Terra Nova

A more "intimate" E3?

I apparently missed the speculation over the weekend, but today various news outlets confirmed that the E3 we know and love/hate is no more-- the trade show atmosphere will be gone from any future shows, and the remaining event (whatever it may be) will focus on "press events and small meetings between media, retail and development."

You could call E3 a virtual world in its own right-- wandering among the booth babes, bands, and flashing lights, it definitely feels like something not of this earth. A place where people wear outlandish costumes, and engage in activities they might not normally try in other places. Some say they hate it, yet keep going back, addict-like.

But what does this mean for virtual worlds? I'd be hard-pressed to say that I thought it mattered much at all. I'm sure the gaming press will continue to be well or over-informed about new and expanding MMOs, and publishers will keep trying to sell MMOs and cut their various deals. Maybe it *is* time for E3 to end, or transition into something else. But I'm sure glad I got to see one in the "old style" before that happened.

James on Julian

TN author promotes friend-of-the-show interviewing other TN author shock!

In The Second Life of Julian Dibbell, Wagner James Au interviews TN Author (who also gets time to write a few books you might have heard of) Julian Dibbell about his latest work: Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot.

Virtual worlds, gold farmers, words like ‘ludocentric’ - it’s all there. Enjoy.

Yum Yum, Pie!

Bright colors, new MMO market share numbers, and an excuse to say the word "pie"?  Heck, who could resist this friendly pie chart from MMOGchart.com?

Now WoW, don't be greedy.  Leave some for the rest of us.

-Via Kotaku, via Wonderland, via Sex in Games.

Sherpas

Tim O'Reilly cites a recent Wall Street Journal article (syndicated ref  here) naming commercial services that offer lessons from "professional gamers" for 15-65$/hr.

Infinite Mind Moving to SL

Wanted to pass along an announcement about the national public radio program, Infinite Mind, and its plans to move its operations into Second Life (permanently, apparently).

Review of Carnagey, Anderson, and Bushman

Review of "The Effect of Videogame Violence on Physiological Desensitization to Real-World Violence," by Nicholas L. Carnagey,  Craig A. Anderson, and Brad J. Bushman, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2006.  Many thanks to Andy Havens for sending us this link.

Synthetic Worlds Initiative

Just  a quick announcement of the launch of the Synthetic Worlds Initiative at Indiana University. The SWI will conduct research and foster community around the study of synthetic worlds. It will also build them (more on that soon). For more information, see swi.indiana.edu .

Cyber Erotica and the Disappearing Arts

Faced with the question, “And what do you do for fun?”, very few of us would think to answer, “Oh, I write erotica.”  But as online you-and-me’s engaging in text-based cybersex--heck, even text-based flirtying–that’s just what we’re doing. 

Of course, most of us probably wouldn’t admit to our internet exploits at cocktail parties anyways (Can you say conversation starter?), but the point remains: When we use text to get each other off, we’re really working together to create a collaboratively-authored story: a form of art, however bad.

So why don’t we think of our sex chat as art?  Because it’s fleeting, in purpose and meaning. Because it disappears.

36 Hours

Physicsweb.org recently reported of A-L Barabasi's work involving a Hungarian news website:

The researchers found that the overall half-life distribution [of a news document] follows a power law, which indicates that most news items have a very short lifetime, although a few continue to be accessed well beyond this period. The average half-life of a news item is just 36 hours...

Size Zounts

A fascinating research paper by Tan et al. (March 2006, ACM, [1.] )  suggests large computer displays assist users engage the virtual spatial world more effectively.  Specifically:

(i)n this article we present four experiments comparing the performance of users working on a large projected wall display to that of users working on a standard desktop monitor... Results from the first two experiments suggest that physically large displays... help users perform better on mental rotation tasks. We show through the experiments how these results may be attributed, at least in part, to large displays immersing users within the problem space and biasing them into using more efficient cognitive strategies.

The R-word & Social Interaction

As an ethnomethodologist and conversation analyst, someone who scrutinizes the micro organization of talk-in-interaction through audio-visual recordings, what intrigues me most about virtual worlds is that they take face-to-face conversation as their communicative metaphor (many of them do anyway). Often when I play, I notice ways in which avatar and chat systems differ, in interactionally consequential ways, from the system of real-life face-to-face. And I ask myself, "Why did the designers do this?" "Was it too hard to follow real life?" "Were they going for a different effect?" "Or did they just not know enough about face-to-face as a system?"

Now whenever I propose that designers might benefit from following real-life, I inevitably get rebuked by some for using the R-word... realism. "You can't translate real-life into the virtual." "Virtual worlds are supposed to be fantastic, aren't they?" "Playability is more important than realism." "We can make the virtual world better than the real." It seems that realism has fallen out of style. So I'd like to step back for a moment and briefly examine what we mean by "realism" in art and media.

Please Welcome Our New Ethnomethodological Overlords(Or, Bob Moore Joins the Author Roll)

It’s official: An invasion force fielded by the Republic of Xerox PARC has established a beachhead on the shores of Terra Nova. To the three PARCers who had already infiltrated our author roll (Nicolas Ducheneaut, Eric Nickell, Nick Yee) a fourth now adds his name: Bob Moore, whose expertise in conversation analysis and other tricks of the ethnomethodological trade has long rounded out the intellectual arsenal of PARC’s PlayOn team of crack virtual-world watchers. Co-author, with Ducheneaut and Nickell, of the wave-making paper Doing Virtually Nothing: Awareness and Accountability in Massively Multiplayer Online Worlds, Moore has brought his mad social-analytic skillz to bear on an illustrious CV’s worth of workplace- and “third place”-oriented studies — and was of course the author of 1995’s cult hit "Dereification in Zen Buddhism," delivered at the annual meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society and now available only as a rare drop deep within World of Warcraft’s Dire Maul dungeon. Phear him if you must, but I, for one, welcome Bob Moore. Please join me.

Your Identity or Mine?

Virtual world paradigms for managing identity are tethered to real lives.  So, for example,  subscribers with credit cards pay for accounts that correspond to characters with abilities that may evolve.  Beyond the impoverishment (or not) of the  avatar-as-metaphor, mapping a real identity into a virtual seems to generally work well from a user's perspective.   

However, from computer security comes ideas about a different way of thinking about identity.  Do these ideas have any translation into virtual worlds?

Time to Turn the MMO Inside Out?

Joystiq reports on a recent talk by Thomas Bidaux of NCsoft Europe at the Develop UK event where apparently it was revealed that 'everything we think know about MMOs is wrong'.  Mr. Bidaux  has a number of opinions about how MMOs are going to be revolutionized, turned on their heads even, via platform innovations (though anyone who played Everquest on the PS2 might be a bit skeptical that this is a positive move), Xbox Live style persistence in terms of player rankings and achievements, novel payment models, and yes, 'a lifestyle revolution' enabled by our experiments with Web 2.0, 'collective intelligence (e.g. Wikipedia) and viral content (e.g. MySpace)' that  'provide opportunites for community and collaborative efforts'.

Well, we like our trend watching here at TN...

RMT Faces Taxes and Regulation in Korea

Correspondent Unggi Yoon reports that Korean government agencies are considering a crackdown on RMT. There's a theoretical case that RMT is essentially a pollution effect, hence a market failure, hence regulable. That case is presented here. Unggi's report is within.   The last chapter of Julian's book is relevant as well.

WTS Custom Designed Doubloons PST

I was idly browsing for some information about Pirates of the Burning Sea the other day, and ran across this bit of information about how Flying Lab Software is looking to integrate the internet meme du jour, "user-created content", with a traditional MMOG design. Here's what they say:

Player-created content.

We put the player community in the designer's seat. Using industry standard tools, you can create new textures and even 3-D models and submit them to the peer-reviewed web site for incorporation into the game. And you own what you create - if you design a new sword hilt or throne or sail design texture, you can make it freely available or charge for it within the game world. Earn in-game income from the sales of your designs! Or keep them to yourself and customize your own unique gear to the nth degree.

This paragraph is fascinating to me, because it manages to capture almost all of the most difficult aspects of player-created content within MMOG gamespaces, and all within a few lines.

Young people today

There’s a big debate about Identity in the UK. We do not have government issued ID cards. We do have strong laws on what data can and cannot be held in respect of us and what can be done with those data. We also have a strong active debate about this sort of thing especially in the face of the so-called ‘war on terror’, including a mini-spat with America over sending data to the US about passengers on transatlantic flights (it’s required by the States but it’s against EU law).

Then there is mySpace, Orkut, Bebo, playahead, Xbox gamertags etc where teens primarily seem happy to post all manner of personal details and sometimes intimate pictures of themselves and others.

Seems to be a bit of a disparity here.

Virtual Trademarks

This is kind of fun: The Guardian runs an article on IP rights in Second Life, leading to some blogs discussing trademark law in particular.  See Marty Schwimmer, Professor Rebecca Tushnet, Robert Scoble, and Jeremy Pepper.  (And while you're at it, re-read Betsy Book's excellent work to get an in-depth treatment of branding activities in VWs.)

House of the Rising Sun

Via billsdue comes mention of  another nationalist incident in a Far Eastern MMO.   In this case 10k players protested in a Netease game (China, "The Fantasy of the Journey West") when an "(in-game) government office had a background that looked liked a rising sun.  For more details including screen shots, see EastSouthWestNorth...

Feeling Crowded?

Jaron Lanier published a beautiful rant on "The Hazards of the New Online Collectivisim."  Are crowds always wise?   Sure, in Jaron's words:

The collective isn't always stupid...  the "Wisdom of Crowds," is real... (b)ut it is not infinitely useful. The collective can be stupid, too. The reason the collective can be valuable is precisely that its peaks of intelligence and stupidity are not the same as the ones usually displayed by individuals.

Rather than trying to fully introduce Jaron's rambling yet eloquent attack - read the complete text there.  The question for here comes by way of a frisky analogy.  How much value does the collective experience in the "massive multiplayer" add to the individual experience - once all the credits and debits are accounted for.  Put it another way, is there reason to wonder whether the MMOG proposition is sometimes more about liking the idea of crowds in your virtual world than about the benefit those crowds actually provide to you?

Convention for the Protection of Virtual Architectural Heritage

Sam Shahrani and Mario Gerosa have completed a Convention that would protect certain architectural elements of synthetic worlds. They write:

"We are pleased to announce the completion of a Convention for the Protection of Virtual Architectural Heritage. This document seeks to lay a foundation for the conservation of our 'virtual architecture', the environments and places that make up the synthetic worlds of video games. More commonly referred to as 'levels', 'maps' or 'worlds', these environments are the stage for players' experiences in video games. Unfortunately, little has been done to protect, catalogue and analyze these game spaces, but such conservation is necessary in order to provide reference material for study. The goal of the Convention is to provide a framework for this vital preservation work, and to encourage further academic study of the principles of level design and the architecture of synthetic worlds."

The Convention has already been published in Italy and may be found on the web here (pdf) and here (html).

ID Theft, RMT & Lineage

[Corrected July 5] On the day that Yanks celebrate our independence from England Great Britain, South Korean jurist and Terra Nova author Unggi Yoon writes in with some MMORPG legal news from South Korea courts.  It seem that NCSoft's Lineage has been hit by a major case two major cases of identity theft. 

Social Space Griefing

Mark Wallace has a great bit over on his 3PointD blog about griefing in MySpace and how it is following an established practice from TSO. Read the piece for the details but his conclusion is worth repeating here:

One of the criticisms that’s always been levelled at the ... [virtual world reporting done by Wallace and others] is that it takes these things too seriously. “It’s only a game,” is the constant rejoinder whenever we call into question the things that go on in these virtual spaces and how they are managed by the companies that run them... But, as we’ve maintained all along, it is not in fact only a game. These places are models for the kind of society we’ll live in, in the not-too-distant future. They’re worth paying attention to — close attention, since much of what happens in them has a direct bearing on the way we will live... [T]he societies that are developing in these places point the way toward the societies of the future, whether online or off. To a great extent, if you want to know how we will live tomorrow, look at the way we live now in a place like Second Life.

Great stuff.