Terra Nova

Leaky Faucets

Object-oriented software guru Grady Booch will be speaking (IBM link) at the upcoming Game Developer's Conference in March ("Best Practices for Game Development").   A harbinger of things to come?

In "Troubles with Tribbles" we discussed the problem with computing parallelism confronting game developers.  Assuming Tim Sweeney's point of a driving growth in the numbers of game simulation objects (to implement larger worlds with more content) then how *does* one begin to manage the complexity of those objects.

Why should you care?  Hang on...

Does Bandwidth Buy Crowds?

Technology question: Yesterday a documentary film crew from Tellabs was in my office and one of their questions carried the premise that the size of the broadband pipe to the home was going to increase 100-fold in the medium term. Their question was: how is that going to affect online games? I answered with an opinion that, primarily, it would allow more users in one virtual space at one time. Ten times more, I'm guessing - if the pipe goes up by 100x, but the information load of a crowd of size n goes up by n^2, then the max crowd size goes up by sqrt(100x) = 10x.

I've been making so many stupid arguments and claims lately, I don't feel a lot of certainty in anything I say any more. So can I ask: Is this sensible? Is it at least not personally offensive to anyone? If so, that would be an advance...

I'm So There

Just wanted to let the TN community know that I’ve started this week on staff at Makena Technologies (the folks who bring you There) as the new Director of Product Management.  In this role I'll be focusing on There's in-world marketing programs, merchandising and events as well as helping to develop and implement new product features.  As many of you know, I've been intrigued by There since its beta period.  Now I'm thrilled to have the chance to gain some first-hand experience with the development of a social virtual world product and I couldn't be happier to have this opportunity.  Looking forward to great things in 2006!

Less *Bang Bang* for Your Buck

Much to the surprise of the folks over at GameDaily and trigger-happy GTA fans alike, sex workers are people too -- even when it comes to video games.

SWOP, the Sex Workers Outreach Project, recently issued a statement denouncing Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto for encouraging the mistreatment of prostitutes. "In the interest of furthering sex workers' human and civil rights to life and personal safety," the statement says, "we object to any media which represents sex workers as legitimate targets of violence, rape and murder."

AAAS Conference

Greetings from St. Louis, where I had the opportunity yesterday to give a presentation about virtual worlds with fellow Terra Novans Cory Ondrejka, Josh Fairfield and Mike Sellers, at the annual conference for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).  Unfortunately I missed Cory’s presentation, which was moved to the morning session. Josh, Mike and I covered the afternoon session and it was quite a range of topics.

The WoW_wave

WoW wave (noun): The phenomena of online gaming creeping in to the public consciousness evidenced by a deluge of exploratory contacts from journalists, marketing organisations, VCs, TV types, blue chip companies and random others asking what all this online stuff is all about, what it means, what they can do with it, and where the money is.

100K

Eve Online has been in the news - recently voted favorite MMORPG of 2005 by MMORPG.com's Reader's Choice Awards (see Joystiq's coverage and comments).  CCP also announced that it had crossed the 100k subscriber mark (Slashdot's comments and links).   

GLS Conference: Submissions Deadline Extended

Games, Learning, and Society Conference
June 15-16, 2006 . Madison WI

Deadline for submission to the second annual Games, Learning & Society (GLS) Conference to be held June 15-16, 2006 in Madison, Wisconsin has been extended to March 3, 2006. The GLS Conference fosters substantive discussion and collaboration among academics, designers, and educators interested in how game technologies – commercial games and others – can enhance not only learning and education but also culture and society more broadly. Speakers, discussion groups, interactive workshops, and exhibits will focus on game design, game culture, and games’ potential for learning and social change.

We invite creative and interactive proposals for presentations, discussions, symposia, workshops, debates, respondents, and exhibits on topics and issues related to conference themes. Please visit our website for detailed submission information: www.glsconference.org

Poster Note: Last year the conference was a huge success (we had a waiting list to get in and only 13% paper acceptance rate) so we've decided to try to make it an annual event but keep it small so that folks can still engage in genuine conversation. I'd personally love to see more MMO representation there, so please consider submitting something!

World of Warcraft is the New Golf.

So, Cory was right.   World of Warcraft is not only the new golf, but there are country clubs forming.

Religion in MMOGs

Many MMOGs have within them some nod toward religion, some degree of religious trappings at least.  Priestly characters are common, as are holy warriors (paladins).  To say nothing of demons and angels based loosely on Christian archetypes, the former of which make regular appearances in online games. 

And yet, actual religion and theology are pretty much absent or at best non-operative in most MMOs.  In fantasy games the priest is typically a "healer" but otherwise the character is a façade.  In modern or science fiction games, religion is conspicuously almost entirely absent. 

I've been wondering for some time about enabling the presence of both real-world and made-up religions in MMOs as thematically appropriate.  Is this a good way to flesh out a world, to create gameplay surrounding a moral code and shared identity, and to bring a significantly missing piece of human community to the game, or would it just be a way to invite controversy -- in effect, to draw aggro from both religious and non-religious players and cause a heap o' customer service trouble?   

The companion to this question is a bit more introspective: to what degree does the answer to the question of operative religions in MMOs vary with our own degree of spirituality/religiosity?  Is the perceived  agnosticism of the game development community keeping religion out of MMOs?

De-levelling

GM: In accordance with TOS Para 16.2.3.1(i) you level was just decreased by 2 for repeated homophobic comments in public chat

Player: wtf

GM: pwnd

Troubles with Tribbles

The slides from Tim Sweeney's (Epic Games) POPL talk are available; it is a deeply technical presentation (PPT, "The Next Mainstream Programming Language: a game developer's perspective") worth noting for a number of reasons.  The most important is its hint of a looming challenge confronting the games industry.  Will the industry need to change how it works with its software?   

While the issues presented are not unique to the games industry it will likely be felt there sooner.  In so many ways the games industry has led the rest of the pack by way of technical challenges, solutions, and breakthroughs.  The problem of software engineering was hinted at in an earlier discussion - albeit vaguely, when the distinction was made between virtual world design and its added-ons (see "Lipsticking the Chicken").  The question here is a more vexing extension:  if I can't practically express it, how can I build it?

What follows is the first in a series of posts planned on software and virtual worlds.   There are large forces in play that shape what worlds look like today and into the future -forces rivaling the imaginations of designers...

All Your Heals Are Belong To Us

The Canadian Red Cross wants game developers to stop using the Red Cross logo in games, claiming trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and playing the "support the troops" card by suggesting that use of a red cross in games removes the “protective value” of the mark in real war zones. No, I'm not making this up. I wish I were. The Vancouver Sun quotes David Pratt, the international issues director of the Canadian Red Cross:

Open Letter to Blizzard Entertainment

[Editorial Note: The following letter is a statement by the author posting it and by those who have signed it; and it is cross-posted at Many-to-Many. It is not a public statement by Terra Nova, or any of the Terra Nova authors who have not signed it]

Open Letter to Blizzard Entertainment—Speech Policy for GLBT guilds in World of Warcraft

Recently, Sara Andrews, a player in Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft (WoW) recruited for a Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transexual (GLBT) Friendly guild in the general chat channel on the Shadowmoon server. She was reported to a Game Master by another player, and subsequently sanctioned for “Harassment – Sexual Orientation”. Under the Terms of Use of WoW, it is forbidden to transmit offensive material, including abusive or sexually explicit material.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Or, Hooray for Hollywood (for real this time?)

If articles in the NY Times, Washington Post, The Economist, and even (today) CNN Money weren’t enough to make you think that maybe MMOs really are finally gaining mainstream credibility, there was the recent announcement about startup Multiverse and its Advisory Board, which includes Oscar-winning movie-makers James Cameron and Jon Landau, among others (full disclosure: they’ll let just about anyone onto one of these, apparently).

In a separate online Business Week article, Cameron said that his next movie project was going to have a companion MMO that would be released before the movie's debut.  So is this yet another lame licensing deal, a bastard child between games and Hollywood, or does this signal something different?  And what do this and Multiverse's announcement mean for MMOs in general? 

Be Afraid, Be--Well, you know

Sometimes Hollywood movies are subtle, giving us a small taste of an idea by hints, whispers or analogy. The conch is really our voting system in a democracy. The lion is really Christ. That sort of thing.

And then there are those times when it walks up, smahes you in the face and says "Ripped from the headlines!!" If producers knew "ZOMG!!", I suspect it would have been in this trailer:

http://www.themoviebox.net/movies/2006/STUVWXYZ/Stay-Alive/trailer.php

Pharaoh's Expectations

I've been following an interesting discussion around A Tale in the Desert. Andrew Tepper, aka Pharaoh, commented on the first use of the legal powers of that game's citizens to have another player banned, by wondering why the relatively expansive political power that the developer-sovereign of the game cedes to the players hasn't been used more often and more pervasively.

"Alone Together" in World of Warcraft?

The "social factor" is often advanced to explain the popularity of MMOs: "it’s the people that are addictive, not the game." And indeed, social networks are essential components of the online gaming experience. Game designers build "virtual third places" to encourage interactions. Quality time in a MMO is time spent with others, be it raiding a dungeon in a group, socializing with bystanders in a cantina, or chatting with remote guildmates while exploring the wilderness on your own.

Or... is it? The data PlayOn has assembled from World of Warcraft challenges many of these assumptions. Could it be that a less, not more, social environment contributed to WoW’s success? Read on for more.

Welcome to Nic Ducheneaut

We're insanely delighted to announce that we have a new author, Nic Ducheneaut, a research scientist in the Computer Science Laboratory at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Nic's research interests include the sociology of online communities, computer-supported cooperative work, and human-computer interaction, and he is one of the principals of the amazingly amazing PlayOn blog.

We've been thinking for a while about how best to mount a takeover bid of the PlayOn blog, coz we're so impressed at what they do. We realized that we just don't have enough capital to buy Xerox (even though the share price is a little deflated these days), so we just thought we would just poach their talent and not bother to pay for it. It works for us. Nic is only the first stage in a long-term project that we anticipate will culminate in us acquiring John Seely Brown at no cost. But more on this later.

Geography And Travel

A while back Kotaku publicized a Google Map application that featured the World of Warcraft (WoW).   For WoW players and map lovers it is a visual feast.   But this is just the tip of our iceberg...

World Persistence: One In A Series of Queries

For me, the holy grail question about MMOG design centers on the vesting of persistence in the world itself rather than in the characters. Almost everything I find unsatisfying, both as player and as scholar of MMOGs, has to do with the almost complete lack of dynamism in synthetic worlds themselves, that the only thing which changes, grows, reflects persistence, is the character.

When I've ventured out before on this topic, I've found a reasonable degree of consensus on this point among scholars, developers and players, that dynamic, changing, responsive synthetic worlds are what we need. I've also heard on many occasions that they simply are not technically possible at the present time.

My basic problem is that I like to think about synthetic world design but lack the technical background to go past thinking fairly abstractly about what is and is not possible. So I want to start a series of fairly focused posts on applied world-persistence where I ask the technically adept among our readership just how difficult a particular fairly precise design would be to implement, especially in comparison to existing designs.

Linden Lab Fellowship

Creative students take note of another fellowship competition involving virtual worlds. Linden Lab has announced a 'Fellowship in the Visual and Performing Arts'. Here is the announcement that Robin Harper of Linden Lab sent to educators who use Second Life as part of their teaching:

I'm very excited to announce that Linden Lab is offering its first fellowship in visual and performing arts for creative innovation in Second Life.

This $4,000 fellowship will provide a young artist with a chance to be free for a semester or summer to explore the use of the digital world of Second Life as an artistic medium. In doing so, we hope that we will see Second Life used to even greater potential in the expressive arts to the benefit of both the Second Life culture and the broader world of art.

I hope that all of you will take the opportunity to visit www.secondlife.com/education for more information, and please let anyone at your university who might be interested know of the March 15, 2006 application deadline. Applications will be reviewed by a panel of distinguished academics, and the fellowship recipient will be announced in mid-April.

Also, please feel free to share this announcement with any colleagues who may have eligible students.

Questions can be sent to [email protected].

Thanks! Robin