Terra Nova

Jack Balkin on Virtual Liberty

Jack Balkin is the Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment and the Director of the Information Society Project (home of Lawmeme) at Yale Law School. He is an accomplished and prolific scholar who helped organize the amazing State of Play conference last year, where many of the Terra Nova authors first met each other IRL.

So obviously, when Prof. Balkin publishes scholarship about the legal regulation of virtual worlds, this is big news to many of us here.  And it looks like my all-time favorite law journal, the Virginia Law Review, has been lucky enough to secure Professor Balkin's forthcoming article: Virtual Liberty: Freedom to Design and Freedom to Play in Virtual Worlds (forthcoming 2005).

v-currency = e-money = clean money ?

Back to ducks… it has been argued that virtual items (including gold pieces, credits etc) might look so much like property that they would be considered to be property. Certainly they are used as if they were.

When it comes to money the EC has provided a handy definition of exactly what it considers e-money to be and hence what organizations it feels it has to regulate, but what if people even worse that eBayers start to utilise virtual goods to move value around the world?

Insta-Globalization

Word has it (thanks to a source who only uses her avatar name) that Lineage II's international server structure has opened up some arbitrage opportunities that are being ruthlessly exploited. One forum writer claimed that for-profit companies are recruiting 'adena-hunters,' people who do nothing but farm the game's money in return for RL pay. Ho-hum, I know. Here's what's different.

Yahoo! Avatars

Randy Farmer just announced on his new blog (see Ted's post below) that Yahoo! Messenger 6.0 is incorporating avatars. Perhaps this means that in the near future, one won't get the "ava-what?" and have to explain the origins: Hinduism, Snow Crash, Richard Garriott, Habitat, etc...

So there's greglas, at right. (He blinks when he's not just a screenshot.) The Beta is giving the standard customization options we've come to expect: hair-styles, clothes, gear. The question on my mind, of course (and perhaps hinted at by Randy through his link to this article): how soon will Yahoo! start selling "premium" accessories & virtual presents a la FunHi or There.com? Because, you know, there's a real market for all that stuff. :-)

Update: Looks like Yahoo! knows that already...

China & Virtual Property

Xinhuanet has the latest update in the "China Virtual Property Chronicles." Case number three has been filed against the operators of Mir3. A player bought a sword for about 1000 yuan (approx US$120) only to have it deleted by the devs because it had been duped by the guy he bought it from. Virtual property, duping, and fraud. Heaven.

What is it with China and virtual property? I thought they were supposed to be a communist state? What's with all this property talk?

(Oh, as an aside, the article mentions that an earlier case alleging theft (which we reported on some time ago) was rejected by the court on the basis that virtual property couldn't sustain a theft action. Would be worth a blog posting all of its own, were I not so lazy).

Reading Everquest

Eric Hayot of the University of Arizona and Edward Wesp of the University of Wisconsin have just published "Reading Game/Text: Everquest, Alienation, and Digital Communities" in Postmodern Culture. The article is an interesting critical ramble (in a good sense of that word) through a number of theoretical debates.

It actually begins in the legal milieu by investigating several cases which deal with the application of First Amendment protections to video games. The analysis here is not really an argument regarding legal doctrine (like, e.g., this), but instead the authors use court opinions on the "expressiveness" of games as a wedge, in effect, to open up the ludology/narratology debate from another angle. The text chosen by the authors for exploration is Everquest; the question, therefore, is whether Everquest is expressive.

John Seely Brown: The Online Social Life of Narratives

John Seely Brown, co-author of The Social Life of Information and previously the Chief Genius at Xerox PARC, raises some provocative ideas about MMOGs & narratives in his recent interview at the Smithsonian Institute entitled "Storytelling: Passport to Success in the 21st Century." In it, he describes ingame play as the construction of a new kind of "nonlinear, multi-authored narrative".

Henry Jenkins, Guru of All Things Comparative Media Studies, recently posted excerpts from this interview on his blog on Tech Review.

I, on the other hand, posted it here. With comments... of course. ~.o

Advertising and Branding in Virtual Worlds

New paper alert! I’ve just put the finishing touches on a paper about advertising and branding in virtual worlds.

Click here to download the paper in PDF format. Warning: It’s nearly 4 MB. (There are lots of pretty pictures.)

It’s based on a presentation I gave back in October at Miami University in Ohio. The presentation received such a great response I decided to turn it into a paper. Yes, it took me a while but hey, all this virtual worlds stuff is done in my “spare” time.

When I say advertising and branding in virtual worlds I really mean in virtual worlds. All examples discussed are various forms of in-world advertising. The marketing of vw’s to the general public is not covered. But within virtual worlds, I’ve found that advertising and branding projects have taken the following forms so far:

[1] Community members who create their own brands and ads to advertise virtual products they are creating and selling to other members

[2] Official ads for products made by the company that owns/operates the world

[3] Contextual advertising campaigns by real, offline companies who are now branding objects within virtual worlds (Nike & Levi’s in There, McDonald’s and Intel in TSO)

[4] Entire virtual worlds created to advertise or promote a company or organization (Coke Music, America’s Army, Aero House, Mokitown)

One interesting trend I also discuss in the paper is how teenagers seem to be more receptive to in-world advertising than adults are, often bringing elements of branding into the worlds themselves. In fact, many of the fully branded worlds are targeted to teens and kids.

Now that I’ve given you the cliff’s notes summary, go read it and let me know what you think. Posts are welcome here. If you prefer to discuss privately, contact me through VWR.

Virtual Worlds and China's Government

From /. : A Korea Herald article on the Chinese government's efforts to control foreign MMOGs. View from 60,000 feet: by 2006, China will overtake the US as the largest presence on the internet. Its government won't be far behind.

There's Army

Adam Messinnger alerts us to the Gamespot feature on the urban warfare simulator that There is building for the US armed forces. It's called "A.W.E." ("Asymmetric Warfare Environment"). Can "S.H.O.C.K." be far behind?

I have no idea how I feel about this.

Farmer and Morningstar Launch Blog

In the 1980s, when TN's moderators were still wondering how to get that big hair look, F. Randall Farmer and Chip Morningstar were building one of the first graphical chat systems, which turned into an an early experiment in social, economic, and political engineering in cyberspace. "The Lessons of Lucasfilms' Habitat" is one of the most heavily cited papers in the area and a must-read for anyone thinking about doing research here. They continue to flesh out these lessons, and, through their new blog, will apply them to ongoing debates in virtual world research and design. Highly recommended.

Only a Game

Michael Froomkin of the University of Miami School of Law, has a sharp eye for interesting cyberlaw issues. (Check out his blog here.) If you go trolling through his Spring 2003 syllabus for The Internet & The Market, you'll find that section 4 is very on topic for TN readers. In Section 5, you'll also find a fascinating case about games and virtual currencies, SEC v. SG, 265 F.3d 42 (1st Cir. 2001).

Rulemaking Strikes Back

Susan Crawford's blog has a link to the FCC's Proposed Rulemaking[edit to fix href] on "IP-enabled services." Susan points out that this covers email and it obviously covers all sorts of games as well. The thrust of the rulemaking effort is VoIP but the proposal is much broader in scope, including such gems as Section 16:

". . . it may become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish “voice” service from “data” service . . . ."

Wouldn't it be great if all online games and email had to support E911 service? Section 53:

"Against this backdrop, we seek comment in this proceeding on the potential applicability of 911, E911, and related critical infrastructure regulation to VoIP and other IP-enabled services."

Wait, it gets better. Section 54:

"We also seek comment on whether VoIP and other IP-enabled services are technologically and operationally capable of delivering call-back and location information"

I've previously posted about the improved rulemaking process. Perhaps this is an opportunity to put theory into practice.

Ebay, Duct-tape, and In-game Markets

Intrigued by Julian Dibbell's recent grand opus, I started to poke around into "Ebay" Eve-Online currency transactions. Along the way I had a number of discussions with folks, dabbled in a few trades. I have little data but the anecdotal, but I do have a theory...

UO lawsuit settled

It looks like the Ultima Online Counselors lawsuit has reached some sort of settlement. While I can't track down any official info at EA, the main link everyone seems to be pointing to is over at Gamerifts (2 April entry) where they have an image of a purported check sent out to former counselors (if anyone finds other info, please do post it). The amount given to at least one volunteer - $1,267.21. Just a little background - a group of former UO volunteer helpers filed a class action lawsuit against EA in 2000 (they'd been previously hit with a suit about their quality of service but that was dismissed as far as I can tell). The main claim was for minimum wages and overtime compensation per the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). You can hit the Lum the Mad archives search for some additional background, an old Salon article for more past coverage, or an always entertaining Tweety Rant archive entry on the subject. The judge's order certifying the group as a class (issued 24 September 2002) is particularly interesting in the way they restate and consider the claimants case, trying to put into context the notion of wages and labor alongside stuff like shards.

I mentioned to Scott Moore (who has a lot of experience/hands-on knowledge with VEs) I was going to do a blurb about the matter here and he wisely suggested I try to pitch the discussion away from simple rehash to what this might mean for the future of volunteer usage in these kinds of spaces. I've certainly long thought the issue of "free labor" (be it via helper programs, content producers, or unpaid testers) remains one of most underexplored - but critically important - aspects facing games (and online communities more generally). So, is there anything new we can learn from this apparent settlement? Are there interesting related stories emerging in other places worth discussing? Are there good non-VE/game spaces who confront this same problem that we can learn something from?

(Thanks btw to Scott, Julian, and Dan's leads for this entry.)

Holy virtual congregation

Mainstream religion is starting to embrace virtual worlds. The BBC is reporting that the UK Christian site Ship of Fools (note due to /. effect they have an alternate home page) is launching Church of Fools “the world's first 3D internet church is going to be virtually unique”. Meanwhile the Diocese of Oxford has i-church and is looking for a “web pastor”.

Holy hanging chads (allegedly)

Over in Alphaville the votes are in and winner is announced. Mr-President won the Alphaville Government Presidential Elections with 53% of the vote.

However the loosing candidate Laura McKnight aka Ahsley Richardson is alleging election irregularities. The Alphaville Herald is also raising questions about the whole process, all the way back to the primaries.

.. and electronic voting is supposed to stop questions about rigged elections - right?

Update 20/04/04: Peter Ludlow aka Urizenus of The Alphaville Herald has broken out of character and written this piece exposing the what is looking like real story behind the election.

Duck DNA

From the point of view of designers and developers of virtual worlds, one of the most unnerving points raised at the State of Play conference last year was that their views concerning virtual property might be irrelevant. As our own Dan Hunter described it, a judge might easily apply the "If it looks like a duck" argument to rule that virtual property is just another example of real property and should be treated as such.

I was wondering just how far this argument could be taken, though.

Journalist Earns Significant Salary Trading Virtual Goods

Julian Dibbell reports that his year-long experiment in virtual item trading from the fantasy world of Ultima Online netted him, in its final month, a tidy profit of $3,917. Over the course of a year, that would be $47,000. The self-imposed challenge here was to beat his best-ever earnings as a writer, but that's not the only benchmark one could apply. Consider the following:

GDP per capita in both China and India: Below $700
Average earnings of short-order cooks: $17,000
US poverty line for a family of 4: $18,400
Average earnings of dancers: $27,000
Average earnings of drug abuse counselors: $32,000
Average earnings of firefighters: $38,000
Average earnings of museum curators: $40,000
Average earnings of secondary school teachers: $46,000
Trader Dibbell: $47,000
Average earnings of insurance salesmen: $54,000
Average earnings of computer programmers: $63,000
Average earnings of economists: $76,000
Average earnings of lawyers: $108,000

Earnings data from BLS.

In short, Play Money has proven conclusively that virtual item trading is a viable occupation.

Congratulations, Julian. [applauds]

Virtual Item Sales Appear in IM Services

The Wall Street Journal (no link, subscription required) reported on March 22 (p. R4) that avatar and virtual item markets are springing up in Asia, but not in the usual places. Games are mentioned in the report, sure. But it seems that avatars are viewed more as personalized ID cards for instant messaging and chat room services than as gaming vehicles. The article mentions There.com not as a spinoff from games, but from SMS: a chat room with pictures.

But whatever the deployment, the interesting thing about the avatars is the secondary market they create for virtual items. If you're going to show a face and body in an IM system, why not give yourself a killer style too? And style, as we all know, costs money.

Excerpts follow. Thanks to my brother, Tom, for the note.

Making Movies?

The NY Times recently described a Hollywood increasingly fascinated with Video Games as a less expensive alternative to movies-as-entertainment (Out of Hollywood, Rising Fascination With Video Games). True, Ludology.org (April 12) questions whether movie moguls know how to make games. Nonetheless, there could be another angle here: on the front page of the April 9th Wall Street Journal (see: When Art Imitates Videogames, You Have 'Red vs. Blue') we discover Red and Blue is profitably making short internet movies based within Halo. Games as movie production platforms? What next, Virtual Worlds as movie studios? Casts of thousands?

Plausible deniability

IGE has been the subject of quite a deal of comment and speculation of late. Not only did Dan Terdiman run a longish piece on them in Wired (noting that IGE has passed 100 employees), but they also threw a bash at the 5th EQ Fanfaire. Since IGE are loathed by the hardcore roleplayers who hang out at fan faires it amazing that they got out of there alive (Brian Whitener alerted us to the comments on the meeting by the die-hard roleplayers over at Erollisimarr. Apart from nicknaming their CEO "Doogie Howser" IGE came out of it amazingly well. And it has to be said that CEO Brock Pierce is insanely young and even younger looking -- something that can't be said of all former child stars.)

Free Play

While avoiding working on my Yale and NYLS presentations, I came across a nice article on Reason Online called Free Play: the Politics of the Video Game by Kevin Parker. While probably a review for many of the Terra Nova regulars, Parker does a nice job of covering the history of video games in the context of how free the player is to make his or her own choices during gameplay before moving on to discuss games as a platform for ideologies, touching on economic and other freedoms, and finally reaching a conclusion that many of us would cheer:

Comics theoretician Scott McCloud has asked if gaming can "‘rewire’ us in some way," and journalist Steven Poole has concluded that games are "rewiring our minds." If so, they just might be pushing us toward individualism, encouraging us to resist both authors and authoritarians. Stories do fulfill a distinct need, and computer games are unlikely to break completely from them. For those so inclined, it will always be possible to glue a dramatic collectivist veneer over a rigged simulation. ... [B]ut this facade warrants little worry. It may take some ingenuity, but free minds eventually break through fake dungeon walls to explore their potential and live their own stories.

Experimental Politics

I recently came across a great political/economic article about virtual worlds written by R. Max Borders and Douglas Bryan, "Experimental Politics: Ways of Virtual Worldmaking." It came out in 2001 and the authors have clearly drunk the Metaverse Kool-Aid. Here's the conclusion:

To sum up, the aim of this paper is to propose, with some justification, a tripartite methodology for using Online Societies as simulation in applied political economy. The first stage set the context of theoretical investigations ueberhaupt, while simultaneously justifying the very multidisciplinary and recursive nature of the enterprise. The second stage showed how certain kinds of rule sets could produce spontaneous orders, exhibiting organic unity, in actual and online societies. The third stage culminated in a distilled set of guidelines for the production of rule sets. The guidelines appeal to more elaborate theoretical considerations, namely, the convergence of moral theory and rational choice theory.

It is a densely written article and is best read slowly. In it, I can see echoes of arguments made by Bradley & Froomkin (re experimental potentials), Chris Crawford (re problems of simulation), and Raph Koster (re structuring online society). I'm actually not much in agreement with the take-away of a "New Lockean Proviso," although it does seem similar to what Dan and I were arguing at the State of Play about griefing behavior. My hesitation is that the rules model proposed by the authors is grounded on an apparent conviction that virtual worlds are simply next-generation social welfare platforms, so the rules "problems" can be solved by conventional political/economic theory. But if you see virtual worlds as expressive and aesthetic game-media, the rules might need to be framed differently. I think the scientific/artistic approach differences are approximately captured in the diagrams in this paper by Michael Mateas -- which is also from 2001 and really worth reading.

Ted and Julian on NPR

From the Talk of the Nation website:

The candidates are picked. The campaigns are under way. The presidential election is set for this weekend... in Alphaville. Over 1,000 strong, Alphaville is a thriving online community -- with issues. We provide a guide to virtual politics and economics.

This is in the second hour, so it should begin at noon PDT. NPR's site also says that the audio should be up by 3pm. Remember to email in your hardest questions!

eBay Sales Rise 9% in Q1 2004

Total sales in eBay category 1654 ('Internet Games,' listing virtual item sales) last quarter were $5.85 million. Also of note:
- The raw number of completed auctions was about 35,000 in a typical two-week period last summer. Now, it's about 65,000.
- eBay now lists 'Video Games' as a major category on its main 'Browse eBay' page.

Complete data here.

Werewolves of London?

There is a new Japanese Location-based phone game Mogi. It has already been Slashdotted; it has also now entered the web social architecture discussion circuit.

What's in a Shard?

For years, and with few exceptions, the massive populations of massively multiplayer games have been divided into many not-so-massive subpopulations, each existing in its own parallel version of the game's reality, none in communication with any other. Last week, though, there was news on two fronts suggesting that the venerable one-world-many-shards model may be showing its age.

One sign of things to come: Origin's announcement of relatively cheap cross-shard character transfer in its classic MMORPG Ultima Online, punching holes in the walls that have divided server populations there for years. Sony already offers this with EverQuest, of course, but at three or four times the price. And there was the interesting coincidence that Sun announced, at the same time, a new game-server technology that promises to end technical obstacles to hosting hundreds of thousands of players in a single world. (OK, props to the folks at Butterfly.net and Second Life who are already on that case too; but a news peg is a news peg, even if it is a week late.)

Are shards on their way out? And if so, will we miss them?

One thing I've already noticed with UO's new service is that the shard economics are homogenizing quickly. So much for MMORPGs as a researcher's utopia -- no more parallel worlds to watch for interesting divergences in.

Of course, there may be less to this story than there seems. At last year's E3 I was assured by some of the eldest statesmen in MMOGdom that the shard phenomenon has little to do with technical limitations and much to do with the cost of content creation, which rises quickly on a per-player basis as the number of shards goes down. One elder got sociological on me too, suggesting that communities larger than 10,000 aren't really communities anyway, so that the benefits of uniting the shards don't tend to outweigh the drawbacks. Can you guess who that was?

User Created April Fools

While the SL developers changed our message of the day to pull comments from our Bugzilla quip file -- creating such MOTDs as "On a clear drive you can seek forever" and "The fact that this ever worked at all is astounding..." -- but we were soundly thumped by our users, who created an amazingly elaborate prank. It started with this forum post and website that introduced Second Life to "Direct Game Marketing." Absolutely brilliant stuff, although in classic April Fools fashion, it had a lot of folks convinced that it wasn't a joke and the protests had already begun :-)!

The forum post got things rolling:

Hello Lifers!

My name is Donovan Lonsway, I'm the CEO at Direct Game Marketing , a new company dedicated to exploring corporate media in "Virtual Worlds".

Violent games, violent kids: The evidence

The American Psychological Society is currently getting a bunch of coverage for the latest report from Craig A. Anderson et al. The APSs summary of the report, The Influence of Media Violence on Youth, says it all:

Research on violent television and films, video games, and music reveals unequivocal evidence that media violence increases the likelihood of aggressive and violent behavior in both immediate and long-term contexts.

As this is official I guess we can put the media effects debate to bed now.

April Fool's Shenanigans

Blizzard's two-headed ogres were a joke, as was my riff on them. But the best gag of the day was from eGenesis and A Tale in the Desert...

Announcement: May 21 event at the ITU

Hi everyone. Just wanted to post an announcement for a symposium - Community Work: Managing Multiplayer Culture - we are hosting here at the Center on May 21. We'll be having a day-long event on the subject of community management in games and are incredibly lucky to have a terrific panel of speakers - Richard Bartle, Edward Castronova, Julian Dibbell, and Jessica Mulligan. The full details and program can be found at the website. Registration is free but required by May 14.

I'll also just note quickly the symposium dovetails as the third day of a PhD course here, Game Culture (details also online) which runs May 19-21. Jessica Mulligan will be a guest speaker on day two of that as well. Applications for the course are due by April 19. Feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions!

Multi-User Avatars: MMORPG Economies May Soon Exceed Entire US GDP

World of Warcraft has just announced a new player race: two-headed ogres (thanks Slashdot and MMORPGDot). The official info page indicates that two players will cooperate in running the avatar. There's probably a precedent of this within text-based MUDs, but with the scale of current graphical worlds, these shared-ownership avatars create a very interesting and potentially extremely lucrative value proposition.

Graphics Shmaphics

Replace the text of a MUD by graphics and you get virtual worlds that look like first-person shooters.

Replace the pictures of a first-person shooter by text and you get IF Quake.

If only it hadn't been released April 1st...

Dmitri takes games 'very seriously'

Shame on you if you have not read at least some of Dmitri Williams’s phd dissertation Trouble in River City: The Social Life of Video Games (note 11MB!) or the rather shorter The Video Game Lightning Rod: Constructions of a New Media Technology, 1970-2000.

But you’re in luck. This week Dmitri was interviewed on Michigan Radio’s State Side program. It’s a great interview where Dmitri talks about the social role and effects of video games and will be of interest to anyone that wants to take the subject ‘very seriously’ i.e. his comments are balanced and research based. The interview is here (requires Real).