Terra Nova

Are we really ready for a global conversation about virtual worlds?

(This posting is about the urgent need to find financial sponsors for State of Play IV: Building the Global Metaverse. Feel free to skip the bulk of the message and cut to the chase.)

San Antonio is not the most cosmopolitan city in the world. We lack an Ethiopian restaurant, and have extremely limited options as far as good Chinese food is concerned. Though we have a handful of (very small) independent  bookstores, we're forced to drive to Borders if we hope to find anything remotely out of the ordinary. We're not on the circuit for hipster college rock bands, and most of the good art house  movies are found only in Austin. We don't even have an American Apparel or a Trader Joe's to call our own.

Some might reach for the word "provincial" to describe this city. Yet, because we have never been close to the epicenter of American power, our perspective is more humble than you might expect from Texans. We've always known that exciting and important things are happening outside our borders. To participate in important conversations about important topics, we know that we must get on the plane and fly to other places.

From San Antonio, there are very few direct flights. As my Mom (a Texas native) once noted, "Even if you go to hell, you've got to stop in Dallas first." Thus, we Texans, like Nebraskans and Coloradans and Latin Americans and Africans and British residents often find ourselves traveling through strange airports with long lay overs. We are used to it.

Ultimately, the transition to a fully globalized world may be  more traumatic for those who live in such cosmopolitan cities as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Washington D.C. After all, when a community has spent more than a century with a reputation as "the place that others must visit," the perspective of its residents tends to become somewhat myopic. One could even use the word "provincial."

Whether or not we choose to admit it, the American Century is over.

Superstition

B.F. Skinner is well-known for his theory of behavioral conditioning, but one of his quirkiest studies involved inducing superstition in pigeons (1948). 8 pigeons were placed in a reinforcement contraption (i.e., Skinner Box) and were given a food pellet every 15 seconds no matter what they did. After several days, each pigeon had fixated on a particular superstitious behavior. One pigeon danced counter-clockwise, another two developed a left-to-right head-swinging motion, another attacked an invisible object in the top right corner of the cage, and so forth. This phenomenon has also been replicated among high-school students (Bruner & Revuski, 1961). And given that MMOs are a kind of Skinner Box that offer some random rewards (e.g., rare drops), it's not surprising that superstitious behaviors emerge in MMOs as well.

The essential paradigm of cyberspace

In 1993 Chip Morningstar penned "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, My Postmodern Adventure".  This essay recounted his and Randy Farmer's 1991 adventure at the Second International Conference of Cyberspace.   Surprised by an academic humanities audience, they hurriedly reworked their presentation at the last moment - nonsensically knitting together bits of phraseology they heard the day before...

Business and Legal Primer

A new chance to add to your game-related tome collection: TN friends Greg Boyd and Brian ("Psychochild") Green are the editors of the Business and Legal Primer for Game Development.  The book is primarily advice for those working in the game industry (not working on MMORPGs specifically) but it features a chapter from James Grimmelmann that gives advice on the construction of EULAs for virtual worlds.  More detail on Brian's blog.  There's also a chapter with some "I wish I knew then" remarks by Richard Bartle, Jessica Mulligan, and other recognizable names.

Participatory Culture

Henry Jenkins has posted the fifth installment of "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture:  Media Education for the 21st Century."  A series of posts based on his white paper on youth and participatory culture for the MacArthur Foundation (1., 2., 3., 4.).  Worth the read, worth the visit.  A few scribbles follow...

Why I will never be a Centurion

I must confess: I like PvP, a lot. Perhaps this has something to do with the inordinate amount of time I spent playing Counter-Strike with my friends in college, or just a basic need to show off my 3l33t skills. But the bottom line is that I've been spending a lot of time in World of Warcraft's Battlegrounds lately, trying to climb up the ladder and equip my avatar with a nice armor set.

Here is my problem though: I am at rank 8 (Legionnaire) and I'm stuck. In fact I've been stuck there for weeks. This is really a problem since I cannot complete my coveted armor set until I reach rank 10! But I also have the luxury of some fresh data about PvP play patterns that Nick, Eric and I computed recently - why not look at some numbers and see if they could help?

Blacksnow documents

Vili Lehdonvirta over at VERN has posted the links to the documents in l'affaire Blacksnow Interactive. Essential reading.

Virtual Worlds as non-predatory spaces

Everyone seems to know that the place to find child abuse perpetrators is in the dark corners of society, in the woods, lurking in the shadows on the edge of town and now of course on the internet, in chat rooms and all over mySpace.

This popular truth about perpetrators is indeed frighteningly true; though of course its prominence also masks the fact that most child abuse occurs at the hands of parents, close family and people in positions of trust, not by strangers.

I’m sure there is a mountain of theory about why the typical abuser is depicted as ‘other’ rather than, say, family. It certainly confuses matters. And if public policy follows received opinion, which I fear it does, we face a serious situation.

But within the context of TerrraNova the thing that confuses me is why Virtual Worlds are not getting the blame. I see no rational reason why Virtual Worlds should facilitate abuse more than other computer mediated technologies (which of course means that there must be cases where a Virtual World is implicated), but causal links don’t seem to be the determining factors in what the media chooses to give primacy to.

We’ve had addiction rhetorics, violence, social-isolation, evil Asians or evil East Europeans. But so far no one has tried to pin child abuse on Virtual Worlds – why not?

Chains of Contract

There's been a lot of contract talk lately -- Bragg's suit is all about the Benja...er...EULAs, Eve is using a new kind of contract clause to penalize RMT, etc.  But can we really create an economy based purely on contracts between games providers and games players?

Second Life Breaks 1 Million Mark

This morning I had a look at SL's main page and saw that the registration number had topped 1 million. Congratulations!