Terra Nova

Believability

[Ed: Posted on behalf of Anders Tychsen.  See also http://www.rpgdot.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=176736]

During a recent analysis of the relatively new Diablo-clone Sacred, it struck me that I felt absolutely no suspension of disbelief while playing. It did not bother me too much that I had to slaughter hundreds of creatures that wandered around aimlessly, seemingly without any purpose except to kill my “overfeatured”, bikini-clad avatar. What ruined the experience was the fact that hordes of goblins would jump me whenever I got within sight, but stay away from e.g. an unprotected farm. They would even follow an avatar into the farm, without ever considering the farmer a viable target. Later on in the game, a 10 ton dragon attacked using wings that was seemingly attached with duct tape, ignoring the demands on the body structure it takes for an organism of that size to have wings, or even use them in a 1G environment.

Simulating a City

Brad King (EEG News) asks "Sim Simulations: Can Games Teach?"  He cites a great post by Jamais Cascio ("The Map is not the Terrain; the Sim is not the City") that worries from an urban planner's perspective:

All models of reality make assumptions about reality. The better sorts of models try to make those assumptions explicit and, best of all, changeable. More worrisome are the models which hide the assumptions within swanky graphics and animations.

The Golden 1M: Please Welcome the Next Candidate, World of Warcraft

The benchmark for US virtual worlds comes from Asia, where worlds with more than a million subscribers are common. Two years ago, anyone working in this area would have picked three or more forthcoming titles as candidates for the first to reach this level. Some of those candidates have failed even to cover their development costs; others are probably profitable; but none has reached the Golden 1M. The MMORPG glut, now more than a year old, certainly played a role. Another factor is the failure of US demand to ramp up as quickly as it has in Korea, Japan, and especially China. True, the space as a whole continues to expand, judging from the most recent numbers. But we still await the first American superstar.

The next candidate launched today. World of Warcraft held an open beta two weeks ago and attracted 500,000 testers before  shutting down the sign-up system. [Edit: They have launched with 42 servers.][Edit: 71 servers as of 7pm EST 11/24.][Edit: 88 as of 8pm EST 11/25]. Exit polls suggest that more than 30 percent of the US population plans to skip work or school today [Edit: I'm kidding!]. Azeroth, are you The One?

[Update: Samantha LeCraft points us to first-day data: 250,000 box sales, 200,000 accounts, 100,000 simultaneous users.]

The Doppelgänger Question

The German word Doppelgänger is by first meaning the"ghostly counterpart of a living person."    They too may also be omens and images in the corner of your eye.  Our avatars in virtual worlds may at times seem our doppelgangers.  For myself, those  moments lie closest to the end on those rarest of nights: have you too ever found yourself playing too long, holding up your edge of an MMORPG party (team) spiraling deeper into the Heart of Darkness?   Leading to those inevitable tiny regrets before dawn.

In this age when our ghosts have become spoons  and online identities become the subject of copyright scrutiny   cradled within examinations of their appearances, perhaps there are fewer chances for our ghostly counterparts,  and perhaps we are poorer for it...

Letter Griefing

"Someone keeps stealing my letters..." is fascinating to watch.   It's somewhat like an open wiki, but with a constrainted set of symbols.  You've got persistence, scarcity, a lack of any clear goal, a lot of anonymity, and the possibility for user creativity.  Like art, but socially negotiated on the fly.  Sound familiar? 

As you watch the letters, you can clearly see things that seem like griefing and acting out (lots of profanity, lots of letter-stealing) as well as emergent organized behaviors (conga lines, letter-sorting, patterns).  Does anybody have URLs listing other shared sandbox spaces?  Any pointers to research papers directly relevant to this kind of stuff? 

Thanks to Jay Bibby for pointing to this. The link follows, but since it's limited to 75 players at a time, you might wait awhile before checking it out.  <link>

EQ2 offers guilds a suite of tools

Woot! Despite the nay-saying to my presentation last year at MUD-Dev conference [6.3MB.ppt] *cough cough Raph cough* where I argued that MMOG designers would do well to provide web-based content-development tools to the people who actually create the majority of their content for free (i.e., the guild leader 'hubs' of the social networks on each shard), it seems Sony Online has finally moved on it.

In conjunction with EverQuest 2, they now offer a new online service called Station Players that includes, for an additional $2.99 a month (in addition to the normal subscription fee), website tools for guilds which include functions such as new articles, screenshots, and forums. Oh, and look! A guild 'Wall of Fame" as well! Finally... a game company that recognizes that the 'service' they provide can potentially go beyond what's there between login and logoff. For many of us, our games goes well beyond it, so it's nice to have the 'service' go beyond it as well.

Now, I realize that this can be construed, in one light, as a way to make more profit. And so it is. But if that profit comes for providing a much-needed service, then I say so be it. Instead of complaining that '98% of all player generated content is crap,' it would do us well to actually honor what the purchasers want. All this is to say: Support actual gamers' practices. They ain't so dum. Trust me.

Ragnarok Musings

Seeing that Ragnarok Online claims to have 17 million subscribers, I thought it might be appropriate to draw out some interesting game mechanics in RO as a way to generate some discussion on cultural differences in MMO design. Even if RO's reported subscriber base were one order magnitude off, they would still have more subscribers than any current Western MMO.

Virtually Virtual Worlds

I've recently been playing a couple of games which aren't quite MMOs, but nearly are. First, the wonderfully silly Kingdom Of Loathing. Initially just the perfect tonic after a hard day's bearded discussion of brain-farts, it creates an impressive sense of community despite lacking a multiplayer core game. A multiplayer core game is one thing that Guild Wars does have and it will be interesting to see whether its reliance on instancing will cause it to suffer in the long term as Richard Predicts. Despite my reservations about instancing, I soon relapsed in to my old monster bashing Diablo addiction. I'm sure it will be a success and it's possible that Guild Weed will act as a gateway drug, bringing more people to MMOs and working well as an alternative on NCSoft's channel. I just hope that it is an alternative, rather than the path that all future MMOs will take. Having come this far it would be a shame to just return to Diablo.

Nation-Time and Newspaper Criticism

Grand Text Auto discusses a really fascinating report by Carnegie-Mellon computer scientist Randy Pausch on the internal corporate culture of Electronic Arts.

There's a lot to talk about in the report, and I may return to it here for a later entry. But my attention was drawn by a fairly peripheral point in the document--that many within EA resent the general attention within the business community and in the wider culture to companies like Pixar or even Microsoft whose size, market capitalization and/or economic performance are actually smaller than EA. This seems to me to touch on something far bigger than EA or its economic success.

Games researchers in general are keenly aware of the degree to which the economic importance of games still does not fully translate into a perceived cultural or even business centrality in the US or the global economy overall. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I want to focus on one: the lack of a usefully  critical, thoughtful mode of games criticism published in newspapers and major magazines in the US.

The Forest for the Spoons

I wrote a brief article for Gamespot News about the oft-repeated "There is no spoon" comment from State of Play 2. I'll likely expand and further flesh out the arguments in future work -- I suspect that we'll all be debating this until the next SoP -- but since I thought that this was one of the most basic disagreements to come out of State of Play 2 that it was worth picking up.

The line from The Matrix, "There is no spoon," was first used during the conference by Yale's Yochai Benkler, but the phrase came up again and again. In various ways, its adherents argued that 3D digital worlds are text with 3D interfaces grafted on. They're Wikipedias with prettier graphics. Often, the "no spoon" argument was invoked as a precursor to discussions about property, regulation, or connections between the real and the digital worlds. It is a tempting shorthand, made all the more powerful by its association with The Matrix. It is also clearly wrong. There is a spoon, just not one that you can eat with. Digital worlds are very real places.

Also, the final version of "Escaping the Gilded Cage", which I wrote for NYLS after the first SoP is now up on SSRN. I've updated "A Piece of Place" and added "Aviators, Moguls, Fashionistas and Barons" which was originally written for Gamasutra.

Anda's game

As I posted on prompt criticality, Cory Doctorow has written "Anda's Game", a short story on Salon about MMOs, IP rights, play, and the power of the people. It is a science fiction story, although it seemed to match what Constance Steinkuehler talked about at State of Play 2, where armed mobs in Lineage 2 bring vigilante justice down on the farmers. It's also a good, quick read and IMHO gets a lot right. It's CC licensed, a first for Salon, although you have to click through Salon's annoying "read this advert to read our content" but if that 10 seconds keeps Salon alive, so be it.

Got MMOG

Slashdot recently cited a National Public Radio story (Marketplace, November 10):

...Mitchell Wade (Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever) (talks) about the video game industry and how first person shooter games will change workplace dynamics for the next generation of employees...

Jan Ken Pon

For those out there looking for seasonal stocking fillers for the budding game designer, but who does not know anyone with feet big enough to accommodate Salen and Zimmerman’s magnificent Rules of Play – try The Official Rock Paper Scissors Strategy Guide.  

Sure it looks silly but as the work points out, albeit lightheartedly, decision-making games of this form are ancient and cross cultural, so taking this trivially simple game seriously looks a like a good catalyst to understanding all kinds of things about human decision making and game play - it also looks fun.

POW! WHAM! Marvel sues NCSoft

Marvel comics has sued NCSoft over copyright violations in City of Heroes.

According to the Los Angeles Times:

The company singles out a game feature for creating "a gigantic, green, 'science-based tanker'-type hero that moves and behaves nearly identically" to the "Hulk."

It's beginning...

Richard

Second class subject

Suppose I went to a conference on Artificial Intelligence and introduced my talk with the following words: "I'm not interested in AI, I know very little about it, and what I do know is beyond my comprehension. I'm only interested in computer games." What kind of a reaction could I expect?

Accelerating Change 2004

I put a longer post up on my SL blog but Accelerating Change 2004 was such a good show that it deserved a post here as well. There were an amazing number of interesting discussions that related to digital worlds, including a panel I moderated with IGE's Steve Salyer, GOM's Jamie Hale, Meridian 59's Brian "Psychochild" Green, and Puzzle Pirates' Daniel James. Very fun but I'll leave it to Ren to write about it since he took copious notes. I also gave a keynote on digital worlds that focused on the inevitable flow of production and community into them.

It was also interesting to meet members of a community who shared so many goals and ideas with those of us who work on digital worlds. Although there was some overlap between AC and State of Play 2, it was clear that these are communities that have much to teach each other. That is always an exciting discovery.

Player Interactions in SWG

Nicolas Ducheneaut and Bob Moore run the PlayOn project at PARC.  The PlayOn project investigates the social dimensions of MMORPGs, fccusing on SWG and EQOA in particular.  Papers available here.  They'll be showing up at Other Players next month and this week, they're presenting a paper at the ACM's CSCW in Chicago entitled The Social Side of Gaming: A Study of Interaction Patterns in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game

State of Play 2: Law Teaching on the Screen Workshop

Just when you thought we’d finished blogging SoP2! Before memories of the conference fade, I wanted to post a few thoughts about the final session, a workshop titled "Law Teaching on the Screen" held at the New York Law School on October 31, 2004.  In this session, Paul Maharg, a professor of law at the Glasgow Graduate School of Law in Scotland, presented an overview of a virtual learning environment called “Ardcalloch,” in which law students and tutors take on roles of lawyers and clients to solve simulated legal cases over a period of 9 weeks.

Autumn Persisted, or Instanced?

Autumn is the time of year when I spend a great deal of time raking leaves, it also offers another perspective on the "Persistent versus Instantiated Spaces" discussion.

Other Players update

In case you haven't seen it yet, just a reminder that the registration deadline for the Other Players conference here in Copenhagen next month is approaching. Here is an update just sent out by the organizers:

A Pessimist Writes...

I've written a rant-style article on Gamasutra which posits a theory that virtual world design is doomed because of the power of the newbie. I'll present a formal, academic version at the Other Players conference next month, but in the meantime feel free to berate me.

MMO Language as a Power-up

While the text of chatter in MMOs has been analyzed by their weight in discourse or the social patterns they imply, less often we think about what it could mean were it directly integrated into the rule-set of the game world.