Terra Nova

WoW-nnui

Since its release not quite two years ago, World of Warcraft has been the undisputed market leader in MMOs.  It smashed through the formerly unattainable one million user mark and kept right on going, now steaming toward 7,000,000 paying users.  WoW has blown out all previous expectations for MMOs in US, European, and Asian markets and keeps right on going.

And yet.

Last night I logged in to WoW for the first time in a long time. I visited my characters one by one, but didn't stick around to play very long despite finally having an evening free to play.   I felt a distinct detachment from my characters and soon recognized my old friend, game ennui. 

Now I don't mean to sound like I'm spelling doom for WoW (or MMOs in general!). Far from it.  I don't know WoW's sales numbers, but as far as I know their box sales remain at or near the top of the charts.  And of course there's a much-anticipated expansion pack coming up that will give them a welcome, if perhaps temporary, bump in their usage numbers. 

But in my case, not only could I really not gather any excitement about playing these characters, knowing as I do that I just don’t have multiple hours per week (much less per day!) to play them, but the more advanced the character the more difficult it was to get back into. I could sorta drive my 22lvl hunter; my 37 warlock was almost incomprehensible -- and for many more expert players such levels are "lowbies." Remembering all those spells, weapons, abilities, talents, etc., just seemed like way too much trouble. And all the quests that were driving these characters’ progress were entirely meaningless now (this is the danger of external motivation—it’s just too easy to lose all sense of why I should care about an entirely artificial set of quests).

I'm involved, loosely speaking (given my lack of attendance), in several different guilds on PvE, RP, and PvP servers.  In each, multiple people I know -- both those with multiple level 60 characters and those who have never come close to that -- have sort of run aground on the over-and-over again gameplay, whether that's yet-another-kill-X-creatures quest or yet-another-raid for yet-another-piece-of-armor.   No one I've talked to dislikes the game; there's no sense of having been spurned or that the experience has curdled.  But in even the best parties there seems to sometimes come a moment when, amidst the music and noise you and your friends silently agree "great party; we're outta here."   For some people that moment has come with WoW.  And I'm guessing that trend is only going to accelerate. 

So if this isn't just a local phenomenon -- if I'm not just hanging out with multiple groups of all the wrong people -- then it seems possible that while WoW continues to be grow (bringing new people into contact with MMOGs all the time), it may be approaching that point where significant numbers of long-term satisfied players nevertheless begin to cycle off.  That's not too surprising given the typical longevity of any individual's interest in a particular MMO.  But if that's so, then two big questions leap out: where are all these players going to go, and, as I’m so fond of asking, what comes next?

I know for example that Vanguard is jockeying for position as WoW's successor, but I wonder about that.  It is supposed to have more flexible grouping and a few other innovations (in addition to expensive and detailed, if perhaps less-than-stunning graphics), but when it comes right down to it, what's the draw for games like this?  Are those struck with WoW-nnui (whether this is their first MMOG or their tenth), who may have taken a handful of characters to level 60 in WoW, and then stuck around or come back to see what's new on the way to level 70 in the upcoming expansion, really going to be excited to  play YAMITG (yet another men in tights game)?  If a player has become bored with  the by now well-trodden traditional MMOFRPG gameplay, how will another game bring them a new sort of experience, and not just present old dwarves in new clothing? (For example, the nifty dwarf shown above comes from Warhammer Online, but would be right at home in any of a number of existing and upcoming MMOs.)  IMO this is the question to which Vanguard, Warhammer, Conan, LOTRO, Hero's Journey, and any other contenders must have a clear and ready answer.

Lawful Carp

Last week a number of our readers passed us word that "(t)he Bank You Can Trust" turned out to be yet another Eve-Online player scam - only recently revealed.  Apparently an elaborate Ponzi scheme.  A run-down of the elaborate behind-the-scenes plot is offered here.  Slashdot picked up this story and offers much fervent comment.  Yes, that place is full of ambivalent  murk, piracy, and rich analogies to "No Laws Just Greed."  Perhaps these are clear lessons of the need for transparency and regulatory structure in (virtual) worlds aspiring to grow deeper roots.

Oddly, I found myself returning to carp in winter and one NOOB's adventure with wolves...

Not too long ago someone handed us this link regarding one self-proclaimed 0.0 Eve-Online experiment:

A n00b plunges himself head first into the dark scary domain of 0.0 low security space in the MMORPG Eve Online, with only a keen sense of adventure to aid him in his merry quest. What will his exciting journeys through space hold in store for him?

Good reading material, though through the lens-of-this-curmudgeon the account feels fictionalized (I don't know this as fact).  Nonetheless it does ring truthful in some of its larger themes.  For example, finding honor among thieves and grudging community in small ponds.

A week ago my sons and I played mini-golf at a location featuring a carp pond.  After querying we discovered that the carp in their shallow waters remained there through the winter (beneath ice).  Conveniently, NewScientist.com reports this week that:

A drop in water temperature prompts the carp to store vast amounts of glycogen in their brains... This enables them to make the switch to anaerobic metabolism – which does not require oxygen – from February to April in the northern hemisphere.

Fascinating.

My wonder is this.  What do those carp - the traders, miners, merchants, and manufacturers - in that rich place called Eve-Online do in their pond at winter?    If everyone is scamming or a pirate can it still be lawful place or has it to be chaos (fn1)?

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

fn1. See alignment  from Dungeons and Dragons.

WorldForge, 50K

Our good friends at WorldForge have announced that they have just crossed the 50k downloads mark.  Furthermore, the rate of change is promising ("...The last recorded milestone was twenty thousand in late October 2005, meaning that the last year has been our busiest ever...")...

As numbers  in the increasingly frothy virtual world  space go, these are tiny digits.  Yet, to Alistair and all the other good folks who have kept this fire going a very long time, gratz!  More seriously,  I might ask why the increase?   A few (idle) speculations follow:

A.)  Is it because more folks have just heard of WorldForge?

B.) Is it because WorldForge has recognizably cooler software to offer to the community?

C.) More folks are interested in virtual worlds these days and "a rising tide floats all boats."

D.) It is a personality driven phenomenon.

E.) Sunspots.

My Other Self is an Ass-kicking Supermodel

I swear, I need this bumper sticker.

It seems like just about every time I get together with female gamer friends, the topic of conversation inevitably (and much to my chagrin) turns to the cuteness of avatars and our frustration with the limited options we are usually given to control their attractiveness. I had a long, involved ranting session the other night, for instance, with another WoW gamer about how frustrating it is to play the Horde, mainly because the avatar customization options are limited to a few (arguably) unattractive races. We talked about how we both have female undead mages, whom we spent quite a bit of time trying to make as cute as possible, yet are still frustratingly unattractive. And how it disturbs us a bit that we care all that much, closet-inhabiting fashionistas though we might be.

But I’m gonna confess. I do care. An unattractive avatar is so disruptive to my gameplay that I will stop playing if I can’t do something about it...

This discussion of avatar attractiveness has been floating around for some time, but generally with a bit more righteous indignation from people who think some avatars are a bit too attractive, and in all the wrong ways.  We all know by now that male gamers are stereotyped as liking sexy (hypersexual, even, or at least that's what's served up) avatars, and that disturbs a lot of people. So it's not surprising that when I talk to male players about gender bending, they often say that it’s because if they’re going to be looking at a toon’s bottom for hours on end, they want it to be a nice attractive female one (and in CoX, my MMO of choice, the female toons run in a much more attractive fashion than the males). The thing is, I and just about every other woman I know can point out a female toon created by a guy from about a mile away. Female players seldom go for the fish-net stockinged, long haired, please-do-me-after-I’m-done-kicking-ass look. The less clothes on the toon, the more likely it is to be a guy behind it. And if the toon has a name like ‘NoPants’ and has no pants, well yeah, no question there. And certainly no woman is going to make a toon called ‘The Naked Female’, though we might chuckle at the ingenuity and ensuing chaos. (Solid Sharkey gleefully called her ‘probably the most sucessfully disruptive force in MMORPGs ever”). But even I was disturbed a bit when he turned her inside out

Still, the idea of men picking female toons based on aesthetic or even playful considerations runs contrary to what is usually emphasized about gender bending, that ‘gamers, both male and female, say female avatars confirm what they already knew: Being a pretty girl has its perks. Female avatars are often the center of attention and showered with gifts such as swords or armor by other characters’. Brenda Braithwaite apparently thinks that it has little to do with exploration of sexual identity, and perhaps not, but I’d also have to disagree that it is always done for economic purposes.  In fact, given the presence of ribald and often inappropriate sexism reported by many players presenting female, it would make sense to play male characters.  And, as a researcher, I myself am curious to know what that's like.   

But I have this problem.  I can't make myself play male characters, especially if they are ugly. I have actually tried playing other people’s characters from time to time and find it unsettling on several levels. But I find it especially difficult playing male toons, particularly when the player has focused on creating something scary, ugly, or just badly dressed. I honestly can’t understand how someone could spend hours and hours looking at an ugly toon, let alone identifying with it on any level. Even when relatively attractive, male toons are generally very disoncerting for me to play. I guess this isn't really suprising - according to Nick Yee's survey data, it is relatively uncommon for women to play male characters.   Sheri Graner Ray has said this has to do with male/female power dynamics, i.e. women feel uncomfortable playing 'higher in the social hierarchy' than they are (men don't apparently feel uncomfortable playing 'lower').  I'm a bit dubious about that, but sure enough, I have only ever personally encountered a handful of instances of a woman playing a male character: in one case, it involved a technicolored male superhero who looked like a psychedelic genie in shades of blue, pink and purple. I knew something wasn’t quite right, and sure enough, it was a girl behind him, who had just made him to see what it would be like.

So why do I exclusively play female characters?  And why do they have to be attractive?  It's really a question that perplexes me.  But there is something about wanting to identify with an idealized (to me) extension of myself that is all too compelling.  I hate to be shallow, but if I spend my physical life being a mundane 30-something mother who spends less time at the gym than she’d like, isn’t it okay that I should want to play toons that are superlatively and uniquely attractive? If given the options, I am happy to spend time exquisitely crafting them and I enjoy their beauty, partly as an extension of who I would want to be, but also just an external aesthetic appreciation.  It does seem clear that women are more likely to think of their avatars as idealized versions of ourselves, perhaps because women inhabit their avatars more deeply.

In Play Between Worlds, T.L. Taylor argues that the issue of avatar attractiveness is not about aesthetics, but about choice : 

‘While there is a fair amount of diversity among female players about which avatars are preferable, there seems to be a consistent message that they want a choice in how they look online. This is not about women not wanting to look attractive or even sexy. Women hold complicated relationships to even stereotypically gendered characters.’ [quote corrected 8/24]

I would replace the word ‘even’ in the last sentence to ‘especially’ – women tend to balk at avatars that have been created according to someone’s else idea of what’s attractive. But I have never interviewed nor met a woman who doesn’t want her virtual representation to be attractive, at least to her.

So why haven't we yet arrived at a point where extensive customization is a given?

After playing City of Heroes for some time, with its infinitely flexible character customization system, I was actually shocked, really shocked, when I played WoW for the first time and found my creativity so curtailed.   I hated walking around in the same apprentice robe as everyone else, only to be given the same incremental upgrades to armor as other characters in my class and at my level. I winced when I ran into another gnome with pink hair in a similar style, just when I’d gotten excited about how cute mine was.  In this case, imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery; it only serves to show how unoriginal I am.  And as I am not unoriginal, why should my toons be?  And why shouldn't they be beautiful, if that's what it takes to keep me playing?

This is certainly not the first time this type of discussion has appeared on Terra Nova, but I'd like to put out a specific call to hear from the female gamers/researchers regarding this issue, or from those who think they might have a bit of that perspective....  or perhaps I am wrong in assuming that this is a bigger issue to women?

(Final Confession: I left several Guild Wars guilds immediately after joining because they had badly designed guild tabards that didn't match my outfits.  That officially makes me shallow, doesn't it?)

State of Play IV: Building the Global Metaverse

State of Play IV: Building the Global Metaverse
January 7-9, 2007 (Singapore)

Sponsored by Harvard, Yale and New York Law Schools as well as Trinity University in Texas and the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, we are convening thought leaders from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas to engage in a lively discussion about the unique regulatory and cross-cultural challenges posed by the growth of transnational virtual worlds.

Whether they take the form of games, social spaces, or educational environments, virtual worlds are now truly global in scope. The popularity of virtual worlds in Asia is phenomenal. From Thailand and Malaysia to Indonesia and the Philippines, the Asia Pacific region's on-line gaming market generated approximately $1.4 billion in annual revenues last year – a figure that is expected to reach $3.6 billion by the end of the decade.

Much of this growth will be propelled by 180 million Chinese Internet users, the majority of whom will play on-line games. Jaw-dropping insight into China's hunger for on-line games can be seen in the turnout for last month's ChinaJoy conference. Now in its fifth year, the event attracted approximately 124,000 game developers and enthusiasts -- almost twice the number who attended E3 at its peak in 2005. As industry analyst Frank Yu points out, "this makes it the most attended game event in the world." Unlike E3 and CES, which emphasize graphics hardware and home consoles, ChinaJoy focuses on virtual worlds and casual games.

Of course China is just part of the story. Throughout Asia, people of all ages are gathering in cybercafes to participate in "deep" virtual worlds such as Lineage II and World of Warcraft or to play casual titles such as PangYa. With the highest broadband penetration rate of any country on the planet, Korea is currently an  epicenter of gaming innovation, pioneering a free-to-play business model that seriously threatens subscription-based titles. Meanwhile, analysts note that India is poised to become a huge player once it builds out the necessary technological infrastructure. India is already the region's third largest market for on-line games, despite the fact that less than .02% of the population has broadband access.

When you take into account the fact that NGOs and many government development agencies hope to seed the Asia Pacific region with inexpensive wireless broadband notebooks, it is clear that we are witnessing something completely unprecedented. We are eager to tease out the implications of these developments, and are intentionally convening virtual world industry experts, game scholars and technological neophytes to deepen our shared understanding.

In addition to premiering two documentaries, this year's SoP will include an extemporaneous discussion about the future of virtual worlds between Neal Stephenson, Cory Doctorow, and our own Julian Dibbell. The legendary Jane McGonigal also has something exciting planned for the opening night.

Panel topics include, but are not limited to: virtual property, regulation of virtual worlds, qualitative and quantitative metrics, digital youth cultures, the interpenetration of the physical and the virtual, cross-cultural interaction, taxation, the state of the industry and virtual worlds as learning environments.

Confirmed speakers include, but are not limited to:

• Alice Taylor (BBC Worldwide)

• Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom)

• Frank Yu (Microsoft Research Asia Advanced Technology Center in Beijing)

• Ge Jin (Director of the Gold Farmers documentary)

• Greg Boyd (Kenyon and Kenyon)

• James Grimmelmann (Information Society Project at Yale Law School)

• Jane McGonigal (I Love Bees)

• Jerry Paffendorf (Acceleration Studies Foundation, Metaverse Roadmap)

• Joey Alarilla (Founding President of Asian Gaming Journalists Association)

• Joshua Fouts (Director of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy)

• Julian Dibbell (Play Money)

• Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)

• Nick Yee (Stanford / PARC)

• Ren Reynolds (Terra Nova)

• Richard Bartle (MUD, Designing Virtual Worlds)

• Unggi Yoon (Gamestudy.Org)

• Yehuda Kalay (Director of Center for New Media at UC Berkeley.

Conference schedule and registration information will be posted on September 1st. Please continue to check http://www.nyls.edu/stateofplay for more details. If you have any questions, please contact the conference coordinators:

Dr. Aaron Delwiche
Organizer, State of Play
Assistant Professor, Department of Communication
Trinity University

Matthew Cuttler
Organizer, State of Play
Institute for Information Law and Policy
New York Law School

Review: Avatars of Story

Avatars of Story, hot off the press from University of Minnesota, well, Press, is no life-changer, but it makes for a marginally interesting read.  Written by Marie-Laure Ryan, an independent scholar from Colorado with a number of related books to her credit, the hefty hardback offers something of an overview of the manifestations of narrative in new (i.e. electronic) media over the last twenty-five years, with a specific hankering for testing out the pliancy of these different "avatars of story."

The book is clearly intended for the likes of academia; no carefree frolics through cyberspace here.  Ryan's tone shifts from dense but captivating to just plain dense.  Specifically, her first section, "Narrative in Old Media," seems lifeless and bland (Think bad high school textbook) in comparison to the palatable, even tasty chapters of her second section, "Narrative in New Media," which become much more readable--and interesting.  Chapter 6 in particular, "Interactive Fiction and Storyspace Hypertext," is just waiting to make some lucky professor a handy-dandy new undergraduate reading assignment.

But even the good parts have their shortcomings.  Ryan can come off as judgemental--of gamers, TV watchers, and culture in general.  She sometimes strays off topic; occasionally for an entire chapter (What, pray tell, does the success of Survivor, really have to do with narrative?).  Her discussion of games in her chapter on ludology vs. narratology can't help but seem archaic with reoccurring outdated examples like The Sims--and not a single mention of a virtual world.  Plus, she makes light of some things that just seem wrong: like the writing of game developers, and the internet; wouldn't you think, in a book about new media, that online resources deserve to be cited just as clearly as papers in print?

Avatars of Story has its useful moments, but it doesn't say anything revolutionary.  The real trouble with its approach is this: If you're a big fan of the subject matter, chances are Ryan has nothing new to offer you.  And if you're not--honestly--you're not going to want to read through this book.

The Bandwidth of Big Hair

In the TN back channel, Nate called our collective attention to today's Washington Post, where Sara Kehaulani Goo writes an article, "Hear the Music, Avoid the Mosh Pit."  The piece is primarily about the appearance of Suzanne Vega in Second Life on August 3, 2006.  I wasn't "there," but you can watch the You Tube version (and listen to John Hockenberry) here. 

My main take-away from both the video and the Post story, I think, is amazement at the intricate cross-currents of hype generation over the event.

I hope I'm not being too jaundiced about this.  I'm a fan of Suzanne Vega--I still probably have my old casette tapes of Suzanne Vega (1985) and Solitude Standing (1987) in my basement somewhere.  Suzanne Vega, being an artist, has something of a duty to self-promote (read: hype) and experiment. So kudos to her for riding this wave. 

But the driving engine behind the hype is virtuality, not Vega, leading me to wonder who is pushing that angle.  I was thinking this might have been another feat primarily attributable to the awesome Linden Lab marketing machine, but The Infinite Mind seems to claim credit for most of it, and apparently Reuben Steiger was working this too.

Goo's article in the Post seems to be both playing up and played by the virtuality hype.  Though the article notes that Second Life has "400,000 registered members," it leads with the fact that  "about 100 lucky fans" were in avatar attendance.  It later claims, though, that this is a big shift:

Marketing and record label executives say Web sites that put users into video-game-like virtual worlds are a unique way to reach out to audiences, who are increasingly spending their time and money on the computer instead of at concerts and music stores. Although still experimental, such sites offer fans more ways to interact with one another and band members directly.

Hmm.  Then later, we hear (from the president of a brand marketing firm, no less) that this kind of thing has "elements of a gimmick to it."  That's quickly qualified:

But "the whole interplay between online and offline is something people that Second Life is targeting don't have a problem with," he said. "With the online-offline divide, they see it much less as a gimmick than as a real thing."

Uh-huh -- glad we cleared up the confusion there over that word "gimmick."  Of course, the "real thing" inevitably gets kind of surreal in Second Life, where Vega's avatar and guitar were created and controlled by someone other than Vega.  Goo later says:

One drawback is that avatars can't keep up with humans' real-time pace of facial expressions and gestures. In Vega's performance, the virtual guitar would not appear on cue and, at first, appeared to stick out of her elbow. The number of attendees at some concerts is limited because crowds take up too much processing power. Sometimes, planners of virtual-reality events ask attendees not to bring too many accessories, such as big hairstyles, because they take up too much bandwidth.

The "bandwidth of big hair" observation almost redeems the article and the guitar foibles are faithfully recorded on YouTube.  But rather than end this with a glitch report, Goo sums up her story (or a copy editor crops it to meet word limits?) by swinging back to the breathless enthusiasm of the promoter explaining how trippy it is that Vega is performing in a virtual world:

"There's a quality that doesn't exist in any other medium," said Bill Lichtenstein, president of the company that produces "The Infinite Mind," the radio show that put on the Vega performance, built a radio booth on Second Life, and plans to broadcast more interviews and performances. The virtual world, he said, simulates the real world in a way that tricks the brain into thinking it's real. "Sitting there in the audience, waiting for Vega to start, you got this feeling -- a sense of excitement."

So what's the real story here?  What was it like to be "in the audience" for this?  Was it great?

Honestly, I really don't know.  Perhaps it was really super.  I assume, like Mulder, that may people who were virtually present in Second Life really wanted to believe that they were attending a concert in cyberspace.

My brain, on the other hand, wasn't much tricked by the YouTube version.  I had the sense I was listening to Suzanne Vega sitting in a studio somewhere watching a screen.  The sound was only vaguely related to the images: a mix of camera angles on an avatar of Suzanne Vega and her recalcitrant guitar in a room full of other (quasi-famous "FIC"?) avatars that was more or less backdrop.  For The Queen & The Soldier, a video would have probably been better for the eyes -- maybe even a slideshow of those Waterhouse paintings that Thomas likes.

A little while ago, Profoky Neva had a blog post about Julian's recent appearance in SL where he was promoting Play Money (</hypeon> which is a great book, btw! </hypeoff>).    The review was titled "The Trouble with Dibbell" but, Neva claimed, the trouble really wasn't with Julian, it was with the disconnect between the wonderful concept of this sort of "live virtual appearance" thing as opposed to its clunky and jarring (virtual) reality.  Hockenberry's lead-in to Vega claims this is "Radio 6.0", but according to Neva's report, it can feel more like "Virtuality 0.2" 

But perhaps that's inevitable: Virtuality is, by definition, something which is almost but not really.  In other words, could it be that when this sort of thing really takes off, maybe there won't be a lot of hype about the fact that it is all so virtual?

Guess My Game

Reginald Braithwaite a while back posted his favorite interview question:  "sketch out a software design to referee the game of Monopoly."  My interest in his question starts with game "nouns and verbs"  and ends up this muse:  would Martians wishing to understand the rules of the World of Warcraft (WoW), say,  be better off trying to read its source code or watching video of millions of hours of screen capture?

Also mentioned, the "Vietnam of Computer Science" and the "Grammar of Gameplay..."

Reginald's interest in the game of Monopoly as the subject of an interview question centers on how to represent games well with object models (see Object Oriented Programming).  While I suggested in Hot Blooded Objects (and Troubles with Tribbles), software objects present a number of challenges to virtual worlds, the challenge that Reginald picks up on is different, though a most interesting one:  how to model the virtual world effectively in code.

Interestingly, he starts with a noun/verb lingo with parallels to how it is used by game developers.   But he also suggests of the challenge in mapping an easy (and perhaps even imperfect vernacular) into software.  Listen:

...Now let's talk about 'object-oriented programming' for a second. 99% of the stuff you read discusses modeling real-world physical objects. Things. Nouns. It is a Kingdom of Nouns. Most candidates start every design by dutifully listing all of the nouns they can think of and then they spend the rest of the time available thinking about piling them into phyla, hierarchies of "IS-A" and "A-KIND-OF."

This approach, which I will call "noun and verb," is so limited I'll dare to call it brain damaged. In fun. But seriously, competent software developers spend much more time on relationships, responsibilities, and constraints than they do on trying to prematurely optimize reuse through inheritance.

Now let's ask a question about Monopoly (and Enterprise software). Where do the rules live? In a noun-oriented design, the rules are smooshed and smeared across the design, because every single object is responsible for knowing everything about everything that it can 'do'. All the verbs are glued to the nouns as methods...

For those of you who want to dig deeper into a related topic, consider Ted Neward's superb essay describing the object-relational mapping problem as the "Vietnam of Computer Science. "  It is a fantastic read (though perhaps a little heavy-handed with the Indochina analogy) that I will try to relate to our non-technical readers as follows.

The best state-of-the-art mainstream software engineering can offer to build applications - virtual worlds included - is object-oriented.  Developers, designers, tools, and training is geared towards modeling the world-as-a-computing-problem in terms of objects.  Problems occur when what goes on in the real world may not be easily communicated in terms of objects.   One area of impedence occurs with trying to map a relational data model (e.g. databases) into an object model.  The challenge is this.  How to reify an intrinsicially relational real world problem, say a social population of players, with an object design without engineering a solution that  is either impractical to build or impossible to maintain?

Now, for our technical readers, were Reginald to jump in he might suggest that instead of using an all-purpose programming language (e.g.  Object Oriented) use something highly specialized to the problem you are trying to solve (see Domain Specific Languages - DSL).

This, however, only brings on the next challenge.   What would be the ideal game-oriented virtual world programming DSL look like?  Perhaps it would involve something like Raph Koster's ambition of a Grammar of Gameplay (see [1.] , [2.] ). 

To return to our Martians.

Let us suppose our Martians don't care about players or player culture.    They simply want to know how the game is played so they can decide whether WoW could be as big a hit on Mars as the macarena.

Would they be better off directly observing the game - sourced by its code.  Or would they be better off reverse-engineering it from the behavior observed of human players?  The challenge of Reginald's interview question is this simple - "If someone were to read the source code, do you think they could learn how to play the actual game?"

In some ways this challenge hints of the reward of "downhill synthesis" over an "uphill analysis":  who really knows what the rules of WoW are (say) except by grace of the analysis of a million fan websites and trial and error.  Do the developers really know?

How will "free-to-play" business models affect the gaming landscape in the West?

In 2004, I traveled to Thailand to learn more about young gamers who congregate in Internet cafes to play online games. With the help of bilingual research assistants, I interviewed approximately 60 gamers, parents, and game shop owners. On average, each interview lasted for approximately half an hour.

In May of this year, I returned to Bangkok and Chiang Mai for a second round of data collection. We interviewed approximately twenty participants, and these conversations were even more detailed.

I'm writing up most of the results elsewhere, but one of the most intriguing findings to emerge from this longitudinal  project seemed more appropriate for Terra Nova. 

Simply put, the finding is this: free-to-play virtual worlds pose an enormous threat to those worlds that require users to pay for gameplay. This surely comes as no surprise to regular readers of this forum, but the topic deserves further discussion.

In 2004, the game Ragnarok Online was nothing less than a cultural phenomenon in Thailand. Daily newspapers and weekly magazines carried stories about the game, and cyber-cafes were packed with obsessive Ragnarok fans. For most Thai youth over the age of 12, Ragnarok was their very first experience in a massively multiplayer virtual world.

Thai teenagers do not have access to credit cards, so developers came up with a different system for extracting payment. Local convenience stores such as 7-11 and Family Mart sell cards for a wide variety of on-line games. Ragnarok players can purchase chunks of game time by purchasing one of these cards. For 399 baht (approximately $10), a gamer can buy a card that guarantees unlimited monthly play.

Two years ago, most of the gamers with whom I spoke were quite pleased with the game's pay-as-you-go system. They loved everything about Ragnarok, and the costs seemed reasonable.

Today, the situation has changed dramatically. Although Ragnarok still has a small core of devoted followers,  most have moved on to other titles such as PangYa, Lineage II,  or Maple Story.

This trend alone is not very suprising. As Richard Bartle, Jessica Mulligan, and Raph Koster (among others) have documented, MMO growth and attrition patterns are relatively easy to predict. However, I was particularly intrigued by the reasons that participants mentioned for quitting the game.

When asked why they had given up on Ragnarok, many gamers mentioned that they had become bored with higher-end play.  "When I reached the highest level," reported one player, "there was nothing much to do except wandering about and maybe fighting with other players." Another gamer described the game as "a dead end."

Once again, widespread disappointment with end-game content is not exactly earth-shattering news.

Yet, almost every single player who had quit Ragnarok mentioned that they could no longer justify spending money on a game that was no longer fun. It was especially difficult to justify this expenditure in the face of games that (seemingly) cost absolutely nothing. Thus, many Thai youth have stopped paying subscription fees and moved – in droves – to “free-to-play” games.

As noted in previous Terra Nova discussion threads, the free-to-play business model allows players to participate in fully functional virtual worlds without  paying a single penny. (Or, in the case of Thai gamers, a single Baht.) However, in order to obtain attractive clothing, powerful weaponry, and new character classes,  players must convert real-world money into in-game currency.  (Note: In an attempt to balance the economy, most of these games have two types of currency: (a) the currency that is generated as a result of activity in the game, and (b) the  currency that one can purchase with real-world money.)

The free-to-play games have been enormously successful. Maple Story claims to have 47 million players, while Yulgang claims to have somewhere around 400 million. These figures should be taken with bushels of salt, but the free-to-play model is clearly successful. And, as my research suggests, the free-to-play titles have seriously weakened Ragnarok's player base. (Lineage II, on the other hand, appears to be doing very well.)

During the coming year, NCSoft will introduce several on-line games targeted at American audiences. Dungeon Runners (fantasy), Smash Star (tennis), eXteel (robotic warfare), and Soccer Fury (soccer) all rely on the free-to-play model that has been so successful throughout Asia. Games like Maple Story and Pangya are already available in Europe and the United States.

In the long run, what might this mean for the future of Azeroth, Norrath, and Telon? Have these free-to-play games already started stealing players away from the market leaders? Will younger players and low-income players gravitate toward the free titles, while older and more affluent gamers continue to shell out monthly subscription fees?

What do you think?

 

Whack-a-Professor

Allen Varney took some time in issue 57 of The Escapist to complain that academics in the humanities have yet to provide a straightforward, simple, scientific answer to the question, "What is immersion?" However, he forgot to ask for a magic pony.

Academics are fond of replying to such challenges with a flash of pedantry, waving citations that the critic neglected. That wouldn't be entirely unfair in this case: Varney takes particular aim at ye olde narratology-ludology debate without really looking either for the works that might complicate his perception of that debate, like Jesper Juul's Half-Real, or looking for the games scholarship that actually engages the concept of "immersion" head on. It's a bit like complaining that debates over the meaning of Shakespeare don't talk much about the structure of plot in mystery novels.

Ok, though. I'm not especially fond of that "debate" myself, nor are most people with an interest in games, scholars or otherwise. Let's move past it and look at the rest of the substance of Varney's complaint. First, that scholars who work on games don't seem terribly excited by or deeply experienced in gaming and gaming culture themselves. I think there's a fair complaint to be made along those lines in a slightly less overwrought manner. A recent article in the New York Times pointed out that there is still a complicated stigma attached to using one's leisure time to play games, which I think is true, and if so, academics are sure to feel its sting more acutely than most. Scholars who work on popular culture in general have struggled with this problem. In order to achieve respectability in scholarly circles, many academics working on popular culture feel an implicit need to distance themselves from the subject of their study.

On the other hand, what does Varney want to see in a work of scholarship that talks about immersion? "Could they ever admit", he asks, "becoming immersed themselves"? There are ways to write about one's own experience and retain some kind of scholarly rigor or structure: ethnography or memoir, for example. But I do assume that people are looking for something more from a scholarly study than just "Wow, Half-Life 2 felt incredibly real to me, dude", or "I was so into World of Warcraft last night."

This is where I think Varney actually goes off the rails most, as do most casual or straw-man attacks by gamers and industry figures on scholarship about games. Why does he want anything substantive from scholars in the humanities on the subject of immersion? Why not settle for game forums, magazine journalism, or for internal discussions among developers themselves? If he's not getting what he wants from scholars now, what is it that he is looking for them to provide?

Varney asks of recent scholarship, "Does any of this bring us closer to an understanding of immersion? These being humanities professors, no one has yet offered a testable, falsifiable hypothesis." Excuse me for leaving behind the "airy palaver" and "buffleheaded pedantry" so beloved of academics, but: DUH.

Try this similar complaint on for size: "Have any scholars helped to understand the meaning of culture? No one has yet offered a simple testable, falsifiable hypothesis that allows us to readily create better novels, plays, or movies yet!" Immersion, whatever it is, is a messy, subjective thing that almost of necessity can't be reduced to some tractable, diagrammatic, easily reproduced technical artifact that can be hypothesized about, tested, and improved. There will never be a Moore's Law of immersion, some steady doubling of the immersiveness of games in response to some scholarly breakthrough.

Immersion involves experience, consciousness, meaning, interpretation, causality. There's a reason why humanities scholars don't practice the scientific method, and it isn't just that they're buffleheaded pedants or postmodern obscurantists. If I ask you, "What does this novel mean?", there are answers which are more correct than others, surely, but no single absolutely right answer. It's not that we don't know the right answer, it is that there can never be a single right answer to the question, "What does that mean?" If I ask, "Why did that novel have such a powerful impact on its audience?" the answer is just as tentative and subject to debate. "What effect did that novel have on the world as a whole?"  "What did the Holocaust mean in human experience?" "Why did European societies engage in imperial expansion  at the end of the 19th Century?" "What is sadness, and why do we feel it?" "Is there a God?" I know there are people out there who think all of these are easy questions, but it's no great achievement to be dogmatically simple-minded in the face of complexity.

If Varney wants academics to help answer the question, "What is immersion, and why do some gamers seek it?", he'd be well-advised to re-think some of his expectations about the nature of the question itself, and the kinds of resources that the humanities bring to the question even under the best of circumstances. I think it's not wrong to say that some games scholarship has gotten entangled in relatively profitless debates, but the answer to that isn't to grotesquely simplify questions that are by their nature ambiguous, messy and in some ways, forever irreducibly complex. If "immersion" was just a matter of slapping somebody under an MRI while they play "Doom", looking at the parts of their brain that light up, and then taking a laundry list of design features into a developer, Varney would never have needed to complain that academics aren't carrying their share of the load. If producing and interpreting culture was that easy, every game would be all things to all its players, every novel would be both Shakespeare and Stephen King all rolled up into one, and every film a combination of Star Wars, Citizen Kane and Casablanca.

Indiana University to Host Digital Media Festival

Andrew Bucksbarg has put together a great program. Should be lots of stuff of interest to TNers. Details here. All invited. Let me know if you're coming, we can have lunch.

Statistical Heroism

I recently started experimenting with Red Orchestra: Osfront 41-45, a first-person-shooter.  There I wondered anew the old question of the meaning of heroism in online gaming experiences...

Joel Spolsky recently (re-)posted his perspective of software development management.  See  The Command and Control Management Method, The Econ 101 Management Method, and finally The Identity Management Method.  There (Econ 101), he makes the following claim:

Extrinsic motivation is a motivation that comes from outside, like when you’re paid to achieve something specific.

Intrinsic motivation is much stronger than extrinsic motivation. People work much harder at things that they actually want to do.  That’s not very controversial.

But when you offer people money to do things that they wanted to do, anyway, they suffer from something called the Overjustification Effect. “I must be writing bug-free code because I like the money I get for it,” they think, and the extrinsic motivation displaces the intrinsic motivation. Since extrinsic motivation is a much weaker effect, the net result is that you’ve actually reduced their desire to do a good job. When you stop paying the bonus, or when they decide they don’t care that much about the money, they no longer think that they care about bug free code.

Another big problem with Econ 101 management is the tendency for people to find local maxima. They’ll find some way to optimize for the specific thing you’re paying them, without actually achieving the thing you really want.

This may not seem novel, however, it bears mentioning here because of the reflection of ourselves within MMOGs.   The grind may be (or not) praiseworthy, but it is also not hard to see how within the scaffolding of its reward system motivation is extrinsic to the backstory.

To stray a little to reach a greater point, recently via Lambda the Ultimate comes mention of CellML - an XML language

...to store and exchange computer-based mathematical models. CellML allows scientists to share models even if they are using different model-building software. It also enables them to reuse components from one model in another, thus accelerating model building.

Yes, this may seem a bit of modeling arcana relevant mostly to those in the biological sciences.  But the larger point made by these sorts of efforts is in their intent to provide visibility and verifiability (via reuse) of the components of systems.  To do so faciliates the sharing of meaning about that system. It is hard to extract insight into a simulation of the cardiovascular system, say, if you don't know or have much confidence in how the components are defined.

System = inspectable (and interchangable) components = shared meaning.

This is where the mainstream MMOG paradigm, in my opinion, has gone wrong.  To a large extent it has learned the wrong lesson from Computer Games (CG).

By and large the single player CG seems more adept at insisting the player buy into the game world without having to reveal (much less confirm) the behaviors of the components of the system.  In fact, we all understand and accept it is smoke and mirrors - scripted bots and what not.  But because of a magic circle, or at least a circle of some sort, it seems to work often.  Players seem to be more willing to try to believe.  Perhaps they know that to be cynical will diminish the $39.99 investment of software they just made!

The MMOG game world experience, for the most part, is still smoke and mirrors.  It is just that there are a lot of you and it is okay to not buy into anything at all except what you feel like doing -subject to the user agreement, and the constraints of whatever norms you think apply and those imposed by the Law of Code.

In other words, The Horde is (Not) Evil to noone in the same way or even at all.  The lack of a convincing world system beyond an online social one staged against vast (and yes engaging) artwork seems to provide few hooks to intrinsically motivate players in terms of the intended world design   (e.g. Role-Playing versus Meta-Gaming - auction house, griefing etc).

Thus, what places like Azeroth do is to extrinsically reward folks to participate by grinding.  We are paid to kill trolls (in experience points, loot).  Yet, it seems to me that (using Joel's words, above) - (s)ince extrinsic motivation is a much weaker effect... the extrinsic motivation displaces the intrinsic motivation.  Does it follow that the reward diminishes the desire of players to kill trolls for any other purpose but for the reward?

A very long time ago we talked about heroism in virtual worlds (Where are the Heroes).  One conclusion seemed that a world where everyone believes (and expects) they can grind their way into a 'hero' is a poor simulation of a heroic process.  Interestingly, first person shooters seem to be able to provide (IMO) richer 'heroic' moments.  It is just that one needs to endure a longer train of missteps to reach them. [BTW, I apologize for use of quotes and 'simulated' disclaimers around heroism here, but as I explained in The Fallacy of War - I have my reasons].  As I describe somewhere else my recent Red Orchestra Osfront experience:

[Red Orchestra's] ‘resource pool’ model is interesting in that it seemed after a while as if they have designed for a smaller number of real players to effectively play over the course of a battle a larger number of nominal/virtual characters. This then dovetails into that old bane (IMO) of arena FPSing – the subject of casualties and how easy it is to distracted by the constant requirement to spawn.

On the other hand there were a handful of incredible (did I say awesome?) moments in the evening whose pattern would entail unexpectedly surviving a long time holed up in a hedge, running out of ammo as swarms of enemy infantry swirled about, finding a panzerfaust, then an incredible shot at the closing moments – [talk about a] tank boom.

A statistical view towards simulated heroics, perhaps.

The interesting quality about a statistical view towards heroics in online games - for all its other faults in terms of player goals and entertainment - is that it may provide a more intrinsic framework for motivating players to engage the world (in this case PvP).  As Will Rogers once wrote - “we can't all be heroes, because somebody has to sit on the curb and applaud when they go by.”

Perhaps in online spaces we can, but we just have to take turns and endure the long half-hours first for those brief moments.

Against Exceptionalism: A New Approach to Games

Selling games short -- it's happening all the time in games research scholarship and in books on game design. In the rush to carve out a special place for games scholarship, to demonstrate its importance, and to attempt to convey what we feel as gamers is powerful about games, games thinkers have relied on an exceptionalist approach to games, seeing them as a form of play necessarily set apart from the everyday, and therefore requiring a distinct treatment. In short, this inherited and largely unexamined theory of games assumes there is a rupture (in experience, in form) between games and other aspects of social life.  But while understandable, this is precisely the wrong approach.

What people find fascinating about activities labeled "games" is precisely how they make the contingency of our day-to-day experience available to us, but within semi-bounded (never fully separable) spaces. It is because of this that they are able to take on the same stakes and range of meanings that we find in everyday experience. If we are ever going to be able to ferret out what is powerful and important about games, we must work from an approach that: (1) sees them as never fully separable from other aspects of experience, (2) recognizes what is at stake in them (they are never entirely "consequence-free"), and (3)  avoids normative, culturally-located assumptions (about "pleasure" or "fun"). In short, this approach must see games as processual -- like everyday life, they are open-ended sites for social practice. Once we have such an approach in place, we will be free to do the more interesting (and challenging) work of exploring their stakes, relative separabilty, and affective or normative associations through empirically-grounded research, no longer assuming what we should be explaining.

I have posted a paper to ssrn, "Stopping Play: A New Approach to Games" (here), that presents such an approach to games  (and briefly outlines the sources and limitations of the play assumption along the way). Any comments welcome.

 Abstract:

Games have intruded into popular awareness to an unprecedented level, and scholars, policy makers, and the media alike are beginning to consider how games might offer insight into fundamental questions about human society. But in the midst of this opportunity for their ideas to be heard, it is game scholars who are selling games short. In their rush to highlight games’ importance, they have tended toward an unsustainable exceptionalism, seeing games as fundamentally set apart from everyday life. This view casts gaming as a subset of play, and therefore – like play – as an activity that is inherently separable, safe, and pleasurable. Before we can confront why games are important, and make use of them to pursue the aims of policy and knowledge, we must rescue games from this framework and develop an understanding of them unburdened by the category of play, one that will both accord with the experience of games by players themselves, and bear the weight of the new questions being asked about them and about society. To that end, I offer here an understanding of games that eschews exceptionalist, normatively-loaded approaches in favor of one that stresses them as a characterized by process. In short, I argue for seeing games as domains of contrived contingency, capable of generating emergent practices and interpretations. This approach enables us to understand how games are, rather than set apart from everyday life, instead intimately connected with it. With this approach in place, I conclude by discussing two key recent developments in games, persistence and complex, implicit contingency, that together may account for why some online games are now beginning to approach the texture of everyday life.

[Edit: One more piece, to fill out the picture I am offering here...]

Here is the short version of the definition of games I offer in the paper, plus a brief elucidation:

"A game is a semi-bounded domain of contrived contingency that generates interpretable outcomes." (p. 9)

All games, I argue, include the incorporation of one or more sources of contingency (the paper identifies four: stochastic, social, performative, and semiotic), carefully calibrated (by design or cultural practices) to create a compelling experience. This is the first aspect of games. The second aspect of games is their capacity to generate meaning. The outcomes that games generate (never perfectly predictable) are subject to interpretations by which more or less stable culturally-shared meanings are generated; the key point about this generation of meaning is that it also is open-ended, potentially transformed by the unfolding of the game itself.

 

The Prison of Embodiment

As strange as it might seem, VR technology was a natural offshoot of the counterculture - a reliance on small-scale technologies to create a disembodied, connected global consciousness (think LSD, funky musical instruments, Whole Earth catalog of gadgets, and personal computers). As an aside, Fred Turner has a wonderful book coming out on the intersection of the counterculture and personal computing.

Of course, contemporary virtual worlds reveal an insistence on embodiment. Most virtual worlds are avatar-based. Where the counterculture was heading towards the liberation of disembodiment, the opposite has taken hold. In a recent study (PDF) at Stanford, we explored this tension between liberation and embodiment in virtual worlds.

There are many well-known patterns that goven how people interact in the physical world. For example, within a social distance of about 12 feet, the closer two people are, the less likely they will maintain eye contact. This is the elevator effect. Proximity and eye gaze are both signs of intimacy. To keep things in equlibrium, eye gaze compensates for distance when we stand too close to another person. Another well-observed pattern is that men maintain less eye contact with other men than women do with each other.

The question we looked into was: Do these patterns carry over into virtual worlds where people move with mice and keyboard instead of arms and legs, and where virtual gender need not match the real gender of a user? We used a script to collect positional and orientation data on social groups in Second Life over a period of about 2 months.

Our data showed that many patterns of physical interaction in the real world carry over into the virtual world. In other words, our insistence on embodiment in virtual environments structures social interactions in these worlds in ways that we may not consciously be aware of. On the other hand, this implies that virtual worlds may be useful platforms for studying things even as visceral as the rules of physical interaction.

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

Yee, N., Bailenson, J.N., Urbanek, M., Chang, F., Merget, D. (in press). The Unbearable Likeness of Being Digital: The Persistence of Nonverbal Social Norms in Online Virtual Environments. The Journal of CyberPsychology and Behavior. PDF

Omaha

Henry Jenkins has posted a thoughtful essay on that nationalist "riot" (fn1) that took place in a Chinese MMOG last month (ref "House of the Rising Sun" ).  We then move to Simtropolis and end with a wonder of the politics of land in virtual places...

I was struck by this linkage made by Henry Jenkins:

Arguably, the Chinese government's efforts to regulate game playing -- and to promote games as part of the national culture -- have transformed what might have been a mere passtime into a more politically charged environment...

A further question might be whether the politicization of a virtual environment somehow diminish its worldy-ness in proportion to the degree it becomes a medium with a message.  Truman Burbank (ref Truman Show) might have thought his place a world, for a while, as did those on the outside looking in might have fantasized it.   Yet lacking the conflicts of otherness and the cacaphony of mixed purposes, could Seahaven have ever been any more than a parody of television?

Mark Wallace brings us a great glimpse into the confluence of human expression and virtual territory (Sim City as a Mirror World).  Apparently Stefan Greens (Simtropolis) has gone to great lengths to recreate Omaha in Sim City 4 using data from Google Earth.  Mess with land and its depiction in an urban simulator, can the real world politics of land and its use be far behind? Consider even this innocuous example, and imagine the slippery slope (comment against the DEDWD Highway Wall mods,  Aug 5):

This download contains a set of highway noise barrier walls. Whilst being of a simple and cheap concrete and steel design, they have a more pleasing curved pattern look as seems to be the trend in a lot of road construction these days.

Metro Quest broaches some of the questions, but still under the safe wing of  urban planning.  To come out from under this bird - e.g. depicting places like Jerusalem to a mass audience - strikes me as full of pitfalls.

The pollution of virtual worlds with real world politics is perhaps inevitable as the meaning and applications of virtual worlds extend vigorously from the traditional dwarf/elf/orc (geek) ghettos that have also protected them to some extent.  To a brave new mirror world indeed.

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

fn1.  I first noticed "riot" associate with this story in Andrew Leonard's  "Fantasy gaming, Sino-Japanese style." July 11, 2006.   Salon.com.

See also eOmaha.com forum discussion of the Omaha mod.

In Praise of the Grind

During my first few years a faculty member, when I was balancing impossibly heavy teaching loads with an impossibly demanding family (hey, I love my kids, but having two under five is challenging!), I didn't use summers to do research and course development. Instead, I used them to clear my mind, to get much-needed downtime. I developed a habit that to everyone else seemed extremely odd...I'd sit on our lawn, literally for hours at a time, tracing the stems of creeping, flowering weeds to their tap roots and then pulling them out.

It was indescribably satisfying, this mindless task. When I found a particularly wide ranging cluster and yanked it out by the roots, I felt triumphant. Everybody who saw me do this thought I was nuts. By the end of the summer, I would only have cleared a few visible patches of lawn, mostly in places where I could sit in the shade of a tree while I worked. But the point wasn't really to eradicate every weed...it was to engage in an activity that felt at once mindless and productive, something that gave me bite-sized victories and could be stopped and restarted easily when toddlers demanded my attention. I could talk on the phone while I did this, or chat with neighbors. I could be social, but I was safe from emails on my computer and laundry in my basement.

Now we have a lawn service, so there are no creeping weeds in our lawn. That's okay, though, because I've got World of Warcraft. And unlike many of my "serious" gamer friends, I love the leveling grind of WoW. It's why I prefer a PvE server to a PvP server, in fact, since it's hard to get into the zen-like grind-mind I enjoy when I'm constantly being ganked. And it's why I so resent being ganked, in fact...those players are interrupting my cleansing trance, my "I don't need to think very hard about this" downtime activity. It's as though a neighbor's dog had come charging onto my lawn while I was peacefully weeding, and nipped me. No blood drawn, no real harm done...but not enjoyable in any way.

I spend far too much of my personal and professional life strategizing, dealing with intellectually and emotionally challenging situations. I don't want to replicate that stress in a game environment...instead, I want to relax, to clear my mind, to do something repetitive that provides visible (to me, not to you) and lasting evidence of my efforts...however small that evidence may be.

Not everybody plays this way, I know. There are plenty of people who want to think about strategy and interaction, who find the grind tedious and off-putting. Probably more of those people than there are people like me (after all, you don't see a lot of people hand-weeding their lawns these days). But not everybody suffers through a grind as just a way to get that status-enhancing "massive, glowing, meat cleaver of a sword." Really. And to assume that when designing games is a mistake. Honestly, who plays Katamari _just_ to get a bigger star in the sky, or the praise of the King of the Cosmos? The fun is in the rolling, not in the status. For me, the same is true for MMORPGs. It's the process, even (especially) the mindless parts, that makes these games so endlessly attractive to me.

Veblenesque Dorodango?

This summer I've been busy writing an article that argues copyright law should be reformed to take greater account of authorial reputation as a motivator of creative production.  The current draft is posted on SSRN here.  While it might seem obvious to some readers that many artists create for love rather than money, our intellectual property laws (at least in the United States) tend to conceive of artistic production (protected by copyright law) as being motivated almost entirely by the pursuit of market profits.  At least, the law of intellectual property conceives of copyright-protected works as simply valuable financial assets and investments of authorial labor that are made in pursuit of financial rewards.

I'd be interested in feedback on the article (here or by email) from Terra Nova readers -- while it isn't about virtual worlds, it does touch on many issues we have talked about here, such as Creative Commons, user-generated content, the Memex, advertising vs. content, etc.  But this post is about one of the topics I didn't get a chance to explore in the article (it shows up in footnote 73 cryptically), namely, how factors other than the pursuit of reputation and money motivate creative production.

In particular, I think there is a strong claim that perhaps the leading motivator for creative production is "play."  Much creativity, thoughout history, has been non-instrumental and non-utilitarian in the modern sense of those words.  Rather creativity can be and has been, like Roger Caillois has said of play, an "occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money."

But what I'm wondering about now is how much the motivation of "play" actually draws upon the motivation that I focused on in the paper: the pursuit of social reputation.  Perhaps some aspect of what we call "play" is largely about the pursuit of status?  As exhibit A, I'd like to point to Dave Elfving's recent post about the similarities between the phenomenon of dorodango (explained here) and the joy(lessness) of the WoW grind.

According to Dave's take on dorodango: "It’s not the process that’s fun, it’s the end product and the potential for recognition that has the kids getting their hands dirty."  And Dave ties this to the WoW grind, saying: "Players of MMORPG games are ultimately driven by a desire to improve their characters. It’s not about winning so much as it is about obtaining a massive, glowing, meat cleaver of a sword. A sword visible to everyone else playing the game."

So play in MMORPGs, at least in one player's view, becomes again a matter of seeking social recognition and enhanced reputation. Huizinga's magic circle is  attractive to the player because it provides an opportunity for enhanced social status that is not afforded elsewhere. If this is true, then the real-money trade in virtual property should explicable (at least in part) as a Veblenesque instance of conspicuous consumption -- money is being transmuted into status.  The reaction against the real-money trade is explicable in the same status terms -- the trade is an insult to the social status of those who consider themselves the true meritocracy.  (Compare doping at the Tour de France.)

We've discussed Veblen's relevance to MMORPGs before at Terra Nova. But honestly, I'm not sure how much I buy into status-seeking as a primary motivator for play.  It isn't clear to me that either Veblen or Caillois had a clear picture of the pleasures of play.  Today, the economist Veblen is often criticized for basing his critique of conspicuous consumption upon what reads like a quasi-Puritanical faith in the virtue of material productivity.  (As Brian Sutton-Smith points out in Chapter 11 of The Ambiguity of Play, this kind of approach doesn't bode well for play.) 

And Caillois' statement about "pure waste" seems to reflect very similar sentiments -- the statement is made under the heading noting that in play "no goods are produced." Additionally, Caillois has been criticized for over-emphasizing the importance of agonistic modes of play, which lead inevitable to winners, losers, and status distinctions.  For Caillois, even solo games such as crossword puzzles and flying kites are socially competitive. We always seem to play, according to Caillois, for an audience or against similar players elsewhere (see the beginning of Chapter III of Man, Play, and Games).

So I guess my question is this: Is Dave right that the primary motivator for the play of grind-intensive MMORPGs like WoW (and the making of dorodango) is the pursuit of social reputation?  More generally, how much of the pleasure of "play" can be traced to the pleasure of social status that is found in "success" at play?

Photo credit: Eamonn Sullivan, who used a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license for the above picture of his first dorodango.

Where am I?

As keen eyed readers will have spotted you can now see a map of where TerraNovans are currently located. It’s neat. But it’s not the map I wanted. I wanted a way to show you all where we are virtually. The problem is that I don’t think that map exists. I’m not sure we even have a metaphor for it. That is - the true metaverse; the universe of virtual universes.

Like other TNers and probably a good slice of our readers I’m all over the metaverse, sometimes in multiple spaces at the same time – Second Life, WoW, There, EvE, SWG and those ‘almost-spaces’ like Animal Crossing; heck I might even get a Cyworld account.

Now, there is the growing set of gamertag type services like onxiam (that’s ‘on x I am’ – geddit geddit). These site collate IDs – some in slightly more clever ways than others – but I want more.

I have this shadow in my mind you see. Like the cube is a partial shadow of a tesseract. I can feel the space of virtual spaces that I want to see mapped and made into a geographical metaphor. I want someone clever and creative to go invent a way to easily understand the relative positions in virtual spaces that we occupy. I know it’s not just a list of IDs, or a flat diagram – I know what it isn’t but I don’t know what is is.

If you done it; gosh, even if you know what I’m on about, do post and let me know I’m not going mad.

[ed. 8/8/6 Ren] Thanks to my friend Jo I now at least have a word for the feeling I’m trying to express: propinquity. Those darn crossword fiends, they have a word for everything.

3D Cloudpoints

On this subject two compelling items come this way.  First Andrew Stern's coverage of Steve Perlman's SIGGRAPH 2006 demo of Contour:

...technology for digital effects production. Performances can now be captured in 3D as they are performed, eliminating much of the post-production work required in the past... It isn't just capturing dots in space anymore; it's actual live-action volumetric capture.

In Andrew's words, "Effectively each grain of makeup is like a motion-capture dot, allowing for very very hi-res, and low-cost, capture."   Brilliant indeed.

Also from SIGGRAPH comes Microsoft's demo of Photosynth (see New Scientist Tech {NST}: "Software meshes photos to create 3D landscape" ).  Fascinating.

NST describes Photosynth as

...software (that) takes individual images and performs careful analyses to find matching sections. It then "stitches" overlapping pictures together to create a three-dimensional landscape composed of many different snaps.

An interesting facet is that virtual worlds seem to strive to invert this user perspective.   Excepting procedural landscapes, virtual world places feel (to me at least) designed to be deceptively compact locales aggregating a large number of stunning vistas - comprised of all sorts of content, graphic and critter.  Yes worlds have come a long way since EverQuest I (EQ), but to this day I am still amazed about how large the ButcherBlock mountains seemed (a zone in EQ) until I figured out its true geometry.   A deception by disorientation, intended to maximize the impact of the smallest size of virtual terrain one could support (infrastructure, design).

I look forward to a complicated geographic experience in a virtual world - the prosady of a rambling landscape sounds interesting, in fact.    Shall we contemplate the 3d Cloudpoint of an English garden stretched to a horizon?

------

Related:  "Geography and Travel" (TN).