Terra Nova

Survey for Emory's Virtual Worlds Conference

As Ted Castronova has already announced, a fascinating conference is coming up at Emory University, called  "Virtual Worlds and New Realities."  There are going to be a number of panel discussions (the last of which will be broadcast live into Second Life and on Second Life Cable Network as part of the Metanomics weekly interview series.) 

To spark discussion on the panels, the conference organizers have asked me to distribute the following survey links.  Even if you are not going to attend the conference, we would love to have your responses to the key questions, which address research questions, research methods, collaboration opportunities, and “commercial, social and political possibilities.”

The link to the survey is here.

Below the fold, I list the questions themselves, and give my stab at some of the answers.  You don’t have to write as much as I have—after all, your responses will be private (unless you want to post them here publicly, as I have.  I am sure that just a few bullet points would be a great help.

Santa Clara / Recent News

Below are some recent mainstream media stories on virtual worlds for those who might have missed them.  Thoughts, comments, and links to other things welcome, as always.

Before that, though, if you should happen to be in Santa Clara County on Friday (the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, specifically), I'll be there as part of a panel talking about how trademark law should work in virtual worlds.  See this page.  Much more interesting, though, are the other folks who will be speaking, such as Richard Stallman, Alex Kozinski, Marty Roberts (GC of Linden Lab), Chris Kelly (Chief Privacy officer of Facebook),  Zahavah Levine (Chief Counsel of YouTube), and a whole bunch of other people rather fancier than myself.  Apparently, you can attend for free, although they encourage you to donate $10 to pay for cheese and such.

Now onto the news...

President of the United States

In 2005, one of the major remaining candidates for the US Presidency proposed anti-game  legislation whose wording indicated many of the biases and inaccuracies that have re-emerged in the Cooper Lawrence incident. Today, that candidate's web site says nothing about video games. While I don't consider myself all that deeply in touch with the gamer webspace, it seems  that I haven't heard anyone taking a position for or against any of the candidates based on the candidate's views about gaming. Is this because their positions on games don't matter? Or is it because gamers don't vote? Or have I just failed to see political stances that are, in fact, out there.

Gamers: Do you read sites like GamePolitics and the Entertainment Consumers Association? Who do you support in the current contest, and is gaming policy part of your position? Is gaming even a relevant issue now? Do you vote at all? How have these questions been answered recently in the elections of other countries?

Metaverse U

WHERE: Annenberg Auditorium, Stanford University
WHEN: Saturday the 16th and Sunday the 17th of February 2008
WEBSITE: http://metaverseu.stanford.edu

There are lots of good people attending this, and it looks like a solid event.

Details below the fold.

MacArthur Series on Philanthropy and Virtual Worlds

From the release:

The USC Institute for Network Culture and Global Kids present a discussion on Virtual Liberties: Do Avatars Dream of Civil Rights?

12:00p.m. PST on Monday, January 28, 2008

Please join the USC Institute for Network Culture and Global Kids for the first event in an upcoming series on philanthropy and virtual worlds.

The Lifetime to Master

It's taken me five years of on-again, off-again but often substantial playing of poker (don't worry, mostly not cash games) to really understand some of the game's concepts that I read about when I was playing but didn't properly understand.

Ludological scholars are right to insist, in this respect and others, that games require attention as games, that they have a character or nature that is intrinsic to games and not to texts or performances or sociality. Poker has a "deep game" that is not spelled out in the rules, but which powerfully sorts out the losers and the winners, given a sufficient number of rounds of play.

What's the "deep game" of virtual worlds, those that have at least some game-like character?

My Tiny Life Now Free

About ten years ago, when I was wandering around the library at the University of Virgina looking for something that would teach me about the shape of community online, I found My Tiny Life.  I pulled it off the shelf and started with the first few pages in which the author confronts a RL server in Palo Alto that happens to contain LambdaMOO. 

It's a wonderful little depiction of a person trying to reconcile a vibrant and rich virtual world with the "silent, bone-white" machine that houses it.  After reading those pages, I was hooked.  I had found the kind of writing and subject that made me sit down on the floor right next to the bookshelf -- I didn't want to expend the time or energy to find a table.  I wasn't the only person affected this way by reading My Tiny Life.  E.g. Larry Lessig's blurb on the back cover says: "Dibbell's story is why I teach cyberlaw."

Well, the main point of this post is that Julian has made his wonderful book available as a free download.  You can get it here, in a very spiffy PDF file.  The Web is now a richer place.

The secondary note is that Julian would like to make MTL even freer.  Yet he hasn't managed that trick yet because apparently there's a little problem with the phones at HarperCollins UK.  Explanation of that here (and that page also includes his reasons for wanting to  release the book for free).

Sleep is cancelled

Over the holidays I found myself notified by those above me in an alliance in the game world of Eve-Online: "sleep is cancelled"  (pg 18, cited document below).  I wondered, how did it come to this:

1. How did the fortunes of my tribe in that game world sour to this point;
2. How many times can an alliance ask for its members to sacrifice a night, a weekend, even if a virtual empire hung in the balance?

I think the answer to these questions is complicated, but they both strike a deeper chord - at a deeply politicized 0.0 alliance game.  Simply put, political tension on a number of interconnected levels drives the purpose and mechanics of the large-scale alliance game in Eve-Online.

We've discussed much of this in the past, here, in the ongoing series on the Eve-Online alliance game  (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 7.  8.  9. ), as we will do too in the future.  I've started a parallel process of pulling together discussions past and future into a more complete set of documents.  An early draft is cited below:

A View of Politics and Morale in Eve-Online  (1.6mb PDF).  

Below the fold are a few footnotes.

Sub-Prime Crisis in Second Life

Real-world regulators are already seriously considering action against  high interest rates for poorly-collateralized loans with high default risk (so called "sub-prime" mortgages).  Well, Linden Lab has moved strongly to eliminate a class of such loans, with a twist:  the banks are paying the high interest rates, and are the ones that tend to default on their depositors.  Here is the key statement in the Linden Lab policy regarding inworld "Banks" (their quotes):

As of January 22, 2008, it will be prohibited to offer interest or any direct return on an investment (whether in L$ or other currency) from any object, such as an ATM, located in Second Life, without proof of an applicable government registration statement or financial institution charter.  We’re implementing this policy after reviewing Resident complaints, banking activities, and the law, and we’re doing it to protect our Residents and the integrity of our economy.    (Full text here.)

My analysis and predictions below the fold.

Foozles I Have Known, Quests I Have Done

Working off of a post by Raph Koster, I set down some of my own thoughts on the games of 2007.

Now I want to think a bit further about the content of game experiences, specifically in virtual worlds.   

World of Answercraft

Amazon.com has had, for about a year, a beta feature/forum called Askville.com.  According to the web site:

 What is Askville?

Askville is a place where you can share and discuss knowledge with other people by asking and answering questions on any topic.  It’s a fun place to meet others with similar interests to you and a place where you can share what you know.

An online Q&A community is not exactly a new idea.  There's the defunct Google Answers and the non-defunct Yahoo Answers.  And see USENET, that virtual community where netizens still share and discuss knowledge, ask and answer questions, and all that good stuff.

What's intriguing about Askville is not the substance of the exchange, but the incentive structure they have wrapped around it.  There are experience points and Quest gold that can be earned by answering questions.  For instance, if you look at the charts on that FAQ page, you'll see that in order to be a level 4  user on Askville, and get a 20 gold payout bonus, you'll need to have 1,500-2,999 experience points.  The real innovation here is that Amazon is apparently targeting all the Gygaxians out there.  Is that a good idea?  Is it a fun idea?