Terra Nova

Applied innovation strategies in a network society

The title of this post is also the title of my thesis on IBM’s 3D Internet initiative, of which I would like to share some of the discussions as my final post as a TN guest author. My arguments are within the frameworks of Network Society & Innovation Strategies, and User Driven Vs. Community Driven Innovation.

July Guest Margaret Corbit

We're thrilled to have Margaret Corbit joining us as a guest author this July.  We asked Margaret (shown right on the Great Wall) to introduce herself:

How did a middle-aged white girl plant ecologist get into virtual worlds? Fair question. I worked at a supercomputing center for 15 years. At the same time that I was writing my thesis on hedgerows as conservation corridors for forest wildflowers, I was working full time at the Cornell Theory Center as the science writer. Then came the Web. And I was launched into visualization and interactivity and an online science book in 1993. Woo Hoo! One of my other lives is that of a graphic artist.

Blending Virtual Worlds and the real world.

Its all fun and games, until somebody gets hurt.  That what my friends and I would say to each other when we were kids and about to do something stupid and dangerous.  Like wrestling while climbing trees or using homemade bike ramps to jump over neighborhood friends.  Sure virtual worlds and games are fun until something more important comes along.  This is starting to change.

What in the World is a Fictional Securities Exchange?

I have spent a fair bit of time recently studying the major stock exchanges in Second Life (particularly WSE and AVIX).  Initially, I assumed these exchanges would be serving the same basic roles as in real life:  to allow business owners an easy way to raise capital for expansion from a broad community of investors.  However, it is hard to maintain this perspective when the WSE includes the following text on all prospectuses, right after the entry allowing (but not requiring) management teams to post their real-life information:

• (Real life details are optional as the WSE is a fictional securities exchange based on avatars in the virtual world of Second Life.)

Look ma! I'm not an addict (yet)

It seems that the American Psychological Association has backed away from recommending that "video game addiction" become listed as a classified disorder in its next edition of their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). Of course we shouldn't celebrate too soon.

Second Life Business Exodus?

In its July 2 issue, Forbes magazine  is running a story called "Sex, Pranks and Reality" about the shifting tides of doing business in Second Life (also picked up by Kotaku and other blogs).  The article discusses the ups and downs of several real world businesses that are or have been in Second Life, concluding with:

Wells Fargo stopped using Linden Lab's clunky technology to run the financial company's virtual Stagecoach Island (from its own Web site) four months after setting it up in September 2005. It no longer has any connection with Second Life. Laughs Erik Hauser, creative director of Swivel Media, Wells Fargo's digital agency: "Going into Second Life now is the equivalent of running a field marketing program in Iraq."

This PR backlash, while not particularly unexpected, isn't great news for Linden Labs.  But what does it mean for virtual worlds in general as operators try to move beyond their "men in tights" roots?  As the difficulties of courting both user-generated content and mainstream business (or education and other non-entertainment sectors) as key constituents become clearer, what does this mean for the evolution of virtual worlds?  How long will it be before companies stung by this experience like Wells Fargo decide it's once again time to venture into virtual worlds for business?

SWI's Declaration of Virtual World Policy

Ted's Synthetic Worlds Initiative at Indiana University convened the second Ludium Conference this past weekend in Bloomington. Attendees were charged with hammering out a well-considered platform to guide virtual world policy. We were successful, and the Declaration of Virtual World Policy [Edit: along with its wiki] has been posted by the conference's designers, Studio Cypher. Here it is for your perusal and comment (along with more details):

Recalculating the Global Virtual GDP, Yet Again

Albania? Nepal? Try Lebanon, noob.

Very soon after the New York Times Magazine published my account of life in the gold farms of China, I received an email informing me of a ghastly factual error in the second paragraph. “I’m not quite sure who you are targeting with the article,” the message began, “but if it was any of the ‘8 million’ players of World of Warcraft they all stopped reading at ‘night-elf wizards.’” I was mortified, of course (everyone knows night elves can’t be mages, for God’s sake), but there was an upside. If all those WoW players were bailing at paragraph two, that meant 8 million fewer chances I’d be busted for the even more horrific cock-up several paragraphs below: My butchering of world geekery’s most vital economic statistic, the total gross domestic product of all known virtual economies.

The offending passage follows. It is a scene of wanton, unadulterated factual imprecision, but if you think you’ve got the stomach for it, read on…

Gaze into your Crystal Ball

I'm often contacted by journalists, and the last thing they always ask me is: "if you gaze into your crystal ball, how do you see virtual worlds in the future?".

Never mind how I see their future, how do you see it? Say, 15-20 years from now?

Call for Papers

From Leigh Schwartz of the University of Texas at Austin:

Aether, an online, peer-reviewed journal, invites submission of papers for a special issue focusing on the geographies of interactive visual media and gaming, to be published in early 2008.

Contracting in Virtual Worlds

In my last post, I discussed inworld “property rights,” which (to prove that yes, I can learn) I am now going to call “permissions.”  Every virtual world grants or withholds a variety of permissions to players, including permissions to transfer, copy or modify inworld objects, to know the attributes and properties of those objects, to enter land and buildings, etc. 

In this post, I want to ask readers about the state of contracting in virtual worlds.  What worlds have gone beyond the plain-vanilla simultaneous transfer, in which one player gives up a permission in exchange for another (like paying cash for a weapon)?

Καὶ σὺ τέκνον

Clive Thompson in commentary on Wired Online wonders anew the voice angst in online games:

"I had just experienced the latest culture-shock in online worlds: The advent of voice. Games that were governed by text are now being governed by chat, and it is subtly changing the feel of our virtual universe." 

I have no more to add since our last time, in that "sprawling, superb debate" (Clive's words).   What I'll do, therefore, is turn to you to weigh this matter, measure the lines, and report back.

Et tu, my sweet sound?

Comment Policy

Since its inception in 2003, Terra Nova has been about promoting intelligent and sustained conversations among the community of virtual world researchers and creators.  While those who manage the blog sometimes delete obvious spam and ban associated IP addresses, our practice has been to let individual authors control the moderation of comments on their own threads.  However, some of the authors and commenters on Terra Nova have been concerned lately about the tone and substance of some of the comments posted here. The problem is not serious at this point, but it has prompted discussion.  Given this, we thought it would be helpful to establish our basic expectations about the comments field.

New Books: Consalvo and Bogost

Mia Consalvo's Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Video Games has just come out, and Ian Bogost's Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games should be out any day now. The former is part cultural history and part contemporary analysis of rules and the people who bend them. The latter projects the disruptive force of digital games into the field of rhetoric.  Both highly recommended.

What else should we be reading this summer?

Life of a Chinese Gold Farmer

Julian has a nice, thoughtful article on the Chinese gold farming industry.  It ran on Sunday in the New York Times magazine -- go take a look.   p.s. Remember this?  :-)

CNN Future Summit

Watch me on CNN International's Future Summit - Virtual Worlds.

Property Rights in Virtual Worlds

Modern capitalism rests on a foundation of property rights, agreements between parties to transfer those rights, and laws that enforce those rights and agreements.  My impression is that property rights in virtual worlds are very simple.  If I have an item in my Second Life inventory, from an inworld perspective I "own" it entirely.  No one can steal it from me without hacking the database, I can use it and sell it as I please.  (EU Lawyer Vincent Scheurer has noted that this ownership doesn't mean a whole lot after leaving the inworld sphere, but that is an entirely different issue.)  About the only sophistication I see is that I can sell it to someone with slightly restricted rights--they can't copy and/or modify it. 

This state of affairs leaves us far from able to automatically enforce some of the most basic commercial arrangements, such as leasing (I can use it but must keep it in good condition), employment (I can bake with the chocoloate, but I can't eat it), transportation (I can move the box, but I can't look inside it). 

Since my goal is to create virtual worlds that can be used to study real-world business (see my first TN post), I use this post to describe some of the property rights that should be supported in code by commerce-oriented worlds, so that code can protect those rights.  If they aren't coded in, expensive and labor-intensive intervention would be required, and no virtual world manager wants that.  (Judging from recent comments on this blog, not many users want human management intervention either.) 

As I am new to virtual worlds, I look forward to being educated by Terra Novans on whether any worlds have attempted to implement rights similar to those I specified, if not, why not, and what I am missing.

In Middle-Earth, No One Can Hear You Shout

Lord of the Rings Online just had its first major content patch since going live. In addition to a major new zone and a lot of new quests, there have been numerous tweaks, adjustments and changes to the look and feel of the gameplay.

One small change that caught my eye--or rather, my ear--was the removal of various shouts and yells that accompanied the use of some class abilities, particularly one used by captains.

In terms of my consistent interest in how structures of play and sociality form and solidify in synthetic worlds after their "initial condition", this change raises some intriguing questions.

Synthetic World Data

For years, we've all been citing the subscription data collected by Bruce Woodcock at MMOGChart.com. SirBruce hasn't updated the numbers in a year. Understandable; the data-collection environment is expanding in all directions. Phil 'Vortal' White now bravely steps into the breach with MMOGData.com, apparently to continue and expand on Woodcock's efforts. What's especially cool is that Mr. White has started to break things down by business model. Free-to-play registrations at Runescape can be distinguished from subscription accounts at LOTRO. If he would add a Children/Teen/Adult variable, we would finally have a way to put Webkinz and Gaia and Club Penguin in perspective.

Let me also take this opportunity to howl into the ether once again about the need for formalized, official statistics for this virtual-worlding activity. The activity itself needs a name. What's a good verb for "going into a synthetic world"? And what name do we give to people doing that? Rory Starks has suggested "peggers" for the travelers, from MMORPG being pronounced "more-peg". The verb for doing the traveling would be "pegging."

Advertisers are not the only people who need to know where the eyeballs are. Parliament, Congress, the Bundestag, and the corresponding revenue-seeking agencies, are  going to want to know very soon how many peggers there are and how much time they spend pegging. The industry needs to create an official, neutral statistics-reporting agency.

Until that solution is found, though, it would be nice if companies would send honest data to efforts like those of Mr. White.

Eighteen years later

It was March 1989 when I found the magazine that changed my life. Working as a temp at an enormous HMO, I had been wearily slogging through an unending pile of data entry chores. The highlight of each day was my afternoon lunch break.

Walking briskly to Delauer's Newsstand in downtown Oakland, I would devour the week's newest magazines. Technically a college dropout at the time, I hungered for the world of ideas that disappeared when abysmal grades forced me to withdraw from the university.

My favorites were the fringe technology and culture periodicals: Utne Reader, Mondo 2000, Against the Current, and a magazine published by disgruntled office workers called Processed World. One afternoon, I stumbled upon a new issue of the Whole Earth Review. (You can view the magazine cover here.)

State of Play V: Building the Global Metaverse (August 19-22, 2007)

State of Play V: Building the Global Metaverse is the fifth annual State of Play conference on the future of virtual worlds. Organized by New York Law School, in conjunction with Trinity University, with the support of Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, this year's conference invites experts across disciplines to discuss the transnational dimensions of the Metaverse and the impact of virtual environments on education, law, politics and society.

Intelligence Seeding - Anger fuels better decisions

I don't know what made me do it.  We had been at the dinner party for a while, everybody was having a good time.  It was the kind of dinner party where everybody brings a dish, and our dish was Stromboli (pizza bread), and I warmed it up at the party on a cookie sheet that we carried the bread on.

The cookie sheet, loaded with some warm bread, had been in the oven for a while, but unbeknown  to the other guests I had turned the oven off a few minutes earlier.  I knew the cookie sheet was only warm.  I pulled the cookie sheet out of the oven as if it was SCORCHING HOT!  I screamed, "IT BURNS, IT BURNS!!", and tried to ease my seemingly searing flesh by trying to hand the warm cookie sheet to my wife who was standing behind me.

At this point, she had a decision to make.

Howard Rheingold Interview: Cooperation in virtual worlds.

I had the opportunity for a short interview with Howard Rheingold. Howard is the author of The Virtual Community and Smart Mobs, and a well respected thinker and writer within the framework of social media, culture and digital journalism. Howard has worked on the Cooperation Commons, a joint project with Institute for the Future so I asked him some questions about his perspective on cooperation theories and how they apply to a Second Life setting and on corporate utilization of the medium. The interview ends with Howard posting a question for the TN readers to discussion and elaborate on.

Learning objectives are best achieved when tied to real-world (not inworld) factors of production.

The literature on virtual worlds includes a few articles and book chapters about production functions, which map labor and capital (the "factors of production") into items or services of value (perhaps only because they are factors of other production functions. (Castronova has a  book chapter in "Synthetic Worlds" and a closely related article; Malaby has a nice article on cultural capital.)

In this post, I want to focus on one tricky issue in worlds desgined for education--distinguishing between inworld and real-world factors of production. Moreover, I want to argue the following thesis:

• Learning objectives are best achieved when tied to real-world (not inworld) factors of production.

Are NPCs better role players?

I admit I have had a soft spot over the years for the Total War computer game set.  Admittedly these are single player/strategy games (not MMOG), yet in 2004 I wondered about moral clarity in MMOGs stimulated by one moment in a Total War campaign (Crying for Cordoba).  More recently I've embarked on the long-winded grand campaign in Medieval II. I found myself wondering about the stuff of online character.  Do NPCs make better role-players than people.  If so, what does that say about you (chalk one up for AI, hmm)?

Censoring Sexual Expression in Second Life

Ren's post from the other day about Linden's recent proclamation, "Keeping Second Life Safe, Together," was both level-headed and observant.  Personally, I find it hard not to be fighting mad.  In the wake of a statement that I read as the promise of censorship (however empty a promise it may be), my blood begins to boil--not only as an active participant in the Second Life sex scene, but also as a sexuality researcher.

Second Life's strength--that is, what's made it so appealing for users, and therefore such a rich environment for social observation--is its freedom.  This freedom creates a welcoming environment where fantasy can grow, where it can turn into community and eventually cultural practice.  Where else but Second Life could we have such an extensive population of furries, or Goreans?  While the real world may wag a finger of judgment at these sexual preferences, Second Life has always seemed to say, "To each his/her own."  Until now, that is.

Real Politik

Almost exactly a year ago I asked whether virtual world makers with significant economies and RMT should "'open their books' about how their economies operate, given how much control they have over the conditions and mechanisms of those economies." Today, via the New York Times, comes this account that suggests that the makers of EvE Online have answered in the affirmative.

The Time of Your Life

In major DIKU-style commercial MMOGs, there are a lot of standard-issue quest types. One of the creative challenges that designers face is how to introduce enough variation in structure or theme with these quests, and every once in a while, they succeed in coming up with a new twist to an old formula. (For example, the Burning Crusade's popular aerial 'bombing runs'.) One type that most games have used  extremely sparingly, however, is the timed quest, where a player must complete a task within a specified period or fail the quest.

There are some technical reasons why these kinds of quests might be a bad idea. Nor, from what I can see, are they popular with players, for a variety of reasons. But it seems to me that they also underscore something odd and unsettling about the temporality of most synthetic worlds.   

Inducing Value in Virtual Worlds

As I have mentioned in previous posts, experimental economists create very simple serious games to study economic interactions.  Experimental economists rely heavily on the notion of “induced value”:  a good economic experiment must guarantee that players care about the things that the economic theory being tested assumes they care about. With that guarantee in hand, we can use the data to answer questions like “how does this feature of the environment affect behavior?” and “how well does this equilibrium concept (like Nash Equilibrium) predict behavior?”  If we don’t know what people value, we can’t answer these questions. 

In this post, I want to explore how one might extend a central element of EE from simple laboratory settings to complex virtual worlds.

Virtual facilitation of real world social interactions

Hallo, TN readers.

For some time now I have been processing thoughts on the matter of, if virtual world facilitation of real world social connections and interactions is a previously somewhat unknown essential key to success, which game designers need to have stronger focus on in the future? I guess my question asked, positions me as part of the “suits”, with a question to the “talents” as categorized by fellow guest author Robert Bloomfield, and also reverses Roberts direction arrow of real world actions migrating into virtual worlds, to an apposite scenario of whether virtual world interactions migrating into the real world prolongs the lifetime of the virtual world because of those potentially new bridging connections.

The State of Second Life

Second Life is at a turning point.

Will we ever see this on a resume?

Education

• Cornell University, 2010, Bachelor of Science, Computer Science
• University of Michigan, 2012, Masters of Engineering, Software Architecture
• World of Bizquest, 35th level commercial banker, with certificates of achievement in credit analysis (Gold), interest rate risk management (Gold), financial instruments (Silver), and fixed income investing (Platinum). 

Altered States

[Thanks to Mike Sellers for the link to the xkcd comic above.]

Ever find yourself reaching for the pause button while listening to your car radio? Picking up your home (land-line) phone to text someone? Both technology and games can shape our dispositions in such a way that, in other contexts, we may find ourselves seeing things, or trying to do things, on different terms...

The Glovebox and the Glovatar

In my last post, I asked readers to comment on my proposal to use virtual worlds to study real world business.  Many of the comments pick up on the tension between the academic's need for control and the inherently uncontrolled nature of virtual worlds. One reader even wondered if I 'haven't managed to strip away just about everything that is interesting about virtual worlds.'

In this post, I want to ask readers to comment on one possible way to deal with this tension, embedding a carefully controlled serious game within an uncontrolled (and more interesting) virtual world.

Evolving Virtual Organisms to create Virtual Life

Can you imagine the day when turning off your computer is considered murder?