Terra Nova

Seriously, the hotel has a great pool

In a week's time I'll be lounging by a pool in Singapore, drinking three or four insanely alcoholic drinks in preparation for State of Play V.

I'll be thinking about the dinner that I'm about to have, that will be followed by Glenn Thomas's film "Ideal World".  I'll be wondering which of the following two day's panels I will enjoy the most, and which of the workshops I'll attend.  I'll be thinking about the dinner the following evening at the Zoo, and the subsequent Night Safari.  I'll be wondering whether Doug Thomas will, in fact, be mistaken for a large primate and not allowed out of the grounds, even if he is going to be interviewing John Seely Brown.  Oh, and I'll be thinking about chili crab. 

I may ask where you and your friends are.  I suspect that many of you will be there.  And you will be thinking of chili crab too, and so we'll make a plan to head out and get some.

Can't wait.

See you in Singapore

This is in the nature of a Shameless Plug (tm):

I'm one of the organizers of the next State of Play Conference which is running in Singapore August 19-22. The conference program is looking pretty nifty (if I do say so myself), and we're about to announce a day of workshops on topics including "Managing identities in virtual worlds", "Educational applications of virtual worlds" and "Commercial applications of virtual worlds". Registration is open now, the food will be fabulous, the hotel is gorgeous and cheap, Singapore is a great place, and you get to spend some time with the best people on these topics in the world.

You should attend. You'd be crazy not to.

Recalculating the Global Virtual GDP, Yet Again

Albania? Nepal? Try Lebanon, noob.

Very soon after the New York Times Magazine published my account of life in the gold farms of China, I received an email informing me of a ghastly factual error in the second paragraph. “I’m not quite sure who you are targeting with the article,” the message began, “but if it was any of the ‘8 million’ players of World of Warcraft they all stopped reading at ‘night-elf wizards.’” I was mortified, of course (everyone knows night elves can’t be mages, for God’s sake), but there was an upside. If all those WoW players were bailing at paragraph two, that meant 8 million fewer chances I’d be busted for the even more horrific cock-up several paragraphs below: My butchering of world geekery’s most vital economic statistic, the total gross domestic product of all known virtual economies.

The offending passage follows. It is a scene of wanton, unadulterated factual imprecision, but if you think you’ve got the stomach for it, read on…

Hey, Who Filled My Ivory Tower With Carbon Monoxide?

Sorry, kids, but I just really needed a post with this title.  Did you all read this beauty (scroll down to 'Terrifying Teachers') buried in comments?  Freaking awesome.  They have no idea just how terrifying we are.  Muahhaha!

Early Bird Registration for Ludium II Ends Today

Register at https://www.indiana.edu/~swi/reg/

PBS to Broadcast Game Accessibility Story

For those lovers (like me!) of PBS, check your local listings for a program called Quest tonight. KQED in San Francisco filmed the special and it will be airing at 7:30pm tonight (Tuesday, May 1st) on the US west coast. Tonight's episode entitled, "Videogames for All," will chronicle the efforts of the IGDA Game Accessibility SIG to spread the word about accessibility issues for games. If the episode is not broadcast in your area, fear not, it should posted on Quest's website, http://www.kqed.com/quest/ today or tomorrow. Or call up your local PBS station and request an airing (I did!).

Update: Here's the direct link to the video!

Game Accessibility?

To start off my guest blogging month, I thought that I'd send everyone a few links in advance so that readers can learn more and (hopefully) join in on the conversations about making games accessible for gamers with disabilities. So this is sometimes done at the end of a paper or a tv show ("for more information...") but I'm going to start out this way because I'm outrageous like that.

Some places you'll want to explore (and more links will be provided later, don't you worry!):

• The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) Game Accessibility SIG Mailing List: Here you'll find members who are experts in the area of game accessibility, gamers with disabilities, developers with disabilities, and more. But that's not all! I chair this group. :)
• GameAccessibility.com: This is a "one stop shop" for everything "game accessibility" and is the main web resource that we use in the SIG to communicate accessibility news and information.

So with that...I'll let you explore a bit and then we'll start the conversation about the field of game accessibility! I hope you'll join me!

Beast of an idea

Like many current virtual world creators, friend of the show Matt Mihaly is lazy. OK, they call it user created content or inclusive design or something, but it’s just laziness. His latest work shirking strategy is to get you, the public, to invent a race for Iron Realms’ new MMO. So if you have Beast of an idea - see the entry criteria here. And of course you can’t call your self a TN reader unless you satisfy yourself of the IP rights involved.

Ludium II Announcement

Details on Ludium II below the fold.

Games and Culture Special Issue on WoW

Yes, a respected academic journal with an issue devoted entirely to that one game. Who would possibly publish in such a rag? Err, a whole bunch of us, apparently. You will find articles on player stats, machinima and guild dynamics, to name a few.

Journal link here, and abstracts below the fold.

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.

Indiana University to Host Digital Media Festival

Andrew Bucksbarg has put together a great program. Should be lots of stuff of interest to TNers. Details here. All invited. Let me know if you're coming, we can have lunch.

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.

James on Julian

TN author promotes friend-of-the-show interviewing other TN author shock!

In The Second Life of Julian Dibbell, Wagner James Au interviews TN Author (who also gets time to write a few books you might have heard of) Julian Dibbell about his latest work: Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot.

Virtual worlds, gold farmers, words like ‘ludocentric’ - it’s all there. Enjoy.

Please Welcome Our New Ethnomethodological Overlords(Or, Bob Moore Joins the Author Roll)

It’s official: An invasion force fielded by the Republic of Xerox PARC has established a beachhead on the shores of Terra Nova. To the three PARCers who had already infiltrated our author roll (Nicolas Ducheneaut, Eric Nickell, Nick Yee) a fourth now adds his name: Bob Moore, whose expertise in conversation analysis and other tricks of the ethnomethodological trade has long rounded out the intellectual arsenal of PARC’s PlayOn team of crack virtual-world watchers. Co-author, with Ducheneaut and Nickell, of the wave-making paper Doing Virtually Nothing: Awareness and Accountability in Massively Multiplayer Online Worlds, Moore has brought his mad social-analytic skillz to bear on an illustrious CV’s worth of workplace- and “third place”-oriented studies — and was of course the author of 1995’s cult hit "Dereification in Zen Buddhism," delivered at the annual meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society and now available only as a rare drop deep within World of Warcraft’s Dire Maul dungeon. Phear him if you must, but I, for one, welcome Bob Moore. Please join me.

Ludium II Plans

The Arden Institute at Indiana University announces: Ludium II is tentatively planned for June 22-23, 2007.  ("Ludium!? What's a Ludium!?") The theme "Videogames and Public Policy" will be explored through a game that puts participants in a 19th century US political convention, complete with smoke-filled rooms and bombastic delegates. OK, due to health concerns we will not allow cigars, but bombasticism will be encouraged regardless of the risks. Gameplay: The delegates will form caucuses and compete to get planks on the party platform. They'll also elect a party nominee for President. Results: A platform recommending 10 (or so) Principles for Sensible Video Game Policy, and a single person, the nominee, who will become our de facto spokesperson for the ideas in the platform. From the Ludium's end until November 2008, we will point to the nominee whenever we are asked about games by the media, legislatures, courts, lobbying groups, or voters. Prizes go to participants who get the most ideas on the platform, and for being a candidate or the eventual nominee. Participation will be open. We have room for 400 people.

Though at an early stage, Ludium II could use a little help.

Welcome to Liz Lawley

I said that we were on a buying spree, and I wasn't joking. Our the newest hire was so expensive that all the current authors had to agree to take a pay cut (it was either that or sell ourselves to Stratics). But this wasn't remotely a problem. Everyone agreed to take 50% pay cut for the privilege of hanging out with Elizabeth Lane Lawley, the incomparable author of mamamusings, the biggest of the big brains at our fave blog Many-to-Many, and one of the chosen at misbehaving.

Welcome to Aaron Delwiche

Flush with the recent influx of capital from an unnamed philanthropist-cum-power-leveling-service, we've gone on a massive buying spree for new talent. We're hoping that they'll boost our rankings in time for the eventual sale of the franchise and the announcement of a new stadium built in Second Life using the tax dollars of North Freeport residents.

Aaron Delwiche, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Trinity University is the first of our new draft picks, and we're tickled to have him. He is the head of the New Media Studies minor at Trinity, and focuses on youth culture, gaming, and global civil society. Anyone who knows anything in this space will recognize him as the teacher behind the wonderful class on qualitative research methods to explore virtual worlds, which we have featured before. (Last year's class concentrated on World of Warcraft, this year's class is using Everquest II as a starting point). Apart from the article referenced off to the side, he also writes a bi-monthly gaming column for the San Antonio Current with material like this.

Welcome Eric Nickell

A while back we announced that we had added Nic Ducheneaut to our authorial ranks, as part of a strategy to take over the brainpower of the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) but pay nothing for the privilege. Since we already had Nick Yee on our non-payroll, this was a moderately-implausible but amusing story. I can now announce the next stage in our takeover strategy, by announcing that we are collectively delighted to welcome Eric Nickell to the blog. Eric is a computer scientist in the Computing Science Laboratory at PARC, with a B.S. from Caltech, an M.A. from Fuller Theological Seminary, and a wealth of experience as a video game designer, and computer programmer/analyst developing high-speed imaging software and task management software. More important than this though, he is one of the principals behind the PARC PlayOn project, which is collecting and analysing and thinking about MMOGs.

Hamlet who?

Hamlet Linden is no more. Arise Hamlet Au. Yup - it’s all change in the VW community this year. Betsy has gone There, Uri has gone who knows where and Hammie has gotten de-embedded.

I would suggest that you can read all about the real deal at LL from my hard hitting interview with the big H where I reduce a grown man to confused tears of rage and pain, or reveal the true life kiss-and-tell story of CA geeks gone wild replete with photo’s, video and avatar reenactments. But no. I’d love to say he’s also joined There, as that would just be funny. But no again.

The truth of is it that he’s changed name, changed URL but has managed to smuggle out the New World Notes brand with him. And he’s writing like crazy, covering free speech, creative commons, abusive float monkeys all this week. Though I have to say the images in Hamlet Reborn are kinda spooky, like a dream where your freakish new clone pitches up and presses your off button.

Anyhoo here’s his new pad: nwn.blogs.com

[note: this message was brought to you by the friends of Hamlet and the letter H, the opinions expresses were bias and may or may not represent those of the author, genuineness being proportionate to units of alcohol bought for said author at time or times to be determined]

I'm So There

Just wanted to let the TN community know that I’ve started this week on staff at Makena Technologies (the folks who bring you There) as the new Director of Product Management.  In this role I'll be focusing on There's in-world marketing programs, merchandising and events as well as helping to develop and implement new product features.  As many of you know, I've been intrigued by There since its beta period.  Now I'm thrilled to have the chance to gain some first-hand experience with the development of a social virtual world product and I couldn't be happier to have this opportunity.  Looking forward to great things in 2006!

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Or, Hooray for Hollywood (for real this time?)

If articles in the NY Times, Washington Post, The Economist, and even (today) CNN Money weren’t enough to make you think that maybe MMOs really are finally gaining mainstream credibility, there was the recent announcement about startup Multiverse and its Advisory Board, which includes Oscar-winning movie-makers James Cameron and Jon Landau, among others (full disclosure: they’ll let just about anyone onto one of these, apparently).

In a separate online Business Week article, Cameron said that his next movie project was going to have a companion MMO that would be released before the movie's debut.  So is this yet another lame licensing deal, a bastard child between games and Hollywood, or does this signal something different?  And what do this and Multiverse's announcement mean for MMOs in general? 

Welcome to Nic Ducheneaut

We're insanely delighted to announce that we have a new author, Nic Ducheneaut, a research scientist in the Computer Science Laboratory at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Nic's research interests include the sociology of online communities, computer-supported cooperative work, and human-computer interaction, and he is one of the principals of the amazingly amazing PlayOn blog.

We've been thinking for a while about how best to mount a takeover bid of the PlayOn blog, coz we're so impressed at what they do. We realized that we just don't have enough capital to buy Xerox (even though the share price is a little deflated these days), so we just thought we would just poach their talent and not bother to pay for it. It works for us. Nic is only the first stage in a long-term project that we anticipate will culminate in us acquiring John Seely Brown at no cost. But more on this later.

Welcome Bonnie Ruberg

We're really fortunate to have Bonnie Ruberg join our happy band of ne'er-do-wells. Ordinarily when an author joins us I try to write some witty commentary about the subject matter that she is going to cover. But since Bonnie is perhaps the leading (and definitely the most interesting) writer on sex and virtual worlds...well, let me just say that all the earlier drafts of this announcement were likely to get me divorced, fired, or jailed. So let me use her own bio to announce her, and just say "welcome" from all of us here at Terra Nova central command:

TN Welcomes Mike Sellers

In my mind, Mike deserves credits at the level of a Bartle for his role as lead design in the first 3D graphical MUD, Meridian 59 (which lives on under the direction of frequent commenter Brian Green).  Consistent with that start, Mike went on to found and direct a number of projects in the industry, and has to be counted among the elite when it comes to both theoretical and hands-on understanding of the strange thing we're all studying. His most recent work on believable AI is likely IMHO to create yet another singularity in this space; the immersive quality made a discontinuous leap when 3D came about, and it will do so again when NPCs begin to acquire credible social and emotive behaviors. Mike's also got a crafting focus in interfaces, and has degrees in cognitive science as well as AI.

We're very lucky to have people like Mr. Sellers, people with actual talent and experience, continue to join our happy band. I increasingly feel that Greg, Dan, Julian and I are playing the role of stone to the fine soup that's being brewed here.  Welcome Mike!

And so as not to miss out on Richard's "Which TNer" quiz, we might ask everyone to guess which of the following things Mike Sellers has NOT done:

Which TNer? - Answers

Those of you pacing the floor in expectation need wait no longer! Here are the answers to the "Which TNer?" quiz!

Which TNer?

Time for a festive quiz!

Or, as they're known outside the USA, a Christmas quiz!

I asked every member of the Terra Nova team to volunteer some interesting trivia about themself, and here is the result. All TNers participated except Tim and TL, whose secrets are obviously too dark for public consumption.

All you have to do is guess which TNer fits the deed.

This has nothing to do with "Exploring Virtual Worlds".

There are no prizes whatsoever.

Richard

My employer wants you to read this

Turns out that my employer (a business school that some may know) has an electronic content thing, and they heard about MMOGs/VWs. The story is here, and has some interesting comments from Cory, Tim, Dmitri and Ted (making this article a Terra Nova quintuple play) and some stuff from me that I don't remember saying but probably did. I sound like an idiot, so it must be me. (For the record, I've never bought anything in the RMT market, but I was indicating that rich people from the First World--ie people like me--are the kind of people who engage in RMT, and for good reason).

Oh, also has some projections about the size of the secondary market which are interesting, but almost certainly wrong.

Terra Nova Welcomes Mia Consalvo

Here at Terra Nova, we're concerned about quality, and we've maintained a facade of it by regularly inviting new authors whose erudition and skills are great enough to distract the uncareful reader from the obvious inadequacies of the founders. That is the case once again as we welcome Mia Consalvo to our happy band. She is an associate professor in the School of Telecommunications at Ohio University as well as the director of Graduate Studies for the School (for which, as a fellow DGS, I must extend my heartfelt sympathies). She is also Director of Research for Ohio's new GRID Lab (Game Research and Immersive Design) which will have a public arcade and an academic space for the study of games; we suspect her primary duties in that capacity are to make sure all of the games are playing properly, all the time. Mia is unlike the most recent spate of Nobel recipients in that she got tenure for writing about television (Star Trek) and videogames - a very good thing indeed. This just in from the Where is Mia Now Department: She has resisted the siren song of WoW, opting instead to remain in Final Fantasy XI, where you may have seen her for the past year and a few months. She's done research in Japan (this past spring) on Japanese game players, research which still stubbornly refuses to write itself up. And other than Ren, there's probably no one here who has spent more thinking and writing about cheating in games. She's got a piece forthcoming (later this year) in New Media & Society called "Console Video Games and Global Corporations: Creating a Hybrid Culture" (of cheating??), and she's on the steering committee of the group Women in Games International (wigi.org). What a great day for TN. Welcome Mia!

Joshua Fairfield

We're really delighted to welcome Joshua Fairfield into our little band of misfits, outcasts and ne'er-do-wells. Unfortunately he doesn't really fit our mold: he's got degrees from Swarthmore and the University of Chicago, he clerked for Hon. Danny J. Boggs, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and has taught at Columbia. He is now at the University of Indiana Law School where he teaches electronic commerce law and commercial law.

We thought that he was far too distinguished for us, but he insisted that he was just right: he's deeply, deeply addicted to WoW like the rest of us, and is Council Member of the Hrafn Warband, Silver Hand, Alliance. And his most prized credential is not on his wall, but on his office computer background: a screenshot of his first Ragnaros kill. It's sad, really, just how like us he is.

Also he recently published a great piece on virtual property which you all should read. So we let him in. Maybe he can bring up the tone of the place (though he's gonna have to work hard to counteract Julian and Greg's influence.)

We're very glad to have him.

Calling all space engineers

STATE OF PLAY - MMORPG PUBLIC SPACE DESIGN COMPETITION
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
DEADLINE: SEPTEMBER 28, 2005

Terra Nova at Supernova

For those of you attending Supernova 2005 next week, be sure to stop by the “Virtual Worlds, Real Money” workshop which will be moderated by yours truly. Cory’s participating as a speaker, along with Ian Bogost and Bill Barhydt from Sennari.

The Future Is…This Thursday

Terra Nova readers are cordially invited to this Thursday’s Future Salon speaker series, an event which takes place in Second Life each month, brought to you by the Acceleration Studies Foundation.  The May salon is happening this Thursday, May 26th, 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM PST at the Second Life Public Library.

The Daedalus Project - New Look. New Content.

The Daedalus Project has been redesigned. New look. New Content. The current issue focuses on a factor analytic approach to player motivations with a backdrop of many great player narratives on why they play. There are also a few interactive gadgets to play with.

General Highlights:
1) A much cleaner and more intuitive 3 factor model with underlying components.
2) Interesting player narratives on the motivations of achievement, socializing, and immersion.
3) Browse through in-depth player profiles that pair the assessment scores with the player's own open-ended description of why they play.
4) Assess yourself.

Findings Highlights:
1) Gender differences in the achievement component are pretty striking. 
2) The reasons why men spend a lot of time in the game are different from why women spend a lot of time in the game.
3) Men and women like to socialize just as much, but they are looking for very different things in those  relationships.
4) The best predictor for problematic usage is escapism (avoiding RL problems) followed by hours played per week and the desire for advancement. In other words, the mindset of the player is a better predictor of problematic usage than game mechanics (a la Skinner Box).

And a collated PDF of the articles is available.

Massively Multiplayer Game Development 2

GDC05 marks the release of "Massively Multiplayer Game Development 2" by Charles River Media. Both Richard and I have chapters in it, and it features articles from an amazingly broad range of MMO developers and thinkers. Hopefully, even experienced MMO folks will find something new and interesting in it.

Games, Learning & Society Conference 2005: Call for Papers

Games, Learning & Society Conference 2005: Call for Papers
June 23-24, 2005 . Madison WI
www.glsconference.com

Sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Academic ADL Co-Lab, the GLS Conference will foster substantive discussion and collaboration among academics, designers, and educators interested in how videogames – commercial games and others – can enhance learning, culture, and education. Speakers, discussion groups, interactive workshops, and exhibits will focus on game design, game culture, and games' potential for learning and society more broadly. This two-day conference will be held at Frank Lloyd Wright's Monona Terrace overlooking downtown Madison's beautiful Lake Monona. Conference highlights include a two-day exhibit hall featuring poster presentations and interactive demos of games; a special track of selected, hands-on sessions designed specifically by and for practicing teachers (continuing education credit may be available); and an outdoor dinner party at historic Quivey's Grove. Participants and speakers currently include John Seely Brown, Edward Castronova, Doug Church, James Paul Gee, Henry Jenkins, Jesper Juul, Jay Lemke, Kurt Squire, and Eric Zimmerman.

Deadline for proposals is March 14, 2005!

Changing Realities

Given that all the cool kids have whitepapers published by The Themis Group, I was excited by the opportunity to do one of my own. "Changing Realities" (released under a Creative Commons license) expands upon the topics I spoke on at my Accelerating Change keynote, exploring the interaction of digital worlds with ownership and innovation. It was a difficult project, but the process has really clarified my own thinking on these topics.

Enjoy!

A New Issue of "The Daedalus Project"

The Daedalus Project is 2 years old! In this issue:

MMORPG Hours vs. TV Hours - Does one influence the other?
The Transfer of Stereotypes and Prejudice - A brief exploration of sexism, homophobia and nationalism through player narratives.
Engineering Altruism - What does to mean to engineer how and when people can help each other?
Faces of Grief - How are Griefers and Achievers related? An exploration of overt and subtle forms of griefing.
Police State - Imagine a world where every conversation you have is automatically recorded, and where every word you say can be altered without you knowing.

The Daedalus Gateway

Over the past 5 years, I've presented findings from my online surveys in a variety of  formats. I settled on The Daedalus Project as a way to quickly provide content on a standardized template.  The blog format made it easy to show the details, but incredibly difficult to show the larger themes. Many who stumbled into The Daedalus Project for the first time simply got lost.

The Daedalus Gateway is an attempt to solve that problem by providing a set of short thematic primers that link to the more in-depth findings and presentations. It will be linked to prominently from The Daedalus Project when the next issue comes out. Take a look.

EQ2 offers guilds a suite of tools

Woot! Despite the nay-saying to my presentation last year at MUD-Dev conference [6.3MB.ppt] *cough cough Raph cough* where I argued that MMOG designers would do well to provide web-based content-development tools to the people who actually create the majority of their content for free (i.e., the guild leader 'hubs' of the social networks on each shard), it seems Sony Online has finally moved on it.

In conjunction with EverQuest 2, they now offer a new online service called Station Players that includes, for an additional $2.99 a month (in addition to the normal subscription fee), website tools for guilds which include functions such as new articles, screenshots, and forums. Oh, and look! A guild 'Wall of Fame" as well! Finally... a game company that recognizes that the 'service' they provide can potentially go beyond what's there between login and logoff. For many of us, our games goes well beyond it, so it's nice to have the 'service' go beyond it as well.

Now, I realize that this can be construed, in one light, as a way to make more profit. And so it is. But if that profit comes for providing a much-needed service, then I say so be it. Instead of complaining that '98% of all player generated content is crap,' it would do us well to actually honor what the purchasers want. All this is to say: Support actual gamers' practices. They ain't so dum. Trust me.

The Forest for the Spoons

I wrote a brief article for Gamespot News about the oft-repeated "There is no spoon" comment from State of Play 2. I'll likely expand and further flesh out the arguments in future work -- I suspect that we'll all be debating this until the next SoP -- but since I thought that this was one of the most basic disagreements to come out of State of Play 2 that it was worth picking up.

The line from The Matrix, "There is no spoon," was first used during the conference by Yale's Yochai Benkler, but the phrase came up again and again. In various ways, its adherents argued that 3D digital worlds are text with 3D interfaces grafted on. They're Wikipedias with prettier graphics. Often, the "no spoon" argument was invoked as a precursor to discussions about property, regulation, or connections between the real and the digital worlds. It is a tempting shorthand, made all the more powerful by its association with The Matrix. It is also clearly wrong. There is a spoon, just not one that you can eat with. Digital worlds are very real places.

Also, the final version of "Escaping the Gilded Cage", which I wrote for NYLS after the first SoP is now up on SSRN. I've updated "A Piece of Place" and added "Aviators, Moguls, Fashionistas and Barons" which was originally written for Gamasutra.

A Pessimist Writes...

I've written a rant-style article on Gamasutra which posits a theory that virtual world design is doomed because of the power of the newbie. I'll present a formal, academic version at the Other Players conference next month, but in the meantime feel free to berate me.

Dragons and Drama Queens

Head on over to the new issue of The Daedalus Project. Lots of interesting narratives used to illustrate:

- Dragon Slaying 101: Understanding The Complexity of Raids
- Dragon Slaying 102: Unsung Heroes
- Elves, Ogres and Drama Queens: Stories of Digital Intrigue and Drama
- The Prince and The Pauper: The Transaction of Virtual and Real-Life Capital

Permission Adventures

Since Second Life changed its EULA to allow residents to maintain their IP rights, an active topic of discussion has been how its permission sytem needed to change. After nearly a year of wrangling -- and lots of help from Creative Commons plus great advice and feedback from James Grimmelmann -- the initial version has been released to our residents for comments. Given how many non-SL users have also speculated on this subject, the proposal is available here on my spiffy new SL specific-blog.

Gamasutra MMOG Resource Guide

Gamasutra is running a week-long series of articles focused on MMOG development that began today. Cory has an article on taxation and land ownership in Second Life (coming out on Thursday), and I have an article coming out on Tuesday about the demographics of motivations, preferences and attrition.

Happy Birthday, Terra Nova

The birthday is a few days late, actually. The first posts here came on September 11, 2003. Since then, about one zillion brilliant posts have been written, and well over a gajillion insightful comments have been added to them. With figures like these, it's no wonder that by now we get more than a zillion gajillion hits on any given day.

On behalf of the founders, let me extend a thanks to everyone who makes the site work so well. Whoever you are. It certainly isn't us!

And in that spirit, we've decided to drop the distinction between moderators and authors - you may have noticed the change to the right sidebar. The founders will still be responsible for managing the site and the membership of the authoring group, but the track record of the side is that it doesn't need strong direction in terms of content.

Thanks again everyone (serious this time).

Video Tidbits for the TN-Starved

We know that many of you just can't get enough of virtual worlds, Terra Nova, and the associated little community of wireheads and bookworms. Thanks to the New York Law School, you can now see some of us and some of our friends, and Clay Shirky as well, on video, taped during last year's State of Play I conference. Shameless Nepotism Advisory: some of the interviewers are also interviewees. And if you're still not satisfied, keep an eye on this space: Terra Nova will be the official blog of State of Play II, coming up at the end of October.

TN Gathering in Austin

The TN community will be getting together at the lobby bar of the Austiin Hilton, across from the convention center, on Thursday September 9 at 5pm. If you happen to be at AGC, do stop by and say hello.

Keep an eye on this space for updates, too. Who knows how plans might change.

Virtual Worlds 101: Draft Syllabus

The following course outline is for a upperclass undergraduate seminar on "Virtual Worlds" here at Indiana University. I'd be eager to get some commentary before inflicting this stuff on helpless students. Don't forget that they are college students, after all, and won't be enthusiastic about reading thousands of pages. Also, book purchases are to be kept to a minimum. The goal is to cover the basics without imposing too much burden. Plus I want lots of time to just discuss things. Suggestions for improvement / change of direction / more representative works are welcome.

Heralding Cory

Just in case you have not seen it - The Alphaville Herald has an interview of TNs own Cory Ondrejka about the moonlighting he does over at Linden Lab as VP of Product Development. The interview focuses on the Intellectual Property issues raised by SL, in particular the fact that one can upload images and now stream music (or any other sound) in-world.