Terra Nova

You've Been Blerped! Now What Do You Do?

The web layering tool Blerp announced today that they are in open beta.  The basic idea is that members create a layer of user-generated content over any website; people who sign up for Blerp and join the layer-creator's group can see and add content in the layer.  Thus, any site--yours or someone else's--becomes the backdrop for social networking, casual gaming, whatever.  (See this Blerp video for an intro, and you can also see a Metanomics interview with the CEO and VP of Rocketon, which developed Blerp.   The interview is actually filmed in Rocketon, so you can see what that layer-as-virtual-world product is like.)

As someone who reads a lot of policy-oriented blogs, I can see a very simple application making Blerp as talked about as Twitter.  The conservative National Review blog The Corner doesn't allow content.  The National Review probably had  good reason for making that decision, but so what?  Some ambitious left-leaning Blerper can create a layer to allow anyone to pepper the pages with unflattering commentary. 

Which leads me to ask Terra Novans:  How likely are the following (not mutually exclusive) futures?

• This never catches on, because Blerp simply ends up being too clunky and/or intrusive.
• After a brief newsgasm of coverage about how "Left-Wingers Take Over Conservative Website", the left-wingers go back to what they are doing now...namely, criticizing right-wing posts on their own websites, so they get their own traffic.
• The Blerpers continue to build viewership on sites they criticize, but the targets don't mind, because they get the traffic.
• The Blerpers build enough viewership for their layers that they sell advertising viewable only by layer members, maybe making even more than the sites they target.
• The National Review calls their lawyer, who asks for damages from the Blerper, and perhaps Blerp itself, for activities that are different in form, but similar in substance, to pirating content and modifying it without permission of the authors.  (In theory, one could use Blerp to put a Hitler mustache on every picture of a Republican, cover up The Corner's advertisements with their own...or put Hitler mustaches on those too.)

The virtual census

This isn't an entirely VW post, but it seems related enough to toss up here. Working with colleagues Nicole Martins of Indiana, Mia Consalvo of Ohio (and TN) and Jimmy Ivory of VaTech, we embarked a couple of years back on a content analysis of all game characters. It was kind of ambitious, but we thought someone ought to take a census of who is in all the worlds and games we study. We do a lot of research on effects and identity, but until you know what's there, well, it's hard to say a lot. The results are in and in print, available from the journal New Media & Society, or in a pre-press version off my site.

The highlights are that whites, males and adults are over-represented compared to the actual US population via US Census data, while females, Hispanics, Native Americans, children and the elderly are under-represented. These numbers parallel similar research for TV. Breaking the findings down into primary (playable) and secondary (NPC) characters, the divides are stronger still.

More below the fold . . .

Duffy: How Not to Experiment in Virtual Worlds

Economist John Duffy of University of Pittsburgh went to an experimental lab in Second Life and came away unconvinced. Some thoughts:

• The virtual lab he visited was a replication of a real-world lab. We've learned, however, that using virtual world technology to simply replicate a real-world thing is usually counter-productive. The utility of virtual worlds does not lie in their ability to re-do, in virtual form, what we do in the real world.
• He carries with him some honored norms about what an economics experiment must be. Participants must not know what the experiment is about, for example, so you ought to ask every participant "Are you an experimental economist?" and exclude them if they are. Otherwise they'll recognize that they are in a test of backwards induction or whatever. Duffy did not face that kind of question, nor anything that would allow the screening of participants based on expertise. There were other issues, other ways in which an attempt to replicate a real-world econ experiment, in traditional form, simply breaks when placed in a virtual environment.
• He properly noted that the incentives (couple hundred Lindens) are very low in terms of cash value. Why would anyone think hard in return for a quarter? However, this raises a debate about the utility of the Linden dollar. Some people seem highly invested in the state of their virtual things, despite low real-world values. This in turn raises big questions in economics about how things, utility, and happiness relate. Punt.
• He was able to lie about his age, a problem for the internet at large.

I come away convinced that there's little point in trying to replicate the standard micro-level lab experiments in virtual worlds. While you gain in terms of distance communication, you lose in terms of body signals and eye contact and such. In that kind of hands-on experiment, you can't automate much.

I would note, however, that Duffy's criticisms are cast too widely when he concludes that these problems also condemn truly macro-level experiments such as those proposed by Bloomfield and Castronova.

Twixt

Dave Myers, a long-time games researcher and commenter here at TN, received some media coverage yesterday for his tale of Twixt, prompting 132 comments and counting. Scott Jennings has some snarky comments on his blog and thinks this is all about a game design flaw.

Personally, I find these kinds of social "flaws" and how they are fixed pretty interesting.  In my book, I'm using the story of Twixt to make a simple point that most readers of this blog will already appreciate.  The rules that are enforced in MMOGs, like the rules enforced in any society, are not limited to the formal rules set forth in writing or coded into the software.  Users decide for themselves how games should be played.

Update: Dave responds to all the attention here.  A few lines I find particularly interesting in relation to what Richard says below and the question of EULAs:

Most surprisingly of all (maybe only to me), game designers themselves seem no longer interested in their rules.  They seem to focus increasingly less on game rules and increasingly more on game rulers.   Rulers don’t like the game rules?  No problem.  Eliminate those rules.

Virtual Bank Robbery Redux

This July 2009 story feels sort of August 2006, doesn't it?  Or maybe even sort of October 2003? 

Like night follows day, it follows that if "virtual" currency X has a "real" exchange value of $Y, and the virtual world mechanics permit or even encourage player A to rob or swindle player B of a substantial amount of X, then we're going to have this sort of virtual crime. 

Q: When will it be old news?  A: Hopefully, sometime in 2012, after my book comes out.

Also, Reuters (or CBC?) doesn't seem to understand the recent Chinese regulations very well.

Update: Apparently, a blog on the New York Times thinks this is new stuff.

Social Network Adoption Effects Map From Real to Virtual

The broader mapping project (first identified by Dmitri Williams) has an new entry in the social networks field. The mapping project is a (unorganized) effort to find out where real-world behaviors map onto virtual worlds and where they don't. The Law of Demand maps; human response to deadly plagues does so only in part.

A new paper from Michigan and Santa Fe (Bakshy, Karrer, Adamic) (thanks Mark Bell for the tip) reports on social network adoption effects in Second Life. "Adoption rates quicken as the number of friends adopting increases and this effect varies with the connectivity of a particular user. We furtherfind that sharing among friends occurs more rapidly than sharing among strangers, but that content that diffuses primarily through social influence tends to have a more limited audience. Finally, we examine the role of individuals,finding that some play a more active role in distributing content than others, but that these influencers are distinct from the early adopters."

The authors don't explicitly associate these findings with mapping; that is, they don't ask or test "is this the same as we see in the real world?" But that conclusion seems fairly easy to make, in that the results don't seem (to me anyways, a person decidedly not expert in this field) all that amazing. In fact it all looks rather normal. That's a finding. The news is: Though virtual, it's pretty normal.

Bit by bit, the grid in Williams' paper is filling in. In many areas, the things we do offline are replicated well when we go online. 

The Postnational Sodalities of Second Life: An Iconographic Approach

Jonathan Kinkley, who has just completed his Masters Thesis in Art History at University of Illinois at Chicago, ask if we could share his research.  We're always happy to link to new work on virtual worlds.

The full paper is available here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/15860034/PostnationalSodalitiesSecondLifeJKinkley

His thesis analyzes the visual culture of Second Life and explores the complex spaces that online social networks create. Jonathan explains:

In Second Life's Caledon, we get a glimpse what an online social formation looks like. It is a society based entirely on shared interests - a themed community built of a patchwork quilt of Victorian-era iconography. Elsewhere in SL, artists like Cao Fei (SL avatar China Tracy) are fascinated with this idea of creating a sense of place out of virtual space. Her RMB city isn't about China, it's about China-ness - an amalgam of all the icons, stereotypes, and archetypes past and present of China. This paper is about the types of spaces in SL and how and why they are created out of the iconography of visual culture.