Old School

I'm a historian, so I have  vested interest in thinking that the past is important. Yet when it comes to virtual worlds, and video and computer gaming more generally, I struggle sometimes to understand how to think about the history that's involved. That history matters to players, to game designers, and to academics studying virtual worlds, and is often invoked by them, but it isn't always clear what lessons we ought to learn from that invocation, or even whether we're remotely talking about the same thing.

I was thinking about this a bit while reading Raph Koster's gentle poking at current game scholars for reinventing the MUD-DEV wheel, and of course Terra Nova has its very own local version of the same observation at times from Richard Bartle. In fact, the issue has come up for us in some of our back-channel conversations in various ways at various points.

My first response, before I try to get thoughtful, is to rattle off my own gaming credentials. I played pen-and-paper D&D  when it was some crummy pamphlets with a naked woman on the front cover of one! I played Adventure and Zork on the campus computer! I was there on GEnie and Compu$erve playing Gemstone and A-Maze-Ing! I played the old graphical Neverwinter Nights! I was on LambdaMOO and LegendMUD! I played X-Com and the original Master of Orion! I chopped wood with the best of them in UO, back in the Dreadlord Days! and so on. To some extent, that instinct reminds me that my academic interest in games comes from being a player first and a scholar second, that to some extent my involvement in game studies is more as an "organic intellectual" whose understanding of games comes first from asynchronous threads on gamer message boards and second (if that) from a scholarly literature. So I don't want to be left out of that history: I want to be recognized as simultaneous with it, derive some street cred within it.

And of course, once I try to do that, I recognize that yes indeed, everything old is new again when it comes to virtual worlds, that many of the phenomena in them and around them that most interest academic researchers are familiar and established ones, long discussed by designers and players, before there was anything remotely resembling "game studies".

On the other hand, new eyes mean new looks. More recent players, scholars and developers sometimes tend to see an old problem in a new way, frame it in some new fashion, or bring new methodological and disciplinary perspectives to the table.  Some old issues have become completely new in their implications simply for reasons of scale: secondary markets are obviously something radically different in current virtual worlds than they might have been in Gemstone or Meridian 59, even if the phenomenon is not wholly novel. And there are genuinely new issues--if nothing else, the perceptual and psychological issues posed by 3-D graphical engines in virtual worlds as compared to text-based  or isomorphic designs.

Finally, there's always this issue: if past is so very prologue for virtual world design, if we already know all the problems on the table, what makes those problems, issues and roadblocks so insurmountable? Why isn't history more usefully instructional?

What this leads me to is a concrete set of questions for any readers who've made it this far:

1) What, if anything, has actually changed about virtual worlds in their design or implementation since 1999? Since 2003?
2) Are there any genuinely new scholarly or substantive questions or issues in the study of virtual worlds since 1999? Since 2003?
3) Why are so many issues that were already well understood by early MUD designers so recurrent and intractable, seemingly?
4) What has actually been forgotten from earlier eras of virtual world design? What designs, architectures, ideas, questions, problems, are now "historical"?
5) What kind of cultural (or tangible economic) capital within the community of people interested in virtual worlds do "old school" credentials actually entitle you to? When should the wider community listen more closely to people who've experienced that history in some form? When is historical experience a limitation rather than an asset, tying us to a concept of eternal recurrence?

Comments

[Mark Wallace]

1.

Nice post, Timothy.

As to your questions, which I won't take on individually, I'll only note that one of the biggest things to have changed is penetration. VWs have undergone a shift similar to that of the Internet/WWW post-Netscape, and the stock market in the same period. These were both things with a limited population of people invested in them (literally or not) until a certain point, at which time the population skyrocketed. Which I think changes the nature of some of the questions you're asking, and/or their answers. Adoption of whatever phenomenon by many millions of people has got to change the characteristics and nature of that space. It certainly did in the case of both the Web and the stock market.

Having a history with games is good and fine and valuable. (I always like telling the story of how I was playing adventure and learning BASIC in 1978 instead of studying for my bar mtzvah.) But with widespread adoption I think we're getting into a new phase of the history of VWs at this point (if history in fact has phases), and a lot of the questions that raises have only begun to be explored.

[Punisher2K]

2.

Koster is a jackass

[Mike Rozak]

3.

Although I largely agree with the need to understand the past, sometimes it's also good to forget the past... Things that are known to be "impossible", according to conventional wisdom, often are possible. It just takes someone with an open mind (and/or no knowledge of the past) to make them possible.

[Jim Self]

4.

The penetration has changed, as Mark said. Related, or perhaps the same, is that a generation has been raised with the modern genres of games. I was raised on the old 8-bit NES, but for kids today the N64 console is considered antiquated, and to them the NES is a piece of history.

[magicback (Frank)]

5.

Hi all,

I think we all kinda know the outstanding issues raised over the history of MMO development.

The problem is that there is little room to do pure research and in a business environment all new ideas or new ways of addressing the same old issues have to meet the risk-reduction axe.

So we're all stuck talking about the same issue, but little room to do anything about it except to continue to talk about it some more.

Example: the grind is horrible but still make money. Too risky to try anything else.

Example: customer service is poor, but it hasn't driven away customers.

Frank

[Ken Fox]

6.

1) I'm a newb, but it strikes me as an awfully short period to expect change. Computers have not changed much in 20 years, so why expect virtual worlds to change in 2?

2) I've been reading background stuff lately and it seems like the first people in the field discovered the hardest technical and social problems. Maybe with one exception: peer to peer computing. The pioneers invented "don't trust the client" and that could be retarding progress in scaling up to really, really big virtual worlds. (On the other hand, P2P systems can't be easily controlled, so they may not appeal to software companies.)

2) Way outside my field. ;)

3) The field is too young to teach formally, so newcomers end up stumbling around the material on the Internet. Also, it's much easier to identify a problem than to solve one.

4) Nothing has been forgotten, but many people haven't found the material yet. I mean this literally -- all the e-mail containing all the embarrassing details of inventing a new field are probably spinning on-line at this very moment.

5) "Old school" credentials mean nothing when we can experience the original conversations and ideas in the original medium. If somebody impresses me, I'll google them. Also, the last part of your question is easy: knowledge never hurts, but some people fall in love with bad theories.

[Cory Ondrejka]

7.

FWIW, the history of the comment of "WoW is the new golf" actually game from a discussion with Ian Linden. We were discussing a job candidate who was using WoW to meet senior game executives at large game companies. That seemed clever and Ian commented that -- for game developers -- WoW is clearly the new golf.

[Cory Ondrejka]

8.

Ack, I am such a n00b. Not sure how I ended up cross posting.

[Raph]

9.

1) Instancing is a major new trend that was never really explored in the text mud days. There has always been talk about "embedded experiences" but the idea of literally replicating single-player to limited multiplayer games wasn't one that had currency.

There is also the rise of micropayments, and the design changes that that implies.

Everything else I can think of is basically the same.

2) I think there's lots of them, and just glancing over many of the questions raised by the folks here, by PlayOn, by Nick at the Daedalus Project, by Project Massive, etc, shows that.

3) Because a) a lot of folks don't WANT to solve them (why change classes and levels? they work, right?); b) because they are difficult problems of human nature.

4) I know I've mentioned some of these before, but some that spring to mind are the collection game a la MUD1 and Abers, the entire MUSH province which is largely unexplored today in graphical worlds, most of the MOO province, and most of the windmills I keep tilting at that people think I'm crazy for tackling. What happened to intermud protocol? There's issues of player governance and democracy, there's user creativity, there's the entire impositional narrative branch... lots and lots.

5) Isn't this question the same in any field?

[Mike Sellers]

10.

Excellent, grounded questions Timothy.

1) What, if anything, has actually changed about virtual worlds in their design or implementation since 1999? Since 2003?

A lot but not much: On one hand, computers now are more than 100x faster than they were in the mid-90s when I started on this; that has had significant impact on the kinds of things that virtual worlds can represent. OTOH, the gameplay tropes are for the most part virtually identical, if graphically prettier. Development budgets have multiplied many times over (even the most indie, least expensive graphical game today is made at a multiple of the cost of M59). Server technology has advanced somewhat -- though the bulk of this change happened pre-1999 (Asheron's Call for example).

Many companies do seem to have figured out that "it's a service, not a product" at least at some level. There's a lot of learning left to go in this area.

Most significantly, the conduit from inception to deployment has become much, much more risk-averse (while paying lip service to the idea of broadening the market, as if you can have both at the same time). This is probably the single most stultifying factor in play, and that which most keeps people putting out yet-another-men-in-tights game.

2) Are there any genuinely new scholarly or substantive questions or issues in the study of virtual worlds since 1999? Since 2003?

I think we're still learning what data to gather. Nick Yee's work is some of the most valuable I've seen in this regard. For example, the recent findings about the high percentages of people who play with an out-of-game friend or romantic partner should be highly significant to developers and theoretical analysts alike.

Mostly though, I see increasing awareness in scholarly and other (e.g. governmental) circles of MMOGs. Once this solidifies and works its way into the academic mainstream, people will move off of the very basic issues onto more substantive ones.

3) Why are so many issues that were already well understood by early MUD designers so recurrent and intractable, seemingly?

For one thing, often the same lessons need to be re-learned as the medium changes in technology and scale. Also, the lessons from early MUDs or smaller graphical games don't disseminate well to those now working on newer, larger games. Finally, I think most people developing these games have a feeling that they have a pretty good grasp of the issues, and that looking backward for answers is somehow a sign of weakness (paradoxically, given how much the game play and themes are based on looking almost entirely backwards).

4) What has actually been forgotten from earlier eras of virtual world design? What designs, architectures, ideas, questions, problems, are now "historical"?

If it's been forgotten, how can we discuss it here? :)

I think Randy Farmer's "Habitat Papers" are some of the most relevant historical writings we have, and it's continually interesting to me how much of what he learned, or what we learned on M59 (and as Raph says what others learned on early text MUDs), seems to have been forgotten. In the case of M59, we had guild, social, and game play structures that were experimental but which showed great promise, but which have not yet been capitalized on. As another example, the economics of arbitrage, first really seen in a VW in Habitat, and still discussed here, seems to contain many lessons that we haven't yet learned.

5) What kind of cultural (or tangible economic) capital within the community of people interested in virtual worlds do "old school" credentials actually entitle you to? When should the wider community listen more closely to people who've experienced that history in some form? When is historical experience a limitation rather than an asset, tying us to a concept of eternal recurrence?

A question that needs to be asked, though I'm not sure it has a singular answer. Experience teaches, but sometimes blinds you to new solutions. Inexperience leads you to reinvent the wheel and make expensive mistakes, but sometimes terrific things come of such experimentation.

IMO when experiences can be reduced to principles that are independent of technology or market, then these are probably most worthwhile. Saying "player governance doesn't work - we tried it" is pretty much useless IMO; it's far too contextually dependent to be meaningful. OTOH saying, "here are three examples from different games/worlds where users having an impact on the world has worked well, and three where it hasn't" is probably more worth considering. And statements like "box games are not the same as online games" or "social issues and realities cannot be resolved technologically" are, while abstract, perhaps the most worth listening too -- especially since game developers continue to fall into these traps over and over again.

[Raph]

11.

Just for the record, player governance did not work in LambdaMOO and in UO. Player governance DID work in Ackadia, Achaea, and others. It seems that psychologically, we're far more willing to say something didn't work based on a few counterexamples, while ignoring the positive examples.

[lewy]

12.

Jim Self wrote:

"The penetration has changed, as Mark said. Related, or perhaps the same, is that a generation has been raised with the modern genres of games. I was raised on the old 8-bit NES, but for kids today the N64 console is considered antiquated, and to them the NES is a piece of history."

But the games by and large have not changed. How many iterations of Mario Cart have there been now? And it's looking increasingly likely that the problems faced by the earliest game developers are fundamental ones which are going to continue to confound future generations of designers.

[Peter Edelmann]

13.

Agree with many things already said, will try not to repeat...

1) What, if anything, has actually changed about virtual worlds in their design or implementation since 1999? Since 2003?
Scale, to a certain extent - we now have at least half a dozen worlds with over a million reported users. The number of users we are seeing in single shards like EVE or Second Life are also unprecedented.

2) Are there any genuinely new scholarly or substantive questions or issues in the study of virtual worlds since 1999? Since 2003?
The field of digital game studies was virtually non-existent prior to around 2001. Designers like Crawford were writing interesting (non-academic) theory much earlier, but there had been little written academically before 1999 (a look at the references in Aarseth's Cybertext [1997] or Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck [1997] illustrate the point...). Many of the issues discussed in recent works like Rules of Play (Salen and Zimmerman) or Half-Real (Juul) really weren't on the radar, and we didn't have a critical discourse within which to formulate such questions.

RMT, although it existed before 1999, has become an order of magnitude more important. I don't think Ted's Synthetic Worlds could have been written in 1998.

3) Why are so many issues that were already well understood by early MUD designers so recurrent and intractable, seemingly?
Depends on the issues. Many such issues are also applicable to most groupings of humans outside virtual worlds. For example, one could look at groupings in the actual world through the lens of Bartle types, or something similar, and see one's theory confirmed in a similar way (sometimes you'll see what you're looking for...). The same is true for phenomena like grouping, griefing, competition, economics, identity, etc.
Other phenomena were not necessarily so well understood by early MUD designers even if they were alive to the issues. For example, identity play was identified very early by designers who saw people playing with gender (and did so themselves). However, identity and embodiment were simply not understood at the same depth, nor with the same coherence that we find in more recent work like T.L.'s.

4) What has actually been forgotten from earlier eras of virtual world design? What designs, architectures, ideas, questions, problems, are now "historical"?
Depends what we mean by "forgotten", but there are definitely sources of thought that aren't being tapped. A lot of the theory around text-based MUDs has fallen by the wayside, especially when it deals in detail with the text as medium (eg: Cherny, Reid, Cicognani, etc.). Incidentally, does anyone know if the MUD-DEV archives will be coming back online? or are they already mirrored somewhere other than Wayback/Google?
There is also a great wealth of information and theory from pen-and-paper role-playing games which could be employed much more effectively in developing an understanding of the construction of avatar-based interactive fictional worlds. Current LARPing theory, particularly in Scandinavia, is becoming quite sophisticated in this respect.

5) What kind of cultural (or tangible economic) capital within the community of people interested in virtual worlds do "old school" credentials actually entitle you to?
Experience is valuable in any field, VWs are no exception. The value of that experience, and the types of experience people bring to the table vary greatly. Listening to people like Richard or Randy Farmer, we get a better sense of the origins of many of the phenomena we are seeing today, and such pioneers often have great insights. We can also learn a lot from the less celebrated "1337 d00ds" who were obsessively playing the games such people were designing, although it often takes more effort to sift the wheat from the chaff. I don't know how much "cultural capital" Mr.Bungle's player is entitled to, but I sure would listen in on a panel where he appeared.

[Matt Mihaly]

14.

Peter Edelmann wrote:

The number of users we are seeing in single shards like EVE or Second Life are also unprecedented.

Kingdom of the Winds did 12k simultaneous in 1997 or 1998 actually.

--matt

[magicback (Frank)]

15.

So in summary the real change is the implication of the network and scale.

Everything listed so far has been tried, but in a lesser scale, and reach.

As the scale and network effect increased, there is a new dynamic and also greater awareness, knowledge-sharing, and learning.

Frank

[Raph]

16.

Gotta point out that the actual scale of individual shards has not changed significantly in the vast majority of games since 1997. ;) The Eves are exceptions, few and far between.

[Lydia Leong (Amberyl)]

17.

Instancing is a major new trend that was never really explored in the text mud days.

There have been multiple MUSHes with instanced areas, starting a little over a dozen years ago. Generated by code, destructed when no players were inside them, and anywhere from totally private to entirely public.

[Michael Chui]

18.

I'm a newb, but it strikes me as an awfully short period to expect change. Computers have not changed much in 20 years, so why expect virtual worlds to change in 2?

My first reaction, before re-reading Tim's questions, was that virtual worlds, per se, have been around for roughly 30 years.

My second reaction, which is more pertinent, is that while personal computers, a la Microsoft's claim to fame, have not changed much, there is a broad, sweeping change of New Stuff, ranging from server farms to cellphones and Sidekicks to iPods and more technologies still in R&D like infrared keyboards.

The principle of innovation speeding up holds for just about anything technology-related. Larger changes happen in less amounts of time. So while we can't expect earthshaking changes (the question would have been less worthwhile), we can certainly expect significant ones.

Just for the record, player governance did not work in LambdaMOO and in UO. Player governance DID work in Ackadia, Achaea, and others. It seems that psychologically, we're far more willing to say something didn't work based on a few counterexamples, while ignoring the positive examples.

While I don't know about UO or Ackadia or others, there is a notable difference between LambdaMOO and Achaea.

Achaea's player governance is within the system. Matt Mihaly isn't going to alter the game because a majority of the voting playerbase thinks they should have a new skill tree, or that credits should cost a dollar less. Sarapis remains the final arbiter on all things, so it's a democracy inside a tyranny.

LambdaMOO's 'experiment', on the other hand, was let the players decide the rules and we'll just make it so. If they had so desired, they could've incorporated levels and skills into the world, or enacted a required fee for entry.

I might be off on a couple of the details, but there IS a difference between your list of what worked and your list of what didn't.

That's not to say player governance is impossible, but it does mean there's more to it than simply the term "player governance".

Just a bit of meta. I'm not sure if I'm derailing or not, so don't do so on my account. =)

[Timothy Burke]

19.

I think Raph's point that the "lessons learned" tend to be singular negative examples magnified through iterative repetition into ironclad laws of design is incredibly crucial. That's worth amplifying in many ways and in many contexts: that what is thought to be known and unknown, possible and impossible, is not often based on an especially comprehensive or systematic historical knowledge of actual virtual world experiences, but on synecdotal inference from singular examples.

[dmyers]

20.

1) What, if anything, has actually changed about virtual worlds in their design or implementation since 1999? Since 2003?

Graphics. Instances were always there in people's heads. You are always, in some sense, playing solo. Oh, and money.

2) Are there any genuinely new scholarly or substantive questions or issues in the study of virtual worlds since 1999? Since 2003?

No.

3) Why are so many issues that were already well understood by early MUD designers so recurrent and intractable, seemingly?

Because they are biological imperatives, or because they are not well understood, or both. Probably necessarily both.

4) What has actually been forgotten from earlier eras of virtual world design? What designs, architectures, ideas, questions, problems, are now "historical"?

Everything that can't be googled or isn't part of the current online vanity fair. Or both. Probably the same thing anyway.

5) What kind of cultural (or tangible economic) capital within the community of people interested in virtual worlds do "old school" credentials actually entitle you to?

Cynicism.

When should the wider community listen more closely to people who've experienced that history in some form?

On Tuesdays?

When is historical experience a limitation rather than an asset, tying us to a concept of eternal recurrence?

Memories of experiences are historical, and I guess they have some use as such. Experiences are whatever it is that we are, and memories tend to distort that. Sometimes for the good, sometimes not. Death tends to break us of the habit of the eternal recurrence thing, so I really wouldn't worry too much about it.

[Raph]

21.

There have been multiple MUSHes with instanced areas, starting a little over a dozen years ago. Generated by code, destructed when no players were inside them, and anywhere from totally private to entirely public.

I'm not saying that it didn't exist--we can likely find a few examples for just about anything. But instancing right now is in ALL the recent games. It's becoming the norm to have it, a de rigueur feature.

My sense was that it was never a common feature; a dozen years ago puts it at '93, which is right when I was most active in looking at different types of muds, and I basically never bumped into it. I was going to have something similar in an area I never finished for Legend that I started in 1996 or so, and it was sort of outre at the time.

Although I also know that 3DO was working on a fully instance-based MMO themed on Might and Magic around then, that never saw the light of day.

Why did Tim pick 1999 anyway?

[Brian 'Psychochild' Green]

22.

Other people have answered questions with similar answers as I was going to give. I'll be a bit repetitive and state that the biggest issue is that these things are about people and how they interact; consider the number of topic in sciences like sociology that are well understood but where that understanding doesn't lead to any easy (or even universal) answers.

The other issue is that people tend to fixate on a few small examples and make incorrect extrapolations. To pull examples from Timothy's original post, Gemstone and Meridian 59 are still around today, so why don't they have similar RMTs like the other games? Hint: age of these games has nothing to do with it, and neither does scale. But, people are too busy looking at WoW (or EQ, or Second Life, or any other particular game) and think that all games must work like that one. Few people really have experience with a wide variety of games, and have been able to keep up with the vast changes that have happened over the years. I personally know that M59 is not the same game it was when it launched over 9 years ago under 3DO's reign or even when it re-launched about 3.5 years ago under our control. Other games have also changed, often even more radically than M59 has; how many people could really talk about the historical context of these games as they have changed? Few, I suspect, and probably only the developers in the case of the smaller games that get overlooked.

This isn't to say that everyone should be fully conversant about the intricate details of my own game; on the other hand, consider what you would think about someone who has only studied the practical economic and business issues in China and tried to apply that knowledge to discuss economics and business in other places like Russia, Sierra Leone, Luxembourg, or even the United States.

My thoughts,

[magicback (Frank)]

23.

Now, for all things learned and not learned, what do you guys think of Civilization IV?

I know that this is not really a MMOG and is slightly off-topic, but (1) it has more than 10 years of history, (2) it is the 4th major edition, (3) it has multiplayer feature (which I'll call massively instanced multiplayer online game), (4) developed in consideration of history and fans, etc.

There are some 'old school' features and there are other 'new school' features too. Based on the reviews I have scanned, it appears to have balanced features for both fans and new players.

What can we learn here in terms of the development of online gaming?

Frank

[Matt Mihaly]

24.

Brian Green wrote:

he other issue is that people tend to fixate on a few small examples and make incorrect extrapolations. To pull examples from Timothy's original post, Gemstone and Meridian 59 are still around today, so why don't they have similar RMTs like the other games?

In fact, Gemstone players were pioneers in the creation of secondary markets, and RMT on Gemstone continues today. (search Ebay or just go here: http://www.gsauctions.com/. My guess is that M59 doesn't have enough players to create a viable secondary market.

Hint: age of these games has nothing to do with it, and neither does scale.

Scale absolutely plays into the creation of -any- market. Not enough participants means you won't have much of a secondary market. I bet players have done RMT on M59 before, but it doesn't have a large enough player population to support full-on trading sites and such.

This isn't to say that everyone should be fully conversant about the intricate details of my own game; on the other hand, consider what you would think about someone who has only studied the practical economic and business issues in China and tried to apply that knowledge to discuss economics and business in other places like Russia, Sierra Leone, Luxembourg, or even the United States.

We all fall into that trap, as demonstrated by the above assertion that Gemstone doesn't have RMT. There are thousands of virtual worlds, but unless you're into text MUDs, you are going to be quite ignorant about nearly all of them. I'm willing to bet that there are few working professionals in virtual worlds who have experienced more virtual worlds than I have (I've tried out probably 300-400 virtual worlds), and I'm still all-but-ignorant about the majority of virtual worlds across the internet. There's just too much to know, too much to experience, and getting even a basic grasp of the intricacies of a single virtual world might take hundreds of hours.

I share your frustration, however, in watching people focus on a single game (WoW) and extrapolate lessons from it to virtual worlds generally, particularly given that WoW is so incredibly derivative.

--matt

--matt

[Michael Chui]

25.

To pull examples from Timothy's original post, Gemstone and Meridian 59 are still around today, so why don't they have similar RMTs like the other games?

I know that both of Simutronics' major games have RMT markets, and the reaction I've seen regarding them is much the same as I've heard it is reacted to in other games.

[Matt Mihaly]

26.

Michael Chui wrote:

While I don't know about UO or Ackadia or others, there is a notable difference between LambdaMOO and Achaea.

Achaea's player governance is within the system. Matt Mihaly isn't going to alter the game because a majority of the voting playerbase thinks they should have a new skill tree, or that credits should cost a dollar less. Sarapis remains the final arbiter on all things, so it's a democracy inside a tyranny.

LambdaMOO's 'experiment', on the other hand, was let the players decide the rules and we'll just make it so. If they had so desired, they could've incorporated levels and skills into the world, or enacted a required fee for entry.

Incidentally, I agree with this. All of our games have player governance, but only within the context of the game fiction, not in terms of control over the game (at least beyond the control any customer base has over its service provider).

--matt

[Raph]

27.

Usually the phrase 'player governance' refers to forms of player policing, controlling territory, etc--stuff within the game fiction. That's the sense I meant, anyway.

[Matt Mihaly]

28.

Fair enough, Raph. In that case, I think there are a lot of virtual worlds where player governance "works." Perhaps not a lot percentage-wise, but I bet we could find a few dozen.

On the other hand, defining what "works" means and measuring whether a system meets that standard is a lot more troublesome. I THINK Achaea's system works for example, but I have no real way of knowing whether Achaea would appeal more strongly to more players if it didn't have player governance.

--matt

[Mike Sellers]

29.

A survey of what current worlds provide in terms of (in-world) governance -- and how many provide anything more than a skeletal guild system -- would be illuminating.

[Brian 'Psychochild' Green]

30.

In fact, Gemstone players were pioneers in the creation of secondary markets, and RMT on Gemstone continues today.

Yep, you found the twist; Gemstone does indeed have a healthy RMT market for virtual goods. Of course, it's not surprising a text game admin knows about other text games; unfortunately, it's also not surprising that few other people seem to know this fact.

My guess is that M59 doesn't have enough players to create a viable secondary market.

Here you're wrong. There is some RMT in M59, but it's substantially different than what you see on WoW and most other games that get the academic attention. Again, the reason has nothing to do with the scale or age of the game.

Scale absolutely plays into the creation of -any- market.

It doesn't in this case. At its peak M59 boasted many, many thousands of subscriptions, which is surely enough to get some RMTs going. Even a few hundred people would be enough to see RMTs under normal circumstances if the statistics I've seen presented are to be believed.

There's just too much to know, too much to experience, and getting even a basic grasp of the intricacies of a single virtual world might take hundreds of hours.

You could say the same thing about different world cultures where it takes more than just a few hundred hours to understand the culture, yet we have people that study cultures and are able to comment intelligently about multiple cultures. Heck, I can comment intelligently on a few world cultures myself, and I only have undergraduate degrees and a bit of travel experience. If the academics and others studying virtual worlds want to be taken seriously, maybe it's time to start studying these things seriously instead of studying a few (or even just one) and making sweeping generalizations about the rest.

My further thoughts,

[Matt Mihaly]

31.

Brian Green wrote:

If the academics and others studying virtual worlds want to be taken seriously, maybe it's time to start studying these things seriously instead of studying a few (or even just one) and making sweeping generalizations about the rest.

I couldn't agree more. The current situation, with all due respect to those studying virtual worlds, is akin to studying movies by studying Jerry Bruckenheimer movies only.

--matt

--matt

[Mike Rozak]

32.

Here's a historical document from 1990 that describes the existing MUDs, all 32 of them: http://www.iol.ie/~ecarroll/mud/mudreport.html.