Terra Nova

Virtual Comedy Stages

Got an email (copied after the break) from a comedian seeking to drive traffic to a charity website. He and his buddies are playing games in Iron Man Mode: One death. Nice, funny premise. It's consistent with Yogscast, the effort by two Brits to perform through Minecraft. My kids watched Yogscast as much as they played the game. "O Lewis! O Simon! AHHHHHH" It was funny.

When serious game content goes over the top - see Tera - it's too, too funny to knock it down. Drives role-players mad, of course. In this ironic age, we're all looking for a lore we can believe in and whatever is produced is just not good enough for some people. So everything gets griefed. I suppose that's healthy.

Healthy or not, if we treat all virtual worlds and everything on the internet as sites for mockery, we do get a heck of a good laugh out of it. Just don't take yourself too seriously out there.

After the break, read the appeal from the Iron Man.

Smithsonian Art of Video Games

So I was lucky enough to get a guided tour of the Smithsonian's Art of Video Games exhibit last week by curator Georgina Goodlander. If you're in DC, it is worth a visit, plus it will be venturing off on a traveling tour at the end of the year.

What I found curious, but not surprising, was my mixture of excitement and disappointment at seeing video games displayed as "art" in the Smithsonian.  During a long stretch of my adolescence, I trained as a visual artist, with the hope of one day producing something worthy of placement in a museum.  At the same time, I spent a significant amount of time (perhaps too significant) with video games and early computer graphics programs.  At that time, it never struck me as strange that video games were not in museums, since the divide between fine art culture and gamer culture was so wide and clear.

So now, in 2012, I get to stroll through a gallery of screenshots and video captures of the Atari VCS, Intellivision, C64, Sega Genesis, etc.  On the one hand, it's thrilling to see the Smithsonian take these small steps into categorizing and curating examples of the video game genre.  (Curiously, in a way that Ian Bogost and Nick Monfort might appreciate, the major room in the exhibit adopted a platform-based taxonomy, with genre-based subcategories.)  And surely, that was my dominant reaction to the exhibit -- it was really great to see the genre put on a pedestal, so to speak, as art.

My slight disappointment: how much was not there.  It struck me that it is impossible it is to put the art of the video game in a small exhibit, or perhaps even to conceptualize this art form as fully expressive in the museum context.  Video games are often such rich, interactive, social, and contextual experiences -- how to capture all of that in a few rooms of exhibits?

Perhaps, though, this is not unique to video games.  I can only imagine what an ancient Egyptian might think, confronted with the average museum's scattered artifacts under glass.  How much does an exhibit on ancient Egypt really give us a sense of what it meant to live in that culture?  You can get a glimpse, perhaps, but not much more.  The odd thing for me about the Smithsonain exhibit, I guess, is that all that you glimpse inside the exhibit is still very much alive outside of it.

Anyway, there's a website that goes along with the Exhibit which has some interviews with game developers -- I have yet to watch them, but I'm sure they're fascinating: http://www.americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/archive/2012/games/artists/

Update: Gamasutra does a piece on this topic, featuring Henry Lowood's efforts.  Must be something in the air this week.

Go visit Petra's Planet

Petra is a Finnish girl who, in the storybooks, is able to fly around the world and see many different cultures. On the Petra's PLanet MMO, the player does what Petra does: Go to different countries. There's nothing special or amazing about this, and that's what's special and amazing. In a decade, we've gone from 4 MMOGs and perhaps 6 immersive world-type games, to the point where a small country's story for children spawns its own immersive virtual environment.

Remember in 1995 when the headlines screamed "Soon there will be computers in cars and refrigerators!" Well, today there are indeed computers in cars and refrigerators, but there's big headline. It happens without noticing.

Therefore, take a moment to notice Petra's Planet.

***

Substantively, is this a good thing? You've walked through Epcot and enjoyed the sensations induced by faux-France and faux-Norway. You tink, hey I learned something about France and Norway today. But did you? Maybe you actually lost knowledge about them.

New name same cast

Just to let TN readers know - I changed the name of the Virtual Policy Network's podcast to: Social Change Technology. That seemed to best sum up what it's about. 

We've done a few shows recently that TN'ers might like - they are also a bit of a TN All Star cast: 

• TL Taylor on e-Sports
• Mia Consalvo and friend-of-the-show Ron Miners on the social aspects of so-called Social Games

 We've also had a preview of this year's Federal Consortum for Virtual Worlds conference; Burcu Bakioglu talkiing to Michael Andersen about transmedia story telling and me talking to Rita J, King about Science House, robots and stuff. For all of 'em you can grab the iTunes feed or RSS.

Bitcoins can be stolen

Couple of reports from the world of the virtual currency Bitcoin indicate that it has become a hacker target. A BTC is worth about $5 at the moment; the thefts are in the 6-digit area in terms of dollars.

What do we have here? A real-world currency who holders are subject to extraordinary attacks? Or is it a virtual currency that is necessarily more vulnerable to security risks? Or, are the holders of Bitcoin small-scale operations with insufficient security? I can't tell; I don't know enough about security. I wonder how this hacker-theft rate compares to the theft rate for Chase's electronic dollar holdings.

The fact that the thieves have acquired a good with stable value - $5 a unit - indicates that Bitcoin is alive and healthy, though.

New Book: Virtual Economies and Financial Crime

I thought reader must be interested in the forthcoming title from Edward Elgar:  Virtual Economies and Financial Crime, by Dr. Clare Chambers Jones.

Here is the description from the publisher:

Virtual economies and financial crime are ever-growing, increasingly significant facets to banking, finance and anti-money laundering regulations on an international scale. In this pathbreaking and timely book, these two important issues are explored together for the first time in the same place.

Clare Chambers-Jones examines the jurisprudential elements of cyber law in the context of virtual economic crime and explains how virtual economic crime can take place in virtual worlds. She looks at the multi-layered and interconnected issues association with the increasing trend of global and virtual banking via the ‘Second Life’ MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game). Through this fascinating case study, the author illustrates how virtual worlds have created a second virtual economy which transgresses into the real, creating economic, political and social issues. Loopholes used by criminals to launder money through virtual worlds (given the lack of jurisdictional consensus on detection and prosecution) are also highlighted.

Looks very promising and timely!

Is it gambling?

So, you do something in a virtual world and you get a random item. Say, you kill a dragon. The item has real-world value. You obtained it as a result of three things: You paid or registered to play the game, you performed an action that may have required skill or maybe not, and the system executed a random item generation process. Still, it's not gambling. Right? It's monster-raiding.

OK, now you go into a social network and do something and you get a random virtual item of nontrivial value. Say, you 'Liked' somebody's pic and you got a free virtual rose. Or you wrote something that 100 other people 'Liked.' But you joined the network, you did something that may or may not have involved skill, and a random process of the system gave you an item of value.

Well, Japan says thats gambling. So does Korea.

We need to be firm at some point that there's a difference between killing monsters in games and 'Liking' things in social networks. It's not a technical or functional difference, its an aesthetic and experiential difference for which there is no bright line distinction. If we don't work to clarify this difference, courts will start calling monster loot gambling income. Not good.

Game worlds need to be identified as such and then tightly walled off, to the extent possible, from reality.