Terra Nova

Ad Deals are Big Deals in Virtual Worlds

Recently Ilya Vedrashko noticed that the Google ad area of his blog was serving up ads for two companies offering in-game advertising and marketing services, inGamePartners and Massive Incorporated. (Full post located here) Ads for the former touted the company as the “#1 name” in the biz while the latter proclaimed itself “the largest.” This mini ad-battle playing out on a blog about media and advertising (as Ren would say, “how meta!”) led Vedrashko to ask, “Is the war officially on?”

An Adventurer is Me

It's the holidays and so, of course, I've been playing more Kingdom of Loathing than is strictly good for me. It's a hoot, and well worth the $0 monthly fee, and a few things struck me:

Notes from the New World

Wagner James Au aka Hamlet Linden writes:

Happy holidays, all. Thought you'd be interested in my ongoing wrap-up of the year in New World Notes, with all '04 stories archived into a dozen-plus entries, this week. Of particular interest for TN readers, I suspect, will be the compilations of stories on sex, politics, religion, and money.

And also "A Lever to Move the Civic-Minded", stories covering Second Life as a teaching and therepeutic tool, a place for benefitting real-world non-profits, and so on.

At first I thought I should be offended that he believes that I'm particularly interested in sex and money. And then I realized he was talking about you, Gentle Reader...

Enlightened Penalties

My son and I are  nearing the end of a  retro  computer game, a "bug hunt" played over many battles, days (X-Com UFO Defense) - I'm soldiering the game and he is the very occasional general.  I don't yet have the heart to tell him, we're in over our heads: we are going down...

Jeff Freeman's "It's 4am...do you know where your corpse is?"  had me thinking about those unfortunate denouements in online experiences.  Can shared purpose in misery be enriching - or are fair-weather encounters all that count?    Jeff's muse was:

The only system-related design that I hate as much as I hate the above things is corpse-recovery. And I have to ponder...Would I hate that as much if it weren't for the... [level-spread on the mobs that forces you to kill everything in one or two rooms about 500 times over before you can move along to the next room and kill everything there 1000 times. It forces the same gameplay dynamic as the camp-n-pull thing]?

Bah, Humbug & Digital Distribution

What’s the point of wrapping Christmas presents?

The Once and Future MMO

From Zen of Design comes an essay ("End of the ‘World’ as we know it?") that serves a good reflection on recent blogsphere discussions on Ultima Online (incl. Terra Nova's "Ultima Online R.I.P.").  UO becomes  a lens with which to view the larger question about the  future of the  MMO...  Let's start with this premise from Broken Toys' "THE UNBEARABLE DARKNESS OF ULTIMA ONLINE": 

Ultima Online - it won’t happen again. Ever. That moment in time was unique - and it’s gone. Because there will never again be a time where there is only one MMO... there will always be choices... The days of UO’s One World where many mutually exclusive play styles are forced to interact, on the terms of the more socially maladroit, are over. The market has fragmented, and cannot be put back together. People, when forced to play the role of “sheep” or “stupid newbie", will simply leave.

A MASSIVE Christmas Present

The MASSIVE-3 distributed multi-user virtual reality system, which I developed with Chris Greenhalgh, Dave Snowdon and Milena Radenkovic has just been released under the BSD open source license. Get your prototype implementations of Sufficient Causal Ordering, Locales and Aspects, Temporal Links and Distributed Event Filters here. A Win32 build is also available (unzip it to the directory created by the source zip). Just add 21st century rendering, optionally reliable unicast or multicast networking and content (ho, ho, ho!).

24-30 Hours

SOE's EQ2 suffered a widespread outage after a server reboot (thanks MMORPGDot), documented in hourly updates  here.  From tales like this, we are of course reminded of how  our worlds, our actions in those worlds, and even our avatar's memories (persistent footprint)  are tethered to technology and  real world actions - "roll backs" and all.  The good news, though, is that on the tomorrow, when your toons get out of bed, they won't remember a thing.

One Lawsuit to Rule Them All

And so, it begins.

"This letter is to notify you that you are violating the World of Warcraft End User License Agreement (EULA) and Terms of Use (TOU), infringing Blizzard’s copyrights and trademarks, and contributing to the copyright infringement of others."

Ultima Online R.I.P.

[Ed: Posted for Petrus]

Ultima Online is dying?

I believe that there is evidence to suggest that it could be.
Admittedly when something is very large, its demise often takes a
considerable period of time...The Titanic took something like four
hours to sink after initially striking the iceberg. But there are a
couple of reasons why I believe that from a long term market share
perspective, the game could be in trouble:-

Grief News

Jean-Jacques Rousseau once claimed that individuals were good - undone by the corrupting influences of society.  Chek Yang Fo recently suggested (Other Players) a form of corruption in MMOG spaces takes form as "grief play" and "greed play".   Greed play, by Chek Yang Fo's description could be thought of as grief play without intent, e.g., greedy players engaged in distruptive activity without the explicit intention to disrupt others.  In contrast, grief players, by Chek's definition, intend to disrupt...

Day Trader Analyzes MMORPG Economies

If you've ever wondered about the of the semi-pro gold farmer, read this interesting piece by Greg Cato, a fellow with plenty of market experience. He sent us a URL but Raph Koster had already posted a link in a previous comment. Why move it to the front page? Because we don't often get blunt analysis from people who actually do this stuff. Reality check.

You Can't Take It With You

I’ve spent the last few days flirting with the Christmas orgy of consumption and along the way introduced a few more people to virtual worlds. All of them express the usual there is no spoon amazement when they find out that people are paying lots of real money for virtual goods. However, it’s less incredible when you consider that even in the real world the goods people are buying aren’t as real as they seem.

Dude, Virtually Speaking

An interesting paper by Scott F. Kiesling surfaced via Clive Thompson, published in American Speech (Fall 2004).  Diagramming the long and colorful etymology and use of the word "dude", Kiesling's paper underlines a striking and varied history - see here - putatively stretching from Yankee Doodle to Mott the Hoople/David Bowie...   Yet, not until championed by Sean Penn (1982, Fast Times at Ridgemont High) did "dude" find ubiquity and fame - leading to distinctions such as: a "native speaker... of Dude".   

What does "dude" say about virtual worlds, if anything?

Treasure Island

Michael Zenke of Slashdot alerted us to the recent auction of "Treasure Island" in Project-Entropia. Winning bid: USD26,500.

Now as anyone who has been to Europe recently will tell you, the US dollar is now worth about the same as the ruble. But still, that's a lot of money.

I don't know Entropia well enough to make any sort of analysis of this outcome. It may be that the available revenue ("Taxation rights on hunting and mining activities on the island"!!) makes this a smart buy. But still, damn, that's a lot of money!

[Other commentary at Slashdot games]

Virtual Architecture

[Ed: Posted on behalf of Stanislav Roudavski]

I need some advice please.

What interesting examples of virtual architecture (i.e. spatial structure of the game-world) do you know of? To explain, I am not interested in style, or in picturesque backdrops, or in realism. Not for their own sake. Rather, I am looking for examples where spatial structures are designed (or gradually grown) to respond to and guide in-world behaviour.

Blizzard Goes to War

It's not going to be news to anyone who follows this page, but World of Warcraft has of course already spawned an active external market. What's different is that Blizzard, the developer, has announced [text below] that it will attempt to shut the thing down. To my knowledge, no major developer has really tried before, but Blizzard has a strong track record in terms of using whatever means necessary to protect its products against the perceived abuses of rogue players. Perhaps they will succeed. I certainly hope so.

If they do, we might have to start thinking of World of Warcraft as the first of a new generation of virtual worlds. It may not seem all that different in terms of some design aspects, but if its war against eBayers succeeds, it will end up being very different in terms of atmosphere.

Seeking legitimacy?

I was going to post a review of some papers from the Other Players conference (many very interesting ones btw) and then this entry but since a discussion got going over in another thread I think it's worth foregrounding now. One of the big conversation points that came up at the end of the conference was on the relationship of scholarly game studies to design. Eric Zimmerman raised a very good question and concern at the end of the last session which was why are we seeing so many academic studies include some kind of conclusion around "what this means for design" or "how designers can use these findings." I was particularly grateful for Eric's intervention because I've personally been feeling a growing unease with how often scholarly work in games seems to seek a kind of legitimacy by being able to sum up how the research can be used in future game implementations. It's of course not the case that we never want what happens in game studies to have real impact and influence but can we always anticipate what that will be? By making moves into predictive work are we quickly losing ground for good basic research to thrive? Are we beginning to foster a space in which research is primarily legitimated through its usefulness in building future MMOG markets?

Currency and the Membrane

Brian Whitener alerted us to Roma Victor, a Roman Empire-themed MMORPG, and specifically their revenue model.

In a nutshell they don't have subscriptions, but require players to purchase the in-world currency ("sesterces") on an on-going basis. They suggest that "€10's worth of Sesterces should allow [players] to enjoy life to the full in Roma Victor for at least a month" but of course some players will have a higher burn-rate than others. Interestingly, they also indicate that some players contribute to the world in ways that are not captured by subscription models, and so presumably these players will be rewarded for this (though it's not clear exactly how this is to happen).

Edge Places

The Other Players conference was a feast amongst a diverse gathering. 

Melanie Swalwell's presentation ("The History and Development of LAN groups: An Australasian Case Study") was one reflective treasure (among many).    From her work with LAN parties in Australia and New Zealand Melanie suggests that these are communities in a shadow-land between the real and the virtual.  Worlds, in an ebb-and-flow, glued together by a tradition of volunteerism, duct-tape, and nary a business plan.  Sure, there looms ongoing challenges: broadband, online gaming, and aging admins.   Yet her report is that they still survive, exhibiting capacity for renewal, innovation, and experimentation.

The Daedalus Gateway

Over the past 5 years, I've presented findings from my online surveys in a variety of  formats. I settled on The Daedalus Project as a way to quickly provide content on a standardized template.  The blog format made it easy to show the details, but incredibly difficult to show the larger themes. Many who stumbled into The Daedalus Project for the first time simply got lost.

The Daedalus Gateway is an attempt to solve that problem by providing a set of short thematic primers that link to the more in-depth findings and presentations. It will be linked to prominently from The Daedalus Project when the next issue comes out. Take a look.

Just Enough Connectivity

To paraphrase Daniel C. Dennett, if you make your world big enough, everything is internal to the world. As Constance wrote about recently, EverQuest 2 gives users some tools for expanding their world. Gaming Open Market, which leverages many aspects of Second Life's scripting system, extends the world of Second Life economically. I just posted on Prompt Criticality about a new site, SL Exchange, that brings searchable listings for SL items to the web. In particular, check out the quality of some of the recent additions. Sure, SL Exchange pales compared to eBay or PlayerAuctions, but there is something very exciting about a website in the real world, written by players that uses open standards to communicate, transact and change a digital world.

Given the recent discussions here about open source, standards and compatibility, SL Exchange had me thinking about the idea of creating just enough interoperability of allow the kind of metaverse growth that many of us are hoping for.

Other Players Proceedings Posted

Proceedings have been posted for the Other Players Conference being held this week at the IT University of Copenhagen.

License to Pretend

Like several other Terra Novans, I'm a fan of City of Heroes and am quite concerned about Marvel's suit against NCSoft.   The Complaint[1.7MB pdf] raises some very strange issues at the level of legal doctrine, but it's a particularly troubling claim with regard to the policy of virtual worlds.  Marvel is claiming that NCSoft is vicariously and contributorily liable for copyright and trademark infringement--which means that it must be claiming that players are infringing Marvel's copyrights and trademarks by making avatars resemble superheroes in the Marvel portfolio (the X-men, the Hulk, etc.). 

Fred von Lohmann (who argued [16MB mp3] the Ninth Circuit appeal in the Grokster case, btw) has an excellent essay today in law.com on what a bad idea this is in terms of law and policy.  After he tells the legal audience what in Sam Hill an MMORPG is, Fred points out that the players are really at the heart of the claim:   

When Worlds Collide

In myth, a hero visits an “other world” in some way apart from mundane reality, an exciting and adventurous place where different rules apply. In everyday life, we can’t easily visit such worlds except when they’re virtual. However, that doesn’t mean that they can’t visit us. Every once in a while, the real world changes and becomes something other than what it normally is.

Yes, I’m talking about Christmas.

Liberation Source Code

Wired (Gamers Eye Open Virtual Worlds) features Peter Ludlow beating the drum for Open Source virtual worlds.  The claim that "(his) expulsion from The Sims Online may well be the highest-profile player ban in the history of video games" only serves as fuel for this metaverse fire: the proletariat want satisfaction.   The real yarn, however, lies with whether or not this can be part of a calculus of virtual world liberation.  After all, game development is hard and perhaps Open Source would be a poor advantage.  While we've discussed Open Source and virtual worlds in the past, another question (beyond technology and its creation) is this one:

...the dream is that one large open-source virtual world could be created by stitching together work created in environments like MUPPETS, the Croquet Project and the OSMP.

What are the issues.  Avatar transfer protocols?  Insurance for virtual property?  Yellow Pages for virtual identiy?  Take your pick.

Missouri to Its Prisoners: No Frags For You

According to the Associated Press, prisoners in a Missouri jail had managed to get themselves some videogames. Those games have now been taken away. The reasoning: These violent criminals have already crossed a line, who knows what Grand Theft Auto might make them do.

Will there be a defense of the right to play?

World of Warcraft Scenery

I've played many MMOs over the past few years (EQ, DAoC, SWG, RO, CoH), but I've never felt compelled to take screenshots of anything in them. But since I started playing WoW last week, I found myself constantly taking screenshots because of how gorgeous the scenes were. I've put the screenshots up (3 pages of thumbnails) and just wanted to share them.

These screenshots are totally unenhanced, but I do run the game using the "Full Glow Effect" option.