Terra Nova

Great Big Monopoly

This week Google launched Monopoly City Streets. The concept is simple. You buy real streets, develop them virtually, and earn a corresponding virtual income. Like Jerry Paffendorf's million-inches-in-Detroit, MCS combines alternate reality, games, virtual worlds, and social networking.

Is it good? I have no idea. Can't get in, because massive user inflow has already crashed the product. I'm reminded of the way that Quake broke some parts of the network when it launched, and EverQuest clogged all the bandwidth of San Diego on its opening day. When somebody comes up with a good idea on the net, the user storm becomes awe-inspiring.

There's a lesson here in the contrast with Google's Lively, a virtual world of avatars and rooms where you could hang out. /yawn. The crash there was caused not by massive user inflow but massive user apathy. Merely virtualizing something is dumb. VR a necessary tool, not a sufficient one. To create new energy, you have to reinvent the game people are playing.

Thanks to Daniel Polonsky for pointing this out.

MacArthur Foundation Enters Second Life

The MacArthur Foundation will launch its own island in Second Life on May 18. A major event has been planned. Details here. Significant? You decide.

GLS Conference 5.0 Call for Papers

Games+Learning+Society 5.0: Learning Through Interaction
June 10-12, 2009 Madison, WI

The GLS conference in beautiful Madison every summer is one of the highlights of the year for many game researchers. Constance Steinkuehler, Kurt Squire, and the gang of incredibly capable GLS students somehow combine high-level discussions, fascinating presentations, and (most important) great gaming time and time again. The coming year's theme is "Learning Through Interaction," and I've put the full call for papers after the jump.

Dear Pew: What is a virtual world again?

Pew has a report out that include some data on virtual worlds. Their view is that virtual worlds have yet to catch on. Data they cite: only 2% of internet users (Edit: in the text, the authors say "gamers" here.) have visited a virtual world. On the other hand, they say that 9% of Internet users "gamers" have played MMOGs. And 6% of adults on the internet have made an avatar. [Edit: I'm really confused about what exactly they did.]

Weird numbers, given that MMOGs are virtual worlds, and avatars are things in virtual worlds, and the survey questions seem to have "internet users" as the base, not "gamers".  Well, the questions follow.

It's Not an Addiction

Two years back, a rehab center in Amsterdam made news headlines because they started a treatment program for video game addicts. They saw gaming problems as analogous to substance abuse and used similar treatment techniques.

But today, the founder of the program has come out and said that they no longer think that gaming problems are an addiction and they are changing how they help these gamers. Some choice quotes from the founder:

"But the more we work with these kids the less I believe we can call this addiction. What many of these kids need is their parents and their school teachers - this is a social problem."

"This gaming problem is a result of the society we live in today," Mr Bakker told BBC News. "Eighty per cent of the young people we see have been bullied at school and feel isolated."

"In most cases of compulsive gaming, it is not addiction and in that case, the solution lies elsewhere."

It's good to hear other people saying this too. As I noted in Daedalus also two years back, taking away the game doesn't solve the problem because gaming problems are not fundamentally rooted in the technology. Calling it a "gaming addiction" distracts us from the real problems.

Well That Was Quick

So in 2009, Google Lively will be Google Dead-As-A-Doornaily.  We never got too excited about Lively's current form around here.  I was always confused about how it aligned with Google's core business.  Still, it's too bad to see the big G moving out of this space and admitting defeat.   More news via Google.  A brief post-mortem after the fold.

Scientists: Spore Sucks

Everybody wants to use evolutionary mechanisms in new media. There are folks who program little AI bots and let them evolve. I feel this is misguided in that a pre-programmed AI is never going to mutate the way a real entity would. Automata are never going to come up with molotov cocktails and IEDs. A virtual world, I've argued, is the best way to get the emergent/evolutionary thing going: replace the programmed automata with people. You'll get plenty of little nasties you never anticipated.

Now, Spore was supposed to give us an an example of how much better this strategy would be. In Spore, real people were going to make creatures that would survive or die out. But the Spore we eventually got doesn't do that, Science reports. Basically, Spore sucks. They didn't make a virtual world in which everybody's animals had to survive in competition over scarce resources. They made a toy.

OK. So look, just make a virtual world with the people as the entities. You'll get evolution.

VERN Gets Bigger

Our friends at the Virtual Economy Research Network in Finland have added a bunch of content and launched a new strategy for reporting developments in virtual goods, RMT, business models, and more. Their bibliography is already the best in the business. Already worth a high-priority bookmark, VERN's future seems ever brighter. See this post for details.

Won't Get Spooked Again

Via Wired comes this bit of news about the Pentagon's fears that WoW (specifically) could be used to organize a terrorist attack. This isn't the first time intelligence agencies have considered what implications virtual worlds have for terrorism, and noting this ongoing interest on their part is just something we've gotten in the habit of doing around here. What does catch one's eye about this one is the level of detail provided in the simulated WoW scenario (check out the screenies). Does this change our assessment of their risk assessment?

[speechless]

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4557935.ece