Topic A. Personally speaking. My view is to to err on the side of regulation and back it with enforcement. Reason: people have a sad habit of cheating. I guess the FDA is in the thick of it. Claim: the pathologies of online gameplay can be seen as a lesson of the foibles of under-constrained folks (/edited nc).
Update 6/2/2007 Links capping Topic-A from comments below:
- Steven Davis ""Unpopular Post #2 - Just Say "No" to Developers playing their own MMOs.""
- CCP's official response.
- Raph: "...a frame job?"
- Scott Jennings: "CCP Strikes back."
- And as close to this chapter, Nate: "In praise of eve."
Topic B. I cite a few short essays and wonder the meta-question: is online gaming a profoundly geek activity?
Topic A.
Endie has posted a story on yet more conflict-of-interest in Eve-Online. This is a follow-on to an earlier discussion about how "mixing it up" might slip into dubious antics. See TN: "It's so easy, Gamemasters."
While this story is new to me, I do respect Endie. Straighten me out on the record if need be.
Topic B.
I recently posted on my personal board several geeky pieces on the relationship of software to beauty and games (fn1.). The gist of which might be summarized for here, thusly: creation in software is a creative process, it might even be a game, it is at least art.
The meta question for here is this. Do MMORPGs have a profoundly deep affinity with its software, are they kindred spirts of sorts. In other words do the famously claimed "geek ghetto" and user-created content and all its flavors in MMORPGs suffer a deep relationship to the process of software? Geeks, not by accident.
I'll leave that to you to decide.
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fn1.
- "Squeaking into art, content, and the future." (dynamism in programming languages: the future?)
- "Code as art, as game, and not engineering." (software as a multiplayer game)
- "The problem of software, 2" (the philosophy of software)
As I wrote later this morning, one thing that strikes me about this little dramabomb is that CCP are at least dealing with it far better than the T20 developer-cheating scandal. They've clearly learned from that incident, and have quickly posted an initial response (albeit one only addressing what i think is the easiest to explain away of the three allegations), have quickly opened a thread for discussion of the subject and so on.
I imagine that it helps, for many, that CCP Arkonos, head of CCP's Intenral Affairs team, is the one posting the initial response. If it were not for the alleged involvement in certain of the internal affairs team in one of the three stories, then this would be even more confidence-inspiring.
Before I get flamed out of existence, let me say that I really don't mean that story as a jab at BoB. It is entirely natural for players in an MMO to be excited about having contacts with the developers, and even to push the nature of those contacts too far. The fault lies wholly with the culture of unprofessionalism which seems to infuse CCP. The contrast with Blizzard and others is jarring.
Posted by: Endie | May 26, 2007 at 08:23
folks - I edited the "claim" as I originally penned it under topic A. I posted this in the very wee hours and phrased it carelessly - was much more expansive than I meant or could possibly defend ;-)
As for topic A. Beyond the original citation, Endie has posted a number of other articles on his site with more of the detail of this story.
I, like most of the readers here, can't really judge the facts - I even play Eve and know in broad strokes all the actors! The problem tends to be incestousness of the drama. That, however, I think is the real take-away point. Whether or not the players who said what they did on record really have insider developer connections (or are engaging in puffery) is in some sense beyond the original point. The fact that they *could* allege it and have it as a point of debate suggests the blurring of boundaries and interests that is at the root of the real issue, imho.
Posted by: nate_combs | May 26, 2007 at 13:00
And what have you expected ? The same is happening in all and every major MMO atm ; there is no accountability , no legal responsability , are money involved, so, what have you expected ?! The second come of Jesus , or what ?! Until 18 yo it's called " naivity ", after 18 it have another name. And you call yourselves " scholars " and " geeks ", while it's only about $ by any mean .
Posted by: Amarilla | May 26, 2007 at 21:23
Nate wrote:
Um, yes? See, for example, here and here and here and here. I'm not looking to start a row or anything, Nate, but I'm continually brought up short by the fact that you seemed to be intrigued by the social implications of MMOGs but nonetheless frame your questions as if no one has ever asked them! There is great work out there already on precisely this issue.
Posted by: Thomas Malaby | May 26, 2007 at 22:13
Ah... The self-referential in-crowd gets snubbed... (points to papers from the 80s, 90s, Usenet and Mud-dev ;-)
Posted by: Ola Fosheim Grøstad | May 27, 2007 at 04:14
/contemplates the irony of bringing up self-referentiality in one of Nate's posts ;-)
Besides, I'm talking about a *current* conversation. And, let's see...Bogost doesn't cite to any of the others. Steinkuehler doesn't cite to any of the others. I cite to a different work of Taylor's (one that appeared in the special issue). Taylor cites to an unrelated work by Steinkuehler. Yeah, that's totally incestuous scholarship.
Posted by: Thomas Malaby | May 27, 2007 at 10:41
Yeah, yeah, ok! At least you got to experience the same "err, wait" feeling those who've been following VR/VW/CVE/MUD since the early 90s quite often feel when walking the web. Made me snicker... ;^)
I repent!
(And predict that if we look down the corridor of the future then we'll see that his is an endless recursive dialog. Now, if we only could harvest all the leaf-nodes.)
Posted by: Ola Fosheim Grøstad | May 27, 2007 at 12:42
Just trying to do my penance by making an on-topic contribution...
I've suspected for a long time that Unix is MUD and if you dig in the mud-dev archives you'll find several references to programming and debugging being like playing adventure-games if I am not mistaken. So apparently programmers think in this way, and maybe they also see code as landscapes (I think Raph Koster have said something about that in relation to how he sees game designs too?). Not sure how far away from the programmer-circles you can extend the argument, but I think most Geeks at least conjure their own worlds (stamp-collectors, gardeners...?)
Posted by: Ola Fosheim Grøstad | May 27, 2007 at 13:12
</a>
Posted by: Ola Fosheim Grøstad | May 27, 2007 at 13:28
> self-referentiality
I think its a fair point - though as has been said, everyone should be spanked with that stick.
The fact of the matter is that people tend to read less than they should (or want to), mea culpa, and tend to graze their meadows first.
The mission of places like this, as I see it, is to get people bump heads and cross-index ;-)
Posted by: nate_combs | May 27, 2007 at 17:57
Ola> Unix is mud
Lol, C'est encroyable! Is WoW windows?
Posted by: nate_combs | May 27, 2007 at 18:04
>programming debugging like playing adventure games
Fascinating. A simple google on a number of combinations of the above turns up an incredible amount of material drawing such parallels. Most are are casual comments. I'll just cite a Toontalk note:
"But ToonTalk isn't just a video game for teaching programming -- the very act of building, running, and debugging programs is like playing an adventure game. In ToonTalk, it is not only fun to play with the resulting creation, it is fun to build it. "
http://www.toontalk.com/English/adultask.htm
Posted by: nate_combs | May 27, 2007 at 18:57
Nate said:
Very much agreed. After all, I didn't object to the fact that you hadn't read that work, only to the framing of the question as if it wouldn't likely already exist. :-)
SL, of course, is a perfect example. Ask a bunch of programmers what the core tools would be that users would need to create *anything* they want and what do they produce as the ultimate world-producing set of tools? 3-D modeling, scripting, and texture-mapping -- quelle surprise, those are the core tools for making game content! Other kinds of content that users wanted to make clearly confounded these tools and the expectations which spawned them, and Linden Lab scrambled to adjust accordingly.
Posted by: Thomas Malaby | May 27, 2007 at 20:01
On Topic A - Steven Davis has picked up the story and elaborated upon it with a number provocative ideas: "Unpopular Post #2 - Just Say "No" to Developers playing their own MMOs"
Posted by: nate_combs | May 27, 2007 at 21:13
Thomas>
Very much agreed. After all, I didn't object to the fact that you hadn't read that work, only to the framing of the question as if it wouldn't likely already exist. :-)
SL, of course, is a perfect example. Ask a bunch of programmers what the core tools ....
-------------------------------------------
I think there is a disconnect.
Left to their druthers, the SL devs you cite on iteration 1, and most other geeky types who never get beyond their niche, are arguably quite happy and think they've solved the problem. It isn't until one gets push-back from less geeky types that compromises need to be reached.
I think it is one view to look at software and geekdom and then look at games and infer connections. I think it is a different view, even if only slightly, to say geekdom *is* the game and everthing else is a compromise.
To use Ola's "Unix as a MUD" thread (which I only scanned and will read in greater detail as well as all the other links). On the one hand it is premised as a tongue-in-cheek (or should I say a cheeky) thought-experiment, but to folks like myself it resonates on a different level than say "expressive AI" and "Eliza" (plucked from Ian's paper).
The former (Unix) is a view of how the game emerges from the geeky substrate, Eliza is fundamentally about how the geek can reflect you, the non-geek.
I think these could be very different perspectives that intersect, undoubtedly.
Posted by: nate_combs | May 27, 2007 at 21:58
Sure, but in my view that follows naturally from the fact that social life is very game-like. So it should be no surprise that technologically(code)-mediated social life should present itself as a candidate for such a deep connection to technologically(code)-mediated games. The reason these points aren't so different, to me, is that programmers are people who, like all people, when they go about creating games create a different version of the mix of routine and surprise that characterizes their lives.
Posted by: Thomas Malaby | May 27, 2007 at 23:18
Thomas Malaby says:
Sure, but in my view that follows naturally from the fact that social life is very game-like
Poor me, i always thought " au contraire "...see " Mircea Eliade ".
Posted by: Amarilla | May 29, 2007 at 08:44
CCP have posted their official link response.
----
Thomas, I think you're making the mistaken assumption that games are still made by three programmers in a bedroom. Games tend to be designed by Game Designers, who may not know how to code at all. Technical people such as programmers will be very involved in the process, but I think your statement is overly simplistic to the point of being wrong.
Posted by: Daniel Speed | May 30, 2007 at 07:57
A very fair point, Daniel. But, then, it would need to apply not just to my point, but the OP's as well. :-) The "game" development environment I know best is Linden Lab, where there isn't a resident "game designer," so that particular disjunction doesn't present itself there. There's little doubt in my mind, however, that game software development has come to develop its own worldview, fairly characterized by the above. At Linden Lab many of the early development staff came from game development backgrounds, and it shows in the combination of gaming and code that they bring to their work practice and to their approach to SL's features.
Posted by: Thomas Malaby | May 30, 2007 at 09:19
I'd be interested to see how many of the architects of whatever worlds had technical backgrounds, but I'd suspect that Linden Lab is going to be very differently made up than say, the team that decided how WoW would work.
I'm not taking issue with the OP, because Nate phrased it as "the process of software". That's something I might spend a few days wondering about the meaning of, and then probably forget about. My reasoning would probably be something along the lines that books are often written in Word, magazines in InDesign or Quark, Art in Photoshop, Architecture in CAD software, TV adverts in Cinema4D (all just as examples), and we're not fundamentally worried about the codeyness of them all, and most of these things are happily designed by people who probably aren't primarily programmers. I think the argument is an irrelevance as better worlds and tools are built that are accessible to a wider range of people, and I might as well just wait for it to answer itself.
On the other hand, I do want to address what appears to be a common misconception of every type of "dev" in these companies being the same being, doing every task sequentially. It's not true, and it plays into so many facets of interaction with game developers. "You should be fixing that bug, not building missions" and ideas about every developer having the same level of access to live servers.
Posted by: Daniel Speed | May 30, 2007 at 10:13
I have no idea why you took my characterization to be a *universal* one. All claims about cultural dispositions are reliable to the degree to which they constitute a useful shorthand for characterizing a group that indisputably includes a fair degree of exceptions/variations, etc. I believe we've been in this territory before, but I'll reiterate that these claims are not normative (i.e.; I didn't say "worried about" or similar), and that it is simply the application of ideas about how we are all shaped by cultural experiences to those who work with deeply and regularly with code and its related tools (such as for, say, content creation).
Posted by: Thomas Malaby | May 30, 2007 at 11:36
Regarding Topic A. Raph and others (e.g. Scott) are reporting the latest turn of this story. Perhaps "a frame job", "a well-timed social engineering attack".
Again, I have no idea about the truth of this case and what opinions I do have I have expressed them earlier in this thread.
All I can do now is dust off (and update) an old piece "In praise of Eve" for the times. A few steps backward to wax: one player's measure of the galactic order ;-)
Posted by: nate_combs | May 30, 2007 at 21:44
Nate: To use Ola's "Unix as a MUD" thread (which I only scanned and will read in greater detail as well as all the other links). On the one hand it is premised as a tongue-in-cheek (or should I say a cheeky) thought-experiment
Yes, it started out as a "sarcastic" joke, but the more I thought about it the more it made sense. Perhaps easier to get if one starts to answer the question "what is the natural habitat for comp-sci geeks?". In some sense the "proto"-MUD is a natural environment for geeks, and perhaps if can be found in many software related contexts.
I can't help thinking that there are other not-yet-found ways of organizing software development that are more worldly, experimental and social, than what we have now. Btw, I don't think .NET is the right direction although the language-agnostic-quality is desirable. Something more immersive is needed. Immersive in a way meaningful for coders, not 3D.
Posted by: Ola Fosheim Grøstad | May 31, 2007 at 10:05
Daniel Speed wrote:
Thomas, I think you're making the mistaken assumption that games are still made by three programmers in a bedroom. Games tend to be designed by Game Designers, who may not know how to code at all. Technical people such as programmers will be very involved in the process, but I think your statement is overly simplistic to the point of being wrong.
I don't know a single decent game designer that can't code to some extent. It is pretty essential to understand something about coding in order to inform your designs.
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | May 31, 2007 at 13:25
You need technical (and analytical, if you want to break that out into a separate thing) people involved in the process, but not every person needs to be a programmer, especially if their responsibility is answering "what sort of game should this be?".
Did a coder necessarily need to be the one who came up with the idea of a ball that you roll around collecting up stuff in order to grow it?
We have a number of game designers whose experience varies from P&P roleplaying products to boardgames, but couldn't write a script for the game if you asked nicely.
Posted by: Daniel Speed | May 31, 2007 at 19:50
CCP in the NY Times.
Posted by: Daniel Speed | Jun 07, 2007 at 04:07