Terra Nova

Government 1.5

Over at GovLoop, Benjamin Strong is mad as hell. Workers in Federal Agencies are still forbidden from using most of the new social media tools. This means they can't participate in the pro- part of prosumer. Mutatis mutandis they're going to face problems launching anything virtual world-ish, be it MMPOG or MSPOG. It's not impossible, its just that anything they do will require approval from way up top - which defeats the value of open production.

One of the more reasonable grounds for opposing the expansion of government influence is the repeated experience that government actors, exposed to the political winds, tend to build houses of stone. As technology unleashes its earthquakes with increasing frequency, stone goes from being a nice protection from the howling wolves to a rather vulnerable crypt-in-the-making.

Job Announcement

The Telecommunications Department at Indiana University is hiring at the tenure-track Assistant Professor level. The announcement is here.

The announcement is rather vanilla - it is an open-field, best-horse-in-the-race search. However, I can report from the inside that the department seems very much in the mood to bet on horses with skin tones reflecting games, social media, and virtual worlds. There's also an interest in advertising and health communications.

Method is somewhat open. We're a social science department with a media production wing. Scholars whose work has no systematic empirical component will be facing an uphill battle. Production applicants face the usual and oft-bemoaned hurdle that you must have a PhD or an MFA to apply. Other than that, though, the search is open to all kinds of disciplinary approaches: Psychology, Anthro, Law, Policy, Economics, Political Science, whatever.

Bloomington is a fantastic place to live and the department is a friendly, warm, dare I say happy group. They often say that they want people with 'spark.' More than any in recent memory, this seems to be a pure 'spark' search. What's spark? Like many good things, its intangible, but the core idea I guess is a combination of imagination and analytics. The concept is not well-represented by this or this. It's more like this or this or this. 

If interested, please apply, and if you have questions, send me an email!

An MMO Manifesto from the Guild Wars 2 Team

^{Disclaimer: I confess to being a fangirl of NCSoft, publishers of City of Heroes, which I studied  for about 5 years.  They have also published the Lineages, the original Guild Wars and Aion.}

So...

The intrepid warriors from NCSoft and ArenaNet are presaging the pre-holiday beta launch of Guild Wars 2 with a declaration of independent thinking. More on that in a sec.

First off, let's review its pre-cursor, the original Guild Wars. What made it obsession-worthy?

- accessible to the 'casual', newbie MMO gamer.
- highly instanced combat (Sir Richard cringed).
- grouping that includes NPC mercenaries.
- very beautiful emotes like the Monk's dance.  Amazing landscapes, architecture, everything.
- alternative play modes allowing high-level play for the low-level n00b.
- observer mode: enjoy the gank gladiator-style, you emerge un-scathed.
- 'no loot stealing, spawn camping, and endless travel'.
- guild capes  (I confess to leaving guilds if they had ugly designs that didn't match my outfits.  How shallow of me!)

I have more than a few opinions about what an exciting, 21st century MMO might encompass.  Happy to say it appears that true evolution is in the works.  Deviations/expansions of established MMO conventions in Guild Wars 2:

- Doing away with the grind.  Not all will agree this is a good thing, but as my kid says, there is nothing worse than a videogame that is both 'hard and BORING'.
- New character classes (professions) like the Ranger.
- Personalized story-lines.  NPCs remember you.  You are not on the exact same quest path as everyone else, with the same goals, outfits, spells, items, etc. at the same levels.
- Cause and effect prevail, personal agency is paramount.  Changes you effect on the environment persist.
- Dynamic events, a mechanic that has worked very well for CoX.
- PvP in non-zoned, non-instanced areas.  Huge-scale world vs world combat events.
- Variations on healing and death rituals.

And for the techno-geeky among you, it's all being built on a new physics engine, Havok,  that allows the designers and developers to more fully realize their conceptual vision:

We're creating a world, and what's the point of exploring a world if there isn't the awe and wonder, you know? We try to create those moments of awe and wonder. - Jeff Grubb, ArenaNet

For those of you who don't readily embrace change, Guild Wars servers will continue running, and an ongoing free trial is on offer.

Any predictions on the effect on social dynamics, innovations that are likely to stick, etc?  Other games trying new things? My kid, for instance, is obsessed with Wizards 101, a pay-for-stuff-the-kid-MUST-have MMO that creates accessibility and safety for the semi-literate aspiring gamer.

I think things are about to get very exciting in Videogame Land. To over-use an over-used term, epic!

More on GW2:

• The official website.
• Wikipedia is chock-full of up-to-the-minute details.
• Guild Wars 2 Community Hub (wiki, blog, video - share, share, share! - talk to devs and they will listen!)
• The art of Guild Wars 2, in coffee-table-book-format. (when you can't stand to look at your computer anymore)
• A playable demo of the game is available at Gamescom 2010 (August 19 until August 22, 2010). Another playable demo will be available at PAX, from September 3-5.

PlayOn is dead. Long live PlayOn!

It is my great pleasure to announce that, after a self-imposed hiatus in our data collection and analysis, the PlayOn project at PARC is back thanks to renewed funding. While we are still focused on large-scale, quantitative data collection in World of Warcraft, this second phase of the project introduces a few interesting changes.

The first phase of the project relied on automated robots to log into the game world and collect a census of the entire population of five game servers. We used this data to analyze, among other things, general play patterns in the game, social interactions between the players, and finally the structure, performance, and social life of guilds. This time however, we are moving away from server-wide analysis to tracking the activities of volunteer participants. Roughly 1,000 players have signed up to participate in our study and provided socio-demographic data about themselves (age, gender, education, etc.) that would have been impossible to collect from the game alone. They also provided us with a list of their current characters, which we track in-game using updated version of our robots coupled with daily scrapping of the characters' data from the Armory.

The simultaneous collection of in-game and out-of-game data will let us explore the connection between a player's profile and his/her online behaviors. As an added twist, we recruited half of our participants in the US and the other half in Asia (Taiwan and Hong-Kong), which opens up the possibility of analyzing cultural differences between the two player populations.

As before, we intend to report findings as they come out on our blog - we'd like to invite you to subscribe to our RSS feed and/or follow our updates on Twitter. While our blog will be focused mostly on short, data-centric posts, we also plan to start posting more frequently on Terra Nova with summaries of the higher-level trends we see in the data. We're looking forward to exchanging ideas with all of you again!

Virtual Communion? No

From Bryan Camp (thanks Bryan!) comes this notice of a legal ruling against an internet-based church. The ruling denies the group's status as a church, saying that it does not meet the standard of association because it does not hold regular meetings. The court decides instead that live-streamed sermons on the internet are primarily about information dissemination, not communion.

My church agrees: "Virtual reality is no substitute for the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the sacramental reality of the other sacraments, and shared worship in a flesh-and-blood human community. There are no sacraments on the Internet; and even the religious experiences possible there by the grace of God are insufficient apart from real-world interaction with other persons of faith."

Professor Camp wonders, what if the church was in Second Life?

What is association? What is communion? Does a virtual meeting accomplish one and not the other? Does the dimensionality of the space matter? Why does the body matter, especially when it comes to religion? 

MSPOG

My current game, Lord of the Rings Online, is going Free to Play. So is EverQuest II. Meanwhile, the casual game sector has sprouted some virtual-worldy features. The intense grindfest games shrink in significance; huge MMOGs have 90% solo content; asynchronous-distant play is the norm; don't grind, rather, buy virtual goods for real money so you can move forward at your desired pace.

In 2006 we learned from Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell, and Moore that surprisingly few people play WoW socially. This paper, it turns out, was the first to identify online gaming's future.

One gets the impression that today, a large number of players dip into environments, sample their experiences, then move on. No subscriptions, no raids, no guilds, no groups even. No Ventrilo; only the occasional banter in general chat. No need to specialize the character or the gear. The columns of Richard Aihoshi at MMORPG.com give interesting insights into this mode of play and the business models that benefit from it.

What should we call a platform that caters to alone-togetherness? How about a Massively Single Player Online Game, or MSPOG. You can find a post on the word at FredCavazza.net. It might be a fascinating post, too; I just don't speak French well enough to know.

The Gnostic Revolution

From TN's Armchair Philosophy Department: Gnosis means Knowledge. Not knowledge but KNOWLEDGE, you know? Understanding of Things Eternal, of the Forms, of the Ephemeral, of the Infinite, of the Capitalized.

Gnostics are people who Know. Gnosticism is a school, or a philosophy, or a frame, or what have you, grounded on the notion that there are things to be Known out there that are only poorly reflected in the "real" world. Indeed, you might identify a gnostic by whether she puts scare quotes around "real." In some extreme forms, gnosticism holds that the "real" world is not only only "real," but also bad, corrupt, yucky. All the good stuff is ephemeral and infinite; the stuff we can handle every day stinks in comparison, therefore a person should spend her life trying to stay connected to the Infinite and reject the ick that lies close to hand. 

Tolkien expresses a gnostic sensibility when he writes that a man who wakes up and finds himself in prison cannot be blamed for trying to get out and go home. For Tolkien, the prison is the real world, and home, for Tolkien, is Heaven. Some religious teaching aligns quite nicely with gnosticism, urging followers to seek Truths only within. Other religions emphasize that the world is a good place and absolutely deserves our attention. Moreover, when some people run around claiming that they have a Special Insight to The Beyond, all too often the Movement results in other people losing their money, their time, or their lives.

Gnosticism invites rejection of the real world and its status quo. A new conflict along these lines is going to play out quite directly through the emergence of virtual worlds.