Terra Nova

The Virtual World of the World Cup

Some of it feels gimmicky, as when Alexi Lalas stands on a real pitch explaining how the players move, the players being life-size digital images superimposed on the video. Some of it seems like genuinely useful application, such monte carlo simulations of outcomes (play the game 10,000 times virtually, count the wins, call it a probability). (Note: Doing it once, like this, is not informative. You have to repeat it 10,000 times.)

Older issues arise again. Once again we encounter the virtual world of sport, where utterly trivial things really seem to matter. It is undeniable - look at the faces of the players. It is life and death to them. An evolutionary argument explains it. Take 10,000,000 football players (not handegg players) with a distribution of talent and interest. Among them, a certain percentage believes that football is the most important thing in the universe. Assume the same initial distribution of talent among them as among the general population of players. Over time, the obsessives become better players, however, due to their obsession. Now we have perhaps 50,000 obsessed, talented players. Repeat. Now we have 5,000 super-obsessed, super-talented players. Repeat. Now we have 500 maniacally devoted, machine-like players. Repeat. Now we have the makings of a World Cup team: A community of people who take it all very, very seriously.

Knowing all this, I nonetheless dive headlong into this virtual world, as I do in any other. Ask no questions, respect the aesthetic, participate, float along. Being American, I was thus jumping on Wednesday and moping on Saturday. When society gets into the act, you find yourself having to suspend belief, not disbelief. The default state (unless you arduously train your mind in skepticism, something I would not recommend) is to accept the apparent reality and go with it. 

Finally, let's take a stroll in the darkest, most evil virtual world of all: The World Cup as seen by the referees. This year, the officials have concocted an internal virtual world in which offsides is onsides, onsides is offsides, goals are not goals, and not-goals are goals. A little bit of bad officiating can help motivate the immersion - "The INJUSTICE!" - but systematically errant calls make you wonder why you dove into this place at all.

Pure Imagination

I ended my previous post by asking: If we are to make reality, what should we make? Lisa then posted evidence that our powers of creation are growing. We are becoming ever more able to immerse our attention in worlds of fantasy. Richard Bartle, getting straight to the point, asks: Where will it go? 

We will be living in worlds of pure imagination, and that right soon from a historical perspective. Doesn't this reveal the normative question in the most commanding way? If imagination is what will be, we need to ask what that should be. We are gaining the power, and with power comes responsibility. 

By what standard should worlds of imagination be judged? From what source do we derive the moral criteria, the normative stances, necessary to decide what worlds to make? Surely the source is not logic and reason; imagination is not fact. Worlds of imagination cannot be true or false. They can be good or bad - that's the moral question - but what makes them good or bad? The answer must involve aesthetics. Judging the moral worth of an imaginary world begins with its aesthetics. Is it Beautiful? Apt? Shocking? Thought-provoking? Balanced? Engaging?

I cannot think of any area of thought more muddled than aesthetics is today (see Dutton). Yet judgment of beauty should be a well-developed ability of all people. Art should not be judged by its politics or its ability to reject any expressed standard. It should be comprehensible without reading 1,000 pages of arcane theory. Great works should be more than tourist attractions, they should be treated as achievements well worthy of respect.

The imaginary worlds being created all around us deserve respectful appreciation, first, and secondly, they should be subjected to inquiry on aesthetic grounds. Those grounds are not mere whims of the observer; they have universal elements. Dignity is an important touchstone here. On entering a new virtual environment, proceed with care and ask whether the world you find is uplifting for the human person.

Everything's Virtual, Part Deux

2010 does not disappoint!

Microsoft has finally announced the super secret Project Natal, a controller-less virtual/physical environment called Kinect for the Xbox 360.

People like it.  GAMERS appear to like it.  Someday people will stop comparing it to Wii.

Watch some video if you haven't seen it!

As I was watching the demo, I could not help but imagine the Kinect-enabled MMO, in which I can emit magical powers from my fingertips, create virtual shields/forcefields for my team-mates, and otherwise INHABIT a digital game space. With buddies.

F*!king Hell.

(disclaimer:  I do work for the Xbox Support team, but this excitement is gamer-me, not researcher-me, per se).

In other news, Nintendo rocks the 3-D universe! (adorable video)

Any thoughts?

Everything's Virtual. Now what.

Another theme from the Roskilde Conference: More ammunition for the view that what's "here" and "real" is not all that here and not all that real. I used to think that people who were trying to de-center reality were fiery communards or something, but the quasi-reality of the here and now finds support from the oddest collection of evidence. On the one hand, completely pragmatically speaking, irreality is everywhere now, in the form of straight-out fantasy living in VR but also in the form of pseudo-realities like "Reality TV" (not real at all), "News" (actually entertainment), and "Security" (a massively morbid social dance of cordons, machines, and rubber gloves, signifying nothing). The surreal isn't theoretical any more. It hits you right between the eyes.

We all know now that money is virtual. But at the conference, I met Dominic Power, a geographer from Uppsala whose work argues that fashion is virtual. Of course! It's all about convention. And speaking of conventions, the thinking of Thomas Boellstorff seems to be becoming more influential, with many people now citing his simple claim that there's little difference between VR and "reality" because culture makes "reality" a construct anyway. Let's not forget that Tolkien and Shakespeare had issues with reality, and to complete the picture, here's Pope Benedict the XVI: "We must rather have the courage, the joy, the great hope that there is eternal life, that eternal life is real life, and that from this real life comes the light the illuminates this world as well." Strange bedfellows, but the weave of argument from all these directions is hard to deny, even for someone like myself, trained in the most objectivist of disciplines: Reality is what we make of it.

It seems to me that this raises a difficult aesthetic question. If we are making reality, what should we make?

Cory Doctorow's "For the Win"

First things first: Have you read sci-fi-novelist/cyber-rights-polemicist Cory Doctorow’s latest, For the Win? And if not, why on earth are you reading this blog instead? Seriously: Most of what you could learn from seven years’ worth of Terra Novan scribblings on the meanings of virtual economies, the seductions of MMOs, and the emergence of digital play as a global socioeconomic force can be learned more quickly and more pleasurably from this gripping tale of epic, continent-hopping virtual class struggle — a “young adult” thriller for the young adult in all of us (or perhaps the budding games scholar in every young adult) starring that unlikeliest of literary heroes and most culturally fraught of online-gaming personae, the Chinese gold farmer.

So go on, buy the thing or snag a free download and read it. When you’re done you can come back here and, if you’re so inclined, join the inevitable nitpickers in the comments thread. Yes, Doctorow’s vision of the near-future MMO landscape misses some critical trends (for instance those that point to a diminished future for gold farming and secondary virtual-goods markets generally) and proposes some game mechanics any MUD-DEV veteran can tell you will never fly (though frankly, who among us wouldn’t kill to get in on the beta of the Mario-themed Mushroom Kingdom MMO in which the book’s climactic virtual battle takes place?). And while the struggles of the story’s young Chinese, Indian, and American protagonists (a ragtag band of gamers bent on establishing a neo-Wobblies union of virtual workers: the International Workers of the World Wide Web, or Webblies) are bound to leave anyone at all sympathetic with Doctorow’s left-libertarian labor politics humming chiptune versions of the “Internationale,” your mileage may of course vary.

Whatever. The novel’s main achievement stands: In a world that seems increasingly convinced the future of work lies in play, For the Win points out and brings to life the fact that even playful work remains a field of struggle.

Extreme Reaction

So, this is a video a woman made in which she deletes her boyfriend's World of Warcraft characters. It rather upsets him.

So, if he sued her, what would the legal arguments involve?

Virtual Worlds Research Project Roskilde

A week ago I had the pleasure of attending a workshop with the above-named project at Roskilde University Denmark. While some things are rotten in Denmark, this workshop was not. The themes of the conference (which was attended by an admirably wide-ranging group in terms of skills and interests) involved user-generated and emergent authorship in the virtual world space. Keynotes by good folks such as Jeremy Hunsinger, Mia Consalvo, Jay David Bolter, and John Lester (all available here) sandwiched a number of innovative sessions.

Different parts of the event will be of interest to different people. My own purely subjective takeaways follow below the fold.

Skirmishes and Powerleveling

I was doing an interview the other day and was asked about the future of gold farming. Without thinking too hard (because there's good evidence), I responded that I thought its future was not very bright. While the virtual goods market seems as hot as ever, it also has been internalized by experience providers. This stands to reason - why let 3rd parties monetize the eyeballs you've captured?

The conversation turned to powerleveling and I stopped to think about it - equally dim future there? I think so. I've been in the resurgent Lord of the Rings Online quite a bit lately, and the skirmish system seems well-designed as an internal PL system. (I understand WoW has something similar, instant dungeons.) The main forces driving the powerleveling market are the need of experienced players to level up alternate characters. Once you've gone through the geographic content a few times, exploring's not a thrill any more, and it becomes a grind. Riding switchback alley from Ost Guruth to Rivendell for the umpteenth time - bleh. Enter the Skirmish. If you just need to kill stuff and gain XP, you cut out the traveling. Press ctrl-J and pow, there you are, solo if necessary, facing a challenging 45-minute adventure with good XP and loot rewards.

On the whole it seems that the industry has worked on co-opting and internalizing 3rd party services. This seems to be good for the gaming experience. There's no gold spam in LOTRO, and my server (Landroval) has a very active RP community with little evidence of griefing between them and the powergamers.