Terra Nova

Muse of Fire

Emergence of content in game worlds is a hot topic, here and elsewhere. In an earlier Terra Nova discussion (A virtual world compiler?) John Arras posted a thoughtful and detailed reply. It is worth highlighting here, not only for the benefit of our RSS readers, but also for the provocative points it raises.

Count ‘em

In the Warhammer thread there is mention of the MMORPG Gold Rush. So I got to thinking: who is actually making really money out of all this - and how much?

While I was digging around for information I unearthed this gem: Earnings Release 1Q, 2004 NCsoft Corp. April 27, 2004 (pdf version or HTLM version via Google).

Like wow!

• You want to know the number of servers they run in China – you got it.
• You want to know the sales commission paid last quarter – you got it.

The headline figure is that (un-audited) pre-tax profit for the quarter was up 244% to 24 Billion Korean Won (which I make to be 16 million euro).

Anyone got similar data for other publishers?

What do you make of the numbers?

Games Masters

Frans Mäyrä of DiGRA and the University of Tampere Hypermedia Lab has just launched an interesting Master's Course in Digital Games Research and Design.

The course is distance learning based (no you have to go to Finland) and materials are provided by the likes of: Richard Bartle, Jessica Mulligan, Jesper Jull, Gonzalo Frasca, Espen Aarseth and Katie Salen – which is pretty much a top team of practitioner / theorists.

So if you fancy taking this stuff _really_ seriously check out the admissions details.

A Piece of Place

As I mentioned previously, I'm going to be presenting at the DCC04 workshop on Virtual Worlds. This audience provided an opportunity to move away from the legal and economic discussions and to focus on the role of place in Second Life. The paper is here.

In earlier papers I've talked about the use of economic motivations to provide context within a general, user-created world. This paper explores a different set of ideas, namely that factors that lead to a sense of place -- such as modeling on the real world, travel, land ownership and a constant influx of new land -- also provide a crucial context and motivator to creation and community formation.

Warhammer Online Cancelled

WO, a virtual world aimed at the powergamer set, was aborted this week. An analysis suggests that the graphics were not good enough, but also that the cost to finish, even after two years of development, was still $30 million. The financial bar seems to be rising.

Meanwhile, recognition seems to be setting in that the boom era of MMORPGs is over. Thanks MMORPGDot for these links.

Moral EULAs

For those who just get the RSS feed, there has been lots of buzz in the comment fields on virtual property issues lately: The "GOM Off-line" thread is up to 75 comments as of this post, with Jamie Hale participating, and Richard's post of his "Virtual Property Overview" is up to 41 comments, with lots of wild analogy-slinging. You know, it's almost starting to feel Slashdotty around here.

So in the spirit of comment field ascendancy, Barry Kearns, who commented quite a bit on both threads, has contributed the following discussion fodder regarding the value of blanket "morals clauses" in MMORPGs:

A virtual world compiler?

Jon Orwant's EGGG: Automated Programing for Game Generation (IBM Systems Journal) is about generating games from a high-level (abstract) language.   The cited paper is based on his dissertation (MIT, 1999). This is interesting work for many reasons; one aspect is that in order to design such a language, you need to worry about the features of games.

Star Maker

After taking the designs of Mrs Jones into the virtual world, RRR (via their Virtual World site SpaceThinkDream), are now travelling in the opposite direction with the launch of Future Fashion 04 – a competition to find new design talent in a virtual world and catapult them onto the physical catwalks of New York and London (let's hope they land a little more elegantly than you do when dropped from a great height in SL).

Categories are: Sports Wear, Evening Wear and Avant Garde – so sharpen you pixels.

Just in case anyone thinks there is a conspiracy – there is!

I’m one of the judges.

CFP: Playing with Mother Nature

Editors Sidney I. Dobrin, Cathlena Martin, and Laurie Taylor seek proposals for a new collection of original articles that address the use and place of space and ecology in video games. Full details here.

More Immersive Immersion

One of the risks of the term "virtual worlds" is that people tend to associate it with the discredited term "virtual reality." Well, maybe that bug will be a feature someday -- our friends at NASA say all that gloves and helmet stuff didn't come to fruition as quickly as we all hoped, but that we shouldn't feel free to write it off completely. Article here. (Caveat: Obligatory Matrix references to be found.)

Update: Maybe the glove isn't needed? (Thx Gonzalo!)

GOM Off-line

Gaming Open Market have just gone off line while they investigate a ‘fraud’.

MMO Sex please we’re Avatars

I guess if you are easily offended you really shouldn’t read on.

Virtual property overview

A white paper I wrote for Themis in April, The Pitfalls of Virtual Property, finally made it to their web site this week. It describes in lay terms some of the issues that commodification raises with regard to virtual worlds.

Terror Games

From the September 11 Commission: "In the fall of 1999, training for the attacks began. Hazmi, Mihdhar, Khallad and Abu Bara participated in an elite training course at the Mes Aynak camp in Afghanistan. Afterward, K.S.M. taught three of these operatives basic English words and phrases and showed them how to read a phone book, make travel reservations, use the Internet and encode communications. They also used flight simulator computer games..."

Emphasis added. Full text available through the New York Times (registration required). A virtual world implementation could only have made the training more effective.

Gaming on the MMOve

I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want – remote access to my favourite MMOs’ that’s what! And it looks like my wish is finally being granted.

The Next Wave

Virtual world research went in new and very interesting directions when law professors took an interest in it, from which we are still reaping the rewards.

If this can happen for Law, what else can it happen for? Researchers of which other academic disciplines ought to be interested in virtual worlds but as yet aren't? Are there any fields that you think would be of such benefit to virtual world specialists that we ought to "invite them in"?

Life on the Edge

After six months of feedback on my original whitepaper on why digital worlds and the real world need to be tightly linked, I've written a new article that focuses on the two most common discussions topics: the right to play and intellectual property (new paper here) Originally written for DCC04 Workshop on Virtual Worlds: Design and Research Directions, I ended up liking the paper but decided that it wasn't appropriate for the workshop. However, it dovetails nicely into the many TN discussions about these issues.

Not quite Camp David but...

At the ComWork symposium Julian introduced a catchy proposition. Juxtaposing an image of a group of some of the most prominent MMOG developers with that of the U.S. founding fathers he asked us to consider the similarities. Both groups operate(d) around questions of governance, normative behaviors, how to sustain vibrant communities... basic social contract questions. So I'm left to muse about what we might make of the recent "EverQuest Guild Summit." This past weekend Sony invited 60 guild members and community leaders (note: a lot of these were the hard-working people who produce all that "auxiliary" material like maps, item databases, and class helpers that makes EQ playable) to discuss a variety of matters related to the game and customer service. I remember when I first gave a talk about culture and ownership in EQ several people commented that Sony was so at the far end of things in terms of inattention to customers and "big hammer" solutions that it was almost unfair to see what was happening in the game as pointing to any significant issues we might generally face in the MMOG world. I disagree of course. EQ, like all games, circulate in a broader culture and work with, and through, all kinds of conventions (legal and otherwise). They may be extreme, but they do tell us something important. So here we are several years later and they are holding an intensive event soliciting player input on matters from game structure to service. It's probably no real surprise. EQ players have made some interesting attempts at group organizing (recall the Steel Warriors protest for example). The leap from communal action to "summit" is one we've seen before... offline.

Coming to a console near you!

[Ed: I'm posting this for Alan Stern, a regular TerraNova commentator and a law-type-person at U.Conn]

Over on Slashdot there's a story: Is The Xbox The Cause Of The PC Gamer's Downfall? While the article discusses "whether the Xbox has grabbed much of the development effort and talent from the PC gaming scene," the comments to the article raise an interesting question. Without a doubt, consoles, coupled with falling prices, a bevy of beautiful games and an ever-increasing load of developers, have helped make gaming (in general) a much more prevalent (and affordable) past-time. Throw in technology add-ons such as Xbox Live and the Playstation 2 Network Adapter and consoles start looking more and more viable.

Imperial Crackdown

At the recent SWG Fan Fest, Haden Blackman (LucasArts Producer of SWG) discussed SOE / LucasArts’ anti-eBay’ing strategy - but he wasn’t giving much away.

A virtual world by any other name?

What do you mean by a "virtual world"? While on the one hand, it is unlikely we can (or even want to) pigeon-hole our virtual world experiences and visions into neat (and irksome) boxes. But on the other hand, it is still useful to calibrate ourselves once in a while. So. What do you mean by a virtual world? What are the basic features you require of a "virtual world" to be one. To get the ball rolling, consider Richard Bartle's delphic words (Designing Virtual Worlds, New Riders Publishing, 2003).

What Have Online Games Done To Us?

"Us" meaning China in this case. This China Daily news story doesn't really answer the question posed by its headline, but it does highlight some of the recent examples of social problems with virtual property and addiction in Chinese MMORPGs. To wit:

On March 6, 2004, a 31-year-old Legend of Mir II addict literally dropped dead after playing the game non-stop for 20 hours in a Chengdu internet café. Soon after this tragedy, a Shanghai online game player suffered serious burns in an attempted self-immolation after the Shanda Customer Service Department expropriated his virtual equipment for The Legend of Mir II that he had bought from other players for 10,000 RMB [ed. approx. $1,200]. On April 11 the first case of online virtual currency fraud, to the tune of 15,000 RMB [ed. approx. $1,800], was exposed by Dalian police.

Interesting reading -- there is also some discussion of cheating, rogue servers, and a micro-history of VWs in China. Again, here's the link.

Everyone wants to be a Jedi

But that’s a problem. If everyone is a Jedi it just won’t be cool anymore - and just think about what will happen to the eBay prices.

SOE / Lucas Arts' way round this is the biggest buzz here at the SWG Fan Fest right now.

Virtual Real Estate Story Resonates

I would have let this go without posting on it, but the amount of pickup has been extraordinary. Reuters reported yesterday on Second Life's virtual real estate sales. It is a pretty good survey of the last few months as well good coverage of Gaming Open Market and comments from a SL land baron. It's been picked up by /., cnn.com, usatoday.com, msnbc.com and others. The concept of virtual real estate resonates with people in a really powerful way.

American Psychiatric Association Joins the Fray

A week or two ago (okay, confession: I am delinquent on blogging this), Kurt Squire & I participated in an 'issues workshop' at the annual conference of the American Psychiatric Association entitled 'OnlineVideogames: Psychopathological or Psychotherapeutic?' I was surprised to find that this was the first time the topic has been formally broached by APA clinical psychiatrists, especially given the amount of air time (and anxiety) given it by the industry (e.g., Damon Watson's session at GDC this year entitled 'Massively Excessive: Addiction or Irresponsibility?'). Either way, these folks may very well be the new face of the movement to 'medicalize' the issue of mmoging.

Here's a barebones (mildly editorialized) overview...

Nomic World: By the Players, For the Players

Clay Shirky, god of group interactions and social software, has posted an essay on governance in VWs/MMOGs that came from his presentation at the State of Play conference. In the paper he asks "What would happen if we wanted to build a world where we maximized the amount of user control? What would that look like?" It's a fascinating question, especially in light of the on-going control issues of game developers (compare Second Life's ceding of control to their users, with the crackdowns on eBaying that are in the news these days).

ComWork Pix

Gonzalo Frasca and Mirjam Eladhari have posted some great pictures from the Com Work symposium at ITU Copenhagen, where four of our Terra Novans presented and six attended. Link, link, link. Quite a fine, happy, healthy-looking bunch of 1337 VW 5ch0l4rz...

Ren's previous coverage here, here, here.

PvP and MMORPGs: is it timidity?

Are Player-versus-Player (PvP) MMORPGS more fun, do they make better business sense?   Recent TN discussions circle:  "Griefing (too much of a good thing?)", "NPCs (if they weren't so busy as rubbish...)", and even (obliquely): "Addiction (is avatar suicide brinksmanship just a perverse variant?)."  Discussion from earlier this year on Gamemethod frames the two schools of thought (pro and con) as follows.

Field trip to Avalon

With Fizik's permission I've posted screen shots from my recent tour of Avalon in Second Life.

The first three shots show the Mrs. Jones clothing gallery. An avid Mrs. Jones collection wearer was nice enough to model a few pieces for me. And yes, most of them would give the wearer very unusual tan lines in RL ;)

The remaining images relate to Avalon's artists in residence. They have living quarters and a sculpture garden with some interesting pieces. The most intriguing one is a cat surrounded by a flock of birds. It looks like a still sculpture, but Fizik told me it's actually a moving sculpture with an extremely slow motion setting. You can't see the sculpture moving but every time you come back it's progressed to a different position. The early 20th century Italian futurist movement lives on in 2L.

I didn't really get a shopping mall vibe from Avalon. The Mrs. Jones gallery was definitely commercial in the sense that there were logos and products prominently placed throughout, but it felt more like a funky SoHo boutique than your average American mall.