Terra Nova

Virtual Policy ‘08

As many TN readers know I’ve recently formed a think tank to look at public policy issues and virtual worlds, it’s called the Virtual Policy Network (tVPN). The point of it is to bring together academics, industry and policy makers in local, regional and global dialog.

As part of the usual thinky tanky things tVPN is creating and supporting a range of conferences and is kicking of a number of research projects.

And so to the point of this post: I wanted to make TN readers aware of a possibly the first UK based conference focused purely on public policy and virtual worlds. Snappily titled Virtual Policy the event is on the 22nd & 23rd of July in London at the Department of Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform’s (BERR) conference center. BERR are co-sponsors of the event and it’s quite inspiring to have a central government department so involved in debates over virtual worlds.

Here is the event sign up page: virtualpolicy08.eventbrite.com

The event features some of your TN favorites such as Richard Bartle, Bryan Camp oh and me; as well as a number of Europeans that might not be so familiar such as lawyers David Naylor of Field Fisher Waterhouse in the UK and Dr. Andreas Lober of Schulte Riesenkampff in Germany.

I can’t bring myself to do a pure promo post though. What interests me about this event is that much of the debate about virtual worlds that one sees in academia, at least, has been driven by the US. This means that North American issues, rhetoric and sensibilities have been given primacy. Hosting an event in the UK should help to flush out those areas where Europeans either don’t think an issue is important or have a very different framing of it.

What do TN readers think the main points of departure are going to be?

Gender Differentials in Age of Conan

This month, a number of my colleagues in VW research have disappeared from WoW in favor of the shiny-new Age of Conan game, and I'd heard a lot of rave reviews from them. I'd also been encouraged before the release by one of their trailers, which showed a kick-ass female toon.

Yesterday, however, I received this email from my RIT colleague Jessica Bayliss:

As some of you are aware, I've been playing Age of Conan for the past few weeks. It's an interesting MMO with some different things from the standard WoW.

Apparently, they have also gender biased their MMO against female characters and according to various reports from the people who played beta, it was a known problem a while ago.

Female animations are slower than the male animations for the attacks of the dual wielding assassin. It is unknown if this effects other class archetypes or not, but I'm guessing it would effect any dual wielding class. Since the female can't attack again until the animation is done, that means that females do less damage than male assassins. And yes, the timing difference is visually noticeable.

There's a video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-C4z-pTrII

I wasn't sure that I completely believed it and so I timed it myself. The male is definitely faster than the female and it is as noticeable as it looks in the video.

The latest we've heard from Funcom itself is that they are "looking into" the issue. Meanwhile, I sit and wonder how something like that could have possibly gotten through QA.

When I asked Jessica's permission to post her email here, she also asked me to add the following:

A link that puts together some discussions of the problem: http://forums-us.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=55674

Funcom's current admission that there might be a problem and that it's
not intended to work that way: page 10 of the link above

And the latest joke about the bias: http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=105819

Suddenly I'm not feeling quite so bad that AoC won't run on my MacBook Pro...

Call for Papers: Culture of Virtual Worlds

A bit of self-promotion for a special issue I'm co-editing with Mark Bell for the new Journal of Virtual Worlds Research. Feel free to contact me if you have questions about what/when/how to submit a piece, and please consider sending something in.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research
Special Issue: Culture of Virtual Worlds
Deadline: September 30, 2008
Publication Date: November 20, 2008

Guest Editors
Mark Bell, Indiana University
Mia Consalvo, Ohio University

* jvwresearch.org *

Early users of virtual worlds trumpeted their potential to bring together like-minded groups to create community, to encourage social activism, and to explore facets of identity. Over the past 20 years, we have seen virtual worlds develop from text-based to graphical, and from 2D to 3D interactive spaces. Some spaces have focused primarily on game-related activities, from MUD through Ultima Online and World of Warcraft, while others have concentrated on social aspects of being, allowing users to define their own goals, and often create many parts of the spaces they inhabit--from LambdaMoo to The Palace and Second Life. Virtual worlds have also become big business at the same time as some worlds remain resolutely tied to different goals. Yet what of the cultures that have grown up in, around, and through virtual worlds in this same time period? What do we know about that culture, or more accurately, those cultures and how to define them?

Patenting Virtual Commerce

Last week I received the following email from an officer of the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO):

I am a Patent Examiner at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office in the area of Business Methods, Finance.  I am the examiner of record of multiple patent applications  (20+) involving virtual worlds and different types of credit accounts, charge accounts,  escrow transactions, risk mitigation (to name a few) used within these worlds….I am looking for references from 2004 and earlier.   A published paper, game manual, or even a detailed blog entry that details the economic system / banking system / shopping / business creation in a MMORPG (especially Second Life) would be amazingly helpful.

As a relative newcomer to virtual worlds (I started writing on these matters in May of 2007), I promised I would pass on this challenge to Terra Novans.   But I can’t help also asking for opinions on a few aspects of the patents that raise some pretty interesting issues.  More background and gory details below the fold, if you dare. (There are a LOT of details).

Onion satire

The Onion News Network  is known for its satire.  Recently it produced a video that has become well known on video game sites on the Web: "Warcraft' Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing 'Warcraft.'  If satire is militant irony (paraphasing Northrope Frye, merci Wikipedia), what exactly is it satirizing, if anything?

A New Virtual World Winter?

(editor's note: find a brief bio of Bruce Damer from his March 2007 guest column)

Its been just over a year since my last guest posting and in that time we have put some real beef into the Virtual Worlds Timeline effort. The team led by Henrik Bennetson and Henry Lowood at Stanford will soon start ingesting hundreds of hours of video and other material produced by a number of people during the mid to late 1990s virtual worlds early-adopter "boom" (a veritable "Cambrian Explosion" of VW platforms happened in 1995-96). Our archival efforts took us back even further with Chip Morningstar's digitization of a superb LucasFilm piece about Habitat produced in 1986. This is also going into the VW timeline project (thanks Chip & Randy!) and you can get a preview of it here on Google Video.

But this column is not about looking back, but about looking forward to the future, especially where this current Virtual Worlds boom may be going. The key question I would like to pose the community is: are we already seeing the early sign of a Virtual Worlds downturn that may lead to a "winter" as severe as the one in the period 2000-2003? The second logical question is: if this is so, what can we do to head off or reduce the slope of a new downturn? If the  infamous "chasm" lies before us, and not back in 2000-2003, then what can we do to sling a rope bridge over it?

On/In

We often post thoughts on TN about things that happen in virtual worlds. 

Note the "on" and the "in" in that previous sentence.  Why do discussions happen "on" TN, but "in" virtual worlds?