Terra Nova

New Nexus Project

One of our banner submitters, Tripp Robbins, let us know he was eager to get word out about a project he is working on to use virtual worlds as an educational tool.  The website of the project is here and I asked Tripp if he could write a short summary of what he is up to for the blog so that people can have a chance to provide input.  So that follows below.  Thanks, Tripp!

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Summary of the NEW NEXUS PROJECT for Terra Nova

After spending a lot of time in various virtual worlds/games/simulation, the idea of using a VW for education seemed powerful. I spent the last 18 months or so doing research on “what’s out there” (and I’m sure I missed a lot). After a great seminar on “Using Videogames in Education” at Stanford University with James Gee as the key presenter (and others from UWisconsin and Stanford) last summer, I came away feeling like what was needed is a tool kit for educators to create VW content. That led to the creation of the New Nexus project.

Two Releases: Arden I and Exodus

Two announcements –

 1. Arden I: The World of William Shakespeare is being released today. If you go to this website, you can play it. You can also download the files and modify it as you wish. All this, and ongoing work, made possible through the generosity of the MacArthur Foundation.

2. My second book, Exodus to the Virtual World, is also being released today.

More on both below the fold.

Fly safe

A common player sign-off in Eve-Online is "fly safe", as in "I must go to bed, *fly safe* everyone."  In Real World (RW) terms to "fly safe" in Eve-Online implies an odd mixture of metaphor. 

In the lingo of Eve-Online, players are called "pilots."  Pilots in turn are said to "fly ships" to conduct "fleet operations."  Well capturing this blending of RW metaphor is my favorite in-game command:  "pilots, align your ships [to a destination]".   To this day whenever I hear it, my pace quickens [Fn1].

TN Banner

December 2008:

Back to the snowy trees (we used this one a couple years ago).  I've added a snowish backdrop too.

October 24, 2008:

 

This kind of abstracty one is just me goofing around with Corel Painter and the little Wacom tablet.  The prior banner we've had this fall (with the nice Tudor houses) was from Rory Starks of the Arden team -- the image can be found lower down in this post.

April 2008:

Thanks to Mark Terrano for a new springy banner!

March 2008:

As you might have noticed, we've emerged somewhat from winter and I've reinstated the banner from Chris Dodds.  At some point, I might switch us to something more emphatically "springy," but I have yet to see the flowers emerging with any real force here in Philadelphia...

11/29/07: 

Thanks to everyone who sent in stuff.  Though it was a close race, Richard Page's submission came in with the most votes.  TN is now settled in for a long winter's blog.

CFP: Breaking the Magic Circle

This call for papers (received via Vili) is of interest, given our frequent discussions about the magic circle here.

Breaking the Magic Circle
Call for Papers: Game Studies Seminar, Tampere 10-11 April, 2008

One of the classic theories of games and play was presented by Johan Huizinga in his work Homo Ludens (orig. from 1938). Huizinga wrote about the free and voluntary nature of play, how it is "an activity connected with no material interest" and how it "proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space", involving and absorbing players utterly into a separate world set off from the "ordinary" life, while being created and maintained by communities of players.

A culture of mistrust in Eve-Online

Players in Eve-Online harbor a mistrust of strangers.  A harsh Player-versus-Player (PvP) culture fueled by competitive (and asymmetric) play drives a culture of suspicion about the identity and purpose of characters.  Throw into the mix "alts" (alternate characters) and one might imagine the total unravelling of a social system: "whose alt are you?"  Yet the social system of Eve-Online flourishes for it, I think.  It does so by layering a degree of nuance and circumspection in player relationships that seems unique in virtual worlds.

I think this aspect of the Eve-Online experience is fascinating because it illustrates how novel and yet sophisticated social arrangements can be constructed in online environments in response to worlds of harsh constraint.

Whose alt are you anyway?

What do we mean by ‘computer game’?

When we talk about computer games we are picking out a set of things in the world. Typically we will think of PC games, console games, flash games – that sort of thing. However I think that there is vagueness when we think about boundary conditions and, more interestingly, that these boundary cases tell us something about how we conceptualize games.

As this is a long post  it's worth putting the answer I get to, then running through how I get there, so this is my proposed definition:

A computer game is a game where at least some of the bounds of game-acts are essentially controlled by information technology.

This is my thought process - at a brief glance it looks to me that there are two areas in which we might find necessary conditions for something to be a computer game. These are: display of action and decision-making.

[Three posts in a row, I’m sure I just heard a gong from the side of the stage]

Do virtual worlds liberate us?

I’m wondering what TN reader’s view is of the trajectory of the intersection of virtual worlds and what some term the political economy is. In short do we think that the practices associated virtual worlds are tending towards liberating us or are acting as just another way for dominant ideologies to be re-enforced?

Plato’s game

Rules are one of the things that define something as being a game. But I wonder what it is we refer to when we talk about the rules of a game.

Warning this is only of interest, and then only marginally so, to the particularly beardy.

Tabula Rasa

So Tabula Rasa is released today, after many years of rumor and speculation.  What is written on the clean slate?  Wired's Susan Arendt claims that it reinvents the MMO to court casual gamers, the point being that you can get into hectic tactical combat quickly.   Seth Schiesel of the New York Times offers some interesting quotes from Richard Garriott that make a few more pitches about the game:

As many kudos as I would like to give World of Warcraft, it’s basically a remake of EverQuest, just incredibly polished and refined,” he said. “There are harbingers of failure in that model. Everyone in these games is obsessed with the concept of how much damage-per-second they are inflicting and maximizing their D.P.S. When you do that, you are no longer playing a role; you are playing an inventory-management game...  With Tabula Rasa we wanted the player to spend as much time as possible actually looking at the environment and what they’re shooting at.