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"?
Personally, I'd like to see what researchers in History and Politics would make of virtual worlds. I also think that anthropologists should be more interested than they currently seem to be.
What do you think? And how should we go about letting these people know what they're missing?
Richard
One area I've always been curious about is how virtual environments may be of benefit to people with physical disabilities, in so far as offering a respite from their daily challenges and difficulties.
The combination of customisable "perfect-body" avatars and the immersion offered by virtual worlds would seem to offer an alternate experience for people unable to engage in activities taken for granted by most healthy, active adults. For the deaf community especially, virtual environments would seem to offer a social space based entirely on visual communication, with no auditory component involved whatsoever.
For many of these people, it could provide an experience where their disabilities become insignificant for a time, where they can run, play, communicate and socialise without prejudice or impairment.
Posted by: Darren Twomey | Jun 13, 2004 at 15:04
Darren Twomey > One area I've always been curious about is how virtual environments may be of benefit to people with physical disabilities, in so far as offering a respite from their daily challenges and difficulties.
FYI – there are a number of studies going on in this area but so far I have not seen any published research specifically on games. I’d be interested to know of any papers that are already out there.
>The combination of customisable "perfect-body" avatars
Yeh, talk about body-fascism there certainly seems to be avatar-fascism in the VWs I hang out in. Just about all avatars seem to be mid-twenties and athletic, its amazing how very strong this norm is.
This really struck me last night when I was hanging in 2L, where fetish influenced fashion seems to be a norm (not that that’s a bad thing in and of it self), I was thinking that maybe I should turn my avatar into an old homeless person (as I am homeless there) to see what happens
Spare any L$ guv?
Posted by: ren | Jun 14, 2004 at 03:41
Well, there must be some wind left in the sails of virtual economics, right? Ted, you're not running out of projects are you? Maybe some universities could be persuaded to foot the bill for a MMORPG solely aimed at testing supply-side economics, or any other worthwhile theory. Any remote chance of something like that?
I'd imagine sociologists being rather interested. We've been discussing the possibility of a completely virtual future; the sociological impacts of that would be tremendous (though I suppose every impact of that would probably be tremendous, heh).
Posted by: Tek | Jun 14, 2004 at 04:08
In particular, I think anthropologists are missing out. A lot of what is discussed in TN ties back into anthropology and related subjects. Let's also not forget the psychology angle. In as much as TN has discussed VWs as potential test-beds for various subjects, they are a virtual (forgive the pun) breeding ground for psychology-related endeavors.
Despite this fertility, I don't anticipate VWs being taken seriously by the or an academic community at large for a while. Until we can dispel the notion that these are "merely games," they won't hit mainstream academia. Nonetheless, due to the efforts of all the authors here at TN (and those not yet here), VWs are gaining more credibility and respect as a subject of serious inquiry.
As for how we should involve these disciplines, IMO it will necessitate a strong academic from the respective field who "go[es] where no man has gone before" and pioneers the study. In the absence of a bold initiative, I'm not sure what "we" could do. (Other than beating them over the head with it until someone relents and realizes what they can do with VWs.)
Posted by: Alan Stern | Jun 14, 2004 at 09:18
Darren Twomey>For many of these people, it could provide an experience where their disabilities become insignificant for a time, where they can run, play, communicate and socialise without prejudice or impairment.
The sentiment is good, but you have to be wary of seeming patronising. By saying that characters in virtual worlds don't have the "disabilities" that some people have in RL, you're implicitly saying that people who don't have the disability are superior to those who do have it. Someone who is disabled might object to that, pointing out that there are plenty of people with that "disability" in RL who have rich and fulfilling lives and giving the whole "differently abled" spiel. They may even have a gameplay case for saying that it should be possible to create characters with a disadvantage in one area if that means they get an advantage somewhere else to compensate.
I do appreciate that there are some people for whom their disability is so much a part of their sense of identity that they reject "cures" offered them on the grounds that they have nothing wrong with them. Personally, though, I've encountered too many disabled people who have been liberated by virtual worlds to go along with this argument, so I'm basically on your side there.
I don't know what the situation is in the USA, but I suspect that in the UK most people working with (say) the deaf are doing so for non-profit organisations, and while they may be interested in possible therapeutic uses of virtual worlds they're not going to be able to afford to create them on their own just yet. It may be that charity by a developer is the way to go, then.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 14, 2004 at 09:40
Tek>I'd imagine sociologists being rather interested. We've been discussing the possibility of a completely virtual future; the sociological impacts of that would be tremendous
The sociological effects on real society of people spending a lot of time in virtual worlds are certainly going to become important in time (although perhaps not in my lifetime). I'm less sure about the sociology of players within individual virtual worlds, though - to be interesting to sociologists they would have to have many more players per instance than they currently do.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 14, 2004 at 09:45
Alan Stern>Let's also not forget the psychology angle
If it's at the level of some of the understanding reported by Constance at the American Psychiatric Association, perhaps we should?
Seriously, though, we've been "done" by psychologists studying addiction and identity already, albeit not in much detail. Are there any other aspects of psychology from which it would be nice for us to get some feedback?
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 14, 2004 at 09:50
Alan Stern>Despite this fertility, I don't anticipate VWs being taken seriously by the or an academic community at large for a while.
If only academics were as keen to look at virtual worlds as some other industries...
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 14, 2004 at 09:55
Alan -
I'm just a few months away from beginning fieldwork in two contrasting MMOGs. Hang in there - the anthropologists are on their way! -Rex
Posted by: Alex | Jun 14, 2004 at 10:07
Alex, good luck on the dissertation! I eagerly await your VW installment.
Richard, as for the psychologists, I'm honestly not sure what specific aspects psychologists would want to study in relation to VWs. I just can't imagine that they must be limited to addiction and identity.
Also, that's a rather interesting Wired article. (Brand new, too.) Of course that probably won't help VWs gain credibility. Maybe the psychologists will use the Red Light World to further study addiction and identity?
Posted by: Alan Stern | Jun 14, 2004 at 10:30
I think there are quite a few more practical applications in say: construction, real estate, urban planning, etc.
Imagine for a moment, a virtual Chicago -- combining the water, sewer, subway and electrical systems; postal, judicial, PD/FD and voting districts -- complete with intersection-camera-updated virtual traffic flow. Buildings could contain full blueprints (on city file), complete with fire exits, tenant lists, zoning information, building materials (asbestos, lead-based paint), and so forth.
Additionally there could be a 'potential Chicago' that could be used to model new construction. 'potential Chicago' could be complete with NPC citizens who could be scaled up and down in quantity to test new highway spurs, new mass transit effectiveness, etc.
Defining a new new construction site in potential Chicago would immediately make obvious where digs could run into existing telecom, water, sewer, etc lines.
Layers of information could easily be password protected, granting users variable levels of 'sight' within the world. E.g. certain access might be required to see blueprints, while basic access allows only postal information.
Construction and Real Estate in general might benefit from such a space, as might Deconstruction (controlled demolition) -- so that the larger impacts of their designs might be visually seen. E.g. How parking design affects traffic flow, how tree maturation will obscure signs and signals, how a different traffic light timing algorithm might help/hinder traffic flow, etc.
Further, a single world to model construction within is easier to maintain physical consistancy for. Having a world stocked with simulation material, in addition to the traditional mathematical testing of various forces would be quite helpful. I'd think it'd be pretty handy to be able to just 'drop in' the fertilizer truck-bomb and see how a design performs and that how it interacts with its neighbors, subway lines, retaining walls, etc.
As for drawing in the audience, it would probably take a a partially realized world created by a developer going out on a limb - and a forward-thinking city office to take up partnership to see it through to 'mostly realized'. The city could leverage coherence of its data for its own benefit, and different contractors would be drawn in as they had dealings with the city, and pilot world, in question.
But I think it'd almost certainly have to be a "Build it, and they will come" scenario. Without producing a world that caters to their needs specifically, I think generating interest would be difficult.
Posted by: weasel | Jun 14, 2004 at 10:52
Rather than being so specific, I really was thinking broadly in terms of virtual environments as therapy for those who need it. In particular, their use as a tool in Rehabilitation Psychology. If the goal is to "help people affected by a disability succeed in reclaiming their sense of belonging, of contribution, of value, and of meaningful participation in the world", then I wonder if time spent interacting in a virtual world would be of benefit or harm? Would it act as a stepping stone towards real-world acclimation, simply offer a break from their rehab, or take a patient backwards by escaping from the realities of their disability?
Posted by: Darren Twomey | Jun 14, 2004 at 11:58
Why try to pick and choose who should be invited?
A "deep" VW would be heavily if not exclusively populated by avatars of human beings. As these would express much of the rich diversity of intellectual, social, artistic, educational, cultural, economic, and other types of behavior of which humans are capable, *every* field related to the study of the human condition should be welcomed.
A deep VW that allows players to express a wide range of interesting behaviors will attract researchers from a wide range of fields. In turn, the observations and interactions from these researchers should suggest where to further extend the palette of possible behaviors in VWs.
The hard part, of course, is creating that first truly complex and massively popular VW from which all others wind up being bootstrapped....
Posted by: Flatfingers | Jun 14, 2004 at 12:39
To me the most interesting are social and political studies of emergent societies and self-governance. Besides these often mentioned topics, I think linguists should be interested in the creation and evolution of dialects as witnessed in VWs.
Posted by: Staarkhand | Jun 14, 2004 at 13:05
I see with interest that Virtual Worlds are gathering the interest of other disciplines too (for example Historians and Biologists: Emergence in Persistent World Massively-Multiplayer Computer Games
from the pilot project description:
"..The question of whether the game itself or the prior instincts and desires of the players are producing particular kinds of persistent structures within these gameworlds is often difficult to answer. In this module, we will continue ongoing projects of ethnographic participant-observation of several MMOGs, seeking to better understand the extent to which participants impute the properties of agency/purpose/contingency to game elements and if so, why...")
What I miss at this stage is a central location where it would be possible to access the results of the different studies in this field, may it be a Journal, an association, conference etc.
It looks like a lot of academic works are starting about the topic but with the absence of knowledge sharing and transfer through the results of the different studies, it is difficult to make significant steps forwards.
Posted by: Luca Girardo | Jun 14, 2004 at 13:14
VWs in Education and training, IMO, will become critical in taking elearning to the next tier.
To borrow from Prensky, students today are digital natives, who need the interactivity and flexibility in their learning environments. The current LMS/CMS paradigm is dying a rapid death in higher ed, and as the students make their way to the workforce, the same thing is going to happen there. Most of my research focuses on connecting the characteristics of digital natives to the characterstics of good games, then pulling in the characteristics of the ideal online learning space = virtual learning worlds. These are the ideal VWs for teaching the current, and particularly the next, generation of students. (VLW white paper nearly done and I'll try and get that posted here somewhere if folks are interested).
Posted by: Bart | Jun 14, 2004 at 16:28
There is also a massive marketing opportunity for realistic virtual worlds. Companies pay fortunes for metrics on how people think, act, and feel because they can use that information to best market a product.
If a VW can effectively simulate and present those results, there would be no problem in finding clients to buy that sort of information.
Posted by: Will Leverett | Jun 14, 2004 at 17:03
Bart>VLW white paper nearly done and I'll try and get that posted here somewhere if folks are interested
I am - let us know when it's available!
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 15, 2004 at 03:11
Darren Twomey>I really was thinking broadly in terms of virtual environments as therapy for those who need it. In particular, their use as a tool in Rehabilitation Psychology.
Virtual worlds have been used successfully for this kind of thing since the early 1990s. Unfortunately, they don't get a lot of publicity because of the nature of what goes on in them (the JennyMUSH "Daddy" incident touches on this). This means that few psychiatrists know about the potential benefits of virtual worlds for rehabilitation or other therapy, and practically none of their patients do.
You're right, it's an area that should be explored much more extensively than it has been at the moment.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 15, 2004 at 03:29
Richard>The sociological effects on real society of people spending a lot of time in virtual worlds are certainly going to become important in time...
I imagine 30-40 years or so should do the trick--once the crest of the wave becomes ~60 years old. Then, VWs will likely become the favored method of connecting across age and space. Throw away the checker board, you and your grandpa can go fight together for the Rebellion in SWG: An Empire Redivided. Also, using VWs as places for distant friends/relatives to meet seems to be an accelerating trend.
Richard>I'm less sure about the sociology of players within individual virtual worlds, though - to be interesting to sociologists they would have to have many more players per instance than they currently do.
Hmm, how far are we from virtual shopping? It's the next logical step after online shopping, right? You get to shop in groups (a big hit with the teen girl crowd), store employees can be logged in to provide assistance, you can try clothes out on your avatar, talk to other shoppers who are considering similar products.
So, the Virtual Mega-Mall could have sufficient "players" to bring out the sociology we're looking for.
Posted by: Tek | Jun 15, 2004 at 04:31
Darren Twomey: "I've always been curious about is how virtual environments may be of benefit to people with physical disabilities"
------------
In my guild we have a large number of disabled people playing. Especially for deaf people, online worlds where all communication is done through text messages, seems to hold a nice distraction from everyday life where communication is more difficult.
In general there can be more unemployed and people who can't work encountered in RPG's, then in everyday life, because of all the free time they have. RPG's provide a enjoyable way to spend time.
Posted by: Dyna18 | Jun 15, 2004 at 07:18
Darren Twomey: "I've always been curious about is how virtual environments may be of benefit to people with physical disabilities"
------------
In my guild we have a large number of disabled people playing. Especially for deaf people, online worlds where all communication is done through text messages, seems to hold a nice distraction from everyday life where communication is more difficult.
In general there can be more unemployed and people who can't work encountered in RPG's, then in everyday life, because of all the free time they have. RPG's provide a enjoyable way to spend time.
Posted by: Dyna18 | Jun 15, 2004 at 07:25
First of all we have to realize that virtual worlds are NOT perfect simulations of the real world. So sciences are simply not necessary in virtual space, for example medicine. There are no ill people in virtual worlds.
Other sciences are useful, but have to watch out for the fundamental differences between real and virtual world. Economics is a good example here. Basic economic laws like supply and demand, or price curves, still work in virtual worlds where trading is enabled. But wealth creation in virtual worlds is fundamentally different from wealth creation in the real world, as you are getting paid for an activity (monster slaying) that has no economic benefit for anybody else.
The sciences most at home in virtual worlds are the ones studying human behavior. There are some added factors, like the effect of internet anonymity, but basically a player is the same as a real world human regarding sociology and psychology.
Posted by: Tobold | Jun 15, 2004 at 10:45
Tek>Throw away the checker board, you and your grandpa can go fight together for the Rebellion in SWG: An Empire Redivided.
I don't think we'll have to wait quite that long. My nephew has already taken advantage of DAoC to spend time with his maternal grandmother (4 states away). 'Used' in the past tense, as they mutually drifted away from DAoCs gameplay after 6 months or so. And yes, it was odd hearing him talk about how he and his grandmother manned the ramparts of Caer Benowyc to help foil a Mid attack.
Granted they're both pretty savvy for their respective ages, 12 and ~60, and my brother and I are shameless cheerleaders for the genre - but I think 40 years is a touch pessimistic.
If we broaden the focus to 'virtual worlds' outside of game-like worlds -- my nieces in Hawaii regularly chat with even their pseudo-luddite maternal grandmother over ICQ. And I can't believe that is very rare anymore.
It's just a matter of adding visuals, and allowing a little customization of the virtual chat space until the blurred boundary between an ICQ chat session and more traditionally regarded VWs disappears.
Posted by: weasel | Jun 15, 2004 at 12:28
Tobold> "sciences are simply not necessary in virtual space ... have to watch out for the fundamental differences between real and virtual world ... The sciences most at home in virtual worlds are the ones studying human behavior."
"The proper study of Mankind is Man." -- A. Pope
I said something similar in my earlier comments; the most rewarding areas for investigation by mainstream academics in the near-term future will be those studying activities driven by human nature. But shouldn't we also examine the limits of what's currently not possible in VWs? Just because the current "laws of physics" within today's VWs are too limited to allow natural science and capital formation now doesn't mean we shouldn't seek to open up those fields, does it?
Natural science is problematic in VWs because it's a study of the natural world... but there's nothing "natural" about a VW! What is the value of discovering the physical laws of the universe when all those laws must be imagined, selected, designed, coded, and tested by the developers of that VW? If the developer has already set the rules, what's the point of "discovering" them?
To ask an even more basic question, is natural science sufficiently worth doing to develop VWs that permit it? Is something worthwhile being lost by not building VWs that allow the inhabitants to practice natural science?
Is it even possible to develop a VW whose internal physical reality is so complete that it incorporates not only most of the physical constants that determine the form of a universe (e.g., electron charge and mass, Avogadro's number, Faraday constant, Reynold's number, Planck's constant, speed of light in vacuum, etc.), but also the processes that dictate the behavior of a universe (strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, gravity, fusion, fission, combustion, laminar flow, light, sound, heat, etc.)?
Suppose we could build VWs whose internal physics flowed from setting these constants. Must such VWs take their values for these constants from our own universe? What if there were a VW that could automatically build new "pocket universes" with unique physical laws generated based on the different values of these constants?
Wouldn't such a VW be interesting enough to allow its inhabitants to do natural science, and thus become places that are interesting to scientists generally?
Posted by: Flatfingers | Jun 15, 2004 at 13:09
In response to/ furtherance of Flatfinger's post - Don't scientists do similarly now? Perform experiments, measure and record results, construct a model to account for them. Couldn't VWs provide a helpful method in accomplishing the last?
Depending on the power of the system, its complexity and depth, VWs could potentially provide a rich interactive environment for testing new theories and seeing how the predicted behavior, as illustrated by the VW environment, correlates to the real world and observatons made thereof/ therefrom.
This is a similar argument as for the applicability of VWs to the study of law or economics. Use the VW as a testing ground (or "playground") to observe/predict behaviors and effects.
Posted by: Alan Stern | Jun 15, 2004 at 14:37
Alan>Couldn't VWs provide a helpful method in accomplishing the last?
I don't see how using any sort of VW would be more beneficial to natural scientists than using the simulations they currently have. The opposing quantities are accuracy and computer cycles. Generally, they only make their models complex enough to constrain outside error to a few percent, or else make them as accurate as possible as long as they take a reasonable amount of time to run the sim. So if
not accounting for gravity results in error of about 1/1000, it is probably not included.
In other words, the basic sciences seem to have already optimised their use of simulation.
Posted by: Tek | Jun 15, 2004 at 17:52
weasel>It's just a matter of adding visuals, and allowing a little customization of the virtual chat space until the blurred boundary between an ICQ chat session and more traditionally regarded VWs disappears.
There are plenty of virtual worlds out there that only use text, with no visuals at all (except those in the player's mind). Few features from these have found their way into ICQ (stuff like :laughs). ICQ and textual worlds remain quite distinct; why should we expect that a graphical ICQ would be any more virtual world-like than non-graphical ICQ?
Obviously I'd be pleased if a graphical ICQ did turn into some kind of virtual world, but what pressures would drive it to do that?
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 16, 2004 at 02:58
Richard>why should we expect that a graphical ICQ would be any more virtual world-like than non-graphical ICQ?
I'd say we should since it helps suspend disbelief. While MUD vets generally have no problems with it, most of the rest do (or at least think they do), as evidenced by the relative number of subs.
Posted by: Tek | Jun 16, 2004 at 05:35
Richard>There are plenty of virtual worlds out there that only use text, with no visuals at all (except those in the player's mind).
I came into the genre through MUDs and MOOs, I know. I suppose I just chose poor phrasing. I was simply talking about the features as they would most likely be implemented in a mass-market product. Surely it wouldn't need to be graphical -- but if it happened, it almost certainly would be (imo).
And while I can see the progression as plausible -sure, I don't see any particular pressure that makes it an eventuality.
If anything, it'll catch on as a gimmick. Someone merges something popular like The Sims with an ICQ plugin, allowing people to start a 'sims chat session' instead of a chat session. The host picks one of his Sims houses as the shared space for the given session, and there you go. Keep in mind I'm referring to real-time chat as opposed to just fire and forget instant messaging.
Each ICQ user joining the session would have their own configurable Avatar, and they would appear within the space as they joined. You could add scaling privilege levels for people interacting with the space if you'd like.
The chat visualization would likely be comic-style text bubble, optionally with proximity chat where your avatar must be near someone to hear what they're saying -- allowing a single chat to more gracefully diverge into two or more conversations.
If anything I think a tendency to favor self expression and body-language would kick start it - and the network effect would take off from there. Perhaps it could even draw in the chatroom crowd with persistent spaces. Of course, I sincerely doubt anyone could charge money for anything like this.
Posted by: weasel | Jun 16, 2004 at 09:17
The Sims Online is already pretty much like that, a graphical chat room. Most activities do not require a lot of attention, so you can chat while studying mechanics, or while body-building. I guess that is the defining feature of social virtual worlds, that the "game" elements do not distract too much from chatting.
MMORPG on the other hand usually require a players full attention during fights. There is chat before, after, and in between fights, but lots of that is centered on in-game issues like discussing tactics or where to hunt.
A sociologist watching the two different types of virtual worlds would find very different patterns of behavior.
Should vw have more realistic physics to make more science possible? I don't think so. Realism is an overrated concept. Most people would prefer playability over realism. If you were an architect in a virtual world, would you want to bother with statics, the effect of gravity? Or would you want to create something breathtakingly beautiful that defies the laws of gravity? (Note to French airport architects: Don't try this in the real world.)
Posted by: Tobold | Jun 16, 2004 at 10:34
weasel>If anything, it'll catch on as a gimmick
Yes, I tend to agree with you there.
>Of course, I sincerely doubt anyone could charge money for anything like this.
I agree with you there, too!
Perhaps what could happen is the following. Someone creates a graphical ICQ that allows people not only to communicate, and not only to create a 3D avatar, but also to create a 3D space that they can customise. The space, along with the avatar and the communication, is linked with that of the other members of the ICQ session. This graphical ICQ is made freely available - actively given away in fact - or made part of some monster developer's service (AOL, MSN, Yahoo, whoever). The money comes from interior design and avatar customisation (and the software to do this), plus consultancy services.
The key to this would be that it would be an open architecture, like the web, and people could do their own avatar and room creation if they wanted (as they can build their own web sites using HTML). The people who support and maintain the graphical ICQ software wouldn't be the only ones to benefit from it, but they'd have a permanent lead on everyone else.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 16, 2004 at 10:39
What is the essence of an MMO? Terrain, as Ted said in an earlier thread? Or "terrain abstracted" - a sense of place? Socialization required? What is the nature of the required socialization? Is the avatar all that critical?
I can remember playing a number of rather engrossing (for a while) web-based games a number of years ago involving very large numbers of players. While the numbers of players were typically very large, socialization was limited and it was asynchronous in design (e.g. messaging).
The key element to their success was "strategy in 15 minutes, once a day". You'd spend the rest of the day plotting your next move. Is this an MMO? I'm not sure. But on the other hand, some of these "worlds" would take quite a life on their own with a fair amount of diplomacy.
So, the interface was a little bit of text on a couple of HTML pages. The game interaction was manipulating a few numbers and deciding how to deal with your pesky neighbors. Socialization was email based. The world was imaginary. An MMO?
If it isn't - what is missing. If it is, what is core.
Posted by: Nathan Combs | Jun 16, 2004 at 11:42
Tobold>The Sims Online is already pretty much like that, a graphical chat room.
But EA charges a monthly fee, players must sort through the 'game' systems to earn enough money to customize their space, and the technical specifications are still slightly beyond mass market system specs. Also, I'm primarily using The Sims as a reference to the level of customization and accessibility I had in mind. There wouldn't be any WASD, character screens, race/class selection or meta gaming -- heck, there wouldn't even be a 'game' in such shared spaces. There'd be avatar customization, space customization and textual/emote interaction.
There'd be no requirement for persistence, and no monthly fee from the technology provider.
Richard>money comes from interior design and avatar customisation (and the software to do this), plus consultancy services.
I thought about that as I was typing my reply...charging for 'designer' objects, spaces, tools, etc. But making it 'open' (like HTTP/HTML)pretty much guarantees that the first-mover or service provider won't be the one who profits off any paid design that might happen. Maybe someone like AOL with a fairly locked-in userbase could manage something like that - with for-pay toolkits and such. But the first-mover who establishes such a trend really couldn't afford to restrict access to customization.
Also, I don't think someone big like Yahoo, AOL or Microsoft would sink money into something like this until well after it becomes an established indie trend. That's why I figured a 3rd party thing, with a link to something already wildly popular, with known file formats, and fairly mature customization tools (The Sims) would be a natural technological base for a small group to kick off from.
Again, not a necessary launching point per se, but a reasonable one to my mind.
Posted by: weasel | Jun 16, 2004 at 12:46
Tobold> "Should vw have more realistic physics to make more science possible? I don't think so. Realism is an overrated concept. Most people would prefer playability over realism."
While as a newcomer here I hesitate to dispute with a veteran, I think the notion of being able to do science in a VW is worth a little more support.
I wasn't suggesting that realism (in a physics sense or any other) should be a goal of VW design. The point of designing a VW that can offer complex physical environments is not to build a simulation or model of our reality, but to allow VWs to have a physical environment that's complex enough to offer the people inside the VW the opportunity to explore that world and discover its operational principles.
Designing VWs with complex physical systems is primarily to create interesting worlds for people to enjoy, and only secondarily about making these worlds interesting to mainstream researchers.
Tobold> "If you were an architect in a virtual world, would you want to bother with statics, the effect of gravity? Or would you want to create something breathtakingly beautiful that defies the laws of gravity?"
To respond, I would have to ask: Why shouldn't VWs be complex (i.e., interesting) enough to give people those two options and more?
Posted by: Flatfingers | Jun 16, 2004 at 15:08
Well, getting back to my interest in the health-related aspects, I've since discovered the Virtual Reality Medical Center and now the 1st Annual Games For Health Conference, which includes some sessions on virtual environments. So it looks like coordinated research in this area is starting to take off.
Posted by: Darren Twomey | Jun 16, 2004 at 22:50
Flatfingers:
"but to allow VWs to have a physical environment that's complex enough to offer the people inside the VW the opportunity to explore that world and discover its operational principles."
Exactly.
To say Virtual Worlds can't involve studying physics seems odd to me. After all, people already study physics in Virtual Worlds.
Just because the damage formula for Magic Missile was set by a developer doesn't make it any less fit for inquiry than the acceleration due to gravity! Indeed, VW provide one of the few places where average people can do cutting edge research. You can be the first one to publicize how the Harm damage falls off with distance. You can discuss how the distance calculation seems to be manhattan rather than euclidean.
Indeed, without ever stepping out of character, you can roll dice a few thousand times to see if there is any correlation in the numbers produced.
So, I think VW can be fit places for scientific inquiry. They key is for developers to provide players with the ability to measure & log easily. Macro support would also be helpful (otherwise one needs the equivalent of grad students.). And, of course, the devloper has to avoid spoiling the game by broadcasting all their tables.
- Brask Mumei
Posted by: Brask Mumei | Jun 16, 2004 at 23:47
Tek: "Throw away the checker board, you and your grandpa can go fight together for the Rebellion in SWG: An Empire Redivided."
Why throwaway the checkboard?
I had great fun playing chess inside of Ultima Online.
- Brask Mumei
Posted by: Brask Mumei | Jun 16, 2004 at 23:49
Oh, I'm a great fan of exploration in virtual worlds. Depending on which version of the questionaire for a "Bartle Test" I use, I score between 70% and 80% for the explorer archetype.
Being a scientist in real life, I certainly apply scientific methods to explore hidden game rules, and it is certainly part of the fun to find out something.
But I wouldn't equal vw exploration with real science. Vw exploration is more like an easter egg hunt: Somebody (the devs) already knows the facts, and has hidden them on purpose, so you can search for them.
Engineering sciences in a vw are more likely to have sets of artificial boundaries, like a maximum number of lines of code you can use to code an item. Real world restraints, like gravity, might or might not be included. But I don't see virtual worlds ever having to bother with safety regulations or ISO 9000 quality procedures, because these real world restraints would not be fun to play with.
Posted by: Tobold | Jun 17, 2004 at 02:38
Tobold> "Somebody (the devs) already knows the facts, and has hidden them on purpose, so you can search for them."
So if God exists, and set up the physical laws, science would be less interesting?
The scientific method is based on the fundamental assumption that we live in a rational world. Crazy assumptions are made: "Things that happen once will happen again", "There will be a simple explanation to these phenemonen", "All effects are reproducible". There is no ground for these assumptions (other than the fact they've worked :>). In a VW, we know they are likely all true (except, of course, the physical laws tend to change over time.)
Tobold> "Engineering sciences in a vw are more likely to have sets of artificial boundaries, like a maximum number of lines of code you can use to code an item."
Occam's razor works because the same principle has proven effective with real world science. Gravity at the macro level is simpler than many combat mechanics I could think of.
Tobold: "But I don't see virtual worlds ever having to bother with safety regulations or ISO 9000 quality procedures, because these real world restraints would not be fun to play with."
Wasn't most of the world's science done prior to the creation of these? VW sciense is pure research without the bureacracy which has grown over the real equivalent.
The beauty of science in VW is not just that it is fun to reverse-engineer the VW, (Which is exactly what real world scientists do with the real world), but it provides a place for normal people to directly experience the scientific method. I think students would learn more from trying to figure out the behaviour of Magic Missile in a VW than trying to figure out G experimentally in the real world. We can't ever perform those experiments like the original experimenters did, for we already know the answers.
- Brask Mumei
Posted by: Brask Mumei | Jun 17, 2004 at 04:17
Nathan Combs>So, the interface was a little bit of text on a couple of HTML pages. The game interaction was manipulating a few numbers and deciding how to deal with your pesky neighbors. Socialization was email based. The world was imaginary. An MMO?
MMO yes; virtual world, no, because (among other things) you don't have a representation within the world through which you interact with other players' representation with the representations.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 17, 2004 at 04:21
weasel>But making it 'open' (like HTTP/HTML)pretty much guarantees that the first-mover or service provider won't be the one who profits off any paid design that might happen.
It might mean that other people make more money, but I don't think it means the first-mover would make none.
Perhaps we'll see something developed in academia first?
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 17, 2004 at 04:26
Brask has amplified my views nicely, so I won't belabor the point. But I can't resist a couple of minor addenda.
Tobold> "But I wouldn't equal vw exploration with real science. Vw exploration is more like an easter egg hunt: Somebody (the devs) already knows the facts, and has hidden them on purpose, so you can search for them."
This seems like a reasonable objection; in fact, I tried to address it in my original proposal by suggesting that VWs could be implemented to spawn "pocket universes" where the fundamental physical constants are randomly generated. The developers wouldn't know any more than the inhabitants what the physical rules of such a universe would be.
But it's also an unreasonable objection in a couple of ways.
1. Figuring out the constants that determine the rules of the universe is interesting, but they aren't the only subjects for natural scientific inquiry. In complex systems, the fundamental constants just set the basic rules; there are always numerous additional behaviors that emerge in such systems due to unpredictable interactions among the basic rules. "Doing science" isn't just about being able to say "X = 0.00194782" -- it's about exploring the myriad physical implications that are created when X and Y and X and twenty other key numbers are allowed to have implications that are realized in observable phenomena... such as the "physics" of a VW.
2. I think a fair case can be made that even in MMOGs where all the rules of physics are set in code, real science is being done. As a scientist yourself, you know that the heart of the process is simply forming testable (or, if you're a Popperian, falsifiable) hypotheses and then testing them. So when a crafter in Star Wars Galaxies suspects that the critical failure rate for item assembly is about 5 percent, crafts 1000 identical items with identical resources, and counts the number of critical failures, how is he not doing real science? The developers know perfectly well what the failure rate is because they explicitly coded it... but the knowledge that this is a "magic number" arbitrarily imposed by the developers hasn't stopped hundreds of players from engaging in this form of the exploration of the physics of their world.
So to sum up:
1. Science, like art and music and commerce and religion and politics and many other subjects, is worth having in VWs because intellectual exploration is an aspect of human nature that many people enjoy expressing. Science is no less worthy of supporting in VWs than making money or fighting or chatting. (Call it the 4C model: Commerce, Combat, Conversation, and Curiosity. If you see a relationship between these four activities and the four Bartle Types, well, that's not entirely accidental.)
2. Science is most fun when it investigates complex systems.
3. The physical rules of VWs built as "places" can allow for complexity by being composed of numerous simple internal rules that interact broadly, deeply, and repeatedly.
4. Therefore VWs, to allow the scientific impulse to be satisfied along with other impulses, should be designed with a sufficient level of "physical" complexity to allow ongoing exploration of the fundamental and emergent natural rules of that VW.
(At this point, do I even need to mention that I regularly wind up scoring around 100% Explorer on the various Bartle tests? Heh.)
Posted by: Flatfingers | Jun 17, 2004 at 12:41