Terra Nova

Ethics of ARGs

In the latest Social Change Technology podcast Dr Burcu Bakioglu talks to Andrea Phillips about Alternate Reality games, their design and some of the interesting legal and ethical issues that come up. 

Those in the TN community that have been watching / making / playing ARGs for the last few years will be familiar with some of the issues - such as what if someone gets hurt, how far can a 'fiction' go before it is deception? 

While some of the issues raised in the podcast are specific to games that have a very physical element and a fictional layer that sits over the everyday - still raise interesting questions about the ethics of game design and what responsibility the designer has for the players' actions.

You can listen to the podcast and see the full show notes on the Virtual Policy Network site. 

Or by subscribing to Social Change Technology on iTunes or via our RSS feed.

The decline of Zynga and Facebook?

Interesting things happening on the interactive social media front. IPO darlings Facebook and Zynga have seen their stock prices falling quite a bit lately. There's more analysis than information, but one thread stuck out at me: The idea that the attention garnered by Zynga and Facebook is not sustainable. For example, Leigh Alexander at Gamasutra carefully unpacks the dyanamics of attention when the portfolio consists of shiny empty games. It works for awhile, but eventually the users become bored at what is after all a very shallow experience. Over at CNN Money, Ben Rooney reports one analyst's conjecture that Facebook is sinking now because parents are using it. If there's any law of modern families, it is, Into the Tents of the Elders go no Teens. Advertisers are not at all desperate to get the rheumy, bloodshot eyeballs of the aged, which are still fixed on TV ("Figure skating is SO beautiful!") but they've lost the young people and can't find them. They thought the kids were on Facebok, but now, eh, where'd they go? In both cases the markets seem to be worried that there isn't nearly as much to this phenomenon as they thought.

OK, so what is the phenomenon all about really?

When FPS becomes virtual world

Our friend Marcus Carter (PhD Student at the University of Melbourne) sends in this report about DayZ. Back in the day, we pushed CounterStrike and friends out of the virtual world category because the multi-user environments were not persistent. Now of course all the lines blur; console-based achievement systems create a persistent community at the hub of every FPS. DayZ takes it a step further, adding a massive spatial environment. When an FPS gets a huge persistent map, we are back to Trammel.

Here is Marcus' report.

Have you heard about DayZ yet? If you’re willing to do battle with the installation process, the runaway successful Arma II mod is definitely worth the time. It is a hyper-realistic, ruthless, multiplayer zombie survival game that strings together a series of interesting and unique features that feels like the MMO/FPS experience I didn’t know I was missing.

 

Here’s a low-down of the interesting features in the DayZ alpha for TerraNovans who haven’t had a chance to play.

 

UK Consumers have rights over you

 

The UK is considering a set of laws that give consumers rights over the providers of digital stuff. These new consumer rights will blow a hole through EULAs and side step a whole mess of intellectual property law. All UK consumers of ‘digital content’ would have these rights irrespective of where it’s provided from, the rights cannot be contracted out of, and the remedies apply to content providers where ever they are.

In short, if you are a game company based anywhere selling to the UK - you need to pay attention.

The right of publicity in video games

I've got a short essay up over at Gamasutra about the right of publicity in video games.  The fundamental question is this -- if you create a game (or virtual world) and you want to include in that setting an indentifiable individual, do you need to pay a licensing fee to that person or the heir of that person?

If games are like books, and not a second class medium, the answer should be "no."  If I write a book, and a character in the book has a chance encounter with William Shatner or Harrison Ford, the artistic use of that celebrity's identity in a fictional content should be protected by the First Amendment.  In other word, Shatner or Ford should not have a right to prohibit the creation of literature that makes reference to them.  If the reference is misleading, or false, or defamatory, of course, there would be a legal problem -- but if not, the use of the identity in a work of art should be fine.

So why should there be a difference result for video games?  In my opinion, games should have the same stature as other forms of artistic expression.  But as William Ford and Raizel Liebler have explained recently, games have historially been of treated as a second-class medium when it comes to the right of publicity.

Now that we have EMA v. Brown, I think it's past time to change that rule.  Hopefully the many courts considering this issue in the next few years will get this question right and protect the creative freedoms of game designers.  The case I talk about in the Gamasutra post is Hart v. EA.  The amicus brief in the case can be found here at Harvard's Berkman Center, with more commentary on the issues raised.

The Secret World

An interesting new MMOG is the Secret World. Much is being made of its class-free system, but for me the real innovation is in the spatial relationship of meaning to the geography. Thank heavens (or is it a plan by the Council of Rome) that we have finally gotten away from quest hubs. Instead, as you run through the zombie apocalypse, you see a smashed delivery truck and a package that is interactable. This leads you on a little mystery that is of independent narrative interest, and gains heft in the circumstances of the game. A package being delivered to - whom? Are they still alive? And why would someone here want a radiation detector? These symbols on the package - do they mean something? Is this a lost love situation, a consortium of devils, back-handed political shenanigans - or something else? OK, so you get to combine shotguns with lightning bolts if you want, but to me that's not the big draw. The big draw is running around in a varied and unpredictable signficance space, something that WoW had all but killed.

-.-- --- ..- / -- ..- ... - / -.. .. . / - --- / ... --- .-.. ...- . / ... --- -- . - .... .. -. --. / .-- .. -.-. -.- . -..

Book Review: "As If" by Michael Saler

I don't normally go in for cultural studies. But every once in awhile, there's a piece that comes up with concepts that tightly and elegantly express thoughts that many are feeling but cannot put to words. Saler's As If is such a book. He addresses himself to "the literary prehistory of virtual reality," drawing connections between the works of Conan Doyle, Lovecraft, and Tolkien and our current exodus into computer-generated fantasy spaces. We have all known that there is a kinship between the 1930s dame obsessed with Holmes and the 2010 gamer obsessed with Onyxia, but it has never been delineated so clearly. Among the concepts Saler uses to make the connection is "animistic reason," a version of rationality that insists on the internal coherence of the fantastic. Animistic reason is the sensibility that delivers the feeling of confirmation and extra horror we feel when Lovecraft's demons turn out to be not spiritual beings but rather scientifically-confirmable alien species. It also produces the "aha" when we trace the Shire calendar to our own and discover that the Ring was destroyed on March 25. Animistic reason tells us that these worlds are fantastic, yet genuine; impossible, yet possible. It produces sensations similar to those of a mathematician who proves something outlandish, or the young theoretical physicist when he first grasps relativity. "Time does not flow the same for everyone? Impossible! Yet not only possible, but necessary!" Saler's book brings many other interesting insights to the table and, rather unusually for a cultural studies book, is a gentle read. I recommend it to you!