Terra Nova

Fifty days and worlds apart

In fifty-and-some days we will see the conclusion of a two year U.S. presidential selection process.  Temperatures have been rising as we draw near the end.  Rather than finding a new means of arguing one's way into someone else's bubble, perhaps the partisan could profit from an altogether new method of persuasion.  I wonder whether an MMORPG can have a political ideology, either by design or by accident.

Legitimate Questions

One of my longstanding interests in studying virtual worlds is governance and legitimacy. How are virtual worlds governed, and to what extent is this governance legitimate? When we think about political legitimacy, we can start to see a key difference between how political institutions have established their legitimate rule in the past, and how the multiple new institutions of governance in virtual worlds go about it. In particular, I am curious about how games may be making larger and larger contributions to political legitimacy in virtual worlds. To what extent are the outcomes that games generate not only legitimate in reference to the game (a valid, just, or fair win, if you will) but also contributing in some way to the legitimacy of associated institutions, such as guilds, gamemakers, and others?

President of the United States

In 2005, one of the major remaining candidates for the US Presidency proposed anti-game  legislation whose wording indicated many of the biases and inaccuracies that have re-emerged in the Cooper Lawrence incident. Today, that candidate's web site says nothing about video games. While I don't consider myself all that deeply in touch with the gamer webspace, it seems  that I haven't heard anyone taking a position for or against any of the candidates based on the candidate's views about gaming. Is this because their positions on games don't matter? Or is it because gamers don't vote? Or have I just failed to see political stances that are, in fact, out there.

Gamers: Do you read sites like GamePolitics and the Entertainment Consumers Association? Who do you support in the current contest, and is gaming policy part of your position? Is gaming even a relevant issue now? Do you vote at all? How have these questions been answered recently in the elections of other countries?

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?

Sustain That Brand

State of Play V, from immaculate Singapore, kicked off this morning with a panel on "Building Businesses in Virtual Worlds." As I write I'm listening as the panel wraps up, with the panelists -- all involved in business development companies that focus to some extent on virtual worlds -- taking questions from the audience. But continuing to resonate in my mind is a phrase that panel participant Ken Brady of Centric used in his remarks to characterize what businesses should aim for in virtual worlds moving forward: "sustainable branding." This idea was echoed by the others on the panel as the discussion progressed, and to me this should prompt us to continue to think about the current era of virtual worlds as one that is beginning to be defined less by the relationship between their makers and their users (as individuals or nascent groups), and more by the expansion (one might even say colonization) of them by both emergent and pre-existing institutions.

Player Vs Player in a corporate environment

Roo and I are very much looking forward to these guest posts we are going to be making here where it brings a chance for yet another voice to be developed. So thank you for the invitation and an obvious /bow to Ren Reynolds.

Before we start I do have to say the postings on this site are of course our own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

Having worked in a corporate environment for a 17 years, but having been a serious gamer for even longer, I have been struck by the similarity in some of the concepts found in games and how they appear to be being played out in a supposedly buttoned down, “professional”, serious environment.

Much of this thought has been sparked by the challenges Roo and I faced in the last 17 months bringing virtual worlds/metaverses, such as Second Life to a corporate environment initially under the banner of Eightbar. We have spent a long time explaining to people that just because it looks like a game, it does not mean that it is. Now I am starting to look at the opposite point of view that business is a game it just does not look like one.

SWI's Declaration of Virtual World Policy

Ted's Synthetic Worlds Initiative at Indiana University convened the second Ludium Conference this past weekend in Bloomington. Attendees were charged with hammering out a well-considered platform to guide virtual world policy. We were successful, and the Declaration of Virtual World Policy [Edit: along with its wiki] has been posted by the conference's designers, Studio Cypher. Here it is for your perusal and comment (along with more details):

Real Politik

Almost exactly a year ago I asked whether virtual world makers with significant economies and RMT should "'open their books' about how their economies operate, given how much control they have over the conditions and mechanisms of those economies." Today, via the New York Times, comes this account that suggests that the makers of EvE Online have answered in the affirmative.

Second Life's infrastructure issues prompt an open letter to Linden Lab

A sizable group of Second Life residents (more than 1300 as of this writing, although there is some doubt as to the authenticity of the signatures) has signed an open letter to Linden Lab, to highlight five concerns related to the infrastructure of the virtual world:

Ganking the Meaning out of Games

Steven "Play No Evil" Davis, in a great comment on Mark Wallace's thread, asked the following question:

Is griefing simply emergent play that some folks don't like?

I think this is an interesting question to pursue, and I'm going to take a somewhat provocative stance and answer "no," partly to explore some territory and partly because I think there's a case to be made against griefing that doesn't founder on a libertarian objection (i.e., that if some people do something in a low-consequence environment, then it must be fun to them/their choice, and therefore must be okay).