Terra Nova

April Guest Florence Chee

We're happy, nay, delighted, to announce that Florence Chee will be joining us as a guest blogger on Terra Nova during the month of April.   You may be able to spot Florence in the picture at right, obviously taken at considerable risk to the photographer.

For those unfortunate enough not to know Florence, some biographical detail follows.

Florence Chee is a PhD Candidate in the School of Communication and Researcher at the Centre for Policy Research on Science and Technology (CPROST) and the Applied Communication and Technology (ACT) Lab at Simon Fraser University. As a communication anthropologist, her research interests focus on the ethnographic investigation of how users define themselves socially amidst their technologies and lived realities. Her field research looks at enabling factors of online game play such as culture, social structure, infrastructure, and policy factors in gaming hotbeds like Korea.

April Guest Elizabeth Townsend-Gard

We're happy, nay delighted, to welcome Elizabeth Townsend Gard and Rachel Goda as guest-bloggers this month on Terra Nova.  They'll be writing about  Fizzy Soderberg, Second Life, and first-year Property law.  You'll have to stay tuned for the details, but if you want a preview of the topic, check out this site. 

We'd like to thank Elizabeth and Rachel for visiting.  We're looking forward to some good conversations!

Elizabeth Townsend Gard is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Seattle University School of Law, and as of July 1, 2007, will be an Associate Professor at Tulane University Law School.  She holds a Ph.D. in European Intellectual and Cultural History from UCLA, and a J.D./LL.M. from the University of Arizona.  She is currently a non-resident fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, as well as Justice Faculty Fellow at Seattle University School of Law.

H. Rachel Goda is a second year law student at Seattle University. After majoring in Business Administration at the University of California at Berkeley she worked for Arthur Andersen as a management consultant. She is interested in researching legal issues surrounding virtual worlds, Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG), and video/PC games. Specifically: intellectual property issues, property issues, constitutional issues, and other cutting edge areas which current laws have not caught up with. Ms. Goda is originally from Japan and is fluent in Japanese.

Matters of State

This day started with the Washington Post reporting (registration required) this incident in Second Life:

...protesters attacked the cyberspace headquarters of extremist French presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen... Protesters fought back with pig grenades, firing fat pink porkers that exploded in neon pink

Apparently all four major candidates in France's presidential election have offices in Second Life.   Mark Wallace also reports that the US State Department is vaguely considering a Second Life project.

Both of these stories, in their ways, harken to the ambitions behind USDS's Internet Freedom Task Force ( 1. , 2. ):  a vibrant global community best serves everyone.  If cyberspace is a useful medium to facilitate information freedom, power to it.  While on this tack I must mention the efforts of Joshua Fouts and Douglas Thomas and USC's Annenberg's Center for Public Diplomacy (e.g. ref here).

I'm not sure why game-y worlds don't seem as favored for organizing these sort of liasons as Second Life - sure, one needs to get beyond the game world misunderstandings and frictions.  Probably some of it has to do with the occasional developer missteps in segregating player groups.  Yet let's be optimistic.  Power - err pwn! - on everyone!

Money and everything

Sara Grimes, Torill Mortenson, kids, and money.

Sara Grimes wrote in The Escapist ( "Mining the game: when marketing and gaming meet, they do a lot more than advertise" ):

Kids' online games present a particularly rich case study for understanding the mechanisms of advergaming because - for the most part - they have been allowed to flourish there unchallenged. Even though children's personally identifiable information, like their names and addresses, is protected in many regions under national privacy legislation, there is currently no legal framework in place that regulates the online collection of other types of data - even though consumer trends and opinions are often what interest marketers the most.

Torill Mortenson on this point forwards the wise note:

I am not saying it is wrong, but it... needs to be questioned, discussed and explored methodologically and ethically.

Some of the details of the essay seem glib - the "spyware" claims are more complex and ambiguous than presented.  However, the total depiction resonates. The issue with subtle change is that noone notices as it happens and thus the questions get pushed to the end of the process. With what concerns our children, however, seems like a good hat-rack upon which to hang our questions now.

My sense is that this is a facet of a larger structural transformation of the online virtual world marketplace.  Perhaps very soon we're all going to wake up and think that dad's subscription-based virtual world wasn't so bad.  Of course if the trend-line is as Julian suggests and we increasingly look to Asia for how things work in these spaces, fat chance.

IMO, the problem with highly monetized virtual world experiences is as that old saw goes: money ruins everything.

The face of information

What do "Big Mamie", Wooden Ships and Iron Men (the board game), and Eve Online fleet combat reify?   Lag, but not in the way you might think.

A few weeks ago I had the excellent fortune of staying overnight on the USS Massachusetts (BB-59, at her museum berth at Battleship Cove). Her keel was laid in 1939, launched on September 1941, commissioned on May 1942, decomissioned on March 1947.  She served with distinction in WWII.  Yet, she reflected a design that was limited by the London Naval Treaty of 1936 - the South Dakota class of battleship was quickly eclipsed by the Iowa class battleship later in the war.  Ultimately, of course, all BBs were then eclipsed by the aircraft carrier.

A striking point involves the considerable distance of time spanning concept to design (to the original strictures of the Second London Naval Treaty), design modification (treaty politicking), commissioning, and subsequent modifications made during the war in response to changing naval warfare environment (radar, more anti-aircraft).

I used to play Wooden Ships and Iron Men - the classic Avalon Hill naval simulation board wargame (18th and 19th century sailing vessels).  The rules were simple, but the effects of simulated wind in confounding the best laid formations and plan made a lasting impression on me.  I'm not sure, however, whether Nelson had the difficulties I had in maintaining formation in large fleets: it seemed to always degenerate into a furball of broken sail and a frenzy of ship boardings.  My difficulties I attributed to some gap separating simulation (rules) and a more continuous reality.

I vaguely recall an optional rule set for simulating command lag in large fleets of sailing ships.  These rules sought to simulate semaphor communications in fleets of those times.  From the admiral's ship the sailing commands would be issued, however it would take time for those orders to disseminate throughout the fleet.  The visual effect of propagating course change amongst all the ships was mesmerizing.  A critical element of strategy here (which I never mastered) was being able to successfully anticipate the lag effects and avoid entangling one's fleet while at the same time sheparding them to some location to achieve an advantage over an opponent. 

"Big Mamie's" design reflected pre-war warfare assumptions (battleships) and was shaped by treaty commitments (Second London Naval Treaty).  Semaphor simulation in Wooden Ships and Iron Men saw information as more dynamic - a form eroded from successive waves of process and effect.  For example, a simulated fleet would be more often than not be operating in a conflicted state (e.g. 1/2 operating under the former orders, and 1/2 operating under the latest orders).  Yet even here, as complicated as this was, one could still visualize the "shape" of the information flow as it moves across the map.

I'm sketching a longer piece on how I perceive information and strategy dynamically interrelate in Eve-Online. To illustrate some of the complexity.  Consider a not uncommon example: a 250+ person (blue team only) raid that stretches multiple systems, 4+ hours, involving (at least) four squads, 5+ text channels, voice channels, multiple (and staged) sub-goals, and yes consider the gradual (and dramatic) degeneration of communications discipline (as evening drags on) on different channels at different rates.  Yet, it somehow comes together (sorta).

This question begs the next logical step stretching from Big Mamie, to Wooden Ships and Iron Men, to Eve-Online now, to the future MMOG.

At what point will games, strategy, and information relationships with players break down?  At what point will players run stark naked mad - or optimistically, at what point will games need to face "better information" over "more information."  What will that face look like?

If you have early thoughts on this subject enter them here.

Prodigal Players

Via BoingBoing, news surfaces of a Chinese MMO that is inviting banned players back into the fold if they agree to donate blood.  That's real life blood, of course.  1 pint of blood = 1 restored game account.  Platelets FTW!

Coldwell Banker selling homes in Second Life

With due respect to Cory, it's well known that there's a fair amount of PR-hype around Second life.  (See Reuters and Ren on the hype cycle.)  I think I've been as skeptical of Second Life news stories as anyone (except perhaps Clay Shirky).  Yet while I have not drunk the Kool-aid they're handing out at Linden, sometimes one of the many self-promoting Second Life-related press releases I chance upon is really striking.  Case in point is this one: As reported by Fortune, Coldwell Banker is now selling land in Second Life. 

Well, okay, I'll drink just a little of the Kool-Aid, because this is so weirdly metaversal -- if it were not marketing, it would surely qualify as performance art.

Three years ago, I don't think I would have dared to imagine that a real realty company would be, at this time, entering into the business of buying and selling virtual real estate.  While I have been telling people for a while now that I believe that virtual property is more like property (e.g. real estate) than intellectual property, I have never felt that virtual real estate is or should be treated like (real) real estate.  As Dan and I have explained in our work, there's a family resemblance between virtual property and property, but there are some very important reasons to hesitate before treating virtual property like real (or chattel) property.

Rather than contemplate on these philosophical fine points, it seems Coldwell Banker has seized the day.

Or has it?  I've got to wonder what exactly Coldwell Banker is doing here and what kind of deal it has with Linden Labs (presumably there is some contractual arrangement).  Second Life advertises on its splash page "Own Virtual Land."  But if you buy virtual "land," do you "own" it like you own real land?  Certainly not, according to Second Life's lawyer.  In a comment on the Bragg v. Linden virtual property lawsuit Second Life counsel Ginsu Yoon was reported as saying: "The term 'virtual' may not have a strict legal interpretation, but if anything it means that the thing being described is NOT whatever comes after the word 'virtual.'"  In other words, you're buying something when you buy land in Second Life, but you're not buying land.

But take a look at this Coldwell Banker press release and, as you read it, try to figure out what, if anything, is meant to be taken seriously:

Company Leads Real Estate Industry Into Virtual Future

PARSIPPANY, N.J. (March 23, 2007) – With the 3-D virtual world of Second Life® having become an online phenomenon, Coldwell Banker Real Estate Corporation today announced that it is the first national real estate company to sell homes within the community. Offering houses in a variety of architectural styles and the ability to tour neighborhoods with a real estate professional, Coldwell Banker® is reinforcing its mission to ensure that everyone can achieve the dream of homeownership, whether on Main Street or in the metaverse...

One of the more popular activities within Second Life is the purchase and rental of virtual land, so players can build their own stores, homes and event sites.

Coldwell Banker has an inventory of more than 500 homes on 550,000 square meters in the Ranchero section of the Second Life mainland, one of the largest home developments in this virtual world. These virtual homes will vary in price based on size and style, including southwestern, colonial and contemporary, among others. In addition, Coldwell Banker is offering homes perched atop a picturesque hill overlooking the ocean. Second Life residents can meet with a Coldwell Banker sales associate avatar in the brand’s virtual office and schedule an appointment to tour virtual properties of interest. Homebuyers who close a purchase with Coldwell Banker will receive free “virtual furniture” for their new home as a closing gift...

“Rather than having to negotiate for top dollar with Second Life ‘land barons,’ users can visit our virtual office and interact with our virtual sales associate to buy homes from Coldwell Banker at reasonable rates,” Young continued. “Ironically, Colbert Coldwell, and later Benjamin Banker, founded our company after seeing similar practices in 1906 San Francisco. Coldwell Banker was founded just 18 weeks after the earthquake largely because our founders saw the need for ethics and integrity in assisting victims of the devastation who were being preyed upon by unsavory businesspeople. We want to do the same thing in Second Life: give residents the opportunity to participate in fair and reasonable real estate transactions."

There's just so much in that for the mind to boggle over that I don't know what to say.  That last line is tongue-in-cheek, right?  Or is it?

In any event, this one worked.  A genuinely uncanny metaversal moment.  Way to go, Second Life and Coldwell Banker -- you got my attention.

Update: In the first comment, Andy, our faithful marketing commenter, points out that this is essentially a 3-D advertisement for Coldwell Banker's offline services.  That's what my cynical side says too -- if it's not all a 3-D advertisement, it is at least partially that.  Yet if that's true, then I think most of the press release, especially that last line, should not be taken at face value.  Yet Andy also says that if Coldwell's virtual agents provide bad advice to Second Life home buyers, this marketing effort might backfire. 

So here's another question: what mistakes might these agents make?  (Other than not showing up.)  What kind of service would you expect from a virtual home broker in Second Life?  Find you a good neighborhood?  Direct Furries to Furry-friendly neighborhoods and the rest of us away?  (Does the Fair Housing Act apply to Second Life?)

Should they counsel you away from buying homes with doors and a slanted roof?  How many baths do you need?  Should they inspect for defects?  I guess people won't care much about the school districts... 

In short, would any of the skills of a real real estate agent seriously translate into Second Life?  And if not, what skills might you want from a buyer's agent in Second Life?

Update 2: From my quick tour of the offices, it seems that on day two of this venture, nobody is holding down the Coldwell fort.  I couldn't find anyone to talk with, except the virtual dog, pictured above.  The dog didn't say much.  But weekends are a pretty busy time -- maybe the sales staff were all out showing properties?  Maybe. 

Ah, well, so much for the Kool-Aid...

How American Is It?

I recently read, on a mailing list populated by astonishingly clever people, an assertion that will no doubt strike a lot of you as astonishingly misinformed: "Almost 100 percent" of online worlds, the writer claimed, are created in the United States. To which, you might think, a hearty "Not!" would have been sufficient reply, but being the inveterate statistics geek I am, I felt compelled to offer a more numerically precise rejoinder, and after an hour or two of data sifting I had my answer:

It's more like 61.5 percent, actually.  At most.

Like all the best statistics, of course, this is a highly debatable number, contingent on data that are themselves a morass of contingencies. But in this case I've drawn my figures from the most reliable source we have (alas): Bruce Sterling Woodcock's in-depth but incomplete MMOGCHART.COM, an informal industry survey whose roster of commercial MMO titles, though last updated in mid 2006, is about as comprehensive as it gets. And though Sir Bruce doesn't break the list down by nation of origin, a little follow-up research on Wikipedia et al. was enough to do the job: Of the 39 titles on the list (not counting sequels), 24 -- or 61.538% -- were developed by U.S. companies.

There are other ways to slice it of course. If you leave out U.S. games with non-U.S. publishers (France's Vivendi and Ubisoft, for instance, market several U.S.-made MMOs, as does Korea's NCSoft), the number of red-white-and-blue titles goes down to 17, or less than 45%.

And none of these numbers tell us anything about the relative market presence of U.S.-made games. If you look at the market-share chart for subscription-based MMOs, you see World of Warcraft (a Franco-U.S. production) with a crushing 52.9%. But even with WoW pulling that much weight, U.S.-made games get only 61.3% of the market. Games developed in Korea, the U.K., Japan, Iceland, and France get 34.3% (with the remaining 3.3% swept into an unalyzable "All others" category).

And remember that this is only subscription-based games. There is a hugely popular class of Asian MMOs that get their revenues from item sales and so forth, and Sir Bruce lists them separately, since it's hard to compare 'active subscribers' to the 'average concurrent users' figure typically used to measure these games. But back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that adding these games in to the mix would create a picture in which U.S. MMOs' market share is considerably less than 50%.

Keep in mind, too, that Sir Bruce, for whatever reason, doesn't even mention several very popular online game worlds aimed at children or teens, such as Neopets, Club Penguin, and Habbo Hotel. These three come off the top of my head, and their creators are, respectively, British, Canadian, and Finnish.

But finally, lest all you non-quants out there think I've gone irrevocably over to the dark side, let me add that I'm aware there are other ways of thinking about American dominance of the MMO space. Made by Americans or not, it might be argued, the vast majority of online games are modeled on games of American origin, shot through with U.S.-inflected cultural types and tropes.

To which I can only say: Whatever. Even ignoring the heavily Asian mythoi of a lot of the new Korean and Chinese games, and even granting that the "mainstream" of MMO history may be dominated by American games like Ultima Online and EverQuest, that history passes inevitably through the primeval choke points of MUD1 and Dungeons and Dragons, the one a British product to the bone, the other created by American wargamers obsessed with the works of the most vigorous literary avatar of Englishness since Kipling -- J.R.R. Tolkien.

But I digress, and sometimes it really is better to let the numbers speak for themselves.

 

"What is missing is the chaos of battle"

Keith Stuart (Guardian games blog) posts a fine interview with Malcom Davis on "what a military expert thinks about modern combat games."  It provides us with a frame of reference to measure previous discussions related to combat in commercial MMOGs.

Read the full article on the Guardian site.

Quoting Malcom: I think that consumer military simulations are never going to be totally realistic because ultimately people don't really die or get injured, and thus the fear element is never going to be there.

1.  Permadeath.

Albeit vaguely related - one must mention the eternally controversial idea in commercial MMO design: permadeath (ref TN: "New York Times on Permadeath").  For the industry's steady rebuttle I'll cite Damion's eloquent pieces from a few years back (1. 2. ): "I  love the Terranova guys. I follow the site closely. But it seems that every fourth thread or so goes into wonkland."

2. Misuse of the "war" analogy.

I've commented on what I perceived to be the inappropriate use of the analogy of "war" to rationalize controversial conduct in MMOGs (PvP combat, ref "The Fallacy of War").

3. Pseudo-Heroism.

Will Rogers once said “We can't all be heroes, because somebody has to sit on the curb and applaud when they go by".  The Achille's heal of the MMOG combat system (MMOG vs Red Orchestra, ref "Statistical Heroism").

4.  Gnawing at the Big One

Malcom: I think one type of warfare missing from computer games, which may be used in the future is the weapons of mass destruction

Not there yet, but trying...  (Eve-Online, ref Strangelove)

Add your own below!

Ludium II Announcement

Details on Ludium II below the fold.

Press Release March 21, 2007

MAIN CONTACT: Kim Fatten, kfatten@indiana.edu

CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT: LUDIUM II
June 22-23

Bloomington

Indiana

"Synthetic Worlds and Public Policy"

 

Bloomington, IndianaSynthetic worlds – million-player online environments with genuine markets, societies, and cultures – are exploding in size and significance. Real world governments around the globe are beginning to grapple with their implications in the areas of taxation, intellectual property laws, consumer rights, addiction, violence, and more. Should synthetic worlds be controlled by developers, or by governments, or both? What about the rights of users? What general norms should legislatures and courts follow? Most experts believe that decisions in the next few years will set the terms for these interactive spaces for generations to come. To encourage the thoughtful development of policy wisdom now, and to help prevent catastrophic policy mistakes in the next few years, the Synthetic Worlds Initiative at

Indiana

University

will focus its second Ludium conference on the topic of Synthetic Worlds and Public Policy.

Ludium II will bring together experts on virtual worlds from academia, industry, and government to play a live-action political game leading to an extremely serious, timely, and important contribution: a consensus Platform of 10 Statements answering the question "What policies should real world governments have with regards to synthetic worlds?" The hope is that this Platform will provide answers when legislatures and administrators wonder what to do in response to the critical public issues that will be raised by these unique social technologies.

 

The consensus Platform will emerge from the game CONVENTION that has been designed specifically to help disparate groups of people come to common understandings. The game, designed by Studio Cypher LLC, puts conference attendees in the role of delegates to a political party convention whose objective is to hammer out a common platform. CONVENTION’s incentives will lead the group to a set of policy recommendations believed by most participants to be important, sensible, and feasible. The rules of the game are available at

http://arden.blogs.com/swn/2007/03/ludium_ii_annou.html

Please direct comments and questions about the rules to Studio Cypher's Lead Designers Nathan Mishler (nmmishle@indiana.edu) and Will Emigh (wemigh@indiana.edu).

After the conference, the consensus conference Platform will be published as an open letter, and sent directly to all major political candidates and officer-holders in the

United States

.

 

REGISTRATION for Ludium II will open on April 23, 2007. A Call for Participation will be released at that time. Because the conference is organized as a live game, registration is limited. For updates, check the Synthetic Worlds Initiative website at http://swi.indiana.edu/ludium.htm . Please direction questions about registration and participation to Kim Fatten (kfatten@indiana.edu) or Bridget Agabra (BridgetAG@lyrael.net).

 

We look forward to welcoming you at Ludium II.

Edward Castronova, Conference Chair
Kim Fatten, Conference Organizer
Bridget Agabra, Conference Advisor

Beam Me In, Scotty

If the forthcoming Star Trek MMO isn't enough to satisfy your fantasies for epic space travel (or if you just like your MMOs served up with a healthy side of RL-relevant content), then do we have some news for you! 

TN guest author Mark Wallace has posted a nice piece about NASA's plans to develop an educational space MMO.  They have earmarked budgeted $3 million and have put out a call for proposals for the project.  It's all part of a larger strategy to increase public awareness and occupational interest in the space program - like the 1960s Star Trek  and Buck Rogers, but for the 21st century, seducing a whole new crop of impressionable young minds into being scientists, engineers, astronauts and such:

To accomplish the VSE goals of returning to the moon and going beyond to Mars, NASA must find ways to enhanced science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. This intramural call for proposal ideas seeks to develop a persistent, online, synthetic environment that will support NASA's STEM education goals and allow millions more American to share in the experience of NASA science and exploration virtually.

...NASA faces the prospect of having an insufficiency of trained professionals in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields to fulfill the Vision for Space Exploration. The shortage of a highly skilled technical workforce is not a NASA-unique problem, but one faced by the Nation as a whole. It is shortsighted to think that NASA should expect to attract a greater proportion of a shrinking pool of new STEM graduates in the near future. The best course for NASA and the Nation is to expand the overall number of STEM graduates. Increasing the STEM graduate pool requires either guiding more students onto paths that lead to STEM degrees, increasing the percentage of students on those pathways that complete STEM degrees, or both.

It occurs to me that various military organizations could similarly leverage the rabid faction-orientation of games like World of Warcraft and get people riled up about fighting enemies, etc.   What ever happened to all of those military MMO projects anyway?

There's still a month to register your intent if you'd like to put in a proposal!  You might consider spending some quality time prepping your pitch, too...

New Paper on the "Virtual Tax" Question

You can find the full draft here.

The paper is by Leandra Lederman at Indiana University School of Law-Bloomington (Josh's colleague).  The title is 'Stranger than Fiction': Taxing Virtual Worlds.          

Abstract:     

Virtual worlds, including massive multi-player on-line role-playing games (game worlds), such as City of Heroes, Everquest, and World of Warcraft, have become popular sources of entertainment. Game worlds provide scripted contexts for events such as quests. Other virtual worlds, such as Second Life, are unstructured virtual environments that lack specific goals but allow participants to socialize and engage virtually in such activities as shopping or attending a concert. Many of these worlds have become commodified, with millions of dollars of real-world trade in virtual items taking place every year. Most game worlds prohibit these real market transactions, but some worlds actually encourage it. Second Life, for example, grants participants intellectual property rights in their creations.

Although it seems intuitively the case that someone who accepts real money for the transfer of a virtual item should be taxed, what about the player who only accumulates items or virtual currency within a virtual world? Is valuable "loot" acquired in a game taxable, as a prize or award is? And is the profit in a purely in-game trade or sale for virtual currency taxable? This is an important set of questions, given the tax revenues at stake. Although the Internal Revenue Service has not yet attempted to tax transactions within virtual worlds, it is aware of the issue, and there is pressure on the government to determine how to resolve it, given that the economies of some virtual worlds are comparable to those of small countries. The Joint Economic Committee has announced that it is studying the issue.

Most people's intuition probably would be that accumulation of assets within a "game" should not be taxed even though the federal income tax applies even to non-cash accessions to wealth. This Article argues that federal income tax law and policy support that result. Loot "drops" in game worlds should not be treated as taxable prizes and awards, but rather should be treated like other property that requires effort to obtain, such as fish pulled from the ocean, which is taxed only upon sale. Moreover, in-game trades of virtual items should not be treated as taxable barter. If courts uphold game agreements that purport to provide players with a mere license to use the game, in-game trades do not constitute realization events and thus are not taxable. Otherwise, tax policy considerations suggest that Congress should provide nonrecognition for these exchanges.

By contrast, in virtual worlds that are intentionally commodified, such as Second Life, tax doctrine and policy counsel taxation of even in-world sales for virtual currency, regardless of whether the participant cashes out. However, as in game worlds, participants should not be taxed on purely in-world trades of non-currency items. This approach would allow entertainment value to go untaxed without creating a new tax shelter for virtual commerce.

Again, full draft here.  I haven't had a chance to give it a close reading yet, but it's clear that Lederman's paper will make an important contribution to the ongoing virtual property discussion.

p.s. Though I haven't found an online version, I should mention that Kevin Saunders of MSU also has an interesting recent piece placed in the Villanova Law Review:  Virtual Worlds-Real Courts, 52 Vill. L. Rev. 187 (2007).  And there have been a slew of clever student Notes published recently on the virtual property question.

Kiddification

Does MMO really mean – Must be safe for kids?

I’ve long argued that adults should be able to play adult games in adult virtual spaces. This argument is most easily understood in terms of issues of sexuality, but it’s not confined to that. The men-in-tights type fantasy worlds can also have dark themes – in fact, they do, they just tend to side step them and sprinkle themselves with glittery elf-dust.

The theme now seems to be popping up in the Virtual World podsphere. Ryan and Gary over at Massively Online Gamer (MOG) have been complaining in their alcohol fueled way about, well, everything; but particularly the developments in Mythic’s treatment (or ‘kiddificatoin’ in their words), of Games Workshop’s property Warhammer. While Scott, Andrew and Randy at The Instance are miffed that Blizzard forced a re-name of their WoW guild “I Eat Babies”. Which as they point out is actually a quote from a character in the game.

This all harks back to the case of Mystere’s EverQuest fan fic and SOE’s successful efforts to have it removed from a non-Sony owned web server.

Let’s face it - we play games of death and destruction. Virtual worlds are replete with tropes of war, violence and sexuality. But what they will admit to is another matter. They just won’t go quite that far. They are neutered. Like so many guitar bands these days they have the ink and the piercings but the music formulaic, simple-melody, boy-band pop. It’s all fit for 12 year olds.

But as the MOGers point out, is the market for MMOs really 12 year olds? Would creating a world where black magic felt, well, a bit black, bring the end of days for the publisher?

I guess in the US the problem might be, to use the old term, ‘the moral majority’. So it’s ok to be hypocritical about what we are doing in online games, we can have characters with funny voices saying they kill babies, we can slaughter countless ‘generic young NPCs’ but we don’t seem to be able to say that’s what we are doing. Female characters are hyper-sexualized and there are ‘kiss’ emotes, but nothing stronger. It’s liquor on the streets in brown paper bags, that’s what it is.

Come on Europe. We embrace the dark. Men-in-tights + EvE sensibilities + dark evil badass magic. Make game now.

Simlish and the Cyrillic

A while back in Whale Watching we thought about the Germans that can be found in the niches of Eve-Online.  Since then I've had the opportunity to experience another region of Eve-Online.  There my tribe occasionally swats tails with another tribe whose Eve dialect is text spelled using the Cyrllic alphabet.  I lose a ship and the "local chat" becomes arcane with masked excitement.  My virtual pirates and I are separated by a real world linguistic partition.

In one way this is handy - inter-group conflict is lessened when folks don't talk to each other (fn1).   On the other hand it invites tagging virtual groups with real world biases.

I've never run across a player organization advertising "Y only", when Y is the dominant RW (game)[/Edited] linguistic group, but I have seen groups that appear forbidding to those not from X (given a majority Y).  Virtual worlds would seem no different from the real one except that everyone there is an immigrant.

If players can't help but import real world distinctions into a virtual world then why not offer them the means to opt out if they so choose. Not everyone wishes the volatile excitement that online nationalism can forment (e.g. The House of the Rising Sun).  If enough players opt out then there would be less tinder to burn.

Another reason why I am sceptical about the Inevitability of Voice  is that it would seem to present new tools to out these divisions.   Start with the prejudices of accent and end up with those of dialect.

But if one insists, what about an artificial language?  How about one that minimizes the baiting real world linkages, should one wish to disguise them.  How about Simlish?

From the Wikipedia (here, 3/18/07):

Simlish is a fictional language featured in Maxis' Sim series of games... The Sims development team created the unique Simlish language by experimenting with fractured Ukrainian and Tagalog (one of the major languages of the Philippines). Inspired by the code talkers of WWII, Sims creator Will Wright also suggested experimenting with Navajo.

Simlish is purported to be a lyrical language capable of portraying emotion and the warm fuzzy stuff that makes people want to be your friend (fn2) .  I wonder how much of an MMOG social network can be fashioned with players forced to express themselves in this way. Sounds like folks would have a hard time moving from the introductions and canned phrases if they had to keep consulting their dictionary.  Yet, perhaps that is the point: keep 'em guessing.

Klingon could be another option, though its fierce spacecraft/warfare overtones might be a turn-off for most players. 

Yet in Eve-Online, I think it would be purrrrfect.

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

fn1.  See also TN.  "Smack talking to your base."

fn2.   Recently, Jeff Atwood excellently frames the Simlish phenomenon - albeit against the backdrop of software localization (don't let that get in the way!).  Also a Languagelog post from a few  years ago (with examples).  Youtube has a variety of videos featuring commercial and amateur artists expressing themselves in Simlish.

Virtual World Legends

Over on Howard Rheingold's SmartMobs blog, he relates a question from Chris Spurgeon that I thought was worth asking here.  Chris relates the practice in Club Penguin of

dozens of [players] hopping up and down on the edge of one particular iceberg, convinced that if enough penguins do this, the iceberg will flip and reveal some sort of treasure. There seems to be no truth in this, it's just a made up story that virally spreads from player to player. Urban myths are commonplace in real life of course, as is the ability of children to make up stories and then convince other kids...and themselves...of the truth of those stories. But I was wondering if anyone knows of other places online where urban myths have appeared and taken hold?

Chris welcomes incidents of other similar urban/virtual world legends on the SmartMobs blog, though I'd be happy to hear other similar stories here as well.  And, I have a few other questions about these legends...

What does the presence or absence of such legends in a virtual world says about the world itself -- do kids making these up make a place like Club Penguin somehow more real?  Is this emergent mythology a step past simple immersion and toward actual virtual world culture?  Is the absence of such legends in, say, the otherwise beautiful Azeroth a hint at the underlying shallowness or sterility of a static world?   Or is it simply the case that in a world as chock full of magic as WoW, no further wonder-inducing stories are needed? 

And how might culturally conscious developers seed and use such stories to increase players' enjoyment?  Is this a place where deeply hidden (and sometimes illusory) 'easter eggs' can lend wonder and awe to the world?  Is this something developers can do, or do we just have to wait for the kids to come up with the idea of flipping an iceberg? 

Iron Priaire: Genuine Currency Exchange

Faculty and students at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology have opened Iron Prairie for your review. It's a virtual worlds trading site, but not like the others. I'm blogging it because this is the first time I've seen a bid-ask structure for pricing. In this, Iron Prairie is the first site to replicate real world currency exchanges. They cut out the middleman. Check it out.

Like most other universities, Rose Hulman likes to spin off the business ideas it incubates. If you'd like to invest in Iron Prairie, contact Mike Shepherd at shepardm@rose-hulman.edu. Disclosure: I'm not an investor. I'm just a guy who wants to help the idea-makers at off-the-coast universities get the exposure they deserve.

Also, this post may make some people wonder about my oft-stated commitment to anti-RMT. My positions, in order:

1. Property is good
2. EULAs (or any contracts) can't turn property into non-property
3. People with property have certain rights, such as the right to trade
4. Trading is generally good
5. Sometimes there are market failures
6. RMT is a market failure
7. RMT should be solved by some kind of covenant among players
8. The EULA is not such a covenant
9. Goverment policy should enable the formation of such covenants when and only when worthwhile for the participants, which is "not always"; i am concerned that there will be ham-handed effort to commercialize all games, or to support EULAs willy nilly, or to stop trading in SL, or some other easy but wrong solution
10. Absent such covenants, I find RMT generally understandable given the design of games, but personally repugnant, especially on role-playing servers.
11. Given that the trade exists, it would be better to have it happen directly between buyers and sellers rather than through middlemen like IGE, who continue to walk off with supra-normal profits because of the absence of market sites like Iron Prairie. This by the way is also the reason i support Station Exchange.

Storytelling in Wonderland

In Ruby Slippers we discussed (in comments) the dreadful state that computer science education finds itself in the west  US. Kami mentioned CMU's Alice in comment back then and Grady Booch reminds us anew recently:

"(Alice is) a modern programming environment designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn basic computer science while creating animated movies, simple video games, where students control the behavior of 3D objects and characters in a virtual world."

From SIGCSE feedback it may be  that Alice is back (if it ever went away) with a Wonderland vengence.  Will virtual worlds be the driver that revives computer science?

Take a look at the 2007 SIGCSE  presentation (8mb PPT).  Note the instructional material at aliceprogramming.  From the SIGCSE slides, the 3.0 version is slated for release in 2008.  Mentioned is Caitlin Kelleher's work with Storytelling Alice (dissertation, 15mb PDF): Using Storytelling to Make Computer Programming Attractive to Middle School Girls.

Worth the visit!

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Other resources:

David Brin.  "Why Johnny Can't Code."   Salon, September 2006.   "BASIC used to be on every computer a child touched -- but today there's no easy way for kids to get hooked on programming."

Computer Science Teacher's Association.  "When the Worst of Times is the Best of Times."   December 2006.  "At the risk of looking a little too hard for that silver lining in the big black cloud, I am beginning to think that some very good things might come out of the current bust in computer science education."

TN.  "Jimmy Neutron."  Jan 5, 2007.    Related discussion.

GDC 2007 Recap

The 2007 Game Developers Conference is now officially closed, and the lucky ones are either still sleeping, or hopped a plane to continue the festivities at the ever-growing SXSW conference in Austin. I've returned in time for finals week and an ever-growing pile of catch up work. I didn't take many notes or live blog the event, but there were standout themes and happenings I thought I'd share. Other TNers and GDC attendees are urged to fill in the gaps --

Beyond the official conference theme, it seems that each GDC has some sort of unofficial theme/idea running through it, with last year being about new interfaces (think DS, Wii) and this year being about social networking and the integration of better communication systems and tools into game spaces.

I didn't attend the Sony keynote by Phil Harrison, but friends noted the focus on a new lobby/portal for the PS3's online space, titled "Home" among other things. Everyone kept saying it was a cross between Second Life and [insert generic reference to a social networking site here]. I also just noticed that the coverage sponsor for Gamasutra is GameTrust, which apparently will "Integrate content of your choice, and then add multiplayer games, chat, avatars, profiles, instant messaging, and micro-transactions to increase your retention, session times, revenues… and FUN!" Another strange coincidence?

Along with Phil and Sony and now GameTrust, I talked extensively with some folks at ECD Systems, who generously agreed to sponsor Women in Games Interational's presence at the Expo. They have their own "Social Networking Engine" they just launched, to bring the fun of Web 2.0 to the casual games space. So it seems that Web 2.0 and games have now met, and the hopeful (by industry anyway) result is Games 3.0.

In remarked counterpoint to that theme (oh the irony) was the actual physical location of GDC this year. Back in San Francisco, we now had two large halls to navigate (each with separate Expos) and (gasp) the loss of the Fairmont bar for a central meeting space. While many groups could and did organize social events in advance, there is always the need for a central space for gathering, the chance encounter, a place to expand your social circle, etc etc. The Fairmont bar in SJ always filled that bill- if you stayed there long enough, you knew you'd run into most everyone you wanted to see at GDC, even if they were outside of your daily social circles.

Yet this year, there was the alleged gathering spot of Jillian's Bar (which I did not hear of anyone going to) and a group of wandering nomads, texting each other with messages such as "I hear there's a party at the W" and "Which bar in the Marriott did you mean?" Not to get too deep, but I think this reinforces the value of social networks, and the importance of some general, agreed upon spaces for that networking to occur in. When those spaces change, you have upset attendees on your hands.

Apart from that, I attended an absolutely excellent presentation about localization at Square Enix by Richard Honeywood. As always, the Game Design Challenge that Eric Zimmerman runs was well attended and the design solutions to this year's "Needle and Thread as Interface" were very well done (click here to read more about the designs and to see who won). Kudos to Celia Pearce for walking up to the mic and asking why no female designers were taking part in the competition (or had in the past competitions). The applause greeting her comment was great to hear, and I'd like to think that CMP will work with Eric to remedy that omission for next year. I had my own presentation on Friday, along with Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost, the Game Studies Download 2.0. Even with a 9 AM timeslot it was well attended, but for those of you who could not make it, Raph Koster has a rundown of the top ten and a link to the slides.

Lastly, perhaps the session that disappointed me the most was the keynote by Shigeru Miyamoto. Perhaps Will Wright has spoiled me, or perhaps the focus of the talk was a bit off. It seemed that Miyamoto was torn between trying to talk about both Nintendo's vision and his own. What I got was a little of each, but not enough on either side. I'd prefer either the straight up vision of Iwata like last year's Heart of a Gamer talk, or more design specifics. We did get to see a brief preview of Super Mario Galaxy, but that was the only real nugget that I gleaned from the talk. Plus, the whole "wife-o-meter" concept was a little grating. Ha, ha. Now even wives play games! Miyamoto's wife too! Sigh. I really appreciate Nintendo's and Miyamoto's efforts to widen the gaming market, but I am really looking forward to the day when reaching "the wife" is no longer something of note.

So, that's what I remember, at least at the moment. Please- add your own thoughts, recollections, 2 cents, etc.

Whither MMO?

Below the fold, early feedback from the GDC:  a highlight of Alice's coverage of "MMOs, Past, Present and Future;"  Project Darkstar...

From the amazing Alice: "MMOs, Past, Present and Future."

Thus the meme trotting through this panel (emphasis added):

Daniel James: y'know, we're at an interesting point. There’s clearly a lot of... tremendous success and kudos to wow, but there continues to be a lot of games made where you whack monsters with big swords. You’re seeing this in Asia, us in on the cusp: many different kinds of games that are massively multiplayer but that aren't in the traditional mud model...

Raph: I would say we are about to see a truly massive explosion in the quantity of online worlds, like Korea saw...

Mark Kern: our definition of MMO is going to change. The line will blur. Xbox Live Achievements. Lots of box games will take on persistent attributes. The way we pay for our games is completely going to change. No box product gets sold in Asia. Once those channels open up, it'll be hard to tell what's an MMO and what's not...   

In 2010 if I presented you with a person substantively engaged with an internet-enabled device for a significant amount of time, with what confidence would you be able to say that they were *most certainly* engaged/not engaged with an MMO. To state the question differently, how crisp is your (all of our) claims to understanding what an MMO is so that we'd know one when we saw it!

***

Sun Microsystems announced Project Darkstar:

Project Darkstar is the game industry’s first open source, enterprise grade, highly scalable, online game server. From Massively Multiplayer Online Games to Casual Games, Project Darkstar can accommodate the varying needs of the online game developer through a single solution. Providing easy to use, simple API interfaces, Project Darkstar will have you up and running in a fraction of the time that it used to take in standing up online game solutions.

Its ambiguous from the accounts I've seen as to what portion of the technology will be made available Open Source, when, and under what terms.  E.g. I've read everything from "not the clustering software and communications components" to "May 2007" to "GPL".  In any case, more fun stuff to look at!

In 2022, from the perspective of a daiquiri hindsight, how closely will this technology arc resemble A Java Parable?

Judging worlds

Both Alice and Cory happen to have noted the "review" of social worlds over at Second Life Games, so Onder is getting quite a lot of play over his view of significant social worlds. Leaving aside the odd choice of worlds that he chooses to discuss, I am weirded out by his criteria of assessment:

"Since these are entirely formed from my little brain, we’ll call them “Onder’s Big Three”. They are:

1. Cash transactions must be easy and readily accommodated flowing both into and out from the system.
2. Users must be able to create unique content and retain some form of ownership over it.
3. The fabric of the world itself must be possible to affect. IE: land ownership, room decoration, or some other content that remains viable even when the player who created it is logged off. (”Pervasive” is the word I’m groping for here…)"

Since I've been in a bad mood for about the last 4 weeks, I hope that Onder will forgive me for suggesting that these three criteria are actually pulled from his arse and not his brain. Well, actually I don't care whether he forgives me or not, coz these are close to the stupidest criteria that I can conceive of to assess social worlds. I mean, why exactly should the ability to engage in cash transactions be a relevant criterion for success in VWs? Coz we think that more worlds should be just like Project Entropia? Yeah, that makes perfect sense. The requirement that the world have user-generated content makes a little more sense I guess, as long as you're a huge fan of poor design, sexual-content, and the tyranny of libertarianism in social spaces. Oh and I love the fact that the users have to have "ownership" of the stuff they create, because, well, private property in non-scarce resources is absolutely vital to its generation since human beings would never produce stuff except if they are given economic incentives to create (pace Wikipedia, ohmynews, open source software, blogs, game mods, etc etc). And I have no idea what Onder actually means by the last criterion. It seems to mean that VWs should be persistent; which, last time I checked, was a definitional requirement of them being worlds in the first place.

Anyway, so we've all just discovered that I'm in a pissy mood and maybe that Onder's criteria aren't exactly tremendously helpful at making any judgment about VWs. So my question is what would be interesting or useful criteria for judging social worlds? (Let's leave aside game/competitive worlds for a bit, coz they have special success conditions. And I promise to try to be less snarky in the comments field, although, I'll be honest, I'm not promising anything. I really am in a deeply shitty mood.)

Next installment on virtual worlds history...

Before I get started on a next leg of the journey down our history timeline I want to bring up some  resources on the web which many of you referenced or requested. After this we will pick up where we left off and then take a crack at the key definitional question: is a "virtual world" different from a "game"?

History Resources on the Virtual Worlds Medium

There are some great sources out there, including:

1) Ralph Koster's Online World Timeline

Ralph artfully weaves together very early concepts of online media such as Memex, with the birth of online worlds and richly innovative platforms such as PLATO, MUDs and early microcomputer-based online environments.

2) My own book (published in October 1997):

Avatars! Exploring and Building Virtual Worlds on the Internet

The book has some good first hand accounts of platforms from the 1994-97 period, plus history sections on seminal work including Habitat (more on Habitat later in this post). And just for you TN subscribers... some years ago a Danish university put the entire contents of my book on their server (from the CD ROM) and you can now get this here (steal that book!).

3) Indeed much of the Terra Nova site is itself a huge and valuable repository of history. Last year TN hosted a discussion (since gone a bit quiet) called:
The History of Virtual Worlds

If you know of other history/timeline sites please let me know (put it in the comments)!

Back to the Timeline

Maze War (Xerox Star version)

OK, lets get back on the journey through the timeline.  In our last installment we took a first peek at Maze War, which was arguably the "first first person shooter". Well, "Maze" (as it is affectionately known) established in just a few iterations from 1974 to 1979 at NASA Ames, MIT, Xerox and elsewhere, all the basic features of a heart-pounding first person shooter. These a-Mazing innovations included many firsts: a first person + plan (overhead) view of a 3D (albeit wireframe) virtual space shared over a network (the Arpanet), the first bot (nonplayer characters) in such a space, as well as spoofing (hijacking someone else's identity and chat) instant messaging, avatars (text handles plus simple arrow graphics at first and later on the famous eyeball in the Xerox Alto version), first in-world building (I think it was in the MIT Project MAC version where you could change the side of a hallway to create a fake passageway), and the first levels in a 3D environment (going up and down tunnels).

Legend has it that in the mid 70s, when the entire Arpanet was operating on a couple of 64Kbps leased lines, a letter went out to the main hubs at the time that demanded "those of you who are playing Maze are taking up to half of the packet traffic on the Arpanet so we respectfully request that you limit play to off-hours" (my paraphrasing). It is ironic that by the middle 70s we had the same dual character we see in the Internet today: the staid, serious and sometimes boring work of email, documents, file transfers and network ops versus the alternate reality of chasing your colleagues down the halls in Maze! Today we sneak in a few moments in World of Warcraft when we really should be writing that next funding proposal. Plus ca change...

As you can see from the Xerox Alto/Xerox Star version of Maze above, the user's 'character' is represented as visual icon, which actually turns left/right depending on the direction of travel relative to the onlooker, so indeed with Maze we have the arrival of possibly the first "avatars" in a game, ie: a graphical representation of a player that is a suggestion of an animate form in motion in the space. It is interesting to note that Philip Rosedale commented at a presentation I gave to Linden Lab in 2006 that the first avatars in the pre-alpha of Second Life were also big eyeballs.

And now we must diverge...

Now here we must diverge into a fundamental discourse. We are using the term "avatar" usually reserved for "virtual worlds" in the context of Maze, a "game". Biologist and author Richard Dawkins beautifully described a "pilgrimage back in time through the evolution of life on Earth" in his recent tome "The Ancestor's Tale". In the style of Dawkins, if we were traveling back along the evolutionary timelines of the medium of shared online spaces, we might observe the animal called "virtual world" join the critter called "multi-user 3D game" in a common ancestor called Maze War. In the truest sense Maze exhibited all the properties a gaming world, but something else was possible outside of game play, using the networked interface and the instant messaging channel, you could chat and just hang around in the maze with people who were physically located thousands of miles away. This experience of "virtual presence" captivated users and confused newbies who were trying to understand the language of these few new pioneers who dwelt in a visual dimensional cyberspace (even before the term cyberspace was coined). For a peak inside the culture of this Precambrian virtual world, see Ted Kaehler's cartoon below, drawn around 1980 at Xerox PARC.

Ted Kaehler's cartoon of a user of Maze War at Xerox PARC, circa 1980

Today we witness journalists trying to grapple with the concept of Second Life and being told again and again "well, its not a game, you cant really describe it as a game". So the term virtual world seems to appear more frequently with but separate from the term game. So if there is a bona fide category of "virtual world" what makes it different than "game"?

So are Social Virtual Worlds different creatures from Game Play Worlds?

Without getting too academic about it, the meaning of virtual world could be derived from its own descriptive terms as a "virtual rendition of the world". Like the "real world", a virtual world is therefore a place where you as an inhabitant are expected to make sense of where you are, what objects are there (maybe even rearranging some of them) and communicating with others (human avatars or non human robots) that might be inhabiting the space with you. So the primary function of a virtual world is discovery then the creation of meaning through the manipulation of the world and communication with others within the world. So entering a virtual world is in a way is like entering the family home as a new born baby, as a child in the first day in kindergarten, arriving at college as a freshman, or as the intern in the first day on the job. So lets adopt the term "social and creative virtual world" or more simply  "social virtual world" and see where that takes us.

This might bring us to suggest complementary terminology "game play worlds" to describe multi-player games. As we all know, there is plenty of social interaction and "off game" communication in most online games, and there is often a great deal of creativity as players shape their own characters and their own home turfs. However, I would posit that the primary reason users are in "game play worlds" is the game. Given that all games impose structure on the players with rules, tools and goals, this gives a pre-built context to any game play world. In stark contrast, many social virtual worlds started as true blank slate! Old timers may recall the endless empty plain of Alphaworld when it launched in the summer of 1996 (see below).

User teleporting into the great empty plain of Alphaworld in Summer 1996

Alphaworld (which later became Active Worlds) had no pre-existing structure or even 3D content other than this vast plain with mountains in the distance (which you could never reach). Users built out the entire space using primitive objects and scripts. While World's Chat, (which preceded Alphaworld onto the scene in the Spring of '96) had a pre-built world (a very nice rendition of a space station), it allowed users to go where they wanted and engage in free form chat. Worlds Chat and Alphaworld, and the many other mid to late 1990s platforms that followed, such as WorldsAway, The Palace, Traveler, Blaxxun, Comic Chat, VChat, Roomancer, Oz, Virtual Places, all shared similar properties and were all therefore virtual worlds. In contrast, early Internet-based multi player games like Quake, Meridian 59 and the Realm, Ultima Online and then of course, Everquest, were clearly focused on game play.

Now one could still muddy the waters and say "how about game play that happens in social virtual worlds"? Fair enough, but this tends to be an structured activity within the larger scope of free form social interacting and building. Of course there is unstructured socializing and general fooling around out of character in game play worlds too but when the break is over, players tend to get back to structured competition.

So does this distinction make sense? Is a social virtual world truly a different creature from a game play world?

So finally... back to some history

Ohmigosh its late and I am probably way over my word limit for this posting! Well, lets give you a teaser for next time. For a real must-read classic, take a look at...

The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat

This was written by Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer back in 1990 for Michael Benedikt's seminal MIT Press book Cyberspace: First Steps and will give you a great peak into how this fearless (some said foolhardy?) team at Lucasfilm successfully shoehorned an online virtual environment into a Commodore 64 running on a 300 baud modem connection (with ungodly 1980s network latency). This is the first environment where avatars were featured by name. Habitat rebirthed the medium of the social virtual worlds on consumer personal computers inhabiting a graphical world in sparkling Commodore colors.

So we now see our destination for the next posting. Chip Morningstar or Randy Farmer, are you out there, and do you want to work together on the next installment?

One last question for the evening from our jaunt back in time: are MUDs, MOOs, WELL-style conferences and IRC also social virtual worlds? Comments?

A New Joystick

Just wanted to let everyone know that the good folks behind Joystick101 have recently relaunched the site, with some new faces and lots of great commentary. Nice to see one of the core sources from our rolodex back in form.

Are We Having Fun Yet?

Laundry = 4.8, Homework = 5.3, Reading = 8.3, Sex = 9.3, Grinding Saltstone Basilisks in the Shimmering Flats = ?

Today Hal Varian poses this question:

"In 1930 the British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that the biggest problem facing future generations would be what to do with all their leisure time. Well, here we are in Keynes's future: Where is that leisure we were promised?"

The answer:  "Hmm, my surplus leisure must be around here somewhere.  Kitchen counter? Coat pockets?"

Nope -- not there.  At least not according to one study: "the amount of leisure time per capita hasn’t changed much in the last 105 years."  Darn it -- and here I thought we had made some progress in the 20th century.  Turns out our great-grandparents were having just as much fun as we're having!

The real rub here is that the economists, like the rest of us, are deeply confused about what leisure is exactly.  Hal Varian explains:  "The economists offer an interesting answer to this almost [Ed: almost?] metaphysical question. According to them, leisure activities are those that give direct enjoyment. So all we have to do is to figure out what sorts of activities people enjoy."

And pursuant to this objective, we get the following numbers, poll results explaining how much fun various things are:

9.3: Sex
9.2: Play sports
9.1: Fishing
8.3: Read
7.9: Lunch break
7.1: Gardening
7.0: Work
6.3: Work commute
5.3: Homework
5.0: Yardwork
4.8: Laundry

That's just a partial list -- see the study for the fuller version. 

Of course, this topic is old hat at Terra Nova, given the RMT and the grind.

As I proposed back in September of 2003, the RMT (the analysis of which was our  early stock and trade) is, essentially, paying others to play a game for you so that you can avoid the fun you are supposed to be having when you pay to play the game yourself.  And Julian has got deep into this, working and playing at play-working for the better part of a year.  Note that the author of the study suggests that paying someone else to do something is a clear indicator that such an activity (e.g. gardening or child care) is not leisure.  Julian replies with a theory of ludocapitalism explained in Play Money -- probably the most interesting stuff out there currently on the play/work line in MMORPGs -- but after three years of batting this around, I'm really still not sure we've grokked this topic.

If the grind isn't fun, is it work?  Various proposals we've entertained here: it could be a design mistake (see above); perhaps it's a social sphere of contrived contingency; perhaps it's gardening (btw, see above--that's a 7.1, barely, barely not work);  perhaps it's like polishing balls of mud; perhaps it is the boring bits of a Hero's Journey? 

Note what I think we've decided some things it isn't: it isn't Raph-type fun (where's the pattern in it); and it might be flow, but as Raph said, we can't draft Csikszentmihalyi into this, because "flow != fun."

So...

Perhaps the whole point here is that Terra Nova is moving past a Keynesian worldview.  We've started to conclude that "fun" and "leisure" are pretty weak vessels, connected to a particular disposition that Max Weber identified many years ago.  As Thomas has argued, perhaps this whole "fun & games" thing isn't worth the candle. 

Serious games?  Well, they're all serious.

Varian asks: will we have more leisure time in 2107? 

The answer is probably no, because that fabled superabundance of play and leisure was something we never really wanted in the first place.  (Note how countries that were once play/work pioneers are now thinking of canceling holidays.) 

A better question for the economists might be: if work can be fun and fun can be work, how should we be measuring productivity and why should we be measuring it?