Terra Nova

Women, Men, and Virtual Item Purchases

Gamasutra has a very interesting report on a recent study of the virtual item economy. More men do it than women, but women spend more money on average. Medians are much closer, indicating that much of the difference is in the upper tail: There must be some women who really buy a lot of virtual items.

Among those who buy virtual items, the average spending amounts are in the $20 - $50 annual range. A very high percentage of the sample (drawn apparently from people who are in games and on social media sites) engages in some sort of real-for-virtual transaction. It seems to be mainstream, normal behavior within this group, and this group, as we know, is getting bigger and bigger.

Similar studies suggest that the virtual economy continues to grow in significance relative to the bricks-and-mortar economy.

Thanks to Ed Gentry for the tip.

Plants v. Zombies

My house, like many others, has been invaded by this little gem of a game that sets life against unlife. Though small and simple, the game upends stereotypes and provokes thought.

Like many good games, PvZ is a violent game. Massively violent. Incredibly destructive. Plants get eaten alive, crushed, kidnapped. The undead get frozen, burned, shot, eaten, exploded, pierced. As the Zombies die, they lose their limbs and then their heads. Yet the game seems completely appropriate for kids. Why?

Though single-player, PvZ is a social game. Yesterday, there were four boys at my house, age 4-8, all crowded around the computer, taking turns at PvZ. When the player unleashed a killer move, they all screamed and jumped for joy. "Jalapeno!!!!" Games are not like TV. If I had them watch a movie, they would slump down quietly on the couch, like, well, like zombies.

PvZ instantiates a fantasy world. Last week, after adults pried the boys away from the computer, said boys invented a RL PvZ game, where one was a Zombie, two were Pea Shooters, and one was the Jalapeno. 

Like many good games, PvZ makes a gendered statement. All the Zombies are male. Most of the plants are male. Some female plants are helper-types, such as the Marigold that creates money. Others, though, are fighters, such as Cactus. Sunflower is the star of the game, taking the lead role in the music video during the credits. She is the main source of power on the side of Life.

PvZ has a dual-currency economy. One currency is Suns, produced by Sunflower (and to a lesser extent, Sunshroom). You use Suns to buy new plants. Coins also appear, dropped at first by Zombies and as level rewards, later by Marigold. Coins are used to buy power-ups between levels. 

PvZ has a coherent ethos that is symbolically consistent with reality. Animated corpses are a universal evil, and living things are a universal good, in RL as in PvZ. RL agriculture is indeed a positive feedback loop, and it does indeed require sun. In RL as in PvZ, disparate weak elements can be combined into powerful teams. The game makes sense.

PvZ is a fine tool for teaching tactical thought. It has been fascinating watching my 4-year-old gradually learn to put tank-like Wallnut by the Zombie entrance points, to hold them at bay, while glass-jawed Pea Shooter plucks away from the middle. At the rear, Sunflower, important but militarily useless, pumps out her sustaining Sun power, which is then used to replace fallen Pea Shooters and Wallnuts. Mind, I didn't teach him any of this. He started with Wallnuts in the back to protect his house, too few Sunflowers, and Pea Shooters up front. The game taught him that the pieces had to be put together in a different way.

If I had to choose a poster child for interactive entertainment, PvZ would be it.

Produce Your Name and Papers, Please

It's been a long while since I posted here, but in the interim, I've been thinking a good deal about virtual worlds and games. I'll have more to say soon on where my head is at, but in the meantime, one interesting bit of news from Blizzard today is the announcement that their planned integration of Real ID into their Battle.net architecture will extend into the official forums for their games, including World of Warcraft. In order to post in the official forums, players will have to use their real names, or at least the names they used to register for Battle.net.

Unsurprisingly, this has caused a wee bit of controversy on the official forums.

I've been thinking about what Blizzard's move to RealID is all about ever since it was announced. One assumption I'm making that I think is especially pertinent to the official forums is that it is an attempt to streamline community management costs for current and future projects. When you force people to provide real names associated with real email addresses to comment on blogs, for example, the volume of commenting drops, but so does the amount of spam you receive. (Though as any manager of a blog or other online forum knows, you still have to deal with a considerable volume of 'hand-crafted' spam from people who are paid to send it and don't care much about preserving the reputation tied to the email address used.) I would assume that the volume of posting on Blizzard's official forums will drop by an order of several magnitudes with this change, and this is very much an intended consequence.

There will of course be other consequences. A few isolated commenters welcome the change, arguing that there will be lots more signal, much less noise. I think this is based on a common mistaken assumption that the point of an official forum is informational rather than to build a sense of connection and community. One of the common sentiments in the increasingly frenzied negative threads on the forums is that virtually no women will post on the forums under these conditions. I think that's probably true. On the other hand, there isn't a lot of introspection so far among the critics about what that implies about the depth and intensity of wannafuck misogyny among WoW players.

I think another thing that's going on, however, is something of a category error. Blizzard is increasingly looking like both like the dominant force in its field and like the last of its kind all at once, a huge success that did not inaugurate but instead capped a particular cultural form. Given the combination of relentless professionalism and market savvy inside the company, I think they must know that as well. So what does the future look like? One answer that's been discussed here at TN and elsewhere is Zynga. The effort to connect World of Warcraft, Starcraft II and future projects with social networking via Real ID seems to me an effort to capture some Zynga-hued lightning in a bottle. The problem as I see it is that casual games on iPhones and Facebook pages are something that many people don't mind having associated with their public lives or reputation capital in part because they're seen as compatible with productive work and with mainstream sociality. World of Warcraft, no matter how streamlined its process of play might become, is not and won't ever be that kind of activity. Joining the office betting pool and going bowling for three hours are intrinsically different things in terms of time and process and compatibility with other activities.

Maybe Blizzard's thinking about future projects is that they'd rather not make another bowling-night MMO. But it's not as if game developers as a whole have abandoned multiplayer games which can absorb hours and hours of dedicated activity.

Anyway, thoughts?

Human Social Adaptation and the Technology Backlog

The various brands of virtual reality made their appearance at different times and there seems to have been a repeating cycle. The concept gets introduced, some applications appear. Then everyone sees massive implications for the future. And then - nothing happens. Or, nothing seems to happen. Rheingold's Virtual Reality seemed to live through this sort of cycle, and the Second Life bubble was similar. Now we are discussing things like Kinect that point to huge changes in human-machine interface, and ludic organizational strategies that will rewire the corporation.

We seemed to have reached the stage in technological development where the pace of advance greatly exceeds the pace at which advances can be processed by human social systems (see Brown and Duguid and I'm sure many others). Technological change is a self-accelerating process, and so is human social adaptation; but one of these runs much faster than the other. We have two positive feedback loops that are out of synch.

This creates a technology backlog: A set of projects that everyone knows are important, yet that remain to be adopted. The technology backlog that I can identify in my little neck of the woods is already prodigious (virtual currencies, guild-based production, entertaining interfaces, self-customization). It can only grow larger - the industries I watch are coming up with new things every year, even though their "old" innovations are still waiting for widespread adoption.

Imagine a process in which the technology backlog gets larger exponentially. There are a couple of interesting dynamics that might come from this kind of situation.