Terra Nova

The MMO Divide

I wonder the possibility of a misunderstanding that separates MMO players from everyone else - perhaps greater now than ever before.  Does the ubiquity of  video games and online (non-MMO) play  in our culture lead to facile analogies?  Are people quicker to extrapolate other media experiences into the MMO space without having actually "been there themselves" - is something is lost in translation?

Dead Monsters and Naked Emperors

I’m now doing much online catching up after a long trip, and Richard Bartle’s entry Fire in Their Bellies is the first place I landed. It's a nice provocation, and echoes some thoughts I had just before I took off about recent experiences playing games with my 3-year old, as well as my own frustrations with the current state of things in MMOGs.

Middle Where?

It was really interesting to see the BigWorld tech up close at the Austin Game Conference and be able to browse their source code and talk to one of their senior developers. I was very impressed (and I'm only slightly biased by its close philosophical resemblance to the tech I built for Warhammer). It was also great to hear that BigWorld have a number of customers. The impression I had of MMO middleware was that there were a number of good solutions, but that the market was small and that the majority of the big players were using proprietary solutions. That impression has been strengthened having talked to people from Sony and Turbine at Austin, from working on Warhammer and Dragon Empires and from looking in to commercialising MASSIVE-3 while at Nottingham University. So what is the future for MMO middleware? A thriving industry in which distributed systems experts sell unfamiliar technology to a grateful games industry or a long winter where middleware developers try to prove their tech by selling it at knockdown prices to aspiring indie developers?

Playing with an Accent

Wyatt Chang forwards a provocative theory about Role-Playing (RP) servers in MMORPGs. His premise is simple enough: Role-playing in MMORPG's is hard work and in the end you are likely to fail, at least to some degree:

Quite simply - players will be who they are in real life. You can pretend to be somebody that you're not for a while, maybe a few hours, maybe even a few days, but eventually your true personality will shine through...

SLU

Wired News' Daniel Terdiman has a story about university classes using Second Life. SL donates accounts and virtual land to universities and has had many classes in world since Alpha. UT Austin's Anne Beamish and Trinity Univesity's Aaron Delwiche are both featured in the article. Students have been responsible for some of SL's most interesting moments, including the group of UT Austin luddites who argued that flying was destroying the fabric of society and that everyone should walk instead!

Fire in their bellies

When Roy Trubshaw and I worked on MUD1, we saw it as a means of giving people freedom. For players, freedom to do and to be; for us, freedom to make our imaginations real (well, OK, virtual). Most of the early UK virtual worlds that followed had that same sense of idealism.

Yet I look at today's big hitters, and I wonder: what happened?

GOM hacked

Nate Combs alerted me to the following announcement from Jamie Hale, head of Gaming Open Market (the folks who provide a virtual currency market and transfer operation for Second Life, and who used to do it for lots of worlds):

--START EMAIL EXTRACT--
"Well, it happened again. Someone took advantage of us and we have another mess to clean up. Linden Lab noticed the problem early and stepped in and froze all the funds in Zeppi's account so that the fraudster couldn't make off with any. But of course, that prevented a few of you from getting your withdrawals. Rest assured your money (USD and L$) are safe - we just have to sift through the records to figure out who owes what to whom. If you have "lost" any L$ in the past day, please reply to this email with the details (time and avatar name) and I'll add it to the list to correct.

A Few Glorious Details

We've accumulated a record of "TN Sightings" here (Thanks, Bridget Agabra Goldstein!).   If you have additional comment on these photos or capture new evidence of these outrageous rogues in their native habitat,  send 'em on in to us.  We've started a TN index here.    One of the next steps is a categorization scheme.  If you have preferences, bring 'em up.

State of Play II Announcement

Just received the following from Beth Noveck, the organizer of the State of Play conference:

"The State of Play, an annual conference sponsored by New York Law School and Yale Law School, explores the next frontier in the evolution of cyberspace: virtual worlds.

Gamasutra MMOG Resource Guide

Gamasutra is running a week-long series of articles focused on MMOG development that began today. Cory has an article on taxation and land ownership in Second Life (coming out on Thursday), and I have an article coming out on Tuesday about the demographics of motivations, preferences and attrition.

TN Comments via RSS

Thanks to Christopher Allen of Skotos for giving us a recipe for syndicating our reader comments on TypePad. You can now subscribe to comments (XML) at: http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/comments.rdf.
To get our main feed, paste: http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/index.rdf into your newsreader.

If you're thinking "What the heck is a newsreader and why would I want one?" -- it's a way to keep track of your blogs on one page without a bunch of surfing and clicking. I'm using Feedreader, which is a *free* and open-sourced (GPL'd) option.

Project Massive: Reloaded

Slashdot has covered it, but we want to get the word out: Project Massive is one of the few sources we have for information about MMORPG users. They've got the results from one survey wave up and are looking for more. Take their wave 2 survey here.

Uniqueness in Virtual Worlds

A recent post (appended) in an Eve-Online forum suggests at least one person's balk at too much uniqueness in their virtual world.  How unique do you want your worlds to be?

Making (CoH) Movies

While not exactly a production studio within a Virtual World, City of Heroes is featuring its first ever Paragon City Film Festival:

Using game footage, animation, live action or whatever you can dream up, show us the city through the eyes of your hero or team. Take us on flights of daring; show us spectacular battles, heroic rescues or zany antics. Be the ultimate CoH film director by exhibiting your editing skills, creating your own exciting story, adding captions, music, voiceovers—be creative, for the sky is the limit... Film entries will be judged in two categories: Best Action and Best Comedy and each film submission can be no longer than 3 minutes long

The Shady Side

Peter Ludlow is in the news again. This time in the company of Will Wright in  Simulating life, love and the Universe (BBC Online)...  Will Wright is everywhere in the news these days, including in 'The Sims' goes bonkers (ZDNet Australia).  A common theme in the recent publicity is Will's fascination with the wild side...

What are they for?

What are Virtual Worlds for? There are Game Worlds and Social Worlds but even this simple categorisation is misleading to those not familiar with the genre - as game words can be just as social as social worlds.

I believe that we need to begin to use a much broader definition of VWs that see them along side the PC or the Internet. One way we should see VWs as a tool that has many uses.

What finally brought me to this conclusion was reading A Lever to Move the Mind by Hamlet Linden / Wagner James Au over on New World Notes; then experiencing The Virtual Hallucinations Building in SL. This is a fascinating project - part research, part experiential learning, part scary.

For me, one of the big futures for VWs is these alternative uses and it is going to be interesting to see where things go - will gaming in virtual worlds end up as minority VW activity?

Happy Birthday, Terra Nova

The birthday is a few days late, actually. The first posts here came on September 11, 2003. Since then, about one zillion brilliant posts have been written, and well over a gajillion insightful comments have been added to them. With figures like these, it's no wonder that by now we get more than a zillion gajillion hits on any given day.

On behalf of the founders, let me extend a thanks to everyone who makes the site work so well. Whoever you are. It certainly isn't us!

And in that spirit, we've decided to drop the distinction between moderators and authors - you may have noticed the change to the right sidebar. The founders will still be responsible for managing the site and the membership of the authoring group, but the track record of the side is that it doesn't need strong direction in terms of content.

Thanks again everyone (serious this time).

50K

CCP announced today that Eve Online crossed the 50k subscriber mark, sustaining  45% growth this year so far.   Impressive for an MMOG space opera characterized by bewitching graphics, PvP and piracy, all the cut-throat corporate melee you can desire, a brutal newbie treadmill (new meaning to rock grinding), and for those who play traders, all the spreadsheeting you can imagine.   In other words, while Eve may not be everyone's cup of tea, if you are a player, you still can't help but be impressed that there are 50K other like-minded folk out there...

Don't Mess With Texas

The 2nd Annual Austin Game Conference took place last week in Austin, Texas, and managed not to jump the shark. Located alongside the Women's Game Conference and a day after another great Breaking Into the Game Industry event, AGC2004 improved on the already well received AGC2003. Of particular note, Terra Nova's own Ted Castronova delivered a fantastic key note address. So, everything was great.

Well, except that the WiFi was ass. Oh, and a bunch of sessions were infomercials. And Microsoft and Sony pwnz u. Oh, yeah, and Lord British is the sole creator and inventor of all online gaming ever in the entire visible universe -- at least that's what the Mythic's Mark Jocobs said.

Read on for the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Reality Check

A business-oriented case study of Kuma Reality Games can be found in the August 2004 Inc. Magazine (online here) - it describes PR and branding issues arising from their experience. Kuma's vision is...

to do for computer gaming what shows like The Real World and Survivor did for cable and network television -- rev up consumer interest by introducing a new "reality" category. ...envisions a future in which all manner of "news" is available in an interactive game format... plans to create new games based on sporting events and crime stories, similarly ripped from the headlines with painstaking attention to detail.

Newsgaming has been discussed with some regularity in the past (e.g. Gonzalo's newsgaming, e.g. GTA recently). Yet there seems a more basic question for us in this age when reality programming is ascendent : can there ever be a "reality-based" entertainment virtual world? What would be the basis of "reality?"

TN Interviews: Julian Oliver

In this interview I talk to Julian Oliver aka delire who is an artist, free-software developer, composer and media-theorist working with game technology.

The list of art works that Julian has either created, collaborated on or initiated includes: q3apd, Deathjam, Quilted Thought Organ, Escape From Woomera, Acmi Park and Fijuu. In 1998 Julian established the art based game collective selectparks one of the most important groups in the development of the genre.

In this wide ranging interview we talk about the way serious art that uses the genre of games is received, virtual spaces as art / public spaces and the importance of Open Software.

Ye Olde Disciplinary Punch-and-Judy Show

So the "ludology" vs. "narratology" debate has flared up again, along with accompanying feuding over whether "game studies" really is or should be a discipline. Markku Eskelinen 's reply to Julian Kucklick (via Ludology) is only one of the stones that Kucklick's review of the anthology First Person has set in motion. Jasper Juul also has replied to Kucklick at his weblog.

So I thought I'd take a crack at this old chestnut myself. On one hand, I think the ludologists are if anything being too generous to some of what has been said about games by scholars who come more from the narratology end of things--the problem with some narratological accounts isn't that narrative is somehow intrinsically different in games, it's that some people coming out of literary or cultural studies have a tendency to write about genres and texts that they know little or nothing about. On the other hand, I don't have much sympathy for the desire to make "game studies" a discipline, partly because that's not where my bread is buttered, but also because I think academic writing about games provides a good opportunity to practice a new middlebrow form of academic cultural criticism that consciously avoids the insular norms of scholarly writing.

Read on for more detail if any of that makes you sharpen your knives...

Chicks and Joysticks

The Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association released a white paper yesterday whimsically titled "Chicks and Joysticks: An Exploration of Women and Gaming."

This document includes a brief history of women in the computer and gaming industries along with current data providing a snapshot of the ways in which female players and female game industry employees affect the video games market. It's a UK-based report with a specific focus on the European and UK market.

Fountain Musings

By way of BoingBoing comes the DataFountain.   Simple, seductive - use fountains to communicate passers-by information about the world.  In this case, currency exchange rates.  It is often attractive to leverage the aesthetic contours of worlds to communicate ideas and information.  In the real world, however, materials and physics can be an impediment.    Virtual worlds, on the other hand...   Yet I am hard-pressed to think of any instance where any sort of in-world gauge, kiosk, headline, any surrogate is used in a virtual world to communicate something substantial about the state of that world.    Datafountains would be cool...  But why stop there, when the trees sway in that copse yonder ... they almost speak...

Whither Good Design?

I get to see lots of virtual world designs in my self-proclaimed capacity of industry consultant. Most are good in some parts and not so good (but improvable) in others. Some, of course, are so bad as to be beyond remption. A small few, however, are absolutely superb.

Hardly any of these projects make it to launch, mainly because they can't get the second-round funding they need. That includes the ones that really, really should be played.

Burning Nostalgia

For those of you who didn't make Burning Man last week, there is always Daniel Terdiman's (Jan 2004) "Burning Man, the Simulation." including the Virtual Playa.   Cool artwork via Church of WOW.  I do love that this cathedral of cybercamps will be built upon Microsoft Flight Simulator (irony).  Perhaps the Second Life Burning Life will do you the better shake and bake?

Heaps of Habbos

Following the June launch of Habbo Hotel Canada, Sulake Labs continued its North American expansion with a September 1 launch of the U.S. version of Habbo Hotel (in beta). According to Sulake's latest press release, worldwide Habbo Hotel membership is 17 million. And this is *before* the U.S. launch? Holy habbos, batman!

Play of State

I'm really happy to join here--I've recently stepped up my academic interest in games research after letting it lie fallow for a while, and I can't think of a better place to explore that interest than Terra Nova. I think Edward is perfectly right that Terra Nova is an excellent model for the way scholarly publication ought to develop in the near-term future, not just for games but perhaps for many disciplines and subjects.

To kick off my involvement: I was snuffling about in the recent thread on SWG's duping problems, jonesing for a link to an essay I recently finished on notions of the state and sovereignty in MMOGs.

Now I don't have to resort to rather pathetically roundabout efforts at self-promotion: I can just cut to the chase and self-promote.

The essay is Play of State: Sovereignty and Governance in MMOGs.

A few thoughts I've had since I wrote it:

1) The point which most interests me overall is the one I discuss the least in the paper, namely, models of the state and sovereignty that are part of the game mechanics of a MMOG (but not "player governance"), particularly in terms of the way virtual economies function. The more I think about it, the more important and problematic this absence seems to me, both in terms of immersive fictions in MMOG and in terms of the functionality of MMOG economies.

2) The one thing I don't want to advocate is what Richard properly rejected in the discussion of SWG's duping and customer-service issues. The problem is not that developers have sovereignty and players don't. Developers should be the sovereign. The problem is that I think many developers are not aware of or don't think fully through the game-mechanical and communitarian implications of that fact. In particular, this is why the flow of information between developers and players matters so much. It's not a public-relations or community-management necessity: it's a basic part of how a sovereignty should function. This is why "stealth nerfs" and the like anger so many players, because the citizens need to know how or whether both the laws of physics and the social laws in gameworlds have been changed by the sovereign. It's not that they question the sovereign's right to do so, only the sovereign's right to conceal what it does.

Terra Nova Welcomes Timothy Burke

Burke is an expert in African history and cultural studies at Swarthmore (one of America's most highly respected schools for undergraduates). He's also offered trenchant commentary on the culture and game design aspects of MMORPGs. We noted a couple of his recent papers here and his assessment of Star Wars Galaxies here. Tim's blog, "Easily Distracted," takes a jackdaw perspective, corvus monedula being known as a rogue among avians.

Among my personal favorites at Tim's site: WHY JOURNALS SUCK.

Welcome Tim!

Star Trek MMORPG Announced

We wonder why this has not happened sooner; there are some very popular science-fiction licenses out there. But now Perpetual Entertainment has obtained access to the entire corpus of Star Trek culture, and we can expect the final massively-multiplayer product in 2007. Read more here.

ALT Friendly?

In recent email to customers Eve Online publicized a deal to encourage players to obtain additional accounts:

...Are you good at multitasking? Would you like to have a specially trained character ready for Shiva's release?...For a limited time, CCP is offering current EVE players the opportunity to create an additional account with 6 months of game play for only 35.85. That’s an amazing 6 months for the price of 3.

PBS: Games Change

Slashdot Games reports that PBS, arguably the most reputable news service in the land of the free and the home of the brave, declares and describes a Videogame Revolution this week. Check the link for broadcast times.

Video Tidbits for the TN-Starved

We know that many of you just can't get enough of virtual worlds, Terra Nova, and the associated little community of wireheads and bookworms. Thanks to the New York Law School, you can now see some of us and some of our friends, and Clay Shirky as well, on video, taped during last year's State of Play I conference. Shameless Nepotism Advisory: some of the interviewers are also interviewees. And if you're still not satisfied, keep an eye on this space: Terra Nova will be the official blog of State of Play II, coming up at the end of October.

Codemasters cancels Dragon Empires

Codemasters cancels Dragon Empires

So, Dragon Empires joins Mythica, True Fantasy Live Online, Ultima X Odyssey and Warhammer Online on the list of MMORPGs that never made it.

Another sad day for virtual worlds, definitely, but also a very sad day for me personally as both MMORPGs I've worked on have now been cancelled.

I, Avatar

Sherry Turkle asked in this essay (NY Times, "When E-Mail Points the Way Down the Rabbit Hole") whether the  (spam) filters we choose and construct can become our alter-egos?   Her point may seem  exotic for spam-filters but are they less so for virtual world avatars...

TN Gathering in Austin

The TN community will be getting together at the lobby bar of the Austiin Hilton, across from the convention center, on Thursday September 9 at 5pm. If you happen to be at AGC, do stop by and say hello.

Keep an eye on this space for updates, too. Who knows how plans might change.