Terra Nova

(Virtual) Virtual Worlds Symposium: The Future of Retail in Virtual Worlds and Web 3D

My good friend John Eyles is an educator, philanthropist and activist, and also leads research and alliance efforts at Telecom New Zealand.  He is organizing this symposium to explore possibilities for retail endeavors in virtual worlds (ideally imagining possibilities beyond the usual brick and mortar simulacra).  I am doing a session on mobile gaming and virtual worlds (a la Parallel Kingdom, which launches Oct 31st), and he is also looking for some more contributors for other sessions that might be of interest, or inspire some new thinking in this area.

It's Oct. 29th - 31st, running for 30 hours so people world-wide can participate.

More information at http://www.futuretelco.net.  Schedule, etc. is forthcoming.

Scientists: Spore Sucks

Everybody wants to use evolutionary mechanisms in new media. There are folks who program little AI bots and let them evolve. I feel this is misguided in that a pre-programmed AI is never going to mutate the way a real entity would. Automata are never going to come up with molotov cocktails and IEDs. A virtual world, I've argued, is the best way to get the emergent/evolutionary thing going: replace the programmed automata with people. You'll get plenty of little nasties you never anticipated.

Now, Spore was supposed to give us an an example of how much better this strategy would be. In Spore, real people were going to make creatures that would survive or die out. But the Spore we eventually got doesn't do that, Science reports. Basically, Spore sucks. They didn't make a virtual world in which everybody's animals had to survive in competition over scarce resources. They made a toy.

OK. So look, just make a virtual world with the people as the entities. You'll get evolution.

Virtual Crime Update

Two tales recently spotted about international virtual mischief -- and real arrests -- after the fold...

VERN Gets Bigger

Our friends at the Virtual Economy Research Network in Finland have added a bunch of content and launched a new strategy for reporting developments in virtual goods, RMT, business models, and more. Their bibliography is already the best in the business. Already worth a high-priority bookmark, VERN's future seems ever brighter. See this post for details.

Game changer?

There has been much said on game-centric sites about an “Obama for President” billboard advertisement placed in the Xbox 360 racing game Burnout Paradise; it is a paid official campaign advertisement.  GamePolitics(.com) posts are representative early discussion on this topic.  Frankly, however, I am wondering what the fuss is about.

Correcting Reality

For almost all MMOs, one of the first things you have to decide when creating a character is the gender of that character. Is it male or female?

Also for almost all MMOs, the choice is of importance only cosmetically (it affects how the avatar looks) or socially (people typically treat male and female characters differently).

What about tangible, in-world differences, though? Jaw-dropping mistakes aside, there usually are none. Male and female characters are identical in all respects. Neither is stronger. Neither is faster. Neither is nimbler. Clothes that fit one fit the other. They're identical.

In real life, however, men and women are not identical. Neither are people of different races (skin colour trades off creating vitamin D against resisting skin cancer). There are advantages and disadvantages. These are not, however, reflected in the implementation of MMOs.

Are MMOs correcting reality by ignoring these differences? Or are they painting a false picture?

Here's a question that may help focus the discussion. Suppose that a new MMO is coming out with a medieval fantasy setting, in which characters can have children so players can establish their own dynasties. Do male characters get to give birth to babies, or is it restricted only to female characters?

Richard

Whither MMO economies?

CBBC, one of our longtime commentators, asked a question by email which seemed worth asking here:

My question -- and do forward it along -- is: What now for virtual economies? What happens to Eve now that Iceland's economy is collapsing?

Long ago, I asked in a Terra Nova link-mail, what influence (or lack of it) Eve had on the value of the ISK. That was when I thought Terra Nova was a hip economist hangout. Nobody wants to identify themself as an economist anymore, so I suppose you are all social scientists. Okay. What now? Will my WoW gold be worth more or less? Will games go under taking their  value with them? Will we see a run on games the same as a run on banks?

Protecting Virtual Playgrounds: The Home Version!

You can access the archive of last week's symposium, "Protecting Virtual Playgrounds: Children, Law, and Play Online," here.  Plus, you can see Robert Bloomfield and yours truly do a little postmortem of the conference on Metanomics, here.  Additional must-see-videofeed: Ted Castronova showed how virtual worlds could cause the end of the human race, because virtual sex could get so good that we stop having children.   In short, much fun was had by all--more below the fold. 

Professionals See Their Future in Second Life

Following up on the great survey work by Dmitri Williams and others, posted recently on Terra Nova, I have just posted some results from a survey in Second Life.  Social Research Foundation, a non-profit organization, conducted the study, and my analysis is now available at Metanomics.

This is a "panel survey," so it does need to be taken with a grain of salt--these are the first 1258 respondents from a group of 11,000 Second Life residents who have agreed to participant in lots of surveys, focus groups, etc.

My headline for this analysis comes from one of the most interesting results of the survey: people who are using Second Life primarily for professional reasons predict that they will be using Second Life more in 2009 than they are in 2008. Those who use Second Life for personal reason also project  increases in Second Life use, but not as strongly. Among professionals, those seeing increased use outnumber those seeing decreased use by 4.4 to 1, compared to "only" 2.6 to 1 for personal users

There are other results that could have also served as a headline, such as "Second Life Residents May Be More Interested in Your Brand Than You Thought," or "Getting Harder to Find Good Paid Work--and Good Workers--in Second Life."   But the professional/personal twist seemed the most surprising to me.

Mundie on Skinnable World

Ian Lamont, who was kind enough to guest-author here a while back, alerts us to some recent comments of Craig Mundie from Microsoft.  Mundie is apparently a bit under-enthused about virtual worlds as separate spaces.  But, on the other hand, he is excited about virtual worlds as augmented reality overlays.  So said he at MIT's EmTech Conference recently:

Mundie noted that Microsoft is counting on the creation of a 3D "parallel universe" modeled with tools like Photosynth. However, he dismissed the potential of social virtual worlds that include user-modeled objects. "Many people are familiar with Second Life, which is a synthetic virtual world that people came quite enamored with," Mundie said. "Our view was that there was a fairly limited audience who was willing to deal with the construction of avatars and operating in that virtual space."