Terra Nova

April Guest Florence Chee

We're happy, nay, delighted, to announce that Florence Chee will be joining us as a guest blogger on Terra Nova during the month of April.   You may be able to spot Florence in the picture at right, obviously taken at considerable risk to the photographer.

For those unfortunate enough not to know Florence, some biographical detail follows.

April Guest Elizabeth Townsend-Gard

We're happy, nay delighted, to welcome Elizabeth Townsend Gard and Rachel Goda as guest-bloggers this month on Terra Nova.  They'll be writing about  Fizzy Soderberg, Second Life, and first-year Property law.  You'll have to stay tuned for the details, but if you want a preview of the topic, check out this site. 

We'd like to thank Elizabeth and Rachel for visiting.  We're looking forward to some good conversations!

Matters of State

This day started with the Washington Post reporting (registration required) this incident in Second Life:

...protesters attacked the cyberspace headquarters of extremist French presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen... Protesters fought back with pig grenades, firing fat pink porkers that exploded in neon pink

Apparently all four major candidates in France's presidential election have offices in Second Life.   Mark Wallace also reports that the US State Department is vaguely considering a Second Life project.

Both of these stories, in their ways, harken to the ambitions behind USDS's Internet Freedom Task Force ( 1. , 2. ):  a vibrant global community best serves everyone.  If cyberspace is a useful medium to facilitate information freedom, power to it.  While on this tack I must mention the efforts of Joshua Fouts and Douglas Thomas and USC's Annenberg's Center for Public Diplomacy (e.g. ref here).

Money and everything

Sara Grimes, Torill Mortenson, kids, and money.

The face of information

What do "Big Mamie", Wooden Ships and Iron Men (the board game), and Eve Online fleet combat reify?   Lag, but not in the way you might think.

Prodigal Players

Via BoingBoing, news surfaces of a Chinese MMO that is inviting banned players back into the fold if they agree to donate blood.  That's real life blood, of course.  1 pint of blood = 1 restored game account.  Platelets FTW!

Coldwell Banker selling homes in Second Life

With due respect to Cory, it's well known that there's a fair amount of PR-hype around Second life.  (See Reuters and Ren on the hype cycle.)  I think I've been as skeptical of Second Life news stories as anyone (except perhaps Clay Shirky).  Yet while I have not drunk the Kool-aid they're handing out at Linden, sometimes one of the many self-promoting Second Life-related press releases I chance upon is really striking.  Case in point is this one: As reported by Fortune, Coldwell Banker is now selling land in Second Life. 

How American Is It?

I recently read, on a mailing list populated by astonishingly clever people, an assertion that will no doubt strike a lot of you as astonishingly misinformed: "Almost 100 percent" of online worlds, the writer claimed, are created in the United States. To which, you might think, a hearty "Not!" would have been sufficient reply, but being the inveterate statistics geek I am, I felt compelled to offer a more numerically precise rejoinder, and after an hour or two of data sifting I had my answer:

It's more like 61.5 percent, actually.  At most.

"What is missing is the chaos of battle"

Keith Stuart (Guardian games blog) posts a fine interview with Malcom Davis on "what a military expert thinks about modern combat games."  It provides us with a frame of reference to measure previous discussions related to combat in commercial MMOGs.

Ludium II Announcement

Details on Ludium II below the fold.

Beam Me In, Scotty

If the forthcoming Star Trek MMO isn't enough to satisfy your fantasies for epic space travel (or if you just like your MMOs served up with a healthy side of RL-relevant content), then do we have some news for you! 

New Paper on the "Virtual Tax" Question

You can find the full draft here.

Kiddification

Does MMO really mean – Must be safe for kids?

Simlish and the Cyrillic

A while back in Whale Watching we thought about the Germans that can be found in the niches of Eve-Online.  Since then I've had the opportunity to experience another region of Eve-Online.  There my tribe occasionally swats tails with another tribe whose Eve dialect is text spelled using the Cyrllic alphabet.  I lose a ship and the "local chat" becomes arcane with masked excitement.  My virtual pirates and I are separated by a real world linguistic partition.

Virtual World Legends

Over on Howard Rheingold's SmartMobs blog, he relates a question from Chris Spurgeon that I thought was worth asking here.  Chris relates the practice in Club Penguin of

dozens of [players] hopping up and down on the edge of one particular iceberg, convinced that if enough penguins do this, the iceberg will flip and reveal some sort of treasure. There seems to be no truth in this, it's just a made up story that virally spreads from player to player. Urban myths are commonplace in real life of course, as is the ability of children to make up stories and then convince other kids...and themselves...of the truth of those stories. But I was wondering if anyone knows of other places online where urban myths have appeared and taken hold?

Chris welcomes incidents of other similar urban/virtual world legends on the SmartMobs blog, though I'd be happy to hear other similar stories here as well.  And, I have a few other questions about these legends...

Iron Priaire: Genuine Currency Exchange

Faculty and students at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology have opened Iron Prairie for your review. It's a virtual worlds trading site, but not like the others. I'm blogging it because this is the first time I've seen a bid-ask structure for pricing. In this, Iron Prairie is the first site to replicate real world currency exchanges. They cut out the middleman. Check it out.

Storytelling in Wonderland

In Ruby Slippers we discussed (in comments) the dreadful state that computer science education finds itself in the west  US. Kami mentioned CMU's Alice in comment back then and Grady Booch reminds us anew recently:

"(Alice is) a modern programming environment designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn basic computer science while creating animated movies, simple video games, where students control the behavior of 3D objects and characters in a virtual world."

From SIGCSE feedback it may be  that Alice is back (if it ever went away) with a Wonderland vengence.  Will virtual worlds be the driver that revives computer science?

GDC 2007 Recap

The 2007 Game Developers Conference is now officially closed, and the lucky ones are either still sleeping, or hopped a plane to continue the festivities at the ever-growing SXSW conference in Austin. I've returned in time for finals week and an ever-growing pile of catch up work. I didn't take many notes or live blog the event, but there were standout themes and happenings I thought I'd share. Other TNers and GDC attendees are urged to fill in the gaps --

Whither MMO?

Below the fold, early feedback from the GDC:  a highlight of Alice's coverage of "MMOs, Past, Present and Future;"  Project Darkstar...

Judging worlds

Both Alice and Cory happen to have noted the "review" of social worlds over at Second Life Games, so Onder is getting quite a lot of play over his view of significant social worlds. Leaving aside the odd choice of worlds that he chooses to discuss, I am weirded out by his criteria of assessment:

"Since these are entirely formed from my little brain, we’ll call them “Onder’s Big Three”. They are:

1. Cash transactions must be easy and readily accommodated flowing both into and out from the system.
2. Users must be able to create unique content and retain some form of ownership over it.
3. The fabric of the world itself must be possible to affect. IE: land ownership, room decoration, or some other content that remains viable even when the player who created it is logged off. (”Pervasive” is the word I’m groping for here…)"

Next installment on virtual worlds history...

Before I get started on a next leg of the journey down our history timeline I want to bring up some  resources on the web which many of you referenced or requested. After this we will pick up where we left off and then take a crack at the key definitional question: is a "virtual world" different from a "game"?

History Resources on the Virtual Worlds Medium

There are some great sources out there, including:

1) Ralph Koster's Online World Timeline

Ralph artfully weaves together very early concepts of online media such as Memex, with the birth of online worlds and richly innovative platforms such as PLATO, MUDs and early microcomputer-based online environments.

2) My own book (published in October 1997):

Avatars! Exploring and Building Virtual Worlds on the Internet

A New Joystick

Just wanted to let everyone know that the good folks behind Joystick101 have recently relaunched the site, with some new faces and lots of great commentary. Nice to see one of the core sources from our rolodex back in form.

Are We Having Fun Yet?

Laundry = 4.8, Homework = 5.3, Reading = 8.3, Sex = 9.3, Grinding Saltstone Basilisks in the Shimmering Flats = ?

McGregor's Garden

I'll start with Beatrix Potter and meander to Eve-Online.  Hang on.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité et réalité?

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, author of Simulacra and Simulations, has vacated our reality. Seems right to pause a moment and consider whether ‘hyperreality’ is truly upon us, and if so, does it mean we have sold our collective soul for the promise of bigger, better, faster, more, convincing ourselves in the process that pale imitations of precious human activities are fulfilling us?

It is more difficult for us to imagine the real, History, the depth of time, or three-dimensional space, just as before it was difficult from our real world perspective to imagine a virtual universe or the fourth-dimension. The simulacra will be ahead of us everywhere. The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none. Since the world is on a delusional course, we must adopt a delusional standpoint towards the world. - Baudrillard

So, let's talk about our delusions...

MMORPG Terror

Intelligence analyst Roderick Jones submits these thoughts on the use of MMORPGs for terror.

First experimental post for March guest column

Hello TN community! This is my first post to TN  so I thought I would quickly shoot you all something and see how it works before embarking on the full guest columns. I plan to provide some perspectives on the origins, evolution and future of virtual worlds as my contribution to TN this month.

For starters, as an "old timer" (I feel like a kind of Gandalf traveling down through the ages of the virtual Middle Earth) I might be able to bring some interesting greying-beard perspective on where this medium got its start. As some of you out there may know, I maintain a barn-full of vintage computer systems going back to the very early days (even before the famed Altair 8800 of some of our youths) and on some of these were created the first shared digital spaces in the form of simple multi-player games. You can learn a lot by looking back at these progenitors of virtual worlds. What is amazing is how fast that the first games "filled all the niches" in terms of the affordances and type of interaction we take for granted today.

One of the first virtual worlds that was rendered in 3D, with multiple players, and played across a network was Maze War which got its start way back in 1974. I am including a screen shot of a restored version of the original "Maze Game" on its first hardware platform, the early vector graphics workstation called the Imlacs PDS-1. This was part of a special event hosted by my Digibarn computer museum which we put together in 2004 as a celebration of the 30th birthday of Maze. By restoring Maze to its rightful place in history, I hoped to uncover more about the origins of first-person shooter games, avatars, social interaction "in world" and the first features of virtual worlds.

Maze War - running on an early 1970s Imlac PDS-1

So folks... can you see this image and does the link work? Please check out the full story of Maze War at the link.

To be continued...

State of the NationStates III: Roleplay

First off, a big woot to the 25 nations who have joined the TerraNova region of NationStates, the MMO (but not quite virtual world) that occupied parts one and two of this three-part series. Those first installments dealt with a couple of interesting NationStates game mechanics and how they might be ported to a more "worldy" MMO like WoW. This final part looks at what to me is most interesting: a mechanic through which NationStates rewards players for roleplaying their nations in the game's forums.

March Guest: Bruce Damer

We're happy to welcome Bruce Damer as a guest author on Terra Nova this month.  You may know of Bruce already, but below is a brief bio with links.  We're really looking forward to Bruce's posts this March and to some lively conversations.