Terra Nova

Unobtrusive Personality Assessment

If you’ve ever gone through any kind of personality assessment for a job interview, a group dynamics workshop, or a psychology experiment, you know how transparent those assessment statements read:

- I find it difficult to get down to work.
- I feel I have no control over my life.
- I make friends easily.

Or the worst of all:

- I usually lie if I know I can get away with it.

The reactivity of standardized personality assessment scales is problematic, and clearly if it were easy for personality psychologists to observe people without them knowing and systematically record their behaviors, one would be far more certain about the assessment.

As MMO environments get more complex, more social and more nuanced, the breadth and depth of behaviors and choices we could unobtrusively track from individual users is quite staggering. One could easily track:

- the average number of characters this person interacts with daily
- the average length of conversations / utterances with another character
- frequency this person is in a leadership position (guild / group leader)

In fact, from the first two alone, one could find out how well connected an individual is in the social network. In real life, stealth marketers pay big money to find trend-setters. In a virtual world, you can figure out who the “connectors” are with great precision.

But you would also be able to build incredibly detailed personality profiles of individuals. And not only that, we would also be able to figure out how an individual ranks on those personality scales against a dataset of at least 200k other individuals. That degree of breadth and precision are impossible with traditional personality assessment techniques.

Now, one might argue that the pretense of separate avatar identities and unrealistic settings precludes us from finding out anything “real” about someone in the MMO environment, but that’s not necessarily true. We know that players in existing worlds are emotionally invested in their avatars and the worlds. And it’s precisely because people are personally invested in their avatars and the virtual world that every choice they make becomes personally revealing.

For personality psychologists, being able to track and record the behaviors of thousands of people unobtrusively through an automated process was never possible. Now they can do exactly that.

Doing Research in Games

In a previous post I mentioned there were a few themes that really stood out to me at the recent AoIR conference. In the middle of hearing about all the interesting data people were turning up during their work I became struck by how many people were talking about, almost confessing, their love of games. It's a familar joke and it usually gets played out as a riff on the AA intro, "Hi, I'm T.L. and I am a games researcher..." "Hi T.L.!" (spoken in unison). Of course, one question that sometimes comes up is how objective you can be if you love the game you are playing, etcetc. I can't say I'm a big fan of the whole objective/subjective dichotomizing framework. If only the world, and research, were so neatly summed up. I think the critical variants of fields like anthropology and sociology have pushed at that debate enough so I won't rehash it here. What I do want to ask though is what does it mean to actually play while you research? This question really hit me when I was at an EQ Fan Faire a few years back. At one point a group of us were doing a Live Quest which involved running all around the hotel, hailing "NPCs", etc. Given my methods fall to ethnography, participant observation, interviews, etc I joined in and hustled up staircases, dashed around the lobby, even taught someone a simple box-step dance all in the service of both research and well, play. I was thinking about how the activity of play puts us in positions of affectivity and even unguardedness. I've done fieldwork before (both online and off) but there is something for me about games research and the play it produces that feels quite different. I'm curious what others think - how does the activity of play affect our work? Is the kind of investment we see in traditional studies the same as what happens when we research in MMOGs or does the activity of play itself produce something more?

Finally, as was previously mentioned, Ted and I had talked about gathering together EQ researchers into a meet online and I want to propose a date for that. How does Saturday, Nov 22 at 3pm EST work for folks? I know mid-afternoon may not be ideal but that would probably accomodate all our timezones. I'd like to suggest the Bristlebane server... and not because I will bring my regular char around ;) I'd suggest we all just start a lvl 1. But with BB it'll be easier for me to load up ale for everyone... in a fine EQ tradition I'm thinking drunken dwarf racing! Feel free to pass this announcement along and post here or email me if you are interested. Who knows, if it is a hit maybe we can do periodic meetings in various worlds.

Talkin' 'bout the EQ Generation.

I hired a research assistant yesterday who (charmingly) couldn't believe that I was actually going to pay him to hang out in MMORPGs and collect data. Like a number of the students I speak with, his dream is to work in the games industry, and many of them see MMORPGs and VWs as the wave of the future.

Which got me thinking about 2 related issues. If you were advising students about ways into the MMORPG (as opposed to other type of game) industry, what would you say? The typical response--as I understand it--is to be a beta-tester, QA person, become a GM, and move up the ranks. Or do an animation/specialist CGI degree and move in from there. But my students are from the business side, and couldn't build a better shader if their lives depended on it. So, given all the interest here in economics/society/law of VWs, is there a need for people who have broader educations than being able to write a Fourier transform from scratch?

Related to this, I wondered what sort of university program would be an ideal training ground for the next generation of Raph Kosters, Dave Rickeys, Richard Bartles, Brian Greens, Richard Garrriotts, etc etc. If, say, Teddy C and I were to create a program, what should it include? (And I'm assuming that it would be necessarily interdisciplinary, and might involve engineering, art, law, economics, rhetoric, etc etc)

New World Discovered, 300,000 Existing Residents Unimpressed

Like Columbus, we stumble upon a new world already filled with happy inhabitants, who - like the residents of the Western Hemisphere in 1452 - don't find the place new at all. Well, MU-Online is new to us (me anyway), but rather ho-hum to the more than 300,000 Chinese and Koreans who visit the place regularly. Thanks to correspondent Unggi Yoon for mentioning this world in a comment.

Indeed, anyone interested in the property rights debate should read his post, under "Who Owns My Lightsaber?" as it refers to recent court cases that have already gone to the highest levels in Korea and China. Bottom line: EULAs are not robust.

Have You Seen Me?

From the LA Times:

Where did everybody go?

One month into the new TV season, overall audience levels have taken a hard tumble from those last year. New shows have sputtered, and scores of established series have slipped in the standings. Even some of the biggest hits - "Friends," "ER," "Survivor," "CSI" and "Monday Night Football" - have lost millions of viewers.

Network executives can't explain it.

For the first time ever, overall television viewership is down from one fall season to the next, the biggest shock to hit that industry since the Nielsens showed that cable networks were significantly cutting into the market for the big broadcast networks. But this time, nobody seems to know where they went. Even more troubling, the biggest drop was in the most coveted viewers:

One demographic group, in particular, was noticeably smaller: young men. The industry is fretting as 8% of men ages 18 to 34 have apparently sworn off television this season.

"It's hard to buy into the explanation that all of these young men suddenly decided to stop watching television at the same time," said [Lloyd] Braun [ABC Entertainment Chairman], who speculated that a factor for ABC could have been two lackluster "Monday Night Football" matchups.

18-34 year-old males are the most desirable audience for TV because they are the last, best hope for advertisers wanting to influence brand choices, that demographic controls a disproportionate amount of the disposable income, and if you can "brand" them, they'll likely stay with the same products for the rest of their lives (when they will control an even larger chunk). So this slippage is a deadly threat to TV and advertising's bread and butter, these are the eyeballs they have contracted to deliver. This year alone it may cost them hundreds of millions of dollars in refunds and rebates to the advertisers, if November "Sweeps" fail to deliver the numbers the networks promised.

Hmmm.... Hundreds of thousands of 18-34 year old males stopped watching TV, where have I seen something like that before? Oh yeah, they're over here, the bulk of the customer base for MMO's comes from exactly that segment of the population, putting in 20-25 hours a week in patterns remarkably similar to those of television viewing. That's not to say that our kind of MMO is the sole cause, this year's dip may have as much to do with XBox Live as with EverQuest. But I am morally certain that it is due to online gaming, and it looks like the TV industry may have a hint of that as well:

"They're not putting on a lot of shows that might appeal to a 25-year-old," he [Brad Adgate of Horizon Media Inc.] said. "These guys are probably doing something else - playing video games or surfing the Internet or reading Maxim.

For a long time, TV programmers and the viewers have had a deal: They'd put out shows, and we'd watch them. They'd put out less of it, and we'd still watch it. They'd put in more commercials, and we'd still watch it. "The Honeymooners" actually only ran for a single year, but back then a "season" was 39 episodes. By the time Star Trek ran for three, a "season" was 26 episodes. And this year, a full "season" worth of a show is 13-18 new episodes, the rest of the year will be filled with re-runs and pre-emptions. The episodes are shorter as well, down to a 44 minute "hour" (which may get "stepped on" by local affiliates or cable companies for the loss of another minute). Even by strictly objective measures, the quality of TV programming has been dropping steadily for a long time.

But they've been getting away with it, because TV's real customer isn't the viewers, but the advertisers. Actually producing new shows is an overhead cost in the process of delivering the eyeballs, and every business tries to minimize their overhead. Since how much new entertainment they delivered didn't have much to do with how many eyeballs they could deliver, it was only logical to spend less on it. After all, where were you going to go? There wasn't anything new to watch anywhere else, either. And now the chickens are coming home to roost.

This seems to be my week for playing Chicken Little, but this is a far bigger potential threat than anything academia alone might do. Samuel Clemens advised "Never engage in a war of words with anyone who buys ink by the barrel." We may already be in a fight with an industry that has their own satellite-beamed presence in every living room in America. If TV starts viewing these games as a competitive threat to their bottom line (and I'm pretty certain we are in the long run, those gaming hours have to be coming from somewhere), this will get to be a very bumpy ride. Nobody is "fair and impartial" when they think you're picking their pocket.

Star Wars Galaxies critique

Just in case folks haven't seen it yet there is an interesting thread developing over at Game Girl Advance around Timothy Burke's recent essay on SWG and his estimation of it as a failure. The article itself was a good read and the comments thread has brought up some fascinating issues around the notion of "the grind," lack of immersive content, flawed gameplay, etc. I haven't been playing myself for very long and I must admit that when I first went in I was not inspired in quite the same way I was with EQ. I was surprised by my response to it given how promising what I'd read was. I've been trying to figure out if this is simply a matter of the genre/tech no longer being new to me, the game culture being too undeveloped, or something specific to the game. I still haven't sorted out why it hasn't hooked me in quite the same way (though I'm giving it more time, especially after hearing some fascinating stuff from a player in one of the biggest player associations on my server) but Burke's essay provides some interesting threads to think about.

Terra Nova Welcomes Dave Rickey

Rickey's credits include EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot, and he's now lead developer of one of the Worlds to Watch, Wish. While Dave writes a development-oriented column, "Engines of Creation," at Skotos, he also shares our unfortunate penchant for boring academic discourse as well. Too bad, Dave! But your loss is our gain, and we look forward to Dave's unique ability to connect gaming praxis and theory. Welcome!

There is Here

The result of a $37 million development cycle, the innovative social world There is now open to the public. You can start with a 14-day free trial, then continue for $5 monthly (with a $20 activation fee) or $50 annually (no fee). Plus, you get Therebucks when you join - bucks that have an explicit cash value that's significantly more than 1/20 of a cent (the usual cash value of coupons in the US). Read about the launch here. Join up here.

Earth Fires Destabilize Virtual Governments

Sony announces: "All Sony Online Entertainment customer service support is closed due to the wild fires raging throughout San Diego and the proximity of those fires to the SOE offices. Normal operations will resume once this local emergency is over." SOE games include the behemoths EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies.

In other words, a firestorm has knocked out the government that rules over 750,000 accounts. There will be no police officers on the streets tonight. If you're in the mood to do some random looting and griefing, now's the time.

We tend to think of synthetic worlds as decentralized because the users are spread over the globe. They are still highly centralized on the production side, however, a state of affairs with clear implications for the relationship of synthetic worlds not only to Earth's weather, but to its politics as well. This time it was a fire; next time, it might be an injunction.

No, seriously...

Yesterday I gave a presentation on virtual worlds to a group I'd never pitched to before, the parents of kids at my university. It was interesting because most of them (mean age ~45-50) hadn't heard much about this field and none of them had begun to consider the social/economic/legal implications.

One of the most interesting things for me was how neatly the audience divided, into (a) those who just didn't see this as anything interesting and (b) those who thought that this was the precursor to the most serious change in human relations since the invention of the wheel. And I recognized in those two different positions how I feel about this area (Mon, Wed, Fri I choose option (a), Tues, Thurs and weekends I'm convinced of (b)).

In looking over the comments from some other discussions we've had, I recognized the same positions. For example, the discussion about content, the property interests of players, and whether End User License Agreements (EULAs) give all rights to developers is, on one level, about whether you think these spaces are just games which the developers should have all rights in (since they built them) or whether they are new social spaces where the actions of the participants need to be recognized as (somehow) important. The discussion from TL's post (and, of course, the analysis in her papers) about whether players are part of a community seems to me to be about the same thing. I suspect that there are many other examples.

So, what's it to be: games or something different? Is there any reason why we should take these "playspaces" as seriously as we here at TerraNova do?

Engines of Creation: Pursuit of Knowledge

As many will know, Dave Rickey, a regular contributor here and game designer at Mutable Realms, has a column over at Skotos.net. It's a great resource generally, and this week he's talking about how academic interest (like this blog) in MMOGs may translate to problems in the long run for game designers and worlds.

It's a fascinating read. Comments probably should be directed to the forum at skotos, since that's where Dave posted his essay. But I'll leave the comments open here, in case there is some reason why posting here is an alternative for some.

Parents Who Game With Their Children

About one-third of MMORPG players surveyed said they played the game with a family member. An interesting slice of this aspect of MMORPGs is what parents feel they get out of the experience of playing with their children. The small handful of anecdotal information I have received is surprisingly positive given how much the media likes to make parents paranoid about video games.

The following narratives bring out several key benefits that resolve some typical parent-child barriers:
- Having a relevant and meaningful pool of shared experiences to open up communication channels
- Using this pool of experiences to illustrate real life issues or lessons
- Moving from the parent-child framework to a peer-friend relationship

When my son first started playing EQ almost 4 years ago, he was entering his teen years and I felt the void between us starting. I didn't understand what he was talking about when he spoke of MMORPGs. So I started playing EQ. Suddenly, we had something to talk about again! Having questions and sharing experiences in the game opened the lines of communication and suddenly that dreaded 'How was your day'... conversation starter became 'You are not going to BELIEVE what happened in game..' Once the conversation started about the game, it was a natural progression to move to RL. Even now (he's 16) when I can tell something's bothering him, I open the conversation with questions about the game and, before he realizes it, he's talking about RL as well. I think all parents should participate in their children's activities, even if it's a computer game. It really does help by giving you a starting point for conversations.[EQ, F, 39]

When I started playing, my boys (ages 11 and 12) were very supportive and enjoyed watching. However, it didn't take long for them to request a character of their own to play and eventually we all got accounts so we could play together. My boys and I talk a lot about several different things and even now, almost 4 years later, we talk openly about a lot of stuff, but the best 'ice-breaker' is to start the conversation with a question about what they are doing in the game. The advantage, of course, is that when we get on a subject that can be used as a segue to real life I take advantage of it and use it as a practical example for the subject I ultimately want to talk about. This is usually dealing with issues of personal relationships, right and wrong ways to approach moral issues, and development of personal character and honesty. These are all issues we deal with in-game, but the opportunity to use them as segues into real-life issues is priceless. How often do you hear of a 43 year old parent able to have intimate, 'choice related', interactive conversations with their teenagers? [EQ, F, 43]

I am an older female - I play the game with my two grown sons. I think it has made our relationship stronger in that in the game I am not 'mom' but a friend and a peer. [EQ, F, 56]

Now, of course I’m not saying that every parent who plays with their children will suddenly have a wonderful relationship. But in the midst of such negative media attention on these games, it is important to point out that very positive transformative experiences occur in and from the game.

The Reforestation of England

England's 50,000 square miles were denuded of forest in the mid-17th century, primarily to fuel the country's growling infernal engine of industrial development. Now you can reforest England in 13 minutes. SpeedTree plants a million unique trees in 500-square-mile plots in 8 seconds; 100 such plots suffice to undo the work of Charles I's contemporaries.

And these trees are not like the one your fire-phobic auntie retrieves from its box during the holidays. These trees are beautiful, richly rendered root and tree and branch. At the same time, they chew tiny amounts of processor resources. I flew at 130 miles an hour just above the verdant plane I had made, skimming over a million conifers and palms and hardwoods, with nary a hiccup from my 64MB GeForce3 Ti500 512RAM vehicle.

Your first chance to see SpeedTree in operation will probably come at Camelot's Trials of Atlantis expansion. Other users include Warhammer Online and the hotly-anticipated Wish. Judging from these forests, well, I wish I could go there right now.

Growth Rates of Synthetic Worlds

It's early, and we don't have the best data, but the numbers we do have suggest exponential growth in the number of synthetic worlds in the eight years from 1996 to 2003. Indeed, the trend bears uncanny resemblence to Moore's Law: The number of worlds seems to double every 18 months.

These conclusions are drawn from Bruce Sterling Woodcock's priceless MMOG subscription data:

Considering first the number of worlds, the data (including Meridian 59, Lineage, and Second Life, which Woodcock's chart omits) show an average annual growth rate of 45 percent. By the Rule of 70, a variable with annual growth rate r doubles every 70/r years; 70/45 = 1.55, or about every 18 months.

Considering subscription levels or aggregate population, these also are revealed to grow exponentially, this time by the interocular impact test - look at the chart and it hits you right between the eyes.

Gaming @ AoIR

Just back from Toronto where I was attending the annual AoIR conference (Association of Internet Researchers). In the past there has been a paper or two on gaming but this year there were three formal panels and a scattering of other papers bringing the total number of presentations to around 13 (and those are only ones with obvious gameish titles). The birds of a feather meeting organized by Mia Consalvo (who actually managed to get us together at 8am - now that is quite an accomplishment!) had somewhere around twenty people. It was great to hear lots of interesting work on the social/cultural/communicative aspects of a variety of games and over the next couple of days I'll post on a few of the themes that particularly caught my ear this time around.

One that wove through several talks was the extent of player participation in creating meaningful, and usable, game worlds. Sal Humphreys, Jason Rhody, and Donald Snyder each presented fascinating data on the ways players are not simply "users" of the tech but active content producers. Sal, drawing on her work with EQ, suggests that players "social, emotional, and material investments" are crucial to the success of the game. It was also nice to get some non-EQ data in the mix and both Jason, with his work on AC, and Donald, with his piece on TSO, pointed to the ways players are constantly involved in the creation of the game space. Jason spoke about the widespread development and use of plug-ins and showed how they get tied to altering the interface and shaping gameplay. Donald's paper on in-game radio was a great example of players not only melding two techs but using them for some fascinating political purposes.

I've often thought the amount of actual labor players put into games and game communities is one of the most hidden aspects of these multiplayer worlds. Sal challenged us to not over-dichotomize between players & developers and it certainly seems the case (at least in these types of games) that players are developers in some respect. Beyond the work they do in the game there are all those fansites, walk-throughs/strategy guides, maps, databases - not to mention the free testing/feedback/community management gamers do along the way. I think players get this point but, as I've written in the past, I'm concerned when companies that run the games don't. I was heartened by Jason's account of how the folks at Turbine treat involvement by the community and I wonder, to what degree should we be calling players designers...? ...developers? And are they getting "enough" in return for all their labor?

Virtual Crime 101

Greg and I are doing a paper for the State of Play conference and our contribution is on Virtual Crime. It picks up on ideas from our thing in Legal Affairs. Anyway, I'm working on it today--the paper is late, as usual--and I thought it would be worthwhile to get your thoughts as I was writing. (Blog hosting: $149.50 per annum. Broadband connection: $49 per month. Having other people write your papers for you: Priceless)

Rather than try to explain all of the paper in one hit, let me divide it up into bits, this being Bit 1. In this Bit want to examine the idea of purely in-world criminal activity. Crimes that cross over into the real world will be the subject of tomorrow's posting.

So, main thrust of this Bit is on the nature of the crimes, and the nature of the regulatory responses that emerge to combat crime. First, what sorts of "crimes" emerge within the virtual world? My initial response was that, well, there's killing, and stealing, and maiming, and... But, as Greg patiently explained, these are perfectly permissible, and so within the limited realm of the world these are not crimes at all. Turns out that the main type of in-world crime (we think) is griefing. Of course this can take many forms, depending on the nature of the world. But in general it seems that crime=griefing within world. Or are we wrong here?

The next section is on what regulatory responses emerge to combat crime. Here, again, we're only talking about the in-world response. I'm interested in people's experience of these responses. As Larry Lessig has famously said, "Code is Law" and nowhere is this more true than in virtual worlds. What examples of coding-to-remove-crime-or-grieving can you think of? The much-used example is the UO reputation flag, but there are others. Perhaps more interesting, are there examples of non-developer (ie community) regulatory responses to the griefer problem? We have a few candidate examples (posses typically) but your mileage may vary.

Evil Avatars

In the spirit of approaching Halloween, I wanted to contrast and compare this rumination on gaming evil from GGA's Jane with this fluffy and rambling MSNBC article on religion in video games. Jane ponders the joylessness of evil, while the MSNBC article toys with virtual ethics, but actually creates a weird idea goulash by mixing the concepts of being virtually "good" with the goal of finding the creator of a divine plan, aka: a game designer (recalling that old familiar god/wizard trope in virtual worlds). The MSNBC article closes with a quote from David Thomas of the always amazing Buzzcut that “there’s actually a pretty positive message in [games including Grand Theft Auto]. And that’s the idea that there’s somebody out there with a plan for me.” (Hmm... like Josef Stalin?) Putting aside the inherent goodness of "plans," the good/bad game behavior question folds nicely into the sound and fury over GTA and other such disputes.

What I find interesting about VW renditions of good/evil, though, is that in networked games, real good and evil roleplay has not been embraced by designers. (I welcome corrections on that point.) In EQ, e.g., you can role-play the "evil races" like Trolls and Iskar (query: why evil races?)... but my understanding of most MMOs is that these so called "evil" races might hang out in dark places with ugly scary bots who use plenty of exclamation points, but they really don't do anything significantly more evil than the "good" races. The good/evil distinction is more like the Albion/Hibernia/Midgard distinction in DAOC. If you're evil in EQ, it seems you're just wearing the scary lizard mask, rat-hacking with your scary lizard pals.

P2P griefing, though, is kind of evil, isn't it? And I would imagine griefers, just because of their personality types, would resist role-playing squeaky-clean good guys in sunlit towns and instead be drawn to the evil avatars who lurk in nasty-looking climes and engage in a lot of 1337sp34k. Is that true? Also, does anyone have stories/links/papers re MUDs or other VWs where the good/evil option is designed as something more than surface ornament?

Some Numbers on Gender-Bending

The demographic that is most likely to gender-bend is not male teenagers, but men over the age of 25. There are several ways one could explain this. One explanation is that male players are probably more tempted to gender-bend because restrictions on crossing gender boundaries are far more stringent for men in real life than for women. And younger male players are probably less secure about their own gender identity to gender-bend.

But of every male and female character you run into in game, how many are actually being played by someone of the opposite gender?

We know that about 19% of EQ players are female (n = 1239). So in a hypothetical pool of 1000 EQ players, 810 are male and 190 are female.

We know that about 15.0% of male EQ players and 4.2% of female EQ players use a character of the opposite gender as their main character (n = 1228). Thus, in our hypothetical pool of players:

Of the 810 male players, 689 are playing a male character while 121 are playing a female character.
Of the 190 female players, 182 are playing a female character while 8 are playing a male character.

So altogether:

There are 697 male characters, of which 8 (1%) are being played by a female player.
There are 303 female characters, of which 121 (40%) are being played by a male player.

So in EQ, every 1 out of 2 or 3 female characters is being played by a male player, while every 1 out of 100 male characters is being played by a female player.

Schooner Rights

Maybe it is just that I'm really fond of Patrick O'Brien's novels, A&E's Horatio Hornblower series, and Sid Meier classic Pirates! game, but was overjoyed to see Pirates of the Burning Sea on the horizon. Like Sid Meier's game, this MMORPG allows you to tell yourself you're really just interested in getting familiar with RL geography: "The entire Windward and Leeward island chains, from Puerto Rico down to Grenada, are modeled with dozens of ports, islands, and cays." (No, I'm not playing a game -- I'm learning about the Carribean.) Oh, and the screen shots look nice.

One interesting thing I've always found about games like this, though, is that you normally play the seafaring segments as a boat, not, e.g., as an avatar running around on a boat trying to control the boat. For those of us who are still thinking about Julian's account of the Mr. Bungle story, this raises some interesting questions about identity in VWs. E.g., what if Mr. Bungle's virtual presence was a Schooner? Do avatar boats have rights? Can groups of boats form a government?

Of course, Ted's core findings are still safe: just as real boats are traded on ebay, I'm sure that a player purporting to own a nice virtual frigate or some virtual doubloons will soon be inclined to sell them on ebay as well. But when we venture onto the uncharted seas of virtual society, are there lessons to be learned from avatar embodiments that don't look like this, but like this? For instance, Nick and TL have both written some fascinating pieces about the presentation of gender in virtual worlds. (See here and here.) Even Dr. Castronova has joined in the fun.

I guess boats are female?

Update: Should have included this originally: Jerry Kang at UCLA Law musing on the CyberRace of avatars. (In the Harvard Law Review, no less...)

Joho says: MMORPGs are BORING!

And he's got a point. Read more here.

Privacy and VWs

Tal Zarsky, a doctoral student at Columbia and one of the people involved in running the Yale/NYLS State of Play Conference, is doing a paper on privacy issues in VWs and MMORPGs. He is going to be looking at gamers' privacy policies and stories of abuse by the players and those running the game. He asked me whether I had any thoughts on the topic.

Turns out I do. But I suspect the TerraNova hivemind does too. Thoughts? Should we worry about participant privacy in these worlds? If so, under what conditions? What data is sensitive/problematic? Are MMORPGs different than VWs? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera?

Game Research Grid

More news than you can shake a stick at today. The latest: The San Diego Supercomputer Center,
the Cal-(IT)2 Game Culture & Technology Lab, the UC-Irvine Institute for Software Research, and Butterfly.net announce a Massively Multi-User Online Grid-Based Game System for Game Research. It will be rolled out on Thursday, October 30 at the Beall Center for Art and Technology at UC-Irvine in Orange County, CA. Speaking of California, I'm not sure if we are all working our abs or our pecs that day. Maybe gluts. Anyway, press are clearly encouraged to attend, and academics will want to red-pen November 15th, when the group begins accepting research proposals. Address queries about attending the workshop to [email protected].

Wayner: Securing Digital Money

Security expert Peter Wayner's new book Policing Online Games has been excerpted at GamaSutra, and the excerpted section deals with money. Interesting tidbits: He frames the problem as one of making sure that money is accounted to its rightful owners. In other words, he's working from an unstated assumption that property rights exist. Also, he seems unruffled at the idea that security is tough to do, asserting instead that hacking and duping and the rest can be controlled with the right systems. He's even unconcerned about security in peer to peer systems; his claim is that a central server architecture is not a necessary condition for ownership security. I suspect he makes everything seem much easier than it is.

Lineage II Launched in Korea, Achieves 100K Club in One Week

130,000 subscribers in 7 days. Look under 'NC News' at the NCSoft English site.

Terra Nova Welcomes T. L. Taylor

Author of ground-breaking studies on the sociology of EverQuest players, T.L. is newly installed at the Center for Computer Games Research at the admirably forward-looking IT-University Copenhagen. Indeed, still unpacking. As she settles in, we'll all hear more from her. Welcome!

Economic Models

Some time ago Ted mentioned how simplistic the economics of game worlds tend to be (I wish I could find his comment). The obvious area where this can seen is in the faucet-drain economic model of resource movement which we've discussed elsewhere, but I'm sure there are a number of other examples that people can think of.

One that occurs to me is the observation that we found massive hoarding of resources as soon as people were able to own virtual property. So, as Raph Koster explained to Elizabeth Koster and she told everyone, entire resource systems were broken in UO almost immediately and one guy ended up owning 10,000 identical shirts, because...well, because he liked having lots of shirts. The observation that a virtual resource would be subject to the endowment effect would have been unremarkable at a behavioral economics conference, but it came as something of an unpleasant shock for Origin Systems.

Alternatively one can fairly easily make the case that eBaying arises as a consequence of a poorly developed economic model that fails to capture (internally) the value of the resources within the system.

A few thoughts/questions/ideas for the TN collective intelligence:

1. Are there other examples of simple economic models which have caused (or are causing) grief? I imagine there must be, I just haven't scoured the literature (Oh, that's right, there isn't any "literature". We're making it here).

2. Does it actually matter if a developer screws up the economics, or has an overly simplistic model? Sure, some assets or classes or other aspect of the world are gonna get nerfed and Dave or Raph are gonna have to pull a few all-nighters re-balancing their worlds. But, so what?

I suspect that a tentative answer to question 2 is "it depends", and it depends on whether the world is economically self-contained. A while back I was talking to Will Harvey, the founder of There. We happened to be discussing how There saw themselves, in part, like a themepark where third party providers could build content/games/etc (Second Life are similar in this) and these third parties got to keep a percentage of the money that they attracted to their attraction. Since there is an official Therebucks<->$USD exchange rate, this is real money. Under these circumstances a simple "re-balancing" is gonna involve very, very, serious redistributions of real money

Golly.

Maslow Short-Circuited

Abraham Maslow was a good storyteller. He told a great story about human motivations as a pyramid of needs -- a lot of people are still hearing that story in Psych 101 classes around the world. Maslow's two basal sets of needs are physiological needs (eating, sleeping) and safety needs. Only after those base needs are met are we motivated to try to address our higher needs, e.g., love and belonging, esteem, and the ever-popular "Self-Actualization." (Are you self-actualized?)

Virtual worlds short-circuit Maslow. The avatar's typist can surely starve and die, but nothing in a virtual world will feed or protect the typist, so actions motivated by the two basal needs in virtual worlds are largely non-existent. (Unless we want to equate representation with reality -- and I don't.) However, love and belonging and esteem are all possible through virtual worlds as social software. Therefore we do see, in guilds and personal relationships, behaviors that we could find motivations for in the higher levels of Maslow's pyramid.

This might, in a nutshell, explain why Dave is probably right in pursuing anarchy and feudalism as alternative forms of good entertainment -- and I'm not just saying that because Dan and I agreed with him in our Legal Affairs article. Violence, anarchy, warfare, and destruction are all great fun to have with your pals in Norrath -- God forbid that anyone try to turn them into a blueprint for real society, though.

But Maslow's story might also be used to explain why virtual worlds are not just games. Avoiding starvation and threats to safety are, for better or worse, not the only motivations for the shape of our real world society. In fact, most people in Western societies seem fixated on other things that may actually have some relation to virtual worlds. So should we care about how virtual worlds are governed? Yes. But caring about them doesn't mean that governments in virtual worlds should look at all like those in the one world where we all eat and sleep.

Updates: 1) The BBC says virtual war is good, 2) Presence ("[A]t *some level* and to *some degree*, her/his perceptions overlook that knowledge and objects, events, entities, and environments are perceived as if the technology was not involved in the experience.")

The Absence of History in Synthetic Worlds

The election of California's new governor is a historical moment. For the first time, the state house is occupied not only by an actor, but a bodybuilder who concurrently appears in a blockbuster film. This event is a prodigious collective burp by the body politic, of such power that I laugh out loud every time I bring it to mind. Ahnuld as governor! Pump You Up! Ha ha ha.

Now, things like this never happen in video games.

In single-player games, of course, every event is scripted, and even odd or exciting events are intended to be that way. Not surprising. The whole thing is designed from beginning to end. In mano a mano sports and shooter games there may be the occasional wierdness - "my guy fumbled on the 3 yard line, then his guy picked it up and ran it back fifteen yards, but then HE fumbled and my guy got it and lateraled to somebody he thought was HIS guy, and..." - largely as a result of the AI proggies spewing out random numbers in huge quantities. But it doesn't change the game. On the next carry, the odds of a fumble are still one in a thousand or so, well, unless the back plays for the Browns and is heading into the endzone during an AFC Championship game. Then it's one in three. But I digress.

If there is history in video games, it ought to appear in large social games. Everyone who considers these games gushes about "emergence" (I'm guilty as charged on this. I gush about emergence so much that I have crusts of dried gush on all my t-shirts). Whatever it is, emergence would probably have to be a property of a nonlinear dynamical system, wouldn't it? The result of chaos: we put all these people together in a room and gave them linear systems to play with, and BOOM this thing happened that we didn't expect. Emergence!

But another property of nonlinear systems, like human history, is that there are phase shifts. Everything conforms to a pattern for awhile, then there's some event, and the system descends into inexplicable wierdness. When it emerges, everthing is settled again but nothing is the same. Think World War I, the Diet of Worms, the Berlin Wall. (Sorry for the centro-Euro-centrism. I am culturally deprived.)

In my knowledge, every phase-shift-like event that I have seen in MMOGs has been induced by the designers. EverQuest's market moved from East Commons to Luclin when a patch made the Luclin zone a more fluid market. Camelot's clerics gave up warfighting when spell effects and resistances pushed them that way. A real phase shift would be, say, a PvP world where one could identify long, stable periods of time when newbies were not ganked, interrupted by equally long, stable periods when newbies *were* ganked, with there being no obvious design changes at the switching points. Rather, the player base, as a group and for no design-related reason, simply changed gears in response to some internal historical dynamic.

Players often clamor for the ability to 'make history' in the worlds, but the designs don't seem to allow for players to influence anything really important. In Camelot, Albion and Hibernia cannot utterly destroy Midgard, even though it would clearly make the world a better place (largely by eradicating those loathesome Healers and their instant stuns). In Shadowbane, Lords of Uber can indeed wipe out L33t D00ds, but once they do, LoU becomes hard to challenge; things are almost too stable afterward (or so I am told). At a fundamental level, most of the worlds are really very stable, very predictable. And that's somewhat puzzling, because history is fun.

Avatar Rights

James Grimmelman's ongoing discussion over at Lawmeme about democracy within virtual worlds, together with the comments on an earlier post has got me thinking about a related issue, the nature of avatar rights. Yes, yes, I know, Greg and I sank ignominiously last time we pushed this boat out, but we didn't have the benefit of the TerraNova hivemind back then. So, at the risk of having to start baling again...

To begin, let's bracket property rights for the moment (of course you can take a look over here, here, or here if you want to check out the skinny on this topic) and concentrate on other human (or constitutional) rights. And let's accept that an avatar doesn't have any rights; it's clearly the human being controlling the avatar which has the rights, if any exist. (I was going to call this "Typist's Rights" but this is too dull, and we'd get waaaaay too many hits from people interested in Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and Repititive Strain Injury).

Of the many ways one can attack this problem, a productive one is to look at the rights within the world and the rights without (ie outside) the world. The rights that inhere within the world are comprised of those granted by the developers or which emerge as a consequence of the society which emerges. And of course this will differ depending on the context of the world: Dave Rickey at Mutable Realms is building Wish to conform with pre-Charlemagnian feudalism and so expectations of inalienable human rights which were codified 1000 years later have little purchase here.

Which is not to say that rights will never exist or emerge within the world. Some worlds are built to facilitate this: LambdaMOO and A Tale In The Desert are, at one level, all about politics as gameplay. The LambdaMOO experience is well known, and ATITD seems to be following it with the combination of law built into the code (and indeed, a commitment that the wizards will code the political decisions of the populace.)

But the existence, in-world, of rights, politics, and democratic expectations, while of interest to sociologists isn't gonna cut much ice with a judge. So what about the rights out of the virtual, and in the real? Here it gets trickier. It's clear that the rights don't map cleanly, especially in RPGs. I'm allowed -- on PvP shards at least -- to frag, waste, and dismember other avatars, and no-one's civil rights are trampled on. But what of a claim that, say, the developers of ATITD failed to code the collective will of the populace?

Outside RPGs, especially in the new metaverses of There and Second Life, the question is a little harder. Where there is no obvious role to play, I'm fairly confident not only that the typists will feel the pain of "rights infringements" more seriously (has anyone else noticed how 2L and T avatars look just like better versions of our real life selves?) but also that judges are not going to be so quick to say that it's just a game. These worlds will, I suspect, be dealt with like other content carriers and will have to negotiate real life claims of rights fairly soon. The most obvious will be the usual sorts of communications problems that ISPs had to deal with -- defamation, porn, etc -- but it's not a stretch to re-imagine the Rape in Cyberspace into these sorts of worlds.

Ted C tentatively suggests that we should divide worlds into "gaming" and "not gaming." As Ted knows this sort of bright line rule pretty much never works, and in this case I wonder whether the sorts of claims at stake here are different in RPGs or metaverses. Maybe they're less likely in RPGs as an empirical observation, because everyone is too busy camping on mobs and signing up for raids, but should we treat EQ any differently (as a matter of law) from There? If EQ engages, say, in race-based discrimination or content censorship, should we cut them a break because it's all just a game?

Slow Food, Party Lines, Corpse Retrieval

Culture is inseperable from the technologies it employs. As everyone knows, more efficient technological systems don't always make for better societies -- the slow food movement provides one example of cultural retrenchment against encroaching efficiency. When I was a kid, I had the pleasure of living with a party line telephone, which as this article indicates, tied communities together in various subtle ways, sort of like proto-flashmobs.

In worlds constructed from code, inefficient technologies also give rise to social structures. These structures, of course, don't require fiber-optical cable investments to dismantle -- they can be nerfed overnight. One of JG's ongoing State of Play posts over at the Meme has produced this little gem of a comment post about how making EQ more n00b-friendly nerfed porters, tipping, and professional corpse-retrieval.

The influence of code changes on VW social structures is now an old story, I realize -- and things like this have been seen in countless MUDs and MMOGs. Julian's chapter on the Schmoo Wars in LambdaMOO was one of my favorite renditions. One thing I found interesting about this particular comment was the last line suggesting that "a lot of the older players have left" -- consistent with the concept that significant technological changes should signal the passing of a generation.

Welcome Nick

We're delighted to welcome Nick Yee to our happy band. Not only does he extend our range of expertise into the psychological aspects of these brave new worlds, he's quick out of the blocks. No sooner than we gave him the keys to the car, he had it out of the garage, and was testing it out with a brand new post.

So, welcome Nick. And our apologies for being slower with the welcome than you were with your first posting.

The ZentralCommittee.

Love in Reverse?

Survey data on the formation of platonic and romantic relationships that originate in MMORPGs are higher than one might expect, and the data on the comparability of online versus real-life friends (on the bottom of the page of first link) is even more revealing. One might explain this by pointing to the increased self-disclosure, the "war buddies" phenomenon, or the freedom to idealize the other person. But one explanation most people tend to lose sight of is that the MMORPG players are pre-selected for compatibility

But the way that relationships form online is also interesting to consider. In real life, you know a person slowly from the outside-in - from the mundane, everyday details working your way to the personal issues and secrets. When you meet a person online, it's the other way around. People like to share personal details online and you only learn the mundane details when you meet them in real life. By then, you already know their character well enough to know you want to meet them. It's also seldom we see our real life friends and lovers react to sudden crises, but that's what happens all the time in MMORPGs. In real life, you need to wait till something bad happens to know if your friends stick around. In MMORPGs, you make friends with the people who have demonstrated their integrity to you.

In a strange way, people in MMORPGs are making friends and falling in love, both literally and figuratively, inside-out.

Sheriffs of Norrath

The Institute for the Future looks like the kind of place that ordinary academics can only dream of hanging out at. And they have a blog, called Future Now. One of their Research Directors, Alex Pang has posted an essay called Sheriffs of Norrath where he asks about the laws of virtual worlds. He even references us. Lordy.

"...there are currently three big legal issues being raised by these massive games: How do you enforce real-world laws against theft or fraud when they apply to digital goods? How do you create legal systems that operate in these online worlds? and finally, Who really owns this property?"

I'm particularly interested in others' thoughts on these issues, especially issue two. How do you create legal systems that operate in these worlds? Or perhaps the logically prior question, do we need to create these legal systems at all?

EconoMUDtrics

Dave Rickey's otherwise tack-sharp take on the virtual-property question, previously cited, contains one passing assertion that could maybe use some sharpening:

"Where the US/European MMO market is over $200,000,000 per year of revenue (and Asia is even bigger), it's doubtful that the secondary market in items and characters is even as much as 10% of that."

I'm curious to see how Dave calculated that estimate for the "secondary market." (Gosh, if only he were a regular commentator on this blog... oh, wait... Dave?)

My own estimate goes something like this:

Starting with Ted Castronova's figures for sales in eBay's Internet games category, we get an annualized total of $16 million. But that is surely only a fraction of total sales in the market. In the Ultima Online market, for instance, the best-educated guesses put the total for non-eBay sales (through sites like UOTreasures, UOEmporium, et al.) at twice the eBay figure. Working that formula on UO alone adds $6 million to the total. Applying it to the rest of the games traded on eBay would add another $26 million. But just to be on the safe side, let's throttle the multiplier back from 2-to-1 to 1-to-1, adding $13 million instead, for a total of $35 million.

We're not done yet, though. We still haven't even begun to reckon with the behemoth that doesn't trade on eBay: EverQuest. Back when EQ auctions weren't yet contraband, Castronova figured the market at $5 million. And that wasn't counting non-eBay transactions. Nowadays, EQ trades still thrive on the gray-market auction site PlayerAuctions, and at superstores like IGE and Jonathan Yantis's MySuperSales. We could assume the market hasn't gone down any since the eBay ban (the subscriber base has only gone up, after all), and we could apply the 2-to-1 rule, for an additional $15 million. But again, let's be conservative, estimate the non-auction sales at 1-to-1, and guess that the market has dropped by half since Castronova's calculations. That adds another $5 million to the total.

Bottom line: $20 million (or 10 percent of industry revenues) looks more like the absolute minimum size of the player-to-player market. A better guess would be more like $40 million. And if you wanted to go nuts (or already are), you could even say it's as much as $63 million.

Still no match for the business of creating worlds, but nothing shabby in its own right. And don't forget, that Asian market no doubt has a secondary market of its own, whose size, if ratios hold, may well outdo the primary market in such backward regions as our own.

Render Unto Caesar

Dave Rickey, a regular commentator here, has his own take on the onwership/economics issue and, prompted by the discussion here, takes up the issue in his regular Engines of Creation column over at Skotos. His article is called "Render Unto Caesar".

Dictionary

I'm looking to put together a glossary of unusual gaming/vw terms. It's hard to do academic work in this area when everybody keeps inventing new terms. You feel like an idiot when a friend says "So I was hanging out in UO, pulled a twink, then went afk, and they did a wipe and I found my Morningstar-of-Extraordinarily-Crushing-Damage had been nerfed!" And you say, "Right..."

So, anybody want to give me terms and definitions that should be included in a dictionary that the media and television arm of TerraNova Enterprises, Inc. might publish?

My current favorite candidates include:

"twink" (v/n) the action of a higher-level player helping a lower level player rather than the lower level player doing everything themselves. Usually means providing higher-level assets (swords, rares, etc) than the lower level character could obtain themselves. Often used where a single person has multiple avatars at different levels, and has the higher level avatar provide the asset to his/her lower level avatar. Source: Koster, LegendMUD, UrbanDictionary. (Not to be confused with "twink" in non-gaming, sexual contexts)

"nerf" (v, trans) the action of developers reducing the strength of an in-game asset where the asset is too powerful and unbalances other parts of the game. Arose when swords in UO were rebalanced and the characters felt they were hitting each other with nerf swords. Source: Koster, LegendMUD, UrbanDictionary.

Frasca Fracas

Games are speech.

We all know this (if we don't, I just point to Natalie Bookchin, QED). Gonzalo Frasca (also previously blogged) wrote a master's thesis (advised by Janet Murray) discussing how games are political speech. And now he's released a QED of his own, September 12, that has drawn the fire of Greg Costikyan (10/6/03 entry). You can check the "simulation" out here. I put the S-word in quotes because one of Costikyan's gripes is that this is more a political cartoon than a simulation. However, Frasca would probably not use the quotes and be more skeptical about drawing lines between the two.

I'm going to play Mercutio/Switzerland here on the substance, but I find the form fascinating. My question is: how does the Frasca Fracas map onto MMOG governance? Synthetic worlds have a simulative aspect, but no simulation can be completely accurate, and the simplification within MMOGs can be as capable of political readings as Frasca's work. If Frasca's little "don't pull the trigger" game can embody a contentious political position, then, a fortiori, so can Everquest and SWG and Wish and yes, even MUD1. The fact that these environments are massively social adds a key wrinkle, though, because the politics of the code is both enabled by and susceptible to modification through the social politics of the gamespace.

So what are the hidden, hard-coded politics of the current crop of synthetic worlds? One obvious prediction is that the code of massive gamespaces will have no reason to embody obvious political statements, and will attempt to distance itself from RL political issues by presenting fantasy settings. But there are always niche markets -- any thoughts on the question of whether specific virtual worlds today target specific political demographics or embody political positions?

Updates: 1) Re the fracas, I found this a little surprising... 2) GTA dissects simulations

SE Asia, Gaming and the Future of MMORPGS

So I've been catching up on some required reading, to wit, the entire corpus of the slides from the first Austin Game Conference. Too much fabulous stuff to list here, so let's pick one at a time.

The reading for today's sermon is from John Lee, Director Corporate Development and Strategy, Softbank Corporation, and is an "Overview of the NE Asia online gaming market - China, Japan and Korea". As we've noted elsewhere, as outsiders it's hard to get a handle on what is happening in the gaming world in SE Asia. Of course there's the standard texts and commentary which, understandably, are almost always about South Korea, PC baangs, and Lineage.

Lee's overview covers Korea, Japan and China, and this latter market is the most interesting one for me, since I've seen so little on it. Some personal highlights:

• 68M Internet users and counting
• Similar dynamic to Korea in 1998, principal usage in PC cafes, not household
• Primary users in inner China, where no alternative forms of entertainment exist
• Average Chinese Internet user spends 14 hours a week online, 8 hours of it gaming
• Concurrent usage for #1 game in China is currently 800,000 users!

Apart from the numbers, I'm interested in the nature of the gaming in SE Asia as against the US. Clearly there are differences in the communal nature of the gaming (in PC baangs or PC cafes) and also in cultural differences between these Asian countries and Western countries. At the risk of being ridiculously coarse and ludicrously coarse-grained, the US (and to a lesser extent) emphasizes the individual as an atomistic, independent actor, whereas the asian nations tend to emphasize the individual as an actor within a community. This goes some way to explaining why Lineage and other MMORPGs that emphasize communal action are so successful in Asia, and have struggled in the US.

Bruce Woodcock, Mark Jacobs and Dave Rickey note that eventually the US market is going to feed off itself (though they differ on when it flatlines) and so the developers are going to need to look to new markets. If these markets are in Asia, what is the future of MMORPGs?

Duping (and sploits)

A couple of postings by Ted and Jools and the fabulous comments therein have got me wondering. So the question of the day is:

Is duping legal and is it ethical?

On the legal front, I wonder whether there is anything in any law that covers it. It's probably not going to be a computer trespass, and I'm not sure that it's gonna be fraud (though I'll probably do some thinking about this and post a response to myself in comments).

But I suspect that the more interesting question is whether it's ethical. To play Duper's Advocate for the moment: if the developers are too lazy to guarantee unique ids for all objects in the worlds then it would be impossible to dupe (of course there may be technical reasons against this). Any duping is, therefore, a consequence of the developers' malfeasance/negiligence and therefore dupers are doing nothing wrong by exploiting it.

As for fedex spolits, well that's just arbitrage isn't it? We allow foreign exchange traders to sell US dollars in, say, Germany to gain the arbitrage benefit. What's the difference?

Hmmm.

Mother Russia

The first virtual world from Eastern Europe: Sphere.

Who Owns My Light Saber?

Under the subject heading "Who owns my sword?", the MUD-Dev mailing list has played host these last few weeks to a long, stimulating thread on virtual goods and property rights. The discussion hit pay dirt today with a post from Ren Reynolds that is as sharp and concise a statement of the legal crux of the matter as I have seen. If I may excerpt, typos and all:

"Companies are saying that they own copyright so customers cant sell characters, but where is the breach of the companies rights ? There is no copying going on, no public performance - just an agreement between two individuals about the use of a virtual item - what's that got to do with the game company ?

"So certainly, if the company has the right to tell customers what they can do in this respect, then they are free to reserve it, at the moment I'm genuinely not sure if companies have it."

This is exactly the question that the abortive Black Snow v. Mythic case left unsettled. And it's interesting to note that while Sony Online Entertainment felt very confident invoking its intellectual property rights to get EverQuest trades banned from eBay two years ago, they have yet to make any such move against the growing field of Star Wars: Galaxies eBayers.

Could it be they're not so sure they'd win the case anymore? Or is this just the influence of the enlightened Mr. Koster?

SWG $300 (and Plummeting)

Yes, it's milestone madness over at Star Wars: Galaxies. First we hear via IGN (and Greg) that the game just passed the 300,000-subscriber mark. Now I'm here to tell you that the eBay trade in SWG virtual goods has just topped, for the first time, the numbers for reigning eBay market leader Ultima Online.

Read it and weep, UO fans: as of this Wednesday, eBayers had in the previous 14 days paid a total of $124,577 for SWG goodies while the virtual stuff of UO brought in only $122,564. This effectively reversed last week's figures of $114,939 for Star Wars and $124,051 for Ultima, thus giving a nod to speculation that the new Sony product is sucking the very life essence out of EA's flagship MMORPG.

All this has been discussed here and on my blog. What you may not have heard, though, is that while the price of UO's currency, the Britannian gold piece, is holding steady, SWG's currency, the credit, seems to be dropping like a stone. Just a couple weeks ago, I'm told, a million credits was going for $300 -- this week the price is around $70.

I shared these numbers with a veteran UO trader, and he noted the obvious: "There's gotta be a working dupe in that game." A dupe being, in layman's terms, a bug that allows players to bypass the normal drudgery required to make in-game money and pile it up by the gazillions. And indeed, according to one wise guy over at Exploiter.org (motto: "You create worlds... we destroy them"), there have been at least three such bugs in SWG, only one of them fixed to date.

It goes without saying that the existence of such bugs is extremely demoralizing to the many players who don't exploit them. What bears noting, though, is that even while the SWG dupes are crashing the SWG currency, the economy itself continues to grow like kudzu.

This suggests two things. (1) The size and growth of an economy are no measures of that economy's fairness. And (2) the exchange rate just might be.

Discuss.

SWG 300K

IGN reports that Star Wars Galaxies has hit the 300K subscriber mark. Congrats to Raph Koster and the Sony team! And perhaps an equally amazing accomplishment: they persuaded a population half the size of Austin to relocate to a galaxy far far away without letting a single one be a Jedi yet. I wonder how many of those 300K are participating in the galaxy-wide holocron scavenger hunt?

Update: As the Slashdot Games discussion points out, the absence of Jedi is both consistent with the Star Wars story and momentarily keeps the first Jedi from diluting a valuable brand by announcing "pwned j00 all! I a/\/\ j00r fathah!!!!" Query related to my last post -- if everyone wants to be a Jedi, does that mean everyone should be a Jedi? On a related note, looks like Ydacy on Gorath is willing to pay credits for holocrons...