Terra Nova

EA to Close EA-Land: Goodbye to TSO

As has been reported in several places starting with the EA-Land blog (to which the EA-Land site now points), EA will be shutting down EA-Land in August.  EA-Land was the do-over of The Sims Online, which at one time in its heady pre-release days was the presumptive heir to the "first million user virtual world" crown.  A virtual world/game  from EA and built using the biggest, most successful and accessible game IP ever? 

What could possibly go wrong?

Tell us what you really think

Ah, the sounds of spring: classes ending, birds chirping, and one Englishman going apeshit on his countrymen. Witness the awesome power of this fully operational Bartle-station in the Guardian.

The Sexual Implications of Going Hands Free in Second Life

Earlier this month, Linden Lab released a demo of a hands-free interface for movement within Second Life.  While they were careful to explain that this project is still in the early stages of development, the interface as it stands would allow players to walk and fly through the world using only the positions of their bodies.  Apparently inspired by the controls on Segway scooters, a 3D camera would capture players' movements as they stand a number of feet in front of their computer screens--or, as in the case of the demo, conveniently ginormos televisions.  Linden also claims that the technology in development can sense facial movement and expressions.

While other bloggers are seeing a potentially ground-breaking new way to interact in a world whose current user interface is a giant pain in the butt, I'm wondering: what will going hands free do for sex in Second Life?

Did We Ignore the Rise of the Personal World?

In a week when Sony has announced yet more delays (another in a longer series of gaffes that has spawned endless humiliation) in the development of their much hyped virtual space, Home, and when even the roar from WoW’s success seems to be fading into an echo, a reminder about the incredible success of a little game that could...  Like All in the Family or this year's indie darling Once (or the Aeron chair, for that matter), it almost never got made 'cause people making decisions about such things didn't believe Will Wright (who doesn't believe Will Wright?!) when he said it would be the best thing ever. Cause after all, who the heck would want to play in a virtual dollhouse?   

The air that we breathe

Neils Clark forwards a five page collage on "Gaming Addiction: Clearing The Air, Moving Forward" on Gamasutra (April 3, 2008).   Clearing the air might be ambitious at this stage of the discussion, but Neils provides a useful catalog of the range of ideas that have taken root in this landscape.  The difficulty of charged-up umbrella issues is that all sort of argument can become ensnared.   A few selected quotes are provided below the fold; read the essay on the Gamasutra site.  There is excellent comment there too.

Against Cyberproperty

This post is a plug for an article that I’ve recently completed with my colleague Michael Carrier at Rutgers-Camden.  The article is here. It is very short (for a law review article — 36 pages) and is our best effort to decisively end to the doctrine of “cyberproperty,” a.k.a. “cybertrespass,” a.k.a. the Internet variant of trespass to chattel doctrine.

Though this article doesn't explicitly mention it, cyberproperty doctrine has some interesting connections with virtual property and virtual worlds -- below I'll explain what cyberproperty is and how it relates to the concept of virtual property.

Voice in Virtual Worlds, Take 3

In line with the recent discussions we had here about the role of voice in virtual worlds (see for instance this post, and more recently this one), some new research by Greg Wadley from the University of Melbourne adds more empirical data to the debate. The findings are summarized in this paper but click below to read Greg's own summary of his findings:

Can you hear the game now?

I was recently invited to speak at the Culture and Computer Games: Studying Online Activities conference held at the HumLab in Umea, Sweden. The conference was organized by Torill Mortensen, and the participants were mainly European games researchers who have their own WoW guild, The Truants. As a non-WoW player I was honored to be asked, and the conference was great, featuring not only research talks and research-in-progress discussions, but also workshops on how to make machinima and how to pull data from games for interesting sorts of analysis and display.

I arrived in the middle of one presentation about game audio (by Kristine Jorgensen), and I'm so sorry I arrived late. Her talk was one of the first I've heard that takes seriously the audio in MMO games. More thoughts on why audio is so fascinating below the cut--

The Point of No Return

I ran a roundtable session at IMGDC last weekend on the subject of "Government Interference: How Much Can you Take?". The way it worked, I presented a number of scenarios in turn, ramping up each one of them to see when (if ever) the situation would become so intolerable that it would stop the attendees from ever wanting to develop an MMORPG.

Some things were irritating, but not so irritating that they'd cause the assembled developers and designers to give up. For example, government requirements for tracking every single transaction to prevent fraud fell into this category: it adds a huge overhead, but it's something people can just about live with.

There were two proposals, however, which hit the abandon ship button for everyone. Both of these are ones I've seen advocated a number of times, included here on TerraNova.

AIIDE '08

Games AI seems most associated most with single-player computer games.  This is because with single-player games there is no social dimension to highlight (it is up to only the AI for dynamic content).  However, AI has an important role yet to play in social "massively multiplayer" spaces, I believe.   Consider the features readers of MMOWatch thought were important in RPGs (see site poll) as illustrative.   In order of importance (at the time of my reading): "NPC interaction", "Character development", "Exploration", "Combat" (only 5%),  "Puzzles", "Questing"...

A call for papers is out (AIIDE '08), details below.  Readers here might take this time to suggest to those considering writing what they think are the important qualities of entertainment AI in MMORPGs.

The Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE '08) is soliciting papers and presentations on research and applications involving artificial intelligence in computer games and entertainment. The conference will take place on October 22-24, 2008, at Stanford University in California, USA. Paper drafts and talk proposals are requested before April 22, 2008. More details can be found at the conference website: http://www.aiide.org ...

U.S. Congressional Hearing on Virtual Worlds

It's April 1st, but this is legit. 

It's a hearing of the Energy and Commerce subcommittee.  See this witness list and there's an MP3 of the proceedings now that can be found here.  I'll refrain from comments until I've listened to all of this, but the opening statements of the Congressfolk were, to say the least, interesting.

Update: Video, audio, and prepared statements now archived here.  Some news reports now available  here.  And one initial thought: apart from the opening remarks, this was mostly a hearing about Second Life.  The speakers other than Rosedale talked primarily about Second Life and UGC worlds.

Update 2: On listening to testimony and further reflection, in lieu of commenting, I think I'll just point to Lum's reaction.  I'm really not sure I have much to say about this event myself.  Still, it is the first Congressional hearing on virtual worlds.  I wonder what the first hearing on airplanes was like?

Update 3: Ok, my last comment on this, in reply to Raph's thoughts.  If you can get past 1) the opening remarks, 2) the promotional video for Second Life, and 3) the fact that everyone at the hearing seemed to think that Second Life was synonymous with virtual worlds (made convenient by the fact that the other witnesses had major investments or involvements in Second Life), then you'll find the Q&A (starting at 51:20) has some very interesting stuff.  Some of it shows the legislators being perceptive.  Some of it shows the legislators and witnesses being not so perceptive.  But if you're interested in the regulation of virtual worlds, it's worth a listen.