Terra Nova

Anda / Grokster / New Paper

Three quick notes on Anda's Game, the Grokster ruling, and my GLS paper on Norrathian law, respectively.

(This post has nothing to do with the Kalmar Nyckle, btw -- just couldn't think of a good picture to use...)

Sony Station Exchange Goes Live

Sony has launched its in-house RMT system (discussed here.) The first exchange-enabled server is called 'The Bazaar'. Currency and characters are already for sale. To get a feel for the interface, see below.

In A Gama Da DiGRA

Went quiet, went stateside, went digra, went moonlighting.

Women Speak

Raya spent four months in 2004 interviewing 110 women, primarily EQ players, about their experiences in mogs. It's a nine-part series, should be interesting. Figuring out what exactly is 'pink' about online gaming - maybe nothing - is not easy.  Are most women online gamers involved in digital recreations of face-to-face gaming (spades, euchre, literati)? What are the implications?

Thanks Oloh, aka Don Shelkey of Silky Venom, for the tip.

Go Cabby (Past) Go!

Kotaku is reporting of Hasbro's "Real World Online Monopoly Live" promotion.  Yet another variant of the blending of the virtual with the physical worlds...

Emergence Emerges Some More

I've got a lot of thoughts sparked by DiGRA coming, including a long meditation on the dreaded ludology-narratology thing, but first I wanted to mention an interesting sub-theme I noticed weaving its way through the conference: emergence, complex systems, non-human agency, network theory and related topics. Nicholas Glean dealt centrally with these issues. I understand  Seth Giddings as also being engaged on these topics, though I missed his paper presentation. I caught a number of other mentions or invocations of these concepts. Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern's Facade (their presentation on it was one of the highlights of the meeting for me) also clearly is a case of emergence, even if they don't explicitly see it as such.

My own paper dealt with the same issues. A draft is available at my blog. I've fiddled with it some since then.

One thing that I think is important about the general suite of concepts under this heading is that they can be painfully vague or misleading in the wrong hands, or just marketing hype. But in the context of games, at the very least, emergence is a technique for creating the psychologically convincing simulation of life or intentionality. There is clearly a deep mental algorithim that human beings use to sort life and non-life that agent-based emergent systems do a pretty good job of tapping into.

I think there's even more to the concept that's relevant to games, and especially persistent virtual world games. But I'll leave that for  the full paper. I do think it's an important concept  for game scholars to consider, and consider well.

GLS Conference

Several Terra Novans (Ted, TL, Cory, Dmitri, and I) have descended on Madison, Wisconsin for the Games, Learning, and Society conference organized by Constance and guided by the James Gee mafia of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  As the title suggests, the focus is mostly on games in education. Below are notes from the first panel I went to, featuring Henry Jenkins and James Gee. (Updated 6/24 -- added notes from PARC PlayOn guys. Added Social Effects / Addiction.)

Developments in the MOG Market

Frequent poster and Online Alchemy CEO Mike Sellers sends this report on recent developments in the multiplayer online game (mog) market:

"Last week, Blizzard announced WoW now has over 2 million subscribers.  And this doesn't count China, where they've just opened up.  They report having over 500,000 concurrent users in China during their open beta.
(http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=5696)

On the same day, rumors (later confirmed) abounded that Monolith had sold The Matrix Online to SOE.  Twenty-six people on the team were given offers to go to San Diego, the rest were out of jobs.  The future of Monolith in the wake of this, not to mention the entire market,  appears uncertain. "

Sticky NeoPets

Game Journalism reports (via WSJ Online) that Viacom has paid 160$ million for the Neopets website and 20 million subscribers.   This is significant money, e.g. when compared with many MMORPGs. 

Ce n'est pas un monde virtuel

Although this has been discussed once or twice before, it is clearly time to charge fearlessly into the breach.

Are graphical digital worlds just text worlds with pretty graphics?  After all, people get all excited about sales of virtual items, weddings, stalking, gender bending, and governance, yet all of these behaviors happened in earlier text-based worlds and were probably discussed on MUD-Dev in 1997.  Several of these comments touch on this topic in the context that creativity in Second Life is no different than MOOs,  so I wanted to put a stake in the ground and then duck and cover:

Physically simulated 3D worlds are fundamentally different from text worlds.

Read on for why

Meta Grinding and Nemo

Second Life so many stories that I try not to clog Terra Nova with them, but two articles on New World Notes deserve your attention.

The first, "Evolving Nemo", details the creation of evolving AI creatures within Second Life. While boids and genetic algorithms built on top of SL's scripting language are interesting, what pushes this effort over the top is the use of shared code and standards within SL's ALife group.

The second, "Grinding the World" covers the exploits of residents determined to ride skateboards all over Second Life. What sets this effort apart from previous attempts is that they've actually built a board that's fun to ride (and shot a video to show what it can do). It certainly isn't THUG 2 yet, but there is something magical about grinding a 30 meter tall replica of Tin Tin's rocket with a group of friends!

It's amazing what SL's residents make as they combine community, creation, and markets with a pinch of physics and scripting.

Longitudinal Census Data at PlayOn Blog

Given that the virtual worlds we spend 20 hours a week in are able to keep track of everything we do in them, there's a gold-mine of social science data (personality, social networks, etc.) that's being accumulated. It's a pity that it's so hard to get access to aggregate server-side data. This is changing though with games like World of Warcraft that allow third-party census mods. But so far, most census mods have only served to provide snapshot data.

Several researchers at PARC (who I'm working with this summer) have devised an automated system that cycles through 3 servers for both Alliance and Horde and performs a census about every 16 minutes. This longitudinal data provides a way to answer far more interesting questions that the static data is unable to. For example:

• Do players who group more often level faster?
• Do players in guilds spend more time playing each week than those not in a guild? (answer)
• How does server type affect guild size or grouping among players?

We will answer these questions and many more at our new PlayOn Blog. We hope you come join us in interpreting and playing with the data. We will have new entries each day this coming week.

DiGRA 2005

Terra Novans descend on Vancouver tomorrow for DiGRA 2005, Changing Views: Worlds in Play.  As you can see from the program, TL Taylor will be kicking off four days of hundreds of videogame-related papers with a keynote address (w00t!).   The other big news, though, is that many of the hundreds of papers are now available in full-text form online.

Terra Nova at Supernova

For those of you attending Supernova 2005 next week, be sure to stop by the “Virtual Worlds, Real Money” workshop which will be moderated by yours truly. Cory’s participating as a speaker, along with Ian Bogost and Bill Barhydt from Sennari.

Virtual Violence

Games and aggression have been a hotbutton item for years, and the controversy isn't going away any time soon. Some of it is fueled by conservative paranoia and some by justifiable parental angst. Nevertheless, as Richard pointed out recently, it doesn't mean that the questions are automatically without merit. So I give you this to chew on--a study of gaming and violence that specifically tested an MMOG, did it out of a lab and used a control group:

Contradictions (2)

Here’s another contradiction about virtual worlds. This one is about character ownership.

Casual Dress

Keith Stuart on the Guardian Unlimited Blog posted an update ("Casual gaming: the new hardcore") to the perspective-duel between  "hard-core" and "casual" gamers...

Playing Alone

I took a header off my bike earlier this week, but luckily I was traveling at speed on blacktop and my face broke my fall.

This resulted in a couple of new developments in my life: some pleasantly-unflappable surgeons kindly sewed my lips back on me, and then they introduced me to Percoset (aka ocycodone). I cannot begin to tell you how much I love this drug. But that is for another day.

The combination of the drug-induced reverie, large amounts of time recuperating in bed wondering whether I will always speak like Sylvester Stallone, and the facial damage naturally got me thinking about what everyone thinks about in these situations: yes, instanced worlds and the films "Abre los Ojos" & "Vanilla Sky".

Rent-A-Vatar

Frequent poster Lee Delarm reports that uber accountness is now available by the hour. Is XP insurance far behind?

AIIDE Citations

This year's AIIDE (Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment) conference seems to have been quite the show.   We're fortunate that around the web some very fine people have gone to the trouble to document what happened in  detail and with keen insight ( Andrew Stern: [1], Michael Mateus:  [2], Robin Hunicke:  [3]).  Others? ...

Human Pac-Man

The BBC reports on the National University of Singapore's Mixed Reality Lab's Human Pacman project. 

Players equipped with a wearable computer, headset and goggles can physically enter a real world game space by choosing to play the role of Pacman or one of the Ghosts.

I want to hear you $cream

Deep breath - - - - go!

Money for nothin'...

I’ve been asked to introduce myself with a short bio. You’ve been warned.

Most of you either know me or know of me; surviving nineteen years with an opinion in this veil of tears known as the multiplayer online game industry can have that effect. I’ve been variously described as a pioneer of the industry, an ill-tempered harridan that bites the hand that feeds her and – my personal favorite – “that goat-blowing bitch.” Well, everyone needs a hobby, I guess.

Where did it all begin, you ask? I started out as a third assistant to an assistant of the assistant file librarian on GEnie’s Apple II RoundTable in 1986, played Stellar Warrior from Kesmai in beta test that same year and, with eighty of us blasting away at each other and my hands literally shaking from the tension of successfully defending a planet with a crippled laser cruiser, decided on the spot to change careers. Along the way, I’ve managed to fill just about every rung on the ladder in the development and publishing of these things, spoken at more conferences than I can remember, co-authored a book about developing online games and spent six years writing a rant column to point out the flaws in the industry and, maybe, improve things a bit. I’ve had my successes and failures, learned something from each… Basically, I was fortunate to have snuck in early, when no one was looking and before the publishers threw so much money at the industry that the bar to entry has become stratospheric for most.

And from that vantage point of 19 years gone, involvement in some capacity with over a dozen MMOs and uncounted other types of online games under my belt (or skirt, as the case may be), I raise a question about the height of that bar:

Is money killing this industry?

SWG Music Muffled

Reminiscent of Marvel v. NCSoft, but just without the lawsuit, Katie Dean writes for Wired about how players in SWG don't have the freedom to play virtual instruments because IP makes that possibility too dangerous for Sony Online:

As musicians, the characters play pretend, virtual instruments like the slitherhorn, ommni box or the nalargon, but are limited to a handful of canned tunes. Lawyers at Sony Online Entertainment and LucasArts envision a legal nightmare if musicians were to re-create music copyrighted in the physical world.

"If we allowed someone to play anything they want, they could play a song by Madonna and then we'd have licensing issues," said Julio Torres, a producer for Star Wars Galaxies at LucasArts. "We don't want to give them the option to try, because the bottom line is, if we open that gate, they will go through it," he said.

My friend Eric Goldman gets quoted on the legal issues.  As to my personal thoughts about all this, I'm again with Fred -- this is a problem that needs a solution.

Super scary

So I guess Marvel / DC own this too.

Terra Nova Levels Up!

Ding!

We couldn't be more pleased to announce that Jessica Mulligan--yes, the Jessica Mulligan--is joining Terra Nova. There is so much that we could say about her, but we'll let her introduce herself in her own words.

But on behalf of all the Terra Novans, welcome Jessica!

DIY Branding in Virtual Worlds

I’ve posted a new paper about member developed business brands in There and Second Life to SSRN, available for download here.  This is something that grew out of last year’s more general Advertising & Branding in Social Virtual Worlds project, this time focusing on four “DIY” brands developed by members themselves.

Contradictions (1)

Here's something that's been bothering me for a while about computer games in general and virtual worlds in particular.

Lost in s-Space

Why don’t we add more social software features to MMOs?

The AI Kiss

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in MMOGs is a hot topic on Terra Nova this week.  Let us introduce a parallel discussion.   Damion Schubert ("You Don't Want Realistic AI") and Jamie Fristrom ("Manifesto Thingy") banter a fresh insight on an observation made many times (e.g.  lately in these comments): namely that MMOG AI is for the most part simplified because it needs to be a player solvable puzzle.

Spaceship Earth Takes Off

Mike Sellers sent us a link to UC-Irvine's designs for a Buckminster Fuller world.

Lost in v-Space

I hate being lost. Physically or virtually. Hate it! hate it! hate it!! But is it a necessary part of the game?