Big and Small Bear

I started out this evening thinking ahout modding - the game-culture phenonomenon that has fallen into some controversy these days.  My thoughts waved into big and small bears, finally to be snagged by recent commentary as to whether we at Terra Nova were preoccupied with larger virtual worlds at the expense of the smaller ones...

I would hate to see modding disappear for many reasons.  Foremost of which is a jealous one: from those places have come so many delightful surprises.  Yes, some mods are clever, yet most of them are derivative at best.  I am convinced most of the value of modding comes from community building rather than game play -  mods seem a means communicating (mostly) campy tales told amongst a niche of gamers with a particular creative and technical bent.

Yes, every now and then a trully impressive game mod leaks out and appeals to a wide audience.  But even with those, I have wondered if we'd all be better off if the same energy were aggregated and harnessed to develop real tools and platforms.  Of course I'm wrong, because mods - as forgettable and tiny as most are - are about community...

Over the years I have read of big and small bears far too many (or far too few) times, depending upon my children's perspective.  The gist of this book is this.  Big bear and small bear bumble through many pages mistaking items intended for the  other for themselves.   From their playful meander we learn that big and small bears enjoy each other's company yet they live worlds apart when it comes to what they collect.  We learn too that shared values is not always about shared ownership or round-robin resource allocation - it is about shared interests, ideals, and support.

Recently on Terra Nova there was a robust discussion about Terra Nova's editorial meandering - whether at this time small virtual words were underserved.   Speaking for myself, I absolutely agree, 100%.  The problem is that it is harder to know what to learn from the small scintillating experiments than it is from the cranky bets played by millions.  At least at first.  Ideas take time to evolve and filter through the larger community.

Yes, small virtual worlds and big ones are not created equally in the forum of public attention.  Sometimes fairly, sometimes not.  If at any time you think we've overlooked something worth noting, send your thoughts to the mailing list on the side-bar.  We don't do marketing (unless you pay us far more than you can possibly imagine).

Curmudgeons and critics us all, we are great fans of the community of bears, big and small.  But remember, big bear wore big shoes, and little bear wore little shoes.

Comments

[monkeysan]

1.

Nate said: "I am convinced most of the value of modding comes from community building rather than game play - mods seem a means communicating (mostly) campy tales told amongst a niche of gamers with a particular creative and technical bent."

@Nate: I think Valve, for example, might disagree with that claim. And while community has certainly exploded around the modding phenomenon, I don't think even the playerbase would agree with your statement. For many modders, the primary motivation is to demonstrate to the industry that they have the chops to make games, turning their dream into a career. And the reason developers go to great lengths to ship robust versions of world-building tools with their games is not primarily to build community but rather to extend the life of their franchises and increase the penetration of their rendering engines. Community is important but is, in many cases, a 'spandrel' of sorts.

Here's a few stats from Wikipedia about Counterstrike that I think brings the modding phenomenon into the context of the 'Big Bear, Small Bear' discussion.

"CS has been the most widely played online FPS for the past few years and has over 19.5 million legal owners. In 2002 there were over 30,000 Counter-Strike servers on the Internet (second place was Unreal Tournament with about 9,800). In 2004, GameSpy statistics showed over 85,000 players simultaneously playing Counter-Strike at any point in time and in 2006, Steam shows over 200,000 players for Counter-Strike (this includes Counter-Strike: Source, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and Counter-Strike 1.6); accounting for almost 70 percent of the online FPS audience. According to statistics gathered by Valve's content-delivery platform, Steam (1), these players contribute to over 4.5 billion minutes of playing time each month, making it the most popular online FPS in history."

[grant]

2.

We don't do marketing (unless you pay us far more than you can possibly imagine

I don’t know Nate, I can imagine quite a bit.

...

Hey, it's obligatory...

[illovich]

3.

I think most of the criticism is off base. You can only cover so much, and it's important to cover what's truly noteworthy or of more than just gamer "gee whiz" interest. After all, every MMORPG's marketing department is sure that their game is "revolutionary, groundbreaking" when very few offerings are. And unless something is both different and significant in some way it's a waste of the Terra Nova staff's time and energy to cover every virtual world when most of them are merely redundancies.

The reasons for covering Warcraft & Second Life are clear. I would like to see more discussion of the burgeoning RMT-to-play trend practiced by Entropia, and planned by a number of VWs, including Roma Victor. But the reason for that is I think the new financing model is different enough that it merits consideration on it's own.

I'd be curious to hear what games "need" to be covered here in more depth, and why... (not trying to be a jerk, just curious what games people think are being missed by this site in particular).

[Richard Bartle]

4.

illovich>it's a waste of the Terra Nova staff's time and energy to cover every virtual world when most of them are merely redundancies.

They may, individually, be so small as not to attract the gaze of Terra Nova's eye. However, we do need to be aware - constantly - that they exist, and that their needs are not always aligned with WoW or SL.

For example: if we were to get some high-profile court case in the USA that was likely to set key precedents for years to come in how virtual worlds conduct themselves, there's a fair chance that TN authors and readers will be called as expert witnesses. If what resulted was some kind of mechanism for partitioning virtual worlds into either WoW-like or SL-like types, each of which had its own particular set of freedoms and responsibilities, well that would be fine for the SL and WoW clones but it could seriously damage those with much smaller user bases who suddenly find themselves having to abide by rules framed for significantly larger games. The same applies for virtual worlds that are built for specific purposes (eg. education/training), for specific demographics (eg. children), using other interfaces (eg. text), with different legal protections (eg. no EULA) and having different business models (eg. free).

SL and WoW are OK as ciphers for "large-scale social worlds" and "large-scale game-like worlds", and in WoW's case in particular it's come to the point where you need to be WoW-literate in order to discuss virtual worlds at conferences. However, they do not between them run the gamut of virtual worlds, and we should always bear in mind when making generalisations that other virtual worlds do exist.

Richard

[illovich]

5.

They may, individually, be so small as not to attract the gaze of Terra Nova's eye. However, we do need to be aware - constantly - that they exist, and that their needs are not always aligned with WoW or SL.

I didn't mean to establish WoW and SL as the boundaries of the discussion, I was just saying that it's clear to me (and I think to most) why they come up so often, and why they tend to dominate discussion.

I agree with your point that WoW is an okay cipher for the majority of the large scale virtual worlds -- it does seem that most of the triple-A titles are simply refinements of the Everquest model (3D GUI to a MUD-like engine with a some variation on the Tolkien fantasy milieu.

I certainly wasn't saying that other types of virtual worlds don't need consideration, on the contrary I'd love to see more discussion of the kinds of world you were mentioning. I think the error of my post was that I was only addressing the WoW clones, but not making that clear.

[Richard Bartle]

6.

Illovich>I was only addressing the WoW clones, but not making that clear.

Yes, I was basically agreeing with you: we can't talk about every virtual world as if they were on a par with WoW and SL, simply because too few people have experience of them. However, we can't be too insular about it, either: other worlds do exist, and we shouldn't just brush them aside for not being (currently) WoW or SL.

Richard

[Bhagpuss]

7.

I think that Terra Nova does a fair job of mixing the big with the small. It does seem to lack contributors whose academic interests are in aesthetics rather than mechanics, though. I suspect that if TN had more academicians from fine art and literature faculties, the Small Bears would be getting considerably more atention than the Big. It may be early days for those disciplines to have any awareness of or interest in the subject matter, though.

The preponderance of discussions of RMT, economies and lawsuits doesn't really do justice to the variety of VWs out there, or the potential of the form. I suspect that including more lesser-known MMOs/VWs would not change the focus all that much, even if it did mean that all the examples were no longer drawn from WoW/SL and occasionally PE.

[Matt Schneider]

8.

Bhagpuss> I suspect that if TN had more academicians from fine art and literature faculties, the Small Bears would be getting considerably more atention than the Big. It may be early days for those disciplines to have any awareness of or interest in the subject matter, though.

As a student of English with interest in areas of literature into which videogames no doubt fall, I think that the biggest problem is figuring out a model for analysis of videogames. When I look at something like Silent Hill I can see a plot with themes, characters with motivations, etc. VWs, on the other hand, will have a backstory but everything else can sometimes prove difficult to pin down as a text. If a framework for discussing such a maliable and unpredictable medium is established, I'm sure that commentary will follow but until then most literary criticism in videogames will likely tend toward offline gaming with more or less fixed plots.