Terra Nova

Report of the Byron Review

The long awaited and, in part, widely feared report of the Byron Review into children, the internet and video games is out.

Titled Safer Children in a Digital World, the report is 226 pages long and includes a section specifically on online games – which recommends that guidelines are created for ‘good practice in child safety’ (I think I get to say to the industry - I told you so, see KidSpace Stamp )

I’ve posted the exec summary below the fold but I suggest people go to the full report, in particular Chapter 8 ‘Online Gaming’.

Even More on Teaching Languages in Second Life

Fresh from the press release oven, we have word of an entire 24-hour conference to be held in Second Life this May on the topic of teaching languages in virtual worlds.  The event is called SLanguages2008, and it should prove fully multilingual (neat!).  It's still two months away, but ESL dorks like myself have been officially advised to mark their calendars.  From the release:

"The conference will be held within Second Life allowing the participants to exchange ideas and share experiences simultaneously around the world. The online conference is free to attend and includes talks, workshops, discussions and posters on language education using virtual worlds such as Second Life. The events will cover methodologies, teaching tools and experiences."

Blizzard v WoW Glider: Interesting, no?

The EFF's Fred von Lohmann just sent round a note on an email list about the summary judgment briefs in the WoW Glider case. I've mirrored the briefs here and here for those who are interested, and below the fold I'm gonna engage in rampant copyright infringement by reposting all of Fred's message. He sums it up too well to bother trying to explain any better, and I'm sure that he'll forgive the infringement...

Using Second Life to Teach English as a Second Language

This one definitely gets filed under "blatant self-promotion."

I recently started freelancing for Forbes.com, and the first article I've written for them is called "How to Spark Remote Learning." The piece covers the (surprisingly sizable) movement to use Second Life's immersive environment to teach residents foreign languages.  Specifically, I talked to Kip Boahn--head of a German ESL school by day, and founder of a new island named Second Life English--who's dedicated himself to providing free resources for the game's estimated  5,000 language learners and 1,000 instructors.  What's particularly interested is the way Second Life English and other programs make the most of the world itself.  From the article:

Second Skin

Did anyone see the MMORPG documentary Second Skin at SXSW? 

I'm curious because the story from the official weblog seems to be that gamers are wildly enthusiastic about the film.  The Escapist says: "gamers walk away feeling like they had seen seen their life story, with slick editing, a peppy soundtrack, and the seductive polish of an Apple commercial."  On the other hand, this opinion at Gamasutra says: "As the lights dimmed, I was excited to explore how interactive media is changing our experience of ourselves. But instead, I just wound up feeling sorry for the losers playing World of Warcraft."  Eric Zimmerman's comment (scroll down on that link) seems to accord with that: "I was distressed by a film that seemed to be a parade of gross stereotypes, most of which were clearly negative."

Who is right?

Virtual Law Bibliography

As part of the preparation for the book on law and virtual worlds that I'm writing, I've been trying to make a comprehensive list of published law review articles and student notes that focus on the intersection of law and virtual worlds. 

Just in case readers are interested, the current version is attached below.  If I'm missing something, please let me know in the comments or by email.

As you'll see, the rate of publications has been increasing, with the majority of the publications coming out in the past couple of years.

Arden I Going Offline

For a couple of months, we've had the Arden I environment available for people to experience, but we have to take it down now. We need the server space to run a social science experiment in Arden II: London's Burning. More on that in a little while.

If you are interested in playing around with Arden I, please do. The module is available for free download at this URL. Go ahead and monkey around however you'd like. See what you can do with a Shakespeare fantasy module.

Philip Rosedale the CEO is Dead....Long Live Philip Rosedale the Chairman of the Board

Today Reuters' Second Life division reported the scoop that Philip Rosedale is stepping down as CEO of Linden Lab, but will replace Mitch Kapor as Chairman of the Board of Directors.

Eric Krangel (Eric Reuters in SL) asked me for a comment on his page of resident reactions, and I went with this:

Linden Lab’s unique business vision allows them to break plenty of rules, but they can’t ignore the basic economic forces governing corporate growth and ultimately access to capital markets.  The search for a successor is going to lead to some real soul-searching about two key trade-offs in Linden Lab’s strategy.  First is the tradeoff between stability of the software platform and feature-heavy construction that allows creators with tremendous freedom.  Second is the tradeoff between catering to individual residents who want a new world full of fantastic possibilities for their personal lives, and enterprises who see virtual worlds (but perhaps not Second Life) as the future of electronic commerce and the virtual office.  Without a tremendous influx of capital that would allow them to become all things to all people, Linden Lab’s new management will need to make some big decisions on which way to turn.

So, what do YOU think?

 

Lying Online

Here we have a top Prof laying into some virtual world research. His objection is basically, that he can lie about his personal details and generally not take the research seriously. While it is more difficult to lie in a real world laboratory about age and sex, as the experimenter can immediately see through the lies, it is still entirely possible to make stuff up. Even with age and sex, if I fill in the form and submit it with 10 other people, it's possible the experimenter won't realise if I say I'm an 80 year old granny.
An experimental economist discussing the possibility of running experiments in virtual worlds, commented that when subjects show up to his real life lab, they see him looking stern, dressed in a suit and generally being threatening. This, he said, causes them to 'straighten up' and take the whole thing seriously. It's true that in our own in world experiments, we've had people clowning around before (sometimes during) and after the work. We just accepted that as part of the world's culture, although we did take steps to try to get people to take the work seriously (mainly by explaining what we were trying to do, rather than using visual cues like the experimental economist, although we did wear suits and our lab was as 'serious-looking' as we could make it).
So here's the question - how can virtual world participants be encouraged to take online research seriously, or should no attempt be made to change their online behaviour?

Are Religions Virtual Worlds?

Right now I’m reading about player behavior in MMOs. I keep thinking how similar those player behaviors and game worlds are to the fantastical real-world-overlays we know as religions. Both imbue players with feeling of elevated direction.

Religions and MMOs give believers/players a lot in exchange for their subscription. Believers get a realm to achieve in that doesn’t necessarily affect what most people hold to be the real world. Recurrent personalities exist at the same time as the believers, but persist regardless of the life span of any one believer. Your grandmother's Jesus is your Jesus. The NPC you met last week during a quest will be there two months from now when you sign up a secondary character. And lastly, religions and virtual worlds both contain objectives that can be broken down into steps for the believer. Religions almost always require believers to do at least one thing, even if it's only to take an NPC into their heart. That action is not much different, and frankly, takes much less time, than solving riddles, collecting items, or grinding XP.

Games+Learning+Society 4.0 Conference -- Call For Papers

Just got pinged by the fabulously fabulous Sean Michael Dargan who, when not touring the world as a surprisingly-tall-and-dapper-guitarist-cum-singer, coordinates Games+Learning+Society for Constance and Kurt and the Madison gang. He reminded me that they have a CFP out. GLS is a great conference, and the location is just wonderful. The CFP is below the fold and y'all should be thinking about submitting a paper, and then going.

Review of "The Second Life Herald"

I just did a short book review of Peter Ludlow and Mark Wallace's "The Second Life Herald" for Science. It's just been published and so I can make it available here. For those who don't want to read a one page review, I'll give a mini-review of the review over the page, and ask a couple of questions of y'all.

Localization meets Culturalization

Due to my interest in the global aspects of MMOGs and games generally, I wound up at a really interesting session at GDC a couple of weeks ago. It was titled "Self-Censoring Potential Content Risks for Global Audiences: Why, How and When" given by Tom Edwards from Englobe. His talk went far beyond the "avoid blood in Germany, stay away from the Taiwanese flag if you want China as a market" tidbits I've seen before. He argued for something beyond localization--adequate culturalization of games, which makes increasing sense, given the emerging markets and necessities for creating games that appeal to more than one cultural/national/whatever group. Yet his talk was focused on single-player and offline multi-player games, and I began to wonder, how would MMOGs fit in?

Residents versus Users

There's been a lot of press lately about how virtual worlds can be used to study human bahaviour. But is it really human behaviour? The following is from an unpublished paper about behaviour in virtual worlds:

 

An interesting point to consider is whether we are researching residents or users (the term ‘resident’ referring to an avatar and ‘user’ referring to the human controlling the avatar). They are not necessarily the same - Turkle (1995) discusses one of the appeals of virtual worlds as being the ability of a user to change themselves, with change of gender being discussed most. For example, one study of a Japanese virtual world revealed there to be 4 male users to 1 female user, but only 3 male residents to 1 female resident (Stone, 1995); given the number of players of that world, many tens of thousands of users were swapping gender (Turkle, 1995). The approach taken here was that we were collecting information from residents about acts performed by residents and the effect this had on other residents.

Is it good enough to study avatars? Or should some attempt always be made to tie things back to the guy sitting at the computer screen?

 

Gary Gygax, 1938 - 2008

Perhaps Gary will be best remembered for Dungeons and Dragons (1974).  I  fondly remember the colorful 1977 Monster Manual (1st Edition), I believe I may still have it in a box in the attic.  I also can look to my bookshelves and see the first version of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), 1974 soft copy plus Greyhawk and Blackmoor supplements winking at me from behind a mountain of paper, "it has been a long time."  Indeed.

How many other books do I still keep from the 1970's?   You?

A story I like is from the Wikipedia: "The game Gettysburg from the Avalon Hill company captured Gygax's attention. It was from Avalon Hill that he ordered the first blank hexagon mapping sheets that were available. He began looking for innovative ways to generate random numbers, and used not only common dice (with six sides), but dice of all five platonic solid shapes."

A generation of kids learned probability from those dice, and a whole lot more.

This quote also  illustrates how imagination and genres of game are cross-fertilized.    A theme we've discussed many times on Terra Nova in the past is the legacy of table-top Role Playing Games (RPG) to modern video-game RPGs and indeed through MUDs to the massively-multiplayer MMORPGs.  Yet, I think this technical lineage is too confining.   Perhaps the clearer statement of legacy is from Anton I., from comment here:

May he rest in peace proudly as one of the very few people whose creations will outlive them.

Of not many people will this ever be said.

Yet, Gary sounded humbler than his legacy, "I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else."

Gamers everywhere, whatever your genre, salute.  One of your kin has passed.

Fair play

(I think the new bloggers here could use some help with the "Continue reading..." feature of Type Pad.)

Second Life griefing was recently defined by a group of residents as unacceptable, persistent behaviour which disrupts the ability to enjoy Second Life. This is strikingly similar to definitions of bullying: aggressive behaviour in a relationship of imbalanced power which happens over a prolonged period of time. Residents described a number of motives which may explain why griefing occurs.

Human Data as a Playfield: The Passively Multiplayer Online Game

For the last two years I've been designing an experiment in play: PMOG, the Passively Multiplayer Online Game (said P-Mog). Justin Hall, Duncan Gough, and I founded a company called GameLayers with investment from O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures, Joi Ito, and Richard Wolpert. We quit our day jobs last summer and got serious about bringing play to the world wide web.

The impetus of my design is my lifelong desire to play with the layers of information that, unseen but forceful, impact our real and online lives. I want to see the invisible world, or at least become more aware of it. Perhaps ironically, PMOG is not a visually intense game. I don’t know that we rank 2D, much less 3D. This is the game HUD that persists from page to page in the Firefox 2 and 3 browsers:

We're now in the beta of our second public version. Both versions were implemented as Firefox extensions that follow players as they surf the web. The players provide the game with access to their browsers; the game provides the players with weapons, writing instruments, a gifting system, and a self-generating RPG character.

We started out to make a casual, massively multiplayer online game that took place alongside the rest of a player's online life. To do that, we had to answer two questions. One: what kind of interaction that occurs alongside the Everyday can we provide to players that they'll accept? And two: how can the game provide players with a set of behavioral summations that they could reasonably attribute to their decision-making process?

VW Taxonomy Q1 ‘08

MUD, MOO, MUSH, MMORPG, VW, Metaverse,,,,

In Search of Furry Economicus

Hi, I'm Thomas, and I'm a first time blogger...

There is a popular perception that people will say and do things online that they never would in a face-to-face meeting. It's easy to find extremely personal blog posts, and 'screaming and shouting' goes on a lot in forums. Anonymity is usually blamed. Economists view human behaviour as based purely on self interest –  ‘homo economicus’ is what they call rational man. He is selfish and uncaring, and has never been found anywhere on Earth (sure we might know individuals like him, but never an entire culture populated by him). You would think that behaviour in an online environment such as Second Life would approximate more closely than anywhere else this concept of rational man - if anyone is ever going to act selfishly, it will be there, as a person can say and do things hidden behind their avatar. Residents do not normally know each others’ identities, and no one can be seen, for example, blushing from having performed a selfish act.

However this doesn't appear to be the case. Participants in recent experiments in Second Life revealed themselves to be as kind, caring and trusting as people in First Life.

Why is this?

Could it be that there is no such thing as a ‘Second Life culture’, and that residents simply bring their First Life culture in with them? The theory behind this says that when people go online they more readily take on the culture of the group they are joining; in this case the 'group' is Second Life users. So current findings imply that the culture of Second Life is identical to the cultures of the users. If this is correct, does it mean that the 'popular perception' mentioned in the first line is wrong? Or are blog posts and discussion groups just fundamentally different from interaction in virtual worlds?

Gaming / Life

It’s my birthday.

Did you know?