Terra Nova

The inevitability of voice

Voice in MMOGs is not new.  There has been TeamSpeak and even "Vent."  Yet now with Eve-Online's live testing of integrated voice (fn1), it is perhaps a good time to consider the future.  From the perfect hindsight of 2020, what will we have gained and what are we about to lose?

In "<> 30: a new reality?"  I was uneasy with the trendline that finds online gamers slipping almost without complaint into extensive use of voice in gaming.  I admire kick-a$$ voice-enabled butt kicking in highly tactical environments as much as anyone, yet I do mind the "ebbing away of the distinction between the virtual and the real identity/experience ."

Dan has pointed out that some players are penalized by voice chat because of their RW standing.  Anecdotally, for example, women seem to be put out by young-male gamer voice mongering (throw in a touch of adolescence and a bucket of pseudo-anonymity... you can imagine).

David Edery (recently) and game+girl=advance (GGA, a while ago) posted industry thinking about how voice-masking technology might be used to help compensate for some of this.  "Sound like a man!" wrote GGA.  However, both GGA and David cautions us that masking technologies could be used for evil by online predators.

A while back I was contemplating joining a player organization in a popular MMOG plagued with all sorts of nefarious player actions.  They insisted I come online and chat with them by voice:  it would help them decide whether I was trustworthy.

Here is a case where voice masking would have been inconvenient.

Perhaps voice in online games into the future is all about convenience ("Ma, no hands!").  But just as likely it is about introducing the real world currency of *you* into virtual domains.  It will be done to enhance social bonding (to the exclusion of more) as well help sort out some of the chaos that pseudo-anonymity has wrought (do you sound trustworthy?).

Will you miss the silence of your keyboard?

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fn1.  From here:

2007.02.28 08:29:55 | NEW
Dear players,

EVE Voice is currently active on Tranquility, but set to 'invite only' access. We would like to invite your corporation and/or alliance to help us with load testing, hardware compatibility and general feedback.

The future?

Jeff Orkin, a game-developer-now-in-academics is doing some cool stuff and is looking for help with The Restaurant Game.  To see how you can contribute, go to Jeff and Andrews' posts (1. 2. , 3. ).  The sound-bite:

...(I)t will algorithmically combine the gameplay experiences of thousands of players to create a new game. In a few months, we will apply machine learning algorithms to data collected through the multiplayer Restaurant Game, and produce a new single-player game that we will enter into the 2008 Independent Games Festival.

Take a look.

Now, to move into the realm of speculation.

A while ago I commented on Luis von Ahn's work.  If games like The ESP Game are algorithms based on a symbiotic human-machine relationship, then that was one kind of symbiosis (games with a purpose).   Another kind of symbiosis could be based on learning and mimicy.

Let us suppose an Artificial Intelligence (AI) were possible that could understand you better than you might understand yourself (especially when contextualized in your virtual world).  In other words, given the tools, would you better trust yourself to create the perfect game (to your tastes) than a hypothetical AI observing you in your play?  Or do you recall poorly that game you once designed and tried to play.

Us Being Human

Discussions of emergent types of game play and questions about whether MMOs are more than “just a game” have made my anthropology senses tingle. In a previous post I brought up ritual but now I’m beginning to wonder why games aren’t tapping into all the different kinds of human culture that encourage human sociality?

Interactivity, room for player controlled practices in-game, a sense of realism and participation in a “living, breathing” worlds all seem to be major VW design goals reflected by the drive for ever better graphics – yet it seems that content writers and designers inevitably fail to acknowledge what it is that makes us human. Although MMO back-stories are often extraordinarily rich and detailed, where is the “culture”?

In every human society we find: 1) some kind of family structure, 2) religion/shared value systems, 3) communication networks, 4) social complexity (government, social organization, leaders/followers, etc), 5) recreation/arts, 6) education, and 7) economics/goods procurement and sharing (food, clothing, etc). Though these social forms are interpreted very differently between cultures, they exist universally as categories in every documented culture past and present.

Of these cultural universals, even the most advanced MMO genuinely incorporates only economics and some basic form of social complexity into their world systems. Yes, there are churches and priests in WoW, but there are no coherent religious belief systems clearly functioning, motivating characters and NPCs, impacting the world. Where are the mechanisms to participate in player-conducted rituals or create new branches of a religion? When will creating your character include constructing a dependant or family that can then play a role in that character’s own motives and missions? Where are the in-game mentoring systems through which you can actually teach other players powers available in no other way (taking it a step beyond City of Heroes and Asheron's Call)? These basic cultural systems help us make sense of our own world and can only advance our attempts to create more immersive virtual worlds. Can’t we create missions that involve a character’s dependant (they kidnapped Aunt Em, go save her!), provide room for people to create in-game cults or become part of existing religions that have all the benefits and restrictions of membership, provide tools for players to conduct meaningful rituals such as initiations, weddings, coming of age events that change the status of their characters?

Here’s my question – is it even possible to provide players with meaningful activities and tools with which they can develop these kinds of fundamental social structures in a way that is integrated with game play? If possible, why are these things still missing from MMOs? Perhaps because we still believe that it is “just a game”?

Will Wright on Spore / Sims / SL

Popular Science has a fascinating and very long interview with uber-game designer Will Wright about all sorts of stuff readers here might find interesting.  E.g., cooperative gaming, educational gaming, game development finances, strategies for integrating user-generated content, what went wrong with The Sims Online, and what WW thinks about Second Life (he's a fan).  Here are a few snippets:

Q: Sims Online seemed like a slam dunk, got huge press, it was going to change the nature of gaming. And it still exists, but it wasn't the raging success people were expecting.

WW: I think that's actually the reason, because with The Sims, I think people love controlling this experience, and creating everything, and playing out these stories, and having the ultimate power to shape the experience and environment to whatever they want to. In an online game you can't even pause the game, or speed it up – you can't control time at all, because everybody has to be on the same time sync...<snip>

I find I don't subscribe to World of Warcraft – I appreciate what they did, but I have maybe a half hour to play, an hour to play, on my own schedule. I can't join a guild and make commitments...

Q: [T]o my eye at least, [feedback on player designs in Spore is] potentially the coolest part of the game.

WW: Looking at things like Pokemon and Neopets, and how much people kind of identify with these creatures, and they didn't even create them – they trained them or gave them some stats or whatever – but it was always Pikachu or whatever. In this case I want people to feel like they are Pokemon designers, Neopet designers, or Pixar designers, and the range of creatures is pretty astounding.

Q: But you're not looking at an economy where people sell what they've created, like in Second Life?

WW: Well, those economies that develop – there's no way for us to prevent them, first of all. If there's a reason for it to exist, as an external economy, they can always go do it on eBay, so I'm not saying we can prevent this from happening. There probably will be some sort of economy that we haven't quite figured out, where the most popular creature, or person, get some sort of reward, and we're not quite sure what form that reward will take yet.       

Those are just to get you interested -- read the full interview here.

Thanks to blogger/CatchBobber Nick Nova for spotting this!

MMO != VC?

This is posted on behalf of Joshua de Larios-Heiman.
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I was at a venture capital cocktail reception at Zibibbos in Palo Alto last week hosted by the Hina Group, a venture capital and investment banking specializing Chinese technology investment. I was there at the behest of a client, a venture capital group, who is currently investing in Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) Games.

Around six o’clock, I ran into an Internet analyst for a rather well known investment bank. We began talking tech development and current trends, basically feeling each other out for our knowledge in the space. I asked him about what he thought of Wikipedia's efforts to commoditize its services without alienating its users. He asked me about what I thought of the iPhone copyright controversy between Apple and Cisco. It was a fine conversation, until I brought up MMOs.

I mentioned that the MMO niche looks to be growing at amazing rate, expected to be in the $14 billion ranges by 2011, the long tail business models, and the vertical and horizontal market potentials. So what did he think?

The Internet analyst, a man with a degree in computer science from a good school, who spends hours on Bloomberg every day ostensibly reading about all things internet, answered: “I cover the internet, dude. Not online gaming.”

This answer both delighted and frustrated me.

It delighted me because it means that for the short term, I get to cherry pick MMO funding deals. Despite the well-publicized success of titles such as World of Warcraft, the analyst’s view of MMO sector is commonplace in the western VC and I. banking communities. Funding access to MMO developers in America from these two sources has been paltry at best, and non-existent at worst.

It frustrated me because the MMO development as a whole suffers from the scarcity of funding. Since I consult for one of the few venture groups that actually funds MMOs, I get a chance to talk to MMO developers. Specifically, I spend a lot of time hearing one thing: “VCs and I.Banks don’t get us.” I am a gamer. I want people to understand the industry. I want my colleagues to get the MMO industry, so they fund good games.

So, fellow TNers I post two questions to you:

1.) Why don't western venture capitalists and investment bankers get the MMO space?
2.) What can/ is the MMO industry doing to change this?

Thanks,

Josh de L-H

State of the NationStates II: Resolutions

If you've visited the TerraNova region of NationStates lately, you'll see that its grown to a whopping 11 nations in the little more than a week since the first post in this short series of thought experiments in hypothetical game design. For this second post, I want to look at the interplay between the UN "resolutions" that member nations are are asked to vote on and the way that collective decision-making affects the NSUN's individual members. To me it's a simple and interesting game mechanic that could perhaps be extended to cover more functional aspects of an MMO game. But that's for you to decide.

Each of the currently 26,537 members of the NationStates United Nations has the chance to vote more or less weekly on a new resolution that's being proposed before that august body. Each of these has been written by a UN member nation, and then must achieve the support of a quorum of UN delegates in order to move to a vote. While the resolutions that appear before the UN can be exceedingly elaborate in their composition (more on that in Part 3), their underlying mechanics are really quite limited in how they affect the metrics that describe each nation. A resolution for the "Advancement of Industry," for instance, may have a negative impact on one of four metrics (e.g., the environment or worker's rights), depending on what was chosen from a couple of drop-down menus when the resolution was composed. Similarly, a resolution to improve "moral decency" will reduce "civil freedoms." The metrics are meaningless to gameplay, but simply provide a scale on which to compare your nation with others. Walkering Industries, for instance, was 51,844th in the world for "Most Eco-Friendly Governments" a couple of weeks ago (out of 92,072 active governments at the time).

We've seen these kinds of rankings before, in "friend" and "enemy" links in The Sims Online, or in the now-defunct ratings in Second Life. They're scales that serve only as scales; ways to place yourself on a leaderboard and compare yourself to others. In most cases, they're easily gamed. One of the things I like about the NationStates mechanic is that you can't really game the system. If I wanted to push to the top of the Most Eco-Friendly Governments leaderboard, I'd have to introduce a number of resolutions and lobby 26,000 people for their passage. (The UN does its best to weed out alts.) This is not gaming the system -- this is playing the game.

The other thing to note about the United Nations is that each resolution that passes there affects all members equally. This doesn't mean everyone is always tied for first on the leaderboards, though, since each nation must also address up to two "issues" every day that constitute domestic politics. (Walkering Industries, for example, besides voting for the Radiological Terrorism resolution before the UN, recently diverted more taxpayer funds to dentists in order to address the nation's poor dental health.)

The interesting thing about this system is that, for UN members, the metrics are affected both by domestic decisions taken by the nation's leader, and by international decisions taken collectively by the UN. What I'd like to find out is this: Could this type of collective decision-making be productively applied to metrics that do affect gameplay in an MMOG along the lines of WoW, CoH/V, etc.? Could a similarly narrow range of effects be designed for players to choose from when making their proposals? What kind of meaningful effects could be safely altered by player vote? Would this radically change what we think of as a multiplayer game? Would it alter it at all? Your thoughts requested.

Origami

Do you wish you could fold your own shapes in your virtual world?

Robert Lang - physicist, software developer, and artist-participant in "The Extreme Sport Of Origami" (fn1) has developed software to generate crease patterns for folding paper into origami shapes (Treemaker, fn2).  Visual poetry!  Look at the examples (here and here).

"Folding under pressure" has become more intense with the use of computer programs that can derive the creases from a sketch (all the while managing the constraints of 1 sheet of paper and no tearing/cutting). Yet knowing the crease blueprint is not in itself sufficient to create a figurine: it does not tell you what folding steps should be used (direction and order).  The combinations can be mind-boggling.  Robert has also developed a program (ReferenceFinder) - to search the folding space of the masters (fn3).  Yet, it is notable that without software assist, origami master Satoshi Kamiya (from here)

...recently produced what is considered the pinnacle of the field, an eight-inch-tall Eastern dragon with eyes, teeth, a curly tongue, sinuous whiskers, a barbed tail, and a thousand overlapping scales. The folding alone took 40 hours, spread out over several months.

One advantage of using software is that it generates blueprints that identify exact crease lines.  Even those who can visualize the geometry may still need to refold on occasion to get the final shapes to balance out just right (from here):

"All the parts of a base are linked together and can't be altered without affecting the rest of the paper, so that's the part you have to calculate just right," Lang says. A base with four flaps is relatively easy to make. Each flap is formed from one of the corners of the square. Making a base with 17 flaps of the right size and in the right places—what you'd need to create Lang's flying rhinoceros beetle—is exponentially more difficult. "Figuring out how to make good legs was all people did for years," Tom Hull says. "Doing a six-legged beetle was a big, big deal."

On this lazy weekend I'll pose the following appropriately lazy thought experiment.

Were there a virtual world in which players had to fold their own avatars (with or without software assists) - would that be good, bad, or "depends."  10 points if you explain yourself.

I occasionally ramble here about the prosaic patterns of systems and software as they impact virtual worlds - but as I've suggested in the past, that is the messy underbelly of the art of the possible (fn4).  More stunning would be a visual language.  Why stop with avatars, why not be able to fold your entire world, would you care more about what lies behind the facade, then?

P.S.  Starcraft in Origami.

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fn1. From:  "The Extreme Sport of Origami."  Jennifer Kahn.  DISCOVER Vol. 27 No. 07 | July 2006 .   Can origami be a sport, a game!?  ( Go Pats)

fn2.  TreeMaker: software and documentation

fn3.  ReferenceFinder: software and documentation   

fn4.  E.g. Ruby Slippers, A Java Parable, Troubles with Tribbles...

Other notes:

Kawasaki's Theorem.

Update (2/18):  Impressive video, Satoshi Kamiya and his origami (in Japanese).

Update (2/18):   "THE ORIGAMI LAB."  SUSAN ORLEAN.  NewYorker, Issue of 2007-02-19

Oh tragedy

There is this meme running around suggesting that parents may be praising their children too much.  Ben Schneider is now telling us [1.] that gamers need to "be weaned off of the constant positive reinforcement of classic gaming. We must start with relatively minor setbacks, or a few big, memorable ones, until gamers are acclimated, thus opening the door to more nuanced and authentic dramatic experience."  Ben seems to be asking for a bit more tragedy, s'il vous plait.  Do you feel up to it?

Yes, I know, we can sometimes layer on a bit of external narrative to suggest gravity (from here):

My son and I are  nearing the end of a  retro  computer game, a "bug hunt" played over many battles, days (X-Com UFO Defense) - I'm soldiering the game and he is the very occasional general.  I don't yet have the heart to tell him, we're in over our heads: we are going down...

But I see Ben's point, it is work and depressed players might be bad for business - especially in online spaces.  Thus we gravitate towards MMORPGs as Skinner Boxes and players who trip easily into crying "HAX" and "CHEAT" at the slightest perception of any disadvantage.

Are (online) gamers praised too much?  Give us your own counter-example.

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[1.]  Ben Schneider. "Losing For the Win: Defeat and Failure in Gaming."  Gamasutra, February 15, 2007.

Virtualizing the Physical

We've had several discussions in the past about comingling virtual world technologies with physical spaces to form augmented realities.  (E.g. 1, 2, 3, 4 )  To give credit where it's due, Jerry Paffendorf has often chimed in with some great links and interesting comments on this topic.  (E.g. 1, 2, 3)  From time to time, we've also discussed the increasing technological viability of virtual-real mashup games like Human Pac-Man.

This week, Nick Carr says:

There's long been talk of what John Seely Brown dubs "ecological computing" and what others call "pervasive computing" - the use of a multitude of wireless sensors to hook the physical world up to the Internet - but not much has come of the idea to date. That may be about to change, though, as the cost of sensors falls, as scientists learn more deploying them in the environment, and as military and commercial applications proliferate.

and he cites an AP article on point.

So here's an open-ish thread on this topic.  Free associate: Where is the trend headed?  What is your vision of the 10/20/100 year horizon of a pervasively wired, data-rich physical geography?   What social problems will be created?  What end-user technologies will provide the best design for an interface to the data layer? (Phones? PDAs?  Books?  Fancy sunglasses?)  And most importantly, how will being able to "see" the history, interior, value, occupancy, etc. of that building across the street make life your daily life different?

References to relevant science fiction are encouraged.

Update:  Two early commenters are pointing to their own posts on this topic.  See rikomatic (historical HUDs) and  CovertC (get the game off the small screen).

The flogging will continue

Captain Cleaver (aka Daniel James) elaborates a terse warcry in this Red Herring piece: game developers clash in a ruthless and bloody 10-year battle for control of the online game industry.  For us here, his distinction between the player-created content 'virtual world' space... (and the) entertainment (one) is intriguing.  His claim is that open-platform virtual worlds are likely to have some kind of network effect properties that lead one to dominate the landscape.  To me this seems contrary to examples in other industries, but I'll leave it to you to contemplate.  10 years?  The Trojans and Achaeans revisited, argh argh.

State of the NationStates I: Influence

I'd like to launch a series of three thought experiments in hypothetical game design by introducing you to The Incorporated States of Walkering Industries, where the nation's children are widely acknowledged as the most foul-mouthed in the region, employers may fire workers without giving any reason, citizens can be frequently spotted going about their business stark naked, and married couples must call each other "darling" or risk a fine. How did Walkering Industries get this way? Because of the decisions its leader (that's me) made in the massively multiplayer online game (but not quite virtual world) known as NationStates, in which players take the helm of individual nations, enact legislation affecting their citizens, and may join a virtual United Nations whose collective decisions also affect their virtual populations.

I bring up NationStates not to examine it as a virtual world (for indeed it is not, lacking any aspect of "presence"), but to examine in turn three interesting gameplay mechanics it incorporates, and to ask whether these might be brought into a more "worldy" MMOG (such as WoW) in an engaging and enjoyable fashion.

The first one I want to think about is known as Regional Influence.

I'll dispense with a full explanation of how NationStates works for the moment. It's very pleasingly simple, and very engaging. The best thing, of course, would be for you to go and create a nation for yourself. It's free and takes about two minutes. (And later we can band them all together and take over the world. /evilgrin)

You'll find that your nation is part of one of the almost 12,000 regions in the game (almost all of which were created by users). A NationStates region is roughly analogous to a guild. Regional founders (the player who created the region in the first place) have the power to kick nations out of the region, to ban them, or to password protect the region so that it consists only of friends. Each region may also elect a delegate to the NationStates United Nations, where legislation is drafted and voted on. Delegates' votes carry more weight than normal UN members' votes. The more endorsements a delegate has from members of its region, the more votes it gets in the UN. Thus there's a very active recruitment effort in the forums and in the form of telegrams between nations to recruit new members to regions so as to give a region's delegate more sway.

At some point in the history of the game (which was launched several years ago by Max Barry, based on his book, Jennifer Government), griefing by regional invasion became a problem. A raft of hostile nations would join an open region and vote out the UN delegate, installing their own. To combat this, a new game mechanic was introduced in April 2006, known as regional influence.

Upon joining a new region, a nation has very little influence, but accrues it daily, in proportion to the number of endorsements it has received from UN members in the region. Thus a nation that's just joined will have almost no influence, while a long-time member will have a great deal, and the UN delegate will have more than most. Regional influence also gives a region's UN delegate the power to kick nations out of the region, or to ban them altogether. But (and this is key) the delegate must spend its own influence in order to do this. Kicking out a new nation that has very little influence costs very little, while kicking out a region that has accrued a lot of influence costs a lot. This serves two purposes: it makes it inexpensive to kick out a raft of invading nations (i.e., easy to repel an invasion), and it makes it costly to kick out a long-standing nation (thus serving to constrain capricious ejections). It's a simple but effective measure to give players more control over their regions without making it too easy for them to become dictators.

Despite (or perhaps because of) its simplicity, this system of self-governance and player moderation fascinates me. The thought experiment I'd like to propose is this: Is this the kind of mechanic that could be usefully brought into an MMOG like WoW (though not necessarily WoW itself) in some interesting form? What type(s) of disruptive gameplay might be mitigated by a mechanic like this? How could one accrue influence (over time, by farming it through kills, by assisting other players, etc.)? What scope could that influence have (over a guild, a party, a zone, an NPC or NPCs, etc.)? What could it enable? Could it be useful for the governance of an in-game market mechanism like an auction house? Could it be used to control access to certain resources or areas in the game? Is there some other crazy way this could be incorporated that would make a game more interesting / engaging / fun? I invite you to let your hypothetical game designer run with this idea, and I look forward to reading your thoughts. (Experiments II and III to follow in the next week or so.)

<> 30: a new reality?

Jack Weinberg is often attributed as the source of "we don't trust anybody over 30 (1965, fn1)."   Clive Thompson introduces a piece ("Say Everything", Emily Nussbaum) from the current issue of New York magazine claiming  "(t)oday's social technologies are creating the biggest generation gap since rock and roll -- with younger people having radically different ideas than their parents about what's public and what's private."  30?  As was written, "at 26, Kitty is herself an old lady, in Internet terms."

What are the virtual world implications?

A glib line of reasoning might start like this:

1.) Your mother plays MMOs

2.) Is your father's MMO your MMO?

Superficially, we could say, yes, while the technical/design evolutionary path of the MMO may seem predictable, especially from hindsight, the user impact at every juncture is "non-linear".  So for example, the addition of integrated voice (or pick your feature) has a dramatic new effect.  Thus, by this reasoning, it will cease to be your mother's MMO.

However, a more subtle view in tune with Emily's thesis starts with dmx's comment made in Life of Game: (m)aybe it would be more appropriate to say 'Its just a performance'.  Your MMO (if you are under 26) may be your father's MMO, but how you interact with it, with your friends in and out of it, is not how your mother or father would do.  In other words, the (cell-)phone, the Internet, the MMO are the means but not the ends to the under 30, err, 26 experience.

Key to this view is the difference in how younger users might interact with each other in a new hybridization of reality -mixing the virtual and meatspace. Clive wrote "young people have adapted to the idea that information about their personal life is now porous, and not always under their control. For their generation, privacy's dead -- so they're making the best of it", Emily observes more deeply:

...In essence, every young person in America has become, in the literal sense, a public figure. And so they have adopted the skills that celebrities learn ...

...Since their early adolescence, they've learned to modulate their voice to address a set of listeners that may shrink or expand at any time: talking to one friend via instant message (who could cut-and-paste the transcript), addressing an e-mail distribution list (archived and accessible years later), arguing with someone on a posting board (anonymous, semi-anonymous, then linked to by a snarky blog). It's a form of communication that requires a person to be constantly aware that anything you say can and will be used against you, but somehow not to mind.

In comment Clive perhaps frames the issue (in comment to his post)  for here best:

Being 38 years old, I know a lot of folks in their 30s and 40s who are hardcore users of social software, for sure. But there's undeniably a qualitative difference in the way someone of my age uses this stuff, and someone who's 19 does, because someone who's 19 does not even really remember a time when these technologies weren't around.

I'm reminded of Clive's point constantly.

Recently, for example, I felt compelled to remove myself from an online player group because of a comfort they had to rely on Ventrilo for the majority of online communications.   To my 40s+ yo view of the world, this seems excessive.  Sure, many gameplay situations, e.g. combat, require voice coordination, and it is gold then.  However I do have a discomfort with the idea of having to commit to hours of low-tempo gameplay over VoIP where chit-chat is the only purpose.  The ebbing away of the distinction between the virtual and the real identity/experience feels like a loss: I don't want to hear their toilets flushing, nor do I want to have to remember to shut off my mic when my kids start fighting.

It is perhaps a generational moment, and I hear Peter (fn2):  This is reality; deal with it.

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fn1.  From Bartleby.com: "JACK WEINBERG, twenty-four year old leader of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, California, interview with San Francisco Chronicle reporter, c. 1965. "

fn2.  Reference Peter Ludlow's quote cited in Life of game:   This is reality; deal with it.

Life of game

In the "It's so easy..." discussion of last weekend, the legacy of the Alphaville Herald was a minor topic.  While the natives still leave me cool, Peter is a wise man and Henry Jenkins provides us with an opportunity for reflection - Part I of an interview.  Is it only a game?

Read it on Henry's site - "The News From Second Life: An Interview with Peter Ludlow (Part One)."  It provides an introduction for those of you unfamiliar as well as for those of you trying to recall this influential episode in online (virtual world) history. Mark Wallace frames the event in this way "Virtual Muckraker Interviewed By MIT Brain."

The part of Peter's reflection that led me to pause was this one:

The more interesting question is why people keep repeating ""only a game"" so much. If you google ""only a game"" and "Second Life" together, you get nearly 12,000 hits. It is like a mantra that people keep repeating to keep some thought or idea at bay - and I think the dangerous idea that Second Life shoves in your face every day is this: our wealth is virtual, our property is transient, and our social lives are mediated by technology, nomadic, and often fleeting. I think that when people keep saying "it''s only a game" they are really saying "the rest of my world isn''t like this: my wealth is tangible and permanent, my friendships are unmediated and also permanent." Saying "it''s only a game" is like saying "this isn''t how things really are, this is just a bad dream." People need to pinch themselves, because this ain''t no dream. This is reality; deal with it.

I am reminded of a point raised in comment by Andy Havens made in It's so easy:

We who play these games take them very, very seriously... Speak to the rock. Don't poke it. Or the milk and honey shall be denied thee.

Both Peter and Andy, in their ways, might be suggesting that the distance between the virtual and real world is not as great as some on the outside and the inside might want us to think. 

For example, those who don't play online games often claim to not understand those who do.  Yet perhaps it is also as true that those who might best be able to "get it" - the hard-core players - end up perpetuating the same misunderstanding by institutionalizing griefing, jerkdom, and other misdemeanors.  In other words, to engage in conduct online that would be hard to excuse in the real world, one must first insure its distinction.

Is it only a game or who are we fooling?

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Select links from across time:

"Playing Politics in Alphaville Disputed elections. Candidate mudslinging. Palm Beach voting irregularities. What happens when our online communities mirror reality too closely?"  Technology Review.  May 2004.

"Ludlow is Everywhere."  TN.   Feb 12, 2004

"Alphaville Herald Hits the Big Time."  TN.  Dec 14, 2003

Sony Releases Virtual Trade Statistics

Sony has released data about the first year of Station Exchange, its experiment in sanctioned RMT among players. First report by Dan Terdiman here; Raph Koster's analysis here; full press release here.

Ganking the Meaning out of Games

Steven "Play No Evil" Davis, in a great comment on Mark Wallace's thread, asked the following question:

Is griefing simply emergent play that some folks don't like?

I think this is an interesting question to pursue, and I'm going to take a somewhat provocative stance and answer "no," partly to explore some territory and partly because I think there's a case to be made against griefing that doesn't founder on a libertarian objection (i.e., that if some people do something in a low-consequence environment, then it must be fun to them/their choice, and therefore must be okay).

I should state at the outset that studying cheating, griefing, and similar topics is not a principal part of my research, and there are several esteemed folks around here that do it, so I hope to learn from them if they'd like to weigh in. Here, I'm just following through on some ideas that have been percolating on meaning and games, and how they might help us answer Steven's question.

To begin this speculation, the first thing I'm going to do is narrow the topic a fair bit. Rather than discuss "griefing" in the broad sense, I'm going to focus on one activity in MMOGs that is often seen as griefing: ganking. Very specifically, I'm talking about a human player, piloting a higher-level/better geared toon, attacking a toon that is much lower level, without any other circumstances (game objectives and narratives), histories (they, or their guilds, know each other or similar), or players (on either side) involved. This is simply the killing (frequently, one-shotting) of another toon by a vastly more powerful toon. I'm drawing my sense of this phenomenon from the open PvP servers of World of Warcraft -- other games/server types may vary considerably and interestingly.

What I would like to suggest is that this kind of PvP is meaningless. Or, perhaps more precisely, that the meaning it has is so narrow, rationalized, and improverished that it is outside of, or rejects, the game in which it is situated. Games, as ends in and of themselves, are things that can generate new meanings and experiences. For the ganker, however, ganking is a means to other ends ("Personal best crit!"), not a potentially generative new experience. (And, by the way, please keep in mind that I am not talking about all PvP -- there are many other kinds, both institutionally designed by the developer and emergent, which would not fit with the argument I'm making here.)

I'm speculating that ganking happens when a player who does not want to be challenged to play a game (i.e., encounters where the outcome is contingent), instead opts to do something where the outcome is a foregone conclusion: kill a player that is vastly lower in capabilities. If meaning is found at the meeting point of inherited systems of interpretation (cultural expectations) and the performative demands of singular circumstances (something I talked about here), then ganking is a denial of that meaning. It is a retreat from the demands of the new, and it signals a disposition that does not want to be performatively challenged. Ganking lower level players is, then, a somewhat pathetic attempt to feel, well, something. But that something is not the meaning that participating in a challenging game would create -- it is removed from that. If there is no contingency, it follows that there is no meaning -- all you have left is an impoverished environment where pointless negative reciprocity (I was ganked at L24, so I’ll gank at L60) reigns.

It might be argued against this that an environment of open PvP, rather than erasing contingency, actually spawns it, generating a wide open landscape of ganking possibility for the lower level players. This would be a way to argue that there is still a game, on a broader level, and it is a cat-and-mouse game. The difference in capabilities once the battle is joined is not in question -- the cat wins -- but the game is actually about avoiding that encounter (thanks to David Simkins for voicing this argument to me). This is an interesting way to go, and I agree that it can turn out this way, under certain game design conditions. I would argue, however (again, I'm being provocative to see where this leads), that in WoW this doesn't hold, because the architecture of the game is not very flexible about alternative places to go to accomplish objectives. The quests for any given level are in a small set of vastly distributed places, and the transportation costs (in time) for low level characters are high. This means that if someone is trying to get quests done in Stranglethorn Vale, there is not a viable game in avoiding the gankers -- they have every advantage also in the "meta" game of cat-and-mouse. For most players, this means that the ganking feels, again, like a foregone conclusion, it is only the question of when it will happen that is utterly contingent (that is, too contingent). In neither aspect is there a performative challenge for the gankee or the ganker. One is left with either too much determination, or too much chaos; either way leads to a loss of meaning.

So why does it happen at all, if it's so meaningless? To answer this, one would have to make a normative, critical claim (and goodness knows those are popular around here). One would have to say that what happens is that the game objectives get replaced by utterly personal objectives, individualistic and empty goals that are the simulacra of actual (new) meaning. Gankers, this argument would say, are getting their jollies in an endless circle of confirming their own expectations, mistaking the increasing number of notches on their belt for actual personal development. In fact, this line of reasoning would argue, they are each stuck in an iron cage of false objectives.

Now, I can spin this argument out, and understand how to get from point A to point B, and it's consistent with my experience and preferences. But, on the other hand, I have lots of friends who enjoy open PvP, even the random but inevitable ganking part of it, so I hesitate. I'm also certainly one to be wary of normative claims about other people's experiences ("Yes, yes -- you say you're having a good time, but you're really just deluding yourself").

On the other hand, the argument that if people choose to do something in these domains it is just a different "style of gameplay," and therefore morally unassailable, also rubs me the wrong way. It seems to rest not only on a separation of play from real experience (and I have a whole set of strong empirical objections to that view), but also on a modernist, individualistic ethic -- it's all about the individual experience, this seems to say, and that should be our final arbiter of all matters ethical.

I don't have any real answers here, but I'm quite taken with the notion that ganking is, effectively, not a game, and with thinking through the consequences for meaning and experience that follow from this. To what extent this could be extended to other kinds of griefing, I'm not sure, but it does seem to me that quite a few players out there actually don't seem to want to play a game at all.

MMO as Ritual?

Traditional ritual is specifically designed to trigger certain emotive, interpretive, and physical responses. Imagine the Pacific Islands ritual with heavy drumming and men in horrifying costumes of spirits believed to inhabit the island. Or the 48 hour shadow play of Indonesia where everyone is eventually exhausted while the performers tap into the beliefs, fears and desires of those watching. Or ancient Maya bloodletting and human sacrifice. Or an aria in a Cathedral. All of these experiences are enacted as a community within a larger socially constructed narrative reflecting general social beliefs and attitudes.

For most of human history, shared “entertainment” was couched in the context of a religious celebration and/or social narrative. Even village storytelling was to some extent ritualized and clearly reflected existing social values. Durkheim’s notion of “collective effervescence” was based on the idea that society is founded upon rituals designed to allow us to share interpretive experiences in order to bring us together. The contemporary social sciences interest in the phenomenology of experience also ties to the relationship between our embodied reactions, feelings, sensations, and interpretations of those experiences in a coherent framework co-created by a community.

As new social forms emerge in virtual communities such as MMOs and Second Life is it possible that we are seeking these kinds of shared experiences through these virtual worlds?

Much has been written about the non-localized community created through exposure to the same pop-cultural media. For example, we watch the latest episode of Lost on TV and that gives us something we can all talk about at work the next day.

Yet these types of cultural experiences are heavily knowledge based. We know the same information about an event on TV and can discuss theories about and feelings related to that event. Most video games fall into this same mold – I can play through Half Life 2 and I have an incredibly immersive experience. I can then share that experience and knowledge of that world with my fellow gamers that have also played Half Life 2. But, an important aspect of this shared knowledge is that it is not a shared experience.

Unlike these isolated forms of media, shared virtual spaces do allow for the co-creation of genuinely shared experiences. Not only is there a knowledge based community (we can all laugh together about Leroy Jenkins or the Peanut Butter Jelly Dance) but then we can also reinforce those ties through shared experiences that perform many of the functions that ritual performs. Our community values are shaped through guild raids, our community beliefs are co-created and reinforced as we share an epic PvP battle against the Alliance noobs.

While I do believe that virtual social spaces can and do fulfill many of the roles that ritual can, my question is to what extent can we imagine that the shared experiences and concerns, shared vocabulary, and shared mythologies constructed in virtual worlds create legitimate communities? Does that great Molten Core raid with my WoW guild create the same kinds of ties that playing hide and seek in the neighborhood might? I would love to see some fMRI or other research investigating whether playing these types of games create experiences that are more akin to reactions induced while participating in event. I do see playing an MMO as participation in a form of social ritual but I still haven’t quite decided how much I believe this can/should replace other forms of experiential community formation.

W-Hat is Emergent Gameplay?

A meta-guild -- i.e., a guild with a presence across a number of virtual worlds and/or MMOs -- allows a group to share their experiences of gameplay in various environments, and eases the process of traveling among such worlds for the individual. I don't play CoH/V, but members of my EVE Online corporation do. As a result, I have a good idea of what the game is like (a better idea than I can get from the press), and I'd have an instant group of co-adventurers should I decide to join, a group which would provide me with tips and aid to speed the process of my getting acclimated (and grinding out my time there).

But just as such groups can serve to funnel information out of virtual worlds to their members, they can also serve to bring information about the group into the virtual world, if the group culture is strong enough. One such culture is that which has arisen on SomethingAwful.com, a Web site devoted to general Internet outrageousness, satire and irreverence of all things . . . well, of all things, really, let's leave it at that.

The rule on SA seems to be, If it exists, it exists to be made fun of. There are some extremely creative minds on the site and in the accompanying forums, and if you can stomach some occasional political incorrectness, juvenilia and scatology, it can be an amusing place to check in. (Try the Missed Connections in World of Warcraft page, for instance.

What fascinates me about SA culture is the way it's manifested itself in the Something Awful meta-guild. The "Goons," as they're known, have a presence in World of Warcraft, EVE Online, Second Life, CoH/V and a number of other games, in most of which they're very active. (There are more than 90,500 users registered on their forums.) In each case that I know of, the edge-of-offensive SA forum culture (sometimes way over the edge) has replicated itself in the native terms of the world in which they're playing, creating what are to me some really interesting examples of emergent gameplay.

In Second Life, the Something Awful Goons are known as "W-Hats," after a forum meme that would get you banned for using the word "what." Members and past members of the W-Hat groups there have been responsible for some of the most outrageous builds in all the virtual world -- including satirizations of the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the assassination attempt on the pope. They are also among the most creative and talented builders and scripters in the world, however. A rotating gallery of their creations can be found in the Baku region.

Being outrageous in Second Life is no great accomplishment, to be sure. More interesting to me is the GoonSwarm alliance in EVE Online, which boasts almost 2,600 pilots (or about 1,500 players, by EVE alt averages). While the Goons can't help but hew to EVE's game mechanics, they do so in their own way: they make gleeful zergling suicide runs at enemies and are regularly accused of using exploits to gain an edge. They color as far outside the lines as the game will let them -- as they do everywhere. The in-game profile of one Goon I encountered in EVE summed it up nicely (I paraphrase): "You may be playing EVE Online, but be warned: we are playing Something Awful."

That profile line is very telling: For the Goons, it's Goon culture that comes first, and game culture a not-very-close second. Is this somehow a failing of the games currently available? Is it a mark of how strong the SA culture actually is? Outrageousness aside, is this a desirable condition for a meta-guild? If so, is it something developers could build for or seek somehow to promote? Or would that merely extend the boundaries, and necessitate even more creativity from those who will always seek to bring something more to a virtual world than the world itself could ever offer?

It's so easy, Gamemasters

I once asked "(w)hat do Julian Kucklich, T.E. Lawrence, The Alphaville Herald, and Linda Rondstadt have in common", suggesting one of the pitfalls of "going native" is that it risks a laziness (if not hubris) among the collaborators that works against considering alternative points of view.

A recent Eve-Online controversy asks the same question but for a different context.  Do Gamemasters (GMs) too run the risk of "going native"? 

On Jan 31 there began what became a 26 + 24+ page Eve-Online forum discussion (at the time of this writing) under the provocative banner of "Allegations of Dev Misconduct."  This is how it began (CCP is the developer of Eve-Online):

CCP is aware there are members of the community concerned over allegations of Dev misconduct coming from a third party message board and those community members are intent upon getting 'their story out to the people'. CCP has investigated, and will continue to investigate allegations of misconduct and take actions accordingly. This instance is no different from past investigations that have resulted in actions ranging from permanent game bans to termination of employment...

kieron
Community Manager,
EVE Online

Fair enough.

As it is a slow Saturday night I skimmed most of the nearly 700 contributions forwarded by readers.  I take it at face value that CCP is investigating and speculation on our part is likely not helpful.   It is useful to point out, however, that at least some of the allegations involve actions that could have widespread (if subtle) impact on the game world (fn1) - one reason why this is different from the usual run-of-the mill claims of GMs gone bad in other worlds (occurs all the time).

What struck me was discussion sprinkled throughout of this theme, bluntly:

PLEASE REMOVE -GAME MASTERS- FROM THE -GAME- WORLD!  (fn2)

So I'll ask you, good readers.  Is the GM institution - as a system of developer-invested player authorities - a corrupting anachronism in virtual world community design.  If not, why not.  If so, are there better models and technologies for managing online game world communities than deputizing players and tempting them with the natives?   

It's so easy to fall in love
It's so easy to fall in love
People tell me love's for fools
Here I go breaking all the rules

-Linda Ronstadt

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

fn1.  E.g. the claims that GMs biased the lottery of Tech 2 Blue Print (T2 BPs) lottery to favor certain groups.  T2 BPs bestow substantial and often long-term economic advantages to its owners.

fn2.  Posted - 2007.01.31 23:01:00 - [661]

/Ed  2/08/06 - CCP provides an update in the Eve-Online forums (Concerning the Recent Allegations of Developer Misconduct) - below.  A rebuttle of sorts can be seen here.

/Ed 2/12/06 - From comment below.  Hilmar Veigar Petursson's (CEO CCP) report.    The confession.

Discipline & Pwnage

So I've been having my usual beginning-of-the-semester chats with my graduate students about their projects and progress. I enjoy these, and I think they do to (they almost never complain about the thumbscrews, or -- more of a shock -- having to read Habermas). One of them, Krista-Lee Malone, is a master's student and long-time gamer who is completing an excellent thesis about hardcore raiding guilds. During our chat she said something about how these raiding guilds went about preparing her to participate in their activities, and it prompted me to follow up on some ideas from here. It's about Foucault, bodies, institutions, and whether the relationship between developers and guilds is changing in important ways.

Krista-Lee plays a priest (one with more purples than I'll ever see for my druid, I'm sure), and what she said was (paraphrasing), "I can healbot Molten Core in my sleep, but if I'm thrown into a new situation, I can't heal at all." While that's probably an overstatement, it suggests something about the nature of raiding guild discipline -- at least, pre-TBC. It turns out, and this is not unusual, that the guild power-leveled her toon and then taught her to follow a very specific and detailed script for the instances they were running, starting with UBRS and then through Naxx.

Michel Foucault famously argued that the power of modern institutions is driven, at root, by the ability to discipline people, or, more directly, to discipline their bodies -- to mold those bodies and order their actions in ways that allow groups to achieve institutional objectives effectively. To do this, they draw on practical techniques developed first in places like early Christian monasteries and the Roman legions. Bodies are organized, regimented, taught to sit, to stand, to kneel, to match their singular shapes to the demands of regularity -- no pinky out of place, the leg held just so. The effect of this "bio-power", as he most convincingly shows in Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, is not only effective institutional control over otherwise unruly subjects, but in fact a re-shaping of their selves. They come to see this discipline as consitutive of who they are, as shaping their very desires. The classic (and idealized -- practice is messier) example is the panopticon, where prisoners are architecturally situated in view of an invisible and authoritative observer. The guard watches from in a darkened room while they are laid out in a brightly-lit Cartesian grid. It comes to matter little if the guard is there at all, as the prisoners internalize the surveillance.

I'm not saying that Krista-Lee was a prisoner of her guild. Um, exactly. Foucault argues (in later works) that this disciplining of bodies is something taking place all around us, particularly as we learn to act within highly-regulated contexts, like schools, the military, hospitals, and airports. And, like the prisoners, he asserts that we come to accept and even celebrate the kind of self the institutions have made of us.

All of this is to get us thinking about to what extent hardcore raiding guilds should be seen in a similar light. The essence of disciplined bodies is that they are malleable; they can be shaped to perform in lock-step (literally) under a command hierarchy. The tension, of course, is that this strategic control always involves a tradeoff with the tactical, the ability of a group to respond on the fly, to emergent situations. For Krista-Lee, this effect was directly discernible -- while she enjoys soloing and quest-grouping, she felt lost in new instances, when there wasn't an explicit script to follow.

As I've pointed out, for WoW, this had -- before the expansion -- created a mutually constructive relationship between the 5(10)-person instancing and the large-scale raiding. While small-scale grouping not only allows for, it depends upon, tactical rethinking on the fly, large-scale groups narrow and leverage the set of available class skills (maybe hunters begin to leave pets behind, druids get pushed into healing, only one hemo rogue is called for) into more strictly-defined roles. The small-scale was, perhaps like boot camp in the military, an intense and necessary part of enculcating a set of competencies (what is a pull, sheeping, aggro), but one that ultimately is left behind, smaller in comparison to the institutional ambitions which these competent bodies now serve to realize. Rationalized systems of resource distribution, like DKP, along with political structures and communications tools, play a role as well for these institutions, harnessing individual desire into organizational discipline, to get the 40 people needed together all at one time, ready to down Onyxia, or tackle a world boss.

The reason I think this is particularly interesting for us to think about now are the cases of both WoW and Second Life and some of the recent changes these VWs have undergone. The downsizing of endgame instances in WoW, the availability of soloable loot roughly on a par with Tier 1+ in Outland, and (to my unsystematic eye) the prevalence of small group quests there with excellent rewards, all suggest that Blizzard's moving away from supporting the emerging institutions (guilds) of its creation, ones which had dominated server culture for pretty much the whole game. This is an interesting contrast with past TN conversations, like the one here.

By contrast, the revamped estate tools in SL (which I'm sure many folks out there know more intimately than I), increase the amount of governance by island owners not only over a piece of property, but also over a group of people, and in fact these tools have thereby become deeply intertwined. To my eye, this enables the generation of institutional players on the SL landscape that LL has never had to deal with before. I'm not thinking first of the existing external institutions with a "presence" in SL, but rather of those entities that until recently we could somewhat reliably continue to think of as individuals, but which are now better understood as institutions. While the relationship of LL to some of its major content creators has been undoubtedly cozy, one can't help but wonder how long that will last -- institutions are competitive. The interesting thing about Second Life is the extent to which Linden Lab has had a "free-ride" for a long time, effectively being the only large institutional player in the arena. Social convention was emergent from the users, and was (is) something with which to contend -- a lot of time at Linden is devoted to this "community management". But architecture, the market, and "law" (others modes of governance, as I see it) were all firmly in Linden's hands. That's changing now, and the question is whether Second Life will fly apart at the seams once these other institutionalized interests find their footing.

All this is really just to wonder whether we're entering an era where the relationships between virtual world makers and the people involved them are changing. It is probably wise for us to get in the habit of thinking just as readily about developer/(in-world) institution relationships as we do about developer/individual player relationships. I actually think this will be a hard habit to break -- the idea of the game maker/game player relationship as primarily institution-to-individual is just one instance of the engrained tendency for those in industrialized societies to think about social institutions primarily as they relate to individuals.

WoW and SL both demonstrate, at a very broad level, different solutions to the emergence of institutions within their creations, an emergence that was, I believe, inevitable once resources began accumulating within these persistent and contingent domains. Foucault, like Weber, thought that people banding together to accomplish something was fine, but was wary of what happens next. Once any nascent institution begins looking for something else to accomplish, its primary raison d'etre has already changed. At that point, it's more interested in its own reproduction than in its original aims or purview. Once that happens, look out.

[Addendum: Ever-alert Julian Dibbell points to ShaunConnery's Rapwing Lair. Surely the script in Krista-Lee's guild never sounded so good.]

Asymmetric Play

Ernest Adam's piece "The Designer's Notebook: Asymmetric Peacefare" on Gamasutra offers a reminder of how games that are more "real" are more likely to be more asymmetric than those that are not.  It also harkens to earlier discussion on the politicization of games ("I Ran"): is asymmetry fun?

By asymmetric, PeaceMaker is of the most pronounced category - the sides are different (Israelis vs. Palestinians) composed of very different and hard-to-balance design elements.  With these sorts of game designs, play balance is typically less a goal than the exploration of a design space that corresponds to a real world circumstance.   PeaceMaker is also a first person game in the great tradition (as Ernest points out) of Chris Crawford's classic "Balance of Power." 

Could there be a successful MMOG that were by design profoundly unbalanced?  Or must such explorations be left to the domain of single player games.

Examples, counter-examples?

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

PeaceMaker, the game, other press, the team. 

/Ed 2/3, Scott Jennings has an insightful review.  I especially like his reference to Hidden Agenda, the other important precursor - a 1988 political simulation game.

February Guest Mark Wallace

We're happy to welcome journalist Mark Wallace as a guest author on Terra Nova this February.  Mark runs 3pointD.com, where he blogs about virtual worlds, massively multiplayer online games and the broader metaverse. His writing on 3D online technologies and other subjects has appeared in Wired, The New York Times and many other publications.

(NB: This month's Wired has an excellent article by Mark about MTV's Virtual Laguna Beach -- previous TN discussion here.)

As Second Life resident Walker Spaight, he is an editor of the Second Life Herald (which Ted once called the first "virtual free press") and with Herald founder Urizenus Sklar (aka University of Michigan philosophy professor Peter Ludlow), he is co-author of the forthcoming book, The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Newspaper That Witnessed the Birth of the Metaverse.

Mark's first gaming experiences, like my own, were back in the days when computers spat out punch cards and games had simple titles like ADVENT.  And a PDP-11 was cutting edge.

Mark is also an original cast member of SecondCast, a weekly podcast on Second Life that is now entering its second year with an audience of more than 10,000 listeners.

In 1991, Mark dropped out of college for the fifth and last time.

February Guest Jen Dornan

We're excited to welcome Dr. Jennifer Dornan as our first 2007 guest author on Terra Nova.  Jen is an anthropologist and game industry writer who will be posting some of her thoughts about MMOGs during the month of February.  We asked her to write a brief description of her work and background.  She did that and threw in a guessing game for good measure:

I’m a cultural/historical anthropologist that found myself applying my theoretical work in neruo-psychology and social theory to my long bouts of MMO playing as I avoided writing my dissertation. After completing my PhD (in record time, which I attribute to City of Heroes), I’ve spent the last 2 years teaching at a few universities, writing and designing for various game companies, freelancing as a multi-media producer/writer, and for some reason seem to move back and forth between Texas and California on a regular basis. 

I’m very in interested in the cultural implications of virtual worlds and expect the study of MMOs and other virtual worlds to continue gaining legitimacy within the hallowed halls of academia.  My fervent wish is that there will be increased communication between the people actually making games and the people studying them.   

Since I’m new here, everyone is welcome to guess which of the five following things I have not done:  

1. Bathed in chicken blood then had a Senegalese shaman give me a forehead hickey.  
2. Killed a highly poisonous snake in the jungles of Central America with my machete.  
3. Investigated Felony 1 murders in Washington DC.  
4. Learned how to climb a betel nut tree and prepare yummy taro dinners in Micronesia.  
5. Eaten bull testicles in Indonesia in order to avoid offending my host.

Let the guessing begin!  :-)