Terra Nova

To market, to market

At the moment on the MUD-Dev discussion list there is a discussion on economic models of VWs. One of the contributors, a MMOG player and investment banker named Daniel Harman said "Personally I'd love games to setup markets that took a few lessons from the real world markets, and facilitated more complex trading strategies. Its would add an interesting axis of entertainment to the game. The first things to add would be player leasing of ships/vehicles (required for goods transport), insurance markets, contracts (should be limited so that humans are not required to arbitrate), multiple exchanges with limited memberships (creates arb opportunities), commodities markets (with seasonal variations etc)."

Obviously this is a complex undertaking, for the reasons that Nate Combs and you all articulate. But let us put aside the issue of difficulty for a minute and ask if it would be a good idea to allow user access to in-world financial markets? Obviously it's not a good idea if your economic system is profoundly, irredeemably broken (as most of the VWs are) because you just open up even greater opportunities for sploits: "Hey, I've discovered how you can leverage that gold dupe through margin buying on the EQ gold spot price...." But there do seem to me to be some obviously interesting ramifications of this idea:

1. Game devs will quickly discover if their economic system has problems. To give you an example, some students and I are building a database of virtual assets in a few games. Once you see the charts for various asset classes you start to realize that they are subject to stale-price market timing, time-sensitive market arbitrage opportunities, and supply shock buying opportunities. (More on this another day, once we've extracted all the money we can from the system--and Mia Consalvo and her conception of "not-cheating in games" can kiss my rosy red bank account)

Devs can use the market to discover how to fix their economic/fiscal model. As a result they would spend less time pullling every single lever of economic control and be like real world central banks who reset the economy with a very parsimonious set of controls (typically a small number of monetary and fiscal policy controls like interest rates and currency purchase)

2. Devs would provide a whole new set of fun things to do for people like Julian Dibbell, who don't really want to play the "game". They want to play the "meta-game" of the economy.

3. Devs can accommodate cat-assers like Julian D without offending RPGers like Ted Castronova. The typical reason why the role players hate the ebayers is that the ebayers kill the play-acting. Well, if you provide the market and economic mechanisms within the game, then the market-game becomes part of the roleplay-game, and no-one loses (assuming the markets are not primarily in assets that are the subject of the current ebaying concerns).

An issue with this was given by Mike Sellers (a game dev at Online Alchemy) on the MUD-Dev list: "I'm not sure I'd want to unleash the full force of things like factoring or shorting in markets, as these can become quickly bewildering. " But I don't think this is a problem. I happen to know very little (and care even less) about derivative markets in the real world, but since I choose not to invest or follow these markets I don't have to care if they're bewildering. I get on with the stuff I care about--like hanging around MMOGs--and leave the Black/Scholes Option Pricing formula to the kinds of people who care about such things.

4. The final reason for this is, of course, the dev gets to run the market and keep the commission on the trades, thereby creating a new income stream.

Am I missing something here? Is it actually a bad idea?

Don't I know you from somewhere?

Those of you who are interested in the social aspects of virtual worlds may like to know about a new service that has materialised, MMOG Reunited, based on the Friends Reunited concept.

"** Welcome to MMOG Reunited! ** a MMog community thats here to stay even if that game comes and goes, Have you played more than one MMOG? Well if you have you probably made some good friends. ....Dont lose them as soon as the next game comes out...."

Don't necessarily let the fact that the authors have better command of Flash than English put you off.

Richard

The Ivy-Covered Console

A New York Times article today features the upcoming March 6 "Form, Culture, and Video Game Criticism" conference at Princeton, organized by Dexter Palmer and Roger Bellin.

Terra Nova is mentioned by URL, and the word "ludology" graces the pages of the Gray Lady. There are quotes from Mia Consalvo, Espen Aarseth, Gonzalo Frasca, Janet Murray, Barry Atkins, and Nick Montfort, among others. I'll be presenting at the conference -- full line-up is here. It looks like a great set of presentations.

Survey Request: Mobile Phones and Gaming

Jason Rutter's group at University of Manchester is doing a study on mobile phones and games. Please take their survey here. You could win one of these.

More EconoMUDtricks: EQEcon Opens for Business

It's finally out of beta: What appears to be the most elaborate economic-data server in the MMORPG universe just opened its doors. EQEcon now offers players free, searchable, "100% accurate" price data for every item in the EverQuest market.

Paying customers get even more, and I quote:

- Server-specific pricing for all items
- Custom stock-market style price charts for each item and server
- Simple Mode and Advanced Mode charting allow anyone to use EQEcon,
even if you've never seen a chart before!
- Email price alerting
- Advanced search capabilities

While you virtual-economist types have yourselves a nice long drool over the potential applications of such a tool, the rest of us might ponder other implications.

Specifically, I wonder what players who complain about the immersion-breaking effects of eBay and other incursions of the dollar economy will make of this. Note that EQEcon's price data is denominated entirely in the coin of the Norrathian realm, the platinum piece. And yet with its histograms, moving averages, high/low envelopes, Boellinger bands, and other quant-friendly econometric arcana, this site would seem to be at least as hazardous to the illusions of EverQuest lore as any Playerauctions trade.

Is it? And should it therefore be as strenuously opposed as some players oppose the eBayers? Or is this just a peculiarly financial version of power-gaming?

New Author: Nathan Combs

Ladies and gentleman, a big Terra Nova welcome, please, for our newest author, Nate Combs. Nate is a senior scientist at the historic Bolt, Beranek, and Newman think tank -- known to some for building the first iteration of the Internet, but best known to us, of course, as the place where Will Crowther doodled up the Ur-virtual world Adventure in his off hours. As an expert in artificial-intelligence systems and working group coordinator for the International Game Developers Association's AI Interface Standards Committee, Nate carries on the BBN tradition of bridging the imponderable gap between high-brow computer science and frivolous entertainment. We're lucky to have him.

Why Are In-Game Economies So Hard To Get Right?

Many MMOGs use in-game player markets to engage the mercantile instincts of players, and as a means of re-allocating resources. Some games support in-game markets fairly informally, such as Everquest, where all that is provided is a text chat system and a user interface and transaction model for trading goods/currency subject to the inspection and approval of both parties. Other games that feature markets more prominently, such as EVE-Online, provide more abstract tools for managing in-game auctions and ability to obtain a range of historical market data.

Why do games support, in varying degrees, market activities? A narrow view is that they provide a sub-game that players enjoy playing on the side. A more liberal view is that they provide a sub-game that players enjoy AND that somehow complements play across the other game aspects. In other words there are synergies between it and the larger game. So, for example, players can hawk goods and trade for new rare armor in EverQuest without having to "go find the spawn" themselves: thus the markets arguably serve as a means of broadening the benefit and experience (of use of the new armor) amongst all players.

These two roles are not necessarily incompatible. Consider a "two-tiered" MMOG design (short activities for casual players embedded in a larger game requiring more time) where the market can be played on either level. For example, Eve-Online supports a range of "trader" opportunities - sized by the trade network and basket traded.

The question then to ask is this: why do in-game economies for most MMOGs appear to be so terribly designed? Why do most MMOGs have markets incapable of functioning long-term without considerable external intervention? Most appear as rickety contraptions that lead to in-game instabilities from hyper-inflation and deflation. Worse still, most attempts by MMOGs to address the shortcomings seem aimed to manage the symptoms: they use item "drains", price-fixing, and market segmentation to manage the effects. But fundamentally the system is very often broken and the players know it.

A (too) simple answer might be that "MMOGs can live without 'em" - players do play MMOGs with broken markets in increasing numbers and so maybe a well-functioning MMOG economy only contributes marginally to the player experience. Said in another way: "an MMOG typically does not strive to be a market simulator."

On the other hand, perhaps there are real impacts which hobble MMOGs going forard - gee, they could do so much better, if they worked? One might claim three impacts resulting from in-game market malfunctions:

1.) A less interesting sub-game (market) for the player
2.) A less useful sub-game (market) to the game as a whole.
3.) It encumbers the game developers with additional work.

(1.) - Is hard to quantify and depends on the role of the market in the game as a whole. However, it doesn't seem unreasobable to believe that a malfunctioning sub-game is likely to impact the overall virtual world illusion.

(2.) - For many MMOGs it appears that the markets serve as a useful "lubricant" for exchanging goods among players in-game so they can broaden their experiences. But why are players largely responsible for implementing trades amongst themselves? Why not just rely upon the Artificial Intelligence (e.g. NPCs) to act as brokers, always? Does having players trade among themselves add some benefit to the broader game?

(3.) - Speaks to the already considerable effort that engage MMOG development teams when it comes to tweaking and re-balancing games (tuning item "drains" etc.) in response to perturbing new content (patches, GM events) or just drift over time. The alternative is to have a system that can "right itself" using mechanisms that are transparent to the player.

So. Why are virtual economies hard to "get right" for most MMOGs? And how important is it, really?

Group types

So, there you are, level 50, playing alongside the friends you've known since you were all level 5. Elsewhere in the virtual world are other parties of L50s, who have also grown into almost unitary groups over time.

Is your group doing basically the same kind of thing as these other groups? Or will different groups of friends focus on doing very different things? Do these things change, depending on the level at which the group operates?

In other words, are there "group types" like "player types"? If so, what might those types be? Can the groups themselves perhaps be regarded as ersatz individual players, so there might be an "explorer group" or "socialiser group"? And are the groups that form in the West and those that form in Asia different in this regard?

Pseudo-Live Blog From U Minnesota

Two points from Greg Lastowka's presentation this morning at the University of Minnesota's GRAVEL program, that made me re-think (yet again) what is happening in these spaces:

1. Ignatius of Loyola conceived of immersion as an important spiritual tool. If you have spent time at Georgetown University, this will ring some bells.

2. The U.S. Supreme Court has already affirmed the existence of a magic circle, albeit negatively. In PGA Tour vs. Martin, the court said that a certain rule is not 'essential' to the game of golf. That implies that some rules are, in fact, essential to golf, and that these rules would receive some kind of respect from the court. The EULA lives, in other words.

Update: Jenny I got your number

The Jackson Sun News reports that eBay yanked the auction for the phone number discussed here. Seems there was some concern about whether this was a property interest that could be alienated. Looks like they haven't read the myriad cases on the issue.

Bidding was up to $200,000 before it was pulled. And they say that gamers need to get a life.

IBM-BIG

Dan Terdiman over at Wired reports on IBM's Business Integration for Games (BIG). The idea is to provide easy-to-use middleware tools that let game devs install billing software to keep track of transactions in virtual worlds. Our very own Dr Ted is quoted (but of course). He cautions that providing internal transactions (denominated in real world currencies) may break the immersive illusion of virtual worlds.

So, it looks like IBM is betting that the role-playing conception of MMORPGs is secondary to the market-based interest of game devs. Color me amazed.

now powered by stars

Pop Quiz: Why will the legal relationship between the individual and their representation in a virtual environment change?

a) Though the combined forces of player pressure, academics writing detailed papers and bloggers blogging?
or
b) Though A list stars and their A list entertainment lawyers trying to secure more control and more moolah?

I’m going with (b).

And on this theme MSNBC has a recent piece on stars seeking more control over of their digital doppelgangers.

This is not simply an issue of extracting cash from the new medium. It’s also one of control.

When an actor signs to do a film they get to see the script and can always refuse to perform acts that they feel don’t fit their profile. But as soon as they are digitised it’s a different game. LTORs Gollum is fine example of what can be done with CG and a big budget – but from the stars point of view, at least that’s in the hands of the director, with a video game the stars are in your hands – and that’s something they really might not want given some people's imagination.

Of course this does not apply to me and my avatar because:

(i) It does not look like me
(ii) I’m not famous

Er, but hold on:

(i’) With VW’s like 2L and SWG my avatar could look like me if I chose, more to the point it could look like you

(ii’) I am famous ! You’ve heard of me, your reading my stuff right now, look look there’s my name – see fame. Or take the case TNs very own Julian - the reputation that he holds in a VW is directly related his profession as a broker – and that’s the kind of reputation courts respect

So does this trend start to add weight to the claims made by us Z-listers in respect of control of our digital selves?

Ren

Earth the (Army) MMOG

As I think most readers know, There.com has a contract with the US Army to build a virtual world. Thanks to Simon Carless for pointing out this interview with There exec (and Prodigy and SOE vet) Robert Gehorsam posted on Homelan Fed. Apparently, they expect to go live in September 2004. It is not clear whether there will be any commercial implementation planned, along the lines of America's Army, or if this is just for in-house use.

"[The] world is fully Earth-sized, with a real-world terrain database. So if you were to view it from orbit (which we can do) you'd see...the Earth. And if your avatar were to walk from San Francisco to New York, it would take a very, very long time.

Interesting to see the good old Earth done as a VW. Currently, it would probably be a pretty boring (as well as long) walk across the US, because so far, it seems they've only modeled Kuwait City.

We've built a portion of the downtown area of a large Middle Eastern capital city where we have a significant presence today. And we can put pretty large numbers of people into that now, and even some synthetic characters (there are a group of women in abayas walking down the street talking and gesturing with each other.)

Where will the recreation of Earth end? Well, if you see someone is walking around your town with a tape measure and a laptop, this might be the explanation...

Gehorsam provides some interesting explanations re why There was chosen for the contract. He notes at one point that choosing an existing game company makes sense because: "think about the demographics of our military, and you'll quickly realize that they are gamers."

Should researchers cheat?

Mia Consalvo has recently started a new blog, Memory Card, dedicated to game studies. Mia has been doing some interesting work looking at the issue of cheating in games, something particularly interesting in MMOGs. What constitutes cheating, how various communities define it/act upon it, how players often frame their own cheats in relation to gameplay etc are all things I've encountered in my own work on EQ. But there is another fascinating angle here that she raises in her blog which is how should researchers approach the issue of cheats. As she asks, "Is there a proper way to play when you are a researcher (or a critic)?" Certainly within my own methodological subfield (qualitative sociology, ethnography, participant observation, etc.) all kinds of tricky questions like this have come up in traditional research. Of course, if you simply deal with the "easy" kind of definitions the cheat issue may seem like no big deal -- But what about twinking your character? Checking out rogue servers? Tagging along with a group that takes advantage of handy pathing glitches? Using a walk-through or guide to get a quest item that ups your stats? Of course, all these questions go back to that definition of what a cheat in fact is but we researchers are in no way immune from wrangling with that one ourselves. I suppose some of it may rely too on what your approach is and what kinds of questions you look at in your work. For example, given the kind of ethnographic work I do the idea of buying a high-level char for EQ so that I could check it out didn't make sense. I wouldn't get that full range of experience/life of the community. But if you are interested in one particular slice of a game, would it be ethical? Methodologically sound? (I'm intentionally stepping around the legal-per-EULA/TOS question here.) Or what if you do close readings of a game, do you need to play it all the way through? Should you confine yourself to not using any outside assistance? At the recent Digra conference there was a session in which this issue came up and it certainly seemed that many people felt that quite a few games weren't playable without cheats and walkthroughs, which I suppose adds a whole other angle to the question. Anyway, I don't want to hijack Mia's thread here too much ; ) Keep an eye out for her work on this subject!

Videogames Do Cause Violence in Kids, Elsevier Says

Elsevier, publishers of Journal of Adolesence, sent a newsflash today announcing a journal edition devoted to the effects of videogame violence on children. The newsflash claims that a consensus has emerged among the scientists that violence in media, especially videogames, causes violence in users. Their words follow. The journal is available here.

In my opinion, researchers in this field establish correlations, not causality. Still, peer-reviewed research is hard to ignore.

New Trade Volume Data

Second Life's land auctions can be used to reveal the real-dollar value of the trade happening within its virtual borders. It comes to $2.17 million annually. 2L has about 2000 users [edit: 2,000 is the number who actively engaged in trading in this period. 2L has many more users than that.], making the annual per capita trade volume $1,084. If the 750,000 users of Sony's virtual worlds traded at about the same rate, that would come to $814 million. It's another hint (the first came in this post) that the amount of trade within virtual worlds dwarfs the amount of trade on eBay (which, according to my own tracking, probably amounts to no more than $100 million world-wide).

Here's how I got the $2.17 million figure: Second Life allows users to run their land auctions in both real dollars ($) and Linden Dollars (L). By the Law of One Price (stating that arbitrage will eliminate price differences in comparable markets), the same effective price must be reached in auctions of both kinds. One 2L user, Kathy Yamamoto, posted land auction data showing that the average Linden price for land was L5.47 and the average dollar price was $0.0294. That implies that $1 buys as much land as L186, meaning the exchange rate between dollars and Lindens is 186 to 1. I queried Philip Rosedale, Linden's CEO, about trade volume within the world, and he reported that the first week in February saw about L7.76 million in trade among the 2,000 users. That's worth about $41,700, or annualized ("times 52" if you hate business lingo), $2.17 million.

Etech: Flickr

Count on Ludicorp, maker of GNE, to push the more interesting dimensions of the VW genre. E.g., Flickr.

Stewart and team announced Flickr at Etech last week.

The idea for Flickr grew out of Ludicorp's online gaming work. The company initially began developing a multiplayer game called Game Neverending, which it expects to launch this summer, and realized it could leverage much of its functionality in an online groupware-type application, Butterfield explained. Flickr, in fact, shares about 75 percent of Game Neverending's code in common, particularly code related to event distribution and messaging.

The Ludicorp slides are available here. (2.6M .ppt)

But it turns out play is about people, not places. In fact, play is often about building things [including places] collaboratively.

First above sentence on a background of Pieter Bruegel, Children's Games (1560). Second statement on Legos -- nice touch! Tom Coates reviews Flickr and gives Ted's Etech speech a good review too. Good times in San Diego, Ted?

Jenny I Got Your Number

Via Slashdot comes news of the latest wrinkle in virtual property sales: Newly portable phone numbers going for five figures a pop on eBay. Specifically, here's some guy selling a number made famous by an old Tommy TuTone hit ("Jenny/867-5309"), with bidding currently topping $15,000. There are some interesting marketing moves in the auction (it's categorized under both "consumer electronics" and "collectibles," for instance), but the most interesting claim, for our purposes, is that the seller is "currently the owner" of the 212-area-code number in question.

Is he? And if so, what bearing, if any, would a court judgment confirming ownership have on MMORPG-property rights?

Discuss.

Warm-up question: In marketing this number, the seller is violating exactly whose intellectual-property rights?

a. The phone company's.
b. Tommy TuTone's (or whoever now owns publishing rights to the song).
c. Who cares? The real crime is contributory infringement of privacy rights. How in God's name does this auction do anything for society that outweighs the inevitable increase in prank calls made to the number throughout the country?
d. Nobody's. Where do I enter my bid?

PS: As usual, the Chinese got here first.

Associated Press Says "Ludology"

A banner moment, as the word will be reprinted in local newspapers throughout the world. Note that it still isn't in the dictionary.

Researchers have long studied a few well-worn topics in games, particularly their violence and effect on social interaction. But newer, more sophisticated games, from ``The Sims'' to ``Everquest,'' take advantage of growing computer power to give players far more choices -- and more profound experiences.

You don't say! All familiar names in the article: Murray, Crawford, Jenkins, Aarseth, Frasca, Zimmerman. And Jesper Juul is featured as "the first person anywhere to ever get his doctorate exclusively in video game studies."

By raising the bar on game criticism and analysis, [academics] hope to also raise the bar on how games are made and how they are perceived by the public -- and the courts.

Update: Re the quote about Dr. Juul: a commenter points to Mary Ann Buckles, "Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame 'Adventure'", Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 1985. Obviously Dr. Juul is not the first person to study games and play. He himself has called game studies a "repeatedly lost art."

Update2 :Various perspectives in the comments field below. Nick Wadhams, who authored the article, explains his authorial intent. Thanks, Nick!

[email protected]: How r u celebrating?

Back in ’74 amidst the flared trousers and glam rock, Dave Arneson and E. Gary Gygax released a little game called Dungeons and Dragons. Yup it’s the 30th anniversary of one of the most ground breaking games of all time. Today D&D is owed by Wizards of the Coast (you know the Magic the Gathering folk, oh don’t tell me you have not played…) who, according to Gaming Report, are planning a 30th anniversary fest of new releases and events:

• Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set – Game
• 30 Years of Adventure: A celebration of Dungeons & Dragons - Book
• Dungeons and Dragons Miniatures Expansions - Models
• GEN CON 2004 - Event
• Worldwide D&D Game Day (some time in October) – Way of Life

I have to admit I have not felt a d20 in my palm for waaay to long. So I was wondering – is anyone doing anything to celebrate, any conference (MUD-DEV, GDC etc) having D&D sessions? Any panels / papers on D&D and its influence on gaming?

As to TN, well for a start, how about this:

Does anyone have any ideas on how the type of themes we cover on TN are modified when we cast them into Table Top role play? Who owns my D&D character? Am I free to sell it?

Ren

Survey: Women Over 40 Dominate Online Games

In the heated competition for the prestigious category of "Most Likely Demographic Group to be Found Playing Games Online," the consensus favorite, Teenage Boy, was edged out by a newcomer: His Mom.

Average hours of online gaming per week: Adults: 9.1 for women, 6.1 hours for men. Teenagers: 7.4 hours. For comparison: intensive MMORPG users seem to be in the range of 20-30 hours per week. The online gaming immersion gap between powergamers and everyone else is not nearly as large as I thought.

Ludlow is Everywhere

The Alphaville Herald saga continues to crawl upwards in memespace. Peter Ludlow, a Zenger for our time, may apear on this US comedy news program tonight. He's also been on CNN, and has this interesting interview up today with someone who knows much about the early design of Sims and Sims Online. Finally, Professor Ludlow has been writing about virtual worlds for the London Times, a purportedly non-comedy newspaper in England. Full text of that below...

Arctic Ice sued again

Xinhua Online reports on the second lawsuit brought against Bejing Arctic Ice Technology Company by a disgruntled gamer who claims he lost 5,000-yuan worth of virtual weapons and equipment. Li Xuguang complained in his petition that his virtual property in the popular online computer game Qiannian, or Millennium, was looted by a hacker and then locked up by the server.

Readers will recall the same company (though a different game) was the losing defendant in the real world's first judgment finding an actionable interest in virtual assets.

US Government Powned!

Wired news has coverage of an event many Terra Novans attended at State of Play, the roundtable on eRulemaking. It covers some of the discussion, has a couple of quotes from Raph, credits Professor Noveck appropriately, but in some ways mischaracterizes the discussion. The government wasn't there to get opinions from game developers about how to improve their process. Instead, they were there to solicit ideas on how to use games to educate citizens about the process.

What's unfortunate is that they ignored the obvious flaws in their design. After all, they were just talking to a bunch of game designers and developers.

The flaws are probably obvious to any TN reader. By moving away from publicizing rules and proposed rules in the Federal Register and allowing responses by snail mail towards electronic publishing and commenting, the government is hoping to broaden democracy and to allow more participation. As anyone who has participated in anonymous and unmoderated forums will immediately recognize, this has some flaws. First, the number of submissions is going to skyrocket, compounding something that the representatives of EPA and DOT folks there mentioned, reading all of the submissions is already a problem. Second, and more dangerous, organizations will be able to more efficiently scour proposed rules for issues that they don't like and then bombard the agency with millions of like-minded comments, greatly exaggerating the actual representation of that organization. Obviously, lobbiests already have an advantage in the rulemaking system. Sadly, the proposed changes will increase their advantage, not decrease it.

However, I don't want to focus too much on this specific case. Raph, who also saw the flaws in the proposed system and commented on them at the conference, either didn't give those quotes to Wired or they chose not to use them. Should Raph, as one of the most visible game designers in the US right now, be writing white papers on "MMO Lessons for Real Democracy"? If Al Franken can be a visiting professor at the Kennedy School of Government, shouldn't Raph (or other MMO creators/designers/educators)? Wouldn't it be in Sony's long term best interest to be able to announce that? A friend went to KSG after being Mayor of a small Northern California town. Shouldn't the folks keeping 300,000 users happy be able to leverage their experiences in the same way?

Authorial Play

Back in September, I posted something about authorship in virtual worlds. Last week, at Henry Lowood's fun conference in Palo Alto, Kevin O'Hara from the Star Wars Galaxies team made an interesting comment with regard to authorship that got me thinking about authorship issues again:

In addition to community building, O'Hara stressed the importance of player interaction in developing content and stories for the virtual world. O'Hara explains that, while there is a live events team that creates monthly story lines, it is not a very cost effective way of creating fiction on-the-fly. Instead, Sony tries to leverage the community aspect of the game to encourage players to create the content for the game themselves.

Robot Love

Gearing up for Valentine's Day, thanks to Andrew at GTA for pointing out an interesting article from The Christian Science Monitor "If you kick a robotic dog, is it wrong?" The question posed by the article is "How should people treat creatures that seem ever more emotional with each step forward in robotic technology, but who really have no feelings?" Here's the opinion of Peter Danielson, director of the Center for Applied Ethics at the University of British Columbia, as quoted in the article.

It seems to me there's a whole ethics of fiction and toys that we're thinking through. Are you telling me I ought to treat something that looks like a kitten, but is actually a piece of plastic, better than I treat a pig, which is actually a sentient and intelligent being? You're building a taboo system that gets further and further from the actual value. And every time you do that, you lose your moral authority with your technologically inclined kid who says, 'That's stupid.'

We've had at least a couple posts here on AI and community before.

To be clear, I don't see this as an avatar rights issue at all. The avatar is a technological extension of personal identity within a virtual world. Putting it somewhat differently, Janet Murray has describe the avatar as a form of narrative agency within a representational environment. In any event, there is a real person pulling the strings of the avatar puppet, and interfering with the puppet can interfere with the puppeteer. (Even if you can draw a clear line between them).

The issues presented by robots are different. There is no puppeteer pulling strings on the bot -- except the original author of the mass-produced program/machine. So Floyd from Planetfall is designed to self-sacrifice and Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde are designed to be eaten alive (except for their eyeballs).

Obviously, people do feel emotional attachments -- just see some of the letters on the GTA Post that Andrew received about Petz. Should we be disturbed by sentimental attachments to inanimate (albeit animated) objects? Perhaps, but if we toss bot love out the window, then what do we make of teddy bears?

2L's Virtual Land Sales Attract Investors, Controversy

Second Life began auctioning its virtual land for $US in December. (View player to player auctions here.) "Buying land" really means buying the right to build things on the land, and on top of that you still have to pay a maintenance rent on what you buy. Buy an entire server's worth of land, and the rent becomes $200 a month.

In January, reports embedded journalist Wagner James Au, a certain 'Fizik' won a hotly-contested auction for an entire server. The price was $1200. That's right, Fizik was willing to pay 2L $1200 plus $200 monthly in perpetuity, in order to make software objects that would live only in the virtual world.

It turns out that 'Fizik' is a marketing agency with clientele in the fashion industry. Not everyone was happy at their arrival. Read more in Au's Notes From a New World. Pick up some general discussion here.

Uru Multiplayer Version Closes

Uru is the latest installment of the pathbreaking graphics-intensive puzzle game Myst. Uru Live was supposed to be a massively multiplayer implementation of the basic Myst idea (beautiful scenery, deep mysteries, hard puzzles). It seems to me that the live service wasn't open for long at all, and in any case I never got the chance to explore it. But it didn't get enough subscribers, apparently - even though it was free - and now it will close. I wonder if anyone in the development community here knows what they were trying to do, and why it didn't work?

Short's Law

Perhaps the economists among TerraNova’s readership can help me out here.

Courts routinely issue fines based on offenders’ ability to pay. Last week, the UK government narrowly avoided defeat over its flagship education bill by effectively conceding that the cost of a university education would be made variable depending on the ability of students to pay.

What if we translated this into virtual worlds? What if objects cost more money depending on a character’s ability to pay? Instead of pricing the sword at 500 units of currency (UOC) it would be priced at 500 UOC + 0.01%? For transfers between players, the percentage factor would be transformed accordingly, but only when the rich bought from the poor (to stop muling). Example: I have 1,000,000 UOC, you have 10,000 and I buy something from you for 500 UOC + 0.01%. I lose 500+100=600, you gain 500+1=501.

OK, so players would never accept this. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting thought experiment: what would happen if everyone paid their own individual price for everything they bought?

The trouble is, I don’t where to look for the answer as I don’t have a background in economics. I suspect I’m feeding Google with the wrong keywords (“ability to pay” when I should be using “Short’s Law” or something).

Anyone care to point me in the right direction?

Falling from Palm Trees

If you happen to be driving your BMW or Mercedes through Palo Alto this Friday, it looks like a detour to the Cantor Center would be warranted. They've managed to somehow get computer games under a "sociological microscope." (T.L. should explain how they did this!) Story here. Event schedule here.

Some choice quotes from Henry Lowood, curator for Stanford's History of Science & Technology Collections and cohort of the Stanford Humanities Laboratory, e.g.:

"computer games and simulations are the emerging narrative form and communication medium of the early 21st century."

Kudos to Mr. Lowood for noting that games are an emerging communications medium, but doesn't he really mean "emerging ludological form"? -- just kidding. Here's another:

"You just have to snap your fingers on this campus and undergraduate students who are interested in this topic start falling from the trees."

And those are, quite possibly, palm trees! Ouch! So if you stop by this Friday, you get to listen to all sorts of people I know about but have never met, e.g.: Will Wright, Haden Blackman, and Warren Spector. It's open to the public. And to top it off, you can even play Zork and watch a live feed from Star Wars Galaxies projected on a wall.

Raph on the spot

If Terranova were a cheesy_late_night_trumped_up_celebrity-host driven interview gig, I’d probably describe Raph Koster as a ‘friend of the show’; though I would be equally likely to prostrate myself intoning ‘we are not worthy.’

Anyway, stealthily approaching the point of this post warcry has just posted an interview with Raph about, well, pretty much everything.

For the reader at the back who might have dozed off during the last 12 months; Raph was the chief creative dood on Star Wars Galaxies and is now, what was that phrase Julian used at the State of Play conference – über head of all creative stuff, at Sony Online Entertainment.

There is so much in the interview that it’s hard to pick out a single point for TN’ers to chew on. However I thought that the very last section resonated with a bunch of themes we have discussed here. Asked about MMOs as social experiment vs entertainment Raph says:

“I think anyone who doesn't think that MMOs are social experiments hasn't tried running one yet.”

Warcry have a bunch of other interviews including one with Dave Rickey (of this parish) during his wish days; which can be found here, here and here: so either they would not stop pestering him or they just could not shut him up - you decide.

Oh bonus points all round for the TN reference in Raphs interview.

Ren

Other Players Conference CFP

Just wanted to make sure everyone saw the CFP for the Other Players conference being organized by Jonas Heide Smith and Miguel Sicart here at the ITU. Here is the announcement that went out yesterday:

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The Center for Computer Game Research at the IT University of Copenhagen invites you to submit a paper for the "Other Players" conference. The conference takes place between the 6th and 8th of December 2004.

Please find full CALL FOR PAPERS here: http://www.itu.dk/op/callforpapers.php

We hope to see you in Denmark in December.

Best regards,
THE CENTER FOR COMPUTER GAMES RESEARCH: http://game.itu.dk/
CONFERENCE WEBSITE: http://www.itu.dk/op/
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I also want to mention that we have a page detailing all the events sponsored by the Center for Computer Games Research as well as an email newsletter you can sign up for.

Politicking

I missed this when it came out, but was interested to read Steven Berlin on the role that political sim-gaming could/can/might/is having on the strategies in the Democratic Primaries. It's not hard to see how this might be extended into the MMORPG space.

Virtual Worlds Research Widens Academic Impact

I thought it's worth noting a few developments on the academic publishing front. The seminal Lastowka/Hunter piece on The Laws of the Virtual Worlds just appeared in California Law Review, and a paper I wrote on avatar attributes was accepted this week by the economics journal Kyklos. While both journals are known for being open-minded, they are nonetheless well within the academic mainstream. Meanwhile, Taylor now has several pieces placed in refereed journals, and insiders tell us that Yee's work is on its way to refereed placements (but don't hold your breath, these things take awhile). And while these are certainly not the first academic publications on avatars and virtual worlds, they do cover new disciplinary ground: law, economics, sociology, and psychology. The irony of this recent acknowledgment of the field is surely not lost on those with more experience in this area; many of the ideas that the academics are now sending off to journals were common wisdom within developer circles many years ago. Still, it's worth pausing now in January 2004 and thinking about how much the landscape has changed just within a year or two. The ideas are gradually percolating upward. We have heard, but are unable to confirm, that the publication of the Lastowka/Hunter piece brought some, ah, very influential people to this site. It's only a rumor, so don't quote us. But I guess it's a good thing that Greg's been cleaning the place up a bit.