Terra Nova

Applied innovation strategies in a network society

The title of this post is also the title of my thesis on IBM’s 3D Internet initiative, of which I would like to share some of the discussions as my final post as a TN guest author. My arguments are within the frameworks of Network Society & Innovation Strategies, and User Driven Vs. Community Driven Innovation.

Network society & Innovation Strategies

The network society described by Castells (2000) in his book; The Rise of the Network Society gives insights to the convergences of the telecommunication, microprocessor, and computer industries as the facilitators of connecting entities in the network society in three stages of diffusion e.g. automation, experimentation, and reconfiguration. And, that openness, equality and grass root commitment were the drivers of the diffusion. Currently, we are in the stage of reconfiguration where technology acts on information, and the network have assimilated diversification and stratification of culture.

The innovation strategies of Christensen (2003 & 2004) speak of the basis of competition and performance gap and surplus, and how product architecture either proprietary or modular should be compliant with the gap or surplus of performance in market demand, for positioning to capture the largest market share. And, how new comers trying to innovate for a sustaining trajectory are almost always bound to fail, and should revert to low-end market solutions for a disruptive trajectory. And, furthermore of new-market disruptions which compete in a nonconsumption market and therefore the market have to be invented from scratch.

Now, the current nonconsumption market of a metaverse development platform or the 3D Internet and experimentation conducted by corporations in Second Life to unlock and invent a profitable market are battling two issues; the openness of the network society and current performance gab in the market to establish a rock solid metaverse development platform for users to experience unlimited user generated content in a high quality graphical environment.

The performance gab in the market would suggest a proprietary solution to the metaverse development platform but I believe at the expense of mass market adoption and counterintuitive to the openness of the current network and web platform. So, my argument is that currently there is a catch 22 in effect, of either attending the performance gab with a proprietary solution or the network society with a modular solution. The latter risking to drive users and businesses away because of instability and lack of performance and the former also risking driving users and businesses away because of inconvenient usability issues of integrating that solution with existing activities.

User driven Vs. Community driven innovation

Another key discussion of the thesis is the notion that community driven innovation reduces the period of negotiating a new market and combat the nonconsumption of new-market disruptions which I believe characterize the current initiatives to establish a standard metaverse development platform for a future 3D Internet and experimentation of services, largely conducted in Second Life and to some extend also in There.

The argument is that the user driven innovation paradigm is fading because it mainly drives the sustaining innovation trajectory of old established markets, because the users in the innovation process are the customers of the client – not the non-customers of the client. Thus, a community of users constituting numerous non-customers are a key for future success.

Furthermore, the argument is that moving into a 3D Internet environment of mediated communication by avatars are facilitating easier access to valuable information from many non-customers to driven the negotiation of a new-market disruption, and ultimately market success.

To end this post, I hope to gain valuable insights from comments to include in the thesis before its turned in next month.

July Guest Margaret Corbit

We're thrilled to have Margaret Corbit joining us as a guest author this July.  We asked Margaret (shown right on the Great Wall) to introduce herself:

How did a middle-aged white girl plant ecologist get into virtual worlds? Fair question. I worked at a supercomputing center for 15 years. At the same time that I was writing my thesis on hedgerows as conservation corridors for forest wildflowers, I was working full time at the Cornell Theory Center as the science writer. Then came the Web. And I was launched into visualization and interactivity and an online science book in 1993. Woo Hoo! One of my other lives is that of a graphic artist.

As the Web tsunami flooded us over us and into enterprise, I met Bruce Damer in October 1998 at a Webnet meeting in Toronto, and moved into 3D lock, stock, and barrel. I had already posted VRML worlds in our first Web site and was frustrated with the digital divide (at that time, the disconnectivity of most of the rest of the world). Bruce, playing Digigardener, was demonstrating a world over a phone line. Through the Contact Consortium I learned to play in Blaxxun, Cosmo Worlds, and then began my own projects in Active Worlds. This led to VLearn3D.org, now an archive of five fun years. More recently I have dabbled in SL, participated in some amazing planning projects for Croquet pre-Quack, and sniffed around Multiverse—very exciting to see all these variations on the Metaverse.

I believe that virtual worlds are intrinsically fun. I have also been pegged as a hopeless Pollyanna on more than one occasion. I am still learning about the relationships between games and virtual worlds. I think it’s a continuum. Surprisingly, not all the folks that participate in our programs necessarily want to create games in their worlds, but that is their very first reaction. I was lucky enough to attend one of Ernest Adams’ workshops and to have interacted with Dave Schwarz as he founded the Game Dsign Initiative at Cornell (GDIAC) and Andy Phelps at RIT. I co-teach a Fine Arts course at Cornell, Studio in Space and Time, with photography professor Barry Perlus, and struggle to get these people, who ought to be able to go there, to think beyond the landscape metaphor.

My favorite worlds remain to this day the worlds that emerged from the Art Center College of Design under the guidance of Mike Heim and the Cyberforum. Where is the next artistic guru? Maybe Tobey Crockett will step up….

Right now I am preparing to run a workshop for teams of educators that will introduce them to virtual worlds and to our approach for launching folks into their own creative projects in this medium (called for now the SciFair Model). We have college faculty, middle school educators, graduate and undergraduate students coming to Ithaca for a few days of fun under the virtual sun.

And I have just moved administratively within the University to the office of the Associate Provost for Outreach. I think that says something about the maturing of the medium!

Thanks so much for joining us, Margaret -- we're looking forward to the discussion!

Blending Virtual Worlds and the real world.

Its all fun and games, until somebody gets hurt.  That what my friends and I would say to each other when we were kids and about to do something stupid and dangerous.  Like wrestling while climbing trees or using homemade bike ramps to jump over neighborhood friends.  Sure virtual worlds and games are fun until something more important comes along.  This is starting to change.

There is a revolution of sorts occurring, and the revolution has to do with the remarkable success of some MMORPGs and the increasing popularity of virtual communities.  There is a remarkable amount of time and energy put into these the environments, and a growing number of us would rather be in the VU than the RU.  The question then becomes how to get people to be productive while being virtual, and this is where the revolution takes place.

Its all about patterns.  We humans see patterns everywhere.  Patterns in language, patterns in biology, patterns in design, patterns in motion, patterns in sewing.  We create patterns through our behavior and how we solve problems.   Because we are self-aware, we can recognize and learn how we develop these patterns, and subsequently, we can teach ways to create new patterns.  We develop patterns in our virtual communities and our games.  The leveling treadmill creates a very recognizable pattern in many of todays games and team combat games like Planetside create an array of attack and defend patterns. 

Lets say we want to study a pandemic emergency, and try to contain the breakout of a new virulent virus strain.  These types of simulations already exist to show containment speeds and mortality rates, what they lack is insight into the effectiveness of containment steps and quarantine.  Introduce the simulation into the virtual world and allow communities to apply variances to the model, and patterns begin to develop.   As the masses collectively think through a problem, knowledge is gained.

We can apply the same model to traffic systems.  Care to be an air-traffic controller for a virtual airport?  How about changing the settings of all the traffic lights in Times Square during rush hour to try and improve traffic flow?  Or be a virtual passenger on a newly designed monorail system?  How about attending a virtual concert in a newly designed arena to help understand traffic patterns?  We could even have a bladder meter that lets you know when to go wait in line at the virtual bathroom.

In all seriousness, there are many great uses for these technologies, and we've only just begun to scratch the surface.  NASA is already studying the challenges of colonizing the moon and the stresses of a year long manned flight to Mars.  I have a feeling many of us will experience these feats in virtual worlds long before the missions themselves get anywhere near completed.   

Google and NASA pair up for virtual space exploration

Reacting to the recent increases in mining accidents, mining companies are beginning to virtualize many aspects of mining, and are already having some success.  I imagine at some point, miners will no longer need to enter and descend into dangerous mine shafts.

The Future of Mining

Of course home and personal use of virtual world technology is going to phenomenal.  I think it still has a way to go.  Here is a semi-decent, if not hysterically funny, effort that might be better at simulating motion sickness.

VirtuSphere ("its a prototype")

I saw something similar to the Expresso Bike in a gym a few years back.  It was a stairmaster machine with a video console of a snowmobile race attached.  The faster I stepped on the stairmaster, the faster my snowmobile went.  I played that game for about 45 minutes trying to win the snowmobile race.  I had never used a stairmaster before, so it was about 2 weeks before I could tie my shoes or walk without a painful limp.  Great concept though, and something we will certainly be seeing more of.

All of this fun isn't just reserved for the macro world either, there will be plenty going on in the micro world as well, especially in the area of medical research and treatment.  Virtual surgery is already a valuable teaching aid, but soon surgeries will be virtualized in real time, with robotic instruments performing the actual tasks of micro-surgery.  Nanotube technology and the construction of micro instruments and tools will provide a whole new miniature perspective for us to experience since we will need to work at the molecular level. 

Hopefully by then there will be implants available so that I don't have to carry this bulky laptop around anymore.

What in the World is a Fictional Securities Exchange?

I have spent a fair bit of time recently studying the major stock exchanges in Second Life (particularly WSE and AVIX).  Initially, I assumed these exchanges would be serving the same basic roles as in real life:  to allow business owners an easy way to raise capital for expansion from a broad community of investors.  However, it is hard to maintain this perspective when the WSE includes the following text on all prospectuses, right after the entry allowing (but not requiring) management teams to post their real-life information:

• (Real life details are optional as the WSE is a fictional securities exchange based on avatars in the virtual world of Second Life.)

My original intent was to post my thoughts on how to improve the functioning of SL’s capital markets through listing and disclosure requirements—but such a post makes sense only if the markets are actually intended to raise capital.  If the markets are simply a game, my assumptions about the goals of the market are invalid, and I wouldn't know what to recommend.   (Would regulations need to be maximize fun, rather than liquidity of capital flows?)

Since many Terra Novans have written extensively on the boundary between games and real life, particularly as it pertains to legal and economic matters, I would like to poll readers on the following issues (weigh in on the ones that interest you):

• Are SL exchanges actually intended to me ways for people to raise capital?  Those who want to answer 'yes' must explain why listed firms are frequently owned almost entirely (e.g., 90% or more) by the CEO and other officers.  Apparently, raising outside capital is not the top priority for many management teams. 
• What does it mean for WSE to be a “fictional securities exchange?”  After all, real people are investing real money (as there is an active curency exchange converting Lindens into US$) in the hopes of getting a real return through the efforts of real people.  Does WSE say this simply to stave off real-world governmental regulation (by the SEC, for example)?
• Are stock exchanges in SL just a game?  If so, is there still a reason for residents to create a quasi-regulatory body (like the SLEC, a group of SL residents seeking to develop stricter listing standards and other practices.)  If not, how long till the SEC or NASD comes knocking?
• Alternatively, are the exchanges simply a way for unscrupulous residents to fleece their naïve compatriots?  Accusations of questionable behavior and outright fraud are certainly common (and strongly denied), both targeting and emanating from major players in the exchanges.  Does this make inworld regulatory oversight by a group like the SLEC essential, or would that simply add a veneer of credibility to what might simply be corrupt enterprises? (Please note that I am no claims about the motives or morals of the leaders of the exchanges, management teams or investors.  To get some evidence on what SL residents think, look at comment threads here, here and here.)

Look ma! I'm not an addict (yet)

It seems that the American Psychological Association has backed away from recommending that "video game addiction" become listed as a classified disorder in its next edition of their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). Of course we shouldn't celebrate too soon.

Coverage of the backtracking still raises questions about heavy use of games, including online games, especially in children. In a Reuters article about the issue, for example, one pediatrician implied that while games may not be clinically addictive, "the more time kids spend on video games, the less time they will have socializing, the less time they will have with their families, the less time they will have exercising." That kind of statement flies in the face of evidence that games are increasingly social spaces, and places where families can interact (along with friends, guildmates, etc etc). I think a question to ask is- how many games have those doctors played? In an article I co-wrote about women gamers (appearing soon), we found that while gamers thought of games as highly social, non-gamers were the quickest to believe that gaming was an anti-social activity appropriate only for misfits who couldn't 'make it' in the real world.

As a kid I had what might have been considered an addiction to a certain form of media. My mother told me to go play outside. I got upset if interrupted. I stayed up late and snuck around. My 'addiction?' Books. Thankfully, no one ever made me give them up.

Second Life Business Exodus?

In its July 2 issue, Forbes magazine  is running a story called "Sex, Pranks and Reality" about the shifting tides of doing business in Second Life (also picked up by Kotaku and other blogs).  The article discusses the ups and downs of several real world businesses that are or have been in Second Life, concluding with:

Wells Fargo stopped using Linden Lab's clunky technology to run the financial company's virtual Stagecoach Island (from its own Web site) four months after setting it up in September 2005. It no longer has any connection with Second Life. Laughs Erik Hauser, creative director of Swivel Media, Wells Fargo's digital agency: "Going into Second Life now is the equivalent of running a field marketing program in Iraq."

This PR backlash, while not particularly unexpected, isn't great news for Linden Labs.  But what does it mean for virtual worlds in general as operators try to move beyond their "men in tights" roots?  As the difficulties of courting both user-generated content and mainstream business (or education and other non-entertainment sectors) as key constituents become clearer, what does this mean for the evolution of virtual worlds?  How long will it be before companies stung by this experience like Wells Fargo decide it's once again time to venture into virtual worlds for business?

SWI's Declaration of Virtual World Policy

Ted's Synthetic Worlds Initiative at Indiana University convened the second Ludium Conference this past weekend in Bloomington. Attendees were charged with hammering out a well-considered platform to guide virtual world policy. We were successful, and the Declaration of Virtual World Policy [Edit: along with its wiki] has been posted by the conference's designers, Studio Cypher. Here it is for your perusal and comment (along with more details):

A Declaration of Virtual World Policy
made by representatives of law, industry, and academia, assembled in full and free convention as the first Synthetic Worlds Congress.

Whereas virtual worlds are places with untapped potential, providing new and positive experiences and effects, we resolve that:
-A self-governance group of virtual world stakeholders should be formed
-A players’ bill of rights should be drafted and should include the right of free speech and the rights to assemble and organize.[Edit: FN1]
-A universal age verification system should be created to support the individual rights of all users
-Virtual world designers should have freedom of expression
-Virtual worlds should include plain-language End-User License Agreements (EULA) to enable all individuals to understand their rights
-There are different types of virtual worlds with different policy implications
-Access is critical to virtual worlds, so net neutrality must be maintained
-Game developers shall not be liable for the actions taken by players
-Fair use may apply in virtual worlds that enable amateur creation of original works
-The government should provide a comprehensive package of funding for educational games research, development, and literacy

[Edit: FN1 Modified to reflect correct wording voted on at Ludium 2.]

SWI plans to send this platform to all major candidates for the presidency and for all contested congressional seats in the coming 2008 election. I'm sure these statements will prompt a lot of discussion and debate (I hope so), but I thought I would remind everyone that the congress is concluded, and these are SWI's policy recommendations, at least until the next Ludium ;-). I'm sure that registration for that one will be open, as it was for this one.

The Ludia are conferences structured as games, and this one was modeled on a political convention, the first Synthetic Worlds Congress. Studio Cypher deserves a lot of credit for creating a game that generated incentives to both compete and collaborate. All attendees began in districts (of three delegates), and started by forging platform planks, combining them regionally (3 districts to a region, 3 regions total) by the end of the first day. On the second day, all voted in multiple straw polls on 30 potential planks, with merging of planks and refinement of language prompted by the game design, the end goal being a list of 10 planks, as determined by a final vote. The list above is the result. In addition, the conference elected me as its Speaker, which basically puts me forward to direct the traffic of media and policy-maker inquiries about the declaration to the appropriate legal, industry, and academic experts. In the process of determining the speaker as well there was a greater interest amongst the nominees (Corey Bridges of Multiverse, Joshua Fairfield of Indiana University Law School and TN, and myself) in focusing on the platform, and the breadth of expertise in the room that would be able to speak to its specific planks, then on the race for the position.

We all know that well-designed games are good at generating incentives for their players, and in a way I took it as a sign of the success of this one that before the first day was even completed many players were eager to concentrate on the content of the planks rather than press for every advantage that the game mechanics gave them to accumulate "influence points" or the currency, gold coins. It quickly became apparent that the Ludium had sparked useful ideas and discussion about virtual world policy. The feeling that we were succeeding in hammering out a useful set of policy guidelines only grew over the course of day 2.

The Ludium was also the setting for related news from Ren Reynolds, who took the opportunity after final voting was completed to let us know about the Virtual Policy Network he is spearheading, and organization based in the UK that will tackle similar policy matters from a European as well as global perspective. Bravo, Ren!

[Edit: Some Ludium2 reports from attendees have appeared. Christian Renaud of Cisco has a post here, and Mia Consalvo has a post here. Ron Meiners has blogged about it at Virtual Cultures, Garrison LeHearst weighs in here, and Michelle Senderhauf of ARGNet posted during the conference. Richard, of course, blogged about it here, and Peter Jenkins has a post on his blog as well. Any I've missed? Drop a comment below and I'll add the link!]

Recalculating the Global Virtual GDP, Yet Again

Albania? Nepal? Try Lebanon, noob.

Very soon after the New York Times Magazine published my account of life in the gold farms of China, I received an email informing me of a ghastly factual error in the second paragraph. “I’m not quite sure who you are targeting with the article,” the message began, “but if it was any of the ‘8 million’ players of World of Warcraft they all stopped reading at ‘night-elf wizards.’” I was mortified, of course (everyone knows night elves can’t be mages, for God’s sake), but there was an upside. If all those WoW players were bailing at paragraph two, that meant 8 million fewer chances I’d be busted for the even more horrific cock-up several paragraphs below: My butchering of world geekery’s most vital economic statistic, the total gross domestic product of all known virtual economies.

The offending passage follows. It is a scene of wanton, unadulterated factual imprecision, but if you think you’ve got the stomach for it, read on…

“In 2001, Edward Castronova, an economist at Indiana University and at the time an EverQuest player, published a paper in which he documented the rate at which his fellow players accumulated virtual goods, then used the current R.M.T. prices of those goods to calculate the total annual wealth generated by all that in-game activity. The figure he arrived at, $135 million, was roughly 25 times the size of EverQuest’s R.M.T. market at the time. Updated and more broadly applied, Castronova’s results suggest an aggregate gross domestic product for today’s virtual economies of anywhere from $7 billion to $12 billion, a range that puts the economic output of the online gamer population in the company of Bolivia’s, Albania’s and Nepal’s.”

Longtime Terra Nova readers will recognize that “$7 billion to $12 billion” figure from a calculation I posted here in April 2005, and if you’re satisfied with two-year-old economic statistics, I suppose it will do. But even at the time, my calculus rested on a fairly wobbly foundation: a very rough estimate of worldwide RMT revenues (somewhere between $540 million and $880 million), which I multiplied by a presumed constant of 13.5 to get my total GDP. Since then, the hardworking folks at the Virtual Economy Research Network have come up with a much more reliable assessment of total RMT, and since I cited their figures elsewhere in the article, I have no excuse—none!—for not having plugged their superior data into my GDP formula and recrunched the numbers.

Forgive me if you can, econ geeks, and while I know there’s no making up for my failure to get the correct number into the pages of America's newspaper of record, please accept the following recalculation as a token of my regret:

So: Take VERN’s final calculation of $2.09 billion for total RMT, multiply by 13.5, and voilà. The official total worldwide virtual GDP now stands at $28.215 billion—several ranks higher than Albania and Nepal, all the way up in the lofty precincts of Lithuania ($29.784 billion), Sri Lanka ($26.794 billion), and Lebanon ($22.622 billion).

And you can take that to the bank.

Gaze into your Crystal Ball

I'm often contacted by journalists, and the last thing they always ask me is: "if you gaze into your crystal ball, how do you see virtual worlds in the future?".

Never mind how I see their future, how do you see it? Say, 15-20 years from now?

Call for Papers

From Leigh Schwartz of the University of Texas at Austin:

Aether, an online, peer-reviewed journal, invites submission of papers for a special issue focusing on the geographies of interactive visual media and gaming, to be published in early 2008.

Although current research investigates other aspects of gaming, the
geographical element of gaming, such as exploration and interaction with
complex, three-dimensional environments, remains understudied.  And
while researchers of other disciplines have applied academic study to
games, geography offers a unique perspective to examine not only the
human element of gaming, but the spatial element as well.  In an attempt
to examine both the human and the spatial aspects of gaming, Aether
welcomes submissions addressing issues of gaming and space from both
geographers and researchers of other disciplines.  The issue will place
this topic not only within media and virtual geographies, but also
within the broader traditions of geography, as research into the
representation and social interaction of virtual environments draws on
examination of designed environments, representation, and discourse of
real landscapes, as well as examining the geographical experience of
interaction and exploration with virtual environments.  Further, this
special issue aims to enhance general academic understanding of
representation, social interaction, narrative, and play in interaction
with virtual landscapes.

Potential themes could include, but are not limited, to the following:
o    Representation in virtual environments
o    Community in online and offline gaming
o    Geopolitical discourse in interactive media
o    Gaming in the external environment, such as the home or school
o    Play and exploration in game environments
o    Narratives of virtual environments

For additional information and to submit papers, contact Leigh Schwartz,
a doctoral student in the Department of Geography and the Environment,
University of Texas at Austin. leighs (at) mail (dot) utexas (dot) edu.

Contracting in Virtual Worlds

In my last post, I discussed inworld “property rights,” which (to prove that yes, I can learn) I am now going to call “permissions.”  Every virtual world grants or withholds a variety of permissions to players, including permissions to transfer, copy or modify inworld objects, to know the attributes and properties of those objects, to enter land and buildings, etc. 

In this post, I want to ask readers about the state of contracting in virtual worlds.  What worlds have gone beyond the plain-vanilla simultaneous transfer, in which one player gives up a permission in exchange for another (like paying cash for a weapon)?

In the real world, even exchanges of cash for goods can be pretty complex.  Consider the following examples:

• Credit sales:  I give up permissions today for the promise of permissions later on (I give you a weapon today, you promise to pay me $10 next week).
• Puts and Calls:  I promise that if you give me $10 in the next month, I will immediately give you my weapon (in finance parlance, I have written a “call option” on the weapon).  I promise that if you give me a weapon in the next month, I will immediately give you $10 (I have written a put option).
• Futures Contracts:  I promise to give you a weapon in 10 days, and you promise to give me $10.  (This is different from a put or call because neither of us has the option to cancel the looming trade).

Cash-for-goods exchanges are only one form of contract.  Employment contracts exchange permissions (usually cash) for effort, which is not a permission at all.  Equity-investment contracts allow people to exchange cash now for a claim on another party’s future income. 

To the extent the contract is governing the exchange of permissions, contracts like the ones above can be objects (either programmed by the developer or scripted by a user) that automatically enforce contract terms, dramatically reducing the need for dispute resolution for routine commerce.  The auction houses in World of Warcraft and the “pay bot” terminals in Second Life serve this function for simultaneous transfers.

So here is my question to Terra Novans:  what are the most sophisticated programmed/scripted contract-enforcement tools in the metaverse?  Have you seen credit contracts, puts, calls or futures?  What about equity/profit-sharing contracts.   If not, why not?

Καὶ σὺ τέκνον

Clive Thompson in commentary on Wired Online wonders anew the voice angst in online games:

"I had just experienced the latest culture-shock in online worlds: The advent of voice. Games that were governed by text are now being governed by chat, and it is subtly changing the feel of our virtual universe." 

I have no more to add since our last time, in that "sprawling, superb debate" (Clive's words).   What I'll do, therefore, is turn to you to weigh this matter, measure the lines, and report back.

Et tu, my sweet sound?

/Ed 6/26/2007.  As mere follow-on to Endie's Teamspeak (below) recording of a notable event . Endie cites a couple of videos (e.g. GoonSwarm Titan Kill June 2007") that have surfaced of the event.  A good foil and footnote for those moving in the direction of 'The.. (voice, eh) of information'. "

/Ed  6/22/2007.  Apropos of little except illustration of something I haven't yet figured out ;).  Endie has posted a Teamspeak recording of a notable event occuring in Eve-Online (here is the "very geeky" description).  The tribe has spoken?

Comment Policy

Since its inception in 2003, Terra Nova has been about promoting intelligent and sustained conversations among the community of virtual world researchers and creators.  While those who manage the blog sometimes delete obvious spam and ban associated IP addresses, our practice has been to let individual authors control the moderation of comments on their own threads.  However, some of the authors and commenters on Terra Nova have been concerned lately about the tone and substance of some of the comments posted here. The problem is not serious at this point, but it has prompted discussion.  Given this, we thought it would be helpful to establish our basic expectations about the comments field.

1.  We expect and hope that those who post comments on the blog will do their best to encourage others to participate in discussions that are civil, good natured, and respectful of the feelings and sensibilities of others.  This means that we do not want to read personal attacks, insults, aggressive comment-fisking, profanity, and sarcastic sniping.  All of these are forms of speaking that tend to scare off and offend certain readers while at the same time derailing the conversation intended by the original post author.  We make a serious attempt at creating sustained conversations, and have a much higher expectation for civility than exists in many other online forums (e.g. political blogs and Slashdot).

2. As one dimension of civility, we expect commenters to give others authors and readers a chance to speak and to listen carefully to what others say.  As long as this principle is followed, there are no word limits on posts.

These expectations apply especially to those who participate here regularly. Naturally we expect our authors to adhere to these guidelines as well.

New Books: Consalvo and Bogost

Mia Consalvo's Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Video Games has just come out, and Ian Bogost's Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games should be out any day now. The former is part cultural history and part contemporary analysis of rules and the people who bend them. The latter projects the disruptive force of digital games into the field of rhetoric.  Both highly recommended.

What else should we be reading this summer?

Life of a Chinese Gold Farmer

Julian has a nice, thoughtful article on the Chinese gold farming industry.  It ran on Sunday in the New York Times magazine -- go take a look.   p.s. Remember this?  :-)

CNN Future Summit

Watch me on CNN International's Future Summit - Virtual Worlds.

On April 23rd 2007, I was part of a taped panel for a CNN program (Future  Summit - Virtual Worlds) exploring the impact of virtual worlds on society. Because of the dissertation and my recent illness, I had forgotten that the planned air date for the edited program was mid-June.
   
The CNN Future Summit is being broadcast on CNN International globally this week. As you may or may not know, the CNN you get in the US is a separate channel altogether where, as my father eloquently explained, they replace substantive content with prettier anchors and juicier news for the American audience. Executives felt that CNN International would be perceived as bland by Americans and so they dumbed down CNN specifically for them.
   
Thus, the show is not being broadcast in the US, but 10 times this week everywhere else in the world, including Hong Kong, where my parents live. On Wednesday night, they recorded the program premier on DVD. They gave me a copy of the DVD last night when they arrived (for graduation on Sunday). I was awed by the editing, presentation, and content of the program, but was saddened that it would never be broadcast in the US.
   
I am honored to have learned how to edit videos from my experiences at Seriosity. I realized I could rip the DVD, edit the video down, and post it on YouTube. I edited the 50 minute program down to 8 minutes, focusing on the segments on online gaming and, of course, my responses. You can watch the 8-minute cut here on YouTube.
   
I began my research in online gaming 8 years ago when there was no academic support for studying online games (apart from the violence agenda). It was my adviser, Doug Davis, from Haverford College who inspired me with the strength and courage to fight for a dream, no matter how tremulous it seemed at times. Over the past years, a small band of colleagues and I have worked hard to carve out a viable field of academic study, dramatically shifting attention away from agendas focused on deviant outcomes of game-play. The study of online gaming and virtual environments is now something that most universities are desperately hiring positions for. I am blessed to have been given the opportunity to change a part of this world such that others interested in studying online   games no longer need to struggle the way I did alone for so many years. Over the past years, my colleagues and I have created a vibrant community of scholars spanning the fields of psychology, communication, economics, law, sociology, among others.

I hope you join me in celebrating this moment and cherishing the conviction that while the light will always be a burden to bear in the darkness, that the beauty of dawn will always be worth fighting for.

Property Rights in Virtual Worlds

Modern capitalism rests on a foundation of property rights, agreements between parties to transfer those rights, and laws that enforce those rights and agreements.  My impression is that property rights in virtual worlds are very simple.  If I have an item in my Second Life inventory, from an inworld perspective I "own" it entirely.  No one can steal it from me without hacking the database, I can use it and sell it as I please.  (EU Lawyer Vincent Scheurer has noted that this ownership doesn't mean a whole lot after leaving the inworld sphere, but that is an entirely different issue.)  About the only sophistication I see is that I can sell it to someone with slightly restricted rights--they can't copy and/or modify it. 

This state of affairs leaves us far from able to automatically enforce some of the most basic commercial arrangements, such as leasing (I can use it but must keep it in good condition), employment (I can bake with the chocoloate, but I can't eat it), transportation (I can move the box, but I can't look inside it). 

Since my goal is to create virtual worlds that can be used to study real-world business (see my first TN post), I use this post to describe some of the property rights that should be supported in code by commerce-oriented worlds, so that code can protect those rights.  If they aren't coded in, expensive and labor-intensive intervention would be required, and no virtual world manager wants that.  (Judging from recent comments on this blog, not many users want human management intervention either.) 

As I am new to virtual worlds, I look forward to being educated by Terra Novans on whether any worlds have attempted to implement rights similar to those I specified, if not, why not, and what I am missing.

Throughout this post, I refer to property rights as "authorities," because I am pretty sure that is how programmers would think of them.  And after all, the term “right” suggests that someone ought to be able to do something, but might somehow be prevented from doing so.  (I have a right to enter my own house, but someone could change my locks without my permission.)  "Authority" suggests a power to do something, not just a recourse if someone prevented me from doing so.

I take a very object-oriented view of the world over which authorities are granted.  The world is populated by goods, all of which have attributes (like quality, quantity, mass, location, etc.).  Some goods are "transformative"--they have production functions that create new goods from old, or simply change the attributes of old goods.  I refer to most of these transformative goods as machines, but if they change the location of the good, I call them "vehicles." For more on production functions, see this TN post.

I specify seven authorities.  Five are authorities over goods or attributes of goods (primary authorities), while two are authorities over other authorities (meta-authorities).

The five primary authorities are:

• Consumption.  An actor with consumption authority over a good has the right to receive the consumption value the good provides to them (which may vary across actors).  (I have written about consumption in this TN post).  Consumption activities may or may not alter the properties of a good.  For example, entering land or a building (forms of consumption) would be unlikely to alter their properties. However, consuming bread or bullets would cause them to cease to exist.

• Production. An actor with production authority over a productive good (a machine, vehicle or data collector) can use the good for production.  An actor with production authority over a non-productive good can use that good in a machine over which they also have production authority.

• Modification. An actor with modification authority over an attribute of a good can change that attribute.

• Transportation. An actor with transportation authority over a good can alter the location of that good by using a Vehicle over which the actor has production authority.

• Information.  An actor with information authority over an attribute of a good can know that attribute.

The two meta-authorities are:

• Transfer.  An actor with offer authority over another authority has the right to transfer that authority to another actor, conditional on the acceptance of the authority by the recipient.

• Assignment.  An actor with assignment authority over the authorities of a new good produced by a machine can offer those authorities to actors, conditional on the acceptance of the authority by the recipient.

This relatively simple set of authorities and meta-authorities can describe a broad array of real-world business situations.  For example, an actor employed as a baker would have a variety of production, modification and transportation authorities over the ingredients he must work with, but would rarely be granted any consumption authorities.  A trucker would be unlikely to receive any authority other than transportation, and perhaps information over the volume and density of the good.  A broker might have a transfer authority over the consumption authority for a good, but not actually have the consumption authority itself.  Note that meta-authorities provide the ability to offer rights to others, but not to impose those authorities upon them against their will—this is essential because some authorities may be undesirable (like authorities over toxic waste).

Note that every primary authority refers to a particular good or attribute of a good (e.g, a production authority over a particular machine).  Similarly, every meta-authority refers to a particular primary authority.  However, a single authority may be held by multiple actors.  For example, many workers in a factory would likely have production authority over the same machine.  Thus, there would need to be a way to arrange voting rights that would deal with disputes--again, without involving human intervention.  Voting is itself a complicated beast....more on that in another post, perhaps.

Let me be the first to point out that I do not discuss intellectual property rights.  For example, I did not specify an authority governing the ability to disclose information to another party.  The reason is that embedding such an authority in code would have little practical value.  For example, assume I am permitted to know the consumption value of a good that I have non-transferable consumption authority for, but am not permitted to tell anyone that quantity.  Would I be able to publish a report that lists my total quantity of consumption value?  If so, I could construct a pair of reports that would communicate the quantity in question (one that includes it, one that does not).  But if I cannot incorporate the information into any report, I would be dramatically hindered in reporting aggregate information.  An additional consideration is that I could easily circumvent the restriction by conveying the information in prose, through chat or instant messaging.

Intellectual property rights are important.  I just don't see any way to have the enforced automatically through code.  Perhaps some readers have ideas on that front.

In Middle-Earth, No One Can Hear You Shout

Lord of the Rings Online just had its first major content patch since going live. In addition to a major new zone and a lot of new quests, there have been numerous tweaks, adjustments and changes to the look and feel of the gameplay.

One small change that caught my eye--or rather, my ear--was the removal of various shouts and yells that accompanied the use of some class abilities, particularly one used by captains.

In terms of my consistent interest in how structures of play and sociality form and solidify in synthetic worlds after their "initial condition", this change raises some intriguing questions.

It's always difficult to tell from forum threads just how many players actually object to a change of this nature, but my informal sense as a situated observer is that many players were surprised and a bit dismayed by the change. A lot of people were talking about the change in guild chat and general chat last night.

It's not the kind of issue that occasions the kind of dissatisfaction or griping that a perceived nerf can set off. It's a change that is completely aesthetic, that has no impact on gameplay mechanics whatsoever. That players care about such changes at all is yet another sign that the study of meaning has to remain an important part of the analytic responsibilities of researchers studying synthetic worlds. A strongly formalist approach to games would have a hard time understanding why the experience of a virtual battle is so different when avatars are shouting ecstatically and when they're making whooshy sounds.

But the change also raises an important question about what the constitutive moment of origin or beginning for the history of any given virtual world might be. Turbine hasn't said anything yet about the motivation for this small but evidently meaningful change, but if I had to hazard a guess, they may be responding to a lot of negative feedback about the shouts during the beta testing of the game. But for many people playing now, beta is prehistory, and the views of testers thus ought to have no constitutive force in shaping the will of the real community.

In general, at least some cultural history really is the history of one damn thing after another. E.g., for some reason, a cultural practice will drift and  present itself as new or novel for essentially arbitrary reasons, rather than because of some deeply determined or instrumental cause, and then people will habituate themselves to that practice, become attached to it, regard it as a part of what makes their daily life familiar and comfortable. Poking that habituation with a stick is rarely a wise thing to do if there isn't something important at stake.

If you start a synthetic world with something like battle shouts and players become accustomed to those shouts as a part of the experience of play in the world, it doesn't matter what anyone thought about the shouts when they were still potentially plastic or provisional parts of the world's culture. Once they've become real, it's as permanent as Pinocchio becoming a boy. A developer that meddles in the purely cultural affect of a virtual world needs to have a good reason for doing so, and more importantly, to share that reasoning with the players.

Synthetic World Data

For years, we've all been citing the subscription data collected by Bruce Woodcock at MMOGChart.com. SirBruce hasn't updated the numbers in a year. Understandable; the data-collection environment is expanding in all directions. Phil 'Vortal' White now bravely steps into the breach with MMOGData.com, apparently to continue and expand on Woodcock's efforts. What's especially cool is that Mr. White has started to break things down by business model. Free-to-play registrations at Runescape can be distinguished from subscription accounts at LOTRO. If he would add a Children/Teen/Adult variable, we would finally have a way to put Webkinz and Gaia and Club Penguin in perspective.

Let me also take this opportunity to howl into the ether once again about the need for formalized, official statistics for this virtual-worlding activity. The activity itself needs a name. What's a good verb for "going into a synthetic world"? And what name do we give to people doing that? Rory Starks has suggested "peggers" for the travelers, from MMORPG being pronounced "more-peg". The verb for doing the traveling would be "pegging."

Advertisers are not the only people who need to know where the eyeballs are. Parliament, Congress, the Bundestag, and the corresponding revenue-seeking agencies, are  going to want to know very soon how many peggers there are and how much time they spend pegging. The industry needs to create an official, neutral statistics-reporting agency.

Until that solution is found, though, it would be nice if companies would send honest data to efforts like those of Mr. White.

Eighteen years later

It was March 1989 when I found the magazine that changed my life. Working as a temp at an enormous HMO, I had been wearily slogging through an unending pile of data entry chores. The highlight of each day was my afternoon lunch break.

Walking briskly to Delauer's Newsstand in downtown Oakland, I would devour the week's newest magazines. Technically a college dropout at the time, I hungered for the world of ideas that disappeared when abysmal grades forced me to withdraw from the university.

My favorites were the fringe technology and culture periodicals: Utne Reader, Mondo 2000, Against the Current, and a magazine published by disgruntled office workers called Processed World. One afternoon, I stumbled upon a new issue of the Whole Earth Review. (You can view the magazine cover here.)

The lead story investigated the seemingly far-fetched notion that, by the turn of the century, the majority of the world's population would be composed by teenagers. Using a variety of qualitative and quantitative survey methods, the author traveled around the world in an attempt to understand youth culture. As you might imagine, he found glimmerings of global culture, but most of the cultural flows were exported from the United States. Most young people lived in dire economic conditions and they were noticeably uninterested in traditional politics, but they were highly attuned to popular culture.

It was the kind of article that would later be ripped to shreds in my graduate seminars as an example of "dangerously Utopian liberalism." But then, and now, I didn't let that critique dampen my enthusiasm. The article rocked my world and eventually led me to graduate school where I wrote my dissertation on Hong Kong youth culture.

Meanwhile, buried deeper in the magazine, a four-page story entitled "The Usenet Underground" highlighted a world-wide teleconferencing network that featured newsgroups on "everything from backpacking to microbiology, feminism to Fortran." I had just started accessing the Internet through a friend's account and marveled at the type of transnational communication that it enabled.

Flipping back and forth between the youth culture  and technology articles, the link between global teenagers and the Internet seemed very important. Someday, those kids would get their hands on global comunication technologies. When they did, the world would change. People would start to look beyond national boundaries, and they might even experience meaningful connections with people they had never met face-to-face. I chattered enthusiastically about this to my friends, but they found the notion pretty far-fetched.

That was eighteen years ago. The Berlin wall still stood, the Soviet Union had not yet crumbled, and few could have predicted that we would fight two wars in the Persian Gulf. My home computer had a ten megabyte hard drive, my laser printer was limited to one font (Courier), my modem puttered along at 1200 bits per second, and I was saving money to buy a mouse.

Eighteen years later, people of all ages are connecting with others around the world through such platforms as Habbo Hotel, There.Com, Second Life, Maple Story, and World of Warcraft. Many of these relationships are quite shallow, but some of the bonds run deep. Virtual world inhabitants work together organizing raids, putting on virtual concerts, raising funds for charities, solving puzzles, and proudly displaying their latest clothing purchases.

Meanwhile, groups like the Global Kids' Digital Media Initiative are bringing together teenagers to talk about international political issues and to take action on those issues. The USC Center on Public Diplomacy is exploring the role of virtual worlds in promoting the public good, charitable giving, and avatar-to-avatar cooperation. And, ten weeks from now, State of Play V: Building the Global Metaverse will bring together thinkers from around the globe to participate in interdisciplinary conversations about transnational virtual worlds.

As virtual worlds receive a flurry of attention from traditional media outlets and Fortune 500 corporations, globally focused online initiatives are increasingly common. It no longer seems so far-fetched to speculate about the transformative potential of virtual worlds.

The readers of Terra Nova are deeply immersed in the culture of virtual worlds, and I'd love to know what you think. Can multiplayer games and social virtual worlds play a positive role in tackling problems that face our planet? If not, why do you think so? If they can play a positive role, how can the rest of us leverage the power of virtual worlds to make a difference?

State of Play V: Building the Global Metaverse (August 19-22, 2007)

State of Play V: Building the Global Metaverse is the fifth annual State of Play conference on the future of virtual worlds. Organized by New York Law School, in conjunction with Trinity University, with the support of Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, this year's conference invites experts across disciplines to discuss the transnational dimensions of the Metaverse and the impact of virtual environments on education, law, politics and society.

Virtual worlds are crucial building blocks of global civil society. As such, they harbor great potential for relationship-building and cooperation across national borders. We hope you will join us for this important interdisciplinary conversation about the future of the global Metaverse. The conference will be held on August 19-22, 2007 in Singapore.

The conference will feature experts from around the world speaking about:

• Cross-cultural communication and avatar-to-avatar diplomacy
• Strategies for understanding behaviors and values of virtual world residents
• Regulating speech, property, and addiction in the Metaverse
• Building transnational businesses in virtual worlds
• Using virtual environments to teach kids and teenagers
• Space, place and virtual world cultures

We also present two new documentaries about how global virtual worlds intersect with real-world economies and social structures: Gold Farmers (Ge Jin, 2007) and Ideal World (Snyder, Thomas, and Portocarrero, 2007). On Wednesday, August 22nd, we offer several half-day workshops on topics including virtual world journalism, using virtual environments to transform global business, educational applications of virtual worlds, and managing virtual identities.

For conference schedule and registration please visit:  www.nyls.edu/stateofplay. We hope to see you there.

Sincerely,

Aaron Delwiche (Conference Co-Chair)
Dan Hunter (Conference Co-Chair)
Beth Noveck (Conference Founder)

Intelligence Seeding - Anger fuels better decisions

I don't know what made me do it.  We had been at the dinner party for a while, everybody was having a good time.  It was the kind of dinner party where everybody brings a dish, and our dish was Stromboli (pizza bread), and I warmed it up at the party on a cookie sheet that we carried the bread on.

The cookie sheet, loaded with some warm bread, had been in the oven for a while, but unbeknown  to the other guests I had turned the oven off a few minutes earlier.  I knew the cookie sheet was only warm.  I pulled the cookie sheet out of the oven as if it was SCORCHING HOT!  I screamed, "IT BURNS, IT BURNS!!", and tried to ease my seemingly searing flesh by trying to hand the warm cookie sheet to my wife who was standing behind me.

At this point, she had a decision to make.

She could do the right thing and share in her husband's agony by taking the scorching pan out of my hands and be burned herself, or she could retreat and create distance from what was obviously about to be a very painful experience.  Her reaction was the same as everyone's reaction (yes, I have since done this to other people).

Her reaction was what I called the "mime" reaction.  She basically motioned to grab the pan as if there was an invisible 3" force field around it.  Not wanting to touch it, but not wanting to let the bread hit the floor either.  I'll never forget that tortured look on her face, of wanting to help, to ease the pain, but not willing to endure much of the pain herself.  Of course everyone else was quite startled, and it took a while before they got the joke.  It took longer for my lovely wife to talk to me again.

I'm not sure what this says about our marriage, but it tells us that while there are aspects of our intelligence that are inate or instinctual, we also contain the ability to override those traits, and that these override abilities increase and decrease when certain emotional thresholds are met.  We can reach out and take a pan that we know is going to burn us.

A recent study by psychologists at the University of California Santa Barbara found that Anger Fuels Better Decisions in 3 experiments designed to determine how anger affects our thinking.  The study demonstrated how raised levels of anger increased the ability to distinguish between strong and weak arguments.  In other words, when certain anger thresholds are met, decisions are filtered differently based on perceived notions about strength of arguments.  The antithesis being that when we are not angry, we are more likely to consider many, and sometimes even weaker arguments.

This brings us to our point, Intelligence Seeding.  As we begin the next epoch of technology, what I refer to as The Intelligence Age, we will need to decide how we wish to develop our next level of intelligence, the intelligence that will move us towards the Singularity.  Do we want machines to develop their own intelligence, or do we want to seed them to be like us?

It's a bigger question than you may think at first, and its why I'm so infatuated with the subject.  To consider the task of seeding intelligence based on your own thought processes, you need a good understanding of your own intelligence.  I recently tried to model some emotional behavior in my intelligence testing, and was quickly struck by the intracacies of our emotional makeup.  Every emotional state we experience has some level of influence over every other brain function.

Anger makes your face red, your eyes bulge, and your blood pressure increase.
Sadness reduces your appetite, your energy, makes you lose focus, and can make you cry.
Fear makes you hypersensative, dialates your pupils, gives you goosebumps.

I propose that emotion models and human intelligence seeding will be some of the first large hurdles of The Intelligence Age.  We will need to compare these intelligence models to organic models that are developed without the corruption of human emotion.  These organic models will have the ability to discover new types of intelligence, and new types of emotions, emotions that we cannot understand.  At some point we will need to chose, because I have a feeling these two seperate races of artificial intelligence arent going to get along very well.

Image is of a tiny sand crab on the beach in Manzanillo, Mexico.  These guys blend into the sand so well, you can hardly see them.  Ahh, evolution.

Howard Rheingold Interview: Cooperation in virtual worlds.

I had the opportunity for a short interview with Howard Rheingold. Howard is the author of The Virtual Community and Smart Mobs, and a well respected thinker and writer within the framework of social media, culture and digital journalism. Howard has worked on the Cooperation Commons, a joint project with Institute for the Future so I asked him some questions about his perspective on cooperation theories and how they apply to a Second Life setting and on corporate utilization of the medium. The interview ends with Howard posting a question for the TN readers to discussion and elaborate on.

Q: What insights on cooperation have you acquired in Second Life so far?
Howard: I am still very much a newbie in Second Life. I am reminded, however, of the complexities of the Unix-based Picospan environment on the Well when I first arrived there in the mid 1980s. Not being technical, most of us new arrivals needed help. So the complexity of the tools required to socialize there required people who knew how they worked to teach newcomers. So in a way, the difficulty of learning how to navigate in a 3D environment forces newcomers to find friends, and forces those already there who want to grow a rich social environment to spend time orienting newcomers.

Q: Interesting. And, does some of the cooperation theories apply to a 3D space like Second Life?
Howard: I don't want to make anything like a strong claim in regard to that question, but some of the basics of cooperation theory apply: people are more likely to cooperate with people in an identifiable group, knowing someone's real name increases the possibility of cooperation, reciprocity builds trust, etc. So if you want to increase cooperation among a collection of people in SL, for example, give them all an identifiable badge or hat or shoe or other easily visible apparel to identify each other.

Peder: So Second Life must be a struggle from a perspective of cooperation’s theory since avatars apparel is so diverse and individuality are emphasized?

Howard: Just like the real world. If you walk down the street and see someone else in the same apparel -- a business suit or a mohawk -- you are more likely to be available to cooperate with that person. In some ways, despite the prevalence of conflict and competition, humans are hardwired for cooperation. Some recent theories hold that the prefrontal cortex that gives us all those "higher" functions evolved because it enables social memory that other primates don't have, and thus enables collective action -- collective defense, collective food-gathering, etc.

Q: And, how do those ”higher” functions of social memory apply to interactions mediated through a masquerade (avatar)?

Howard: Axelrod -- cooperation is dependent on the "shadow of the future." You are more likely to cooperate today with someone who can reciprocate tomorrow; you are less likely to cooperate today with someone who failed to cooperate yesterday. So if people change their avatars all the time, they are less likely to build up networks of potential reciprocators. Having a persistent identity, even if it is pseudonymous, enables individuals to build social capital.

Q: And from a corporate perspective, building trust is thus about displaying a persistent identity . But, how does world culture apply to this variable of trust and cooperation via pseudonymous identities?

Howard: Certainly a persistent identity that exhibits trustworthiness is essential to brand -- a brand is a promise that a produce or service with this identity meets certain criteria. Coke tastes the same. Nokia phones are of a certain level of quality. Etc. Pseudonymous identities build trust by acting in a trustworthy manner over time. It is more important to identify a past cheater or co-operator than to know his or her real name. So behavior over time is the most important factor, not whether you know exactly who is behind the mask.

Q: Which build reputation?
Howard: Yes. Reputation is the record, *in the minds of others* of your past behavior. You can influence your reputation through your behavior, but it is an attribute of a social network, not an attribute that you own or control.

Q: Now, about a Second Life setting for brainstorm sessions for development of new ideas. Would the mediated communication through avatars yield a greater potential for generating better ideas than in real life?

Howard: You always have more bandwidth in a face to face setting, and that isn't going to change soon. Humans have evolved highly sensitive perception mechanisms for evaluating micro gestures, tone of voice, etc. The point about virtual worlds is not that they are better for human communication, but that they enable communication that wasn't possible before -- connecting with people you never met and don't know but who share an interest, interacting in real time or asynchronously with people all over the world, socializing in a simulated environment and using simulations in communications. However, in brainstorming, I'd say that there might be an advantage in NOT seeing the look of skepticism (or tone of voice that denotes skepticism) on the faces of others. The only way to tell is to experiment.

Q: To finish off, is there a future for enhanced cooperation in 3D spaces? And, what does a Second Life type application need to evolve into before it can seriously interlink with cooperative processes that adds value in a real world business setting?

Howard: I would recommend experimenting with exercises and games to see what works. The great advantage of SL in experiments like this is that you can record them from multiple angles and replay them for analysis later.

Q: One last thing. Do you have something you'd want to share and discuss with the TN community? 

Howard: Here is something I came across during our interview, for example. Would this work in a 3D environment? Link

The link in question contain details of a workshop methodology for eLearning, Web 2.0, and Games as MUD maps, that I would recommend reading. (Intro from the blog post)

This is the story of how I began to discover the way Web 2.0 may change learning for college students, the three journeys involved in building online systems, and why a workshop game may be a mud map. Oh, and how the Open Innovation Exchange model may be the way to tie a lot of these things together.

I don't have insight knowledge about learning in 3D spaces or Second Life for that matter but think that the methodology sounds like an interesting experiment to carry out but TN community members with more expertise might have insights to share on the subject? 

Learning objectives are best achieved when tied to real-world (not inworld) factors of production.

The literature on virtual worlds includes a few articles and book chapters about production functions, which map labor and capital (the "factors of production") into items or services of value (perhaps only because they are factors of other production functions. (Castronova has a  book chapter in "Synthetic Worlds" and a closely related article; Malaby has a nice article on cultural capital.)

In this post, I want to focus on one tricky issue in worlds desgined for education--distinguishing between inworld and real-world factors of production. Moreover, I want to argue the following thesis:

• Learning objectives are best achieved when tied to real-world (not inworld) factors of production.

To clarify the inworld/real-world distinction, consider World of Warcraft.  (For consistency with my Worlds of Study paper, I refer to humans as "participants" and the characters they control as "actors.")

Assume that two participants collaborate to kill an NPC that will drop loot of 100 silver pieces and two valuable weapons.  Looking only at inworld activities,