Terra Nova

Terra Nova Welcomes Constance Steinkuehler

The newest author adds to Terra Nova in several ways. She's trained in cognitive psychology (rather than law or economics, of which we have more than enough here already). She also has some experience in online learning issues, a perspective we completely lack so far. But most important of all, she's an expert, and an influential guild leader, in Lineage, the mammoth PvP siegefest that fascinates all of us yet remains, like much Asian gaming, obscure to our eyes. Constance is a member of the James Gee / Kurt Squire et al. videogame group at the University of Wisconsin, the school with the best student union beerhall in the world (speaking from personal experience, of course). On Wisconsin! And welcome Constance!

FunHi

Dan Terdiman in Wired reports on FunHi, a curious amalgam of social software system (à la Friendster, Orkut, etc), chatroom, and MMOG.

The milieu is gangsta, the economics purely Castronovan, the property regime Lastovkian.

Weird|Brilliant.

Should Some Be More Equal Than Others?

CCP (Eve-online) is trying to capitalize upon Earth and Beyond's decline:

Welcome Earth and Beyond users... CCP is now offering Earth and Beyond users access to a special evaluation program in cooperation with Gamespy. Earth and Beyond users have been forced to start looking for an alternative Sci-fi online game as Electronic Arts has announced it will close down Earth and Beyond at the end of summer... This upgrade program will include a no-obligation free trial of EVE Online and an in-game walkthrough of the game by an EVE volunteer who will explain the differences between the two games and help with the transition into EVE from Earth and Beyond. (see here).

Where the Real World ends...

...Second Life begins...

So goes the announcement in my intray that Second Life v1.3 is shipping.

The new features are interesting because they seem to mark a specific push by Linden to blur the boundaries between SL and "real world" communication modes. So says the announcement:

The walls between Second Life and the real world are tumbling down! When you're not able to visit Second Life in person, v1.3 lets you receive and reply to your in-world Instant Messages via email.

Free Culture for Free

Lawrence Lessig has a new book out. It’s called Free Culture and the really really really neat thing is that he has released it under a Creative Commons Licence, so it’s available for free all over the place, such as here. Physical copies can also be purchased.

For any TN readers not familiar with Lessig’s work, this promises to be another fascinating meditation / polemic on the nature of intellectual property generally and copyright specifically.

So are virtual items property?

There's Island of Women

On March 30, There will unveil its very own Paradise Island of iVillage women. Although the island is described by There as a "a special iVillage sanctuary" the boundaries between the iVillage island and the rest of There's world will be far fuzzier than the original fabled Paradise Island, as males will be able to freely access it and interact with "the natives."

This will be an interesting experiment for several reasons:

1 - It's a virtual space doubly marked by gender and commercial co-branding. (Is this the first of its kind? Anyone know of any precedents?)

2 - iVillage is a text-based community of women whose bonding often takes place specifically around members' relationships to their RL bodies in the form of pregnancy, dieting, health, and beauty tips. While there may be the rare case of role-playing and gender-bending in the iVillage web community (ie. men posing as women), most participants' online identities are extensions of their RL (female) selves. Will this direct tie between offline/online identity carry over into a virtual world? Or will iVillage women use There to role play, whether that means creating an avatar that looks radically different from their RL body, or even choose a male avatar?

3 - The branding of a virtual space as female automatically sexualizes it. Already some of the male community members in There are viewing the addition of iVillage island as a welcome opportunity to increase their chances for romance. How will the iVillage women respond to these romantic overtures? Is There prepared to deal with any Mr. Bungles that show up?

We'll find out soon. Next Tuesday the experiment begins.

Play Money / Julian is Famous

Another brief news note -- while I would normally permit our co-author Julian to declare that Wired's Daniel Terdiman has now made him famous -- see "But Will IRS Accept Virtual Cash?" -- it seems Julian has been understandably pre-occupied lately with his Play Money pursuits, conducting business by wifi (and engaging in soul-searching / ethographic research) in the back corner booth of a Flying J truckstop. And I should note he's got a new marketing slogan:

SHOP NOW AT THE playMONEY STORE
Do it, damn you!

Catchy, eh?

In the not-too-distant future, online play will rule universe

Or so says the Houston Chronicle. The story is actually an AP feed, by Matt Slagle, elsewhere running under the much less exciting headline "Tale of two video game worlds: Online consoles soar, PCs stumble."

US Sales of Online Game Titles: $1b and Counting

SiliconValley.com and the San Jose Mercury News report (thanks for the tip, Tomasz Wozniak) that sales of online-capable games in the US topped $1 billion last year, up 167 percent over the previous year. Note that these are only online-capable; people who buy Madden football may not use the online feature. Indeed, 69 percent of the online-capable titles are sports games. Seems natural, actually. Aren't sports games more likely than RPGs or world simulators to take avatar technology mainstream?

Should MMOG Players be Meta and Portable?

At the 04 Game Developer's Conference I attended a tutorial Tuesday by the Sony contingent (Raph, Rich, Gordon, Developing a Massively Multiplayer Game).  Somewhere in the QA late in the day, a claim regarding the business of MMOGs emerged.  Namely, given the current western MMOG ecosystem consisting of "AAA", "Mid-range" and "Boutique" games, the claim was that the economics of the subscription business model will eventually squeeze out the Mid-range MMOGs. 

What would it be like to live in an MMOG ecosystem at whose center were a few big generic MMOGs and at whose fringes were lots of smaller, less-stable, yet arguably more innovative MMOG experiments?   There would be a vague problem of transitions: how to flow ideas from the edges to the center?   How to encourage players to play in the fringes without being orphaned?

Fast forward to a point floated by Peter Molyneux (AI: Gameplay and Design)  in a later session:  wouldn't it be nice if in the future player profiles could be exchanged  between games.  Somehow games might collect, save, and then share player meta-info with  other games.  Then games could then adapt and configure themselves using this information to  enhance the player experience. 

Bloggin’ @ GDC

Yup it’s GDC time. I’m not there, so to keep up to date I’ve been checking out some GDC bloggers:

Mia Consalvo (memorycard.blogs.com) is tapping away and also references ‘Friends of the show’ Ian Bogost (www.watercoolergames.org), Gonzalo Frasca (www.ludology.org), David Thomas (who as always, has a pic-tastic version) (www.buzzcut.com); Jurie Horneman (www.intelligent-artifice.com/2004/03/live_from_gdc_2.html) is there too. Finally GameDevNet is getting all industry about it: (www.gamedev.net/columns/events/gdc2004).

Any more good GDC blogs?

Let the mid / post conference analysis commence...

MMOMGs

Sega has announced plans for a "massively multiplayer online mobile game" using the Nokia N-Gage.

Virtual Honesty

Journalist Clive Thompson had an interesting essay in the New York Times magazine this Sunday: "The Honesty Virus". In the essay, he muses over a study by Jeff Hancock of Cornell University that found people are more honest when communicating by e-mail than they are when communicating over the phone. (And Clive offers anecdotally today that prostitutes verify this.)

Hancock's data suggest that the archival nature of email is responsible for the increased honesty -- there is a belief that email messages are recorded and may be subsequently recounted verbatim, unlike normal speech, where misstatements are forgotten. (Unless you're Donald Rumsfeld.) So, Hancock says, chat and IM conversations are no more honest than phone conversations.

I was wondering if increased honesty through email might be strained to relate to Nick's post back in October: "Love in Reverse?"

USC: Rolling in the Plat

The lovely Beth Noveck alerted me to the announcement that Electronic Arts has given USC's School of Cinema-TV $8m to create a master's degree program in video game design and to fund an endowed faculty chair. According to the press release: "The program will help forward USC-CNTV’s goal to educate the next generation of high-level gaming design and visionary thinkers in what will be one of the 21st Century’s primary entertainment media."

No word on whether the program will include MMORPG/VW design components.

Financial Cost of E&B's Closure

A recent scan of eBay turned up several auctions like this one. On March 15, eBay user shakti_122 paid $3000 for an account in Earth and Beyond. On March 16 (as reported earlier here), EA announced that the world is going bye-bye, taking shakti_122's $3000 asset with it. Recall that EA has expressly rejected the possibility of transferring the world to others.

shakti_122 isn't the only one left holding the bag. There's devonis, daveup2bat, zaxam, storm2004, jj2828, and many others. E&B had something like 40,000 accounts. Total damages caused by the closure of this corner of space are not trivial.

So, again: Why doesn't EA transfer the title? The previous discussion hung up on the question of value - is it a game, and if so, the things that happen there don't matter, etc., etc. But eBay makes the eocnomic aspect of that discussion moot. Game or not, the economic value is there, it's tangible, it's real. Just ask Shakti_122.

At last - a free lunch

Guild Wars the free MMORPG is out pretty soon.

The business model seems to run like this:

Base content, access to the world / community – Free
Content expansions – Paid per ‘chapter’

They are also using a skills based combat system. So, in theory, the casual player can compete on a pretty level playing field with the power gamer - at no cost (did I mention that bit?).

Prediction time: have they actually cracked the casual player issues?

Cricket lovely cricket

Some things are just more important than contract law. Cricket, it seems, is one of them – at least according to the Attorney-general and Solicitor-general of India (as reported by India’s The Telegraph and elsewhere)

Do cases like this point the legal route that Earth and Beyond’s users should take?

Lost Culture

Triggered by nostalgia over EverQuest's 5th birthday, I sought briefly, the other day, forum discussion from EQ's first year, curious to see what was being discussed then versus now.   I only made it to a couple of fan sites.  However, that was enough to notice a worrying pattern.  Forum discussions beyond a couple of years or so seemed no longer available on these websites.   Perhaps not all this material is lost permanently (some of it may be archived somewhere), but I it seems fair to believe that a great deal of this material, across all fan sites, is vanishing for good.

This problem is hardly unique to Virtual Worlds and their communities.   Initiatives such as The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program are at work on the larger World Wide Web and digital information problem.

WoW β

I would not normally post when yet another MMORPG goes into Beta. But as this is the much talked about World of Warcraft I think it is worth noting that Beta is now live.
The next big thing?

Gaming in Russia

From the Moscow Times: an industry emerges.

Worlds within worlds within…

Questions first:
(1) Can this description of this game be true?
(2) Would any sane person play it?
(3) If they did, would they need counselling later?

.hack / infection (Dev: CyberConnect2, Pub: Bandai / Atari, Plat: PS2) is an RPG with a plot centred on a fictional MMORPG.

So you’re a single player, playing the character of person that is playing a character in a multi-player game, replete with fictional friends that want to trade with you, I mean your character, I mean your character's character – ohh I need a lie down.

... and if anyone even mentions the Matrix they get a /slap.

What Happens When the Virtual and the Real Embrace: Are We Really a Cheap Date?

This past weekend there was a road-race in the deserts of Southern California.  It featured 15 robotic vehicles careening for a million dollar prize: The Darpa Grand Challenge.   Wired magazine extensively covered the year-long build up; their last article summarized last weekend's result. For all efforts, however, the best that human ingenuity  could muster was a pair of autonomous vehicles capable of 7 and a bit miles along a 142 mile circuit.  Yet it was considered a success and there is a hint of a 2006 repeat.

On the one hand this event could be seen by Virtual World denizens as an orcish irrelevance: this industry, these machines, their wheels, that torn sod, and those hell-bent contraptions impaled one-by-one by barb-wire, confusion, and fence posts in a dusty place outside of Barstow California... what does this stuff matter to the beauty of Elves and Sim parties.    But on the other hand, in the spirit of Philip K. Dick (sci-fi, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"), are these machines and their descendents in the future, the conundrum of Virtual Worlds (VW) to be?  Do these robots, with their virtualized minds of  sensor and effector interfaces and web of intelligent instincts, suggest a future taboo and threshold VWs must cross?  Is there a massive convergence waiting, in the wings, between the real and the virtual.

Sherry Turkle is quoted at the Evocative Objects seminar as claiming:

Meanwhile, Microsoft and McQuaid Announce Vanguard

Schumpeter said that capitalism is creative destruction. The creative counterpoint to the demise of E&B and Mythica: Vanguard, a new MMORPG from Sigil Games, the new company of veteran designer McQuaid, now backed by Microsoft. From Slashdot Games.

E&B to close

Michael "Dialogue" Zenke alerted me to the announcement that Earth & Beyond is to close. Some other details here.

Hmmm...

New Author: Betsy Book

A big Terra Nova welcome to Betsy Book, our newest author!

Ms. Book is the creator of Virtual Worlds Review, "a guide to persistent online social virtual worlds." She also writes and presents on issues such as advertising & branding in virtual worlds and tourism and photography in virtual worlds. She has a background in art history and works managing online communities at BBI Systems in New York City.

Sacred Spaces

At 12:00 CET on 15th March there was 3 minutes silence across the EU in memory of the victims of the Madrid bombing.

Did the citizens of Norrath or SWGs Naboo put down their swords or blasters for this brief period? Were EU game servers turned off?

Should they be?

Beware the Ninja-Dwarves!

There have been many proposed methods of broadly categorizing humans, from the ubiquitous Myers-Briggs to Richard’s player types, many methods have been proposed for both the real and virtual worlds. Fortunately for researchers everywhere, the quest for the ultimate classification system is over.

Behold Tom Coates’s new approach: From pirate dwarves to ninja elves.... Feel free to classify your fellow Terra Novans.

Design Query: Inserting New Users in Ongoing Stories

Question for the hive mind: Isn't it the case in table top RPing that there are ways of inserting a new player into an ongoing campaign? Argo, Flim, and Buxley are all level 12 and find themselves deep in the Caverns of Crud, when Balabad somehow shows up, not as a level 1 newbie but as a level 12 character with appropriate gear. What are the stories used to avoid breaking the fiction?

Happy Birthday EQ

EverQuest is 5 – hurrah and raise a flagon of Bleeding Brain!

Let’s see, in human years it would be toddler, in dog years it would be middle aged, in MMORPG years – who knows.

Anyway if you’re visiting Norrath during March celebrations are a-foot. These include: Fabled NPCs, Scavenger Hunt and my personal favourite “Skeletons Marching: They're marching, and they are angry!” is this a parade? w00t!

Sponsored links

What do Bonusprint, Ofoto and RCS have to do with developing online games?

The Crash

Ren referenced David Wong's brilliant article about the impending video game crash and it deserved a link here. A typically brilliant mix of fact and humor, it deserved a front page link to the three people who hit this site without having read /.

The Other Primaries

Elections are in full swing over at The Sims Online. Today marks the final primary to choose the candidate to challenge for the presidency of the Alphaville Government.

For background see: The Official (though of course the government is not actually official) Alphaville Government Site. The Alphaville Herald's running coverage of the elections. Wired's recent piece Mr-President Bids for Re-Election, and games/.'s coverage of Wired's coverage here.

Where do we start: democratic control of MMO's generally, why does the Alphaville Government and its election structure seem so modelled on the US system, or the fact that in A Tale in the Desert the Demi-Pharaoh’s get real power when they are elected and the eGenesis have integrated the legal system into the game?

14/03/04 Update: Results are in - Ashley Richardson won and will be running with Loxee in the forthcoming presidential elections.

Princeton & Games

I was going to post a recap of the Princeton Conference on Form, Culture, and Videogames organized by Dexter Palmer and Roger Bellin — but Dave Thomas, Dennis Jerz, and Nick Monfort all beat me to it. Dave Thomas, professional journalist that he is, gives an excellent play-by-play of the papers if readers are interested. In short, it was a very interesting and diverse group of presentations.

The most enjoyable papers, for me, were the numerous close readings (or as Tevis Thompson called it, close playings) of specific games. Nick Monfort did an impressive multi-faceted critical analysis of the Combat cartridge that shipped with the Atari 2600 console. I had completely forgotten about the 3 on 1 biplane variant (talk about a petit madeleine!).

Voices in Games

Konami's "LifeLine" (a new Playstation game) features prominently a voice-based interface. Unlike with the speech packages many of us use (e.g. TeamSpeak) LifeLine's speech interface is its only player interface.  An other difference between LifeLine and MMOG voice is that LifeLine uses A.I. to interpret the speech codec.  MMOG's have people to do it.

I've never played LifeLine (to be released this month), however, I am led by GameSpy to believe that in this case the speech-person-game interface does not work well (1 star out of 5).

Don’t pass it on

Belated a.k.a. Is cheating now a crime?

US Federal law may have taken one step closer to the regulation of Virtual Worlds.
How so?
By making it possible to consider the use of someone else’s password to access a protected system a Federal crime – that’s how.

Open Source Worlds

Some of the recent discussion on the EA Growth reminded me of a question I've been meaning to ask the hivemind: what impact is the open source movement likely to have on virtual worlds?

There are obviously some elements of this movement that one can find in VWs: the user-developed content in Second Life, the open source framework of Beyond 2. But as others have noted, it's hard to build a world, it takes a lot of artistic talent, programming talent, etc etc. And some have tried and failed.

Yet it works in lots of other contexts. The only thing that keeps Bill Gates awake at night is Linux.

Is there any reason that it can't/won't work in virtual worlds?

EA Exec Predicts Virtual World Growth

At the D.I.C.E. summit held this week in Las Vegas, EA CEO [edit: Chief Creative Officer, not CEO] Bing Gordon discussed the medium-term future of games. Virtual worlds will play a prominent part. Basic message: Each generation of teens is more comfortable than the last when combining different media. "What magic circle?" they will say.

Read on for a few quotes, thanks to GameSpot. Also, coverage at Gamespy.

Database of Intentions

John Battelle has a Very Big Idea. It's called the Database of Intentions, and his take on it is something like this:

The Database of Intentions is simply this: The aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result. It lives in many places, but three or four places in particular hold a massive amount of this data (ie MSN, Google, and Yahoo). This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind - a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, supoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends. Such a beast has never before existed in the history of culture, but is almost guaranteed to grow exponentially from this day forward. This artifact can tell us extraordinary things about who we are and what we want as a culture. And it has the potential to be abused in equally extraordinary fashion.

Confounded industry

I often wonder about how narratives, especially speculative ones, shape reality. There certainly seems to be a powerful effect on markets (in that stocks can be ‘talked’ up or down).

So with trepidation I note that in November 2003 Dr Castronova posted The Coming MMORPG Crash, Or Not and then First Sign of an MMOG Downturn?.

Then in February Mythica was taken into the dark woods never to return. And last week the news sort of sneaked out that (according to gamespot) Ubisoft have followed the cancellation of the online component of Uru: Ages Beyond Myst by pulling out of The Matrix Online – leaving Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment to take the project forward (with Monolith Productions remaining as the Dev shop). According to Warner Bros. Beta is still expected to hit our screens this spring with the full release in November.

Though these events do have too be contrasted with industry predictions that overall the MMO market is growing in strength.

So maybe it is just all a case of too much too soon.

Though none of this helps when all I want for xmas (publishers start taking notes now) is a Steam Punk based virtual world. I want wear decent clothes (with an unfeasibly tall hat) and create infernal devices comprising of pistons, valves and shiny bits made from brass.

Confound you games industry, confound you I say.

New York Times on Permadeath

Yes, that's right. Jonathan Glater of the New York Times wrote an article today on the frequently debated VW design issue of permadeath. The article even mentions corpse retrieval. Quotes are from Richard Garriott, Haden Blackman, Jeff Green (Computer Gaming Monthly), Rodney Humble (SOE), Alex Galloway (NYU Media), Stephen Hinshaw (Berkeley Psych).

This from Taylor Carman, associate professor of philosophy at Barnard:

[Permadeath in VWs] makes me suspect that our own mortality is, as some existential philosophers maintained, such a constitutive dimension of our self-understanding that even in utopian fantasies we can't see our way out of the prospect of our own demise.

Chew on that. (Mr. Carman spends a lot of time reading Heidegger, btw.) And since we've been talking about the Oscars, this interesting bit from Jeff Anderson of Turbine, on LOTR and permadeath seems apropos:

Mr. Anderson said [that] designers considered the nature of J. R. R. Tolkien's imaginary world of Middle-Earth and the expectations of current players and the target audience. "The first thing that's obvious is, people don't get randomly resurrected within the world of Middle-Earth," he said. So "one argument would be, that would suggest that the Tolkien world should be all permadeath." But that notion was rejected, he said, because permanent death discourages new players, who are more likely to get their characters killed.

Apropos of nothing, I like Viggo Mortensen's artwork.

Can We Save MMOGs from Ourselves (using simulation)?

MMOGs today are works-in-progress.  They appear as improvised experiments  - ambiguous on theory, and rich on ingredients.  In the ecosystem of MMOGs, optimists might believe that the best features will survive in the genetic pool through a process of value-testing and convergence...

The public face of computer gamers

First, a chance of 15 minutes of fame - for some of you.

Granada TV here in the UK just phoned me about a short series called Game Stars they’re going to make. It’s basically an awards show, one of the aims of which is to find "the UK’s best computer gamer". The result will be a number of programmes that will be shown over the course of several evenings. They ran a pilot last year, and had 10,000 people turn up at the ExCel centre in London to take part.

Well, actually they had 10,000 male people aged between 16 and 25.

Granada are aware that the words "computer games" and "competition" aren’t female-friendly, and that they can therefore once again expect that those attending their event will not reflect the true make-up of computer gamers across the UK. They are keen to redress this imbalance by, in the narrative part of the programmes, showing pictures of (among others) women gamers playing games in real life. Hopefully, this will go some way to erasing the impression they would otherwise give that computer games are the sole preserve of enthusiastic spods yet to discover the meaning of the word “shampoo”.

Unfortunately, the people at Granada don't know any female gamers.

So, if you’re a female computer games player in the UK over the age of 25 who is prepared to be filmed playing a game at which you are skilled (and this includes virtual worlds), Granada would like to hear from you. More specifically, Yeva Paley of Game Stars, would like to hear from you: her email is [email protected] (you can mention my name if you like).

As the Terra Nova angle on this, is this kind of "balancing" a good idea or simply patronising? Is there any way to find "best gamers" that might persuade women and the over-25s to come out of the woodwork? And if there were an award for "best player of a virtual world", what criteria could be used to determine a winner?

MMO-Skill

Over at GamerDad’s Long Shot column, Dave Long kicks off his current post with the statement:

“the reason I don't play a lot of the conventional massive player games is because there's no skill involved in them”

His argument is that for some players most MMOs just don’t provide enough control or hand-eye co-ordination based challenges. He goes on to feature a new crop of what one might term hybrid-MMOs that are starting to mix FPS, RTS game play stylee with the social and levelling side of trad-MMOs.

The two hybrid-MMOs referenced the piece are: Jumpgate (which I have heard good things about from other MMO players) and PlanetSide.

But, sorry, I’m obsessing, I just can’t get out of my head a big flashing sign saying: wadayoumean no skill involved !

OK. Deep breath. I'm calm.

Mmm now if I could have optional real time FPS type combat, with neat flying machines and a good community – all the to music of Mike Oldfield, I might just be happy :)

Ommadawn of the new age of MMOs?

If MMORPGs are going to gain a bigger market share then some of them have to be different. OK, so welcome the impending arrival of new kid on the block - Maestro.

Maestro is the creation of Mike Oldfield. If you’re an aging hippy / prog-rocker, then: yes _that_ Mike Oldfield. For the rest of you he’s a multi-talented muso that created a series of mainly instrumental albums in the 70s and 80s. Famously an excerpt from Tubular Bells is that beautiful yet creepy music used in the Exorcist.

Mr Oldfield’s new project certainly looks different. While I was reading the PR for it I almost ran from the keyboard screaming – the bumph actually includes the line “Maestro is not a game - it is a lifestyle”.

But I’m not posting this to mock. No, really. Different is good right, and Maestro really does look like it has a few unusual elements to it.

• The project is not for profit.
  
• The core of the project is based on Oldfield’s work. Tubular Bells seems to be a constant theme but new and exclusive music is also promised.
  
• There seems to be some kind of server licensing deal so you can set up and run your own version.
  
• The environment is non-violent, socilising seems to be the primary aim of the space but game play is also an option.

Now you could dismiss this as little more than a 3D fan site – though I think that would be to rush to judgment as it will be interesting to know if a 3D fan site will work, is the presence of a star and exclusive content enough to sustain any kind of virtually embodied community?

There is also the structural and commercial model. If this is a form of game / social world, do the two mix or will it end up being a themed Second Life / There? The not for profit and potential to licence a server is fascinating, but what will be the restrictions – can I run a version of the code where I stream death metal and change the colour palet to sublet shades of black.

One to watch…

Committee for Economic Development Enters Copyright Wars

In a NY Times article (also linked off of /.), the Committee for Economic Development has some interesting comments on copyright policy.

"The ideas of copy-left, or of a more liberal regime of copyright, are receiving wider and wider support," said Debora L. Spar, a professor at Harvard Business School. "It's no longer a wacky idea cloistered in the ivory tower; it's become a more mainstream idea that we need a different kind of copyright regime to support the wide range of activities in cyberspace."

Nice to see this being talked about in the US mainstream press.

On Oscar

The annual film awards show is wrapping up here in LA and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King has won in 10 of the 11 categories in which it was nominated, with only Best Picture to go [Edit: It just got best picture too]. Earlier in the night, I was watching the awards for things like Sound Editor and Visual Effects. The recipients there wore tuxedos and glamorous gowns, just like the actors and actresses, but they also had more of a techy look to them, as if the clothes didn't exactly fit. I imagined that is what game developers might look like, were there an Oscars for games. There are game awards, of course; we're looking forward to the next round at GDC next month. Still, the contrast between that ceremony and the star-studded gala on Hollywood Boulevard is striking.

Yes, game software and hardware now outsell Hollywood's box office. Games may even have more overall impact on behavior than movies. But games don't have anywhere near as much cultural whuffie as the movies. Not even close. Why not?

[Disclaimer: every idea in this post has probably already been written down by a ludologist. I haven't done my homework, and know absolutely nothing about games as art. I'm sure that will become obvious in a moment anyway.]