Terra Nova

Situational Awareness

Regarding the display and representation of information, Ben Shneiderman's famous mantra "(o)verview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand" (OFZaFtD-o-D) may seem unambiguous.   Most of us likely intuit that we consume the global structure of a scene first then move onto its details.  Yet it worthwhile to remember that it wasn't until the digital age that information layering became a practical option in many cases - recall the visually stunning chrome dials of automobiles of the days of yore. 

However, the OFZaFtD-o-D is an incomplete answer.  The follow-on question becomes what is the right organizing global structure to use?   The virtual world interface provides us with an opportunity for an interesting thought experiment...

Play Money

Julian Dibbell's book deserves a thread of its own. I sometimes get the sense that people don't believe any of the things we talk about on this page until they hear some stories by real people. What a story Julian tells, and it's all about the econ. Run, don't walk, to Amazon.com and buy this thing.

Summer Reading Suggestions

                  

Gamers are Standing By

Dave Elfving (of Machine Chicago) pointed me and others to this insurance commercial ("The Lord of Mishap"), which he first saw on television. Take a look and come back. I'll wait.

56% LOL!

A while back Bonnie pointed out how people engaging in online text communication liberally use expressions such as LOL (Laughing Out Loud) to soften the real meaning of what they are saying.  In part doing so helps them cope against miscalculation is a channel where substantial error can arise without the benefit of paralinguistic information (gestures etc).  Research seems to suggest that the motivation for this communicative waffling is well founded.  It would appear that we are significantly prone to miscalculate the meaning in text messages because our "(s)ocial judgement is inherently egocentric"...

Grounded in Virtual Spaces

A personal blog is a complicated thing.  On the one hand, it gives you a chance to say what you want, to put your thoughts in order, to clear you head at the end of the day.  On the other--as your less internet-obsessed friends are always happy to point out--it's rather narcissistic.  After all, what's a personal blog but a chance to hear yourself speak?

But a personal blog can always serve a different purpose; it becomes a surrogate home.

Fifteen new papers on virtual worlds

Fifteen new virtual world research papers are now linked to the on-line syllabus for the course “Games for the Web.” Written by thoughtful undergraduates at Trinity University, the papers explore topics ranging from sexual practices in virtual environments (PDF) to ways that MMOs might be used to ease the suffering of children with cancer (PDF). (Note: As some curmudgeons have correctly noted, the title "Games for the Web" is a misnomer that glosses  over the distinction between "the web" and other TCP/IP-enabled services. The explanation can be found in the appended comments.)

Students met throughout the semester to discuss milestone works related to gaming and virtual worlds, and they supplemented these theoretical conversations with ongoing fieldwork in the virtual world of Norrath (Everquest II). The class played primarily on the Antonia Bayle role-playing server, where they were welcomed by the guild The Vindicators. In a completely unplanned twist of fate, the guild leader (Bandel) turned out to be the legendary game designer Scott Adams.

A Tale of 6 Cities

In a recent musing on VWs as petri dishes, Ted Castronova commented on the impact that creating four new auction houses in WoW's Azeroth has had on the populations of the capital cities. Wondering just what exactly did happen, I went scuttling back to the PlayOn data.

Here are the pretty pictures. Explanations of the data are left as an exercise for the readers.

Dead Metaphor Walking

Oh summer - the humid time to contemplate, the death of the avatar...

TN Welcomes Lisa Galarneau

We were sitting around the GLS conference and someone - maybe it was Thomas Malaby - said Hey what about getting some more anthropologists on TN? And we said Great. And then we said Thomas what if it was a socio-cultural anthropologist like Lisa Galarneau? And he didn't say anything because he was lost in thought over the realization that anthropologists and virtual world scholars both study shards but have little to say to one another about them. Undaunted, we went to Lisa and asked her to join us. And she agreed! Lisa is indeed a socio-cultural anthropologist, writing a PhD about spontaneous learning communities in City of Heroes. We first heard of Lisa through her Social Study Games site, highly recommended. Welcome Lisa!

World of Madden-Craft

Well, not exactly, but close enough.  EA is acquiring Mythic.  Mythic will stay in Virgina and become EA Mythic.  Mark Jacobs will become vice-president and general manager of the studio.  The news reports are generally glowy re-hashed press releases.  My informal survey of the buzz from the blogosphere reveals commentary that is a bit more mixed in tone:

Synthetic Worlds as Petri Dishes

I wrote a paper arguing that synthetic worlds had already performed interesting quasi-experiments; it was published in the prestigious journal Games and Culture. The point was that if game developers were unconsciously generating interesting experiments at the social level, just think what could be done if researchers became developers. The main experiment in the paper involved market location dynamics. The theory that I claimed EverQuest confirmed has just been tested again, in WoW, and happily it may have just been confirmed again. We would call this an out of sample confirmation. When it happens, it's generally viewed as strong confirmation that the method and the theory really do sit together nicely. Synthetic worlds really are good tools for social experimentation. I'll explain, below the fold.

South Korea

Citations from the TN in-basket on the hyperconnected experiment called South Korea.

Non-linear Chat

A couple of technical references crossed my desktop this evening:  Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise (ACM Queue, Nov. 2005); Software untangles chat room debate (NewScientistTech, June 2006).  A few thoughts for virtual worlds.

Online conversation is a tricky beast for many reasons.  Much of it has to do with context and how it is so difficult to trace through - even for highly caffeinated and well-trained online conversationalists.   Why then is the text box in virtual worlds so small  (scrollable or not, does it matter)?...

Games People Play

Another Ph.D. dissertation focusing on virtual worlds -- this one is in the field of psychology.  Jennifer Jamieson Bortle, Games People Play: Identity and Relationships in an Online Role-Playing Games.  The research focuses on three players of Everquest.  The abstract is below.

The MMO Powerplant

We live in the age of the Internet.  We compute at the cusp of the age of software-as-service: enter the dominion of  web services and server farms.  Yet can you imagine the efforts of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to build multi-billion dollar server "powerplants" in remote locations served by cheap power and good network access to do their new deed (Fn1)?   Sure it is scale, but scale can become a new feature onto itself.  Yes, we've known of the long tail that is the MMO unseen (ref [1.], [2.],  [3.]  ).  Yet I wonder, should we anticipate the future MMO in these terms?

The Droids We're Looking For?

Now that Kopp v. Vivendi is off the radar, it is probably time to mention another virtual world-related lawsuit that has been making the news lately: Bragg v. Linden Lab. The defendant in this case is not the owner of the first game we always seem to talk about here (WoW) but the owner of the other game virtual world we always seem to talk about here (Second Life).  The lawsuit is rooted in a dispute over a virtual land deal and is being promoted by the lawyer-plaintiff as "a possible first-of-its-kind lawsuit" that is "unique because the land doesn’t actually exist."

Confessions of a Virtual Transient

or, The Future History of the Triumph of Persistence over Pseudo-pseodonymity

In my twenties, I threw my two cents into a discussion on computerized trading. The year was 1986, and the venue was the Risks Digest. Google was more than a decade in the future. It was a spur-of-the-afternoon comment on my part, and probably reflected my naivete of how stock markets actually worked more than anything else. What's interesting to me is that by 2000, this was the top bit of information that Google knew about me, and remained so for a couple years.

The internet is slowly erasing the venues where ephemeral forms of communication can take place. I had no realization in 1986 that my words would be readable (if they cared) by a huge fraction of the world's population today. I'm not claiming that any harm has come to me, but I find this fact mildly surprising. Today's kids seem at peace with this. Googling your date is acceptable, and you expect potential dates to google you in turn. Even still, kids like Laura K Pahl, and even the initial author who blogged about her, can be quite surprised when the internet tunes in to a conversation thought to contain only a couple or a couple dozen participants.

Okay, time for a change of topic. Let's talk about MMOs and virtual worlds.

Data: Daedalus + Presence Paper

A new daedalus issue is out. Several articles in this issue focus on role-playing:

• 20% of players role-play at least once a week. 28% of players indicated that at least one of their characters belong in a role-playing oriented guild. 24% of players have role-played a scene or event with a group of at least 10 players.
• Role-players talk about which character creations they feel are over-used and what counts as original.
• What are the protocols of role-playing? What makes a role-player a good role-player?

Also just out in press is a journal article on MMORPG demographics in the journal Presence (manuscript PDF here). Many of the basic player numbers - average age, gender ratio, average hours per week - are in this paper, as well as a factor analytic model of player motivations. Also some numbers on relationship formation and potential leadership skill acquisition.

Kopp v. Vivendi: Game Over

So says CNet.  Blizzard has agreed to stop taking down the auctions.  (I guess I should have just waited a few more days for some news to develop!)

Pwnage and the Lobbyist Grind

Video games are one again being portrayed as the root of society's problems. As predicted, members of both the House and the Senate are scrambling to figure out how to better protect us. This should surprise no one. Games aren't alone of course, with a the pitchfork and torch wielding mob of Attorney's General currently storming the gates at MySpace and Facebook. Games and social networking services could argue the facts all day long but do we really want to deal with reality and its well known liberal bias? Is there be a better way to handle the problem? There is, we just need to learn from eBay.

Read on for more.

SL and Server Architectures

Dan Terdiman has a story over at CNet on Second Life's server architecture, and the way in which servers are loaded generally in the MMOG arena. References to our Cory Ondrejka and Mike Sellers, and some interesting questions about balancing and server architecture design.

The Fallacy of War

MMORPG Player-versus-player (PvP) combat discussions tend to polarize attitudes quickly (e.g.  The Price of Serenity), often resulting in claims that import value-systems, frames-of-reference from real-world armed conflict - war (ref. Fn1)!  What feels lacking from such discourse, however, is basic.  Is war even the right metaphor?

I'll suggest that 'war' is a lousy way to think of what goes on in mainstream MMORPG PvP.  Yes some players wish it were different, and yes  perhaps some developers are happy to go along with this paltry fiction, thinking it color on the backdrop.   However, it seems to me that this sort of nonsense does a disservice - both to those in real war and to those on the exterior trying to figure out what the heck is going on in these virtual spaces, even the ganking ones.  I'll claim that what is going on is more like 'sport' and ill-mannered PvP is just bad sportsmanship - filled with raw unfairness and even obnoxious play, but 'war' it is not.

World of DMCA Countersuit Craft

Kopp v. Vivendi is old news, granted, but we never really got around to blogging it here.  So to look for something new to say with this post, I went over to the Central District of California website and took a peek at the docket this week and... nothing much new to report.  Some exciting filings about the pro hac vice issues but no answer yet to the Complaint.

If you follow MMORPG/techlaw news and didn't catch the stories about this suit the first time around, you've obviously been hiding under a virtual rock.  See, e.g, Security Focus, Mike from TechDirt, Outlaw. Slashdot Games, Marty Schwimmer -- the list goes on.   But anyway, here's a brief recap: it seems that gamer/uber power-leveling virtual moneybags/entrepeneur Brian Kopp brought suit (with help from the consumer defenders at Public Citizen) against Vivendi after auctions of his tome "The Ultimate World of Warcraft Levelling & Gold Guide" were repeatedly taken off eBay pursuant to the VeRO system by Vivendia and the ESA (no, not the Entomological Society of America -- the other ESA).

Guilds and Government

One of the rocks that players and academics often throw at developers is that their virtual worlds "aren't democratic". Democracy is good; virtual worlds aren't democratic; therefore, virtual worlds are bad.

Far East News

Below are a couple of stories from the Far East, cleared from the Terra Nova in-basket:  Vietnam restricts online play; Habbo China pairing online and real-world purchases.

Naked in a Lawn Chair, LOL

Things don't always mean what they mean -- especially on the internet.

When we speak to each other online, we use real-life language in non-real-life environments. The rules of our virtual linguistics shift accordingly, mutating to fit their surroundings. Phrases become abbreviations; abbreviations -- evolved beyond their meanings -- dominate our written landscape.

An Army of One

From Dan Norton comes word of an interesting challenge posted on the World of Warcraft (WoW) forums.  A thought experiment of sorts, spooled out over 360+ posts.  The proposition started out simple enough.  Someone named Xzin announced that he "want(ed) to solo 40 characters at once... I want to play an entire raid - by myself."  Captured within this simple declarative are a raft of questions - ranging from the technical, to the relation of a player to the game world, and to the future role of widgets in virtual worlds...

Global Kids Present: Holy Meatballs!

Barry Joseph and Global Kids have been working in the teen grid of Second Life, and now they offer the world an invaluable insider's report on how you build education in digital 3D. Barry writes:

"Global Kids has been working since last December in the teen-only space of Teen Second Life. From what we understand, we are the first and (so far) only organization running public (and educational) events for the entire teen grid. We documented our experiences from the beginning, capturing the trials and tribulations of translating a youth development model into a virtual world, exploring the existential issues raised, and analyzing our work from a games and learning model (a la James Gee, Castronova, etc.). These monthly journals, the Holy Meatballs of Divine Spongiform, were only available through in-world books. But today we can announce that the past volumes, and future content, can now be seen on our blog. TerraNova has been an important community that has informed our practice and we look forward to any feedback it has to offer."