Terra Nova

Computational Social Science and the Problem With Hakkar’s Blood

Everyone remembers the Ironforge Plague, back when Zul’Gurub was new and some enterprising raiders brought the Curse of Corrupted Blood back from fighting Hakkar, and in doing so turned the Undercity and Ironforge into a scene from a charnel house. You remember it: Skeletons lining the hallways of every urban locale, the plaintive cries of the newbies as they died matched in intensity only by the laughter of the high-end hunters who brought the curse back with them by stashing their infected pets in ZG and then releasing them in IF. At the time I recall hearing that the Centers for Disease Control were excited by this story as a way of using virtual worlds as a way of understanding the spread of disease. And a couple of months ago Elizabeth alerted me to the article in Nature in which a couple of epidemiologists discussed exactly this idea in some detail.[fn1]

Now the problem for me is that Lofgren and Fefferman’s Nature article is really nice. It’s smart and informed and actually demonstrates that the authors actually know their Jin'dos the Hexxers from their Bloodlords Mandokir. The thing is that I’ve used the “Problem with Hakkar’s Blood” as one of my standard pitches about the dangers with drawing real world conclusions from virtual world behaviors.[fn2] And the article has once again made me ask what are appropriate questions for the field of what might be labeled “computational social science.” So after the fold, I want to discuss the conclusions of the article, and ask the Terra Nova hivemind for some help with understanding what computational social science might look like.

My friend's keeper

Rodgers and Hammerstein's popular portrayal of the 19th century American mid-west depicted strain amongst rural countrymen.  The Farmer and the Cowman seems prescient of intra-alliance strains in an online game called Eve-Online in the 21st century:

One man likes to push a plough, the other likes to chase a cow, But that's no reason why they can't be friends...  [oh really?]

Noting  the tensions separating friends is useful for two reasons.  First, it would suggest a more complicated structure to their relationship than outside appearances might indicate.  Second, given enough scale - for example, a decision process involving potentially 1000's of cooperating players in Eve-Online - it might be useful to cast the process in political terms rather than a straight up-and-down management or "command and control" problem.

For discussion, let us characterize broadly two player interests that occupy the same territory and share common purpose in its security and economic vitality yet differ in approach and apparent priorities (fn1).  Let us label one constituency as cowmen, and the other as farmers.

Consider then the house they have built together.

Play What You Are

Following a link from f13 to Kotaku brings me to a story that the management of the Chinese MMOG King of the World has suspended accounts owned by male players who used female avatars. Supposedly by using required webcams to verify the match between the gender of character and players.       

My World = Google's World?

It looks like Google might really be planning an avatar space.  We noted vague fuzzy hints of something a year ago, but it now seems Arizona State is doing student sign-ups for a prototype test of an avatar/game/social network for a "major internet company" which everyone seems to think is the G-borg.  Google isn't talking, no real details are out there that I found, and the beta isn't live yet, but... the cutesy little graphic on the ASU page asks:

"Are you into 3D modeling, videogaming, etc?  Do you have a virtual avatar?  If so, click here!" 

Shameless Plug Redux

Since the folks on Terra Nova really helped me revise my Anti-Social Contracts article, I wanted to provide the updated version.   Special thanks to Richard Bartle, Greg Lastowka, Leandra Lederman, and Peter Jenkins for some great comments. 

Also, please feel free to stop by Second Life and hear me give an in-world lecture on the role of contracts within virtual worlds, as part of the Metanomics Series.

New Blog on Virtual Worlds & Learning: Pop.Cosmo

File this under: Blatant Self-Promotion.

We started a new blog based on the research our team (aka Pop.Cosmo) is doing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as part of the Games, Learning & Society Initiative . We study cognition & learning in the context of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) or virtual worlds. Constance Steinkuehler (that's me) is Principal Investigator. With the help of a generous grant from the MacArthur Foundation, we empirically investigate key literacy practices that constitute successful MMO gameplay (such as scientific literacy, computational literacy, and reciprocal apprenticeship) & how those literacy practices connect up with life and learning beyond the virtual worlds themselves. Then, based on this understanding, we develop after school instructional programs that leverage MMOs to get kids involved in what we see as core 21st century skills (that are often under-emphasized in classrooms).

This is our research website and blog: http://popcosmo.org/

Areae's Metaplace Announced

Yesterday Raph Koster's group Areae finally took the wraps off of Metaplace, the project they've been working on for some time (this has now been covered by Boing Boing, the BBC, and Slashdot, as Raph notes on his site).  The announcement was greeted with much applause, along with a bit of head-scratching by some (and I'm sure more than a little relief for the Areae team).

Metaplace is not just another virtual world: they're doing their best to break down the walls around  the currently walled gardens.  This is a huge development that could change how we think of virtual worlds... if they can make this cool flying machine actually take to the air. 

Job Postings

Indiana University has a job opening, and I know there are others but I've forgotten who they are. If you have a job opening, post it here.

Scarcely rare

In the linguistic shorthand of Eve-Online some minerals are said to be "rare."  The rarer mineral is the scarcer one in market terms:  they are more expensive than the less scarce ones (fn1).  Yet minerals are much less rare than one might suppose:  I know where they are, I know how to extract them, and yes, I can even arrange the logistics.    But I don't do it myself.  Why?

Minerals in Eve-Onine are scarce for lack of another in-game resource which can be indeed quite rare in some areas:

security. 

The structures that players use to manage security in Eve-Online can be substantial. 

Metanomics

My plan to teach a course here at the Johnson School has blossomed into a partnership with Metaversed to present a public speaker series and website called "Metanomics."  Thie series is open to anyone who wants to hear from—and engage with—academics, industry leaders, regulators and influential virtual-world residents.  So far, our speakers list includes legal scholars Joshua Fairfield and Bryan Camp, the unclassifiable Ted Castronova and Julian Dibbell, Congressional Staffer Dan Miller, Second Life tycoon Anshe Chung, and senior representatives from IBM and Intel—with many, many others yet to commit.  Yours truly is kicking off the series with a session entitled "Metanomics 101."

This post defines metanomics, clarifies the scope and goals of the series, and asks Terra Novans for some help.

Pen and Paperless

Many contemporary virtual worlds draw a lot of their structure of play as well as thematic content from Diku-Muds, which I would argue in turn drew a lot of their structure and themes from pen-and-paper roleplaying games (and from early non-multiplayer computer games like Wizardry that also drew from pen-and-paper as a source).

I think we sometimes do not pay enough attention to the embedded influence of pen-and-paper games on current virtual worlds, both in terms of how they are designed and in terms of some of the gamer practices and discourses that surround them.

NYT on Second Life

The New York Times ran a pretty standard Second Life "people are buying and selling virtual stuff and working in virtual jobs" article yesterday.  Nothing new, really.  I only mention it here because Julian, Robert, and Nick get quoted -- so good for you guys!  :-)

The Singularity, Virtual Worlds and AI Babies

I'm reporting from the Singularity Summit (AI and the Future of Humanity) in San Francisco where a bunch of fascinating luminaries (from MIT, IBM, Google, WorldChanging, etc.) are discussing the possibility that despite a lack of excitement in AI research lately, we might yet invent artificial intelligence that is smarter than we are.  (The term singularity, though I'm sure you all know this, was first pulled from the physics/big bang/black hole vernacular and used in this context by Vernor Vinge, then popularized by Ray Kurzweil, who is speaking via video conference tomorrow). Some people get as excited about the Singularity as Christians do about the Rapture, thinking it might solve all of our problems via a positive feedback loop emerging from intelligent systems that are capable of making themselves recursively better.  Others refer to it as a nerdpocalypse and tell tales of Hal-like doom and gloom or economic and network catastrophes that will inevitably arise from AIs (either malevolent or just behaving stupidly because of bad programming) running rampant.

NBSI and the grey problem

In Eve-Online there are player groups called "corporations" which roughly correspond to "guilds" in other MMOGs.  Corporations may band together forming alliances that can number thousands of players and control large amounts of territory (in space opera terms - swaths of planetary systems).  The bread and butter of these alliances is the territory they control: territory forms the first rung of the economic system that makes the game possible (or enjoyable) for its members.  From territory comes the minerals to fuel factories to build ships to fight wars.  Something like that.

Members within an alliance are marked by varying colors.  Green means that fellow is a corporation member, blue he's part of the alliance, etc.   Degrees of separation, even among buddies.   Red, in several flavors, distinguishes shades of bad guy.

The problem is with the grey.