Terra Nova

WoW v. MDY: Copyright, EULAs, and Game Rules

We've been talking about TOS/EULAs for quite a long time here at Terra Nova.  Here's a fairly obvious theory about these agreements, borrowed from Jeremy Bentham's felicfic calculus:

1) If TOS/EULA provisions make both the designers and participants in virtual worlds on the whole better off (while making third parties no worse off), they're generally good, and we should support them.

2) If TOS/EULA terms make all collective interests generally worse off, they're bad, and we should oppose them.

So, here are the thoughts of Public Knowledge and the EFF on the copyright claims in the MDY case.  In short they seem to say: sure, cheating is bad, but using the power of copyright law to enforce TOS/EULA contractual agreements will lead to bad results for software users generally. 

This is indeed a very interesting case.

I Gamer

Computer games are a catalyst for a generational change in self-identification.

I believe that the notion of being a ‘gamer’ is not merely growing but becoming mainstream. Gamer is no longer a excuse for having bad personal hygiene and no social skills but simply something one is.

Of course as practices norm the category is being rendered as un-remarkable. In my personal experience Wii’ers, for instance, do no self identify as gamers; but I wonder what the trend is, where users of highly social Wii games will remain in that category or start to encompass thing that they more readily identify as computer games.

Now, in terms of the impact of computer games on society there’s a lot of discussion around these points at the moment. Some of the central themes of Castronova’s Exodus To The Virtual are about the impact of expectations of fun on society. Earlier books such as Got Game talk about the impact of the gamer generation.

Here I’m wondering I there is anything to be said about a very specific narrow point. Not the direct impact of the fact of us gaming, or as Joss de Mul has explored the idea of ludically constructing identity but that of self-identification.

Malaby has touched this here Gamers are Standing By where he posits the notion that there might be “[…] a growing cultural tendency to see the world, technologized or not, as a game?”.

For one thing I wonder if in a world of game we see our selves as gamers, or as a gamer we see the world as a game. I suspect that it’s a bit of both. An increasing number of systems and media are using the language and aesthetic of games and have elements that can or are even designed to be ‘gamed’.

I can’t say that I have much to actually say in answer to my own question. My un-informed instinct follows the equally un-informed musing above that game tropes are becoming functionally pervasive and at the same time we not only increasing see systems as things that can be gamed, but as self-identified gamers we see ourselves as people capable and legitimized to game these systems.

Here I feel the urge to defend against trivialization rhetoric. It does not seem to be that it’s a corollary that by gaming things we necessary under-value or differently value the outcomes. I still have not quite put my finger on what the nature of games as things that are generative of meaning and value does to our relation with systems and practices that we start to see through a ludic lens, I add this point to the open list that I present to the floor.

I’d just like to add a note of thanks to the Science Museum’s Dana Center for its series of game / virtual world events which inspired these thoughts.

An Atlas of our Terra Nova?

Truly a herculean effort has been undertaken!  The Association of Virtual Worlds has compiled 'The Blue Book: A Consumer Guide to Virtual Worlds", an index to 250 virtual worlds from all over our physical world, all neatly meta-tagged and linked.  Oh, and there's a glossary... 

So who are these people, I ask myself?  Turns out it's an assortment of international figures in the virtual worlds industry, including a former Linden...

From their site (someone loves themselves some iphones!):

The Association of Virtual Worlds believes that virtual worlds represent a major information and technological revolution in how we work, play and live. The Association mission is to serve those companies and individuals who are dedicated to the advancement of this multi-billion dollar global industry and reach out to those who have not yet found virtual worlds.

1. To create a forum for the discussion of issues affecting the industry
2. To assist in the development of industry procedures and standards
3. To promote the virtual worlds industry, its interest and developments
4. To educate on the benefits of virtual worlds to enhance work and play
5. To offer business and social networking opportunities
6. To connect the public and consumers with members of the virtual worlds industry
7. To participate in the determination of the collective interests of the industry
8. To further the common interests of the industry
9. To provide leadership for the betterment of the industry
10. To recognize accomplishment within the virtual worlds industry

So the document is free.

Here's what I'd like, though... Put the whole thing online, wiki-fied, and let people add to it.  Screenshots, stories, knowledge bases, forums, etc.  That would be amazing.

The Cookie Monster Economy and "Guild Socialism"

Recently, I happened to catch a segment of Sesame Street that my daughter was watching. In it, Cookie Monster was trying to hire a human assistant to help him sell six cookies. Cookie Monster explained helpfully, “Cookie Monster sell cookies in order to have money to buy cookies”.

Virtual world exchange can feel like a Cookie Monster economy sometimes, but never more so than in Flying Lab Software’s Pirates of the Burning Sea. It’s been an interesting economy to watch as the live game has taken shape. Not so much because it is innovative or provides a fun game mechanic. Even by the standards of persistent virtual worlds, the economy in Pirates is unusually broken in functional terms. However, on one hand, it is one of the most successful Cookie Monster designs I’ve seen, in that it attracts players who are most strongly drawn to the game’s setting or the game’s design ambitions and niche vision. On the other hand, it also throws a sharp light on collective action in MMO economies that are designed to blunt or hedge against exposure to markets.

Mechanisms of exchange have evolved in graphical, commercial virtual worlds from some remarkably crude beginnings. Veterans of the early days of the first Asheron’s Call may remember that at one point, there was no mechanic for secure trade between players. You could hand someone else an item, and then wait and hope for payment in kind. Players responded to that certainty by trying to improvise a reputational culture, including players who built reputations as a trustworthy mobile escrow (both players in a trade would hand their items to the escrow player)., who would then verify that the trade met both of their expectations and distribute the items to their new owners.

Pirates of the Burning Sea has many of the features that have developed over the years to facilitate economic production and exchange, such as an Auction House. On the surface, the game presents itself as putting economic play at the center of its action. One of the three player classes for “nationals” (French, Spanish, English) is the “freetrader”, many of whose skills seem to confer economic advantages. The ships that players sail are largely built by player production, as are many other items used in the gameplay. Overall, the ostensible interaction of the economy and struggles between the four player factions most strongly invokes some of the design of EVE Online.

In EVE and many other games, the production of virtual goods begins either with materials gained through drops from combat targets or through the labor of gathering and extraction from the environment. In mining in particular, in EVE, the value and volume of the output is pegged partially to the game-mechanical skill of the player-character, partially determined by the amount of risk a miner is willing to take in dangerous areas, but it is also a product of the real-world time invested by the miner in production.

In Pirates of the Burning Sea, the faucet-sink relationship is skewed in an odd way. The faucet is as it is in many virtual worlds: players run missions and sink NPCs to earn money. The sink, however, is player-produced commodities. Players can pay to establish a warehouse in a number of ports, and then pay to build production facilities in those ports. Each production facility has a recurring rent associated with it, and there is a per-item cost that needs to be paid at the time of production. Many commodities also require other player-produced items as inputs.

The goods produced through this system are intended to be sold to players through an auction house. The first problem in the early history of the game is that the faucet and sink were significantly out of balance: the flow of money into the game’s economy was very tight while the sink of production-related rents sucked a lot of money out of the economy. The consequence was that the end product of most player production, ships and their outfittings, were expensive enough as to make many players reluctant to risk them in combat against other players. There were other problems, some familiar in the history of virtual worlds: some of the most potentially desirable player-produced goods are also drops from NPCs, the volume of production that the system allows swamps imaginable demand many times over for many goods, and some production chains seem to misconceptualize a high value of the ultimate product in relationship to its specified uses. This is aggravated still further by the fact that all types of players have effectively equal access to and capacity for economic production. Though the “trader” class on paper appears to have important advantages, in practice these are (so far) negligible.

The developers are moving to open the faucets wider, but there is still a structural issue that they and many players don’t seem to fully understand. When a player makes a sale of an item on the auction house, he’s not making value. He’s only moving value around. Money only enters the game through the labor invested in missions or combat against NPCs. In most other virtual world economies, including EVE, the production of items begins with the labor of players and is pegged to the time they spend extracting resources in some form or another. In Pirates, all players who want to engage in economic forms of play must rely on other players to generate currency value. Money can flow from the “worker” players to the trader players, but then money flows from the trader players back into the rent-sink.

The economy is a kind of Potemkin Village: on the surface, it looks like the economy of an economic-sim game like Port Royale with many primary and secondary goods being produced and listed that evoke the setting and mood of the game. But it doesn’t function very well, though a few players are fooled by the surface into imagining its depths. More importantly, the economy doesn’t sustain its own distinctive type or kind of play, it isn’t a sandbox of its own.  The developers of Pirates have a lot of tasks on an urgent to-do list, but reworking the economy strikes me as something that both has priority and is exceptionally difficult to do.

Nevertheless, one thing that the flawed design in Pirates has helped me to see more clearly about economic behavior in MMOGs is something that I’ve come to think of as “turtling”. When I think about how a market in a virtual world could be seen as playful or ludic in its own right, I tend to think of an almost idealized representation of exchange and investment around a commodities or futures market. Looking for low prices as a buy, looking to make slightly differential profits as a seller. Looking for underserviced markets and opportunities, investing a great deal of effort in becoming a major supplier of a consumable good, maybe even engaging in a little collusion on the side with other producers or consumers.

In many virtual worlds, however, it seems to me that the most economically-oriented players look for serious bottlenecks in the developer’s economic design and move very quickly (often using knowledge from participation in a beta-test) to establish a commanding position at that bottleneck. This makes good economic sense, but it is often precisely what motivates a great deal of the actual economic activity of players to disappear from the structured mechanisms built into the economy, for a great deal of production and exchange to disappear from auction houses into the closed world of guilds. This is “turtling”: to protect themselves from being ganked in the open market by monopolizers dominating production bottlenecks, many guilds look to build vertical monopolies of important or crucial production chains from among their members and to reduce production to its base costs. This has the side-effect in some cases of killing any hope for playful exchange in public markets, of creating a kind of “guild socialism” within what is ostensibly a “free market”.

There is nothing wrong with this strategy. It’s a sensible way to curb one’s vulnerability as a player to the machinations of other players. And yet, it always makes me a little sad to see it happen to a major extent (as it has in Pirates). Any ideas about how to keep auction houses and similar mechanics sufficiently playful, to keep most players vested in the public economy rather than the private economy of guilds?

Bears are People Too! The Metanomics Colbert Challenge

Last Monday capped off the first season of interview series, Metanomics:  Business and Policy in the Metaverse.   Over the course of the season (35 shows in 35 weeks), we refined our focus to the following four target audiences:

• representatives of real-world enterprises using virtual worlds to achieve their goals
• virtual world entrepreneurs meeting the needs of those enterprises or their fellow residents
• developers,  policy-makers and analysts who will shape the future of the metaverse; and
• academics who are studying and educating these groups, or using virtual worlds as their classrooms or laboratories.

One industry we haven't delved into yet is entertainment.  The fit is natural, as the reports on Virtual Worlds News shows us just about every day.  But how do we get movers and shakers in entertainment to appear on Metanomics?  Well, one way is to be a little more entertaining.  So take a gander at our Metanomics Colbert Challenge.

No one is going to suggest I quit my day job to do comedy, but SLCN does an excellent job of packaging.  Feel free to pass it on to your friends--and to Jon Stewart, Rob Riggle and Stephen Colbert, if you know them.

Metanomics is running 'best of' shows on Mondays at 11am Pacific Time and Tuesdays at 3pm Pacific, until we start our second season in June.  If you want to suggest guests, please do--self-nominations welcome.