Terra Nova

A Virtual Slice of Tax Law

At the State of Play/Terra Nova Symposium in New York last fall, Bryan Camp of Texas Tech School of Law gave us a primer on tax law as it relates to virtual worlds. I never knew that listening to a tax professor could be so illuminating and fun (really). Now he has written a paper giving a similarly engaging overview of the issues as they relate to SL and WoW.

And to think his elegant solution may be ruined by pizza...

The State of Play Academy

Rachel and I will be appearing at SOPA today at noon pst to discuss the Fizzy experiment at there.com (http://stateofplayacademy.com/).  Everyone and anyone is welcome  Thanks again for a great month.

Using Second Life and the Concept of Virtual Property in a First Year Property Law Course

Exploring the Past and Present of Property in Our Current Future...

A Project by Elizabeth Townsend Gard and Rachel Goda

I (Elizabeth) am delighted to be guest blogging at Terra Nova for the month of April. I want to discuss a current project that I am working on, and in the process I hope to gain suggestions on the direction it should take in the future. Beginning in January 2007, I decided to take 100 first year property students into Second Life as part of their graded work. (I am currently a visiting professor of law at Seattle University School of Law, teaching property, intellectual property, and copyright). The idea of taking 100 students into Second Life was a gamble indeed…for so many reasons. I was not alone in my endeavor, however. I have had the most amazing 2L research assistant, Rachel Goda, who early in the fall, agreed to be part of this crazy adventure, and lend her enormous gaming expertise, both to the design and execution of the project. Our posts will be about our journey—from my perspective, from hers, and even from the students. 

Prodigal Players

Via BoingBoing, news surfaces of a Chinese MMO that is inviting banned players back into the fold if they agree to donate blood.  That's real life blood, of course.  1 pint of blood = 1 restored game account.  Platelets FTW!

Beam Me In, Scotty

If the forthcoming Star Trek MMO isn't enough to satisfy your fantasies for epic space travel (or if you just like your MMOs served up with a healthy side of RL-relevant content), then do we have some news for you! 

Liberté, égalité, fraternité et réalité?

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, author of Simulacra and Simulations, has vacated our reality. Seems right to pause a moment and consider whether ‘hyperreality’ is truly upon us, and if so, does it mean we have sold our collective soul for the promise of bigger, better, faster, more, convincing ourselves in the process that pale imitations of precious human activities are fulfilling us?

It is more difficult for us to imagine the real, History, the depth of time, or three-dimensional space, just as before it was difficult from our real world perspective to imagine a virtual universe or the fourth-dimension. The simulacra will be ahead of us everywhere. The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none. Since the world is on a delusional course, we must adopt a delusional standpoint towards the world. - Baudrillard

So, let's talk about our delusions...

Ganking the Meaning out of Games

Steven "Play No Evil" Davis, in a great comment on Mark Wallace's thread, asked the following question:

Is griefing simply emergent play that some folks don't like?

I think this is an interesting question to pursue, and I'm going to take a somewhat provocative stance and answer "no," partly to explore some territory and partly because I think there's a case to be made against griefing that doesn't founder on a libertarian objection (i.e., that if some people do something in a low-consequence environment, then it must be fun to them/their choice, and therefore must be okay).

Discipline & Pwnage

So I've been having my usual beginning-of-the-semester chats with my graduate students about their projects and progress. I enjoy these, and I think they do to (they almost never complain about the thumbscrews, or -- more of a shock -- having to read Habermas). One of them, Krista-Lee Malone, is a master's student and long-time gamer who is completing an excellent thesis about hardcore raiding guilds. During our chat she said something about how these raiding guilds went about preparing her to participate in their activities, and it prompted me to follow up on some ideas from here. It's about Foucault, bodies, institutions, and whether the relationship between developers and guilds is changing in important ways.

Dreaming of An Educational MMO

Finally, via Joystiq, a productive use of time for those of us who worry that repeatedly whacking monsters is not actually contributing to improvements in our zen… Or maybe it is, but soon it will be possible to learn Chinese in Zon – The New Chengo Chinese MMO, and we'll be able to both get zen and spout koans right and left in their intended language! And maybe even be able to play someday with our  millions of  Chinese fellow WoW fiends, or at least lambast the gold farmers appropriately...

Anti Anti-Anecdotalism

The recent flurry of attention to SL and its numbers (here, here, here, and, most recently, here) leads me to think that folks might be interested in having a chance to chew through some methodological stuff, along the lines of the "Methodologies and Metrics" panel on which Nic, Dmitri, and I served at the State of Play/Terra Nova Symposium early this month. Below the fold, some tweaked ideas from some emails I circulated among the panelists in preparation for the panel. While I'm not discussing virtual worlds and the methodologies we'd use to understand them specifically, I hope this will be helpful background for such a discussion.

A New Backbone for Our Metaverse(s)?

This just in via CNET...

The International Association of Virtual Reality Technologies (IAVRT) has just announced plans for the Neuronet, an initiative that "will evolve into the world's first public network capable of meeting the data transmission requirements of emerging cinematic and immersive virtual-reality technologies".

Why?

"Today, the best and the brightest innovators in the world are pushing the boundaries of virtual reality and gaming. Virtual worlds such as Second Life, The Sims, Everquest, and World of Warcraft continue to attract legions of followers while new game systems from Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft offer near life-like character renditions. In business, companies like IBM and Sun Microsystems are investing heavily in virtual reality business applications. These VR trailblazers, and many others, have been limited by the confines of the Internet. The Neuronet's communication bandwidth and real-time VR and gaming data transfer protocols will enable them to reach their full potential."

Have they really been limited?  I'm not so sure.  But certainly thinking about fancy infrastructure for the MMOs that might exist from 2009 onwards (the date this will be ready for 'consumer applications') must be a good idea, right?

Domain names - .vr (for 'immersive virtual reality neurosites') and .cin (for 'cinematic virtual reality neurosites') - will be available next year...

 

Games & Culture CFP

For those of you who want to escape family obligations today and tomorrow, tell them that you have to work on a submission for this call for papers!  It's for a special issue of the Games and Culture journal, focused on Gaming in the Asia-Pacific region. Read on for details...

UCLA Mediascape CFP

UCLA's film, television, and digital media e-journal would like to solicit contributions from the TN community for the features and reviews section of an upcoming issue.

Read on for more details...  (but hurry, deadline is Jan 1, 2007!)

Meaning, Games, and Bureaucracy

A while back in a comment posted in this thread, Ren posed an excellent question that I've been pondering for some time. Wondering about the implications of my model of games as process for the question of meaning, he asked:

Do we then just have that the meaning-generative property of games is just a fact of process [i.e., no different from other social processes] and the types of meanings [in games] are consequences of the contrived contingency?

Curse you, Ren! I haven't slept since August!

The MMO Brand Goes Bad?

It’s easy to look at the graphs of MMO growth over the last few years and think that it’s a game category that will continue to grow exponentially.  In fact, I have often said that since games have always been largely social (and single player gaming an anomaly that resulted largely from technological limitations), that once people have a taste of gaming with others few will choose to go back to solo play.  And I do believe that.  Other players represent that sort of super sophisticated AI that no NPC can begin to approach.  And for me, the only thing that makes the average MMO grind at all fun, for instance, is the chaos and uncertainty brought forth by other random players.  Social structures make games more complex and interesting, to be sure.  But is that always a good thing?

State of Play / Terra Nova Symposium, Dec 1-2, NYC

Yes, the lunatic has finally taken over the asylum.

I'm organizing an academically-oriented virtual worlds workshop under the aegis of both State of Play and Terra Nova. It's running at New York Law School on Dec 1-2, down in bee-you-ti-ful Tribeca. Attendance is very small and exclusive. The people speaking are very smart, and the audience is going to be even smarter and involved in all the panel discussions. The conference registration is cheap. The food will be good.

Details are here and registrations are now open.

Are Virtual Worlds Good For the Soul?

Dmitri recently received an e-mail from Mike Fred, a Behavior Intervention Specialist who uses WoW therapeutically as part of his work with challenged kids: 

I play WoW with a few of the students from my school. It has proven to be beneficial to the students socially, academically, and therapeutically. In general these students lack social skills. Even when they want to make friends, they often behave inappropriately and tend to push people away. Yet, as these students have gotten involved with playing WoW, they have made social connections - not only with each other, but with other players online. They are all active members of their online guilds… their online relationships are not deep. However, the fact that they make relationships at all is significant. Moreover, two of these students have developed a real friendship.

First Monday Special Issue on Governance

The online journal First Monday has just published their 7th special issue, Command Lines: The Emergence of Governance in Global Cyberspace, wherein you will find a number of articles by current and former Terra Novans, including Ted, Richard, T L Taylor, and me. (NB: the articles are appearing in three sets over three months; the complete list of them is at the link.)

The special issue (edited by Sandra Braman and me) grew out of the Command Lines conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (sponsored by its Center for International Education), where we brought together a number of people interested in governance online. In many ways I saw it as a chance for scholars of virtual worlds to contribute their unique perspective to a broader conversation, and the conference was a tremendous success. Anyone interested in how to make sense of the moving target that is governance in and beyond virtual worlds is encouraged to dive in.

State of Play IV: Building the Global Metaverse

State of Play IV: Building the Global Metaverse
January 7-9, 2007 (Singapore)

Sponsored by Harvard, Yale and New York Law Schools as well as Trinity University in Texas and the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, we are convening thought leaders from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas to engage in a lively discussion about the unique regulatory and cross-cultural challenges posed by the growth of transnational virtual worlds.

Whether they take the form of games, social spaces, or educational environments, virtual worlds are now truly global in scope. The popularity of virtual worlds in Asia is phenomenal. From Thailand and Malaysia to Indonesia and the Philippines, the Asia Pacific region's on-line gaming market generated approximately $1.4 billion in annual revenues last year – a figure that is expected to reach $3.6 billion by the end of the decade.

Much of this growth will be propelled by 180 million Chinese Internet users, the majority of whom will play on-line games. Jaw-dropping insight into China's hunger for on-line games can be seen in the turnout for last month's ChinaJoy conference. Now in its fifth year, the event attracted approximately 124,000 game developers and enthusiasts -- almost twice the number who attended E3 at its peak in 2005. As industry analyst Frank Yu points out, "this makes it the most attended game event in the world." Unlike E3 and CES, which emphasize graphics hardware and home consoles, ChinaJoy focuses on virtual worlds and casual games.

Review: Avatars of Story

Avatars of Story, hot off the press from University of Minnesota, well, Press, is no life-changer, but it makes for a marginally interesting read.  Written by Marie-Laure Ryan, an independent scholar from Colorado with a number of related books to her credit, the hefty hardback offers something of an overview of the manifestations of narrative in new (i.e. electronic) media over the last twenty-five years, with a specific hankering for testing out the pliancy of these different "avatars of story."

Against Exceptionalism: A New Approach to Games

Selling games short -- it's happening all the time in games research scholarship and in books on game design. In the rush to carve out a special place for games scholarship, to demonstrate its importance, and to attempt to convey what we feel as gamers is powerful about games, games thinkers have relied on an exceptionalist approach to games, seeing them as a form of play necessarily set apart from the everyday, and therefore requiring a distinct treatment. In short, this inherited and largely unexamined theory of games assumes there is a rupture (in experience, in form) between games and other aspects of social life.  But while understandable, this is precisely the wrong approach.

Review of Carnagey, Anderson, and Bushman

Review of "The Effect of Videogame Violence on Physiological Desensitization to Real-World Violence," by Nicholas L. Carnagey,  Craig A. Anderson, and Brad J. Bushman, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2006.  Many thanks to Andy Havens for sending us this link.

Time to Turn the MMO Inside Out?

Joystiq reports on a recent talk by Thomas Bidaux of NCsoft Europe at the Develop UK event where apparently it was revealed that 'everything we think know about MMOs is wrong'.  Mr. Bidaux  has a number of opinions about how MMOs are going to be revolutionized, turned on their heads even, via platform innovations (though anyone who played Everquest on the PS2 might be a bit skeptical that this is a positive move), Xbox Live style persistence in terms of player rankings and achievements, novel payment models, and yes, 'a lifestyle revolution' enabled by our experiments with Web 2.0, 'collective intelligence (e.g. Wikipedia) and viral content (e.g. MySpace)' that  'provide opportunites for community and collaborative efforts'.

Well, we like our trend watching here at TN...

Fifteen new papers on virtual worlds

Fifteen new virtual world research papers are now linked to the on-line syllabus for the course “Games for the Web.” Written by thoughtful undergraduates at Trinity University, the papers explore topics ranging from sexual practices in virtual environments (PDF) to ways that MMOs might be used to ease the suffering of children with cancer (PDF). (Note: As some curmudgeons have correctly noted, the title "Games for the Web" is a misnomer that glosses  over the distinction between "the web" and other TCP/IP-enabled services. The explanation can be found in the appended comments.)

Students met throughout the semester to discuss milestone works related to gaming and virtual worlds, and they supplemented these theoretical conversations with ongoing fieldwork in the virtual world of Norrath (Everquest II). The class played primarily on the Antonia Bayle role-playing server, where they were welcomed by the guild The Vindicators. In a completely unplanned twist of fate, the guild leader (Bandel) turned out to be the legendary game designer Scott Adams.

Bogost: Unit Operations

I just got my copy of Ian Bogost's new book, Unit Operations: An Approach to Video Game Criticism. My jacket blurb says "Bogost challenges humanists and technologists to pay attention to one another, something they desperately need to do as computation accelerates us into the red zones of widespread virtual reality...Highly recommended." Reading it over again, that's still how I feel. A tough and important subject, handled really well, chock full of arguments relevant to the virtuati.  Read it!

Holiday Reading

Want some reading over the holidays?

I'm a bit late with this, because of Typepad's recent problems, but take a look at the term papers for Aaron Delwiche's Games for the Web course at Trinity university. They're almost all refreshing and insightful, and if I didn't tell you they were written by undergraduates you might have had a hard time figuring it out from the content - it's of a very high standard. Not all of them are formal enough to put in .pdfs, but even some of those that aren't make some interesting observations.

If you're into the social science side of virtual world research, check them out.

Richard

Ludium I Results Available

Go to arden.indiana.edu to download the report and watch a documentary. 

DAC and PCD

We just hosted the DAC conference here at the ITU and it was, as always, great to hang out with smart, interesting folks and get to chat and hear what they are up to. There are a lot of threads that came up during the conference and you can read various coverage via links at the conference wiki. I just want to mention one theme I have been hearing more and more about recently, something termed "player-centered design."

Delusions of granter

One thing that I've been thinking about a lot lately is my set of experiences over the past two years reviewing for large grant agenices. While my experience is still a bit limited, it has been intense, and I have developed some impressions (and that is really all they are, given anyone's limited point of view relative to these funding agencies) about the current trends in social science research on technology in general (and virtual worlds in particular)...

Flying the kite

In the UK or want to study here? Has your local higher education establishment recently started a computer game design course? Do you worry that they are just surfing the Abertay wave and are looking for applications by the bucket-load with all the attendant grant money but don’t have anyone on staff that know the first thing about game design?

Worry not.

Ludium I: Wrap-up

The Thalo delegation won the overall competition fair and square (despite reports in disreputable media) and with it the Shining Star of Light (left); Kudos to Betsy Book, Nick Yee, Greg Lastowka, Dave Rickey, Larry Yaeger, and Ron Meiners. We believe the mace has been taken to New York, where rumor suggests it may play a role in controlling the flow of events at State of Play this weekend. The delegation from Sysland (Raph Koster, Joshua Fairfield, Mark Terrano, Tim Burke, Nate Combs, and Peter Ludlow) won the Chalice of Saethryd (right), which we understand has been enshrined in a place of honor (relatively speaking) at the IU Law School. The delegation from Aroland was admitted into the Royal Order of Somnambulists and Gluttons (ROGS): Thomas Malaby, Sasha Barab, Michael Steele, Cory Ondrejka, Ren Reynolds, Mia Consalvo; the deciding factor was the bourbon consumed in their conference room at 2:30 am - at the behest of Judge Daniel James, mercifully trying to get them to stop working.

And as the previous example suggests, it was at times hard to see the line between play and work. As a result, work happened. Indeed, it may have happened in abundance, although we will not know for sure for a few months. In the pipeline (and don't hold me to this, you know how things go): Several research-ready, tiny-but-scaleable MMORPGs  to be launched at universities; several student-run projects at Indiana; as well as a cross-university research initiative helped along by industry support.

Speaking of students...based on their performance this past weekend, I'd advise you to hire the following people: Will Emigh, Nathan Mishler, Ian Pottmeyer, Victor Chelaru, Ian Aliman (MS/MA); Nick Cassidy, Nick Mendel, David Hall, Derrick Kelley, Derek Strand (BS/BA). Tomas Feher, Master of Thieves, was the executive producer.

[Edit: Bridget Agabra Goldstein, co-organizer, deserves most of the credit for making the ludium run smoothly. If I was smart, I would have asked her to edit this post before it went live, precisely to avoid such an egregious omission as I've made in failing to celebrate her contribution properly.]

Look for a short documentary and a full report soon.

Anarchy Online to Teach Technical Writing

Amanda Linder, a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, now uses Anarchy Online to teach Technical Writing. While past teachers had students read a sci-fi novel as the context for all the writing assignments (reports, instructions, memos, and the like), Amanda has students play – and write from the context of – Anarchy Online. All technical writing assignments and class discussions are now based on in-game content, typically written from the perspective of employees of Omni-Tek, the mega-corporate power in the game.

You can find her very cool course syllabus here.

What happens when fan fiction becomes part of the writing curriculum? We’ve talked about the ramifications of breaking the golden circle IRT economy (i.e. when in-game worth becomes out-of-game wealth), but what happens when in-game literacy practices becomes part of our more general (and offline) understanding of what it means, say, to write? On the one hand, the idea of schools colonizing peoples’ game spaces seems to add one more notch to the belt that marks the closing of the great virtual frontier. On the other hand, though, when the in-game practices are of equal (if not greater) complexity and sophistication of those we want folks to engage in out-of-game, it starts to seem like foolishness not let them “count” in the off-line world as well.

Ah, the eternal question… Should GL have RL consequence? Doesn’t it already?

National Academies to Host Game Seminar

This conference is different, first, because it's being hosted by the National Academies, the premier academic organization in the United States. Second, representatives from 30 funding agencies will be there. The conference was developed in stealth mode, but the remaining seating is now open to the public. Invitation here [note: 3.1mb; link will go bad when the event is over]. See inside for an accompanying text.

SOP 3

State of Play III: Social Revolutions is the third annual State of
Play conference on the future of cyberspace convened by the Institute
for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School, the
Information Society Project at Yale Law School, and the Berkman Center
for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. This year, we focus on
social relationships in the metaverse and how to build vibrant,
flourishing, creative places.

Academic Job Openings

It would probably make sense for us to start a post every August for the academic job openings that virtual world specialists might be interested in. To keep it simple, let's only have positions open to people with the standard university-level terminal degrees - PhD, JD, MFA.

In 2005, there aren't going to be too, too many of these. But time, and the digital revolution, marches on.

I'll start with my department's two tenure-track openings at the assistant professor level...

New Journal: Games and Culture

Sage has recently launched a new peer-reviewed print journal for game studies named Games and Culture. They seem to be really putting a lot of backing behind it (even turning up at DiGRA to get a sense of the work out there and meet folks) and hopefully a new kid on the game-journal-block shows the strength of the field :) You might have heard about it before but they have just announced they are offering a free trial issue (electronic) for the first issue due in January. You can find out more about the journal and sign up for the freebie at their website. I also really encourage folks to consider submitting work. The editor, Doug Thomas, has a very exciting and ambitious vision and I know he is looking forward to receiving submissions so definitely check it out.

Copenhagen in December... again

In case you missed it, the next DAC (digital arts & culture) conference will take place December 1-3 at the IT University of Copenhagen. DAC has long been a host to game studies work so definitely consider submitting and coming out for it. Deadline for papers and workshop proposals is August 8. Full info can be found at the conference website.

Review of the Research - Good Luck

Recently, I have been faced with the task of "Reviewing the Research on Virtual Worlds" (yes, with capitalization) as part of my dissertation requirements (ch. 1 of dissertation for me, due in 13 days and counting) but also to be published in a "Handbook of New Literacies," edited by well-known literacy scholars such as Michelle Knobel and Conlin Lankshear. So, for the past few weeks, I've been burying myself in old and new writings on the very spaces we all hold so dear – MMOGs, MUDs, virtual worlds of all forms.

The task is, well... obscenely hard and messy. There's stuff on MUDs, web-published but never peer reviewed, that's held up as "canon" for the field. Then there's the academic papers, much of which consist of conference papers and proceedings publications. There are a few books, here and there, written from fairly atheoretical stances that focus on game design or personal stories. And then the occasional academic paper, such as T.L. Taylor's work or Hunter & Lastowka's (to name a few). Our collective work is all over the place. And that's fine for individuals, but not fine for the development of a field of research for others to draw on.

Am I naive in thinking that we exist as a field? If we do, where do we send our students to read through the literature? So far, I've treated Terra Nova as a sort of repository of ideas. But this will not easily sustain us as more scholars join the field. So... I wonder. Is it time we publish a journal of our own? Or at least a yearly review of some form? I worry that knowledge gets lost as generations move on to other topics/activities and newcomers will see nothing but a whole lot of webtalk without much scholarly, peer-reviewed writing on the issues.

And, yes, it does matter. If academensian's (pun intended) are to take virtual worlds seriously, then we have to give them reason to do so. R. Bartle, you question why it is that MMOG's are constantly translated into the home fields of those who write on them. Well, without a defined audience of our own that proves itself legitimate, we risk becoming nothing more than a fandom community around a technology that will, itself, grow tired, as all eventually do.

So, my questions include: Are we ready for a peer-reviewed journal on MMOGs? And, if so, who exactly ought to serve as peer review? And too, would we be "selling out" or whatever to establish such a forum for paper publication? And could we create one that worked in conjunction with the lively discussions here?

In A Gama Da DiGRA

Went quiet, went stateside, went digra, went moonlighting.

Emergence Emerges Some More

I've got a lot of thoughts sparked by DiGRA coming, including a long meditation on the dreaded ludology-narratology thing, but first I wanted to mention an interesting sub-theme I noticed weaving its way through the conference: emergence, complex systems, non-human agency, network theory and related topics. Nicholas Glean dealt centrally with these issues. I understand  Seth Giddings as also being engaged on these topics, though I missed his paper presentation. I caught a number of other mentions or invocations of these concepts. Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern's Facade (their presentation on it was one of the highlights of the meeting for me) also clearly is a case of emergence, even if they don't explicitly see it as such.

My own paper dealt with the same issues. A draft is available at my blog. I've fiddled with it some since then.

One thing that I think is important about the general suite of concepts under this heading is that they can be painfully vague or misleading in the wrong hands, or just marketing hype. But in the context of games, at the very least, emergence is a technique for creating the psychologically convincing simulation of life or intentionality. There is clearly a deep mental algorithim that human beings use to sort life and non-life that agent-based emergent systems do a pretty good job of tapping into.

I think there's even more to the concept that's relevant to games, and especially persistent virtual world games. But I'll leave that for  the full paper. I do think it's an important concept  for game scholars to consider, and consider well.

Announcing: Command Lines

Command Lines: The Emergence of Governance in Global Cyberspace will be really useful to this community, I think. We talk all the time about economics and law, not enough about governance.

We now have some firm info about the conference. From the website: The conference "will examine the diverse ways       in which governance is both implemented and emerging       within cyberspace and the effects of such approaches       to governance in the off-line world. Sessions will       cover the entire range of types of governance mechanisms,       from the formal laws of government through the       formal and informal governance mechanisms of both       state and non-state actors to the cultural practices       of governmentality that sustain and enable both governance       and government."

New New Zealand Academic Site

Social Study Games.com collects research about social effects of MMORPGs. Many TN sources are linked there.  Brought to you by doctoral student Lisa Galarneau.

By the way, we encourage anyone mounting a site like this to send us the link for our resource list. Centralized info is good.

Wanted: FFXI Players For Survey, Esp. Japanese

Alan Meades, under the aegis of Middlesex University / UK, is running a survey of Final Fantasy XI players. Please publicize and distribute the link. Participation by Japanese players is especially welcome. A full Japanese translation of the survey is available at the site.

Talk about beardy!

Back in January this year Espen Aarseth (short beard) of ITUC and Henry Jenkins (long beard) of MIT met up at HUMlab in Sweden to discuss games. Fortunately the face to face was filmed and even more fortunately there is a stream. 

So if you want over an hour of heavy weight discussion of: what it is to study games, ludology the role of story and a whole lot more, tune in, kick back and enjoy.

Defining Everquestness

What are the defining qualities of virtual worlds? What defines their worldliness: the there of There, the everquestness of Everquest?

These questions are central to Lisbeth Klastrup’s recently published phd thesis: Towards a Poetics of Virtual Worlds: Multi-User Textuality and the Emergence of Story.

Seeking legitimacy?

I was going to post a review of some papers from the Other Players conference (many very interesting ones btw) and then this entry but since a discussion got going over in another thread I think it's worth foregrounding now. One of the big conversation points that came up at the end of the conference was on the relationship of scholarly game studies to design. Eric Zimmerman raised a very good question and concern at the end of the last session which was why are we seeing so many academic studies include some kind of conclusion around "what this means for design" or "how designers can use these findings." I was particularly grateful for Eric's intervention because I've personally been feeling a growing unease with how often scholarly work in games seems to seek a kind of legitimacy by being able to sum up how the research can be used in future game implementations. It's of course not the case that we never want what happens in game studies to have real impact and influence but can we always anticipate what that will be? By making moves into predictive work are we quickly losing ground for good basic research to thrive? Are we beginning to foster a space in which research is primarily legitimated through its usefulness in building future MMOG markets?

Other Players Proceedings Posted

Proceedings have been posted for the Other Players Conference being held this week at the IT University of Copenhagen.

Second class subject

Suppose I went to a conference on Artificial Intelligence and introduced my talk with the following words: "I'm not interested in AI, I know very little about it, and what I do know is beyond my comprehension. I'm only interested in computer games." What kind of a reaction could I expect?

Other Players update

In case you haven't seen it yet, just a reminder that the registration deadline for the Other Players conference here in Copenhagen next month is approaching. Here is an update just sent out by the organizers:

Anthropologists: Ethnography in MMOGs

Alex Golub, founder of the Digital Genres movement at the University of Chicago and PhD student of one of the world's most highly reputed anthropologists, will hold an informal meeting on ethnographic practices as they apply in virtual worlds. The site, suitably, is the virtual world of Second Life. Since C. Steinkuehler's recent post, we have all been thinking deeply about the human subjects/ethnography issue, and with good reason. Golub's meeting is aptly timed.