Terra Nova

Welcome to Merci Victoria Grace

GameLayers which is developing the Passively Multiplayer Online Game (PMOG), which is trying to meld the existing web with a game space in interesting ways. She's going to be joining us to talk about the sorts of opportunities and challenges that this generates. Her details are over the fold, but I wanted to be the first to welcome her.

Criminal Law in Virtual Worlds

My friend Orin Kerr is a leading expert in the area of cybercrime and the author of the Computer Crime Law casebook, the first legal casebook in this area.  He is also a blogger at the Volokh Conspiracy, one of the most-visited legal weblogs.  Orin has just posted a draft to SSRN of his forthcoming essay, Criminal Law in Virtual Worlds.  It's quite timely, given the ongoing discussion of Arno's recent post.  Here's the abstract:

US Government Looking for Terrorists... In Virtual Worlds

I've read this story in Wired a couple of times, the Secrecy News blog entry from a few days ago that it came from, and even went and looked at the (unclassified) original report (PDF) from the Office of the  Director of National Intelligence to Congress discussing it.  I still don't know what to make of this.  From the report:

Reynard is a seedling effort to study the emerging phenomenon of social (particularly terrorist) dynamics in virtual worlds and large-scale online games and their implications for the Intelligence Community.

"[The project will ] conduct unclassified research in a public virtual world environment. The research will use publicly available data and will begin with observational studies to establish baseline normative behaviors."

Collaboration in the Virtual World

Since 2006 I have been working within Second Life, using it as a collaborative platform. But one of the key questions to be answered is what makes Second Life qualitatively better than a discussion forum or VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) application? What is the added value of a virtual synthetic world like Second Life? And where will this lead in 2008?

GDC 2008: Game Designers' Rant

I was sick on Wednesday, and missed the annual Game Studies Download featuring Terra Nova co-author Mia Consalvo and the amazing Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost. (Perhaps Mia will post about that talk...) But on Friday I was healthy enough to make it to the "Pouring Fuel on the Fire: Game Designers' Rant," which included Jane as well.

The session was wonderful--engaging and inspirational. I took copious notes, which follow.

Why not qualify the taking away of virtual objects as theft?

As a coincidence, on the same day I gave an in-company course on Law & Virtual worlds, a Dutch 17 year old boy[1] was arrested for ‘stealing’ items from the Habbo Hotel.[2] Both the producers of Habbo and the kids that lost their virtual items turned to the police. The producers reported hacking, the kids reported theft.

Whether virtual items can be stolen is an often recurring issue, which core is the status of virtual objects. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Dutch Supreme Court decided that computer data cannot be stolen. The element of “taking away” was considered problematic: one can obtain computer data after copying them, but the original owner still has possession of the same data.

This ‘multiple character’ (identical computer data being at different locations) is no longer prominent in case of most virtual objects.

GDC 2008: The Future of MMOs

What self-respecting virtual worlds blogger could pass up the opportunity to attend an all-star GDC panel on "The Future of MMOs"? Not me, certainly. So at noon on Thursday I found myself in the first row of a crowded room, listening to John Wood (managing editor of MMORPG.com) pose a series of interesting questions to:

* Jack Emmert (Cryptic)
* Matt Miller (NCSOFT)
* Ray Muzyka (BioWare)
* Min Kim (Nexon America)
* Rob Pardo (Blizzard)

What follows are my notes on the session; in many cases the responses are not verbatim, but instead are condensed versions of the key points. I was very impressed with how articulate and thoughtful these questions and answers were; it was an hour well-spent.

Is 'Free Gesticulation' For Avatars Here Yet?

I attended the Metaverse Roadmap workshop last week at Stanford, and I was pleased to hear Mitch Kapor touting the benefits of gestural input for virtual worlds (see Dan's blog post). I was especially excited when he said you can (almost) buy "3D webcams" - cameras plus an infrared depth sensor - for only $39! (Not sure if he was talking about the ZCam specifically). A couple of years ago, when Richard Marks of the Sony EyeToy team visited PARC and demonstrated their "real-time motion capture" for games, he said 3D cameras still cost $20,000!

Now I don't know if gestural interfaces will revolutionize computing in general, but I'm very excited about the new possibilities they create for 3D avatar control. As I've written about before, avatars will never be fully expressive until they are enabled with free gesticulation. With 3D cameras and real-time motion-capture techniques, "Players could use their own bodies and faces as joysticks in puppeteering their avatars." Currently in MMOs, gesture and facial expression are limited to a pre-specified library of commands (/bow, /wave, /point, /smile, /wink, etc.). Imagine if text chat were like this? What if you could only send chat messages by selecting them from a pre-specified library of phrases (like chat between strangers in ToonTown)? This would be severely limiting in terms of communication and expression. However, that's the current state of avatar gesture in virtual worlds.

Consensus

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading Benjamin Duranske's excellent virtual-worlds-and-law blog, Virtually Blind, and came across the following remark:

Most writers, including VB’s editor, take commodification and subsequent legal intervention as a foregone conclusion at this point.

This got me thinking: the first State of Play conference was in November, 2003, and since then the arguments have settled down considerably. When we do get legal intervention, it will be far more informed than it would have been 5 years ago.

I'm wondering, though, what degree of consensus there is out there with regards to how the law "should" treat virtual worlds?

Virtual Trademarks

About a year and a half ago, I pointed out some commentary on trademark law in virtual worlds.  In the past year, there have been many developments on this front, including the Eros lawsuits in Second Life and more attention from legal practitioners (see this from WIPO).  So, when I was recently invited by the Santa Clara Computer and High Technology Law Journal to write about user-generated content and virtual worlds for a Symposium, I decided to write a short overview of the topic of Virtual Trademarks with Candy Dougherty.

You can find the current draft here on SSRN.  The abstract reads:

In this article, we discuss how trademark law might apply to virtual worlds and virtual economies. In Part I, we consider how trademark infringement in virtual worlds resembles and differs from trademark infringement in other media. In Part II, we look at the various business models of contemporary virtual worlds and how commerce takes place within them. In Part III, we consider the circumstances where trademark infringement may occur in virtual worlds by discussing questions of use, confusion, dilution and fair use. In Part IV, we examine the issue of contributory trademark infringement.

Organising Virtual Events

On the 18th December 2007 Twofour Learning and the Beyond Distance Research Alliance at the University of Leicester launched the Second Life Media Zoo project. The Island showcases a range of learning initiatives put forward by the Beyond Distance Research Alliance and is intended as a learning and research platform, aimed at gathering data on social interaction, behaviour and the importance of learning within a virtual 3D environment.

The event was synchronized between a virtual and real life launch at the University of Leicester and at the Media Zoo Island, within Second Life (SL). Many academics, company representatives, students and reporters attended both events. 42 avatars in total attended the launch at the Media Zoo Island, an extremely positive number as the Second Life architecture only caters for a maximum of 100 Avatars, with more than 60 causing increased lagg and decreased sim stability.

 

An MMO in the Imagination of a Little Girl

What do little girls dream of? 

A number of journalists, myself included, are pretty psyched about this new, small-scale MMO called Lila Dreams.  It's still in the early stages of development, but it's due to be published by Kongregate later this year, when it'll be available to play free.  According to designer Jason McIntosh, the game takes place in the imagination of an eleven-year-old girl, where "darkness... surrounds the world, constantly encroaching inward and eating away the landscape. But there is also going to be an array of strange creatures from Lila's thoughts and nightmares with which to contend and befriend."  The concept art, the creative concept, and the game's small (three-person) but enthusiastic team make Lila Dreams a promising title to keep an eye on when it comes to innovation in MMOs.  We all love fantasy titles like World of Warcraft and social environments  like Second Life. but it's refreshing to think there are new artistic directions we can take virtual worlds!

Surveillance: whose territory is a virtual world anyway?

When I visited mid January 2008 a technology crime police team in
Amsterdam, they told me about the internet related issues they were
struggling with. One issue was related to the physical location of a server.

They said to have permission to open someone’s mail box
only if the servers are physically located in the Netherlands.
In any other case they needed permission from the “hosting” state.

There had been a case where a mother killed her child and the
Yahoo-mailbox showed an unread e-mail with a subject that
seemed highly relevant for the case. Not looking at this e-mail
because the mail is hosted in the  US seems to me an
unjust territorialisation of the internet.

How should this policy be applied to virtual words?

On the Convergence of Virtual Worlds and Social Networking Sites

We're starting to see a convergence of virtual worlds and social networking sites in the new wave of virtual "social" worlds (e.g., Kaneva, vSide, Virtual MTV) and new 3D Facebook applications (ActiveWorlds, Gaia Online). This might be dismissed as fad. After all, everyone is either trying to replicate or piggyback on the success of America's #3 (MySpace) and #9 (Facebook) top-visited websites. World of Warcraft's 10 million users is impressive indeed, but MySpace has 30 times that. However, I think there is more to a convergence than mere hype. I see some interesting similarities and possible synergies between virtual worlds and social networking sites but also some important differences that could make integration tricky.

Welcome N00bs

Maybe it's just because I've been scanning the digital ocean horizons nervous about piratical death bearing down upon me in the last few days, but as I look around the universe of virtual worlds just opening or about to open, I don't exactly see any rivals to World of Warcraft around. The big issues facing the new products are not whether they're WoWkillers, but whether they can avoid being roadkill.

February Guests: Andrew Jinman & Arno Lodder

We'd like to welcome two guests to Terra Nova for this month of February: Andrew Jinman and Arno Lodder.  We're looking forward to their posts and some interesting discussions.  Biographical information & intros from both Andrew and Arno follow below the fold...

Legitimate Questions

One of my longstanding interests in studying virtual worlds is governance and legitimacy. How are virtual worlds governed, and to what extent is this governance legitimate? When we think about political legitimacy, we can start to see a key difference between how political institutions have established their legitimate rule in the past, and how the multiple new institutions of governance in virtual worlds go about it. In particular, I am curious about how games may be making larger and larger contributions to political legitimacy in virtual worlds. To what extent are the outcomes that games generate not only legitimate in reference to the game (a valid, just, or fair win, if you will) but also contributing in some way to the legitimacy of associated institutions, such as guilds, gamemakers, and others?

An Avatar's Day in Court

Farnaz Alemi, an associate at the law firm of Latham & Watkins, has just published a piece in UCLA J. of Law & Tech. about the resolution of disputes within (and without) VWs. From the abstract:

"Though the real world is attempting to recognize in-game property rights to provide relief, it is not the viable solution some may think. As this paper demonstrates, parties face major obstacles in the real world attempting to resolve in-game disputes. Thus, I have proposed a two-tiered justice system: the In-Game Justice System (the "IGJ") and the Real World Justice System (the "RWJ") to provide a potential means of resolving in-game disputes using various real world theories of law and judicial proceedings. More importantly, real world courts would now be sought as a venue of last resort if an aggrieving player pierces the virtual veil (the "PVV"). This proposal intends to provide justice and relief to victims of virtual worlds, and hopefully a means towards understanding the interplay between the virtual world and the real world."

Sexual Safety for the Price of a Teddy Bear

Build-a-Bearville, a new child-oriented MMO run by teddy bear retailer Build-a-Bear Workshop, opened its colorful virtual doors this winter--joining "web playgrounds" like Club Penguin and Webkinz on the highly-lucrative bandwagon of virtual world for kids. Though Build-a-Bearville's population is still small in comparison to giant Club Penguin, the teddy bear-themed MMO has used a lot of the same elements (character and clothing personalization, thematic mini games, etc.) to make the world appeal to children. Specifically, Build-a-Bearville is designed for kids who've purchased an animal from a Build-a-Bear store, which they can register online--though anyone can play.

Of course, like other children's MMOs, Build-a-Bearville is billed to parents as a "safe place where children can play" free from the dangers of internet predators, identity thieves, and inappropriate content. However, what's disconcerting about the world's play model--in which signing up is free, but certain privileges are reserved for players who've registered a purchased animal--is that the level of "safety" changes depending whether or not your child is a paying customer.