Terra Nova

Wanted: FFXI Players For Survey, Esp. Japanese

Alan Meades, under the aegis of Middlesex University / UK, is running a survey of Final Fantasy XI players. Please publicize and distribute the link. Participation by Japanese players is especially welcome. A full Japanese translation of the survey is available at the site.

Designing for the 'Bitch-goddess Success'

Could virtual worlds encourage more failure, and if so, what would that imply?    A recent op/ed piece in The Economist  (Feb 26th, Lexington, "An Ode to Failure" - subscription required), provokes thoughts along these lines.  From  "A Million Dollar Baby" to H.L. Mencken, Lexington's piece asserts this (real world) cultural claim:   "The (American) worship of success inspires not just extraordinary achievements but worthwhile failures"  - too, citing William James - "(t)he exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success...is our national disease...'"   

State of Play 2: Update

This just in from Beth Noveck:

"The Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School is pleased to announce the publication of the Symposium Issue State of Play. This is the first collected exploration of law and virtual worlds. This special Symposium issue of the New York Law School Law Review grows out of the first annual State of Play Conference, held at New York Law School from November 13-15, 2003, and features several Terranova authors. The issue is available on-line at http://www.nyls.edu/lawreview. Hard copies are available by writing to [email protected] or by calling (212) 431-2118.

The State of Play II: Reloaded Video Timecapsules are now available on-line. Go to http://www.nyls.edu/stateofplay to see 19 online interviews filmed during the State of Play II conference. Click on Timecapsule to see Dan Hunter interview Richard Bartle, Torill Mortensen interview Betsy Book and Dave Myers, Cory Ondrejka interview David Post and Yochai Benkler and more."

If I give you some money will you stop it?

We have all been wondering how Funcom are going to sustain their free offer. When the press release back in December said “This unique move will allow us to test important new business models” I assumed that they were talking about increasing their total user base and hoping that enough upgraded to a paid scheme for numbers to work out. Looks like either I was wrong and this was always the longer term plan or the numbers didn’t ad up after all.

The new deal is that Funcom will present / bludgeon (delete according to taste) the players with in-game billboard ads. Upgrading to a paid scheme makes them go away (press release below).

It’s a weird type of anarchy if you ask me. And coming fast on the heels of the /pizza story, I don’t mean to be a drama queen, but: is this the end of the virtual world as we know it?

Talk about beardy!

Back in January this year Espen Aarseth (short beard) of ITUC and Henry Jenkins (long beard) of MIT met up at HUMlab in Sweden to discuss games. Fortunately the face to face was filmed and even more fortunately there is a stream. 

So if you want over an hour of heavy weight discussion of: what it is to study games, ludology the role of story and a whole lot more, tune in, kick back and enjoy.

1st Penguin

Congratulations to Professor Richard Allan Bartle Ph.D for being first among Penguins.

Which is a weird title for a neat honour.  The IGDA (International Game Developers Association) special award for “the courage and bravery of a developer who is the first to test the proverbial waters, in the face of uncertainty of success or failure.  Receiving a "penguin" serves as an inspiration and lesson to the community.” Full details are in the press release below.

Anyone who knows Richard will also know that this award does not just recognise the fact that 20 years ago he and Roy Trubshaw developed MUD, the foundation of every MMO you see today but that he remains active and I can say from personal experience inspirational in both the academic and professional communities. Oh, he has a book out too: Designing Virtual Worlds.

Congratulations from me and all the TN authors.

Content?

Grand Text Auto (GTxtA) is discussing the role of content and its creation in game worlds  (Not/Non Feeling Content: The Unfairness of Programming). 

Who’s Rulz?

Who gets to decide what’s good gaming and what is bad - player base, publisher, Microsoft !! ?

Welcome Unggi Yoon

We’re incredibly happy to welcome Unggi Yoon to our list of authors.

Unggi was born in Seoul on 18 November 1971, and since then has been busy: played a lot of Ultima, Rescue Raiders, and Wolfenstein; got a law degree from Yonsei University Law College and a graduate degree from Yonsei Graduate School; and became a judge in Busan, Korea. Nowadays he plays Nexon's MMORPG Mabinogi and Blizzard's WoW, and acts as a member of the Gamestudy group. When not gaming or judging, he translates works like Larry Lessig's "Free Culture" into Korean.

He is going to provide us with some much-needed insight into the Korean virtual world scene. We couldn't be more pleased. Welcome Unggi.

DRM and VWs

Danny Vogely sent us a query that follows on from a comment by Euphrosyne in an earlier post:

"[A] possibility this model brings up is DRM for game items. If you can only buy items from the developer, then it is relatively easy to make sure that you don't sell/give that item to others (via internal or external means). Avatars and possessions could be checked against each other for "proper authorization". Seems likely to infuriate players, but is still a possibility."

Down on the Pharm, Penny-Arcade Style

It is humbling almost to the point of despair to discover that fifteen dozen screenfuls of ponderous commentary produced by a small liberal-arts faculty's worth of beardy gamer geeks can, with almost zero loss of insight, be reduced to the three panels of a Penny Arcade cartoon.

Whither the tangibile?

Ilya Vedrashko has a post about a virtual keyboard. 

No shortage of currency options

Blimey there are a lot of currency trading sites all of a sudden.

A Mercantile Divide?

In the United States there is renewed debate about whether Social Security (public pension system) should be restructured to be based upon individual private accounts.   The public policy discussion is beyond us here.  However, a fair question is which would be more fun for you?   A pension scheme of fixed guaranteed rewards?  Or one in which you may feel compelled to proactively engage (game) over time to maximize your retirement income?

The answer to this question, I suggest, may shed light upon  the putative conundrum of market-based in-game economies from the player's perspective...

That /pizza story

OK, we give in, here is the /pizza story.

Ghey

Nick Yee's Daedalus Project recently discussed some findings on the the portability of stereotypes into virtual worlds. The comments by players in this context reinforce some arguments that have been made about virtual communities and computer-mediated communication for some time, that our lives in "meatspace" are the necessary and inescapable predicate for how we act in virtual contexts, that a virtual world is not a utopian interruption of the real world that allows us to leave behind our prejudices like bodies discarded in the Rapture.

Some Skepticism

My colleague in legal academia and uber slinky-fan Eric Goldman joined Cory at the Santa Clara Rules &  Borders conference and is attempting to throw a wet blanket on some of the more ambitious legal claims regarding virtual worlds.

War is Peace. Black is White. EQ2 is Casual-Friendly.

John Smedley recently published an assessment of Everquest 2's achievements to date, followed by some interesting thoughts on the MMOG future. In it, he says that one of the design goals for EQ2 was to make it friendly to a wider user base, particularly the so-called casual players, a group that Terra Nova writers and many others have struggled to define even while recognize the centrality of the category.

Lots of commentary on Smedley's letter has followed, much of it cynical. Far be it from me to depart from what all the cool kids are doing, so I figured TN should join in the fun, if somewhat tardily. I too had to laugh at the proposition that EQ2 was governed in any way by friendliness to casual play, or with a consciousness of the possibilities of a wider market. In fact, I don't feel, having messed around with the game some, that the game has a particularly clear design sensibility of any kind: it's more a bricolage of many gestures and ideas, some good and some not good.

On the other hand, once you read Smedley's letter carefully...

Skimpy Armor: Hawt, Skanky, or Indecent?

A debate has erupted about avatar-clothing options in World of Warcraft [insert obligatory fanboi disclaimer here]. What obligations do the developers have in terms of clothing options? Suppose the uber gear is indecent according to the standards of some appropriately defined community. Is it a problem? For extra credit - was this an issue in text-based MUDs (everything was, I think), and how was it handled?

Making Spoons

Do the "spoons" crafted  in virtual worlds imply an act of production, of value?   Assume so here for discussion.  Can the underlying  social nature of virtual worlds then  imply an organizing system for production that is more flexible (and efficient) in some circumstances than traditional [Ed: ref  below - NC] market systems?

Valentine's Day: Love vs. Levels

Thanks Eric Hayot for pointing us to this essay about games and relationships. He also links to the EverQuest Daily Grind, a blog for declining-in-significance others. I'm a little worried it might be tactical media, like MAVAV.org (a spoofed anti-violence site), but if it isn't the stories are eye-openers.

[Edit: David Reim sent us an essay about how some types of games can help families... read on to see How Toontown Saved Dinner...][Edit: Removed by request of the author]

IGE Speaks

Steve Salyer, IGE's CEO, takes some tough questions about the secondary market from okratas.

Once Upon a Tank and a Time

In and around 1997 I played in a vast MMOG world, now only a brave shadow, a place of "magenta sunsets, vast lines of fortresses, and choreographed tank battles that took hours to resolve."  It never had more than a couple of hundred players.  I'm not exactly sure if it was my first graphical MMO (I was involved in UO somewhere about that time as well as online air sims) but it left the largest, earliest mark.   All the earlier video games, board games, pen and paper games,  were just preparation it seemed.  Enter the age of redemption.

On Fun

One of the tracks my brain keeps going down regards the weakness of the theory I was trained in (rational choice) when it comes to explaining why people play games. Playing the lotto is irrational unless the mere act of buying a ticket has value. When we buy a carrot, say, the value comes from the carrot alone, not the buying of it; the buying of a carrot is not in itself fun.  Applying the same to lotto tickets, its not clear why anyone buys them, because on net they are a money loss. So  unless, somehow, mere playing is valuable in itself, no one should buy them. Yet millions do. It's a puzzle - in one paper I called it the 'Puzzle of Puzzles' - and I've got this idea to write my next book about it.

As I've been thinking about this sort of generalized theory of what fun is, I've begun to notice that other people are about at the same place.  And I thought I would put a few links together and ask for readers to help build some connections here. 

Rules and Borders Part 3

Lunchtime presentation by Wendy Seltzer, EFF

Read on for Wendy's interesting comments on EFF and their interest in games and online worlds. Shockingly, this even talks about Marvel v. NCSoft!

Rules and Borders Part 2

Session 2: Future of Technology: Licensing and Usability

Professor Dorothy Glancy, Santa Clara University School of Law
Niel Smith, Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin
Kevin Saul, Apple Computer, Inc.

(moderated by Professor June Carbone, Santa Clara University)

Read on for some interesting comments about the Apple music store and viral licensing . . .

A Thought Experiment

Suppose a disgruntled programmer were to run some code that flipped the sex of every player character in EverQuest. Further suppose that this programmer did such a thorough job that it would take a week before all the characters could be flipped back.

The players would complain, obviously, but would they actually play for that week? Would they learn anything from the experience?

Feel free to partition the player base any way you like, if you feel that different groups would have different reactions. Note, though, that I'm not asking how you would react; I'm asking how you think players in general would react.

Live from Rules and Borders Part 1

Session 1: Digital Actors and Locations

David Anderman, Lucasfilm
Keith Boesky, Boesky and Company
Professor Leslie Kurtz, UC Davis School of Law

(moderated by Riley Russell, SCEA)

read on for my notes from the session . . . apologies for typos!

Marvel v. NCSoft Update 2

The EFF is keeping copies of various Marvel v. NCSoft pleadings here.  It appears Marvel has filed a Second Amended Complaint, and NCSoft has responded with an amended Motion to Dismiss. 

Will the Real Virtual Sweatshop Please Stand Up?

The MMO-sweatshop meme is on the march again. Over the weekend MSNBC ran a column that led with an oblique reference to Blacksnow Interactive’s notorious Tijuana gold-farming maquiladora. And though the rest of the column focuses almost exclusively on the fascinating and hardly ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever discussed intersection of massively multiplayer games and RL legal systems (“Virtual Worlds Wind Up in Real World’s Courts,” reads the headline), you can bet that when the piece got Slashdotted and BoingBoinged, nobody wanted to talk about anything but Mexican MMORPG peons. And who can blame them? In a single 16-word synopsis, the tale of the Blacksnow sweatshop says more about virtual economies, digital labor, and hypermodern capitalism than 18 months of beardy Terra Novan brain farts combined.

Here’s the problem, though: As far as I know, every reference you’ve ever seen to the Blacksnow sweatshop derives its factual authority from a single, very brief article that ran in Wired two years ago, bearing the byline of yours truly.

What Would Walt Do?

You're a game company and you're looking for lore. We've learned that even if you pick something obviously in the public domain, you still might get sued.  What to do? Do what Walt did! Take your lore from sources whose heritage is so ancient and obscure that no one can possibly claim ownership. (For extra credit, twist this ancient and revered lore around so that it suits some contemporary ideology. )

The WWWD Award for 2005 goes to ...
 

Endurability, Engagement, Expectations, and Fun

Janet Read (et al)'s  Endurability, Engagement and Expectations: Measuring Children's Fun  provides an interesting and empirically grounded perspective on the nature of fun...

The Wisdom of Crowds, MMOG-style

I've been reaching for a while for organizing metaphors to help me describe the relationship between developers and players in persistent-world massively multiplayer games. While thinking about developers as the rulers of a virtual state and players as their subjects or citizens is useful, it's also important to think about this as a mass medium and the players as an audience. This sounds more straightforward. But there's a very deep scholarly literature, particularly coming from cultural studies, about audiences in popular culture. With his book Textual Poachers, Henry Jenkins initiated what is now a commonplace insight in this kind of writing, that audiences for contemporary mass media are far more active and creative in their relationship to what they watch, hear and read than the old, tired portrayal of them as passive and disempowered. From that perspective, there's still something really amazingly different about the players of MMOGs. Via online forums, they're much more deeply involved in the nitty-gritty labor of managing and developing the mass media that they consume.

Face off

Do you want to be in a video game?

Collective Amnesia

My grandmother used to say "to move house three times is as good as a fire."  She meant it in the sense of getting rid of the detritus that accumulates as we move through life.   I doubt she meant to include the virtual realms, but perhaps she should have...

/played

While playing WoW recently, a friend of mine suggested we all type in "/played" to see how many hours of game time we had logged. To my surprise, I was at 12 days, 8 hours and 17 minutes. That's 296 hours of time. My friend (a stay-at-home dad) then pointed out that he was at 28 days. That's 672 hours of time. Let's say for the sake of argument that a work week is 40 hours long. My friend has spent almost 17 work weeks in WoW (7 and a half for me) since November.

There are a few possible reactions to this. Let me play out two extremes:

Aarrhhh! Puzzle Pirates Pillages Retail

/. reports that Puzzle Pirates, everyone's favorite pirate-themed MMORPG, is going to be published by Ubisoft. It will have a teen rating, be $19.95, and be available in April. Congratulations to Daniel and the rest of the 3 Rings crew!

Synthetic Statehood and the Right to Assemble

A long time ago (late 2003) I posted about a protest in EverQuest. Some of the feedback was 'so what? This stuff has happened in virtual worlds forever.' Elizaebth Kolbert wrote about protesting, naked, vomiting avatars in her seminal New Yorker piece about Ultima Online.  And Dibbell told us all about the politics of virtual spaces way back when.

That's probably why these pages didn't get too excited about the Star Wars Galaxies protest that occured in August of 2004, although we mentioned it.

Lately, there was a protest in World of Warcraft that brought down the Argent Dawn server. Alan Stern was kind enough to send us links.

Despite being an admitted WoW fanboi, I think it deserves discussion. Is it old hat? Or evidence of latent statehood?

There’s resource based pricing

Bruce Boston (aka Mr January) has just blogged There’s move from it’s current in-world pricing scheme to what Bruce is calling ‘resource based’ pricing - he’s even included spreadsheets for those that want to tinker with the model.

Forming a link between virtual items and physical resources is an interesting move as it provides a kind of ‘iron standard’ for pricing, though more often than not pricing depends much more on perceived value rather than actual cost.

It going to be fascinating to see what impact this has on the overall economy – though I wonder with worlds like There and SL just how broke the economy has to be for the world to really suffer.