Terra Nova

What About Game Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins?

The inventor of my Treo wrote a persuasive book about how brains think, with one scary chapter about how to make machines think the same way. What's scary about it is this: Hawkins doesn't seem to grasp the way AI and people interact outside the context of handhelds. It gets intimate, you know. And that makes a big difference.

You mean, like, you can make money at this?

Who woulda thunk it?

Zerg, Borg, Firm, Guild, Collablog

Nate's most excellent post on Zerging suggests the alien Zerg collective's attack strategy may be bad because it is boring.  By contrast,  the Borg, another four-letter alien bunch whose name ends with "rg", are not particularly boring, but are thought to be bad because their all-assimilating Hivemind wipes out Mill's concept of individual liberty (and plus all that flesh-machine grafting is kind of icky).  The Firm, according to Grisham and certain others, is dangerous when it gets too big, too powerful, too sharp.  Collectivity threatens the individual, and in some cases, it threatens society as well.  Which, of course, leads me to Robert Marks' interesting book: Everquest Companion.

Cows, Immersion, and Sports Law

My friend Eric Goldman (who I've mentioned before as skeptical of much of "virtual law" scholarship) posted recently about a presentation on Vacheland,  a French simulation of virtual farm management.  Eric says Vacheland was "initiated by a public agency to increase awareness of farm issues and to help address negative perceptions due to mad cow disease."  Eric says that: 

Norrath's Fictional Factions

I'm hardly an Everquest expert, but I'm in the process of writing an essay about law and governance in Norrath, and I was drawn into a side issue on which I wanted to elicit comments.  (So beware, I'll steal your thoughts if I like them). 

My primary focus in the essay will be on two issues that I feel more qualified to discuss: first, the general relation of game rules and game governance systems to "real" law, and second, the relation of coded (so-called "architectural") software constraints to legal regulation.  Still, in parsing out these issues in relation to Everquest, I feel obligated to  discuss Everquest as a text that actually represents a fiction of governance, and investigate, to some extent, how this fiction relates to the other "governance" issues I want to talk about.  So here's a (slightly edited) bit of my thinking:

Memories of virtual children

I remember the warmth of the sun, the feel of breeze and the exotic scents that it brought. I remember friends and the spaces we made sacred by being there together.

It's a Faux World After All

'[J]ust as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral...," wrote Jean Baudrillard, "Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real...." I leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess what insidious purpose Baudrillard will ascribe to the nth-order simulation that is Disney's Virtual Magic Kingdom, now live in "sneak preview beta" mode (via). Meanwhile, last one into their own private virtual Jungle Cruise safari boat is a rotten avatar!

The Future Is…This Thursday

Terra Nova readers are cordially invited to this Thursday’s Future Salon speaker series, an event which takes place in Second Life each month, brought to you by the Acceleration Studies Foundation.  The May salon is happening this Thursday, May 26th, 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM PST at the Second Life Public Library.

Unexpected Effects of RMT

Arseni Stardoumov, Stockholm School of Economics, has written with an interesting set of propositions regarding RMT. Assume the players have a diversity of tastes for both the rewards of the game system (R) as well as its challenges (C). Assume further that there are alienable items that affect an individual's perception of C. It follows that there will always be, in that population, a market for these items. Each person has an ideal {R, C} bundle. The game system offers some default {R, C} bundle. In order to move from the default to their ideal level of challenge, players will buy items that get their C values closer to their personal ideal, and sell ones that do not.

One implication that I thought was interesting: Currently, all RMT involves people buying items that reduce the challenge level. But what if a game was too easy? Then people would actually buy things that make the game harder. Or, at least, that's how the potential market would work. That market never appears, though. People quit easy games. Only in hard games do they stay and use markets to adjust game conditions.  Not sure why.

Note that all this is independent of any diversity of income and time. You can have completely equal incomes and time resources in your player base and this model says you'd still get RMT.

Well, there's more, but who has time these days? Inside you'll find a full text of Arseni's thoughts, and his request for feedback.

*war*

I’ve cracked this whole MMO marketing thang,,,

The World in Your Pocket

I recently re-read this account of Mike Mayfield's  development of Star Trek (circa 1971-2).  A few thoughts follow - on how this relates to Animal Crossing, the metaphor of paper tape as a storage medium, and A Theory of Fun...

Grimwell on RMT

Of possible interest to the virtual property mavens: Matthew Hector (a.k.a.  CmdrSlack)  has posted There's Gold in Them Thar Pixels! over at Grimwell.  It's a law review format walk through RMT issues -- Matt's previous posts are here and here.   I'm turning off comments here to push them toward Grimwell's forum.

The Unsinkable IGE?

Not long ago, some folks were cheering Sony Online's embrace of real-money trades (RMT) as a fatal blow to third-party RMT brokers like IGE. Well, if you believe today's rumors, we should all be so fatally, um, blown. Says Galrahn over at UO Powergamers.com: "My sources out of Florida have confirmed that IGE has completed negotiations for limited license agreements for at least 5 North American MMOGs. The official announcement is expected at E3."

Accelerating Change 2005-Update

File in the "Shameless Plug" Section:

Jerry Paffendorf (Community Director of Acceleration Studies Foundation, and a man whose name cries out for superhero treatment on City of Heroes) writes:

Preparations for Accelerating Change 2005 have hit their groove and registration is open. You can check out what’s recently been added at http://www.accelerating.org/ac2005 . We’ll still be nearly doubling the amount of speakers we have listed and adding events and tutorials, but we’re looking tight enough to get the word out. Virtual World-specific, right now we have confirmed Linden Labber Philip Rosedale, two architects from the Croquet project, and a full-day Second Life tutorial (which Cory will help run), and we’ll be adding more great folks in this area.

As an AC2005 Media Sponsor, we’ve added a $50 Terra Nova discount code that you’re free to publicize. We keep our conference prices down to begin with, and with the code “AC2005-TERRANOVA” (no quotes, all caps) registration is $300 until May 31st (then $350 for a time after that, then up $50, etc.—registration page at http://www.accelerating.org/ac2005/registration.html ). Student and Academic/Gov’t/Military/Retired registrants are always a flat $150 and $250, respectively.

Don't say we never give you anything.

Console Hacks & Game Economies

A recent Wired News article describes how Microsoft is attempting to combat Halo II hacks.  What does this have to do with virtual worlds?  Our own Ted and Julian explain:

OECD Discovers Games; Thinks There's Something There

The OECD (ou "OCDE" si vous preferez) has a "Working Party on the Information Economy" which has released a not uninteresting report on "Digital Broadband Content: The online computer and video gaming industry." (For some reason the only place I could find it was Larry Lessig's archives, not on the canonical OECD/OCDE site)

I haven't read it all; but if nothing else it looks to be a good overview and source for statistics about broadband usage for gaming in Korea, China, Europe and the US (amongst other places). There are sections on the nature of the industries in each country surveyed, some not-completely-lame analysis of the differences between consoles and PCs, and so on.

I'm not sure that it will be massively new to the readership here. But you'll probably find a nugget or two. And it's always interesting to see governmental types take the social aspects of these games seriously.

(From Lessigblog)

The Zergling Rush (of your dreams)

Recently I fell into a discussion of the Rebellion of Boudicca (AD 60-61, see Tacitus) - a time and a place where trained and disciplined (Roman) legions triumphed over the horde (Britons). In this day and in our culture one can’t help but to reach to Starcraft’s Zergling Rush for edgy (albeit simplistic) analogies.  The trouble with zergs is that while long among us in MMOs, their new presence is filled with energy and insufficient cunning…

No See Ums

There's a small set of design features in MMOGs that cause recurrent problems again and again, problems that are both technical and experiential in nature. That is, there are questions about coding and implementation of the feature and then questions about the way the feature interacts with player expectations and desires.

Some of these are familiar subjects at Terra Nova: economies and craft skills, levelling and time sinks, and so on.

One I don't think we've talked about much but that has been an interesting issue in most of the MMOGs and even many text-based MUDs I've played is stealth.

You Had to Be There

Humor about massively-multiplayer online games, or computer and video games in general, is notoriously an insider's art. Barely a month goes by without a pretentious independent artist or cartoonist taking a shot at the creators of PvP or Penny Arcade about the extent to which their strips require a knowledge of gaming or geek culture to be funny. My personal sounding board, aka my spouse who rigorously abstains from all knowledge of games and gaming, nevertheless finds both strips pretty amusing with some frequency.

But even I wouldn't dream of asking her to look at some of the truly insider humor that comes from MMOGs, even when it makes me laugh uncontrollably. There's a kind of "emergent humor" that comes from players that's some of the best evidence about what players can do creatively with game content--in many ways, a better example of player "authorship" than self-conscious role-playing or tinyplots of various kinds.

New Daedalus Content

Some highlights of this issue's content:

• 26% of female players are introduced to an MMO by a romantic partner, compared with 1% for male players.
• An extensive interview with the leader of a top-ranked WoW guild (they just killed Ragnaros recently). The material provides a glimpse of how the high-end culture differs from the casual game.
• Narratives from players who play with their romantic partners, family members, friends and co-workers illustrating the good and bad things about playing with someone you know in real life.
• Motivational, gender and age differences in problematic usage.

Fearless E3 Predictions

At this time next week, the gaming masses--developers, publishers, journalists and fan boys--will descend upon the Los Angeles Convention Center to collectively have their hearing permanently damaged by the sound and fury of E3. We know a few things for sure: their will be announcements, sessions, unveilings, scantily clad women and large men guarding cordoned-off areas as if they housed ultra-cool partygoers sipping champagne (rather than nerds catching demos of Doom). Amidst the glitter, neon and decibles, what will matter?

Shoot to kill

What would it feel like if with your very last hit it was not just the MOB that fell but a living breathing creature somewhere in the world died too?

As Worlds Age

As virtual worlds age, how far and how quickly can they evolve their content before players have cause for alarm?

A $200M Market?

Gamespot has a story about secondary markets, focusing on WoW and SOE.

Sukow discovered that the top seller of WOW gold made more than $23,000 in April, just on WOW gold. And that wasn't even a good month--in January and February the number-one seller took home more than $44,000 each month

The article estimates that WoW secondary market at $2M/month and quotes SOE as saying that the overall market is $200M/year. Our own Ted makes an appearance as well.

Reputation Capital

MMOG designers concerned with griefing and other antisocial activity by players have tried a variety of strategies to cope with such practices. One of the subtle things that has impressed me about World of Warcraft's endgame, besides the fact that it's relatively easy to get to that point, is that reputation alone at that stage exerts an enormous weight on players. Reading a recent slew of outraged threads on the official forums (and elsewhere), I'm not entirely sure that Blizzard itself understands this aspect of their gameworld. Nor do they seem to understand to fully grasp the ways that reputation capital is accumulated--and lost--in the larger relationship between designers and players.

Pure or Applied?

I was listening to the radio in my car yesterday, and there was an interview with composer Alexander Goehr. It's OK, I'm just as much a philistine as you are, and I hadn't heard of him before either. Anyway, during the interview he expressed a view that it's one thing to write music about, say, the Holocaust if you yourself have lived through it and are working your personal experiences; it's another thing altogether if you're attempting through your music to convey how others felt. He called the latter "applied".

I wonder, can such a distinction be made with computer games?

15 MMOG Experiments

Thanks to Lisa Galarneau for pointing out a this 60-page Technical Report made for the ADL of the DOD by Curtis Bonk of Indiana U and Vanessa Dennen of Florida State: Massive Multiplayer Online Gaming: A Research Framework for Military Training and Education.  Though styled as a report, it's essentially a blueprint of what the authors think they could do with a bunch of military research money earmarked for the study of MMOGs.  The Executive Summary begins:

Consoles and Virtual Property

Not being a console player, I'm probably the last to notice the introduction of virtual property into console gaming. But this morning I saw the article by BBC news entitled "Online gaming costs set to rise." Terrible headline, and the subbie should be shot, but the upshot of this is that console game devs like Microsoft and EA are introducing "downloadable content" into their games. Which content costs money, and which looks quite a lot like the sorts of virtual assets we've gnawed over for the last couple of years here at Terra Nova.

Here's the snip from the article that caught my eye:

Dances with Turing

A while back, noob-I, discovered the virtues of scripting dance routines (ole!) in Second Life (SL).