Terra Nova

Are we really ready for a global conversation about virtual worlds?

(This posting is about the urgent need to find financial sponsors for State of Play IV: Building the Global Metaverse. Feel free to skip the bulk of the message and cut to the chase.)

San Antonio is not the most cosmopolitan city in the world. We lack an Ethiopian restaurant, and have extremely limited options as far as good Chinese food is concerned. Though we have a handful of (very small) independent  bookstores, we're forced to drive to Borders if we hope to find anything remotely out of the ordinary. We're not on the circuit for hipster college rock bands, and most of the good art house  movies are found only in Austin. We don't even have an American Apparel or a Trader Joe's to call our own.

Some might reach for the word "provincial" to describe this city. Yet, because we have never been close to the epicenter of American power, our perspective is more humble than you might expect from Texans. We've always known that exciting and important things are happening outside our borders. To participate in important conversations about important topics, we know that we must get on the plane and fly to other places.

From San Antonio, there are very few direct flights. As my Mom (a Texas native) once noted, "Even if you go to hell, you've got to stop in Dallas first." Thus, we Texans, like Nebraskans and Coloradans and Latin Americans and Africans and British residents often find ourselves traveling through strange airports with long lay overs. We are used to it.

Ultimately, the transition to a fully globalized world may be  more traumatic for those who live in such cosmopolitan cities as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Washington D.C. After all, when a community has spent more than a century with a reputation as "the place that others must visit," the perspective of its residents tends to become somewhat myopic. One could even use the word "provincial."

Whether or not we choose to admit it, the American Century is over.

Superstition

B.F. Skinner is well-known for his theory of behavioral conditioning, but one of his quirkiest studies involved inducing superstition in pigeons (1948). 8 pigeons were placed in a reinforcement contraption (i.e., Skinner Box) and were given a food pellet every 15 seconds no matter what they did. After several days, each pigeon had fixated on a particular superstitious behavior. One pigeon danced counter-clockwise, another two developed a left-to-right head-swinging motion, another attacked an invisible object in the top right corner of the cage, and so forth. This phenomenon has also been replicated among high-school students (Bruner & Revuski, 1961). And given that MMOs are a kind of Skinner Box that offer some random rewards (e.g., rare drops), it's not surprising that superstitious behaviors emerge in MMOs as well.

The essential paradigm of cyberspace

In 1993 Chip Morningstar penned "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, My Postmodern Adventure".  This essay recounted his and Randy Farmer's 1991 adventure at the Second International Conference of Cyberspace.   Surprised by an academic humanities audience, they hurriedly reworked their presentation at the last moment - nonsensically knitting together bits of phraseology they heard the day before...

Business and Legal Primer

A new chance to add to your game-related tome collection: TN friends Greg Boyd and Brian ("Psychochild") Green are the editors of the Business and Legal Primer for Game Development.  The book is primarily advice for those working in the game industry (not working on MMORPGs specifically) but it features a chapter from James Grimmelmann that gives advice on the construction of EULAs for virtual worlds.  More detail on Brian's blog.  There's also a chapter with some "I wish I knew then" remarks by Richard Bartle, Jessica Mulligan, and other recognizable names.

Participatory Culture

Henry Jenkins has posted the fifth installment of "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture:  Media Education for the 21st Century."  A series of posts based on his white paper on youth and participatory culture for the MacArthur Foundation (1., 2., 3., 4.).  Worth the read, worth the visit.  A few scribbles follow...

Why I will never be a Centurion

I must confess: I like PvP, a lot. Perhaps this has something to do with the inordinate amount of time I spent playing Counter-Strike with my friends in college, or just a basic need to show off my 3l33t skills. But the bottom line is that I've been spending a lot of time in World of Warcraft's Battlegrounds lately, trying to climb up the ladder and equip my avatar with a nice armor set.

Here is my problem though: I am at rank 8 (Legionnaire) and I'm stuck. In fact I've been stuck there for weeks. This is really a problem since I cannot complete my coveted armor set until I reach rank 10! But I also have the luxury of some fresh data about PvP play patterns that Nick, Eric and I computed recently - why not look at some numbers and see if they could help?

Blacksnow documents

Vili Lehdonvirta over at VERN has posted the links to the documents in l'affaire Blacksnow Interactive. Essential reading.

Virtual Worlds as non-predatory spaces

Everyone seems to know that the place to find child abuse perpetrators is in the dark corners of society, in the woods, lurking in the shadows on the edge of town and now of course on the internet, in chat rooms and all over mySpace.

This popular truth about perpetrators is indeed frighteningly true; though of course its prominence also masks the fact that most child abuse occurs at the hands of parents, close family and people in positions of trust, not by strangers.

I’m sure there is a mountain of theory about why the typical abuser is depicted as ‘other’ rather than, say, family. It certainly confuses matters. And if public policy follows received opinion, which I fear it does, we face a serious situation.

But within the context of TerrraNova the thing that confuses me is why Virtual Worlds are not getting the blame. I see no rational reason why Virtual Worlds should facilitate abuse more than other computer mediated technologies (which of course means that there must be cases where a Virtual World is implicated), but causal links don’t seem to be the determining factors in what the media chooses to give primacy to.

We’ve had addiction rhetorics, violence, social-isolation, evil Asians or evil East Europeans. But so far no one has tried to pin child abuse on Virtual Worlds – why not?

Chains of Contract

There's been a lot of contract talk lately -- Bragg's suit is all about the Benja...er...EULAs, Eve is using a new kind of contract clause to penalize RMT, etc.  But can we really create an economy based purely on contracts between games providers and games players?

Second Life Breaks 1 Million Mark

This morning I had a look at SL's main page and saw that the registration number had topped 1 million. Congratulations!

Tooling Around

Reginald Braithwaite forwards a couple of obscure essays on the trade-off between static typing in computer languages and dynamic programming ( 1. 2. ) .  Reginald clearly does not like static typing.  We on the other hand on Terra Nova love virtual worlds and all their content.  How did we meet?  Hang on...

It Takes a Guild to Raise a Child

In my WoW guild backchannel not long ago, there was a lively discussion of our childrens' experiences in MMORPGs, and the question of what constitutes "stranger danger" in a virtual world context. As a parent of two avid underaged gamers, this is a question of more than theoretical interest to me. On the one hand, I love that online games provide my children with opportunities to learn how to work in groups, to collaborate in order to accomplish tasks, and to understand economic behaviors. On the other hand, like most early online adopters, I've had my share of encounters in which my online friends were revealed to be something other than what they presented as online.

Those of us who play games _with_ our kids have a decided advantage here. We're not dealing with an unfamiliar environment, and while we may not be around for every second of their gameplay, we have a sense of their behavior and actions in virtual environments. We're more likely to know when they're exhibiting "risky behavior," and better able to explain the risks and benefits.

Blurring Boundaries of Play

Worth noting, a brilliant video presentation by Nick from this summer (PARC forum, July 2006): "The Blurring Boundaries of Play: Labor, Genocide, and Addiction."  It provides a solid survey of the complicated and always intriguing MMORPG landscape.  It is well suited to novice and jaded Terra Novan alike...

JEC says don't worry about virtual tax

Via Reuters Second Life, Congressman Jim Saxton (R-NJ), chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, has issued a statement about the taxability of in-game transactions for virtual goods:

under current law, if a transaction takes place solely within a virtual world there is no “taxable event.”

Searching for the 3D tipping point

In the long and winding why do we never talk about SL thread a question that lurked around is whether SL is the basis for a 3D version of the web and the meta question of whether such a notion makes any sense. Just below this post we are raising the notion of a global metaverse from the point of view of its social implications, but I want to talk about product and market dominance for a moment.

This got me thinking about whether SL has already reached that tipping point. Sure it has an infinitesimally small number of users compared to the web or mobile phones, but every day we see yet another brand setting up office .

If you view is that SL has certainly not attained status of de facto standard as the ‘3D web’ - how are we to know when something has? What characterizes the tipping point when a n other wizzy 3D tech becomes the 3D tech?

Building the global metaverse

Whether they take the form of games, social spaces, or educational environments, virtual worlds are now truly global in scope. The popularity of virtual worlds in Asia is phenomenal. From Thailand and Malaysia to Indonesia and the Philippines, the Asia Pacific region's on-line gaming market generated approximately $1.4 billion in annual revenues last year – a figure that is expected to reach $3.6 billion by the end of the decade. Much of this growth will be propelled by 180 million Chinese Internet users, the majority of whom will play on-line games.

China is just part of the story. Korea is an epicenter of innovation. For example, Cyworld, a South Korean Web community site, boasts one-third of the country’s population as its residents. India is already the region's third largest market for online games and participation in virtual worlds is sure to follow there as in other developing economies. Yet the conversation about virtual worlds is dominated by Western voices. While there are tradeshows for the videogame industry in Asia, most discussions of virtual world research have been located exclusively in the West to the exclusion of meaningful international participation.

There are significant negative consequences to the lack of global dialogue about virtual worlds. The absence of cross-cultural dialogue means that virtual worlds are being set up and run without sensitivity to diverse cultural, legal and social norms.

This lack of cross-cultural understanding does not just harm the industry; it also manifests itself in the social tensions emerging online. Last June, close to 10,000 Chinese players rioted within The Fantasy of the Journey West to protest the presence of what they thought was Japan’s national flag. Two years ago, players of Lineage II teamed up to slaughter game characters perceived to be “Chinese gold farmers.” Meanwhile, thousands of Chinese players complain that Western gamers in World of Warcraft apply racial profiling, excluding Chinese players from social groups based on language skills and recognizably Chinese surnames.

In this era of global virtual worlds, differences in legal approaches to free speech, privacy and intellectual property across cultures also need to be navigated. Companies of one nationality operate virtual worlds with servers located in another country and subscribers resident in a third. These spaces do not respect national boundaries nor should they. We are excited by the possibilities of enhancing cross-cultural interaction and understanding, and this requires that we provide guidance to politicians, courts and legislatures about approaches to virtual worlds. With the trade of virtual assets and currencies across national borders, we need to develop regulatory approaches that understand global technology while respecting local values.

These virtual worlds are crucial building blocks of global civil society. As such, they harbor the promise for relationship-building and cooperation across national borders. Solutions to the cross-cultural growing pains of this new medium require a sincere commitment to transnational dialogue.

State of Play IV: Building the Global Metaverse, the fourth annual State of Play conference on the future of cyberspace, will be held in Singapore on January 7-9, 2007. Organized by Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, New York Law School, Trinity University, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, this pioneering global conference on virtual worlds invites experts across disciplines to discuss the future of cyberspace and the impact of these new immersive, social online environments on education, law, politics and society. The hallmark of the conference is its multi-disciplinary perspective.

Among the topics explored at this year's conference are:

.       Virtual worlds and cross-cultural cooperation
.       Virtual and digital property
.       Youth cultures in virtual worlds
.       Regulation of virtual worlds
.       Taxation and digital assets
.       Global virtual worlds journalism

This fourth annual event is sure to be our best yet. In addition to a remarkable slate of speakers (including writers Neal Stephenson, Cory Doctorow, and Julian Dibbell and legendary I Love Bees designer Jane McGonigal), we will also host the world premiere of two documentaries on virtual worlds (The Ideal World and Gold Farmers). Conference panels will be streamed live on the web, and the entire gathering will synchronized with mixed reality activities in Second Life, There, and World of Warcraft.

We hope you will join us for this important and vibrant conversation about the future of the global metaverse. For more information, see: http://www.nyls.edu/stateofplay/

Indentured Servitude

Steven Davis reports sketchy details of a seemingly novel anti-(Real Money Trade [RMT]) twist adopted by CCP (Eve-Online)...

Datamining the Forums

When I'm thinking about a particular virtual world, studying it, playing in it, I find it useful to read both official forums and unofficial fan site forums. It's one source of information about what players are thinking, doing and wanting in a given virtual world, one of the visible tips of the larger below-surface iceberg of the sociality and culture of a given virtual world.

I don't find it that hard to use forums for gathering information, nor does it seem to me to be that difficult to recognize the evidentiary limits of the data available on them.

Why, therefore, is the question of what forums are good for such a perennial issue? Why, in particular, do many developers seem to exhibit varying degrees of hostility to forums as a source of information, and cast them instead as a tool for "community management"?

I Ran

With news of a videogame of blowing up tankers off the Strait of Hormuz, is seems a good time to visit an old question.

Bragg v. Linden 2.0

The Second Life based Bragg v. L inden lawsuit, previously discussed here, has been re-filed in Pennsylvania state court.  A new press release by the plaintiff is here.  The new 46-page Complaint can be found here.  No comments to offer at the moment, since I haven't read these carefully yet.

Are Virtual Worlds Good For the Soul?

Dmitri recently received an e-mail from Mike Fred, a Behavior Intervention Specialist who uses WoW therapeutically as part of his work with challenged kids: 

I play WoW with a few of the students from my school. It has proven to be beneficial to the students socially, academically, and therapeutically. In general these students lack social skills. Even when they want to make friends, they often behave inappropriately and tend to push people away. Yet, as these students have gotten involved with playing WoW, they have made social connections - not only with each other, but with other players online. They are all active members of their online guilds… their online relationships are not deep. However, the fact that they make relationships at all is significant. Moreover, two of these students have developed a real friendship.

Strangelove

In 1964, Stanley Kubrick's cold-war political satire "Dr. Strangelove or:  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" hypothesized a "doomsday device."  On the 26th of September 2006...

Second Life

Why a post on Second Life?  Because you just can't get away from Second Life these days -- putting aside the exact terms of Cory and Dmitri's bet, Second Life is certainly vying with WoW as the apple of the media's eye, the virtual world publicity monger du jour.  For instance, in the past month of so I've personally encountered:

• An eight-page Wired "Let's Go" travel guide to Second Life, complete with a fold-out map.  (Can't beat a fold-out map!)
• A nice big article in The Economist about Second Life with quotes from Ted, "father of virtual reality" Jason Lanier, Cory, and Henry Jenkins.
• Henry Jenkins writing an essay-length blog post about brands in Second Life, and declaring that "Second Life has been one of the hot new stories in participatory culture in recent months."
• Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks, the Web 2.0 book du jour, which mentions Second Life on pages 74-75, 136 according to the index. (But I think I saw it alluded to several more times than that as a paradigmatic "peer production" environment.)
• A Wall Street Journal write-up on Virtual Fashion -- a.k.a. the fashion designers of Second Life.
• A Harvard Law School extension course in Second Life.
• Even the good folks at Cultural Studies are featuring articles about Second Life.

Better dating through MMOs

Meeting potential romantic partners in MMOs is often seen as bad idea.

The case against: the medium is too thin to establish a ‘real’ relationship, there is too high a chance of projection or out-right deception and everyone online is supposed to be playing a role anyway.

At the recent Sex in Video Games conference, artist and now game maker Andrea Fryer spoke up for the medium suggesting that meeting in MMOs has advantages over traditional dating. Here she summarizes the case for romance in MMOs:

Trust, Contingency, and WoW Guilds

For the last year I've been very involved with a guild in WoW that is beginning, it seems, to break apart (as so many do after their core members reach 60). I've had a fantastic set of experiences that were possible only in this guild, but their apparent loss leads me, now, to reflect a bit on the nature of social groups, trust, and games. (And, it's refreshing, by the way, to write something here shaped more by my point of view as a gamer than by my research interests.)