everyday mishaps to the appearance of an otherworldly menace wielding arcane powers on Maple Street.

56% LOL!

A while back Bonnie pointed out how people engaging in online text communication liberally use expressions such as LOL (Laughing Out Loud) to soften the real meaning of what they are saying.  In part doing so helps them cope against miscalculation is a channel where substantial error can arise without the benefit of paralinguistic information (gestures etc).  Research seems to suggest that the motivation for this communicative waffling is well founded.  It would appear that we are significantly prone to miscalculate the meaning in text messages because our "(s)ocial judgement is inherently egocentric"...

In "Egocentrism Over Email: Can We Communicate as Well as We Think?" [1.] we are led to believe that about half of the people using email are:  a.) likely to believe that they are more effective at communicating using email than they actually are;  and b.) the sender's "over-confidence' is a result of an egocentrism - an inability to evaluate what they write from the other person's perspective.   Folks in this case appear terrible at distinguishing the writer's voice (e.g. "sarcastic").  Discerning outright humor fared worse.  The authors suggested that more dynamic mediums such as chat and gaming environments would only compound the problem.  As Clive Thompson notes: 

there are a couple of conclusions here. Either a) people are crappy writers; b) people are crappy readers; or c) a subtle mixture of the two governs all online communiations, ensuring that we have no clue what the hell anyone else is trying to say.

However, the optimist, I am inclined to believe that online language may be more robust (adaptive) in ways that email in structured channels can never be: redundancy and language softeners can go a long way to take one to a point... eventually.   It just means you have to have  the time and patience and be able to manage all that chat.

LOL!

-----------

[1.] Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2005, Vol 89, No. 6. 925-6.

Grounded in Virtual Spaces

A personal blog is a complicated thing.  On the one hand, it gives you a chance to say what you want, to put your thoughts in order, to clear you head at the end of the day.  On the other--as your less internet-obsessed friends are always happy to point out--it's rather narcissistic.  After all, what's a personal blog but a chance to hear yourself speak?

But a personal blog can always serve a different purpose; it becomes a surrogate home.

The idea that we even need homes to weigh down our ramblings on the internet super-highway (or whatever the kids are calling it these days) seems a bit cheesy.  "Home, sweet home."  "Home is where the heart is."  Embroider it on a pillow and hang it on the wall.

But internet wanderers or not, we're still human, and some of our most basic physical needs keep on coming back, even in virtual spaces.  Like sex, for one.  Or the need to feel grounded in a place we can call our own.

Thus we have blogs. Blogs galore.  We have millions of MySpace pages.  We have Facebook.  We have, essentially, an innumerable number of metaphorical houses (some mansions, you might say, some mobile homes) dotting the internet landscape.

Maybe that's why, when I recently considered what day-to-day online life would be like without my own blog, I got a little flustered--dislocated, even.  Or why, in Second Life, a place with so much freedom you can literally fly, players still buy up plots of land with homes. 

Freedom can be overwhelming.  To appreciate it, we set up our own boundaries, our own tiny corners of the world.

This is certainly not the only example of "grounding" our virtual spaces.  Even our internet lingo reveals our land-based heuristic at work.  Websites are just that: "sites".  You can "visit" them, like you would places.  And should one become your favorite, why not make it your "home"?

We've transformed virtual space into physical space. As for physical space as virtual space... oh, the possibilities.

Fifteen new papers on virtual worlds

Fifteen new virtual world research papers are now linked to the on-line syllabus for the course “Games for the Web.” Written by thoughtful undergraduates at Trinity University, the papers explore topics ranging from sexual practices in virtual environments (PDF) to ways that MMOs might be used to ease the suffering of children with cancer (PDF). (Note: As some curmudgeons have correctly noted, the title "Games for the Web" is a misnomer that glosses  over the distinction between "the web" and other TCP/IP-enabled services. The explanation can be found in the appended comments.)

Students met throughout the semester to discuss milestone works related to gaming and virtual worlds, and they supplemented these theoretical conversations with ongoing fieldwork in the virtual world of Norrath (Everquest II). The class played primarily on the Antonia Bayle role-playing server, where they were welcomed by the guild The Vindicators. In a completely unplanned twist of fate, the guild leader (Bandel) turned out to be the legendary game designer Scott Adams.

As they became more familiar with both the theoretical and the virtual landscapes, each student articulated a narrowly defined question that could be answered with qualitative methods. They paid close attention to ethical concerns and the importance of informed consent, and all students were required to pass a test on research ethics before collecting a single scrap of data. All of the class research projects were approved by the Institutional Review Board at Trinity University.

Please wander through the class site at your leisure, and take a look at the student's preliminary research findings. The students would love to hear your constructive feedback, either through e-mail or via postings to their web logs. Please keep in mind the limitations of this research setting. Time was too short to pursue in-depth ethnographic research, and sample sizes were too small to extrapolate with confidence to the broader gaming community. For many of the students, it was the first time that they had undertaken a research project of this scope. Nevertheless, this work reflects the efforts of a new generation of scholars grappling with the social significance of this vital medium.

Gritty details about course mechanics and pedagogical premises are elaborated elsewhere, as are extensive acknowledgements of those who supported the course in some way. I am especially grateful to my colleagues at Terra Nova for graciously sharing their time and expertise, to our guild-mates in The Vindicators on Antonia Bayle for helping us navigate the world of Norrath, and to the many gamers who agreed to participate in these studies.

A Tale of 6 Cities

In a recent musing on VWs as petri dishes, Ted Castronova commented on the impact that creating four new auction houses in WoW's Azeroth has had on the populations of the capital cities. Wondering just what exactly did happen, I went scuttling back to the PlayOn data.

Here are the pretty pictures. Explanations of the data are left as an exercise for the readers.

The data was collected on five different servers over different periods. The date of the auction house change is January 3, 2006.

Dead Metaphor Walking

Oh summer - the humid time to contemplate, the death of the avatar...

Matt Mihaly's post on "Language and User Interface Design" is an interesting read .  He mentions "dead metaphors" (fn1) in passing.  I turn to them in earnest.  A metaphor dies when it ceases to communicate its original novelty, becoming a cliche:   "ground-breaking plans", "to grasp the concept".  Can you think of virtual world metaphors that have died somewhere? 

Let us imagine the avatar a cliched  metaphor whose hold weakens with every fantasy title.   Let us consider if the avatar (in most cases) has ceased to be a useful representation of us except by the accident of social contact. You are a polygon cartoon until something about *you* leaks out and touches someone else.

In Civicus we considered the possibility that with at least with mainstream MMORPGs, strangers - those outside of your tribal circle - carry few hooks to grab and hold our attention as people.  Part of the problem is the medium.  Biological triggers (eye-contact, gaze) don't help much.  So we're left with imagination, which can wear thin with grinding and hurry.  Do you sail past a sea of characters with strange names (often with too many consonants) without thought of a greeting?

Another issue, perhaps, is that outside of our direct relationships and social ambitions there are so many of us with names, colors, and textures that do too little to memorably differentiate ourselves.   Of course it doesn't help that when you speak to strangers they tend to reply in dudisms without inflection:  Non-Player-Character mimicry. 

Then there is that issue on the ease (and hence costlessness) of choice.  In a universe where square jaws, pinched jaws, pug noses, pink lips, blue hair, and epic tattoos are so easily interchangeable, how can the degrees of freedom available to avatar design be anything but noise in the statistics of a sea of toons?

Perhaps we can start with the question posed in comment in this TN discussion: can there be an MMO experience that is without need of the iconic avatar?   Eve-online might be at a midway.  Sure, instead of trolls it is spacecraft.  But it seems more than a difference of appearances: witness the  avatar as cockpit.   

The quarrel I have on this summer evening with the mainstream conceptualization of the avatar is its apparent iconification of a frivolous vanity.  Should online identity be tethered to a virtual (lo, even commercialized) peacock?  One answer is that we must have some sort of visual placeholder, a proxy for ourselves in the virtual world.   Sure.  But why these vainglorious designs?  Remember Monopoly (the boardgame)?  Why not: car, thimble, iron... pick your noun.

Is there a step further?

One useful means of classifying strangers is by their behavior.   I have been in guilds that have kept track of players useful and harmful outside of the group.  Whether it be on wikis, in forums, or as sticky-notes on the monitor, or just in memory - extraordinarily bad gankers or useful contacts were remembered.  Thus those encountered could find in-game life beyond the facade of their toon.  A few strangers became lucky and took on a living relationship with your tribe: a metaphor renewed. 

Tony Lee recently posted on work (fn2) with  "behavioral classification" techniques to combat viruses and other software malware.  The problem we all face with malware is that the old model of identifying and uniquely naming every new virus/worm that comes along is too confusing (e.g. Blackmal, Nyxem, MyWife, KamaSutra, Blackworm, Tearec and Worm_Grew = functionally the same virus!).   Thus, Tony and other researchers are looking at techniques to classify virus/worms by event profiling.

BTW, How different are avatars and malware in their abundance, really?  Many names, fewer classes of behaviors.

Interestingly, in this discussion we contemplated how another sort of declarative medium (chat) can turn to meaningless gibberish unless tested against the measure of history and personal reputation.

Toy with this on this fine summer evening.  Cut the peacock; spurn the colorful declarations of inconsequential consequence.   Be real, virtually.

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

Fn1.  George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, Chicago University Press.

Fn2.  Tony Lee,  Jigar J. Mody.  "Behavioral Classification."  5/9/2006.  Microsoft website.   Synopsis: "This white paper proposes a behavior-based automated classification method for malware based on distance measure and machine learning."

The New Love?

If you’ve ever read the Everquest Widows mailing list (a bit of a guilty pleasure), you’d think that the road to nowhere good (really fast) has an MMO at every bend:  players leaving  otherwise satisfying RL relationships to selfishly seek their romantic pleasure online.  It all starts innocently enough…  normal people with normal lives start playing MMOs and voila! discover that their identities/interactions aren’t limited by the narrow physical world definitions they’ve become accustomed to.  As a friend of mine recently said:

Folks glut themselves on the chance to meet, greet, and be (in)discreet with new faces - and invent their own, i.e. reinventing themselves in the context of whatever environment they like - also an opportunity most folks don't have. So you get to explore the possibilities of these new relationships, be whoever you want (and with whomever you want, however you want) - why go back to a stultifying relationship?

To be sure, this tendency sometimes leaves the devastation of abandoned/abused spouses and children in its wake, but let’s put the value judgments away for a minute...

The problem is that the issues of the satisfactions found in virtual life tend to be rather messily bundled in with discussions about addiction, and as with most effects research, make loose correlations that ignore the actual causes more or less completely.  But as Nick Yee and some bona fide medical researchers from Cedars-Sinai pointed out at the Games * Learning * Society conference last week, the truth is much trickier.  In fact, Nick has evolved his discussion of problematic usage into an acknowledgement of the seductive nature of virtual worlds – why focus on a symptom when we should be focusing on the underlying compulsion?  Or as he put it (as awed silence settled over the room and goosebumps rose on my arms): “Until we solve the problem of making the world a perfect place for everyone, is it pathological to prefer being where you have social status and respect?”

For really, how many people feel truly respected or valued in their real lives?  But more importantly, how many people are really known by their friends/partners and can achieve real intimacy within the context of their physical relationships? If we think of the human body as another technology to be mediated, there are quite a lot of people (most of us, one could say, to some degree or another) who feel a sufficient degree of discomfort with their physical presence that the only way for them to achieve real intimacy is via the affordances of technologies that are less intimidating to those who have achieved a high degree of fluency in them.  No stinky breath, discomfort, awkward speech, spinach-in-teeth, or pheromones to get in the way; just pure, unadulterated brain-to-brain interaction via technologies in which one has a great degree of proficiency.  How satisfying.  Then, combine that with the opportunities for intensely shared experiences in MMOs, and here’s human interaction that goes way beyond chatrooms or idle chit-chat with the bank teller (it always stuns me when luddites complain that the fabric of society is melting away because people no longer enjoy talking to public servants and people on the bus, as if that was such a socially cohesive activity to begin with).  And it certainly goes way beyond the conversations of your average married couple with 2.1 kids, unsatisfying jobs, and mortgage payments beyond comprehension.

But is it possible that the seduction is based in post-modern narcissism?  Are virtual worlds vast playgrounds of funny mirrors that allow us to see/inhabit/be seen in all sorts of parts of our fragmented selves that our largely modernist societies tend to largely ignore?  As Miroslaw Filiciak puts it, “To be visible means to be real.  When we make ourselves visible on the screen, our self becomes more real...  Our self is more liquid than ever… if people play games eagerly to be able to shift their identities, they must be deriving pleasure from that.’

Philosophical meandering aside, there is something quite tangible at work here that is apparent when one examines the richness of relationships cultivated across multiple venues, both physical and virtual.  I’m particularly interested in what I call the layering effect:  what happens when we layer virtual relationships on top of physical ones?  Is the resulting relationship greater than the sum of its parts?  So, when Aaron Delwiche spent months courting his girlfriend in WoW, did that experience, in combination with their physical world interactions, result in a stronger, deeper relationship on the whole?  And are there different aspects of ourselves that can be best explored via different channels?  Does one part of myself emerge via IM, another via phone, another on my blog, another while raiding in an MMO? And does someone who can experience me on all those channels get a more comprehensive view of who I am?  How often in RL do people get to show off their butt-kicking, heroic selves, for instance?  (unless you are a Superhero pizza delivery guy, but I digress…)

Interesting datapoint:  Psychology Today reported in the May/June 2006 issue on a Japanese study that found ‘Text-messaging makes for more intimate friendships.  Pals who only communicate face-to-face have less chummy relationships than those who also let their fingers do the talking’.  In the future, rather than an either/or proposition of physical friends or virtual ones, will our true friends be the ones we have both kinds of relationships with?  Is the virtual+physical relationship the new gold standard for love?

TN Welcomes Lisa Galarneau

We were sitting around the GLS conference and someone - maybe it was Thomas Malaby - said Hey what about getting some more anthropologists on TN? And we said Great. And then we said Thomas what if it was a socio-cultural anthropologist like Lisa Galarneau? And he didn't say anything because he was lost in thought over the realization that anthropologists and virtual world scholars both study shards but have little to say to one another about them. Undaunted, we went to Lisa and asked her to join us. And she agreed! Lisa is indeed a socio-cultural anthropologist, writing a PhD about spontaneous learning communities in City of Heroes. We first heard of Lisa through her Social Study Games site, highly recommended. Welcome Lisa!

World of Madden-Craft

Well, not exactly, but close enough.  EA is acquiring Mythic.  Mythic will stay in Virgina and become EA Mythic.  Mark Jacobs will become vice-president and general manager of the studio.  The news reports are generally glowy re-hashed press releases.  My informal survey of the buzz from the blogosphere reveals commentary that is a bit more mixed in tone:

"No matter EA's reasons, the buy will likely be good for gamers."  

"I am now an EA employee.  I will now be working for the largest publisher of video games, making MMORPGs. I don't have to move, I may get more money, and I don't have to change projects."

"Need I remind anyone of what they’ve done to all prior MMORPG’s?"

"The Game destroying machine known to many as EA has gone and waved its credit card at Mythic and bought the buggers."

"Color me pissed off."

"If you're looking for a positive, you might assume that this deal will somehow supply Mythic with limitless money to use on their projects. But I'm sure EA will be monitoring that budget closely so I wouldn't get my hopes up."

Greg C says: "My guess is: Mythic gets left alone at least until they ship Warhammer. Shortly thereafter, they are gutted, with responsbility for the Mythic games transferred to California."

There's a lot more chatter out there about this.  Lum doesn't say much--he just wishes his friends the best.  Update: Mark Jacobs responds.
 

Synthetic Worlds as Petri Dishes

I wrote a paper arguing that synthetic worlds had already performed interesting quasi-experiments; it was published in the prestigious journal Games and Culture. The point was that if game developers were unconsciously generating interesting experiments at the social level, just think what could be done if researchers became developers. The main experiment in the paper involved market location dynamics. The theory that I claimed EverQuest confirmed has just been tested again, in WoW, and happily it may have just been confirmed again. We would call this an out of sample confirmation. When it happens, it's generally viewed as strong confirmation that the method and the theory really do sit together nicely. Synthetic worlds really are good tools for social experimentation. I'll explain, below the fold.

The theory is that market location is an n-player asymmetric coordination game. When EQ started, markets were in EC tunnel, North Freeport, or Greater Faydark. Then there were server splits, and the pattern of splits showed that coordination effects, rather than mere history or economics, were the dominant predictors of where the markets went. That's the argument of the Games and Culture paper.

WoW used to have Auction Houses only in one city per side. Focusing on Alliance (Horde sucks and is evil, as everyone knows, so I will ignore it), the city was Ironforge. Then WoW opened up Stormwind and Darnassus for auctions as well. The prediction would be that if coordination effects are strong, one city would be used. If Ironforge remained as the main market, that would be inconclusive - maybe it is just history. But if it remained one city, but not Ironforge, that would confirm the power of coordination.

I'm told by David Bricker of the Indiana University Presidential Adminstration that Stormwind has become the main market on the Alliance side. I'm not in Wow myself at the moment. If this is true, and generalized across servers and the Good/Noble vs Evil/Suckage divide, this would generally confirm the theory. And it would be more evdience that large games are good for experiments.

South Korea

Citations from the TN in-basket on the hyperconnected experiment called South Korea.

From the O'Reilly Radar we have "Why the Future  is South Korea" (June 2006) - where S. Korea is identified as "the world's best laboratory for broadband services."  Beyond the usual positives, hints of the cost of being so out in front is given by John Levine who wrote:

South Korea has made itself into a thoroughly unpleasant net neighbor. When they wired up the country, they gave no apparent thought to security. You could tell each time a new school came online because it had a server with the same unpatched version of Windows which was taken over by worms in about 15 minutes and started spewing spam and worse. 

Also, "The Future is SouthKorea" (CNNMoney.com, Business 2.0, June 14, 2006).

Non-linear Chat

A couple of technical references crossed my desktop this evening:  Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise (ACM Queue, Nov. 2005); Software untangles chat room debate (NewScientistTech, June 2006).  A few thoughts for virtual worlds.

Online conversation is a tricky beast for many reasons.  Much of it has to do with context and how it is so difficult to trace through - even for highly caffeinated and well-trained online conversationalists.   Why then is the text box in virtual worlds so small  (scrollable or not, does it matter)?...

Claim: online chat scales poorly.

How many people can you fit on a single channel?   Sure it depends, it is some function of the turnover in speakers and the number and depth (how long running) of the conversation threads and how important the threads are in terms of synchronizing some activity.  Yes, RL point-to-point conversations don't scale well either, but the online medium invites an ease of channel aggregation and switching that is hard to engineer in the social spaces of the real world.

The NewScientistTech reported worked by Eduard Hovy (et al.) presented at the recent Human Language Technology Conference (NY, May 2006)  based on an adaptation of the Hypertext Induced Topic Selection (HITS) algorithm applied to messaging.  The idea here is to identify the most influential post or message in a conversation.

David Millen's (et al.) ACM piece is on one level a conventional spin on social bookmarking systems.  However its detail is spun - interestingly enough - in terms of the enterprise space.  Content collaboration there has a stronger value-added proposition that clarifies a little more sharply the benefit of shared content.

Both of these pieces, combined suggest that meaning and content may be best organized in non-linear structures, e.g. graphs. Or is there some narrative bug grounded into our biology that gets in the way.

Can you think of a better way to organize an online conversation in the same amount of real-estate now afforded to the chat box?  Or is this what we got, to the end of time.

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

From here:

KillSwitch: [Shouting] Does anyone want to join our hunting party?
Farglik: Dude?
KillSwitch: We're gonna go hunt wrixes.
Farglik: Right on.
KillSwitch: Why are you attacking the durneys?
Farglik: Dude?
KillSwitch: The durneys, the little bunny things -- why do you keep shooting at them?
Farglik: Dude?
Troobacca:My weapon powerup expired, I need a new one.
Farglik: Sure.
Troobacca: ...what's this?
Farglik: Dude?
Troobacca: You handed me a melon!
Farglik: Dude!
KillSwitch: Knock it off guys, I see some wrixes up ahead. Let's do this.
Farglik: Right on.
KillSwitch: We rock!
Farglik: Dude!
Troobacca: We so OWNED them!
Farglik: Dude!
KillSwitch: Uh oh, hang on. Up ahead are some Sharnaff bulls. We can't handle them, so don't shoot.
Farglik: Okie.
KillSwitch: You IDIOT! Farglik why did you shoot at them?
Farglik: Lag.
KillSwitch: Well don't do it again.
Farglik: Sure.

Games People Play

Another Ph.D. dissertation focusing on virtual worlds -- this one is in the field of psychology.  Jennifer Jamieson Bortle, Games People Play: Identity and Relationships in an Online Role-Playing Games.  The research focuses on three players of Everquest.  The abstract is below.

Abstract

The following is a study of online relationships and identity formation in Everquest, a multiplayer online role-playing game. Using a phenomenological and reflexive approach, the study seeks to explicate the attractions of this type of online forum, which draws hundreds of thousands of players who spend many hours each week playing the game. Three Everquest players' experiences are considered in light of literature from mainstream psychological, social constructionist, psychodynamic, and cyborg theory, with special focus on the players' reports of the dialogue between player and character, and of the nature of their relationships in Everquest. Subjects participated in a non-directive, qualitative interview and submitted and discussed gameplay logs. Findings challenge the notion that these players' online identities are escapist paradoxes of their offline personae, but highlight the ways in which their ego-ideal colors and limits their online identifications. The participants' ambivalence about the limits of Everquest relationships is also explored, especially such as the Everquest community might be understood as an example of hyperreality structuring the experience of the real. Finally, suggestions for further research in the area are suggested.

PDF (230 pages, 719 kb)

I'm always interested in seeing recent Ph.D. theses on MMORPGs, because they situate their research within their particular academic disciplines (of course) while at the same time they address issues that are peculiar to virtual worlds and found in "game studies" more generally. 

Here are a few Ph.D. dissertations related to MMOGs available via a simple URL. 

• Torill Elvira Mortensen, Pleasures of the Player; Flow and control in online games (about MUDs, but close enough, I think)
• Constance A. Steinkuehler, Cognition and Learning in Massively Multiplayer Online Games: A Critical Approach
• Dmitri C. Williams, Trouble in River City: The Social Life of Video Games (MS Word 11MB) (mostly about video games generally, but has an extended section on Asherson's call).

There are more, I know, and if you want, feel free to add links below in the comments -- it might be a good resource.  Raph and Richard both have plenty of links, btw, but I'm (somewhat arbitrarily) honing in on MMORPG-related Ph.D. dissertations here.

Btw, just in case anyone isn't aware, the format for hyperlinking in comments on Typepad is standard HTML (& thanks, James!):
<a href="http://linkurl">link visible text</a>

Credit for tasteful graphic: Animation Factory

The MMO Powerplant

We live in the age of the Internet.  We compute at the cusp of the age of software-as-service: enter the dominion of  web services and server farms.  Yet can you imagine the efforts of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to build multi-billion dollar server "powerplants" in remote locations served by cheap power and good network access to do their new deed (Fn1)?   Sure it is scale, but scale can become a new feature onto itself.  Yes, we've known of the long tail that is the MMO unseen (ref [1.], [2.],  [3.]  ).  Yet I wonder, should we anticipate the future MMO in these terms?

Fn1:  $1.5 billion/Google, $2 billion Microsoft.   See New York Times, "Hiding in Plain Sight, Google seeks more power." June 14 2006 (registration required, here).   Business Filter blog synopsis here.

The Droids We're Looking For?

Now that Kopp v. Vivendi is off the radar, it is probably time to mention another virtual world-related lawsuit that has been making the news lately: Bragg v. Linden Lab. The defendant in this case is not the owner of the first game we always seem to talk about here (WoW) but the owner of the other game virtual world we always seem to talk about here (Second Life).  The lawsuit is rooted in a dispute over a virtual land deal and is being promoted by the lawyer-plaintiff as "a possible first-of-its-kind lawsuit" that is "unique because the land doesn’t actually exist."

The Complaint was filed in District Justice Court of West Chester county -- not exactly a fancy place to break new legal ground, since it is a county court of rather expeditious procedures and limited jurisdiction.  The plaintiff is Marc Bragg, is an attorney with his offices in West Chester, who has issued a press release with details about his lawsuit.  We've since heard that Jason Arcihiano (whose SSRN article was mentioned here by Thomas) will be representing Bragg.  Bragg's holographic, one-page Complaint reads in part:

Defendant runs an online internet game in which it offers virtual land for sale via various auction processes and charges consumer credit cards for on-line purchases.  Def. made unauthorized charges on pltf. credit cards, breached an auction contract by allowing the land to auction, accepting payment, and then suspending pltf's account.  Dft froze pltf's game assets exceeding $8,000 in value.

The Complaint can be found here (thanks to BNA).  Reporting on the case can be found at BNA, Wired, Clickable Culture (with some skeptical comments at CC by Prokofy Neva), and there are over 100 comments over at Slashdot Games.

It appears from these news reports that Bragg figured how to tweak the URLs for Second Life land actions so that certain plots ("sims") that were on the standby queue could be brought up for auction early and bought at a lower price (about $300 compared to about $1000). According to BNA, after Second Life learned of the sales, it froze Bragg's accounts, cleared the sims of his structures, and re-auctioned the property. 

So the key question, from our perspective, is probably: are these the droids we're looking for? 

Well, it seems Bragg and Second Life disagree about this as well.  Second Life's counsel, Ginsu Yoon, told BNA that Bragg's actions violated the Second Life TOS and that this is a "straightforward consumer contract dispute."   Yoon also seemed to imply to BNA that this might be a lawsuit about publicity, pointing out that Bragg had contacted various press outlets and asking "Are these the typical actions of an innocent consumer with a legitimate complaint?"

With regard to the legal reality of virtual land, Yoon went on to say that  "The term 'virtual' may not have a strict legal interpretation, but if anything it means that the thing being described is NOT whatever comes after the word 'virtual.'" (Hmm.. Fair enough, Mr. Yoon, but good luck building your metaverse with that kind of attitude!)

Josh Fairfield, of our ranks, seems to share the opinion that there isn't much to see here.  Quoting copiously from his comments to Wired about the case:

"This case is not the droids case that (people interested in virtual property have) been looking waiting for," said Joshua Fairfield, a professor at Indiana University Law School and a specialist on the law and economics of virtual property. "As I understand how Second Life is set up, land is (the equivalent of) bandwidth. They're selling bandwidth, no different than AT&T selling the bandwidth that allows me to talk to you."

Fairfield thinks the case that everyone is waiting for "is the one about whether or not these things are real property. This (suit) is more like airline mistake cases, where people snap up cheap tickets and try to keep the tickets."

In the end, Fairfield said, Bragg's case is "about the terms of service," and according to Fairfield, U.S. courts tend to strictly enforce such agreements.

Accurate assessment or Jedi mind trick?  Comments open. 

(Fwiw, Second Life TOS are here.)

Confessions of a Virtual Transient

or, The Future History of the Triumph of Persistence over Pseudo-pseodonymity

In my twenties, I threw my two cents into a discussion on computerized trading. The year was 1986, and the venue was the Risks Digest. Google was more than a decade in the future. It was a spur-of-the-afternoon comment on my part, and probably reflected my naivete of how stock markets actually worked more than anything else. What's interesting to me is that by 2000, this was the top bit of information that Google knew about me, and remained so for a couple years.

The internet is slowly erasing the venues where ephemeral forms of communication can take place. I had no realization in 1986 that my words would be readable (if they cared) by a huge fraction of the world's population today. I'm not claiming that any harm has come to me, but I find this fact mildly surprising. Today's kids seem at peace with this. Googling your date is acceptable, and you expect potential dates to google you in turn. Even still, kids like Laura K Pahl, and even the initial author who blogged about her, can be quite surprised when the internet tunes in to a conversation thought to contain only a couple or a couple dozen participants.

Okay, time for a change of topic. Let's talk about MMOs and virtual worlds.

Some people say that virtual worlds can provide a place to explore identity. They seem safe, and pseudonymous. Over the last few years, I enjoyed my virtual life as a virtual businesswoman, hard-nosed and avaricious. Oh, and my other life as an inept womanizer. I was a not-so-teenage virtual transient, spending a few months in one pseudonymous identity or another. They've been fun, but I'd just as soon keep their identities separate from my own.

But instead, I predict a future where [1] public chat from virtual worlds will be as available on the net as my 1986 Risks missive, and [2] where the analysis tools to link pseudonymous identities will be widely available. As to persisting public chat, I'm actually rather dumbfounded that Google is currently aware of zero occurrences of "WoWChatLog.txt" on the net. And one could even make an argument that post-WoW games may not provide the convenient chat logging or game API that Blizzard has provided, but if the player is able to access the information on his game screen, eventually there will be enough reason to scrape and persist the data. I'm less certain about analysis tools to link pseudonymous identities. Certainly, this is a harder problem, and will take longer, but people are already creating increasingly subtle ways to extract information from the www bit-bucket, like Googlism, Unsafe Google, or Google Trends.  But even if it takes 20 years or more, there will be people who will wince at having their current sexcapades or Orgrimmar tirades linked to whoever they have become by that time.

On the other hand, maybe in 2026 I'll come across this post using some technology invented a decade from now, and will chuckle at my naivete about pseodonymity and the persistence of MMO communications.

What think you?

Data: Daedalus + Presence Paper

A new daedalus issue is out. Several articles in this issue focus on role-playing:

• 20% of players role-play at least once a week. 28% of players indicated that at least one of their characters belong in a role-playing oriented guild. 24% of players have role-played a scene or event with a group of at least 10 players.
• Role-players talk about which character creations they feel are over-used and what counts as original.
• What are the protocols of role-playing? What makes a role-player a good role-player?

Also just out in press is a journal article on MMORPG demographics in the journal Presence (manuscript PDF here). Many of the basic player numbers - average age, gender ratio, average hours per week - are in this paper, as well as a factor analytic model of player motivations. Also some numbers on relationship formation and potential leadership skill acquisition.

The turn-around time for journal articles pains me, especially in this era of blogs. This paper was actually written in 2004 and accepted in mid-2005. Nevertheless, this resolves the problem of people in academia feeling hesistant to cite a website when talking about who plays MMOs.

</em Jedi mind trick> - cite this article in your paper:

Yee, N. (2006). The Demographics, Motivations and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively-Multiuser Online Graphical Environments. PRESENCE: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 15, 309-329.

Kopp v. Vivendi: Game Over

So says CNet.  Blizzard has agreed to stop taking down the auctions.  (I guess I should have just waited a few more days for some news to develop!)

Pwnage and the Lobbyist Grind

Video games are one again being portrayed as the root of society's problems. As predicted, members of both the House and the Senate are scrambling to figure out how to better protect us. This should surprise no one. Games aren't alone of course, with a the pitchfork and torch wielding mob of Attorney's General currently storming the gates at MySpace and Facebook. Games and social networking services could argue the facts all day long but do we really want to deal with reality and its well known liberal bias? Is there be a better way to handle the problem? There is, we just need to learn from eBay.

Read on for more.

EBay, when you think about it, is in a remarkably tenuous position. Any number of state or federal laws could impinge on the ease with which goods are currently bought and sold. So, eBay is very careful to monitor legislation that might impact it and employs many lobbyists. However, in addition to paying numerous lobbyists 6-figure retainers, eBay also messages it 169 million members directly, as described by the New York Times. It's a great idea since eBay users pretty much define grass roots. Much like my comments about rule making from several years ago, this is a real opportunity to drive the system.

Games have millions of users, Facebook nearly 10 million, MySpace is rapidly approaching 100 million. Why should these communities just stand around waiting for harmful laws to pass? Why not take a page from eBay and leverage these numbers? Look at what the extremely conservative Parents Television Council is able to do. A tiny number of committed letter writers have generated millions of dollars worth of fines. A vanishing small minority has made it harder for mainstream viewers to see what they want. Why should that power only be used by the fringe of the religious right and ideologues?

MMORPG players are already used to grinding, so why not have the "Write to Senator Clinton and tell her you won't vote for her if she doesn't spend the time to learn about video games"-quest? Or tools built into MySpace to write your Representatives and Senators? Facebook in particular, with millions of educated college students, should be able to mobilize the kind of lobby that should terrify both local and national politcos.

After all, who do you think runs the government? It isn't the members themselves, but the army of dedicated, young graduates scurrying around the House and Senate office buildings. The same type of people who have Facebook and MySpace accounts.

And who play videogames.

It's time for the people who actually use these places, the communities that flourish because of these technologies, to pwn Washington.

SL and Server Architectures

Dan Terdiman has a story over at CNet on Second Life's server architecture, and the way in which servers are loaded generally in the MMOG arena. References to our Cory Ondrejka and Mike Sellers, and some interesting questions about balancing and server architecture design.

The Fallacy of War

MMORPG Player-versus-player (PvP) combat discussions tend to polarize attitudes quickly (e.g.  The Price of Serenity), often resulting in claims that import value-systems, frames-of-reference from real-world armed conflict - war (ref. Fn1)!  What feels lacking from such discourse, however, is basic.  Is war even the right metaphor?

I'll suggest that 'war' is a lousy way to think of what goes on in mainstream MMORPG PvP.  Yes some players wish it were different, and yes  perhaps some developers are happy to go along with this paltry fiction, thinking it color on the backdrop.   However, it seems to me that this sort of nonsense does a disservice - both to those in real war and to those on the exterior trying to figure out what the heck is going on in these virtual spaces, even the ganking ones.  I'll claim that what is going on is more like 'sport' and ill-mannered PvP is just bad sportsmanship - filled with raw unfairness and even obnoxious play, but 'war' it is not.

First, let us start with the recent fine essay by Andrew Phelp on "Pvp and the Honorable Enemy."  Yes, he does cast this essay's presentation in terms of WoW's 'warcraft', but here it only feels lightly brushed onto the backdrop called Azeroth.  Wink, wink.  'Honor' hints noble here, to at least this reader, as a sensible proxy for fair play and good sportsmanship.

Civicus suggested that outside of a tribal friends-centric MMORPG social system there are few reasons to connect with strangers in mainstream MMORPGs.  One consequence of this seems to be that without civility, sportsmanship and fair play go wanting and what substitutes for these is mayhem.  In Andrew's terms - why don't we see the ideal of an honorable warrior that has long existed in both Eastern and Western cultural mythology in the World of Warcraft?

Yes, that warrior motif again.

Christopher Bassford's take on Carl von Clauswitz  (ref. below) suggested a view of conflict that is unstable within a political system (loosely applied): politics leads to esculation, esculation leads us to places that are hard to anticipate.  Conflict in the Clauswitzian view is about nonlinearities in the forces that drive stakeholders to miscalculate.  When Carl's trinity (the public, the army, the government) howled, the dogs of war truly came unleashed.

What would have Carl said of war in the World of Warcraft?  Probably very little.  To start with some convincing would have likely been in order - starting with that matter about toons that turn into ghosts for a three minute penalty run back to their corpse and whether that could be a true approximation of the residue of war.  I am reminded of an old editorial by Haemish denouncing MMOG developers as having "trivialized war" and wrote this:

"Do not hold the delusion that your advancement is accomplished by crushing others."  (Marcus Tullius Cicero)

That quote sums up how I feel about PVP in MMOG's. The secret to creating fun, non-divisive PVP in an MMOG is not by allowing or encouraging all-out open war across entire servers or between guilds, but to encourage competition without annihilation. The perfect model is that of sports leagues. 

If MMORPGs form pitiful beasts of war, is sports the better metaphor?  Medieval sports were pretty ganking places, I hear. Perhaps, one reason many claim war in MMORPGs is wishful thinking.  By the same measure that Carl saw wars as titanic and terrible struggles involving systems of forces capable of changing landscapes in unpredictable ways, players desire a place to hold and a world to call their own.

Instead what we have are folks playing sports in online cartoons with many claiming the tin mantle of a warrior.

Perhaps Andrew's view of honor among online PvPers strikes the right balance between the martial frustrations of the  some and a general collective desire for order and mechanisms of fair-play shared by friends and strangers alike. 

Aye, even sporting events can be subjected to bad taste when it comes to references to The War - but sports it still is and war it still ain't.

Perhaps one day we will see worlds where the following (as Andrew wrote) carry nuance:

I imagine, one day, an Alliance general returning from razing an entire Horde village to the ground, killing the undead men, women, children, and animals, burning the crops and plundering the countryside. He saunters back into town only to be decapitated by his own tribe, because to do otherwise is to condone the behavior. Even in the conflict of Azeroth, there should be honor.

Such would be grand.  But in the meantime it is all about football.

P.S. Careful readers will note how even Haemish's quote (above) slips the weary 'war' word and metaphor between us.   Ah, the web of shallow fiction we all weave!  The trickery is not in the fiction, but the the arguments -presented in all seriousness - against PvP combat.

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

Fn1.  Count the number of times 'war', 'war zone', 'war time', etc... was used in comment here.  Anecdotally, consider Google returns  3,970,000 hits for "PvP and War", 961,000 hits for "PvP and Sport,"and 581 for "PvP and Sportsmanship."

Ref.  Christopher Bassford and Edward J. Villacres.  Reclaiming the Clausewitzian Trinity, Parameters, the journal of the U.S. Army War College, in Autumn, 1995.

World of DMCA Countersuit Craft

Kopp v. Vivendi is old news, granted, but we never really got around to blogging it here.  So to look for something new to say with this post, I went over to the Central District of California website and took a peek at the docket this week and... nothing much new to report.  Some exciting filings about the pro hac vice issues but no answer yet to the Complaint.

If you follow MMORPG/techlaw news and didn't catch the stories about this suit the first time around, you've obviously been hiding under a virtual rock.  See, e.g, Security Focus, Mike from TechDirt, Outlaw. Slashdot Games, Marty Schwimmer -- the list goes on.   But anyway, here's a brief recap: it seems that gamer/uber power-leveling virtual moneybags/entrepeneur Brian Kopp brought suit (with help from the consumer defenders at Public Citizen) against Vivendi after auctions of his tome "The Ultimate World of Warcraft Levelling & Gold Guide" were repeatedly taken off eBay pursuant to the VeRO system by Vivendia and the ESA (no, not the Entomological Society of America -- the other ESA).

According to the allegation in Kopp's Complaint, he tried to get things straightened out with emails and phone calls to the ESA and Vivendi and finally ended up with an explanation from Vivendi's counsel that his guide

involve[d] the infringement of Blizzard Entertainment's intellectual property, specifically the World of Warcraft / WoW trademarks and copyright.

Another message stated that

The EULA prohibits using the World of Warcraft software for 'commercial purposes'.  Your disclaimer that the guides are for "educational purposes only" is ineffective.

Evidently, there were/are some WoW screenshots in the guide, which is apparently still being sold by Kopp here with the assurance that it is "100% legal."  So, essentially this is a case about the proper extent of intellectual property rights.  Among the issues to be briefed and decided are: 

1)  Is Kopp's use of the WoW screenshots for his guide a fair use under copyright law?   (Relatedly, is this a fair use? This?)
2) Are there any other copyright grounds (beyond the screenshot use) for pulling the guides? (E.g. is this anything like the Seinfeld aptitude test?)
3) Was there a valid claim of trademark infringement here and if so, how does the threat of potential contributory liabiity under trademark law mesh with the ESA/Vivendi's actions under eBay's VeRO (some light background reading on that topic) 
4) Can the WoW EULA/TOS agreement trump the fair use defense under copyright law? (And, btw, Blizzard's lawyers have some experience in getting this type of result, much to the consternation of those of us who share the EFF's worldview.)

But of course, this is a guide the teaches people how to get gold quick and power level.  E.g., in a "free tip," Kopp mentions that "A Place I go to farm easy gold, about 40 an hour, is Azshara."  As we all know, some people don't like gold farming.  I'm not this should have any bearing on the questions above, but I guess there is a very remote possibility that it could come in through the equitable considerations in the fair use analysis.  (At TN, we just have to mention the gold farming angle, you know.)

Anyway -- we'll be watching this and will bring you another news update several months after something interesting happens.  Comments open.  Feel free to take the discussion in any direction. 

photo credit: dweekly

Guilds and Government

One of the rocks that players and academics often throw at developers is that their virtual worlds "aren't democratic". Democracy is good; virtual worlds aren't democratic; therefore, virtual worlds are bad.

OK, so players often use "not democratic" as a short-hand for "not a democracy in which I am the president", and academics often use it as a short-hand for "not Utopia", but they do have a point: on the whole, virtual worlds really aren't democratic. Nevertheless, as Ted points out in his book, this is a consequence of players' having no reason to want to be political leaders: they'd get responsibility, but no power.

However, players do organise themselves politically, typically in what have come to be called "guilds". These aren't usually democratic either, but they do represent player self-governance. Furthermore, some of these guilds can get quite big.

So, here's a scenario. Suppose that a guild got large enough that the players in it wanted their own server, for guild members only. They approach the developer, the developer says OK, and sets up a special server that can only be accessed if you have the guild's say-so. This would leave the running of the entire virtual world up to the guild; guild officers could even be given customer service powers if that's what the guild wanted.

It's only hypothetical, but it does raise some interesting questions. Would developers ever want players to run their worlds like this? Would such a guild-operated world address players' and academics' complaints about lack of accountability? Would it wipe out RMT on that server? Would it be sustainable, if the guild had the right critical mass, or would it inevitably fail? What are the legal issues, eg. if someone put in a minimum wage claim for their CSR work, whom would they sue? Would developers still get rocks thrown at them for not being democratic?

Thought experiments: don't you love 'em?

Far East News

Below are a couple of stories from the Far East, cleared from the Terra Nova in-basket:  Vietnam restricts online play; Habbo China pairing online and real-world purchases.

"Vietnam joins China and Korea in taking Action on Gaming Addiction (06/02/2006)."

-This follows earlier regulations in China.  A trend?

"Habbo China to Match Real and Virtual Purchases (Wed, 05/31/2006)."

-Pacific Epoch (06/05/2006) suggests items as flowers, clothes, and movie tickets as candidates.  Is this new?  Is there something more to this than just another vending channel?

Follow Steven Davis' links (above) for more detail and discussion.

Naked in a Lawn Chair, LOL

Things don't always mean what they mean -- especially on the internet.

When we speak to each other online, we use real-life language in non-real-life environments. The rules of our virtual linguistics shift accordingly, mutating to fit their surroundings. Phrases become abbreviations; abbreviations -- evolved beyond their meanings -- dominate our written landscape.

A few months back, in the midst of doing some linguistic research on the performance of gender through Second Life sex language, I came encountered the following utterance: "im naked in a lawn chair, lol."

The player my research alt was chatting it up with -- a self-admitted middle-aged, overweight, married man -- was testing the waters turning our virtual flirtations into a real-life proposition. He wanted to draw attention to his actual physical arousal, but didn't want to scare away the theoretical cutey behind my alt.

So what did he do? He said exactly what he wanted to say, except he added "lol."

Now, technically, "lol" means something very specific, namely "laugh out loud." Using "lol" makes literal sense, for example, in response to something funny. But the fact of the matter is, it's used for a lot more than that.

In a world of text communication where real-life facial expressions and vocal intonations are impossible, abbreviations like "lol" sacrifice their real meaning in order to articulate our nuanced intentions. They, in and of themselves, become glib, cliche -- while at the same time almost necessary for expression online.

"Lol" has come to mean: I'm being playful; I'm just kidding; I'm flirty; I'm friendly. It tints everything around it with a certain joviality. To replace it's original meaning, we have new favorites, like "rofl." And who knows what that will come to mean, someday.

Of course, "lol" is just one example of many.

This is why it always make me laugh when someone who isn't familiar with internet speak -- my tech-clueless mother, most recently -- proclaims with a knowing air, "Oh, 'lol'? That one means 'laugh out loud.' These kids think we don't understand, but we do."

But what is there to understand? Meaning is no longer meaningful. The pragmatics of the internet have shifted language use beyond real-life recognition.