Terra Nova

Who Owns My Ownership?

How naive must one be, in this day and age, to spend months debating the question of virtual property without once wondering whether the question itself (or at any rate the phenomenon underlying it) wasn't already somebody's intellectual property?

Speaking only for myself, I confess the thought never crossed my mind. Not until last week, that is, when I received a friendly email from veteran game designer Ron Martinez, who alerted me to U.S. patent 6,119,229, "Virtual Property System," filed April 1997, granted September 2000, and jointly held by Martinez, Greg Guerin, and the famous cryptographer Bruce Schneier.

Here's the abstract. Game designers, read it and weep:

"A digital object ownership system is disclosed. The system includes a plurality of user terminals, where each terminal is accessible by at least one individual user. The system also includes at least one central computer system that is capable of communicating with each of the user terminals. A plurality of digital objects are provided, where each of the digital objects has a unique object identification code. Each of the digital objects are assigned to an owner. The digital objects are persistent, such that each of the digital objects is accessible by a particular user both when the user's terminal is in communication with the central computer system and also when the user's terminal is not in communication with the central computer system. The digital objects have utility in connection with communication over a network in that the object requires both the presence of the object identification code and proof of ownership."

It's hard for this layperson to see how the patent doesn't cover every MMORPG with an economy, but Martinez assures me not all games with property in them infringe. In particular, he notes, "[t]here is a distinction between [traditional multiplayer inventory systems] and a limited edition, ownable object, particularly one that can be exchanged for cash value." To the extent that that's a distinction with a difference, my guess is it means that the deeper designers build transaction systems into their games, the harder they step on this patent's toes.

IP lawyers and other masochists will want to read through the details of the claim and judge for themselves.

Syndicate Sponsorship

Slashdot Games reports that the uber-guild The Syndicate is now sponsored by Thunderbox PC, a high-performance box maker. Like simoniker, I'm not sure exactly what this means practically or portends for the future of guilds.

It's certainly an interesting development, though.

Avatar: Use/Conceptualization & Looking Glass Self

On the one hand, avatars in EQ-clones seem to merely serve the play-style and motivations of the individual user - achievers choose race/class combinations that optimize certain attributes and think of their avatars as pawns, while socializers think of their avatars as they key to their online social network, but there seems to be more subtlety going on in the creation, use and conceptualization of the avatar. Some players create the same type of character over and over again, while others never play the same one twice. Some players create avatars that become idealized versions of who they are (or want to be) while others create antitheses of who they are in real life, and some develop emotional attachments to their avatars while others are perfectly willing to sell their avatars. I like to think of avatars as personality projections. Looking at one avatar may not say much, but knowing the avatars that a player has created over time might be very revealing. Has the question of how gender, age and personality intersect with avatar creation and use already been explored quantitatively somewhere already? In either case, what are other interesting avatar creation/use/conceptualization differences that might be interesting to explore using survey data?

Here's another interesting idea. The Looking Glass Self concept refers to how who we are is shaped by what others perceive us as - which takes on a whole new twist in virtual worlds where one can manipulate how others perceive a user (unbeknownst to the user). There's a classic social psychology experiment where a male subject chats with a female subject over the phone, and the manipulation is whether the male subject is given a photo that is attractive or unattractive and told that that is how the female subject looks like. The surprising part isn't that the male subjects are more intimate and expressive while talking with the "attractive" female, but that blind judges rated the "attractive" females as more intimate, positive, and expressive in their dialogue than the "unattractive" females. In other words, you become what others believe you to be (see also pygmalion effect). Now there is a social norm that you don't comment on the obvious so when you meet a girl you don't say "did you realize that you are female?". So what happens if you switch the genders of certain users in an MMORPG so that others perceive them as the opposite gender but the players see themselves unchanged? People act differently towards men and women, so how does this affect self-image and how one should act towards others? Would we be able to get male users to act more sensitive and considerate and more people-oriented? And how might this affect a community as a whole?

Castronova on NPR

A ten-minute gab [scroll down for audio links] on NPR's Talk of the Nation, subject: Learning from events in virtual worlds. The interview got wrapped up in the Peter Ludlow saga, of course; that's the big news items these days. I tried to steer the discussion to broader implications. I guess I got some of that in...

In the end, no sooner than I tried to dampen the flames of the Alphaville story here on Terra Nova, I found myself fanning them again {sigh}. mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

The way we live now

[bump] Some of you may have noticed, buried deep in one of the threads was a reference to the fact that that Dr. Bartle (of this parish) was interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 Today program (the UK's most important news and current affairs program that is the one program generally listened to by the movers and shakers of this fair land).

The piece was inspired by Richard's letter to the Independent newspaper based its coverage of Dr Lundlow being banned from TSO as discussed here. His interlocutor was one Professor Susan Greenfield – Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, celebrated academic, pharmacologist and writer on the internal workings of the brain; knowledge / experience of computer games / virtual worlds – unknown.

I thought I would extract some points from the transcript on Richard's site:

JH = John Humphrys (presenter), RB = Richard Bartle, SG = Susan Greenfield
[SG] Well already you only have to see people on their mobiles as they're walking down the street, and often they'll both be on the phone, and ignoring each other and ignoring the outside world, and they're in some cyberspace - they're in some, "other world". You only have to see people glassy-eyed on the keyboards, staring into the screen, to again know that they're ignoring the press of the real world. Now I'm not … saying that's a bad thing necessarily, but it's a fact of life.
...
[JH] But if they're on the phone and things then they're talking to real people, aren't they; that's slightly different isn't it?
[SG] No, the issue is more that they're ignoring the immediate input from their senses. They might be listening to music, erm, they might be, I don't know, listening to some answerphone. It's not the person, it's more the issue that their mind-set, their attention, their consciousness is not on the immediate world around them but somewhere else in a virtual world.
...
[RB] Well, erm, it's not, it's not quite so simple as that. What happens is that you go into a virtual world and, erm, when you're there you take on the role of a, a, a character in the world. So you project yourself -
[JH] It might be a horrible character, mightn't it? It might be a murdering rapist
...
[RB] Well, it might be, in which case you'll find out just how awful it is to be considered as a, erm, a rapist, in which case you wouldn't want to do that in the real world. It would educate you –
...
[SG] I'm not saying it's good or bad, but what does it say about the lives they're living nowadays? That they find it more interesting, and more stimulating, more "reassuring" in this other world. And if we are concerned about it, rather than just sacking people, or crying foul, or pulling the plug out, what we should be doing is exploring why it makes us unhappy, and how we can make real life better for people if ...indeed we find this a, this a problem.

Wired on Virtual Greed

Wired News runs a short piece today on virtual currency markets, featuring Ken Merrill, a trader who uses Gaming Open Market and Phil Rosedale from 2L.

Interesting bit here, quoting from Ken:

"I feel like I am above the players of these games. They are toiling and investing hours and hours into creating wealth and building empires and here I am, no virtual avatar running around and no virtual real estate, just skimming money off the top."

To the developers of some of these games, such behavior is anathema. And for now, Hale and his partners are hoping that they can either fly beneath the radar long enough to establish a reputation for protecting players or, alternatively, convince the developers to let them continue unheeded.

Hmm...

Our own Professor Hunter gets to opine as well:

From Dan Hunter's perspective, terms-of-service violations may not be the biggest hurdle to GOM's long-term viability. An assistant professor of legal studies at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton business school and a moderator of Terra Nova, a blog about the economies of virtual worlds, Hunter thinks the biggest threat to the success of a virtual currency exchange may be the devaluation of the currencies themselves.

In fact, Dan even gets to say "MUDflation" at one point. Minor quibble with the description of TN: we're not just talking about the economies of virtual worlds here.

The Value of Realism

So I'm still reading Richard's Book. On pp. 329-342, he talks about the physics of virtual worlds. One thing he makes clear (that we non-devs frequently forget) is how challenging it is to code reality in a way that bears any similarity to the physical world we all know and love. Virtual worlds are not made of atoms and molecules, but are generally assembled with discrete software "objects" (in the programming sense of that word) that interact with each other and have specific properties. Modeling reality by way of such objects poses some interesting challenges.

As Richard says:

Given that virtual objects are, on the whole, intended to exhibit behaviors at the physics level that are consitent with reality, it might be expected that there are common problems that recur whenever some particular aspect or other of reality is considered. This is indeed the case: Some facts of reality are easy to implement and others are downright impossible.

So when you're modeling real objects, what's easy and what's impossible?

IGE Buys Yantis

[edit: I don't have time to give this what it deserves right now but the news needs to be out there.]

Increasing firm size makes sense, since this is a field where returns to scale are positive. The question is, how much bigger can IGE get? I doubt that item sales are likely to be monopolized, but there are clearly some gains to be made by streamlining operations and collecting similar functions (item farming, auction management, delivery, web updates) across many games.

Read more here.

But is it play?

Brian Sutton-Smith and Marie-Laure Ryan were just here for Jesper's defense (which went quite well, he is now Dr. Juul!) and they both gave interesting talks. Sutton-Smith (who is much more lively and fun than came across with the DiGRA videoconference event) lectured on the nature of play. While he gives a fascinating historical account of the different ways play has been thought of he also, roughly speaking, proposes that play is what we do to deal with the fact that life can be miserable - it's a tough world, full of anxiety and disappointment, so we cope via play. It's a fascinating proposal and when he presents all kinds of engaging stories about children's play I find it hard to not buy it at least a little bit. But I've been thinking about this issue lately. We often hear how when we play we step inside a "magic circle" for the duration of the game, agreeing to a kind of fiction that is fairly distinct from our normal lives. Theorists like Huizinga and Caillois seem to go even further, suggesting that play is actually a space quite separate from, and even contaminated by, the real world. I wrote a paper on power gamers recently (comments/feedback very welcome btw) and part of what it drew me to thinking through was what we make of play that doesn't look like what we traditionally think of it as. I've been doing some research on professional gaming as well and have hit the same point - can we call this stuff that often looks like work play? Caillois is particularly harsh on this point, suggesting that when play is colonized by reality, "What used to be a pleasure becomes an obsession. What was an escape becomes an obligation, and what was a pastime is now a passion, compulsion, and source of anxiety. The principle of play has become corrupted. It is now necessary to take precautions against cheats and professional players, a unique product of the contagion of reality." So I wonder, what might he (and other theorists who take this harder line) make of all the stuff that goes on in MMOGs? All those instances where the fiction of the game collides with "real" lives. The buying and selling of virtual goods for offline money. The obligations, passions, even anxieties. Are all those players really players in any strict sense? Or are they doing something else? Hidden in this question of course is why it matters at all what we call this activity. I can't say I've worked this through completely yet but I can't help but think that the more the "magic circle"-like definitions of play get pushed at (and in turn "labor"), the closer we will get to understanding what it means when our play is not fun, when it is repetitive, when it seems to look like work, when it doesn't run smoothly but is filled with contentions over rules, strategies, and cheating... and yet we keep going back, finding pleasure in it somehow. What does it mean to the definition of play when the boundaries between gamespace and "regular life" are less clear, when investments in each blur into each other. Maybe MMOGs are a special case of play and have led me to see games as much more messy than if I'd come at it from other genres (though to be honest, I doubt it). But I still wonder about all the weird boundary-activities we find in MMOGs and how much they will influence our understanding about what play is. Maybe they aren’t so boundary after all.

What could I say ?

Last night the head of one of my guilds announced that she was going to quit pretty soon. The reason was not that she is bored or found another world but that her parents have told her that she has to quit. Their reasoning, apparently, is that participating in virtual worlds is a complete waste of time and money and that a teen should pursuing other interests.

The guild feels upset and powerless and, I am sure, over the next few days similar feelings of loss, frustration and anger will ripple through the world. There is nothing we can do.

But I could not help wondering: what if did have a chance to chat with the guild leader’s parents ? Say we were caught in an elevator or I bumped into them as they made their way back from church – how could I sum up the virtues of virtual world and a teen’s participation in it in a way that would speak to a middle class middle American averagely religious family ?

Ren

US Army Adopts MMOG Tech

Via Slashdot: Military Training Online reports that MMOG technology, developed under contract by the makers of There, will be used to improve the learning environment of combat simulations. Needless to say, it also familiarizes the Army with the virtual battlespace, should conflict ever erupt There.

Only 24 hours ago, the Independent (UK) argued that anyone concerned about events in a virtual world, such as TN commenter and Alphaville Herald Editor Professor Ludlow, should just get a life. Perhaps. But it is worth noting that the very first serious inquiry I got when my research broke in early 2002 was not from my fellow economists, or any other academics, or anyone in business. No, the very first phone call was from DARPA. Needless to say, that phone call erased whatever doubts I had about the importance of virtual worlds. Now they just need to call the Independent; its long run vitality is far more fragile than Professor Ludlow's.

NYT On TSO

Amy Harmon [registration required probably] picks up the story first broken by the Alphaville Herald. [Edit: The article revealed that TSO's subscriber base has fallen to 80,000, so it is gone from the 100K group list at left.]

Reuters: Korean Kid Plays Videogame, Spends Dad's Real Money On Virtual Items; World Loses Interest

Yet another news story about Korea's lost youth. Games are becoming the bugbear of Korean society.

" 'One 25-year-old unemployed man confessed he had once sat up three straight nights to win game items in order to sell them back to other players for real money,' Hwang Jang-min, a researcher at Yonsei University, said in a research report. The man said he made almost $1,400 by selling them." The average Korean earns $2,000 a month [edit: Java; scroll down to the link on monthly earnings].

"Committed players devote between 17 and 26 hours a week to online games." Half the time Americans spend watching TV.

"In extreme cases, game addicts have collapsed and died after playing for hours, consuming nothing but soda and instant noodles." Thousands and thousands of noodle-bloated gamers, keeling over at their desks. Medic!

" 'In most cases, heavy game players show the same kinds of problems -- they do badly at school, have problems with their friends, family and teachers, and even play truant from school,' said Lee Su-jin, a counsellor at the Center for Internet Addiction Prevention and Counselling, established by the government in April 2002."

Maybe game addicts have problems with their families. Or maybe problem families have game addicts. That's an important distinction for any policy response, isn't it?

Free Rogue Server Achieves Significant Population

It's a known but little-remarked fact that most multi-player worlds eventually spawn rogue versions. While this was very common in the early days of MUDs (see Bartle's book, chapter 1), it may be surprising to learn that one of the current crop of pay-for-play graphical worlds, Ultima Online, apparently has over 300 rogue copies in existence. That factoid has emerged in the course of a debate about a recently-launched rogue shard that implements a four-year-old rule-set (basically, full nonconsensual PvP), and is free to play. Unlike many other emulators, this shard has rapidly grown, and now has over 8,000 accounts and 1,200 simultaneous users, numbers that compare favorably to UO's official servers.

For more, see this thread on the UO official forums, and this interview with the rogue shard's designer.

Questions for Terra Novans: Once again, we appear to have a behavior that is forbidden by the EULA yet tolerated by the company. And this one, unlike eBaying, quite clearly represents a threat to the profitability of the entire official service. Is server emulation as hard to control as eBaying? If so, why don't people emulate EverQuest and Sims Online? Or do they? I'm guessing that the answer is: it's not the server software, dummy. It's the customer service. You can't emulate that; but, with full-on PvP, you can effectively obviate the need for it.

Let me speak

In SW:G I keep encountering players that are talking to each other. And I’m starting to feel left out.

‘No I dnt ventrilo or teamspeak thx’ - I type.

But the merits of voice in MMO are highly debatable. Richard has views ! In the unambiguously titled Not Yet you Fools! he talks about the problems of breaking immersion in the world. Though he does offer a potential hope for the future when technology is neat enough for technology to integrate into the role play i.e. what if a dwarf or a troll avatar really sounded like one irrespective of who was speaking.

But what about the social worlds like Second Life and There, one could certainly imagine that being able to press a _chat_ button might increase their appeal.

So far I’ve only touched on game design issues, no this is not a MUD-DEV take over ploy, what I’m wondering is whether there are issues outside gameplay.

Would voice be a potential revenue stream for game companies, does voice add new legal or social issues to the mix ? Are MMOs with their highly specialised linguistic conventions be sites where real-time text translation and text to speech technology could get the world playing together ?

Ren
www.renreynolds.com

Not so Final

Some 3-day-old news about a cross-territory VW.

On 7th January, Square Enix announced that its PlayOnline service (ie. basically Final Fantasy XI Online) hit 500,000 registered users in North America and Japan combined. Final Fantasy XI now has an online population of "nearly a million" characters. How much bigger that's going to get when hordes of PS2 users come on stream in March is anyone's guess.

It would be interesting to discover what proportion of these 500,000 users are based in Japan and the USA respectively.

Final Fantasy XI was Gamespy's PC MMORPG of the year 2003.

500,000 is over 200,000 more than the population of Iceland.

Richard

TN + CC?

The question of whether or not the Terra Nova blog should be licensed under the Creative Commons has been raised. While some have worried that this might appear to be pimping for Professor Lessig, it is certainly an intriguing idea.

I was elected to post because Second Life will soon be working with the helpful people at CC.org to figure out how to best apply the various CC licenses within a virtual space. Many of the CC licenses directly map onto existing SL permissions, but some permissions don't have CC analogs. For example, there is no real world CC license for the Second Life permission "Buyer may copy, but not transfer, this texture" which is used to protect the seller of repeating textures, like bricks, without forcing the customer to buy one copy of the texture for each geometric object she wants to texture. Julian and Lawrence have also proposed the very interesting idea of allowing SL users to search and view the world based on whether the objects allow copying/reuse.

So far, the following licenses have been proposed:

The Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial License, which means that any use of TN postings must be attributed, may not be used commercially, and may not be used for derived works.
The Attribution-NoDerivs License, which is the is the same but allows commerial use if attributed.
Attribution-ShareAlike License, which allows commercial work and derived works, but any derived works need to be shared with the same license.

For an example of this at work, you can check out Julian's website, which is now licensed under CC.

So what do you think?

GOM and Ted Featured Across the Pond

Gaming Open Market and Ted's research are mentioned on the BBC's website. Good, quick article, plus a nice selection of links to other BBC articles on virtual goods.

Game.not

From your UK correspondent...

(OK, one of your two UK correspondents).

An article in gameindustry.biz today announces the demise of Game.net, formerly known as Barrysworld.

Barrysworld started out as a game hosting service along the lines of BT's Wireplay. During the dot com boom, Wireplay merged with games-by-mail retail company ICE to form Gameplay, which did indeed go boom during the dot com bust. Barrysworld was bought by High Street retail chain Game (now merged with Electronic Boutique in the UK) and survived, renamed as Game.net.

The business model for Gameplay and Game.net was the same: provide games servers for free or at low prices, in order to build a community who will then naturally buy their games from your online store. They won't check out other stores for lower prices because ... er ... well that's kinda where the model broke down. If you want to make profits from selling games mail order to hard-core gamers, you can only do it by undercutting the prices of your competitors. You can't do it if you have to fund a farm of high-spec games servers too, and players won't pay high fees to rent those servers when they can play more cheaply elsewhere (eg. using their own broadband PC as a server).

Why am I mentioning this here?

Because publishers and VCs will use the death of Game.net as evidence that online games don't make money. Ignorance among UK sources of finance is scuh that the Gameindustry.biz article's careful use of the words "online gaming services for standard PC multiplayer games" may as well not have the middle 6 words. New virtual worlds, being "online games", will thus become even harder to finance in the UK. If the people who actually sell games in their hundreds of shops can't make a profit from them, who can?

Someone tell me I'm being too pessimistic, please...

Rather Sophisticated Cheating

Alan from the Dev's Corner at Everquest mentioned last month:

Over the last few days there has been a growing community concern about possible cheating, exploiting and platinum duplication. Rumors and speculation have begun to run rampant, and I've received a lot of concerned email on the topic.

Themis Group Projects Rapid Growth in Online Game Revenues; Teams with IGE

The premiere consulting firm in the online gaming space, Themis Group, has released its annual report. The forward is by the same guy [me] who wrote the Game Studies article blogged below, but you should pay attention to the report anyway. Highlights: Revenues from virtual worlds should hit $1.4 billion in 2004, up almost 100 percent from 2002. Cash sales of virtual items are projected to grow from $25 million this year to $680 million in 2008. [Edit: There's a quick facts link at the site, but it seems to be down.]

Meanwhile, virtual goods dealer IGE has retained Themis to produce a worldwide marketing campaign. Says Brock Pierce, CEO of IGE: "With Themis Group on our team, we are confident that our brand value and services will be even better conveyed to the market of MMORPG gamers.”

Game Studies / Virtual Economies

Because he's apparently too humble to self-promote, I'll note that the latest issue of Game Studies is out, featuring a new article by our own Doctor Castronova. (Note to authors: do post about your latest publications -- "Blatant Self-Promotion" is indeed an approved category.)

Four points about virtual economies seemed particularly worth re-posting here, given the recent discussions in the TN threads about scarcity, rivalrous goods, yadda-yadda:

VWs, Data Mining, Advertising and Privacy

Tal Zarsky, an Information Society Fellow at Yale Law School is doing a dissertation and paper on data mining and data privacy, and part of this project involves virtual worlds/MMOGs. An initial discussion of his work is available here.

He wanted to follow up on the comments and asked the following about datamining in VWs:

"First I want to thank you all for taking interest in my project.

Also, I want you all to perhaps think of the following scenario: The “gods” do not share the information with others – nor do they try and connect the virtual identities to the real ones. Nevertheless, they still can gain from their omnipresence and constant surveillance of the virtual identities. Here are some ideas:

(1) The “gods” provide specially tailored ads to every player (Adaboy strikes back?) – thus taking the practices of DoubleClick to another level. Here we have to think what the possible detriments are: providing advertisers with greater powers of persuasion? Being put in a “virtual Skinner box”? Having others decide for you what you should consume?

(2) The “gods” use the information they collect and data mining analysis (data mining is a personal favorite of mine, and the main theme in my dissertation) to provide different goods to different players at different prices. These goods could be game related (different playing plans) or non-game related.

What do you think? Am I too pessimistic here? I was wondering if you think the commercial entities will have the ability to muscle their way into the virtual worlds - perhaps by providing 2 pricing schemes for every game - one that will be "ad free" and the other with ads. Since it is clear that we all have a myopia problem when it comes to privacy rights - such a strategy should be fruitful for commercial entities."

2003: Year in Review

Well, to contradict myself and emboldened by the fascinating thoughts of the hivemind on 2004, perhaps it's worthwhile asking people about 2003. What were the most interesting developments of the year just past? What was the least interesting development? The most troubling and the most uplifting?

2004: Predictions and Resolutions

Though Terra Nova managed to missed the traditional "Year in Review" discussion, perhaps we can redeem ourselves by asking the collective what they think will or should happen in 2004 (in MMOGs, VWs, etc). I don't have any clue, so won't venture any thoughts.