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!

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

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.

The goal of the New Nexus is to see the creation of a software tool set for creating 3D virtual world experiences for learning. This "Dream Kit" should be:

1) free to the public to use or modify

2) easy to use (well, as easy as possible)

3) powerful, flexible and adaptable

4) suited to multiple operating systems (or in different OS flavors)

If and when the Dream Kit is created, educators around the world will be able to use it to create Learning Modules. (My conservative ballpark guess is that a reasonable tool would only be useable by 1%-2% of primary and secondary teachers; at its most user-friendly, it’d still require some tech savvy.) Each new module can be shared on the web and available for free download so that the storehouse of available, ever-improving materials will always be growing. (Alternately, it may be wise to allow some users/organizations to create works for commercial sales, since the incentive to recover costs would allow for more time and energy to be put into a module.)

We are not naive about the challenge that this project poses; we are inspired by the potential it shows. The possibilities are staggering. We see two possible routes to the development of the Dream Kit. The first is an open source approach, with volunteers working collaboratively to create something for the good of mankind and harnessing the power of the web to fuel the work. The second approach is to obtain funding from charitable organizations and/or individuals to hire world-class software engineers and artists to create the kit. For either approach, regular updates to the engine would be expected.

Having a little familiarity with software development, I understand that creating something that is really powerful/flexible AND user-friendly is hard, really hard. I’m sure the reason such a tool doesn’t exist is because it’s extremely hard to create. But it’s not impossible. So if it’s possible and if it’s worth doing, how do we get it made? Which approach, Open Source or charitably funded (or a hybrid) is best?

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.

1. Release of Arden I to the public.

In Arden I, we implemented the vast majority of content items that we hoped to. If you run around in Ilminster (our opening town) and talk to every NPC, you should encounter all of these things fairly quickly: Shakespearean quest lines; historically accurate tavern games; NPCs and resources drawn from Shakespeare; Shakespeare Q&A games that give experience points; Shakespeare text objects that grant power (text-as-treasure); Shakespeare texts accessed verbatim, in summary, and in quest/plot form.

In short, lots of Shakespeare. It’s also rather boring, as I’ve said before. We failed to design a gripping game experience. As several of our playtesters said, Where are the monsters? -- a good question to ask of any serious-games initiative. We do have monsters, Shakespearean ones even, but they are out in the woods somewhere, not part of the main game experience.

No monsters is a big problem for our larger goal, which is to use virtual worlds to run experiments. No monsters means no fun, no fun means no people, and no people means no experiment. Back to the drawing board. We are taking our experience with Arden I and putting it into “Arden II: London's Burning," conceived entirely as a game. In Arden II, we are not trying to put Shakespeare in front of anyone, nor are we seeking historical or textual accuracy in any way. We are making a game; monsters everywhere. The Bard is there too, but this time, he is not getting in the way of the monsters. We expect a decent population in Arden II, and when we get it, we will run experiments. Results will be presented at the International Communications Association meetings in May 2008.

I am releasing Arden I to the public now for two reasons. First, there continues to be tremendous interest in the basic idea of building a virtual world at a university for the purpose of research and education. Arden I splashes lovingly cold water on the face of anyone who dreams about that. The research and education part is easy, as you can see here. You can also see that fun is not so easy. The second reason to release is to encourage other people to build on what we started. If you want to take a traditionally-conceived Shakespeare world and make it fun, please do. I think it would be cool to see where others would go with it.

 

2.  Exodus to the Virtual World

In this one, I try to project the medium-term impact of virtual worlds on daily life in the real world, especially in regards to politics and policy. To make projections, I rely on the history of human migration: knowing in general what happens when people migrate, we can forecast what’s going to happen as people migrate to virtual worlds. To explain why many will migrate, I propose a psycho-physiological theory of fun. Then I argue that the people who design virtual worlds are actually doing public policy. As such, their innovations will bleed over into real-world policy-making. You get some odd outcomes when you suggest that real world governments will try to please citizens raised in virtual world policy environments: things like zero economic growth, huge estate taxes, and full-employment economies, all at once. Bottom line: big political change is coming.

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].

I am unsure of the roots of this confluence of naval and aviation metaphor in Eve-Online.   Perhaps it is a throw-back to the age of dirigible.  Whatever the reference, the developers certainly have had a strong hand in shaping the vocubulary of this place. As one minor example, recently they have decided to retire an old favorite of mine from their user interface.  "Gang" as in a "gang of players" and "gang commands" has been replaced with "fleet" as in "fleet" options as a menu choice on the GUI.   I always imagined that "gang" was colorfully related to the 17th century naval practice of impressment - as in impressing "gangs" of sailors.

As the old players evolve and speak to the new players who in turn speak to what they see - the days of "gang" in Eve-Online are going as the texts are changed, I would reckon.

Beyond metaphor jazz, there is another aspect to "fly safe" - at least in my imagination - that is lovely.  I think it contains a nod to a game world with forces larger than what individual players can account for.  It is like what "God speed" or "good luck" might mean in the RW.  Sure luck is allied to the prepared, but to admit that a place is not entirely controllable by the actions of individuals makes it seem larger. 

You and I may be just cogs in a large Player-versus-Player machine in the world of Eve-Online,  but I wish you the best of outcomes.

Appealing to a player's fortune in the big chess game in a game world's sky may be just a bit of cultural idiosyncracy in Eve-Online or even just my imagination.   If true, however, perhaps it is also a tiny poke to other game worlds where cause-and-effect are designed to be dispatched with more quid pro quo.  In Eve-Online you may do everything right and still lose your ship, again and again.   Oh, do "fly safe."

The readers of this series of posts on Eve-Online (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. ) may also suspect that community story-telling (at least for alliance players) may also play a role [Fn2].  As in, "I hope your flight is safe, but whatever happens it is part of the story."   To close with a very minor anecdote.  A character of mine in Eve-Online finds himself in a 0.0 enclave that feels shrinking: more reds, more red raids, daily, nightly, hourly.  Perhaps the outcome is inevitable, but that is also the fun of it.  A story needs to be told.

Fly safe, indeed.

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

Fn1.   

To align a ship is to vector it - e.g. towards a celestial object. To align a fleet is to have all that fleet's ships point in the direction it intends to travel.  Doing so allows the fleet to move off the mark more quickly once the command to move is given.  When a fleet aligns its ships, therefore, it is usually an indication that a fleet is readying to move.  Aligning a fleet of ships is usually done at the last moment - just before movement - so as to minimize the "intel value" that an enemy observing that fleet can obtain about that fleet's intentions.   Sometimes aligning orders are given that are later changed to misinform possible enemy observers about that fleet's intentions.

Fn2.  From here:

Dave Rickey perhaps thought similarly when he wrote (comment):

So each player puts themselves, or at least their alliance, at the center of events and interprets them in that light…Even if they *lost*, the experience was far superior to anything CCP could direct, because they felt involved, engaged, *important*. Even if they were just one cog in a PvP machine, they get a derived sense of meaning that a developer event, no matter how well scripted, could never provide.

Finally, I’d just like to mention a theme that has surfaced in the TN series (cited earlier).  It is that the player groups in Eve-Online can be viewed as part of a large ecosystem that recycles players (The moon is a harsh mistress), that is exploited for asymmetries (PvP, asymmetry… ) to keep the game world fair, and that above all provides the moving pieces to keep the story skipping along and the players coming back.

TN Banner

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.

11/26/07: Winter banners so far... (tomorrow is the deadline!)

from Richard Page

from Richard Bartle

from Bziomek

from Amanda Cosmos

from Tripp Robbins

Awesome!  Many thanks!

For what it's worth, here's the one we've used in past years, which is taken from the snowy woods of northeastern Pennsylvania:

11/15/07 Update:  So recently on a bus in Daegu, South Korea, I bumped into Mark Terrano, who, in addition to working for Hidden Path Entertainment, did that cool TN butterfly banner.  He was wondering when we were going to have another round of Terra Nova banner submissions.  Answer: How about now?

The current banner (which looks kind of "Highlander" according to Mike Sellers) was something I worked up from a photo I took on the Isle of Skye a few years ago.  But it looks like winter is soon to arrive here in the North, so it's probably time to switch it for something a little more chilly.

I'd really rather not call this a "contest" this time around, since there's really no prize, and we tend to like everything that you all submit. But, in short, if anyone with spare time and creativity wants to send in your "winter" banner ideas for popular display, please do.  What we're looking for are original, copyright-problem free,  900 pixel x 105 pixel, 30K or less,  JPEG files to be sent to the good old roaringshrimp address (see the about page).  And see the stuff below for ideas, but think "winter" rather than spring.

The deadline will be midnight Nov. 27th.  As before, if you send us stuff that looks good, I'll be posting it here so that folks can see what fabulously creative pixel-wizards our readers are.

p.s. Also, since last spring, you might have noticed I've started doing tiled matching background images that appear outside the 900 pixel width of the blog.  I can probably whip up something in a pinch, but if anyone wants to send in a wintry tiled background to make my life easier, feel free. :-) 

--------

6/15/07 Update -- Now featuring the awesome butterfly banner of Mark Terrano.

3/31/07 Update -- After counting all the votes, it looks like Chris Dodds (Christo) of Icon, Inc. is the winner.  It's really a pretty banner.  (And btw, Icon is located in Melbourne, Australia, where Spring looks an awful lot like fall -- so thanks, Christo, for putting up with our borealocentrism.)

I should also note that a majority of the TN judges suggested that we could do a rotation of these submissions, using some of the great stuff that folks created in the future months.   And I think that's what we'll do (with credit, of course).  So if you submitted something you'd rather not see at the top of the page someday, just let us know.

Thanks again.  We were really overwhelmed at the quantity and quality of the banners.

3/27 3/28/07 (update) -- Wow! We got a bunch of entries (11) (22!) for our Spring Banner!  Many thanks to our creative community for taking care of our design work.  (And if anyone has procrastinated, you've still got til midnight today). 

The next step is that I'll direct the TN authors to this post and we'll convene in the virtual star chamber this week to reach a decision.  But I firmly believe that all contests are somewhat silly and that creative work should be appreciated outside of artificial rankings.  So, just so that you can tell us where we go wrong in choosing among these, here's what we have received so far:

From Chad O'Neil:

From  Dave Levinson:

From Rory Starks

Two from Andy Havens:

Five (!!!) from Mike Michael Chui:

And from a Mike Michael Chui & Andy Havens collaboration:

And in under the wire, Sean Duncan:

And at the 11th hour, we've got two new sets, one set from Chris Dodds:

And these from Mark Terrano:

Again, thanks to everyone for submitting banners -- I'd be happy to have any of these at the top of the TN page.

Honestly, there are so many drop-dead gorgeous banners here that it really feel unfair to choose just one, but I guess that's what we said we would do.  We'll try to reach a decision before April.

Original Post from 3/20/07:

The snow is starting to thaw in Philadelphia and elsewhere -- it feels like it's about time to ditch our
winter bannerscape. 

Our past Spring banners have looked like this:

I could dust them off and drop them in place again, but I'm thinking something new would be more fun.  Does anyone want to take a shot at a seasonal Spring '07 TN banner?

If so, send us a 900 pixel x 105 pixel [ed: sorry, forgot that before] 30K or less JPEG file to the roaringshrimp address (see the about page) and if we get a few submissions we'll have a vote of the TN authors to pick a winner and do a post giving credit.  (If you come up with something nifty, you should post links to files in the comments here as well.)

Of course, graphics would need to be original.   (The photos above and the current snowy trees were both backyard shots.)

Update circa Vernal Equinox: I forgot to give a deadline -- let's make it the 27th of March.

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.

Huizinga's view has become widely known within contemporary game studies, and it is often referred as the 'Magic Circle' view on games and play. This concept has also been widely criticised, as it has become increasingly obvious how various "games external" areas play an important role in digital play, and also because digital games have become more widely enmeshed with and applied into various economical, educational and other social and cultural processes and uses.

"Breaking the Magic Circle" seminar invites presentations from multiple
> points of view, including theoretical as well as empirically based studies into that question or expand existing conceptions regarding digital games and play. Particular fields of study might include, but are not limited to:

•    pervasive, mobile or location based gaming,
•    alternate reality gaming
•    casual, non-immersive or coincidental forms of play,
•    professional gaming,
•    money gaming, betting and gambling within digital games and play.

The seminar is fourth in the annual series of game studies working paper seminars organised by the Games Research Lab in the University of Tampere. Due to the work-in-progress emphasis, we strongly encourage submitting late breaking results, working papers and/or submissions from graduate students. Early considerations from projects currently in progress are most welcome, as the purpose of the seminar is to have peer-to-peer discussions and thereby provide support in refining and improving research work in this area. After the seminar, separate consideration will be given to various options of publishing the seminar papers.

The papers to be presented will be chosen based on abstract review. Full papers are distributed prior the event to all participants, in order to facilitate discussion.

The two-day event consists of themed sessions that aim to introduce current research projects and discuss ongoing work in studies of games, play and their relation to surrounding phenomena. The seminar will be chaired by professor Frans Mäyrä (Hypermedia Laboratory, University of Tampere). Paper commentators include researchers Markus Montola, Aki Järvinen and Simon Niedenthal, associate professor of interaction design.

The seminar will be held in Tampere, Finland and will be free of charge; the number of participants will be restricted.

Important Dates

•    Abstract Deadline: January 15, 2008
•    Notification of Acceptance: January 30, 2008
•    Full Paper deadline: March 27, 2007
•    Seminar dates: April 10-11, 2007

Submission Guidelines

Abstract submissions should include maximum of 1.000 words (excluding references). Abstracts should be send to info-gamestudies{at}uta.fi as plain text only (no attachments). Guidelines for submitting a full seminar paper will be provided with the notification of acceptance.

Our aim is that everyone participating has been able to read materials submitted to the seminar, therefore the maximum length for a full paper is set to 6.000 words (excluding references). Note also that the presentations held at the seminar should also encourage discussion, instead of only repeating the information presented in the papers.

Tentatively, every paper will be presented for 10 minutes and discussed for 20 minutes.

---

Ed: I won't be able to make it to Finland, but hopefully, these papers will show up online eventually.  Personally, I'd like to see a paper contrasting Huizinga's magic circle with Foucault's notion of the heterotopia.  Has anyone written one of those yet?  :-)

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?

Let's start to unravel this via a minor story that occured recently from the world of Eve-Online. A small number of players were apparently beseiged in a station for a number of days by mercenaries.  David Ammerman offers an insighful note on his observation of a mercenary moment in Eve-Online (his entire description - worth the read - is available here).  The synopsis:

A small mining corporation was war-dec'ed (War Declaration [Fn1.]) by another corporation who hired a mercenary corporation to execute their messy deed.  The small mining corporation was beseiged in a station after some loss, effectively removed from the game for a period of time.

Earlier in this series on Eve-Online (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) I framed Eve-Online as a place where players and how they organize themselves seems in constant motion.  Eve-Online is to my view an ecosystem of players in transition.  Players transition into new roles and areas over time as a means of adapting to harsh circumstances as well as opportunistically seeking better niches.

Some of this theme was touched upon when we discussed how Eve-Online recycles its losers (The moon is a harsh mistress, Anecdotal research).

The microcosm of 0.0 PvP pilots in Eve-Online to my view well illustrates this dynamic.   To work through a hypothetical set of examples.  Individuals and groupings of "professional PvPers" (using  the terminology of My friends keeper)  may find themselves:

1. Fighting as foot soldiers on behalf of a large organizations (alliances).
2. Then through the course of events turn to dual-hat roles (fighting afield for personal gain and loosely furthering their alliance's goals).
3. Perhaps even turning to piracy [Fn2].
4. Then later recycling themselves into mercenary roles.

The transition between (2.) and (3.) above, is to my mind usefully captured (metaphorically) by the 19th century practice (and earlier) of privateering.  The problem with privateers was that many operated in a grey area broaching piracy.  As a metaphor I think it well illustrates a type of transition among some professional PvPers in alliances. 

Some professional PvPers may start out as foot soldiers in an alliance but along the way acquire a second hat.  For example, some may develop an arrangement with their organization where they still work on its behalf but may also engage in activities for their own (and associate) profit and interest.  Thus they may start to attack enemy shipping - or shipping of friends of enemies - far removed from their alliance areas of concern.  They may do it for a cocktail of reasons:  a desire for a lifestyle of "pew pew" (2nd definition ), for profit and distinction for uberness within their group under the guise of economic warfare.  Unfortunately, there are cases where such far afield dalliances have lead to political trouble for the parent alliances.  Birds do come home to roost.

If such players slip into piracy - as some have - they likely fall into an activity further removed from their alliance's interests, at least on the surface.  Such players may also reconstitute themselves back into the organized struggle as mercenaries, or they may transition back into stable alliance frameworks. 

Mercenaries are an interesting player-created organizational artifact in the Eve-Online universe.  David's account (cited above) touches a number of important points:

• The best mercenary groups are very good at their craft and consider themselves "professionals."
• The best mercenary organizations consider themselves "uber" or elite.

The blacker PvP current in the estuary that is Eve-Online is as suggested above.  Many players are in transition.  This scales up to groups.  For example, groups along the evolutionary path of turning into mercenary groups may have started out as pirate organizations.  While some pirate groups may be as professional in conduct and skill as the best of the mercenaries, they are steeped in darker colors.

If you think players and their movements in this ecosystem is difficult enough to decipher and interpret, let me now introduce into the mix "alts".  Alts seem to be used by players to develop "aspects" of themselves and their player interests that cross-cut player organizations and roles.

Alternate characters are hardly anything new to online gaming.  Yet, to my view, Eve-Online is one of the most "alt friendly" MMORPGs out there (Note that there are two types of alts in Eve-Online [Fn3]).  Not only does the player culture appear to have so thoroughly incorporated them, but also because their use seems actively encouraged by the developers (e.g. CCP's "Power of Two" offer [Fn4]).

What can you do with alts in Eve-Online?  The following are common patterns of use:

1. Alts used as scouts.
2. Alts used as miners.
3. Alts used as haulers.
4. Alts allocated to research.
5. Alts for spycraft.
6. Alts as combat proxies (e.g. building shell organizations that alliances or corporations may use to disguise activities to enemies).

And plenty more.

Points 1-4 involve fleshing out in-game actitivities with additional capability.  Points 5-6 enter the real of asymmetric competition discussed in the last post in this series (PvP, asymmetry, and the information game...).

To my reckoning, 0.0 / alliance players are more likely to have alts than Empire players (the distinction between the two groups is described in The moon is a harsh mistress).

To my view, these are fairly typical social practices regarding the use of alts in Eve-Online:

1. You as a player may be referred to via your "main" (designated primary character) on voice channels.  However, on (text) chat channels you are likely refered to as whatever character you are using.   For example, "Fizzle is our CEO (though Fizzle may also have a couple of other alts)."  Your main may be your most valuable (highest skill-point) character, however, it can be an arbitrarily designated.
2. High skill-point secondary alts may become known in their own right - e.g. "DogABCD is our corporation's manufacturer."
3. Low skill-point and designated special-purpose alts may be viewed functionally:  "Wailing Wallaby is my scout/hauler/etc." (merely so).
4. You as a player may not have to reveal all your alts to your corporation/alliance, however, if you have undeclared alts the expectation is that they cannot be used against your corporation or alliance (e.g. for an enemy organization). The trade-off lies between knowing who are your alts" versus "too much information" to keep track of.
5. Most players will declare their functional alts and in fact enlist them within a single corporation/alliance - it simplifies management considerably (e.g. Not-Blue-Shoot-It issues, see NBSI and the grey problem ).

The problem with alts for players is that it turns an already difficult player relational information space (in terms of PvP, asymmetry) into a much more complicated one.   The question always lurking in every player's mind when they see a character is "whose alt is that".   It is a defensive reflex.

Earlier I suggested that the "professional PvPer" is a player who could transition from pure alliance roles to privateering roles to piracy ones.  That path could be tied to the movement of a single character across organizational and functional boundaries.  Or it could be a movement of focus and interest in alts.  "Joe may continue to leave a character in the alliance, but instead choose to focus his attention on the adventures of a PvP alt."  Joe's shift in focus in his characters are not independent actions - it is still Joe playing them.  The question is how explicitly are the two characters linked in purpose.  It gets complicated quickly.

To highlight this point.  Alts are often used as proxies by more formal player organizations to engage in grey-area struggle in Eve-Online.  Shadow corporations and groups are set-up and used as part of asymmetric competition.  My group may not want to risk open conflict with yours, but we may seek other means to undermine your interests.  For all these reasons, I think questions about how to cleanly depict player transits between roles emerge.

As illustration, the wikipedia suggests something which many pirate observers in Eve-Online have suspected - that some pirate organizations are likely shadow proxies for alliances (from here):

Motherships... Despite being intended for alliance level warfare, one of the first Motherships built actually went to a small pirate corporation. This has caused some of the major alliance powers in the game to begin controlling the construction of these behemoths, or at least try to ensure that the only pirate gangs who have them are run by alliance alts.

"Whose alt are you" is a question that permeates the process of managing players in corporations and even in alliances.  Mistrust of strangers seeps deeply into the culture of Eve-Online.  Here are but a few of the impact points:

• Characters need to appear trustworthy, longevity in well-regarded organizational frameworks is a bonus.  Such doesn't prove trustworthiness of the player, but it does suggest that that player has some investment in that character and may be less reluctant to undermine its reputation.
• Eve-Online has a sophisticated system of access-control implemented at the corporation level.  Resources can be shared amongst corporation members ("hangar access") but different characters can be assigned different levels of permission to access  different hangars (and access gear).  Typically new characters with no reputation have very few permissions.
• Earlier in this series we saw how large-scale policy decisions in alliances are driven in large part by the fear of alts (greys, see NBSI and the grey problem).

To conclude with a lighter illustration.  In 2006 there emerged a "role-playing" of sorts combat group known as the VCBees [Fn5].  From forum discussions it would appear that they started out as an alliance adjunct attack group that turned mercenary after a period of time.  They were notable for a distinctive chat style (in role), some of it is illustrated below.  What is also notable is that they are clearly alts to other characters who were marshalled and organized from time-to-time based on whenever their interests saw fit.

The VCBees affair strikes me as a bit of light-hearted alt shadow play.  But it well illustrates the deep levels of ambiguity that players in Eve-Online work with.

Who were those Bees anyway?

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

Fn1.

Corporations can combat each other in Empire space after first issuing a “war-dec” and registering it within the game. The one issuing it has to pay some ISK (money).  Doing so enables them to combat in Empire space without intervention by the NPC police force.   War-decing is an Empire space protocol (read The moon is a harsh mistress  for explanation of Empire space).  In low-security and “0.0? space alliances and corporations are not required to follow this convention.

Fn2.

There is a broad spectrum of use of the term "piracy" in Eve-Online.  Most careful definitions, however, seem to involve PvP for purposes of extracting ransom.  So for example, a mining operation in low-security space might be attacked by pirates who will attack and disable their ships and give them a minute or two to transfer in-game funds to their account as ransom to be set free, else their ships and cargo will be destroyed.

Fn3.

Each account (subscription) in Eve-Online can have three characters.  However, only one account can be played at a time.  Some "alts" may be alternative characters played on one account - and cannot be played concurrent.  Alternatively players can have multiple accounts to allow them to play multiple characters simultaneously.

Fn4. 

Power of Two offer ends on Monday!
reported by: CCP Wrangler | 2007.11.09 17:34:44

Space is a cold and dark place and sometimes you could use an extra hand to get ahead or even just to survive. Power of Two gives you the opportunity to create your own minion in EVE to do your bidding, be it to obtain ISK or fight your enemies.

The Power of Two offer is open for everyone who has had an active account before Wednesday. Included is account creation and 6 months of game time for a reduced price.

Fn5. 

Example exchange (from here).

Posted - 2006.08.03 22:52:00, Mr FuglyX
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Since 2 days ago there has been loads of peopel called "VCBee xxx" xxx being a number from 000 to "n". Over 20 in Orvolle, loads in Jita.... some goonfleet alt trick or something?
This was in Orvolle Local, They all talk the same as well, its bizzare.

? VCBee 059 > u giev missl?
? VCBee 059 > u giev missl AND 50 ISKU
?? VCBee 059 > ME HERE U GIEV MISSL

? VCBee 351 > missl?
? VCBee 351 > first u giev missl

? VCBee 369 > ? corp
? xxxxxx > why are there so many of you VCBee
? VCBee 369 > we vcbe. we free!
? xxxxxx > what you mean
? VCBee 369 > we not mean!
? xxxxxx > what do you mean your vcbe. free?
? VCBee 369 > no, 10 iskies
? xxxxxx > 10 isk for what
? VCBee 369 > mssle

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]

Display of Action
An obvious definition of a computer game seems to be that that a necessary part of the game is that actions are displayed by technology. A broader argument would be that the game is mediated by technology.

The latter of these definitions seem weak. We might play a game of chess by email but here the mediation seems ancillary to the game and thus not something that would determine its categorisation.

The notion of display also seems too limited. We need to work out what we mean by technology and display here – something may be displayed on a TV and most TV’s these days are effectively computers, they certainly are technology. So mere display of action especially when that display is just a picture of the acts seems insufficient for our needs.

What I think people are getting at when they talk about display is representation. When we interact with a computer game our acts are displayed on technology and generally through some form of representation. We act on an interface device and the act is represented by a block or a ship or a wolf or something acting in either direct or indirect response to us.

But again I don’t think that representation is sufficient. The reason is that acts can be represented but the representation can be in direct relationship to the act i.e. we simply replace video display noted above with some kind of rendered display – motion capture would seem to fall under this definition. Also there are Eye Toy games where there is simply the image of us as a player.

It looks like the key point in the notion of display or representation that has been lurking back there is the fact of the necessity of interface, but again I think that all the counter examples above include the fact of an interface.

But I do think that interfaces have something to tell us.

What I think underlies these ideas is not display, representation or interface but rather boundedness. That is, it seems to me that the defining quality behind these notions that video games are those things where the affordances provided by the technology (interface, representation, code) are a necessary and essential boundary to game acts.

Decision Making
An alternative approach to the definition of a computer game is by looking at the role of technology in decision making, or more properly, in determining game outcomes.

We might argue that if decisions in a game are determined wholly by technology then that game is a computer game. We may then as whether partial decision-making also counts.

Here the argument would go that if decision making in a game is determined by technology then that is a computer game. One motivation behind this as a definition is that we picking out those practices where technology is essential to the outcomes practice. We might also argue further that such practices have a distinct character (at least within the general set of games) because of the character of the outcomes or their mode of determination.

This character is derives from the fact of technology making a decision as we can say that a characteristic of technology based decision making is that there is a strict relationship between input data and outcome. Thus for any set of conditions C there will be decision D, and that for every instance of the conditions C the decision will always be D.

This one might argue is different from games were humans make the decisions because while in the ideal case we might think that conditions C would lead to D, in practice humans have a much higher bandwidth so, in practice, there may never be absolutely identical conditions and / or there will be interpretation of those conditions leading potentially to different outcomes.

Thus there seems to be a difference in the contingency and the expectations about contingency between the cases where humans are making decisions and computers are.

A challenge to this comes in the potentially hypothetical case of functional equivalence, and here we reach into all kinds of philosophical arguments about what matters behind what we can see and know – so I’m thinking about Turning tests, Searle’s Chinese room, Chalmer’s Zombies etc.

The argument would go like this: suppose that decision making is done by computer but that that computer system uses techniques such as AI to replicate human decision making to such a degree that under observation the nominal referee would pass the Turing test i.e. we would not be able to determine from function whether a human or machine were making the decisions.

In this case does it still mean anything to say that one instance is a computer game and one is not – if so, what it is that is important that we are picking out; or do we simply have games and the technological component is neither hear nor there.

Bounds and decisions
Here I want to re-introduce the idea of the computer as a necessary boundary of the game. We might say that one way in which a computer can provide a boundary is by it being outcome determining. In this way we are giving primacy not to the functional aspects of the boundary but to its technical nature.

But I wonder if this works, even in the case where there is not functional equivalence (assuming here that where we see computers as being distinct in the way that they make decisions then something certainly appears to be a computer game to a degree that the functionally equivalent machine would not). Let’s take racing as an example – and here I’m being generic about the genre of game, it can be athletics, horse racing, F1, rally – what ever. Suppose that the outcome of the race is determined by a sensor picking up that at least one participant has gotten over the finish line, the sensor triggers an image being taken or the use of some other sensing device, the input from this is processed and the processor determines which of the participants was in fact the first over the line. So it’s a photo finish where image detection is determining what ‘won by a head’.

A specific example of this is the use of ‘Hawkeye’ technology in tennis to help determine whether a serve was out or not. Thought at present it is used only as an aid not as the decision maker – but we can imagine a rule shift to it primacy - as evidence seems to suggest that it is more accurate than line judges (also even in this case the technology is determining only part of the outcome of the match – though it may be crucial)

Here technology is outcome determining. What’s more we can see cases where the technology would certainly not be functionally equivalent to a human – a human may react in very different ways to effetely the same circumstance they may also participate in negotiation over the outcome. 

My sense is that determination of outcomes is not essential to the notion of computer game, because even in the examples given above where there might be a computer determined non-negotiable outcome, the acts involved in the game e.g. tennis, are not bounded by technology – thus it feels that the game is actually not a computer game despite this use of computers.

A refinement might be how replaceable the technology is. So in the examples given above we are in situations where the technology could be replaced by a human (as the examples posited are hypothetical where we have gone the other way). But there might be games where all the acts are completely non-mediated but the game is constructed on the notion that the outcomes that those acts lead to are and only are determined by computer.

Here I think we get harmony with the definition that started to emerge above because here we have a boundary that is not merely based on technology but is essentially based on technology the fact that the boundary happens to be related to outcomes seems not to the important point.

Negotiation
Lastly I want to touch on negotiation. I think that it seems inherent in the idea of the essential nature of the computer that the acts or the meaning of the acts is in the act of play non-negotiable.

However we must take into to account cases which are common in MMOs where players argue with GMs or argue on forums about the meaning of acts and whether they fit within the rules of the game or not, they also argue about aspects of the game itself.

I think we would agree that MMOs are computer games. But there is also negotiation – very like arguing over line calls in tennis.

What I think that this shows is that something can be a computer game under this definition and outcomes can be negotiable, that is I don’t think the that point has anything like the force that it seems to have when it’s examined in the context of practice.

Proposed Definition
I thus arrive at this very simple notion of what a computer game is:

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

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?

It seems to me that in many ways virtual worlds are the ultimate expression of consumerism. Game worlds construct new needs which the use-value of virtual artefacts meet and new forms of labour are constructed to enable us to gain them.

Both game worlds and social worlds, in their different ways, can also act as a pure mechanism for symbolic-value exchange through the mechanism of virtual goods. For example: a virtual Gucci bag may have no use-value what so ever in a virtual world but it carries with it much of the symbolic value of the brand.

In general virtual worlds seem often to replicate structures of labour and production – they even support a class hierarchies based on geography, contextual knowledge, time in the given community etc.

At the same time virtual worlds offer the promise of liberating us. Not quite in the old utopian ideal of freeing us fully from pre-existing notions of self but at least opening up new opportunities for self-exploration. What’s more should you have access to a virtual world the barrier between roles of consumption and production seems to have been lowered such that both within the context of a virtual space e.g. as a crafter or builder in second life; or outside it, say as a fan fic creator, many can participate in a mixed traditional, amateur and / or gift economy.

We might also note that widespread fact of things like gift economies within virtual worlds stand as a challenge to the rigidity of exchange-values and all they stand for in respect of social relations.

A we can see how individuals have the power to subvert ideologies through playing with brands and taking stabs at ideologies – such as Dead in Iraq and others that work on the art / politics threshold.

Plus virtual worlds do give us pause for thought. They motivate discussions about the contingency of many things we see in the physical world around us – for example the nature of property and money. However I wonder if those that really engage in those discussions are largely an intellectual elite who would be talking about them anyway.

Lastly when we look at something like Second Life and There what we seem to see are endlessly reproduced norms of body type etc that look like the products of an internalisation and then self production of dominant types. While there are many ‘fake’ versions of brands, they are still versions of brands so still operate in the same world of assumed values. What’s more we can no longer gamble in Second Life the reason being because of US laws – hence many virtual worlds seem simply to act as a way of expanding US cultural and legal norms, even if the virtual world is not in-fact based in the US as it will probably have a tendency to norm towards its values. As virtual worlds come out of China I expect that we will see a spreading of its cultural assumptions too.

So I contend that virtual worlds hold the potential to liberate and the potential to reinforce and indeed spread the dominant ideologies of the time. What I’m interested in are people views of where things are now and where they seem to be headed.

I’m currently erring towards the pessimistic view of things – give me hope :)

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.

Salen & Zimmerman suggest that we can understand the rules of a game as being made up of three layers: constitutive, operational and implicit. Where constitutive rules are the underlying logic of the game; operational ones are those that we often point to as the rules, ones set out in books etc.; and implicit include the social conventions around how we conduct given games.

I’ve wondered for a while whether it’s useful to think of rules along another axis. That is to think of rules in terms of a paradigm or quintessential rule set and a practical rule. This I think is what S&Z are almost, but not quite, getting at when they talk about constitutive rules.

For example: take any MMO with an economy. What artifacts are there that establish what the MMO is? Well, there are design documents, there will be internal emails and correspondence about aspects of the game, there will code, rule-books, forum posts etc etc.

But what happens when there is a ‘bug’? Say one that provides players with lots of funds. Now it may be the case that the code works fine, and that the code corresponds to the design document. And it is un-arguable (from a practical perspective) that this is part of the game as it is an affordance that the game artifact provides players. But if one uses it one might be accused of cheating. Here players might quite rightly say – but the game allowed me to do this, so by definition it must be OK or at the very least it’s your [the producer’s] fault that it went wrong.

It seems to me that the argument against this has to appeal outside any practical instantiation of the game and reach to some paradigm game. In this paradigm there is a perfectly balanced faucet-sink economy, where every element is in harmony and the code perfectly reflects this. Added to this there are notions of fair play and right conduct that game producers are also apt to draw upon when telling player’s what they should do – of course players have their own competing notions, but that’s another argument.

In this paradigm game, rules are also fully described and un-ambiguous. Whereas in the practical world rules are always under-determined as it’s impossible to fully describe every circumstance that a rule may conceivable be needed for.

What’s more as games evolve they tend towards a paradigm constantly being re-aligned to better meet the ideal. So in terms of sets, the practical rule-set and the paradigm rule-set overlap. In an MMO the majority of the practical rule-set my be in union with paradigm, but this is not to say that this is true for the majority of the paradigm, indeed I’d suggest (by the incompleteness of rules idea) that it is not and indeed cannot be as the paradigm rule set will always be substantially larger than any practical instantiation of itself. I think I would argue this for even the most trivial of games.

So when a producer talks about the game, I believe that the they are often making an appeal to a quintessential notion of game that can, in fact, never exist; but operates as a crucial concept in the way that we think about game and the way that norms are brought into operation. Thus any reference to a rule is potentially a reference to a highly abstract object and an appeal to an ideal. And it strikes me that this is different in character, in certain respects, from an appeal to the purely practical and explicit.

I offer this as a pure theoretical musing. I’m not sure it has any practical value. I’m not sure it has any theoretical value either, it’s possibly not even very original – I'm sure TN'ers you will tell me,,,,

[Ed. 6th Nov 2007: I realize that a number of people read this post then skip to comment. So just to update it, when I wrote it I had in mine a multiplicity of Ideals or an Ideal that was very complex in structure such that an individual or range of people could hold differing views of what the ideal is. For anyone that studies such things I would be interested if there is a stream of idealism that deals with a typology of ideals some of which are unitary in character some of which are multiple. - ren]

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.

As should be expected from Garriott, there's also the promise of an interesting ethical dimension to the game:

In most games you are simply the great hero and you save the day by defeating the great evil...  But in the real world many people can agree on a goal but disagree wildly about how to achieve it. In some areas we present the player with dilemmas akin to the global war on terror: How far are you prepared to go to do what you think is right? To defeat the Bane, are you prepared to poison a river that your peaceful allies depend on? Or to destroy large swaths of your allies’ forest home? Are your allies expendable in the sense that you’re fighting over there, so you don’t have to fight over here?

Much more out there via Google News.  Here's the official site.

Any thoughts on how much appeal TR will have to MMO & casual gamers?  Early reviews?  Predictions about numbers?  Will WoW be losing subs?

Here's one thumbs-up opinion from Joe Stafford of the Austin American Statesman:

For the hard-core gamer, "Tabula Rasa" offers the kind of souped-up eye-candified and, most important, addictive online action that actually gives it a shot at being a "Warcraft"-killer, or at least a "Warcraft"-hurter.

Without a new hit, video game designer Richard Garriott will end up as gaming's Neil Diamond. He's a pop legend in the industry whose reputation rests entirely on his groundbreaking "Ultima" series. The question: Can lightning strike twice for Garriott? The answer, based on several weeks of beta testing "Tabula Rasa": yes.