Terra Nova

Report of the Byron Review

The long awaited and, in part, widely feared report of the Byron Review into children, the internet and video games is out.

Titled Safer Children in a Digital World, the report is 226 pages long and includes a section specifically on online games – which recommends that guidelines are created for ‘good practice in child safety’ (I think I get to say to the industry - I told you so, see KidSpace Stamp )

I’ve posted the exec summary below the fold but I suggest people go to the full report, in particular Chapter 8 ‘Online Gaming’.

"Executive Summary

• The internet and video games are very popular with children and young people and  offer a range of opportunities for fun, learning and development.
• But there are concerns over potentially inappropriate material, which range from content (e.g. violence) through to contact and conduct of children in the digital world.
• Debates and research in this area can be highly polarised and charged with emotion.
• Having considered the evidence I believe we need to move from a discussion about the media ‘causing’ harm to one which focuses on children and young people, what they bring to technology and how we can use our understanding of how they develop to empower them to manage risks and make the digital world safer.
• There is a generational digital divide which means that parents do not necessarily feel  equipped to help their children in this space – which can lead to fear and a sense of helplessness. This can be compounded by a risk-averse culture where we are inclined to keep our children ‘indoors’ despite their developmental needs to socialise and take risks.
• While children are confident with the technology, they are still developing critical evaluation skills and need our help to make wise decisions.
• In relation to the internet we need a shared culture of responsibility with families, industry, government and others in the public and third sectors all playing their part to reduce the availability of potentially harmful material, restrict access to it by children and to increase children’s resilience.
• I propose that we seek to achieve gains in these three areas by having a national strategy for child internet safety which involves better self-regulation and better provision of information and education for children and families.
• In relation to video games, we need to improve on the systems already in place to help parents restrict children’s access to games which are not suitable for their age.
• propose that we seek to do that by reforming the classification system and pooling  the efforts of the games industry, retailers, advertisers, console manufacturers and online gaming providers to raise awareness of what is in games and enable better enforcement.
• Children and young people need to be empowered to keep themselves safe – this isn’t just about a top-down approach. Children will be children – pushing boundaries and taking risks. At a public swimming pool we have gates, put up signs, have lifeguards and shallow ends, but we also teach children how to swim."

Usually TN is a place of analysis rather than simply reporting, but I thought it was worth putting this up here right away. I'm sure as the ripples start to pan out there will be further analysis. One of the central points that on first view I'm very sympathetic with is putting the emphasis on guardians to take a responsible view of children and technology and not simply blame the tech for creating evil kids.

Even More on Teaching Languages in Second Life

Fresh from the press release oven, we have word of an entire 24-hour conference to be held in Second Life this May on the topic of teaching languages in virtual worlds.  The event is called SLanguages2008, and it should prove fully multilingual (neat!).  It's still two months away, but ESL dorks like myself have been officially advised to mark their calendars.  From the release:

"The conference will be held within Second Life allowing the participants to exchange ideas and share experiences simultaneously around the world. The online conference is free to attend and includes talks, workshops, discussions and posters on language education using virtual worlds such as Second Life. The events will cover methodologies, teaching tools and experiences."

Blizzard v WoW Glider: Interesting, no?

The EFF's Fred von Lohmann just sent round a note on an email list about the summary judgment briefs in the WoW Glider case. I've mirrored the briefs here and here for those who are interested, and below the fold I'm gonna engage in rampant copyright infringement by reposting all of Fred's message. He sums it up too well to bother trying to explain any better, and I'm sure that he'll forgive the infringement...

Fred says:

Glider lets WoW players play on "autopilot" in order to maximize in- game experience and loot. Blizzard has not been able to successfully stop players from using it, despite the deployment of technical countermeasures (i.e., "Warden").

Blizzard is arguing direct copyright infringement by WoW players who
use Glider (because they breach the EULA term that says "no bots!" and
copy the WoW software into RAM), and secondary liability for MDY, the
maker of Glider. Blizzard's argument is built expressly on the MAI v.
Peak's "RAM copies" doctrine, plus the argument that any contractual
breach of a EULA term creates an infringement claim, at least where
the license grant is expressly conditioned on compliance with the
contractual restriction (apparently the WoW license grant is
contingent on compliance with **all** the terms of the EULA, a typical
drafting approach in modern EULAs).

Blizzard also argues 1201 liability, on the view that Glider evades
Warden. There is an interesting question here as to what copyrighted
work Warden restricts access to -- Warden blocks access to Blizzard's
WoW **servers**, not the client-side game software itself. Blizzard
seems to argue that certain client-side game assets -- i.e., graphics
-- are rendered inaccessible when Warden blocks an account for
cheating. But it's fair to say that this is not the typical
"encryption" or "password" 1201 terrain.

Finally, Blizzard argues tortious interference with the EULA, premised
on the same EULA whose breach is supposedly also a copyright
infringement.

Interesting, no?

Fred
--
Fred von Lohmann
Senior Intellectual Property Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation

Using Second Life to Teach English as a Second Language

This one definitely gets filed under "blatant self-promotion."

I recently started freelancing for Forbes.com, and the first article I've written for them is called "How to Spark Remote Learning." The piece covers the (surprisingly sizable) movement to use Second Life's immersive environment to teach residents foreign languages.  Specifically, I talked to Kip Boahn--head of a German ESL school by day, and founder of a new island named Second Life English--who's dedicated himself to providing free resources for the game's estimated  5,000 language learners and 1,000 instructors.  What's particularly interested is the way Second Life English and other programs make the most of the world itself.  From the article:

"Boahn takes a hands-on approach to teaching in a virtual classroom. During workshops, he uses a team of teachers to present students with different linguistic tasks, which could include anything from asking for directions to bargaining to buy a knickknack. To do those tasks, Boahn and his colleagues use "holodecks," rooms that can flip through as many as 40 different scenes at the mere click of a mouse. Want to practice ordering American fast food? Just switch the holodeck to Dara's Diner and line up at the counter.

Another popular way to teach English in "Second Life," says Boahn, involves role-playing and quests. "I once dressed up as a pirate, had a ship and everything. I was kind of rough on the students," he admits. "I put some of them in cages, and had them confront language in a shock-and-awe kind of way. They seemed to like it, and they learned all sorts of new words, like 'loot' and 'booty.'"

Boahn's approach may appear nontraditional, but he feels a new medium calls for a new way of teaching language. Even using the game's English interface gives students a chance to practice what they've learned. "We like to encourage teachers to see 'Second Life' itself as a classroom," he says."

Has anyone out there tried learning a foreign language through Second Life, or any other virtual world?  Boahn says his results have been excellent, but as an ESL teacher myself I can't help but wonder what element of communication gets lost when you can't work with students face-to-face.  Then again, none of *my* students know what "pirate's booty" is...

Second Skin

Did anyone see the MMORPG documentary Second Skin at SXSW? 

I'm curious because the story from the official weblog seems to be that gamers are wildly enthusiastic about the film.  The Escapist says: "gamers walk away feeling like they had seen seen their life story, with slick editing, a peppy soundtrack, and the seductive polish of an Apple commercial."  On the other hand, this opinion at Gamasutra says: "As the lights dimmed, I was excited to explore how interactive media is changing our experience of ourselves. But instead, I just wound up feeling sorry for the losers playing World of Warcraft."  Eric Zimmerman's comment (scroll down on that link) seems to accord with that: "I was distressed by a film that seemed to be a parade of gross stereotypes, most of which were clearly negative."

Who is right?

Virtual Law Bibliography

As part of the preparation for the book on law and virtual worlds that I'm writing, I've been trying to make a comprehensive list of published law review articles and student notes that focus on the intersection of law and virtual worlds. 

Just in case readers are interested, the current version is attached below.  If I'm missing something, please let me know in the comments or by email.

As you'll see, the rate of publications has been increasing, with the majority of the publications coming out in the past couple of years.

1996

• 1.    Jennifer L. Mnookin, Virtual(ly) Law: The Emergence of Law in LambdaMOO,  J. COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMM. 2 (1996).

2002

• 2.    Molly Stephens, Note: Sales of In-Game Assets: An Illustration of the Continuing Failure of Intellectual Property Law to Protect Digital-Content Creators, 80 TEX. L. REV. 1513 (2002)

2003

• 3.    Daniel C. Miller, Note: Determining Ownership in Virtual Worlds: Copyright and License Agreements, 22 REV. LITIG. 435 (2003)

2004

• 4.    Jack M. Balkin, Virtual Liberty: Freedom to Design and Freedom to Play in Virtual Worlds, 90 VA. L. REV. 2043 (2004)
• 5.    Peter S. Jenkins, The Virtual World as a Company Town - Freedom of Speech in Massively Multiple Online Role Playing Games, 8 J. INTERNET L. (2004)
• 6.    F. Gregory Lastowka & Dan Hunter, The Laws of the Virtual Worlds, 92 CAL. L. REV. 1 (2004)
• 7.    David Nelmark, Virtual Property: The Challenges of Regulating Intangible, Exclusionary Property Interests Such as Domain Names, 3 NW. J. TECH. & INTELL. PROP. 1 (2004)

2004/2005 (State of Play Symposium Essays)

• 8.    Jack M. Balkin, Law and Liberty in Virtual Worlds, 49 N.Y.L. SCH. L. REV. 63 (2004)
• 9.    Richard A. Bartle, Virtual Worldliness: What the Imaginary Asks of the Real, 49 N.Y.L. SCH. L. REV. 19 (2004)
• 10.    Caroline Bradley and A. Michael Froomkin, Virtual Worlds, Real Rules, 1 N.Y.L. SCH. L. REV. 103 (2004)
• 11.    Edward Castronova, The Right To Play, 49 N.Y.L. SCH. L. REV. 185 (2004)
• 12.    Susan P. Crawford, Who's In Charge Of Who I Am?: Identity And Law Online, 49 N.Y.L. SCH. L. REV. 211 (2004).
• 13.    James Grimmelmann, Virtual Worlds as Comparative Law, 47 N.Y.L. SCH. L. REV. 147 (2004)
• 14.    Ethan Katsh, Bringing Online Dispute Resolution to Virtual Worlds: Creating Processes Through Code, 1 N.Y.L. SCH. L. REV. 271 (2004)
• 15.    F. Gregory Lastowka & Dan Hunter, Virtual Crimes, 49 N.Y.L.S. L. REV. 293 (2004)
• 16.    Cory Ondrejka, Escaping The Gilded Cage: User Created Content And Building The Metaverse,  49 N.Y.L. SCH. L. REV. 81 (2004)
• 17.    Tal Z. Zarsky, Information Privacy in Virtual Worlds: Identifying Unique Concerns Beyond the Online and Offline Worlds, 1 N.Y.L. SCH. L. REV. 231 (2004)

2005

• 18.    Robert Bullis & Andrew Schwarz, Rivalrous Consumption and the Boundaries of Copyright Law: Intellectual Property Lessons form Online Games, INTELL. PROP. L. BULL. (2005)
• 19.    Joshua Fairfield, Virtual Property, 85 B.U.L. REV. 1047 (2005)
• 20.    Mia Garlick, Player, Pirate Or Conducer? A Consideration Of The Rights Of Online Gamers, 7 YALE J. L. & TECH. 422 (2005)
• 21.    Eric Goldman, Speech Showdowns at the Virtual Corral, 21 SANTA CLARA COMPUTER & HIGH TECH. L.J. 845 (2005)
• 22.    Andrew Jankowich, Property and Democracy in Virtual Worlds, 11 B.U. J. SCI. & TECH. L. 173 (2005)
• 23.    Beth Simone Noveck, Trademark Law and the Social Construction of Trust: Creating The Legal Framework for Online Identity, 83 WASH. U. L. REV. 1733 (2005)

2006

• 24.    Woodrow Barfield, Intellectual Property Rights in Virtual Environments: Considering the Rights of Owners, Programmers and Virtual Avatars, 39 AKRON L. REV. 649 (2006)
• 25.    Charles Blazer, The Five Indicia of Virtual Property, 5 PIERCE L. REV. 137 (2006)
• 26.    Allen Chein, Note: A Practical Look At Virtual Property, 80 ST. JOHN'S L. REV. 1059 (2006)
• 27.    Andrew Jankowich, Eulaw: The Complex Web Of Corporate Rule-Making In Virtual Worlds, 8 TUL. J. TECH. & INTELL. PROP. (2006)
• 28.    Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Napster's Second Life?: The Regulatory Challenges of Virtual Worlds, 100 NW. U. L. REV. 1775 (2006)
• 29.    Michael Meehan, Virtual Property: Protecting Bits in Context, RICH. J. GLOBAL L. & BUS. (2006)
• 30.    Theodore J. Westbrook, Owned: Finding a Place for Virtual World Property Rights, 2006 MICH. ST. L. REV. 779 (2006)

2007

• 31.    Farnaz Alemi, An Avatar's Day in Court: A Proposal for Obtaining Relief and Resolving Disputes in Virtual World Games, 2007 UCLA J.L. & TECH. 6 (2007)
• 32.    Jason A. Archinaco, Virtual Worlds, Real Damages: The Odd Case of American Hero, the Greatest Horse that May Have Lived, 11 GAMING L. REV. 21 (2007)
• 33.    John Baldrica, Mod as Heck: Frameworks for Examining Ownership Rights in User-Contributed Content to Videogames, and a More Principled Evaluation of Expressive Appropriation in User-Modified Videogame Projects, 8 MINN. J.L. SCI. & TECH. 681 (2007)
• 34.    Mark Bartholomew, Advertising in the Garden of Eden, 55 BUFFALO L. REV. 737 (2007)
• 35.    Bryan Camp, The Play's the Thing: A Theory of Taxing Virtual Worlds, 59 HASTINGS L. J. 1 (2007)
• 36.    Bettina M. Chin, Regulating Your Second Life: Defamation in Virtual Worlds, 72 BROOK. L. REV. 1303 (2007)
• 37.    Bobby Glushko, Tales of the (Virtual) City: Governing Property Disputes in Virtual Worlds, 22 BERKELEY TECH. L.J. 507 (2007)
• 38.    Steven J. Horowitz, Competing Lockean Claims to Virtual Property, 20 HARV. J. LAW & TECH. 443 (2007)
• 39.    Kurt Hunt, Note: This Land Is Not Your Land: Second Life, CopyBot, and the Looming Question of Virtual Property Rights, 9 TEX. REV. ENT. & SPORTS L. 141 (2007)
• 40.    Jamie J. Kayser, The New New-World: Virtual Property and the End User License Agreement, 27 LOY. L.A. ENT. L. REV. 59 (2007)
• 41.    Leandra Lederman, Stranger Than Fiction: Taxing Virtual Worlds, 82 N.Y.U. L. REV. 1620 (2007)
• 42.    Todd David Marcus, Note: Fostering Creativity in Virtual Worlds: Easing the Restrictiveness of Copyright for User-Created Content, 52 N.Y.L. SCH. L. REV. 67 (2007)
• 43.    Juliet M. Moringiello, False Categories in Commercial Law: The (Ir)relevance of (In)tangibility, 35 FLA. ST. U.L. REV. 119 (2007)
• 44.    Juliet M. Moringiello, Towards a System of Estates in Virtual Property, in CYBERLAW SECURITY & PRIVACY (Sylvia Mercado Kierkegaard, ed. 2007), available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1070184
• 45.    David Naylor & Andrew Jaworski, Virtual Worlds, Real Challenges, 18 ENTERTAINMENT LAW REVIEW __ (2007)
• 46.    David Naylor & Andrew Jaworski, The Tangled Web of Virtual Marks, Trademark World ___ (June 2007), available at: http://www.ffw.com/publications/all/articles/the-tangled-web-of-virtual-mar.aspx
• 47.    W. Joss Nichols, Painting Through Pixels: The Case for a Copyright in Videogame Play, 30 COLUM. J.L. & ARTS 101 (2007)
• 48.    Cory R.. Ondrejka, Collapsing Geography Second Life, Innovation, and the Future of National Power, 2 INNOVATIONS: TECHNOLOGY, GOVERNANCE, GLOBALIZATION, 27-54 (2007), available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1023493
• 49.    Erez Reuveni, On Virtual Worlds: Copyright and Contract Law at the Dawn of the Virtual Age, 82 IND. L.J. 261 (2007)
• 50.    Erez Reuveni, Authorship in the Age of the Conducer, 54 J. COPYRIGHT SOC'Y U.S.A. 285 (2007)
• 51.    Kevin W. Saunders, Virtual Worlds-Real Courts, 52 VILL. L. REV. 187 (2007)
• 52.    David P. Sheldon, Claiming Ownership, but Getting Owned: Contractual Limitations on Asserting Property Interests in Virtual Goods, 54 UCLA L. REV. 751 (2007)
• 53.    David S. Wall & Matthew L. Williams, Policing Diversity in the Digital Age: Maintaining Order in Virtual Communities, 7 Criminology & Crim. Justice 391 (2007), available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1012702
• 54.    Jason S. Zack, The Ultimate Company Town: Wading in the Digital Marsh of Second Life, 10 U. PA. J. CONST. L. 225 (2007)

2008 & forthcoming

• 55.    Andrea Vanina Arias, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Swords and Armor: Regulating the Theft of Virtual Goods, forthcoming EMORY LAW JOURNAL, available at:: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1012886
• 56.    Caroline M. Bradley, Gaming the System: Virtual Worlds and the Securities Markets, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1022441
• 57.    Candidus Dougherty & Greg Lastowka, Virtual Trademarks, forthcoming SANTA CLARA COMPUTER AND HIGH TECHNOLOGY LAW JOURNAL, available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1093982
• 58.    Joshua Fairfield, Anti-Social Contracts: The Contractual Governance of Online Communities, available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1002997
• 59.    Steven J. Horowitz, Note: Bragg v. Linden's Second Life: A Primer in Virtual World Justice, 34 OHIO N.U.L. REV. 223 (2008)
• 60.    Orin S. Kerr, Criminal Law in Virtual Worlds, forthcoming UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LEGAL FORUM, available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1097392
• 61.    Greg Lastowka, User-Generated Content & Virtual Worlds,  forthcoming VANDERBILT JOURNAL OF ENTERTAINMENT AND TECHNOLOGY LAW, available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1094048
• 62.    Albert C. Lin, Virtual Consumption: A Second Life for Earth?, 2008 B.Y.U.L. Rev. 47
• 63.    David Naylor & Andrew Jaworksi, Virtual Worlds: Children and Virtual Worlds, 10 ECOMMERCE LAW & POLICY (2008).
• 64.    Michael H. Passman, Transactions of Virtual Items in Virtual Worlds, 18 ALB. L. J. SCI. & TECH __ (2007)
• 65.    Jacob Rogers, Note: A Passive Approach to Regulation of Virtual Worlds, 76 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 405 (2008)
• 66.    Ryan G. Vacca, Viewing Virtual Property Ownership Through the Lens of Innovation, available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1100302

p.s. Note that this list seeks to be comprehensive only with regard to published articles in law journals. (I have thrown in one or two published pieces from other places that seem to have a legal focus, but I'm not trying to be comprehensive there.)  Books, Web self-publishing, and works from science/game studies/business/humanities/etc. are not included (despite the importance of those works to legal scholarship).

Arden I Going Offline

For a couple of months, we've had the Arden I environment available for people to experience, but we have to take it down now. We need the server space to run a social science experiment in Arden II: London's Burning. More on that in a little while.

If you are interested in playing around with Arden I, please do. The module is available for free download at this URL. Go ahead and monkey around however you'd like. See what you can do with a Shakespeare fantasy module.

Philip Rosedale the CEO is Dead....Long Live Philip Rosedale the Chairman of the Board

Today Reuters' Second Life division reported the scoop that Philip Rosedale is stepping down as CEO of Linden Lab, but will replace Mitch Kapor as Chairman of the Board of Directors.

Eric Krangel (Eric Reuters in SL) asked me for a comment on his page of resident reactions, and I went with this:

Linden Lab’s unique business vision allows them to break plenty of rules, but they can’t ignore the basic economic forces governing corporate growth and ultimately access to capital markets.  The search for a successor is going to lead to some real soul-searching about two key trade-offs in Linden Lab’s strategy.  First is the tradeoff between stability of the software platform and feature-heavy construction that allows creators with tremendous freedom.  Second is the tradeoff between catering to individual residents who want a new world full of fantastic possibilities for their personal lives, and enterprises who see virtual worlds (but perhaps not Second Life) as the future of electronic commerce and the virtual office.  Without a tremendous influx of capital that would allow them to become all things to all people, Linden Lab’s new management will need to make some big decisions on which way to turn.

So, what do YOU think?

 

Lying Online

Here we have a top Prof laying into some virtual world research. His objection is basically, that he can lie about his personal details and generally not take the research seriously. While it is more difficult to lie in a real world laboratory about age and sex, as the experimenter can immediately see through the lies, it is still entirely possible to make stuff up. Even with age and sex, if I fill in the form and submit it with 10 other people, it's possible the experimenter won't realise if I say I'm an 80 year old granny.
An experimental economist discussing the possibility of running experiments in virtual worlds, commented that when subjects show up to his real life lab, they see him looking stern, dressed in a suit and generally being threatening. This, he said, causes them to 'straighten up' and take the whole thing seriously. It's true that in our own in world experiments, we've had people clowning around before (sometimes during) and after the work. We just accepted that as part of the world's culture, although we did take steps to try to get people to take the work seriously (mainly by explaining what we were trying to do, rather than using visual cues like the experimental economist, although we did wear suits and our lab was as 'serious-looking' as we could make it).
So here's the question - how can virtual world participants be encouraged to take online research seriously, or should no attempt be made to change their online behaviour?

Are Religions Virtual Worlds?

Right now I’m reading about player behavior in MMOs. I keep thinking how similar those player behaviors and game worlds are to the fantastical real-world-overlays we know as religions. Both imbue players with feeling of elevated direction.

Religions and MMOs give believers/players a lot in exchange for their subscription. Believers get a realm to achieve in that doesn’t necessarily affect what most people hold to be the real world. Recurrent personalities exist at the same time as the believers, but persist regardless of the life span of any one believer. Your grandmother's Jesus is your Jesus. The NPC you met last week during a quest will be there two months from now when you sign up a secondary character. And lastly, religions and virtual worlds both contain objectives that can be broken down into steps for the believer. Religions almost always require believers to do at least one thing, even if it's only to take an NPC into their heart. That action is not much different, and frankly, takes much less time, than solving riddles, collecting items, or grinding XP.

On a daily basis, religions exist mostly as information overlays on the everyday lives of people that subscribe to them. Believers translate the information they receive from the 3D graphical world into strategic information which determines their action in that world. This action-to-strategic-decision chain can be as ephemeral a believer getting a feeling after prayer that a problem has been resolved by that prayer. The believer may continue in the world without needing to confront the problem through any other action, secure in the knowledge that ‘something has been done.’ What other human activity offers this kind of achievement?

Players communicate, often on a daily basis, with other human beings that are participating in their personal instantiation of the experience. But religions can be pretty different from each other, or at least they contain varying teachings and characters. So are religions just shards of the same virtualspiritual world that humans have concocted? If you’ve ever seen the “all religions have a Golden Rule" posters (“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you,” et cetera) then you’ve seen that the underlying values of nearly all religions are the same.

Players also communicate with the personalities directly tied into the fiction of the world. Saints, gods, buddhas - or NPCs? Though a very High Level of NPC is ususally barred from communicating with the believer, until a certain “level” has been reach, at some point the believer will go to heaven, reach nirvana, or ascend. Or does the believer just level up?

Religions even have their power gamers. I think of John Donne as a religious power gamer. He left the Catholic church for the Anglican church. It might be more that he left one guild for another, seemingly more powerful, guild. His poetry, in which he pleads, demands, and then cajoles with an unmoving non-player character seems as efficient a strategy as any in a world in which your turns are very limited... And he wasn’t even a self-fashioned god or prophet. Aren’t self-fashioned prophets and saints just demanding more agency in the game world? It is called god mode, after all.

Here I am not positing that virtual worlds are religions, but rather that religions are virtual worlds.

What do you think?

Games+Learning+Society 4.0 Conference -- Call For Papers

Just got pinged by the fabulously fabulous Sean Michael Dargan who, when not touring the world as a surprisingly-tall-and-dapper-guitarist-cum-singer, coordinates Games+Learning+Society for Constance and Kurt and the Madison gang. He reminded me that they have a CFP out. GLS is a great conference, and the location is just wonderful. The CFP is below the fold and y'all should be thinking about submitting a paper, and then going.

The fourth annual Games, Learning & Society (GLS) Conference will be held July 10-11, 2008 in Madison, Wisconsin. Sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education and the Academic ADL Co-Lab, the GLS Conference fosters substantive discussion and collaboration among academics, designers, and educators interested in how game technologies – commercial games and others – can enhance learning, culture, and education. Speakers, discussion groups, and interactive workshops will focus on game design, game culture, and games’ potential for learning.

For three years the GLS Conference has been the space for academics, industry leaders, educators, and policy makers to meet and to engage, not just in industry building, but in serious discussion about the current state of the field: where we ought to be headed, and what impact games can and ought to have on culture and society. We are planning the biggest and best year ever for this very important gathering, and we hope you will join us.

This two-day conference will be held at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Monona Terrace Convention Center, overlooking downtown Madison’s beautiful Lake Monona. Conference highlights include: a special session of hands-on workshops designed by and for videogame researchers and designers; a two-day lounge featuring Chat 'n' Frag sessions with key scholars and designers; fireside chats with industry leaders and special guests; a game room; webcasts of selected conference sessions; and our signature Thursday night dinner party.

We invite creative and interactive proposals for presentations, discussions, symposia, workshops, debates, respondents, and exhibits on topics and issues related to conference themes. To continue providing a high-quality program, all submissions will go through peer review and be evaluated with respect to quality, originality, clarity, and relevance to conference themes. Based on positive feedback from last year's conference, we especially encourage interactive session formats such as workshops, debates, and hands-on events for the GLS lounge.

Complete submission guidelines are listed inside the submissions site at http://glsconference.org. Submission format includes: Title; Abstract (500 words or less); Author name(s), picture(s), and short bio(s); and lastly, whether you would like your presentation to be considered for an interactive (workshop, chat ‘n’ frag, poster) or more expository (symposium, plenary) session. Submissions are due online by March 31, 2008.

Thank you for your time; we look forward to seeing you in July!

smd.

Sean Michael Dargan
GLS Conference Coordinator
http://glsconference.org/2008/
gls@seanmichaeldargan.com

Review of "The Second Life Herald"

I just did a short book review of Peter Ludlow and Mark Wallace's "The Second Life Herald" for Science. It's just been published and so I can make it available here. For those who don't want to read a one page review, I'll give a mini-review of the review over the page, and ask a couple of questions of y'all.

So, "TSLH" is a really good book. It works on a number of levels, and it provides what are probably the most elegantly-introduced-and-handled explanations of basic VW concepts. (The relevant technology and topics are seamlessly introduced and explained without the usual clunkiness that you see in writing for n00bs). You have probably read it, and if you haven't you should. But a review for Science is necessarily for a different audience than the one that congregates here. The basic issue in the review--do you buy the magic circle?--is something that everyone here understands and can use as their means of parsing whatever Ludlow and Wallace say. So the types of questions that this group has of the book are different, and for me the most obvious question is whether anyone remains concerned about the class war that animates "TLSH".

TLSH is all about the injustices of devs against users (or Peter, actually) which is a useful and fun way to sell books, but it struck me as basically false. I didn't get the sense that the authors really did feel aggrieved about the problems that devs generate. Perhaps I'm just cynical, but it seemed like the kind of reportage we see in Fox's "current affairs" programming: "And tonight we will show you how eating healthy foods can make you FAT and give you CANCER and make your BRAINS EXPLODE!!1! And then we'll have an interview with Lindsay Lohan's breasts."

Yet if we take VWs seriously there is an obvious Chickasaw problem that we have to confront at some point. Ludlow and Wallace take this seriously, and I don't know why I don't anymore. Is it just the standard 'voice and exit' answer? Beats me. Obviously this is something that my therapist and I have to confront.

There are lots of other issues that TLSH raises but which I don't have time to kick around here. I'm especially interested in how we write about these worlds and their issues, because Peter and Mark's approach is interesting and idiosyncratic. But this, like I say in the review, is a story for another day.

Localization meets Culturalization

Due to my interest in the global aspects of MMOGs and games generally, I wound up at a really interesting session at GDC a couple of weeks ago. It was titled "Self-Censoring Potential Content Risks for Global Audiences: Why, How and When" given by Tom Edwards from Englobe. His talk went far beyond the "avoid blood in Germany, stay away from the Taiwanese flag if you want China as a market" tidbits I've seen before. He argued for something beyond localization--adequate culturalization of games, which makes increasing sense, given the emerging markets and necessities for creating games that appeal to more than one cultural/national/whatever group. Yet his talk was focused on single-player and offline multi-player games, and I began to wonder, how would MMOGs fit in?

Going back to his (great) talk, he mentioned various areas that can cause trouble when games leave their studio (and I should point out that he also mentioned the United States as a "potential hot spot" for some content, which is really no surprise). Potentially troublesome themes include religion (including borrowing from actual religions or making up religions that look suspiciously similar to real world ones), ethnicity (again, using the real, or creating fictional races that might be mistaken for real ones), history, politics and cultural systems, and particular types of content (including character design, text, images, maps, audio, packaging and marketing). Whew! Makes you wonder how games ever make it past such 'content police.'

But his main point wasn't to erase anything potentially provocative from games, but to be aware of what might cause trouble, to get rid of what you really don't need in games, and to build your arguments for content you think must or should be included. Fair enough. But again, all of the examples he drew from were not MMOGs. How might they fit in? They certainly have a global audience, and we know some elements are localized, yet I haven't seen systematic work that examines those changes or any potentially troublesome examples. So my question is-- do you know of material that has been altered for various "versions" of MMOGs (different servers/countries), or problems that have arisen because of such content? And do MMOG designers take such things into account?

Residents versus Users

There's been a lot of press lately about how virtual worlds can be used to study human bahaviour. But is it really human behaviour? The following is from an unpublished paper about behaviour in virtual worlds:

 

An interesting point to consider is whether we are researching residents or users (the term ‘resident’ referring to an avatar and ‘user’ referring to the human controlling the avatar). They are not necessarily the same - Turkle (1995) discusses one of the appeals of virtual worlds as being the ability of a user to change themselves, with change of gender being discussed most. For example, one study of a Japanese virtual world revealed there to be 4 male users to 1 female user, but only 3 male residents to 1 female resident (Stone, 1995); given the number of players of that world, many tens of thousands of users were swapping gender (Turkle, 1995). The approach taken here was that we were collecting information from residents about acts performed by residents and the effect this had on other residents.

Is it good enough to study avatars? Or should some attempt always be made to tie things back to the guy sitting at the computer screen?

 

Gary Gygax, 1938 - 2008

Perhaps Gary will be best remembered for Dungeons and Dragons (1974).  I  fondly remember the colorful 1977 Monster Manual (1st Edition), I believe I may still have it in a box in the attic.  I also can look to my bookshelves and see the first version of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), 1974 soft copy plus Greyhawk and Blackmoor supplements winking at me from behind a mountain of paper, "it has been a long time."  Indeed.

How many other books do I still keep from the 1970's?   You?

A story I like is from the Wikipedia: "The game Gettysburg from the Avalon Hill company captured Gygax's attention. It was from Avalon Hill that he ordered the first blank hexagon mapping sheets that were available. He began looking for innovative ways to generate random numbers, and used not only common dice (with six sides), but dice of all five platonic solid shapes."

A generation of kids learned probability from those dice, and a whole lot more.

This quote also  illustrates how imagination and genres of game are cross-fertilized.    A theme we've discussed many times on Terra Nova in the past is the legacy of table-top Role Playing Games (RPG) to modern video-game RPGs and indeed through MUDs to the massively-multiplayer MMORPGs.  Yet, I think this technical lineage is too confining.   Perhaps the clearer statement of legacy is from Anton I., from comment here:

May he rest in peace proudly as one of the very few people whose creations will outlive them.

Of not many people will this ever be said.

Yet, Gary sounded humbler than his legacy, "I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else."

Gamers everywhere, whatever your genre, salute.  One of your kin has passed.

Fair play

(I think the new bloggers here could use some help with the "Continue reading..." feature of Type Pad.)

Second Life griefing was recently defined by a group of residents as unacceptable, persistent behaviour which disrupts the ability to enjoy Second Life. This is strikingly similar to definitions of bullying: aggressive behaviour in a relationship of imbalanced power which happens over a prolonged period of time. Residents described a number of motives which may explain why griefing occurs.

1. Asserting power through knowledge

There was a strong experience that griefers are driven by their need to assert power. In the context of First Life bullying, the victim is weaker than the bully in some way. In Second Life, this weakness translates as lack of knowledge about the virtual world, which prevents victims being able to defend themselves. As a simple example, if an avatar sits down, it is not possible for them to be pushed around. Someone who knows this fact can use it to deal with an assault. Griefers were seen as trying to assert their superior knowledge over those who have less knowledge or who are new to Second Life.

2. Second Life as a game

There is a conflicting view among Second Life users, between those who see it as a game, and those who do not. Some of those with the gaming view come into the world with a 'who-do-we-kill' attitude, whereas the others just want to get on with their work, chat, raising babies, skydiving, fishing and all the rest. Those with the view that Second Life is a game, were also those who didn't see griefing as a problem, it's-just-a-little-harmless-fun-get-over-it-and-move-on sort of thing.

3. The Second Life environment

The third motive is the notion that Second Life may itself promote griefing because it is a ‘safe’ and easy environment to bully in – few rules and few consequences, and programming tools to help cause maximum disruption. Some participants felt that griefers were helped by a sense of anonymity. From the victim's point of view side, there was some suggestion that the consequences are less severe for them than real life – they can just switch off. A victim can end the grief at any time by 1) disconnecting from Second Life, 2) moving to a private area 3) entering the world with a new avatar. However, as with other forms of cyberbullying (if that's what it really is), by doing any of these, the victim is denying themselves, respectively, 1) access to the world, 2) access to a part of the world 3) access to their original avatar (and the reputation built up in its name).

So what are some of the others?

Human Data as a Playfield: The Passively Multiplayer Online Game

For the last two years I've been designing an experiment in play: PMOG, the Passively Multiplayer Online Game (said P-Mog). Justin Hall, Duncan Gough, and I founded a company called GameLayers with investment from O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures, Joi Ito, and Richard Wolpert. We quit our day jobs last summer and got serious about bringing play to the world wide web.

The impetus of my design is my lifelong desire to play with the layers of information that, unseen but forceful, impact our real and online lives. I want to see the invisible world, or at least become more aware of it. Perhaps ironically, PMOG is not a visually intense game. I don’t know that we rank 2D, much less 3D. This is the game HUD that persists from page to page in the Firefox 2 and 3 browsers:

We're now in the beta of our second public version. Both versions were implemented as Firefox extensions that follow players as they surf the web. The players provide the game with access to their browsers; the game provides the players with weapons, writing instruments, a gifting system, and a self-generating RPG character.

We started out to make a casual, massively multiplayer online game that took place alongside the rest of a player's online life. To do that, we had to answer two questions. One: what kind of interaction that occurs alongside the Everyday can we provide to players that they'll accept? And two: how can the game provide players with a set of behavioral summations that they could reasonably attribute to their decision-making process?

In the first public version of PMOG we ran the game through a sidebar on Firefox. People forgot (or never knew! ha) that the game was happening. And while the sidebar had a lot of space, it was problematic precisely because the game could be so easily ignored once the sidebar was closed.

The current version of PMOG injects HTML overlays onto any html document with a http://. These events, as we call them, stack up in the bottom right corner of the Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 browsers and are easily dismissed. A lot of game data is delivered to the player via image and text, in those HTML overlays.

Game-to-player messages (You leveled up! You unlocked the Torch badge!) and player-to-player messages (hey dahling, will you be a dear and trade me 10 crates for a mine? kthxbai!) are delivered as HMTL overlays as well.

Fitting Into the Browser
Currently, there are three stages of intensity to the appearance and persistence of the HUD. I'll begin at the least involved level and move on to the most involved.

At its most invisible, players can completely pause the game. The player ceases to earn datapoints from each new top level domain they visit and they do not receive any in-game events. They can also hide the heads up display, leaving a small "P" favicon in the bottom right edge of their browser as the only reminder.

The second level of integration is that the player can choose to hide the heads-up display but continue playing, in which case events still occur and the player still earns currency but their tool inventory, level progress bar, and other game statistics are not present in their browser. In-game events occasionally appear in the bottom-right corner of their browser.

At the most involved stage of PMOG, the player has a styled tool bar at the bottom of their Firefox 2 or Firefox 3 browser that displays all their game statistics. Dismiss-able game events (tripped traps, invitations to mission, player-to-player instant messaging) stack up in the lower-right corner of the browser. Additionally our extension tracks their movements over URLs that begin with http://, but it only attach that location to the player if they engage with game content. This is the default setting.

Passive-ists aren't asked to roll for initiative and then take part in a full-on turn-based combat. Rather, moments of combat and gifting invite the player briefly into the gameworld. This is not the same as the strategic blow-by-blow that makes Dungeons and Dragons style combat so engrossing. PMOG's fun is often the fun of discovery and misdirection.

Making the RPG Casual
Role-playing game metrics are already inherent in a lot of social networks, as Amy Jo Kim has pointed out. In both role-playing games and social networks, players posture within the space of the avatar and explore their identities online. Players balance social relationships with their own goals and values, and use these relationships to promote the exchange of virtual goods.

However, distinctly RPG metrics of dexterity, strength, charisma, et cetera, don't serve the browser-based internet in the same way they've served the kitchen table. Attributes such as these exist in RPGs largely to determine if an event has occurred and how the player can or does respond to it: Have you been spotted by the lacedon hiding in the reef? Do you attack first or are you attacked? Are you prone? In a gameworld largely driven by the collection and reinterpretation of the players' data streams, these metrics are unnecessary.

The landscape of the internet is no place to stall a player's momentum. Rather than spending the first hour of game time rolling a character, the play simply begins. Over the course of hours the player will accumulate characteristics. Though we don't want players to belabor the choice of race and class, I do rather like "types" in games and wanted to use them.

Associations
There are currently six associations in PMOG, and at any time each player is described by three of them.

Pmogeon associations reflect what game tools the players use and determine what array of game tools can be purchased by the player. Because the flexibility of the player within the game is determined by their associations, I wanted player identity to be flexible as well. Now associations are determined by the tools that the players have used in the game, and by the associations of the players whose missions they take. In this way players can both determine their designation and have it be determined by the content they choose.

This may be a case of adding additional elements when I should have subtracted (why not remove a designation like class?), but I wanted to both have associations and allow them to be flexible.

Initially, character associations were determined by attributing characteristics to websites themselves. The player’s type was generated from the number of times they’d visited those hundred URLs. Players accumulated the sites’ characteristics. Reading the Wall Street Journal made you more of a Destroyer; visiting Flickr made you more a Hoarder.

But the players themselves resisted the approach. The landscape of the internet has already been established by destination logic: websites are places. Players expect to affect the environment rather than have it affect them. The game is watching, sure, but the player decides when and if to engage.

This is the point in the design process at which the internet really became physical for me, and the aesthetic decisions stem from that. Mines, the first tool I'd designed, were initially meant to be crafted by players from flotsam they'd collected on websites like so much primordial goo. Now they're prefabricated tools you can buy, trade, set, or detonate. The imaginary world of the internet in my mind became a city that had been built over and over again, a sprawling maze of secrets.

Becoming Massive
Now that people are playing the game again I have another set of fascinating problems and questions. Scaling PMOG successfully is paramount among them. PMOG would be less interesting if it lived on shards; much of the gameplay relies on displaying the internet as an uninterrupted field of play. We've also been warned against asking our servers to calculate long strings of relationships like "friends of friends"; this is supposedly one of the reasons that MySpace ate Friendster's lunch. But if we become as massive as we aim to be, it would be foolhardy to attempt to show players everything that happens in the game. So we can limit visibility to approved relationships, in the model of Facebook and MySpace.

Rather than using "friends" to describe online relationships we use one meta-designation (acquaintances) and two sub-designations (rivals or allies). Below is a screenshot of one of my allies, Pixielo. The top of each player's profile looks like this, with buttons for you to attack, gift, or message them, and three buttons that display the tier of relationship.

These relationships will be a lot of fun to add features to. Maybe you can hunt your rivals in real-time games of tag; maybe your weapons deal less damage when your allies trigger them. There are tons of ways to continue to layer play within the existing structure.

Tomorrow afternoon at 2 during Emerging Technology, Justin Hall and I will be presenting some existing and imaginary surveillance-based game designs. If you're around, please stop by to argue with us.

VW Taxonomy Q1 ‘08

MUD, MOO, MUSH, MMORPG, VW, Metaverse,,,,

I just wanted to put a marker down to record current usage of terms. In fine OED style this is descriptive of actual use rather than normative of how I, or others, think they should be used – well, let’s see how long that can hold up.

I’m not citing source on any of this, mb that’s a hive mind thing.

Game world (also Ludic World) – used in contrast to ‘Social World’ under the super-set of Virtual Worlds. i.e. those with a game mechanic built into the code, generally from the DikuMUD strain of design

Metaverse – Currently has at least three uses (ultimately derived from N Stephenson, of course – but the book meaning is not that which it presently tends to denote)
1. The 3D web of the future built, possibly, on some of the Social World technology we have now.
2. The general set of Virtual Worlds implicitly of the present dominant form.
3. In relation to the ‘Thin Virtual Worlds’ that are web based, a term to explicitly denote the current mode of virtual world be it either Social or Game.

MMORPG – (Massively Multiplayer On Line Role Play Game) A term that seems to be dying out. Pronunciation varies from M.M.O.R.P.G. to ‘More-pig’. Generally means the same as Game World (though not generally used in contrast to Social World in the same way) but is sometimes used as a super-set in a similar way to ‘virtual world’ when used in that mode.

MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) – Probably now used more than MMORPG, often simply as a contraction, sometimes, to indication that the RPG element is not there hence as a generic super-set in a similar way to ‘virtual world’ when used in that mode.

MOO / MUSH – really not used at all these days, the difference between MUD, MOOs and MUSHs is probably an enigma to all cept those that actually used them.

MUD – not a term used much these days. Until a few years ago it was still used as a generic for virtual spaces, not just text ones, so was a pre-curser to ‘virtual worlds’ (under some uses). Now tends to be used by what we might call first generation virtual scholars as a generic or others as a generic for text spaces.

Synthetic World – generic term intended to encompass all types of virtual world essentially the same a Virtual World.

Social World – used in relation to Game World and sometimes MMORPG or MMO under the super-set of Virtual Worlds. Denotes a virtual space either with no game mechanic in the code or at least no over-aching game mechanic e.g. where there is a social space with embedded mini-games.

Thick Virtual World – those which are not ‘Thin Virtual Worlds’ (see below).

Thin Virtual World – (term genially used possibly only by me) browser based virtual space that meets Bartle’s definition but tends to be small, possibly user created, and is not ‘massive’ in term of the use of any one world. Used to indicate difference with many current Virtual Worlds.

Virtual World – this I have found now has two uses (which is what got me thinking about all this), these are relational.
1. When used in relation to Social Worlds and Game Worlds, Virtual World is the super-set of these, generally following Bartle’s technical definition. 
2. When used in relation just to MMO’s or Game Worlds the term is synonymous with Social worlds.

OK, so what have I got wrong, what did I miss?

Remember I’m trying to record just how the terms are used not what we think they should mean.

In Search of Furry Economicus

Hi, I'm Thomas, and I'm a first time blogger...

There is a popular perception that people will say and do things online that they never would in a face-to-face meeting. It's easy to find extremely personal blog posts, and 'screaming and shouting' goes on a lot in forums. Anonymity is usually blamed. Economists view human behaviour as based purely on self interest –  ‘homo economicus’ is what they call rational man. He is selfish and uncaring, and has never been found anywhere on Earth (sure we might know individuals like him, but never an entire culture populated by him). You would think that behaviour in an online environment such as Second Life would approximate more closely than anywhere else this concept of rational man - if anyone is ever going to act selfishly, it will be there, as a person can say and do things hidden behind their avatar. Residents do not normally know each others’ identities, and no one can be seen, for example, blushing from having performed a selfish act.

However this doesn't appear to be the case. Participants in recent experiments in Second Life revealed themselves to be as kind, caring and trusting as people in First Life.

Why is this?

Could it be that there is no such thing as a ‘Second Life culture’, and that residents simply bring their First Life culture in with them? The theory behind this says that when people go online they more readily take on the culture of the group they are joining; in this case the 'group' is Second Life users. So current findings imply that the culture of Second Life is identical to the cultures of the users. If this is correct, does it mean that the 'popular perception' mentioned in the first line is wrong? Or are blog posts and discussion groups just fundamentally different from interaction in virtual worlds?

Gaming / Life

It’s my birthday.

Did you know?

-10 if you did not & you are on one or more of my social networks
-15 if you are on more than 3
-20 if you are on my IM
+/- 0 if you did not and are not

That’s the way today has been for me. It really is my birthday. I’d forgotten till someone sent me a text asking me what I was up to at the weekend.

In past years I did not do anything about it, I ignore it, I get grumpy if anyone mentions it.

This year was different: txt’s, IM’s, emails, twitters, fb presents. Also it’s following the clock so my birthday started as the US got into the evening and logged on and I’m sure it will continue until the west coast goes to bed.

The fist thing that this has taught me is that that James Governor’s notion of Declarative Living is one that in reality means that it’s very hard for us to control what it is we are declaring. Many web2.0 require you to give a birth date, and you have to remember to turn that option off. Of course I knew all this, I just did not feel it as much as I do today.

The second thing that I’ve realized is the degree to which I frame my life in ludic terms. I started to get the birthday messages. Immediately I was struck by who was sending them and what medium they were using. Some were unexpected, and I think there is a time factor there, if we are Web2.0 linked and we were drinking together a few weeks ago then I guess you will notice the b/day sign in face book.

Of course what was really present was the absences – that’s you!

Why haven’t /you/ sent me anything yet, eh???

I realized then that I was starting to implicitly rank things. Those that had send something, my relationship with them – are they just a contact on flickr or are they more upscale than that?

Next I started to make this explicit, and started to work out a relative points system for the different types of interactions I was, and importantly, was not having. Basically, I’m the GM / the Game god and I’m working out your XP on the My Birthday Quest, or better still it’s a DKP system.

To put it another way, I’m raking my own personal social relations in terms of game points. OK now I lean more to the Asperser than the Empath it has to be said, but still, I wonder to what degree my automatic use of this conceptual frame actually does change the way that I think about people.

Lastly I realized that there is not only a need but also a business model in this.

In relation to the pre-web2.0 days I now have a lot of contacts spread over a many many social networks. I also have a terrible memory.

Now one of the many interesting things about the Metavese Roadmap meeting and MetaverseU event that, to some degree, carried over into GDC was the idea of the virtual permeating into the web and the physical world. The former though thin virtual spaces such as Raph’s metaplace and the latter through augmented reality, such as gps based google-map overlays being displayed through one’s mobile phone and other geowanker (no really that’s what they call themselves, you just can’t make this stuff up) projects.

The other concepts to bring in here are those of passively multiplayer games and using distributed ranking systems / crowd sourcing / prediction markets, to solve problems. So, for example, there is the idea from a number of sources (including IBM labs) of allocating points to emails and then using point distribution to work out how emails are ranked – there are a number of variations on this theme. We should also ref the Linden ‘love machine’ here too.

So, to apply those kinds of technique - what I need is a way to manage all this data and especially these social relations. The solution might be a passively multiplyer game plug-in to all my communications feeds that will allow me to build the type of rule base I mentioned above than then apply it to a set of meta-data about the people I know. If there is a standard there somewhere I could also be shown the delta between how I rank you or you rank me – at least in macro sense, I don’t want to start wars or break up relationships here.

As a fellow TN’s t often says: I am judging you.

But it’s ok – you can judge me too.

……file under speculative musing