Terra Nova

State of the Diku 2008

It is well understood that the game structures and mechanics that undergird most commercial virtual worlds today draw their underlying DNA from Diku-style text-based MUDs, though many contemporary players have only experienced the latest iterations or forms of those game mechanics.  Many of these features are now so familiar and expected, so much a part of the grammar of play activity, that developers seem to implement them without asking what purpose or role they will serve in a particular gameworld. Moreover, precisely because these features have become so foundational, it seems difficult to think of new approaches or game mechanics, even those that offer only a mild twist. But even a single such innovation can do a lot to spark new interest among players.

By way of illustration, a look at two such mechanics in two fairly new commercial virtual worlds, Age of Conan and Warhammer Online. (The latter is approaching open beta, with a release later in September 2008, but the NDA has been lifted .)

YouTube Social VWs Tour

Gary Hayes recently posted a video tour of over fifty social virtual worlds -- his blog entry here (with some commentary).  I had not seen many of these before.  This is a neat resource to get a few seconds of introduction to what some of these spaces look like.

The video is embedded after the fold.

[speechless]

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4557935.ece

Q&A with Google Lively's User Experience Designer

Apparently my gripes over Google Lively's frustrating whisper chat were heard all the way in the kingdom of Google.  After posting them here at Terra Nova I received an email from Lively's User Experience Designer, Mark Young.  We got to chatting about what was and wasn't working in Google's new virtual world, user-interface-wise, and Young agreed to a little Q&A.  The results are posted here for anyone interested in how interface design develops in a world like Lively -- or just anyone who's comforted to know that, yes, Google hears your gripes:

Q: What's your role on Google's User Experience Design/Lively teams?

A:  I'm a User Experience Designer on the Apps team, which includes people working on Gmail, Calendar, Talk, Blogger, Reader, Docs, Sites, Picasa, Orkut and more. I am the UX designer on the Lively team.

Q: What criticisms have you been hearing most about Lively's UI?

A: Crashes, problems logging in and lag were the biggest complaints initially. The engineering team has been working furiously to solve those, making great progress which should show up in client updates shortly...

The Latest on the Virtual Tax

Professor Theodore P. Seto of Loyola Law School has the latest entry into the debate over the virtual tax question.  You can find it here.  Here's the abstract: 

On Emoticon Flirting

Not to bring down the general caliber of academic discussion currently going on here at Terra Nova, but :).

I recently wrote a feature for a new Village Voice Media pop culture blog I co-anchor called "Top 10 Emoticons for Flirting Online with Minimal Effort."  Silly though the piece may be, it brings up some hopefully interesting points about the shifted meanings of what appear to the untrained eye as simple ASCI faces.  Much like the socially normalizing LOL, which can supposedly save the dignity of even Second Life players sitting naked in their lawn chairs, emoticons take on new, adapted meanings in online, multiuser environments.

Any additional meanings to add?

Structures of Governance

From a governance perspective – what the key structural differences between Virtual Worlds and the Internet and what does this mean for national governments?

Rigorous Analysis of RMT

Courtesy of Richard Heeks of University of Manchester, everything currently known with any confidence about gold farming is reported here, without any apparent agenda.